Midas w-2

by Russell Andrews

  “How does one get obsessed with bomb signatures, exactly?”

  “I’ll explain when we’re inside. I want to prepare you for what you’re gonna see,” Chuck said. “That’s why I thought it’d be better if we walk a little bit first.”

  “It’s been cleaned up already, hasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, yeah. It’s clean. Well. . it’s clean compared to what it was. You’re not gonna see any body parts or anything. But it’s still pretty disturbing.”

  “Okay. I appreciate the preparation.”

  “I want to prepare you for some other stuff, too.”

  “Such as?”

  Billings slowed down a bit. His walk turned into more of an amble. “I’ve never been involved with anything like this. I mean, I’ve worked with the Feds before, I know the kind of assholes they can be, but this is something different.”

  “Different how?”

  “I can’t explain it. I’m going against strict orders by bringing you into this restaurant, but one of the reasons I’m doing it is ’cause I hope you can explain it.”

  “What is it I’m trying to explain, Chuck?”

  “I don’t want to say anything more. Let me just show you around, give you my impressions of what happened, then you tell me what you think. Fair enough?”

  “More than fair. Anything you want to give me is fair. Like I told you, I’m just trying to get some info so I can help a friend sleep a little easier.”

  “Good,” Chuck said. “Maybe you’ll wind up helping two friends.”

  Chuck Billings had been right. He flashed his badge, told the two FBI agents at the front that Justin was with him, then they stepped inside. And despite the extensive cleanup, Justin almost burst into tears when he walked into the building that had, just a few days ago, been Harper’s Restaurant. Justin had seen death and death didn’t frighten him. But the bombed-out restaurant did frighten him. It sent a deep chill throughout his entire body and filled him up with sadness. This was much worse than being surrounded by death. It was as if the room they were standing in was filled with ghosts.

  “Yeah,” Billings said, looking at Justin’s expression. “A bomb site can be pretty overwhelming.”

  Justin took a deep breath, swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want to show me?”

  “I don’t know exactly what you’re looking for,” Billings explained, “so I’m just going to show you what happened, or what I can pretty much deduce happened. Things we’ve picked up from surviving witnesses, from people who saw the bomber on his way to the restaurant, from bomb fragments, a few other pieces of physical evidence.” He was all business now, he didn’t even wait for Justin to respond. He launched into his recitation. And Justin thought it was just that: this was something Chuck Billings had been practicing.

  “Okay,” Billings said. “We believe the guy walked here from several blocks away. Maybe as many as eight or ten.”

  “Where was he before that?”

  “Let me go through this, Jay. Hold your questions until after I’m done. But remember ’em. You’ll see why when I’m finished.” Justin nodded and Billings continued. “What we know for sure is that our guy walked in the door carrying a briefcase. That was the bomb. He talked to the hostess, went to a specific table”-Billings walked to a spot in the restaurant, stood there as if trying to visualize the room intact-“right about here. We narrowed it down to four possible tables. Our job is really to determine three things: the quality of the explosive, the type of explosive, and the location of the blast. So we got the location. This baby went off right here, give or take a couple of feet.”

  Billings walked away from the spot, as if it were dangerous to stand on it for too long. “Okay, we know he talks to someone at the table, leaves the briefcase on the floor next to the guy he’s talking to. Takes a couple of steps away, like he’s walking out of the restaurant, his cell phone rings.”

  “His cell phone rang?”

  “Yeah. Hold on. You got a pen and paper? Write down your questions if you have to, but lemme go through the whole thing.”

  “Go ahead. I don’t need a pen. I’ll remember.”

  “His cell phone rings,” Billings repeated. “And then. . boom.” The head of the Providence PD bomb squad shrugged his shoulders up to his ears, as if he were trying to block the sound of the explosion. “You know anything about explosions?”

  “Am I allowed to interrupt you with an answer?”

  “Don’t be a wiseass.”

