The man outside the Café Artisan, preparing to kill Sachs, was Charles Vespasian Hale, his birth name, though he was known by many others too. Richard Logan was one. And most recently: David Weller, the indignant attorney who’d contacted the New York Bureau of Investigation about the upstart young officer Ron Pulaski.

The only name that he truly liked, however, was the one that described him best: the Watchmaker – echoing both his skill in crafting intricate criminal plots and his passion for clocks and watches.

He now regarded one of these, a Ventura SPARC Sigma MGS, a digital wristwatch that cost five thousand dollars. Hale owned 117 watches and clocks, the majority of which were analog, even if powered by electronics and batteries. He had Baume & Merciers, Rolexes and TAGs. He’d had a chance to steal a six-million-dollar Patek Philippe Calibre 89, the famed commemorative pocket watch created to honor the company’s 150th anniversary. It had more complications – those windows and dials giving information in addition to the present time – than any other watch ever created. The eighteen-karat masterpiece offered such data as the phase of the moon, power reserve, month, temperature, date of Easter, constellations, sunset and split second.

And yet Hale had chosen not to steal the masterpiece.

Why? Because the Patek was a relic. It was a new era now. The way of analog was gone. It had taken Hale some time to accept this but his arrest by Lincoln Rhyme some years ago had shown him that the world had changed.

And Hale had risen to greet the dawn.

The Ventura on his wrist represented this new face – so to speak – of timekeeping. Its unparalleled accuracy gave him great pleasure and comfort. He looked at the watch once again.

And counted down.

Four …

Three …

Two …

One …

A blaring fire alarm screamed from the back of the café.

Hale pulled on a wool cap over his shaved head and stepped into the offensively hot coffee shop.

He was unseen by everybody – including Amelia Sachs and her interviewee – as they stared toward the kitchen, where he’d left the device twenty minutes ago. The stand-alone smoke detector, sitting on a shelf, appeared old (it wasn’t) and greasy (it was). The workers would find it and assume it had been discarded and left on the top shelf accidentally. Soon someone would pull it down, pluck the battery out and throw the thing away. Nobody would think twice about the false alarm.

Amelia looked around – as did everyone – for smoke but there was none. When her eyes returned to the kitchen door behind which the blare persisted, Hale sat in a chair behind Amelia and on the pretense of setting his briefcase on the floor, slipped the bottle into her purse.

A new record: two seconds.

Then he looked around, as if debating whether he wanted to enjoy a latte in a place that was potentially on fire.