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As they waited for the lanky FBI agent to return, Rhyme noted some other aspects of Dellray’s office: photos of his wife and threechildren. So the couple had had another youngster … Then again, maybe he’d had three the last time the subject of his family came up.
The criminalist was perpetually short on knowledge of his colleagues’ personal lives.
Sellitto began to ask something. But Rhyme held up a finger as he stared forward—not at the evidence whiteboard, but out the window. Branches and leaves and clouds, and some striking blue sky beyond.
Dellray returned. He dropped into his chair. “Gotcha one for the ages, Lincoln. Didn’t come across my desk ’cause I’m spending my precious hours and brain cells putting some racist skinheads away. Now, this is most interesting. Three days ago, incident at JFK. No collateral intel, no chatter, no hot box alerts. Not. A. One. We all together on that?”
“I will be when you tell me what you found out.”
A chuckle. “Triple Seven on an international flight. Parks at the gate, everybody hightails it off the big steel bird, passengers, flight crew. Now, this is where it gets good.
“Next flight, few hours later, the first officer does a walk-around. What they have to do. Checks out the plane, kicks the tires, makes sure the wings’re bolted on. And she looks into the nosewheel well. And guess what that woman finds? You can’t, so I’ll tell ya. An oxygen tank, big enough for an eight-hour supply, a mask, and a thermal sleeping bag heated with a twelve-volt battery.”
At thirty-five thousand feet, temperatures can reach –70 Fahrenheit, though you won’t feel unpleasant for very long. Hypoxia—lack of oxygen—will kill you before cruising altitude.
One for the ages …
“Departed where? Manchester?”
“Yes indeed.”
Sellitto muttered, “The Watchmaker, just the sort of grand entrance he’d go for.”
“Evidence?” Rhyme asked.
“PERT bundled it up and took it down to Quantico.”
The Bureau’s Physical Evidence Response Team was good. And the lab in Quantico was perhaps the best in the world.
“Can they pull a print now? I … We have to know for sure.”
“Name’s Hale, right?”
“Charles Vespasian Hale.”
“Hold on.”
A green and yellow flash as he disappeared.
Rhyme’s eyes slipped out the window once again.
A crane stabbed the sky …
In his mind, the pieces were lining up.
But he needed the critical confirmation from Dellray.
Who was back, two minutes later.
“It’s your boy, Lincoln. Nothing big in the surprise department—Hale was smart enough to wear cloth gloves in the plane, but must’ve figured that’d be suspicious inside the terminal. They lifted a print on the door handle for the baggage crew. So the Watchmaker is the crane man.”
“Looks that way. Let Homeland Security know. He’s on their list too.”
They disconnected.
The Watchmaker. The man whose plots Rhyme had foiled several times in the United States and Mexico. The man Rhyme had actually arrested and incarcerated, though he’d managed to escape from a prison that was very difficult to escape from.
