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"Bob Cavanaugh."
She nodded.
"I heard that you're clearing the construction site?"
"That's right. We couldn't find anywhere he'd attack in the school. It's mostly carpet and--"
"But a job site makes no sense," Cavanaugh said, gesturing frantically toward it.
"Well, I was thinking . . . the girders, the metal."
"Who's there, Sachs?" Rhyme broke in.
"The operations director of Algonquin. He doesn't think the attack's going to be at the job site." She asked Cavanaugh, "Why not?"
"Look!" he said desperately, pointing to a cluster of workers standing nearby.
"What do you mean?"
"Their boots!"
She whispered, "Personal protective equipment. They'd be insulated."
If you can't avoid it, protect yourself against it. . . .
Some were wearing gloves too and thick jackets.
"Galt would know they're in PPE," the operations man said. "He'd have to pump so much juice into the superstructure to hurt anybody that the grid'd shut down in this part of town."
Rhyme said, "Well, if it's not the school and it's not the job site, then what's his target? Or did we get it wrong in the first place? Maybe it's not there at all. There was another volcano exhibit."
Then Cavanaugh gripped her arm and gestured behind them. "The hotel!"
"Jesus," Sachs muttered, staring at the place. It was one of those minimalist, chic places filled with stark stone, marble, fountains . . . and metal. Lots of metal. Copper doors and steel stairs and flooring.
Nancy Simpson too turned to gaze at the building.
"What?" Rhyme asked urgently in her ear.
"It's the hotel, Rhyme. That's what he's attacking." She grabbed her radio to call ESU's chief. She lifted it to her mouth, as she and Simpson sprinted forward. "Bo, it's Amelia. He's going after the hotel, I'm sure of it. It's not the construction site. Get your people there now! Evacuate it!"
"Roger that, Amelia, I'll--"
But Sachs didn't hear the rest of his transmission. Or rather, whatever he said was lost completely to her as she stared through the hotel's massive windows.
Though it was before the deadline, one o'clock, a half dozen people inside the Battery Park Hotel stopped in their tracks. Their animated faces instantly went blank. They became doll faces, they were caricatures, grotesques. Spittle appeared in the corners of lips taut as ropes. Fingers, feet, chins began quivering.
Onlookers gasped and then screamed in panic at the otherworldly sight--humans turned to creatures out of a sick horror film, zombies. Two or three were caught with their hands on the push panels of revolving doors, jerking and kicking in the confined spaces. One man's rigid leg kicked through the door glass, which severed his femoral artery. Blood sprayed and smoked. Another man, young, student age, was gripping a large brass door to a function room, and bent forward, urinating and shivering. There were two others, their hands on the rails of the low steps to the lobby bar, frozen, shaking, as the life evaporated from their bodies.
And even outside, Sachs could hear an unearthly moan from deep in the smoldering throat of a woman, caught in midstep.
A heavyset man plunged forward to save a guest--to push him away from the elevator panel the smoking victim's hand was frozen to. The good Samaritan may have believed he could body-slam the poor guy away from the panel. But he hadn't reckoned on the speed and the power of juice. The instant he contacted the victim he too became part of the circuit. His face twisted into a mass of wrinkles from the pain. Then the expression melted into that of an eerie doll and he began the terrible quivering too.
Blood ran from mouths as teeth cut into tongues and lips. Eyes rolled back into sockets.
A woman with her fingers around a door handle must have made particularly good contact; her back arched at an impossible angle, her unseeing eyes gazing at the ceiling. Her silver hair burst into flames.
Sachs whispered, "Rhyme . . . Oh, it's bad, real bad. I'll have to call back." She disconnected without waiting for a response.
