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'I don't know.'
'Well, put on the news and find out. Thom! Where the hell--?'
'I'm here, Lincoln.'
'The news. I need the news on! I asked you.'
'You didn't ask. You thought you asked.' The aide lifted a chastising eyebrow.
'Maybe I didn't ask,' Rhyme grumbled. The best 'sorry' the man was going to get. 'But turn the fucking thing on now.'
In the corner the Samsung clicked to life.
Rhyme stabbed a finger at the screen. 'Breaking News, News Alert, This Just In, We Interrupt This Program. Why aren't I seeing those? ... I'm looking at a fucking commercial for car insurance!'
'Don't use your arm for useless gestures.' Thom changed the channel.
'... press conference ten minutes ago the mayor told citizens of Manhattan and Queens that an evacuation would not be necessary at this time. He urged people--'
'No evacuation?' Rhyme sighed. 'He could at least have cleared Queens. They can go east. Plenty of room on Long Island. Orderly evacuation. He could've arranged for that.'
Mel Cooper said, 'It wouldn't be orderly, Lincoln. It'd be chaos.'
'I recommended announcing an evacuation. He ignored me.'
'DEP's calling,' Pulaski said, nodding at the caller ID box on the main monitor over a worktable.
Rhyme's mobile rang too. The area code was 404. Atlanta, Georgia.
'It's about goddamn time,' he muttered. 'You take the water people, rookie, and coordinate with Sachs. I'll talk to our friends in Dixie. Let's move, everyone! We've only got minutes!'
And he hit the answer button on his keypad hard, drawing another admonishing look from Thom.
CHAPTER 63
In his Department of Environmental Protection coveralls and hard hat, Billy Haven stepped into a cross street in Midtown, the East Side, and lifted a manhole cover with a hook, then descended partway and muscled the disk back in place.
He climbed down to a metal floor and began walking through the tunnel, under the shadow of a water main pipe glistening with condensation. This huge conduit ran from Water Tunnel 3's main valve room, in central Midtown, to the three submains that supplied water throughout Manhattan and to parts of Queens. Approximately eighteen thousand households and businesses received water that passed through this pipe.
He switched the heavy gear bag from one hand to the other as he walked. It weighed 48 pounds. The contents were what he'd removed from the workshop on Canal Street: the drill, portable welding kit, electric cord and other tools, along with the bulky steel thermos. He didn't have his American Eagle with him now. That part of the Modification was over with. No more inking with poison.
Though the Rule of Skin was still very much at work, of course.
He checked his GPS, made an adjustment and kept walking.
The plan for the Modification was complex, as befit a scheme delivered through an intermediary whom God Himself had picked.
The Commandments ...
At the last scene, at TT Gordon's tattoo parlor, the police would have found trace of explosives he'd intentionally planted and Lincoln Rhyme would immediately wonder about this anomaly. Explosives and poison? What was the relationship?
The Commandments speculated that Rhyme would then think: What if the poisoned tattoos were about something other than random killings by a psychotic?
They'd analyze the numbers in the tattoos and would come up with the flood in Genesis. He'd intentionally inked the tattoo artist in the Village with "the six hundredth" last, because it would have been too easy to find the flood passages in the Bible if he'd given them in proper order.
In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights ...
So domestic terrorists had returned to plant bombs to re-create the flood and wash away the sin of this Sodom.
