ipping strong, sweet coffee in the café across the street from the Gray Rock, thirty-nine-year-old Miguel Abrera was flipping through a brochure he’d received in the mail recently. It was yet another in a recent series of unusual occurrences in his life. Most were merely odd or irritating; this one was troubling.

He looked through it yet again. Then closed it and sat back, glancing at his watch. He still had ten minutes before he had to return to the job.

Miguel was a maintenance specialist, as SSD called it, but he told everybody he was a janitor. Whatever the title, the tasks he performed were a janitor’s tasks. He did a good job and he liked the work. Why should he be ashamed of what he was called?

He could have taken his break in the building but the free coffee that SSD provided was lousy and they didn’t even give you real milk or cream. Besides, he wasn’t one for chitchat and preferred enjoying a newspaper and coffee in solitude. (He missed smoking, though. He’d bargained away cigarettes in the emergency room and even though God hadn’t kept his side of the deal, Miguel had given up the habit anyway.)

He glanced up to see a fellow employee enter the café, Tony Petron, a senior janitor who worked executive row. The men exchanged nods and Miguel was worried that the man would join him. But Petron went to sit in the corner by himself to read e-mail or messages on his cell phone and once again Miguel looked over the flyer, which was addressed to him personally. Then, as he sipped the sweet coffee, he considered the other unusual things that had happened recently.

Like his time sheets. At SSD you simply walked through the turnstile and your ID card told the computer when you entered and when you left. But a couple of times in the past few months his sheets had been off. He always worked a forty-hour week and was always paid for forty hours. But occasionally he’d happened to look at his records and saw that they were wrong. They said he came in earlier than he had, then left earlier. Or he missed a weekday and worked a Saturday. But he never had. He’d talked to his supervisor about it. The man had shrugged. “Software bug maybe. As long as they don’t short you, no problemo.”

And then there was the issue of his checking-account statement. A month ago, he’d found to his shock that his balance was ten thousand dollars higher than it should be. By the time he’d gone to the branch to have them correct it, though, the balance was accurate. And that had happened three times now. One of the mistaken deposits was for $70,000.

And that wasn’t all. Recently he’d had a call from a company about his mortgage application. Only he hadn’t applied for a mortgage. He rented his house. He and his wife had hoped to buy something but after she and their young son died in the auto accident he hadn’t had the heart to consider a house.

Concerned, he checked his credit report. But no mortgage application was listed. Nothing out of the ordinary, though he noted that his credit rating had been raised—significantly. That too was odd. Though, of course, he didn’t complain about this particular fluke.

But none of those things troubled him as much as this flyer.

Dear Mr. Abrera:!!!As you are quite aware, at various times in our lives we go through traumatic experiences and suffer difficult losses. It’s understandable that at moments like this, people have trouble moving on in life. Sometimes they even have thoughts that the burden is too great and they consider taking impulsive and unfortunate measures.!!!We, at Survivor Counseling Services, recognize the difficult challenges facing persons like you, who’ve suffered a serious loss. Our trained staff can help you get through the difficult times with a combination of medical intervention and one-on-one and group counseling to bring you contentment and remind you that life is indeed worth living.

Now, Miguel Abrera had never considered suicide, even at his worst, just after the accident eighteen months ago; taking his own life was inconceivable.

That he received the flyer in the first place was worrying. But two aspects of the situation really unnerved him. The first was that the brochure had been sent to him directly—not forwarded—at his new address. No one involved in his counseling or at the hospital where his wife and child died knew that he’d moved a month ago.

The second was the final paragraph:!!!Now that you’ve taken that vital first step of reaching out to us, Miguel, we’d like to set up a no-cost evaluation session at your convenience. Don’t delay. We can help!

He had never taken any steps to contact the service.

How had they gotten his name?

Well, it was probably just an odd set of coincidences. He’d have to worry about it later. Time to get back to SSD. Andrew Sterling was the kindest and most considerate boss anybody could ask for. But Miguel had no doubt that the rumors were true: He reviewed every employee’s time sheets personally.

Alone in the conference room at SSD, Ron Pulaski looked at the cell phone window, as he wandered frantically—walking in a grid pattern, he realized, not unlike searching a crime scene. But he had no reception, just like Jeremy had said. He’d have to use the landline. Was it monitored?

Suddenly he realized that although he’d agreed to help Lincoln Rhyme do this, he was at serious risk of losing the most important thing in his life after his family: his job as an NYPD cop. He was thinking now how powerful Andrew Sterling was. If he’d managed to ruin the life of a reporter with a major newspaper a young cop wouldn’t stand a chance against the CEO. If they caught him he’d be arrested. His career would be over. What would he tell his brother, what would he tell his parents?

He was furious with Lincoln Rhyme. Why the hell hadn’t he protested the plan to steal the data? He didn’t have to do this.!!!Oh, sure, Detective… anything you say.

