Another surge of panic. Was it only a matter of time until they were successful?
He closed his eyes but then decided he shouldn't sleep. He didn't dare. They'd move on him when he was asleep, they'd move on him if he closed his eyes, they'd move on him if he didn't pay complete attention to everything, everyone, every minute.
And now his agony was complete. Judy had said that Lincoln might have found something that could prove his innocence. She didn't know what, and so Arthur had no way to judge if his cousin was simply being optimistic, or if he'd discovered some concrete proof that he'd been wrongly arrested. He was furious at this ambiguous hope. Before he'd talked to Judy, Arthur Rhyme had resigned himself to a living hell and an impending death.
I'm doin' you a favor, man. Fuck, you'd do yourself in a month or two anyway. . . . Now jus' stop fightin' it. . . .
But now, realizing that freedom might be attainable, resignation blossomed into panic. He saw in front of him some hope that could be taken away.
His heart began its manic thudding again.
He grabbed the call button. Pushed it once. Then again.
No response. A moment later another pair of eyes appeared in the window. But they weren't a doctor's. Was it one of the cons he'd seen before? He couldn't tell. The man was looking directly at him.
Struggling to control the fear that trickled down his spine like electricity, he pressed the call button again, then held it down.
Still no response.
The eyes in the window blinked once, then vanished.
Chapter Thirty-seven "Metadata."
On speakerphone Rodney Szarnek, in the NYPD computer lab, was explaining to Lincoln Rhyme how 522 most likely had learned that the "expert" was in fact an undercover cop.
Sachs, standing nearby, with her arms crossed and fingers picking at her sleeve, reminded him of what she'd learned from Calvin Geddes of Privacy Now. "That's data about data. Embedded in documents."
"Right," Szarnek confirmed, hearing her comment. "He probably saw that we'd created the C.V. last night."
"Shit," Rhyme murmured. Well, you can't think of everything. Then: But you have to when you're up against the man who knows everything. And now the plan, which potentially could have netted him, had been wasted. The second time they'd failed.
And worse, they'd tipped their hand. Just like they'd learned about his suicide ploy, he'd learned how they operated and had a defense against future tactics.
Knowledge is power. . . .
Szarnek added, "I had somebody at Carnegie Mellon trace the addresses of everyone who was in their site this morning. A half dozen hits originated in the city but they were from public terminals, no trace of the users. Two were from proxies in Europe, and I know the servers. They won't cooperate."
Naturally.
"Now we've got some information from the empty-space files Ron got from SSD. It's taking some time. They were . . ." He apparently decided to avoid the technical explanation and said, ". . . pretty scrambled. But we've got fragments coming together. Looks like somebody did assemble dossiers and download them. We've got a nym--that's a screen name or code name. 'Runnerboy.' That's all so far."
"Any idea who? An employee, customer, hacker?"
&n
bsp; "Nope. I called a friend in the Bureau and checked their database for known nyms and e-mail addresses. They found about eight hundred Runnerboys. None in the metro area, though. We'll know more later."
Rhyme had Thom write the name Runnerboy on the list of suspects. "We'll check with SSD. See if that's a name anybody recognizes."
"And the customer files on the CD?"
"I've got somebody going through it manually. The code I wrote only got us so far. There're too many variables--different consumer products, Metro fare cards, E-ZPasses. Most of the companies downloaded certain information from the victims but statistically nobody's jumping out as a suspect yet."
"All right."
He disconnected.
"We tried, Rhyme," Sachs said.