HE AWOKE FAST, from a dream.

He tried to recall it. He couldn't remember enough to know whether it had been bad or simply odd. It was certainly intense, though. The likelihood, however, was that it was bad, since he was sweating furiously, as if he were walking through the turbine room at Algonquin Consolidated.

The time was just before midnight, the faint light of the clock/alarm reported. He'd been asleep for a short time and he was groggy; it took a moment to orient himself.

He'd ditched the uniform and hard hat and gear bag after the attack at the hotel, but he'd kept one of his accoutrements, which was now dangling from a chair nearby: the ID badge. In the dim, reflected light he stared at it now: His sullen picture, the impersonal typeface of "R. Galt" and, above that, in somewhat more friendly lettering:

Considering what he'd been up to for the past several days, he appreciated the irony of that slogan.

He lay back and stared at the shabby ceiling in the East Village weekly rental, which he'd taken a month ago under a pseudonym, knowing the police would find the apartment sooner or later.

Sooner, as it turned out.

He kicked the sheets off. His flesh was damp with sweat.

Thinking about the conductivity of the human body. The resistance of our slippery internal organs can be as low as 85 ohms, making them extremely susceptible to current. Wet skin, 1,000 or less. But dry skin has a resistance of 100,000 ohms or more. That's so high that significant amounts of voltage are needed to push that current through the body, usually 2,000 volts.

Sweat makes the job a lot easier.

His skin cooled as it dried, and his resistance climbed.

His mind leapt from thought to thought: the plans for tomorrow, what voltages to use, how to rig the lines. He thought about the people he was working with. And he thought about the people pursuing him. That woman detective, Sachs. The younger one, Pulaski. And, of course, Lincoln Rhyme.

Then he was meditating on something else entirely: two men in the 1950s, the chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, at the University of Chicago. They devised a very interesting experiment. In their lab they created their version of the primordial soup and atmosphere that had covered the earth billions of years ago. Into this mix of hydrogen, ammonia and methane, they fired sparks mimicking the lightning that blanketed the earth back then.

And what happened?

A few days later they found something thrilling: In the test tubes were traces of amino acids, the so-called building blocks of life.

They had discovered evidence suggesting that life had begun on earth all because of a spark of electricity.

As the clock approached midnight, he composed his next demand letter to Algonquin and the City of New York. Then with sleep enfolding him he thought again about juice. And the irony that what had, in a millisecond burst of lightning, created life so many, many years ago would, tomorrow, take it away, just as fast. Earth Day

"I haven't failed. I've just found ten thousand ways that won't work." -THOMAS ALVA EDISON

" PLEASE LEAVE a message at the tone."

Sitting in his Brooklyn townhouse at 7:30 a.m., Fred Dellray stared at his phone, flipped it closed. He didn't bother to leave another message, though, not after leaving twelve earlier ones on William Brent's cold phone.

I'm screwed, he thought.

There was the chance the man was dead. Even though McDaniel's phrasing was fucked-up (symbiosis construct?), his theory might not be. It made sense that Ray Galt was the inside man seduced into helping Rahman and Johnston and their Justice For the Earth group target Algonquin and the grid. If Brent had stumbled into their cell, they'd have killed him in an instant.

Ah, Dellray thought angrily: blind, simpleminded politics-the empty calories of terrorism.

But Dellray'd been in this business a long time and his gut told him that William Brent was very much alive. New York City is smaller than people think, particularly the underside of the Big Apple. Dellray had called up other contacts, a lot of them: other CIs and some of the undercover agents he ran. No word about Brent. Even Jimmy Jeep knew nothing-and he definitely had a motive to track down the man again, to make sure Dellray still backed the upcoming march through Georgia. Yet nobody'd heard about anybody ordering a clip or a cleaner. And no surprised garbagemen had wheeled a Dumpster to their truck and found nestled inside the pungent sarcophagus an unidentified body.

No, Dellray concluded. There was only the obvious answer, and he could ignore it no more: Brent had fucked him over.

He'd checked Homeland Security to see if the snitch, either as Brent or as one of his half dozen undercover identities, had booked a flight anywhere. He hadn't, though any professional CI knows where to buy airtight identity papers.

"Honey?"

Dellray jumped at the sound and he looked up and saw Serena in the doorway, holding Preston.

"You're looking thoughtful," she said. Dellray continued to be struck by the fact she looked like Jada Pinkett Smith, the actress and producer. "You were brooding before you went to bed, you started brooding when you woke up. I suspect you were brooding in your sleep."

He opened his mouth to spin a tale, but then said, "I think I got my ass fired yesterday."

"What?" Her face was shocked. "McDaniel fired you?"

"Not in so many words-he thanked me."

"But-"

"Some thank-you's mean thank you. Others mean pack up your stuff… Let's just say I'm being eased out. Same thing."

"I think you're reading too much into it."

"He keeps forgetting to call me with updates on the case."

"The grid case?"

"Right. Lincoln calls me, Lon Sellitto calls me. Tucker's assistant calls me."

Dellray didn't go into the part about another source of the brooding: the possible indictment for the stolen and missing $100,000.

But more troubling was the fact that he really did believe William Brent had had a solid lead, something that might let them stop these terrible attacks. A lead that had vanished with him.

Serena walked over and sat beside him, handed over Preston, who, grabbing Dellray's lengthy thumb in enthusiastic fingers, took away some of the brooding. She said to him, "I'm sorry, honey."

He looked out the window of the townhouse into the complex geometry of buildings and beyond, where he could just see a bit of stonework from the Brooklyn Bridge. A portion of Walt Whitman's poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" came to mind. The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious; My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

These words were true of him as well. The facade of Fred Dellray: hip, ornery, tough, man of the street. Occasionally thinking, more than occasionally thinking, What if I'm getting it wrong?

The beginning lines of the next stanza of Whitman's poem, though, were the kicker: It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil; I am he who knew what it was to be evil…

"What'm I going to do?" he mused.

Justice For the Earth…

He ruefully recalled turning down the chance to go to a high-level conference on satellite and data intelligence gathering and analysis. The memo had read, "The Shape of the Future."