It was totally crazy.

But then he pictured the body of Myra Weinburg, eyes gazing upward, hair teasing her forehead, looking like Jenny. And he found himself leaning forward, crooking the phone under his chin and hitting 9 for the outside line.

“Rhyme here.”

“Detective. It’s me.”

“Pulaski,” Rhyme barked, “where the hell have you been? And where are you calling from? It’s a blocked number.”

“First time I’ve been alone,” he snapped. “And my cell doesn’t work here.”

“Well, let’s get moving.”

“I’m on a computer.”

“Okay, I’ll patch in Rodney Szarnek.”

The object of the theft was what Lincoln Rhyme had heard their computer guru comment on: the empty space on a computer hard drive. Sterling had claimed the computers didn’t keep track of employees’ downloading dossiers. But when Szarnek had explained about information floating around in the ether of SSD’s computer, Rhyme had asked if that might include information about who had downloaded files.

Szarnek thought it was a real possibility. He said that getting into innerCircle would be impossible—he’d tried that—but there would be a much smaller server that handled administrative operations, like time sheets and downloads. If Pulaski could get into the system, Szarnek might be able to have him extract data from the empty space. The techie could then reassemble it and see if any employees had downloaded the dossiers of the victims and the fall guys.

“Okay,” Szarnek now said, coming on the phone. “You’re in the system?”

“I’m reading a CD they gave me.”

“Heh. That means they’ve only given you passive access. We’ll have to do better.” The tech gave him some commands to type, incomprehensible.

“It’s telling me I don’t have permission to do this.”

“I’ll try to get you root.” Szarnek gave the young cop a series of even more confusing commands. Pulaski flubbed them several times and his face grew hot. He was furious with himself for transposing letters or typing a backward slash instead of a forward.

Head injury…

“Can’t I just use the mouse, look for what I’m supposed to find?”

Szarnek explained that the operating system was Unix, not the friendlier ones made by Windows or Apple. It required lengthy typed commands, which had to be keyboarded exactly.

“Oh.”

But finally the machine responded by giving him access. Pulaski felt a huge burst of pride.

“Plug the drive in now,” Szarnek said.

From his pocket the young officer took a portable 80-gigabyte hard drive and slipped the plug into the USB port on the computer. Following Szarnek’s instructions, he loaded a program that would turn the empty space on the server into separate files, compress them and store them on the portable drive.

Depending on the size of the unused space, this could take minutes or hours.

A small window popped up and the program told Pulaski only that it was “working.”

Pulaski sat back, scrolling through the customer information from the CD, which was still on the screen. In fact, the information on customers was mostly gibberish to him. The name of the SSD client was obvious, along with the address and phone number and names of those authorized to access the system, but much of the information was in.rar or.zip files, apparently compressed mailing lists. He scrolled to the end—front matter, Chapter fourteen.

Brother… it would take a long, long time to pick through them and find if any customers had compiled information on the victims and—

Pulaski’s thoughts were interrupted by voices in the hall, coming closer to the conference room.

Oh, no, not now. He carefully picked up the small, humming hard drive and slipped it into his slacks pocket. It gave a clicking sound. Faint, but Pulaski was sure it could be heard across the room. The USB cable was clearly visible.

The voices were closer now.

One was Sean Cassel’s.

Closer yet… Please. Go away!

On the screen in a small square window: Working…

Hell, Pulaski thought to himself and scooted the chair forward. The plug and the window would be clearly visible to anybody who stepped only a few feet into the room.

Suddenly a head appeared in the doorway. “Hey, Sergeant Friday,” Cassel said. “How’s it going?”

The officer cringed. The man would see the drive. He had to. “Good, thanks.” He moved his leg in front of the USB port to obscure the wire and plug. The gesture felt way obvious.

“How d’you like that Excel?”

“Good. I like it a lot.”

“Excellento. It’s the best. And you can export the files. You do much PowerPoint?”

“Not too much of that, no.”

“Well, you might some day, Sarge—when you’re police chief. And Excel is great for your home finances. Keep on top of all those investments of yours. Oh, and it comes with some games. You’d like ’em.”

Pulaski smiled, while his heart pounded as loudly as the hard drive whirred.

With a wink, Cassel disappeared.

If Excel comes with games, I’ll eat the disk, you arrogant son of a bitch.

Pulaski wiped his palms on his dress slacks, which Jenny had ironed that morning, as she did every morning or the night before if he had an early tour or a predawn assignment.

Please, Lord, don’t let me lose my job, he prayed. He thought back to the day when he and his twin brother had taken the police officer exam.

And the day they’d graduated. The swearing-in ceremony too, his mother crying, the look he and his father shared. Those were among the best moments of his life.

