Jeffery Deaver
The Burning Wire
The ninth book in the Lincoln Rhyme series, 2010
For editor extraordinaire, Marysue Rucci
“Hell, there are no rules here. We’re trying to accomplish something.”
– THOMAS ALVA EDISON, ON CREATING
THE FIRST ELECTRIC GRID
Thirty-seven hours until Earth Day
I THE TROUBLEMAN
“From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce.”
– THOMAS ALVA EDISON
Chapter 1
SITTING IN THE control center of Algonquin Consolidated Power and Light’s sprawling complex on the East River in Queens, New York, the morning supervisor frowned at the pulsing red words on his computer screen.
Critical failure.
Below them was frozen the exact time: 11:20:20:003 a.m.
He lowered his cardboard coffee cup, blue and white with stiff depictions of Greek athletes on it, and sat up in his creaky swivel chair.
The power company control center employees sat in front of individual workstations, like air traffic controllers. The large room was brightly lit and dominated by a massive flat-screen monitor, reporting on the flow of electricity throughout the power grid known as the Northeastern Interconnection, which provided electrical service in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut. The architecture and decor of the control center were quite modern-if the year were 1960.
The supervisor squinted up at the board, which showed the juice arriving from generating plants around the country: steam turbines, reactors and the hydroelectric dam at Niagara Falls. In one tiny portion of the spaghetti depicting these electrical lines, something was wrong. A red circle was flashing.