The Watchmaker’s Hand

A hollow laugh. “Pets? Hardly. They choose to live here. I don’t know why. Fatter pigeons in this part of the park maybe? More stupid squirrels? But here they’ve settled and I’ve enjoyed watching them nest, propagate and hunt. I’m going upstairs.”

Hale was apparently debating. “All right... Here’s what you’ll do. You have a pulse oximeter on the chair. Put it on one of your fingers and turn it so I can see its screen.”

Rhyme did. “Clear enough?”

“Your oxygen levels are good, Lincoln. And your pulse lower than most people’s under these circumstances.”

“Pulse rates increase when adrenaline spills into the bloodstream because of the fight-or-flight response. I can’t do either. So why get riled up?”

“All right, go upstairs, but keep the signal active. One phone call from me and Pulaski is dead.”

A chuckle. “You’ve won, Charles. There’re no tricks I can pull. I just want to see the birds one last time.”

Rhyme guided the chair into the small elevator and pressed the button to take him to the second floor. He wheeled out of the cage and turned to the left into the hallway and then to the main bedroom, which faced Central Park West. The glass was bulletproof and the view of the greenery and distant battlement of posh buildings on the East Side were distorted.

He looked down to the nest.

The birds — a couple and two fledglings — turned their heads his way. The faces, by nature, radiated hostile suspicion, whatever was truly in their hearts. Of the quartet, the youngsters were by far the more aggressive. They would spar for sparring’s sake. Their parents took prey — at two hundred miles an hour — not for the joy of killing; for them the process was merely shopping for dinner.

He gazed at them for a full minute, then said, “All right. I’m ready.” Glancing down at the hypos. “Two. In case I dropped one, I assume. Fentanyl...” He added sardonically, “Such a lovely concoction of phenethyl, piperidinyl, phenylpropanamide. You know you can change the potency by moving the methyl group into the three-position of the ring. I assume this is the strongest. Now, your word about Ron?”

“My word.”

Rhyme sighed, looked at the birds one more time and slipped the needle into the vein on the back of his left hand. He slowly pressed the plunger.

By the time the last of the liquid was in the blood vessel, his head was lolling.

The heart rate on the sensor began a countdown.

In ten seconds, the small screen read 0.

And there it remained.

66

As with so many human constructs meant to interpret indifferent nature, time knows no natural intervals. We’ve decided on hours and minutes and seconds.

So while it could be said that Lincoln Rhyme died at 10:14:53 post meridiem on Tuesday, April 16, the most accurate way to put it is the truism: he lived the length of time from his birth to his death.

Requiescat in pace, Lincoln.

Hale put the tablet into his backpack and, still crouching in the bushes, pulled out his phone and read the message he’d received a few moments earlier. It was from the pilot, reporting that the plane was in Teterboro, the private airport in New Jersey, and ready to go at any time. The drive there would take forty minutes.

This portion of his mission was completed, yes, but he decided he’d been inaccurate to think of Rhyme’s death as the finale. It was the penultimate mission — next to last.

Clocks are not moral or amoral. They count second by second, marking moments of joy and sorrow and pain and pleasure and cruelty, but they remain utterly indifferent to what occurs at any particular click.

This was the template too for Charles Vespasian Hale, who with no affect whatsoever carried out his jobs in the most logical way possible, regardless of the consequence to anyone.

And so it was with no regret — or joy — that he dialed the number that detonated the charge on the acid jar in the warehouse basement where Ron Pulaski was held. He’d kept him alive until now in case Rhyme had wanted proof that he was all right.

Lincoln Rhyme had died thinking that he had saved the life of the young man. That would have brought him some peace.

But Hale could not afford another grain of sand in the works of his life.

Pulaski was heir to Rhyme’s skill and had that grit that would motivate him to do whatever it took to find Hale and either bring him back to New York for trial or — he believed the officer capable of it — kill him on the spot.

He had to go.

And Amelia Sachs?

She was less of a threat. Justice was within her, like a vein of a diamond. But revenge was not. She wouldn’t choose to forgo her job of stopping evil in the city for the lengthy and possibly futile mission of pursuing her husband’s killer.

Hale had been dramatic with Rhyme in describing the effects of HF gas on Ron Pulaski. There was no time-release mechanism on the device. All the acid in the jar would flood the room at once. A painful death, yes, but brief. He’d be dead by now.

Hale looked around him and, seeing no threats, lifted his backpack to his shoulder.