  “No,” Justin said. “I don’t know anything about explosions except they’re loud and they kill people.”

  “Look around you. You see this room?” When Justin nodded, Billings made a circle in the air with his left hand. “All right,” he said, indicating the invisible circle. “This is water. You smack your hand down right in the middle of it, you get a depression. Can you picture that?” Justin nodded again. “Think of the water as the atmosphere. The atmosphere in this room. When a bomb goes off, the blast scatters the atmosphere the way your hand scatters the water when you smack it. It pushes it away. That’s the initial effect of an explosion. It pushes everything away. Blows the windows into the street, sends tables flying, all that other shit. But nature abhors a vacuum, as we know from our sixth-grade science class, so there’s a negative pressure that replaces the atmosphere. Right? You hit the water, it swirls, moves away, but then it comes back, fills up the vacuum. That’s what happens with a bomb. This negative phase sucks things toward it. Lighter things like paper, clothing, debris are sucked back toward the explosion. It all happens instantly, it’s why things get so surreal. All this pushing and sucking. It’s why that table wasn’t touched, the one next to it was pulverized. But the closer you are to the point of the explosion, the better chance you have of being pulverized. We call it a kill ratio. Within ten feet of a pound of a high explosive, like a grenade, you’ll have a hundred percent kill ratio. With three pounds, it’s approximately twenty feet. This bomb was about three pounds. You want to know about the actual explosion? I mean, what happened in here?”

  “Yeah. I think my friend might want to know that.”

  “It was a hell of a bomb. Like I said, about three pounds. They used Semtex. It’s an ex-Soviet bloc explosive. They still make it. The Czechs still make it, too. Not so easy to smuggle in, but it can be done. It’s basically the equivalent of our C4. Al Qaeda uses it. So do the Colombian cartels. Used to be big with the IRA, but I guess they’ve cleaned up their act. Anyway. . the bomb went off right over there. Anything within twenty feet, forget it. The primary fragmentation on this was brutal.”

  “Sorry, you have to explain that.”

  “Primary fragmentation? That’s pieces of the bomb that are intended to hurt. You read about it all the time when stuff goes off in the Middle East. If it’s a pipe bomb, they’ll stuff the pipe with rocks or glass or nails. The explosion drives those things outward, scatters them. They’re like mini-missiles. They’ll rip through just about anything-walls, flesh, bone.”

  “Christ.”

  “Yeah. Know what our genius used here?” Billings didn’t wait for an answer. He walked over to the nearest wall and pointed to a small object embedded in it. When Justin squinted, not sure what he was looking at, Billings pulled the fragment out of the plaster and held it in the palm of his hand.”

  “A jack?” Justin asked. “A kid’s toy?”

  “Pretty fuckin’ deadly kid’s toy when it’s packed into three pounds of explosives. It’s the perfect thing. Doesn’t matter which direction it’s facing, there’s a little spike on every surface. They’re small enough, you can squeeze a shitload of them into the container, and the more there are, the more damage can be done. These things were flying at people at about two thousand feet per second.”

  “Jesus, Chuck. Who the hell would think of that? Jacks. .”

  “Really pretty brilliant. In a sick kind of way. And if this isn’t a one-time thing, he’s gonna use
’em again, I guarantee you. It’s what I started to tell you before. Bombers can’t resist their little signatures on their work. Everybody’s got a different one. When you know what they are, it’s pretty much as defining as fingerprints. And this is one of the most distinctive signatures I’ve ever seen.”

  “You ever seen it before?”

  “Never even heard of anyone using jacks.”

  “Would you?”

  “Jay, I told you I was obsessed with this kind of thing, right? You know what the hell I do with my free time?”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “I’m on the weirdest fucking Internet bomb sites, shit you can’t even imagine. I’m on crackpot blogs about explosives. Some psycho blows up a cat somewhere in Kansas, I’m looking into it, checking out the signature. It’s why they called me in here.”

