The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(71)

“How could he be gone?” Lahori raged, as if it were her fault.

“The saw? The one he uses for his sculpture? He used it to cut through the bars on the window.”

So the father had locked his own son in a cell in the basement.

Now the fucking kuritsa had escaped?

Rostov risked a look to see if they were coming out the front door. But, no, all three adults hurried to the back of the house and down the stairway to the cellar.

He backed away from the front door and down the steps. He walked into the neighbor’s property and jogged to the backyard.

Hiding behind a hedge, he peered into the Lahoris’ yard. No sign of the boy. But he did see thick metal bars lying on the grass in front of a low window.

He sighed and turned, striding quickly to the sidewalk. He got into his car. For ten minutes he cruised up and down the streets of the placid neighborhood, with no success. He searched for only a brief time, though, assuming that the redheaded kuritsa would call other officers to scour the neighborhood too.

Glancing to the seat beside him, he noticed some cold Roll N Roaster fries. He shoved them in his mouth, chewing absently and swallowing fast. He lit a cigarette and enjoyed the inhale. A setback, yes. But Vladimir Rostov wasn’t as upset as he might be.

The Promisor is savvy, the Promisor is devious.

And, even though he’s completely gone to the stone, he always has a backup plan.





Chapter 35



Three p.m.

This was the time Lincoln Rhyme and the man he’d texted yesterday, after meeting with Edward Ackroyd, had agreed on for a phone call.

And it was with, no less, a spy.

Lincoln Rhyme had a relationship with the American espionage community. It was ambivalent and infrequent but undeniable.

The reason he’d been unable to participate in the El Halcón case—the Mexican drug lord who was on federal trial for murder and assault—was due to a meeting in Washington, DC, to assist a new U.S. security agency.

Rhyme and Sachs had come into contact with the organization on a recent case. They, on the one hand, and the Alternative Intelligence Service, on the other, had butted heads over a clandestine operation the AIS had run in Naples, Italy. In the end, Rhyme and Sachs had saved the organization’s reputation—and some lives in the process. The director had been so impressed with their forensic work, he’d tried to recruit them.

But working for the AIS would involve considerable foreign travel. Given Rhyme’s physical limitations, he was not inclined to sign on, despite the intriguing jobs the organization promised. Besides, New York City had no lack of challenging cases. Why fish elsewhere? It was also his and Sachs’s home. He had, however, been happy to jet down to DC, to help the AIS set up a new division to use forensics and physical evidence as an intelligence resource.

At the first meeting in DC, one of the congressmen involved in the creation and funding of the AIS had said, “Glad you’re here, Captain Rhyme, Detective Sachs. We know you can help us in our task to parameter a new dynamic for evidentiary intelligence analytics and weaponization.”

Rhyme, who otherwise would have engaged in a bit of verbal fencing about verbosity and about turning “parameter” into a verb, reminded himself he was inside the Beltway, and simply ignored the bullshit. The concept was clever: The new division would employ crime scene and crime lab skills to gather and analyze intelligence…and, yes, to “weaponize” evidence.

Need to identify a mole within the American consulate in Frankfurt, when everybody passes the polygraph? Just find the one employee bearing a molecule of trace evidence that can be matched with a molecule of trace in the Generalkonsulat der Volksrepublik China.

Need a North Korean hit team in Tokyo taken down? Just deliver to the Japanese Keiji-kyoku some trace evidence and shoe prints suggesting they have illegal weapons, and, bang, they’re in jail—for a long, long time. So much more humane than snipers. And more important, somebody other than the U.S. government does the dirty work.

The name would be the EVIDINT Division of the AIS, a word coined by Rhyme himself. As in “evidence intelligence.” Spy-speak. Like HUMINT, human intelligence. Or ELINT, electronic intelligence.

It was the director of the AIS, Daryl Mulbry, whom Rhyme had texted when Ackroyd told him of Unsub 47’s Russian roots. Mulbry’s text suggested a 3 p.m. call.

Espionage apparently engendered promptness and at 3:00:02, his phone rang.

“Lincoln, hello!” The man, Rhyme recalled, was pale and slight and with thinning hair a light shade of brown. To judge by his patois, his roots were the Carolinas or Tennessee. When Rhyme had first met him he’d thought Mulbry was a minor, regulation-bound low-level diplomat. The man’s appearance and self-effacing manner gave no clue that he ran a hundred-million-dollar intelligence operation, including tactical teams, who, if they wanted you to disappear, could fulfill that task with a minimum of fuss.

“So sorry it’s taken this long to get back. Had a brouhaha in Europe. Was a mess. It’s largely—though not completely—cleared up now. But more about that later. What can I do for you? You want to know how your baby, the EVIDINT’s going? Swimmingly. Though that’s not a word I really understand. It’s not all that easy to swim. And one can drown, course.”

“Something else and it’s urgent.”

Mulbry was used to Rhyme’s impatience. “Of course.”