Page 151 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

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In a dress shirt, with the sleeves rolled up, Mayor Tony Harrison rose and strode past the men in his office.

He gripped the door and seemed to debate slamming it. The panel was quite heavy, though, and it would not have been a particularly dramatic gesture. Besides, Rhyme sensed that he felt he should maintain some decorum.

Even under these circumstances.

Rhyme and Thom, along with Al Rodriguez and football-build Richard Beaufort, were in the spacious office, decked out with a museum’s worth of New York historical memorabilia and offering quite the splendid view of the city, though a view that was a mere sliver of the urban sprawl that the man governed. Ironically one window faced north and in the far, far distance—invisible from here—was Albany, the place on which his sights and hopes were aimed.

Although Lincoln Rhyme had zero interest in politics, if he’d been forced to govern, he would have picked New York City in an instant over the state as a whole.

Harrison returned to his chair.

“Explain.” The grating word was directed at Rodriguez. “Brett Evansarrested—and not him?” A look at Rhyme.

Rodriguez said, “A couple of weeks ago I asked Captain Rhyme to help me run a sting operation. It’s been with full knowledge of the chief of department, the district attorney, and the department’s general counsel.”

“Sting? About what?”

“To get to the bottom of why there’ve been so many investigations and prosecutions compromised lately.”

The mayor’s eyes narrowed at this—the very incidents that his opponent for governor had been using as campaign fodder against him.

Beaufort sat and was silent, though he glanced toward Rhyme once or twice uncertainly.

Rodriguez continued, “I spent days looking over what went wrong, how stakeouts got made, how CIs had changes of heart—or ended up in the Gowanus Canal. I found dozens of incidents ruining investigations—incidents that just could not have happened unless somebody was tipping off suspects and defendants.”

“Somebody inside …” Harrison muttered. “We had a mole.”

Rodriguez nodded. “The only lead seemed to be that they were selling NYPD information to Viktor Buryak. So the DA had one of his prosecutors, John Sellars, bring a case against Buryak—for the murder of Leon Murphy.”

“Which I threw,” Rhyme said.

The mayor whispered, “You … you intentionally screwed up the case?”

“I did indeed.”

Rodriguez added, “It was touch-and-go for a while. We weren’t sure the jury would acquit Buryak but, thank God, they did. Thatput him back in play, on the street, with one big fear: that Lincoln—who’s known, all respect, to have a bit of an ego—”

“Not a worry.”

A faint smile appeared beneath the handlebar mustache. “A big fear that Lincoln would continue to go after him. We even made sure that Buryak heard that Lincoln was going to do anything he could to bring him down.”

“How?”

“Oh, Buryak’s people bugged the prosecution’s briefing room in the courthouse. We thought it might happen and scanned it. Left the bugs in place long enough to deliver the message.”

“The fuck.”

Rhyme added, “We were sure Buryak would use the department mole to find out what I was up to.”

Beaufort snapped, “So you were running an operation and didn’t tell me or the mayor?”

Rhyme hated obvious questions and tended not to answer them.

But Rodriguez offered, “We didn’t know where the leak was. Your office is copied on a lot of classified NYPD information. Somebody here could have been skimming it.”

The mayor gave a laugh. “I was a suspect too.”