Enough to make sure that there’d be no blinks.

The proof of vacation burned into a silicon chip, the tourists turned to gaze at the sea and conversation meandered to dinner and shopping in Miami and the Fontainebleau hotel and was Versace’s mansion still open to the public?

“I heard he had an eight-person shower,” said Jim from London.

Claire disputed that.

“Holy shit,” Jim from New Jersey gasped.

“Honey!” chided his wife.

But the camera was up once more and by the time the sound of the explosion reached them, everyone had turned and was focused on the massive mushroom cloud rising perhaps a thousand feet in the air.

“Oh, Jesus. It’s the oil rig!”

“No, no!”

“Oh, my God. Somebody call somebody.”

Click, click, click, click…

Chapter 96

CHAPTER 96

W HAT’S THE DAMAGE ASSESSMENT?”

Shreve Metzger, in blue jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt that was partly untucked amidships, was leaning over a computer monitor, staring, staring at the smoke and haze hovering over the Caribbean Sea, a thousand miles away.

“Gone completely,” said a NIOS communications specialist at a control panel beside him, a young woman with hair pulled back in a bun that looked painfully tight. The comspec’s voice was unemotional.

The scene on the monitor revealed clearly that, no, there was nothing left, other than an oil slick, some debris.

And smoke. A lot of smoke.

Gone completely…

Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs, along with Metzger and the comspec, were in the outer office of NIOS’s Ground Control Station trailer, on Rector Street in lower Manhattan. In the parking lot.

Rhyme squinted at the bits of wood and plastic and rocking sheen of oil, which had until thirty seconds ago been the 110-foot Dominican cargo ship that Robert Moreno’s friend, Henry Cross, aka Enrico Cruz, had guided toward the Miami Rover, the American Petroleum Drilling and Refining oil rig off the coast of Florida.

The comspec touched her earphones. “Reports of a second detonation, underwater, Director. About eight or nine hundred feet depth.”

A moment later, they could see on the high-resolution monitor a slight bubbling up of the water on the surface. That was all. Rhyme supposed that however large the second bomb had been, intended to destroy the rig’s wellhead, he guessed, so much water had quite a mitigating effect.

Rhyme looked through the glass wall dividing the trailer in half: the Kill Room of the GCS. He noted in the dim light the man who had just caused the devastation—and saved the lives of the people on board the rig, as well as much of the east coast of Florida.

Oblivious to those observing him, Barry Shales was at the drone operations station. To Rhyme it seemed like a freestanding airplane cockpit. Shales was sitting forward, apparently quite relaxed, in a comfortable tan leather chair, facing five flat-screen monitors.