AllFreeNovel
Share Us
32.
FROM THE EARLY-MORNINGshadows of an alley across from his next target, Charles Vespasian Hale was looking over the jobsite.
Specifically, his attention was upon a cluster of men near the entrance—there were two other ways into the place, but they had been sealed with four-by-eight plywood sheets.
The men were engaged in a lively conversation. Sports? Streaming TV shows? Women?
But, having been transformed from craftsmen to guards, they were observant, surely hoping for the chance to whip the hide of the man who’d pissed on their sacred profession.
Wearing jeans, a dark windbreaker, a black baseball cap, he studied them now, these stocky men in brown overalls, yellow and orange vests and yellow hard hats. Their hands were blunt, their brows broad, faces tanned. The job would pay well, and Hale supposed they, like the late Andy Gilligan, owned boats for weekend diversion. One smoked—furtively, breaking a rule—while another sipped coffee. The third occasionally lifted a brown paper bag to his lips. Hale had learned that a surprising number of skyscraperworkers drank, especially those doing beam work. Their deaths from falling were underreported.
These three looked about occasionally, but being amateurs at the security business, they missed much.
Including Hale himself.
He gazed skyward to the Swenson-Thorburg AB tower crane soaring into the sky, the tubing like blood-coated bone, the company’s signature crimson hue.
The slewing unit—the massive turntable—was unlocked and, like the one he’d seen yesterday at the dead-drop site, the jib swiveled slightly in the wind.
The crane was, from this base view, a brute of a creature. But from his research for the project here in New York, Hale had come to see them as devices of great subtlety. Their development in fact paralleled the evolution of timepieces.
From shadoofs—pivoting levers that held buckets to scoop up well water—to derrick cranes (named after Thomas Derrick, the famed Elizabethan hangman) to the towers of the 1970s, cranes, like clocks, drove the engines of industry, and therefore society. At some point, cities could no longer grow geographically and remain cities. Horizontal expansion did not work. It was cranes that made cities seek the skies, drawing more and more population, and grow increasingly powerful.
To Hale, though, there was one immutable difference between cranes and clocks. While he could not conceive of destroying any watch or clock (other than IED timers, of course), he could without any twitch of concern bring one of these monsters crashing to its knees.
And this particular tumble, in a few hours, would be spectacular.
The crane itself was only slightly higher and heavier than the one he’d brought down yesterday. But the difference was this: there was no operator in the cab to heroically point the jib whereit could do the least harm. When the Swenson-Thorburg AB died, so would many people. The building the jib towered over was 1960s construction: the superstructure, of course, was steel. But much of the rest was soft aluminum and glass—which would explode under the impact like a thousand hand grenades made of sharpened shards and collapse upon itself. Layer upon layer of building material, bone and blood.
He looked at his watch.
The time was 7:03 a.m.
There remained, of course, the question of getting the acid delivered to the device’s counterweight trolley. This would be a bit trickier than the first one, given the guards.
Whose eyes diligently scanned the street, the sidewalk, pedestrians, passing vehicles—especially those that slowed as drivers and passengers shot fast, nervous glances at the spidery red legs of the crane, which reached to a hazy sky.
Could any of these be the crane killer?
But after a few minutes of observing the impromptu guards, Hale decided that the risk of his being discovered in the act of sabotage was minimal.
The trio was keenly observant, yes. But they were looking everywhere except where they should.
33.
NO LUCK WITHthe acid manufacturers.
No luck finding who might have hired the Watchmaker, and why, now that housing terrorism seemed unlikely.
No luck with the FBI’s finding leads from Hale’s front-of-the-airplane accommodations on the flight to JFK.
No luck with the dirt that Pulaski had collected at the Gilligan shooting, supplemented by what Sachs had found at the Helprins’ house in Queens.
Then Rhyme grew irritated that he’d even thought the word “luck,” a concept that had no place in forensic science, or any other branch of serious study—despite the Seneca poster in FBI agent Fred Dellray’s office.
Lyle Spencer’s hunting expedition last night had confirmed that every tower crane site he stopped at was guarded by at least three individuals, either workers volunteering for the job or rent-a-cops. All the exits were either sealed off or guarded, and floodlights turned on to illuminate the ground around the crane bases.
At 7:30 this morning, however, they did catch a break.