Would all that be wasted? Goddamnit. Okay, Rhyme’s brilliant and no one cared more about collaring perps than he did. But breaking the law like this? Hell, he was home sitting in that chair of his, being waited on. Nothing would happen to him.

Why should Pulaski be the sacrificial lamb?

Nonetheless he concentrated on his furtive task. Come on, come on, he urged the collection program. But it continued to churn away slowly, assuring him only that it was on the job. No bar easing to the right, no countdown, like in the movies.!!!Working…

“What was that, Pulaski?” Rhyme asked.

“Some employees. They’re gone.”

“How’s it going?”

“Okay, I think.”

“You think?”

“It—” A new message popped up:!!!Completed. Do you want to write to a file?

“Okay, it’s finished. It wants me to write to a file.”

Szarnek came on the line. “This is critical. Do exactly what I tell you.” He gave instructions on how to create the files, compress them and move them to the hard drive. Hands shaking, Pulaski did as instructed. He was covered in sweat. In a few minutes the job was done.

“Now you’re going to have to erase your tracks, put everything back the way it was. To make sure nobody does what you just did and finds you.” Szarnek sent the officer into the log files and had him type more commands. Finally he got these taken care of.

“That’s it.”

“Okay, get out of there, rookie,” Rhyme urged.

Pulaski hung up, unplugged the hard drive and slipped it back into his pocket, then logged off. He rose and walked outside, blinking in surprise to see that the security guard had moved closer. Pulaski realized he was the same one who’d escorted Amelia through the data pens, walking just behind her—as if he were taking a shoplifter to a store manager’s office to await the police.

Had the man seen anything?

“Officer Pulaski. I’ll take you back to Andrew’s office.” His face was unsmiling and his eyes didn’t reveal a thing. He led the officer up the hall. With every step the hard drive chafed against his leg and felt as if it were red hot. More glances at the ceiling. It was acoustic tile; he couldn’t see any damn cameras.

Paranoia filled the halls, brighter than the stark white lighting.

When they arrived Sterling waved him into the office, turning over several sheets of paper he was working on. “Officer, you got what you needed?”

“I did, yes.” Pulaski held up the client list CD like a kid at show-and-tell in school.

“Ah, good.” The CEO’s bright green eyes looked him over. “And how’s the investigation going?”

“It’s going okay.” These were the first words that came to Pulaski’s mind. He felt like an idiot. What would Amelia Sachs have said? He had no clue.

“Is it now? Anything helpful in the client list?”

“I just looked through it to make sure we could read it okay. We’ll go over it back at the lab.”

“The lab. In Queens? Is that where you’re based?”

“We do work there, a few other places too.”

Sterling gave no response to Pulaski’s evasion, just smiled pleasantly. The CEO was about four or five inches shorter but the young officer felt he was the one looking up. Sterling walked with him into the outer office. “Well, if there’s anything else, just let us know. We’re one hundred percent behind you.”

“Thanks.”

“Martin, make those arrangements we talked about earlier. Then take Officer Pulaski downstairs.”

“Oh, I can find my way.”

“He’ll show you out. You have a good night.” Sterling returned to his office. The door closed.

“I’ll just be a few minutes,” Martin said to the policeman and picked up the phone and turned slightly, out of earshot.

Pulaski strolled to the door and looked up and down the hall. A figure emerged from an office. He was speaking in hushed tones on his mobile. Apparently in this part of the building cell phones worked fine. He squinted at Pulaski, said a brief farewell and flipped the phone shut.

“Excuse me, Officer Pulaski?”

He nodded.

“I’m Andy Sterling.”

Sure, Mr. Sterling’s son.

The young man’s dark eyes confidently looked right into Pulaski’s, though his handshake seemed tentative. “I think you called me. And my father left a message that I was supposed to talk to you.”

“Yeah, that’s right. You have a minute?”

“What do you need to know?”

“We’re checking into certain people’s whereabouts on Sunday afternoon.”

“I went hiking up in Westchester. I drove up there about noon and got back—”

“Oh, no, it’s not you we’re interested in. I’m just checking where your father was. He said he called you at around two from Long Island.”

“Well, yes, he did. I didn’t take the call, though. I didn’t want to stop on my hike.” He lowered his voice. “Andrew has trouble separating business from pleasure and I thought he might want me to come into the office and I didn’t want to screw up my day off. I called him back later, about three-thirty.”

“Do you mind if I take a look at your phone?”

“No, not at all.” He opened the phone and displayed the incoming-call list. He’d received and made several calls on Sunday morning but in the afternoon only one call was on the screen: from the number Sachs had given him—Sterling’s Long Island house. “Okay. That’ll do it. Appreciate it.”

The young man’s face was troubled. “It’s terrible, from what I’ve heard. Someone was raped and murdered?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you close to catching him?”

“We have a number of leads.”

“Well, good. People like that should be lined up and shot.”

