The Watchmaker’s Hand

“Did Detective Gilligan give you any clues about associates he might’ve been working with? Either on this case or any others?”

Rhyme and Sachs regarded each other. She shook her head.

The detective put the pad and pen away, buttoned his jacket, and with a last look around the parlor started for the door. He paused and turned back. “So, this Hale wants to tag you, and Gilligan was working with him. I don’t know whether it’s important or not, but there’s something maybe you should know. After we got the paperwork on him, we pulled Gilligan’s activity report. Last week he went to Emergency Service and checked out six flash-bangs and five C4 breaching charges.

“Put ’em together and there’s more than enough bang to be fatal. We’ve searched his office and house. We didn’t find them.”

Hylton glanced at the scanner in the front hallway. “You get any packages from people you don’t know, well, make sure you take a close look. And don’t drop ’em accidentally.”

28

Charles Hale gazed up at the tower crane that Simone had mentioned as they sat in the Harlem coffeehouse.

The jib was weather-vaning in the wind; the slewing plate had been released so it could turn and keep pressure from the wind off the mast. A huge American flag flapped noisily two hundred feet up. He’d think that might affect performance, but it wasn’t his concern.

He turned and glanced at the building west of the one Simone had rented as a drop site. He’d half-expected the police, investigating how the young man who lived there had come to overdose on an anesthetic cocktail.

But no. He had the street to himself.

With the key she’d given him in the “gift bag,” he opened the door. Coincidentally, the key was the same as he used in all his safe houses, including the one here. It was of an unusual design, a short length of chain. The lock it fit into was as unpickable as one could be.

Inside, hand near a weapon in his waistband, he clicked on the green-tinted overheads and walked to the box containing the device she’d had made. He looked down at the printing on the cardboard side.

KitchenAid Bread Maker Deluxe

He was amused at the camouflage. He knelt and opened the lid, looking inside.

The device was of quite the compact design, resembling a generator of the sort you’d buy at a home improvement store. A burnished metal base, on top of which sat an array of metal and black carbon fiber boxes and tubes and fixtures and wires. To one side were large batteries. The top was the business end: a brushed aluminum tube, two feet long and six inches in diameter.

Most devices of destruction appear haphazard. True IEDs are just jumbles of wires and circuit boards and chunks of explosives. No order, sloppy and tangled.

What Simone had created, however, was stylish, elegant, even sensuous. German Bauhaus design of the early twentieth century came to mind.

He ran his hand slowly over the top, regretting the necessity for latex gloves. He would have liked to feel its texture on his skin.

As a watchmaker by avocation, Hale was talented with tools and had the ability to construct any number of things — the acid delivery systems for the cranes, for instance, or the one that killed the witness in Queens.

But this was different. This was special, beyond his skills.

All the more reason for respect. Then he sealed the box back up and wheeled the bulky thing out to the back of the SUV. He wrestled it in.

He then returned to the apartment and found the cardboard box that Simone had mentioned in the note she’d given him in Harlem. Inside were what appeared to be a bag of flour and a can of Crisco. Hale dumped the contents of the bag — a metallic-shaded powder — onto the floor near where Simone’s device had rested. He opened the can and poured the brown gelatin inside over the floor in a trail from the door to the powder.

The last thing he extracted from the box was a Fourth of July sparkler.

At the doorway, he turned and lit it, dropping it on the gelatin, which ignited immediately. The mix of gasoline, naphthalene and palmitate — napalm — caught fire immediately and began to burn toward the powder, which was iron oxide rust and aluminum, also known as thermite. The napalm burned at about 1,000 degrees Celsius, hot enough to do considerable damage, but the thermite would reach a temperature of 4,000 degrees, guaranteeing that not a molecule of DNA remained.

Hale returned to the SUV and drove down to Greenwich Village. There, near the Hamilton Court cul-de-sac, he left the vehicle in a garage one of his companies had rented and returned to the trailer.