AllFreeNovel
Share Us
This was unfortunate, but not unexpected.
He tried to anticipate what Lincoln would do with that connection.
That remained a mystery.
But Hale’s plan was unfolding quickly; he would finish up here and soon be gone.
More coffee. Drinking it slowly. Hale had an idea for a weightloss program. The key thing to count? Not calories or carbs or fat, buttime. The slower you ate, the fuller you felt and the less you took in. And you enjoyed the act of indulging longer. Another creative idea he would never put into practice. Every once in a rare while, he regretted striving for perfect anonymity.
His eyes were on the clepsydra that had so interested the late Andy Gilligan. The ancient Romans relied on sundials and obelisks for most of their timekeeping, but on overcast days and at night, they used hourglasses like this one.
Hale had once read a story about the emperor Caligula. A fascinating man, he was the world’s first Photoshopper, having a sculpture of his own head affixed to a statue of Jupiter. He was also completely mad, vindictive and paranoid. He got it into his demented head to kill a number of Jews who were not worshipping him with sufficient adulation. But an advisor convinced him that the clepsydra in his chambers was magic, and that it had transported him back in time. He’d already murdered hundreds in the Jewish community, so there was no need to kill any more.
Caligula believed the man and would spend hours playing with the timepiece, convinced that with it he could move back and forth in time.
As he sipped the coffee, finishing the cup, he let his thoughts wander away from imperial Rome—and away from Lincoln Rhyme.
A minute later he picked up an unused burner phone.
“No,” he told himself and set it down. He’d actually spoken aloud.
Then he lifted the unit once more and tapped in a number.
29.
DRIVING NORTH THROUGHTribeca, Ron Pulaski was on the phone with an Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives supervisor.
“I’ll tell you, Officer, we’ve been talking.” Nate Lathrop was speaking loudly, as he’d done throughout the conversation. This happened occasionally with those in this particular profession. Because of the explosives side of the outfit’s business, a number of agents’ hearing had suffered over the years.
Pulaski was on Bluetooth earbuds and lifted the phone to turn the volume down.
“Go on, Nate.”
“What?”
Pulaski shouted, “Go on!”
“Us and the Bureau and Homeland? No trace of Tarr on any of the wires. No intel on any target. We think he was transiting.”
“So he’s not priority?”
Nate shouted, “So I have to tell you he’s not high priority.”
“All right, but you’ve got the red sedan out, don’t you?”
“The sedan? Yeah. But—”
“I know there are a lot of them, but I sent you the likely timehe hit either the bridge or the tunnel to get back to Jersey. I just want somebody to look over the vids.”
“Yeah, it’s in the system.”
Pulaski almost added, “Did your meeting include the discussion that, target or not, he had probably murdered someone?” But what was the point?
They would care, of course, about a homicide in Manhattan, but they wouldn’t care as much as Pulaski.
He thanked the man in a shout and disconnected.
In truth, he didn’t really mind how it was turning out—the investigation into Tarr was his alone. He didn’t have to answer to the feds, who could be overbearing at times. A lot of jurisdictional turf wars in this business. Tarr was his and his alone.
