And Hale had risen to greet the dawn.
The Ventura on his wrist represented this new face - so to speak - of timekeeping. Its unparalleled accuracy gave him great pleasure and comfort. He looked at the watch once again.
And counted down.
Four ...
Three ...
Two ...
One ...
A blaring fire alarm screamed from the back of the cafe.
Hale pulled on a wool cap over his shaved head and stepped into the offensively hot coffee shop.
He was unseen by everybody - including Amelia Sachs and her interviewee - as they stared toward the kitchen, where he'd left the device twenty minutes ago. The stand-alone sm
oke detector, sitting on a shelf, appeared old (it wasn't) and greasy (it was). The workers would find it and assume it had been discarded and left on the top shelf accidentally. Soon someone would pull it down, pluck the battery out and throw the thing away. Nobody would think twice about the false alarm.
Amelia looked around - as did everyone - for smoke but there was none. When her eyes returned to the kitchen door behind which the blare persisted, Hale sat in a chair behind Amelia and on the pretense of setting his briefcase on the floor, slipped the bottle into her purse.
A new record: two seconds.
Then he looked around, as if debating whether he wanted to enjoy a latte in a place that was potentially on fire.
No. He'd go someplace else. The man rose and headed out into the chill.
The sound stopped - battery-plucking time. A glance back. Sachs returned to her coffee, to her notes. Oblivious to her impending death.
The Watchmaker turned toward the subway entrance at West Fourth Street. As he walked along the sidewalk in the brisk air an interesting thought occurred to him. Arsenic and antimony were metalloids - substances that shared qualities of both metals and non-metals - but were rigid enough to be crafted into enduring objects.
Would it be possible, he wondered, to make a timepiece out of these poisons?
What a fascinating thought!
And one that, he knew, would occupy his fertile mind for weeks and months to come.
CHAPTER 76
'Go with it,' Lincoln Rhyme said. The criminalist was alone in his parlor, talking through the speakerphone as he gazed absently at a website featuring some rather classy antiques and fine arts.
'Well,' said the voice, belonging to a captain at the NYPD, presently in police headquarters. The Big Building.
'Well, what?' Rhyme snapped. He'd been a captain too; anyway, he never took rank very seriously. Competence and intelligence counted first.
'It's a little unorthodox.'
The fuck does that mean? Rhyme thought. On the other hand, he himself had also been a civil servant in a civil-servant world and he knew that it was sometimes necessary to play a game or two. He appreciated the man's reluctance.
But he couldn't condone it.
'I'm aware of that, Captain. But we need to run with the story. There are lives at risk.'
The captain's first name was unusual. Dagfield.
Who would name somebody that?