The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(94)

Edward Ackroyd had found no one trying to move the rough on the underground market.

Rhyme wheeled to the window and gazed out upon the gray, still day. Even the evergreens seemed muted, their color bleached away. Across the street, a man walked by, minding the icy patches. His dog—a small fluffy thing—pranced over them without a care in the world.

Rhyme closed his eyes in frustration.

Then, as sometimes—not often but sometimes—happens, a break in a case came unexpectedly.

It arrived in the form of Ron Pulaski, who stepped into the parlor, nodded greetings to Rhyme and Sachs and said, “May have something here, Lincoln. On Forty-Seven.”

To differentiate this intelligence from their other—clandestine—assignment, working for the defense attorney representing El Halcón.

“Well, I don’t have a fucking lead at all. So, what?”

“I was wondering who’d have a motive to stop the drilling. We talked about environmentalists. But that seemed too obvious. So I started looking into energy industry competitors.”

Rhyme said, more reasonably, “Good. Initiative. What’d you find?”

“Unfair trade practice complaint with the FTC against Algonquin Power.”

Well, this was interesting.

“Apparently the company hired an oppo lobbying firm—”

“A what?”

“Oppo firm. They dig up—or make up—information that trashes business competitors or political candidates you’re running against.”

“Oppo. Makes sense. Though for some reason, I dislike the term. Go on.”

“The firm was hired to discredit alternative energy sources—any technology that would siphon off income from traditional oil and gas electrical production. For instance, they planted rumors that wind farms kill seagulls. And that solar panels make roofs heavier and more prone to collapsing in fires—and injuring firemen. Employees actually left seagull corpses near wind farms—killed elsewhere—and published pictures of fires in buildings equipped with solar panels, even though the panels had nothing to do with the roofs’ collapsing.” He smiled. “And they looked into research as to whether—”

“Geothermal drilling created earthquakes.”

“Exactly.”

“Algonquin,” Sachs mused. “Who’d we see from the company on TV?”

It was Thom who recalled. “C. Hanson Collier. President or CEO.” The aide frowned. “But didn’t he say he supported geothermal?”

Sachs said, “He’d have to do that, wouldn’t he? Play innocent. And now that I think about it, didn’t he say something like it wasn’t likely there’d be earthquakes? It was generally safe. Damning with faint praise.”

Rhyme then tossed a glance toward her.

She nodded and said to Pulaski, “Let’s go for a drive.”

*



Amelia Sachs had been here before.

Not long ago some individuals at Algonquin Consolidated Power and Light in Astoria, Queens, had been suspects in a series of crimes involving the New York City power grid.

Sachs and Rhyme had drawn the case.

The company, which supplied electric power and steam throughout much of the New York area, had its main facility and headquarters on the East River—across from Midtown Manhattan. The operation covered a number of blocks, with the main building—its fa?ade was huge red and gray panels—rising two hundred feet above the streets. This, where the turbines were located, was the working heart of the complex, and massive pipes and electric wires—thick, inflexible cables—ran everywhere.

High above the street level, where Sachs, driving, and Pulaski were now pulling up to the plant, were four towering smokestacks, also red and gray, topped with blinking red lights as a warning to low-flying aircraft. In the summer the stacks seemed to exhale no vapor at all but today, with the March chill that just wouldn’t quit, wisps of steam trickled upward to dissolve in the dull white sky.

She braked the Torino Cobra to a stop and flashed her badge to the security guard at the main gate and told him she had an appointment with the CEO. The massive man, skin as pale as the overcast, glanced at her and Pulaski, who was in uniform. He made a call and, nodding to no one, told her where to park.

A second guard met them in a lobby and took them to the same place Sachs had been a few years before, on that prior case: the executive offices. The floor was right out of the 1950s, “modern” furniture upholstered in brown and white and tan, the designs geometric.

The art was black-and-white photos of the power plant over the years.

The employees here—mostly men—were dressed as if they too had been locked in time for seventy years. White shirts, dark ties, dark suits with jackets often buttoned. Hair was trim. Sachs imagined she could smell the Brylcreem her father wore, though surely this was a psychological, not an olfactory, sensation.

The guard deposited them in a waiting room outside the office of the CEO, C. Hanson Collier. He had not been head of the company when she and Rhyme had worked the prior case but she wondered if she’d passed him in the halls back then.

She glanced down at the kidney-shaped coffee table, on which sat copies of trade magazines. Electricity Transmission Monthly. Power Age. The Grid.

A limp Time, dated circa six months ago.

“How’re we going to handle it?” Pulaski asked.