“Thanks for your time.”

As the young man walked off, Martin appeared and glanced at Andy’s receding back. “If you’d follow me, Officer Pulaski.” With a smile that might as well have been a frown, he walked toward the elevator.

Pulaski was being eaten alive by nervous energy, the disk drive filling his thoughts. He was sure everybody could see it outlined in his pocket. He began rambling. “So, Martin… you been with the company long?”

“Yes.”

“You a computer person too?”

A different smile, which meant nothing more than the other one. “Not really.”

Walking down the hallway, black and white, sterile. Pulaski hated it here. He felt strangled, claustrophobic. He wanted the streets, he wanted Queens, the South Bronx. Even the danger didn’t matter. He wanted to leave, just put his head down and run.

A tickle of panic.!!!The reporter not only lost his job but was prosecuted under criminal trespass statutes. He served six months in state prison.

Pulaski was also disoriented. This was a different route from the one he’d taken to get to Sterling’s office. Now Martin turned a corner and pushed through a thick door.

The patrolman hesitated when he saw what was ahead: a station manned by three unsmiling security guards, along with a metal detector and an X-ray unit. These weren’t the data pens, so there was no data-erasing system, as in the other part of the building, but he couldn’t smuggle out the portable hard drive without being detected. When he’d been here earlier with Amelia Sachs they hadn’t passed through any security stations like these. He hadn’t even seen any.

“Don’t think we went through one of these last time,” he said to the assistant, trying to sound casual.

“Depends on whether people’ve been unattended for any period of time,” Martin explained. “A computer makes the assessment and lets us know.” He smiled. “Don’t take it personally.”

“Ha. Not at all.”

His heart pounded, his palms were damp. No, no! He couldn’t lose his job. He just couldn’t. It was so important to him.

What the hell had he done, agreeing to do this? He told himself he was stopping the man who’d killed a woman who looked a lot like Jenny. A terrible man who had no problem with killing anyone if it suited his purpose.

Still, he reflected, this isn’t right.

What would his parents say when he confessed to them that he was being arrested for stealing data? His brother?

“You have any data on you, sir?”

Pulaski showed him the CD. The man examined the case. He called a number, using speed dial. He stiffened slightly and then spoke quietly. He loaded the disk into a computer at his station and looked over the screen. The CD apparently was on a list of approved items; but still the guard ran it through the X-ray unit, studying the image of the jewel box and the disk inside carefully. It rolled on the conveyor to the other side of the metal detector.

Pulaski started forward but a third guard stopped him. “Sorry, sir, please empty your pockets and put everything metal on there.”

“I’m a police officer,” he said, trying to sound amused.

The guard replied, “Your department has agreed to abide by our security guidelines, since we’re government contractors. The rules apply to everybody. You can call your supervisor to check, if you’d like.”

Pulaski was trapped.

Martin continued to watch him closely.

“Everything on the belt, please.”

Think, come on, Pulaski raged to himself. Figure something out.

Think!

Bluff your way through this.

I can’t. I’m not smart enough.

Yes, you are. What would Amelia Sachs do? Lincoln Rhyme?

He turned away, knelt down and spent several moments carefully unlacing his shoes, slowly pulling them off. Standing, he placed the polished shoes on the belt and added his weapons, ammo, cuffs, radio, coins, phone and pens to a plastic tray.

Pulaski started through the metal detector and it went off with a squeal as the unit sensed the hard drive.

“You have anything else on you?”

Swallowing, shaking his head, he patted his pockets. “Nope.”

“We’ll have to wand you.”

Pulaski stepped out. The second guard passed the wand over his body and stopped at the officer’s chest. The device gave a huge squeal.

The patrolman laughed. “Oh, sorry.” He undid a button on his shirt and displayed the bulletproof vest. “Metal heart plate. Forgot about it. Stops everything but a full-metal-jacket rifle slug.”

“Probably not a Desert Eagle,” the guard said.

“Now here’s my opinion: A fifty-caliber handgun is just not natural,” Pulaski joked, finally drawing smiles from the guards. He started to remove the shirt.

“That’s all right. I don’t think we need to make you strip, Officer.”

With shaking hands Pulaski buttoned his shirt, right over the spot where the drive rested—between his undershirt and the vest; he’d stuffed it there when he’d bent down to unlace his shoes.

He gathered up his gear.

Martin, who’d bypassed the metal detector, guided him through another door. They were in the main lobby, a large, stark area in gray marble, etched with a huge version of the watchtower and window logo.

“Have a good day, Officer Pulaski,” Martin said, turning back.

Pulaski continued to the massive glass doors, trying to control the shaking of his hands. He was noticing for the first time the bank of TV cameras monitoring the lobby. His impression was of vultures, sitting serenely on the wall, waiting for wounded prey to gasp and fall.