"One hour," Rhyme grumbled.

The aide was going to argue but then he glanced at Rhyme's face and, while he probably saw anger and don't-fuck-with-me eyes, which wouldn't have affected him one bit, he observed too the criminalist's heartfelt concern for the next victims on the Conjurer's list. Thom conceded, "One hour. If you sleep."

"An hour it is," Rhyme said. Then added wryly, "And I'll have the sweetest of dreams. . . . A drink would help, you know."

The aide tugged at the subtle purple tie-a gesture of weakening that Rhyme seized on like a shark lapping a molecule of blood. "Just one," the criminalist said.

"All right." He poured a little ancient Macallan into one of Rhyme's tumblers and arranged the straw next to his mouth.

The criminalist sipped long. "Ah, heaven . . ." Then he glanced at the empty glass. "Someday I'll teach you how to pour a real drink."

"I'll be back in an hour," Thom said.

"Command, alarm clock," Rhyme said sternly. On the flat-screen monitor a clock face appeared and he orally set the alarm to sound in one hour.

"I would've gotten you up," the aide said.

"Ah, well, just in case you were occupied and somehow forgot," Rhyme said coyly, "now I'll be sure to be awake, won't I?"

The aide left, closing the door behind him, and Rhyme's eyes slipped to the window, where the peregrine falcons perched, lording over the city, their heads turning in that odd way of theirs-both jerky and elegant at the same time. Then one-the female, the better hunter-glanced quickly at him, blinking her narrow slits of eyes, as if she'd just sensed his gaze. A cock of her head. Then she returned to her examination of the hubbub of the circus in Central Park.

Rhyme closed his eyes though his mind was speeding through the evidence, trying to figure out what the clues might mean: the brass, the hotel key, the press pass, the ink. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. . . . Finally his eyes sprang open. This was absurd. He wasn't the least bit tired. He wanted to get the hell back downstairs and return to work. Sleeping was out of the question.

He felt a breeze tickle his cheek and was angrier yet at Thom-for leaving the air-conditioning on. When a quad's nose runs, there goddamn well better be somebody nearby to wipe it. He summoned up the climate control panel on the monitor, thinking about telling Thom that he would've gotten to sleep except that the room was too cold. But one look at the screen told him that the air-conditioner was off.

What had the breeze been?

The door was still closed.

There! He felt it again, a definite waft of air on his other cheek, his right one. He turned his head quickly. Was it from the windows? No, they too were closed. Well, it was probably- But then he noticed the door.

Oh, no, he thought, chilled to his heart. The door to his bedroom had a bolt on it-a latch that could be closed only by someone in his room. Not from the outside.

It was locked.

Another breath on his skin. Hot, this time. Very close. He heard a faint wheeze too.

"Where are you?" Rhyme whispered.

He gasped as a hand appeared suddenly in front of his face, two fingers deformed, fused together. The hand held a razor blade, the sharp edge aimed toward Rhyme's eyes.

"If you call for help," said the Conjurer in a breathy whisper, "if you make a noise, I'll blind you. Understood?"

Lincoln Rhyme nodded.

Chapter Twenty-five.

The blade in the Conjurer's hand vanished.

He didn't put it away, didn't hide it. One moment the metal rectangle was in his fingers, aimed at Rhyme's face; the next, it was gone.

The man-brown-haired, beardless, wearing a policeman's uniform-walked around the room, examining the books, the CDs, the posters. He seemed to nod approvingly at something. He studied one curious decoration: a small red shrine, inside of which was a likeness of the Chinese god of war and of police detectives, Guan Di. The Conjurer seemed to think nothing of the incongruity of such an item in the bedroom of a forensic scientist.

He returned to Rhyme.

"Well," the man said in his throaty whisper, looking over the Flexicair bed. "You're not what I expected."

"The car," Rhyme said. "In the river? How?"

"Oh, that?" he said dismissively. "The Submerged Car trick? I was never in the car. I got out in the bushes at the end of that street. A simple trick: a closed window-so the witnesses would see mostly glare-and my hat on the headrest. It was my audience's imagination that saw me. Houdini was never even in some of the trunks and barrels he pretended to escape from."

"So they weren't skid marks from braking," Rhyme said. "They were skid marks from accelerating tires." He was angry that he'd missed this. "You put a brick on the accelerator."

"A brick wouldn't've looked natural when the divers found the car; I wedged it down with a shoe." The Conjurer looked Rhyme over closely and asked in a wheezing voice, "But you never believed I was dead." Not a question.

"How did you get into the room without me hearing you?"

"I was here first. I slipped upstairs ten minutes ago. I was downstairs too in your war room, or whatever you call it. Nobody noticed me."

"You brought that evidence in?" Rhyme recalled being vaguely aware of two patrolmen carting in boxes of the evidence collected outside the Neighborhood School and the Reverend Swensen's hotel room.

