But, no, it was somebody else. Still, the eyes were just as cold and they spent no more time regarding Arthur Rhyme than they would glancing at a spill on the floor. He left without a word.

A half hour passed, Arthur dipping into and out of waking.

Then the door opened again and he glanced up, startled, as another patient was brought in. He’d had appendicitis, Arthur deduced. The operation was over and he was recovering. An orderly got him into bed. He handed the man a glass. “Don’ drink it. Rinse ’n’ spit.”

The man drank.

“No, I’m tellin’ you-”

He threw up.

“Fuck.” The orderly tossed a handful of paper towels at him and left.

Arthur’s fellow patient fell asleep, clutching the towels.

It was then that Arthur looked out the window in the door. Two men stood outside, one Latino, one black. The latter squinted, staring directly at him, then whispered something to the other, who briefly looked too.

Something about their posture and expressions told Arthur their interest wasn’t mere curiosity-seeing the con who’d been saved by Mick, the tweaker.

No, they were memorizing his face. Why?

Did they want to kill him too?

Another surge of panic. Was it only a matter of time until they were successful?

He closed his eyes but then decided he shouldn’t sleep. He didn’t dare. They’d move on him when he was asleep, they’d move on him if he closed his eyes, they’d move on him if he didn’t pay complete attention to everything, everyone, every minute.

And now his agony was complete. Judy had said that Lincoln might have found something that could prove his innocence. She didn’t know what, and so Arthur had no way to judge if his cousin was simply being optimistic, or if he’d discovered some concrete proof that he’d been wrongly arrested. He was furious at this ambiguous hope. Before he’d talked to Judy, Arthur Rhyme had resigned himself to a living hell and an impending death.

I’m doin’ you a favor, man. Fuck, you’d do yourself in a month or two anyway… Now jus’ stop fightin’ it…

But now, realizing that freedom might be attainable, resignation blossomed into panic. He saw in front of him some hope that could be taken away.

His heart began its manic thudding again.

He grabbed the call button. Pushed it once. Then again.

No response. A moment later another pair of eyes appeared in the window. But they weren’t a doctor’s. Was it one of the cons he’d seen before? He couldn’t tell. The man was looking directly at him.

Struggling to control the fear that trickled down his spine like electricity, he pressed the call button again, then held it down.

Still no response.

The eyes in the window blinked once, then vanished.

“Metadata.”

On speakerphone Rodney Szarnek, in the NYPD computer lab, was explaining to Lincoln Rhyme how 522 most likely had learned that the “expert” was in fact an undercover cop.

Sachs, standing nearby, with her arms crossed and fingers picking at her sleeve, reminded him of what she’d learned from Calvin Geddes of Privacy Now. “That’s data about data. Embedded in documents.”

“Right,” Szarnek confirmed, hearing her comment. “He probably saw that we’d created the C.V. last night.”

“Shit,” Rhyme murmured. Well, you can’t think of everything. Then: But you have to when you’re up against the man who knows everything. And now the plan, which potentially could have netted him, had been wasted. The second time they’d failed.

And worse, they’d tipped their hand. Just like they’d learned about his suicide ploy, he’d learned how they operated and had a defense against future tactics.

Knowledge is power…

Szarnek added, “I had somebody at Carnegie Mellon trace the addresses of everyone who was in their site this morning. A half dozen hits originated in the city but they were from public terminals, no trace of the users. Two were from proxies in Europe, and I know the servers. They won’t cooperate.”

Naturally.

“Now we’ve got some information from the empty-space files Ron got from SSD. It’s taking some time. They were…” He apparently decided to avoid the technical explanation and said, “…pretty scrambled. But we’ve got fragments coming together. Looks like somebody did assemble dossiers and download them. We’ve got a nym-that’s a screen name or code name. ‘Runnerboy.’ That’s all so far.”

“Any idea who? An employee, customer, hacker?”

“Nope. I called a friend in the Bureau and checked their database for known nyms and e-mail addresses. They found about eight hundred Runnerboys. None in the metro area, though. We’ll know more later.”

Rhyme had Thom write the name Runnerboy on the list of suspects. “We’ll check with SSD. See if that’s a name anybody recognizes.”

“And the customer files on the CD?”

“I’ve got somebody going through it manually. The code I wrote only got us so far. There’re too many variables-different consumer products, Metro fare cards, E-ZPasses. Most of the companies downloaded certain information from the victims but statistically nobody’s jumping out as a suspect yet.”

“All right.”

He disconnected.

“We tried, Rhyme,” Sachs said.

Tried… He offered a lifted eyebrow, a gesture that meant absolutely nothing.

The phone buzzed and “Sellitto” popped up on caller ID.

“Command, answer… Lon, any-”

“Linc.”

Something was wrong. The tone, through the speakerphone, was hollow, the voice shaky.

“Another vic?”

Sellitto cleared his throat. “He got one of us.”

Alarmed, glancing at Sachs, who was involuntarily leaning forward toward the phone, her arms unfolding. “Who? Tell us.”

“Joe Malloy.”

“No,” whispered Sachs.

Rhyme’s eyes closed and his head eased into the wheelchair’s headrest. “Sure, of course. That was the setup, Lon. He had it all planned.” His voice lowered. “How bad was it?”

“What do you mean?” asked Sachs.

In a soft voice, Rhyme said, “He didn’t just kill Malloy, did he?”

Sellitto’s quivering voice was wrenching. “No, Linc, he didn’t.”

“Tell me!” Sachs said bluntly. “What are you talking about?”

Rhyme looked at her eyes, wide with the horror that they both felt. “He set up the whole thing because he wanted information. He tortured Joe to get it.”

“Oh, God.”

“Right, Lon?”

The big detective sighed. He coughed. “Yeah, got to say it was pretty bad. He used some tools. And from the amount of blood Joe held out for a long time. The prick finished him off with a gunshot.”

Sachs’s face was red with anger. She kneaded the grip of her Glock. Through clenched jaws she asked, “Did Joe have kids?”

Rhyme recalled that the captain’s wife had been killed a few years ago.

Sellitto answered, “A daughter in California. I made the call already.”

“You okay about it?” Sachs asked.

“Naw, I’m not.” His voice cracked again. Rhyme didn’t think he’d ever heard the detective sound so upset.

In his mind he could hear Joe Malloy’s voice when he was responding to Rhyme’s “forgetting” to share about the 522 case. The captain had looked beyond pettiness and backed them up, even after the criminalist and Sellitto hadn’t been honest with him.

Policing came before ego.

And 522 had tortured and killed him simply because he needed information. Goddamn information…

But then, from somewhere, Rhyme summoned the stone that resided within him. The detachment that, as some people had said, meant he had a damaged soul, but that he believed allowed him to better do his job. He said firmly, “Okay, you know what this means, don’t you?”

“What?” Sachs asked.

“He’s declaring war.”

“War?” It was Sellitto who asked this question.

“On us. He’s not going underground. He’s not running. He’s telling us to go fuck ourselves. He’s fighting back. And he thinks he can get away with it. Killing brass? Oh, yeah. He’s drawn the battle line. And he knows all about us now.”