What followed was comical. The water was choppy and the boat small. They were trying to maintain balance but afraid if they lowered their arms, death from on high would find them. Two fell over and scrabbled quickly to their feet, shooting their hands into the air. They seemed like drunks trying to dance.

“Florida Center to UAV Four Eight One. Copy surrender. Navy advises Cyclone-class patrol ship, the Firebrand, one mile away, making thirty knots. Keep secondary target dead in the water until it arrives.”

“Copy. Four Eight One.”

Chapter 97

CHAPTER 97

BARRY SHALES CLOSED THE DOOR to the Kill Room and, ignoring Shreve Metzger, walked to Rhyme and Sachs. He nodded.

The policewoman told him what a good job he’d done at the commands of the drone. “Sorry, I mean UAV.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said unemotionally, his bright blue eyes averted. Some of this reserve was perhaps because he was facing two people who’d intended to hang a murder charge on him. On reflection, though, Rhyme thought not. He simply seemed to be a very private person.

Maybe when you have his particular skill you’re mentally and emotionally in a different place much of the time.

Shales then turned to Rhyme. “We had to move pretty fast, sir. I never got the chance to ask how you figured it out—that there was going to be an attack on the rig, I mean.”

The criminalist said, “There was some evidence unaccounted for.”

“Oh, that’s right, sir. You’re the evidence tsar, someone was saying.”

Rhyme decided he liked that pithy phrase quite a bit. He’d remember it. “Specifically paraffin with a branched-chain molecule, an aromatic, a cycloalkane…oh, and some alkenes.”

Shales blinked twice.

“Or to put it in more common parlance: crude oil.”

“Crude oil?”

“Exactly. Trace amounts were found on Moreno’s and his guard’s shoes and clothes. They had to pick that up at some point before your attack on May ninth when they were out of the South Cove Inn, at meetings. Now, I didn’t think much of it—there are some refineries and oil storage facilities in the Bahamas. But then I realized something else: The morning he died Moreno met with some businesspeople about starting up transportation and agriculture operations there as part of his Local Empowerment Movement. But we’d also learned that fertilizer, diesel oil and nitromethane had been shipped weeks ago to his LEM companies. If those companies hadn’t even been formed yet, why buy the chemicals?”

“You put together crude oil and possible bomb.”