"That's right. I was waiting on the sidewalk. This cop came up with a couple of boxes. I said hello and offered to help. Nobody ever stops you if you're in a uniform and you seem to have a purpose."

"And you've been hiding up here-covered up with a piece of silk that was the color of the walls."

"You caught on to that trick, did you?"

Rhyme frowned, looking at the man's uniform. It seemed genuine, not a costume.

But contrary to regulations there was no nameplate on the breast. His heart suddenly sank. He knew where it had come from. "You killed him, Larry Burke . . . You killed him and stole his clothes."

The Conjurer glanced down at the uniform and shrugged. "Reverse. Stole the uniform first," came the whispery, disembodied voice. "Convinced him that I wanted him naked to give me a chance to escape. He saved me the effort of stripping him afterward. Then I shot him."

Repulsed, Rhyme reflected that he'd considered the danger that the Conjurer had taken Burke's radio and his weapon. It hadn't occurred to him, though, that he'd use the man's uniform as a quick-change costume to attack his pursuers. He asked in a whisper, "Where's his body?"

"On the West Side."

"Where?"

"Keep that to myself, I think. Somebody'll find him in a day or two. Sniff him out. The weather's warm."

"You son-of-a-bitch," the criminalist snapped. He might be civilian now but in his heart Lincoln Rhyme would always be a cop. And there is no bond closer than that between fellow police officers.

The weather's warm. . . .

But he struggled to remain calm and asked casually, "How did you find me?"

"At the crafts fair. I got close to your partner. That redheaded policewoman. Very close. As close as I was to you just now. I breathed on her neck too-I'm not sure which I enjoyed more. . . . Anyway I heard her talking to you on her radio. She mentioned your name. Then it just took a little research to find you. You've been in the papers, you know. You're famous."

"Famous? A freak like me?"

"Apparently."

Rhyme shook his head and said slowly, "I'm old news. The chain of command passed me by a long time ago."

The word "command" zipped from Rhyme's lips through the microphone mounted to the headboard into the voice recognition software in his computer. "Command" was the latch word that told the computer to be prepared for instructions. A window opened up on the monitor, which he could see but the Conjurer could not.

Instruction? it asked silently.

"Chain of command?" the Conjurer asked. "What do you mean?"

"I used to be in charge of the department. Now, sometimes the young officers, they won't even return my telephone call."

The computer seized the last two words of the sentence. Its response: Whom would you like to call?

Rhyme sighed. "I'll tell you a story: I needed to get in touch with an officer the other day. A lieutenant. Lon Sellitto."

The computer reported: Dialing Lon Sellitto.

"And I told him-"

A sudden frown from the Conjurer.

He stepped forward quickly, swinging the monitor away from Rhyme's face and looking it over. The killer grimaced, ripped the phone lines from the wall and unplugged the computer. With a faint pop it went silent.

As the man hovered a few feet from him Rhyme pressed his head into the pillows, expecting the terrible razor blade to appear. But the Conjurer stepped back, breathing hard with his asthmatic wheeze. He seemed more impressed than angered by what the criminalist had tried.

"You know what that was, don't you?" he asked, smiling coldly. "Pure illusionism. You distracted me with patter and then did some classic verbal misdirection. Ruse, we call it. That was good. What you were saying was very natural-until you mentioned the name. It was the name ruined it. See, telling me that wasn't natural. It made me suspicious. But up until then you were good."

The Immobilized Man . . .

He continued, "I'm good too, though." The Conjurer reached forward with an open, empty palm. Rhyme cringed as the fingers passed close to his eyes. He felt a brush against his ear. When the Conjurer's hand appeared a second later there were four double-sided razor blades gripped between his fingers. He closed his hand into a fist and the four blades became a single one, now held once more between his thumb and index finger.

No, please. . . . Worse than the pain, Rhyme feared the horror of being deprived of yet another of his senses. The killer eased the edge close to Rhyme's eye, moved it back and forth.

Then the killer smiled and stepped back. He glanced across the room into the shadows on the far wall. "Now, Revered Audience, let's begin our routine with some prestidigitation. I'll be assisted by a fellow performer here." These words were spoken in an eerie, theatrical tone.

The man's hand rose and he displayed the glistening razor blade. In a smooth gesture the Conjurer pulled out the waistband of Rhyme's sweatpants and underwear and tossed the blade like a Frisbee toward his naked groin.

The criminalist winced.

"What he must be thinking . . ." the Conjurer said to his imaginary audience.

"Knowing that a razor blade is against his skin, perhaps cutting into his skin, his genitals, a vein or an artery. And he doesn't feel a thing!"

Rhyme stared at the front of his pants, waiting for blood to appear.

