The Watchmaker’s Hand

He needed to move on to the next step.

Time, counting down.

Always, always...

He asked, “Do you know Prague?”

“We did a job there, my team. I would have liked to stay for a while. But we needed to evac.”

“In Old Town Square there’s a medieval astronomical clock. The Orloj. Tourists come to see it. Lots of tourists. Big crowds on the weekends. Hard for surveillance to see anything. I’ll be there next year. The first Saturday in May.”

She reached for his hand. The grip, fingers entwined, was far more intimate than a kiss.

In the rearview mirror, he believed he saw someone glancing at the SUV, the pose reminding him of the man he’d seen in the monitor at the mouth of Hamilton Court last night. He was carrying something, a suitcase, Hale believed.

He turned to look directly.

But the figure was gone.

Now that he was turned fully around, he lifted his backpack from the floor. He reached inside.

He extracted a white box, six by six by two inches. It was closed and fixed with a rubber band. He handed this to her. She frowned, then opened the lid.

And lifted out the bone clock, the one he’d told her about, the one the Russian political prisoner had made.

“Ah.” She studied it for a long moment. “I was going to bring something for you. A wheel, the kind I use in my steam engines. Our wheels are real wheels.”

“Not gears pretending to be something else.”

A glance into his eyes.

He showed her how to set the time and where the switch was that released the tiny weights. He moved it now.

She held the clock to her ear and seemed to find the ticking pleasant. As he always did.

She reboxed the gift, and slipped it into her own backpack, where he saw the grip of a large semiautomatic pistol. She climbed out of the car and bent down to speak to him through the open door. “You’re doing it now?”

He nodded.

He hoped if she said anything it wouldn’t be common, like good luck or take care.

It wasn’t.

What she said was a single word: “Prague.”

60

Endgame...

Lincoln Rhyme had been thinking of his earlier concern, of not being able to grasp the Watchmaker’s strategy to win their deadly chess game.

But what if that was not the proper question?

Perhaps the query should be: What is your real goal?

What if you have no interest in taking the king?

Maybe it’s the queen you want. Or her knight? Or the king’s bishop?

Or a lowly pawn, which might one day ascend to the role of matriarch of the board by traipsing doggedly and unnoticed all the way to the distant edge of the checkerboard world.

And even if it’s then checkmate to you, and your king is snagged... You don’t care. You’ve won after all.

Lon Sellitto took a call. His conversation was lengthy — and apparently alarming.

He disconnected. “Okay, Linc. Stuff’s happening. That was the mayor’s office. The counter’s disappeared from that website, 13Chan. And Computer Crimes and the Bureau were monitoring chatter. ‘Kommunalka’ was the keyword. CC intercepted an email. Anonymous account in Philly to an anonymous account here, Manhattan. It says, ‘It’s time. Do the last one, and place packages where discussed on alternate routes. And keep up the façade of Kommunalka. There are people who are checking, they don’t believe it. We can’t let them find us. Remember: “Men make their own history.” — Karl Marx.’

“That’s why we couldn’t find Kommunalka. It’s a front for some other radical outfit. Group X.”

Mel Cooper said, “And ‘Do the last one.’ Does that mean a crane?”

Sellitto: “So it was Group X that hired the Watchmaker, and...” His phone hummed and he took the call. This conversation was troubled too. “No shit. Send me details.” He disconnected. “Another one, Linc. A crane.”

“Where?”

“Downtown.”

Mel Cooper had tuned in to the news on his phone. He called, “It was at a jobsite near the entrance to the Holland. Nobody dead. Injuries. Some serious.”

“What did it hit?”

Cooper examined his screen. “Odd. No buildings anywhere near it. Landed on a street is all. The injuries were in cars and trucks.”

Sellitto lifted the phone away from his ear and filled in with information that was likely not public. “This one was different. He used C4.”

“Ah, now that’s significant.”

“Why?”

“Time.”

“Huh?”

“Obvious,” Rhyme muttered. “He can’t know for certain exactly when the acid’d eat through the counterweights of the cranes. But for some reason he needed this one to drop at a particular time. Down. To. The. Minute.” Frowning at the murder board, the map of the city. “The Holland’s closed?”

“At least eight hours, they’re talking maybe longer. The traffic’s a—”

“Yes, yes, yes, I’m sure it’s a fittingly clichéd adjective or participle about vehicular congestion. Why that time, why that location?”

Rhyme settled on one particular entry.

Senator Talese reported possibly being followed to meeting at Water Street Hotel.