“Not decoys?”

“Well, they didn’t look like cops and they were looking pretty freaked out. Are you on Lexington?”

“Yeah.”

“In a car?” Jodie asked.

“Of course in a car,” Stephen said. “I stole some little shit Jap thing. I’m going to follow them. Then wait till they get to some deserted area and do it.”

“How?”

“How what?”

“How’re you going to do it? Like a grenade or a machine gun?”

Stephen thought, Wouldn’t you like to know?

He said, “I’m not sure. It depends.”

“You see ’em?” Jodie asked, sounding uncomfortable.

“I see them,” Stephen said. “I’m behind them. I’m pulling into traffic now.”

“A Jap car, huh?” Jodie said. “Like a Toyota or something?”

Why, you little asshole traitor, Stephen thought bitterly, stung deeply by the betrayal even though he’d known it was probably inevitable.

Stephen was in fact watching the Yukon and backup vans speed past him. He wasn’t, however, in any Japanese car, shitty or otherwise. He wasn’t in any car at all. Wearing the fireman’s uniform he’d just stolen, he was standing on the street corner exactly one hundred feet from the safe house, watching the real version of the events Jodie was fictionalizing. He knew they were decoys in the Yukon. He knew the Wife and the Friend were still in the safe house.

Stephen picked up the gray remote-det transmitter. It looked like a walkie-talkie but had no speaker or microphone. He set the frequency to the bomb in Jodie’s phone and armed the device.

“Stand by,” he said to Jodie.

“Heh,” Jodie laughed. “Will do, sir.”

Lincoln Rhyme, just a spectator now, a voyeur.

Listening through his headset. Praying that he was right.

“Where’s the van?” Rhyme heard Sellitto ask.

Two blocks away,” Haumann said. “We’re on it. It’s moving slowly up Lex. Getting near traffic. He . . . wait.” A long pause.

“What?”

“We’ve got a couple cars, a Nissan, a Subaru. An Accord too, but that’s got three people in it. The Nissan’s getting close to the van. That might be it. Can’t see inside.”

Lincoln Rhyme closed his eyes. He felt his left ring finger, his only extant digit, flick nervously on the comforter covering the bed.

“Hello?” Stephen said into the phone.

“Yeah,” Jodie responded. “I’m still here.”

“Directly across from the safe house?”

“That’s right.”

Stephen was looking at the building. No Jodie, no Negro.

“I want to say something to you.”

“What’s that?” the little man asked.

Stephen remembered the electric sizzle as his knee touched the man’s.

I can’t do it . . .

Soldier . . .

Stephen gripped the remote-det box in his left hand. He said, “Listen carefully.”

“I’m listening. I—”

Stephen pushed the transmit button.

The explosion was astonishingly loud. Louder than even Stephen expected. It rattled panes and sent a million pigeons reeling into the sky. Stephen saw the glass and wood from the top floor of the safe house go spraying into the alley beside the building.