Then the Conjurer smiled. "But maybe the blade's not there. . . . Maybe it's someplace else. Maybe here." He reached into his own mouth and pulled the small rectangle of steel out. He held it up. Then frowned. "Wait." He removed another blade from his mouth. Then more. He now had the four blades back in his hand. He fanned them like cards then tossed them into the air above Rhyme, who gasped and cringed, waiting for them to hit him. But . . . nothing. They'd vanished.

In his neck and temple Rhyme felt his heart pounding, harder now, sweat trickling down his forehead and temple. Rhyme glanced at the alarm clock. It seemed like hours had passed. But Thom had left only fifteen minutes ago.

Rhyme asked, "Why are you doing this? Those people you killed? What was the point?"

"They weren't all killed," he pointed out angrily. "You ruined my performance with the equestrian by the Hudson River."

"Well, attacked then. Why?"

"It was nothing personal," he said and broke into a coughing spell.

"Not personal?" Rhyme spat out, incredulous.

"Let's say it was more what they represented than who they were."

"What does that mean? 'Represented'? Explain."

The Conjurer whispered, "No. I don't think I will." He walked slowly around Rhyme's bed, breathing hard. "Do you know what goes through the mind of the audience during a performance? Part of them hopes that the illusionist isn't going to escape in time, that he'll drown, he'll fall on the spikes, burn up, get crushed to death. There's a trick called the Burning Mirror. My favorite. It starts out with a vain illusionist looking in a mirror. He sees a beautiful woman on the other side of the glass. She beckons to him and finally he gives in to temptation and steps through. We see they've changed places. The woman's now on the front side of the mirror. But there's a puff of smoke and she does a quick change and becomes Satan."

"Now the illusionist is trapped in hell, chained to the floor. Flames begin shooting up from the floor around him. A wall of fire moves closer. Just as he's about to be engulfed by flames he gets out of the chains and leaps through the fire at the back of the mirror to safety. The devil runs toward the illusionist, flies into the air and vanishes. The illusionist shatters the mirror with a hammer. Then he walks across the stage, pauses and snaps his fingers. There's a flash of light and, you've probably guessed, he becomes the devil. . . . The audience loves it. . . . But I know that part of everyone's mind is rooting for the fire to win and the performer to die." He paused. "And, of course, that does happen from time to time."

"Who are you?" Rhyme whispered, despairing now.

"Me?" The Conjurer leaned forward and passionately rasped, "I'm the Wizard of the North. I'm the greatest illusionist who ever was. I'm Houdini. I'm the man who can escape from the burning mirror. From handcuffs, chains, locked rooms, shackles, ropes, anything. . . ." He eyed Rhyme closely. "Except . . . except you. I was afraid that you were the one thing I couldn't escape from. You're too good. I had to stop you before tomorrow afternoon. . . ."

"Why? What's happening tomorrow afternoon?"

The Conjurer didn't answer. He looked into the gloom. "Now, Revered Audience, our main act-the Charred Man. Look at our performer here-no chains, no handcuffs, no ropes. Yet he can't possibly escape. This is even harder than the world's first escape routine: St. Peter. Thrown in a cell, shackled, guarded. And yet he escaped. Of course, he had an important confederate. God. Our performer tonight, however, is on his own."

A small gray object appeared in the Conjurer's hand and he leaned forward fast, before Rhyme could turn his head. The killer slapped a piece of duct tape over his mouth.

He then shut out all the lights in the room except a small night-light. He returned to Rhyme's bed, held an index finger up and flicked his thumb against it. A three-inch point of flame rose from the digit.

The Conjurer wagged the finger back and forth. "Sweating, I can see." He held the flame close to Rhyme's face. "Fire. . . . Isn't it fascinating? It's probably the most compelling image in illusionism. Fire's the perfect misdirection. Everyone watches flame. They never take their eyes off it onstage. I could do anything with my other hand and you'd never notice. For instance . . ."

The bottle of Rhyme's scotch appeared in the man's grip. He held the flame under the bottle for a long moment. Then the killer took a sip of liquor and held the flaming finger in front of his lips, looking directly at Rhyme, who cringed. But the Conjurer smiled, turned aside and blew the flaming spray toward the ceiling, stepping back slightly as the stream of fire vanished into the darkness of the ceiling.

Rhyme's eyes flickered to the wall in the corner of the room.

The Conjurer laughed. "Smoke detector? I got that earlier. The battery's gone."

He blew another flaming stream toward the ceiling and set the bottle down.

Suddenly a white handkerchief appeared. He wafted it under Rhyme's nose. It was soaked in gasoline. The astringent smell burned Rhyme's eyes and nose. The Conjurer coiled the handkerchief into a short rope and, ripping open Rhyme's pajama top, draped it around his neck like a scarf.