The aide glanced in the mirror. “Two, no, three people inside. Black males. Late twenties or thirties. T-shirts, one gray, one green, short-sleeved. One sleeveless yellow. Can’t make out their faces.”

“You sound just like a patrol officer, Thom.” Rhyme shrugged. “Just police keeping an eye on us. That commissioner—McPherson—isn’t very happy we strangers’ve come to town.”

Thom squinted into the rearview mirror. “I don’t think they’re cops, Lincoln.”

“Why not?”

“The driver’s got earrings and the guy next to him’s in dreads.”

“Undercover.”

“And they’re passing a joint back and forth.”

“Okay. Probably not.”

Chapter 33

CHAPTER 33

FEW THINGS ARE MORE REPULSIVE than the chemical smoke aftermath of an IED plastic explosive detonation.

Amelia Sachs could smell it, taste it. She shivered from the cloying assault.

And then there was the ringing in her ears.

Sachs was standing in front of what remained of Java Hut, waiting—impatiently—for the Bomb Squad officers to make their rounds. She would run the crime scene search herself but the explosives experts from the Sixth Precinct in Greenwich Village always did the first post-blast sweep to check for secondary, delayed devices, intended to take out rescue workers. This was a common technique, at least in countries where bombs were just another means of making a political statement. Maybe Don Bruns had learned his skills abroad.

Sachs snapped her fingers next to each ear and was pleased to find that over the tinnitus ring she could hear pretty well.

What had saved her life and those of the coffee drinkers had at first made her laugh.

She and Jerry, the inked manager of Java Hut, had gone into the small, dimly lit office, where the store’s computer was located. They’d pulled up chairs and he’d bent forward, entering a passcode on the old Windows system.

“Here’s the program for the security video.” Jerry had loaded it and then showed her the commands for reviewing the .mpg files, how to rewind and fast-forward, how to capture stills and write clips to separate files for uploading or copying to a flash drive.

“Got it, thanks.”

She’d scooted forward and looked closely at the screen, which was divided into quadrants, one scene for each camera: two were of the floor of the shop, one of the cash register, one of the office.

She had just started scrolling back in time from today to May 11—the date the whistleblower had leaked the STO from here—when she noticed a scene of a man in the office where they now sat, walking forward.

Wait. Something was odd. She’d paused the video.

What was off about this?

Oh, sure, that was it. She’d laughed. In all the other scenes, because she was scrolling in reverse, people were moving backward. But on the office video, the man was moving forward, which meant that in real time he had been backing out of the office.