"Out! Now!"

"I won't be long."

"You'll leave now."

"Thom-" Rhyme began.

"Quiet," the aide muttered.

The look from the doctor said, You let your assistant talk to you like that?

"I'm not going to tell you again."

"I'll leave when I've finished." Kopeski eased closer to the aide. The doctor, like many medical people, was in good shape.

But Thom was a caregiver, which involved getting Rhyme's ass into and out of beds and chairs and exercise equipment all day long. A physical therapist too. He stepped right into Kopeski's face.

But the confrontation lasted only a few seconds. The doctor backed down. "All right, all right, all right." He held his hands up. "Jesus. No need to-"

Thom picked up the man's briefcase and shoved it into his chest and led him out the door. A moment later the criminalist heard the door slam. Pictures on the wall shook.

The aide appeared a moment later, evidently mortified. He cleaned up the broken china, mopped the coffee. "I'm sorry, Lincoln. I checked. It was a real organization… I thought." His voice cracked. He shook his head, the handsome face dark, hands shaking.

As Rhyme wheeled back toward the lab he said, "It's fine, Thom. Don't worry… And there's a bonus."

The man turned his troubled eyes toward Rhyme, to find his boss smiling.

"I don't have to waste time writing an acceptance speech for any goddamn award. I can get back to work."

ELECTRICITY KEEPS US alive; the impulse from the brain to the heart and lungs is a current like any other.

And electricity kills too.

At 9 p.m., just nine and a half hours after the attack at Algonquin substation MH-10, the man in the dark-blue Algonquin Consolidated overalls surveyed the scene in front of him: his killing zone.

Electricity and death…

He was standing in a construction site, out in the open, but no one paid him any attention because he was a worker among fellow workers. Different uniforms, different hard hats, different companies. But one thing tied them all together: Those who made a living with their hands were looked down on by "real people," the ones who relied on their services, the rich, the comfortable, the ungrateful.

Safe in this invisibility, he was in the process of installing a much more powerful version of the device he'd tested earlier at the health club. In the nomenclature of electrical service, "high voltage" didn't begin until you hit 70,000v. For what he had planned, he needed to be sure all the systems could handle at least two or three times that much juice.

He looked over the site of tomorrow's attack one more time. As he did he couldn't help but think about voltage and amperage… and death.

There'd been a lot of misreporting about Ben Franklin and that insane key-in-the-thunderstorm thing. Actually Franklin had stayed completely off damp ground, in a barn, and was connected to the wet kite string with a dry silk ribbon. The kite itself was never actually struck by lightning; it simply picked up static discharge from a gathering storm. The result wasn't a real bolt but rather elegant blue sparks that danced from the back of Franklin's hand like fish feeding at the surface of a lake.

One European scientist duplicated the experiment not long afterward. He didn't survive.

From the earliest days of power generation, workers were constantly being burned to death or having their hearts switched off. The early grid took down a number of horses, thanks to metal shoes on wet cobblestones.

Thomas Alva Edison and his famous assistant Nikola Tesla battled constantly over the superiority of DC, direct current (Edison), versus AC, alternating current (Tesla), trying to sway the public by horror stories of danger. The conflict became known as the Battle of the Currents and it made front-page news regularly. Edison constantly played the electrocution card, warning that anyone using AC was in danger of dying and in a very unpleasant way. It was true that it took less AC current to cause injury, though any type of current powerful enough to be useful could also kill you.

The first electric chair was built by an employee of Edison's, rather tactically using Tesla's alternating current. The first execution via the device was in 1890, under the direction not of an executioner but a "state electrician." The prisoner did die, though the process took eight minutes. At least he was probably unconscious by the time he caught fire.

And then there were always stun guns. Depending on who was getting shot and in what part of the body, they could be counted on for the occasional death. And the fear of everyone in the industry: arc flashes, of course, like the attack he'd engineered this morning.

Juice and death…

He wandered through the construction site, feigning end-of-day weariness. The site was now staffed by a skeleton crew of night-shift workers. He moved closer, and still no one noticed him. He was wearing thick-framed safety glasses, the yellow Algonquin hard hat. He was as invisible as electricity in a wire.

The first attack had made the news in a big way, of course, though the stories were limited to an "incident" in a Midtown substation. The reporters were abuzz with talk of short circuits, sparks and temporary power outages. There was a lot of speculation about terrorists but no one had found any connection.

Yet.

At some point, somebody would have to consider the possibility of an Algonquin Power worker running around rigging traps that resulted in very, very unpleasant and painful deaths, but that hadn't happened.

He now left the construction site and made his way underground, still unchallenged. The uniform and the ID badge were like magic keys. He slipped into another grimy, hot access tunnel and, after donning personal protective gear, continued to rig the wiring.

Juice and death.

How elegant it was to take a life this way, compared, say, with shooting your victim at five hundred yards.

It was so pure and so simple and so natural.

You could stop electricity, you could direct it. But you couldn't trick it. Once juice was created it would instinctively do whatever it could to return to the earth, and if the most direct way was to take a human life in the process, it would do so in, literally, a flash.

Juice had no conscience, felt no guilt.

This was one of the things he'd come to admire about his weapon. Unlike human beings, electricity was forever true to its nature.

THE CITY CAME alive at this time of night.

Nine p.m. was like a green flag for a car race.

The dead time in New York wasn't night; it was when the city was spiritually numb, ironically when it was at its busiest: rush hour, mid-morning and -afternoon. Only now were people shedding the workaday numbness, refocusing, coming alive.

Making all-important decisions: which bar, which friends, which shirt? Bra, no bra?

Condoms?…

And then out onto the street.

Fred Dellray now loped through the cool spring air, sensing the energy rise like what was humming through the electrical cables beneath his feet. He didn't drive much, didn't own a car, but what he was feeling now was akin to punching the accelerator and burning gas in a frenzy, as the power flung you toward your fate.

Two blocks from the subway, three, four…

And something else burned. The $100,000 in his pocket.

As he moved along the sidewalk Fred Dellray couldn't help but thinking, Have I ruined it all? Yes, I'm doing the morally right thing. I'd risk my career, I'd risk jail, if this thin thread of a lead ultimately revealed the perp, whether it was Justice For or anyone else. Anything to save the lives of citizens. Of course, the $100,000 was nothing to the entity he'd taken it from. And the cash might, thanks to bureaucratic myopia, never be missed. But even if it wasn't, and even if William Brent's lead blossomed and they were successful in stopping more attacks, would Dellray's malfeasance gnaw at him, the guilt growing larger and larger like a spiky tumor?