  “All right. So you’ve got a signature: jacks. And they did a lot of damage. What’s next?”

  “Well, that’s just the primary fragmentation. You’ve still got a secondary. Like all the window glass that was in this place. The glassware, silverware, all that stuff. That stuff was slicing the shit out of everything and everybody. The secondary fragmentation was devastating. What you have to remember is that it’s not like in a movie. A bomb isn’t static. There’s a huge amount of bleeding. The lights are out, it’s smoky, the noise is literally deafening, it’s almost impossible to hear anything. Here, it was particularly bad because it was a restaurant. So it didn’t just start a fire, there were live electrical lines that went down, there were gas and water leaks. When the fire hit the gas, that was worse than the initial explosion. It must have been a fucking nightmare. The only thing I can tell you that might help your friend. . according to the seating charts, which we got off the computer, her husband was about eight feet from the blast. He wouldn’t have felt a thing. Some comfort, huh?”

  “I don’t know what to say to all this, Chuck.”

  “You want to indulge me a minute, Jay? Lemme guess the questions you’ve been storing up.”

  “Go for it.”

  “Okay,” Billings said. “First has got to be about the bomber.”

  “I’ve got a few about him,” Justin admitted.

  “First is: Did we get a description? Yes, we did. A pretty decent one, from people who are pretty sure they saw him on the street before he arrived, and from a few survivors in the restaurant. We know at least a few of the blocks he covered to get here. I might have partial fingerprints, too, from recovered bomb fragments.”

  “So-”

  “So what’s being done to track him down? Nothing.”

  “Chuck. .”

  “I got your next question, too, Jay, ’cause I know you’re a good cop. If it was a suicide bombing, why the hell was he moving away from the blast when it went off? Another few feet, he would have been out of range of the hundred percent kill ratio.”

  “You’re two for two.”

  “How about the cell phone? You probably want to know about that, too.”

  “Yeah,” Justin said. “Like-”

  “Can a phone be used to trigger a bomb? Yes. It’s a delightful new technology. The tones can be programmed to set the thing off.”

  “Okay, so-”

  “So was it the trigger? I think it was. I’m pretty damn sure it was.”

  “But-”

  “But, then, does that mean it wasn’t a suicide bombing? And if the phone was the detonator, what are we doing to find the guy who made the call?”

  “You got the questions down cold, Chuck. Now, you got any answers?”

  “No.”

  Justin couldn’t decide which was getting the best of him at the moment, his confusion or his anger. “Why the hell not?”

  “Jay. . remember I told you I couldn’t figure out the Feds on this one? Well, let me try out another question on you: Why wouldn’t they want answers to all of the questions we just asked?”

  “Because they don’t want to know the answers,” Justin said. But even as he said it, he didn’t believe his own words.

  “Or?”

  “Or”-and now Justin spoke very slowly, as if he wanted to hear exactly what he was saying, trying the words out to see if they could possibly make sense-“they already know the answers. And they don’t want anyone else to find out what they are.”

  Billings stayed silent for a few moments. Then he said quietly, “There are four or five guys working the bomb angle. I was partnered with a very good guy, a Feebie, Dorell Cole. We were making some headway, he knows a lot about signatures, too. As soon as we thought we might be getting somewhere, Dorell got yanked off. A new guy came in to oversee the whole thing, and believe me, this guy was a total asshole. He’s the head of the New York bureau.”

  “Fuck me. Was it Rollins? Agent Len Rollins?”

  “No. This guy’s name is Schrader. Hubbell Schrader. Who’s this Rollins character?”

  “Someone I had a run-in with, about a year ago. He was the New York bureau chief then.”

  “A run-in, Jay?” Billings’s left eyebrow rose, the first relaxed gesture Justin had seen since they met.

  Justin shrugged. “I told him if I ever saw him again I’d kill him.”

  “That sounds like one of your run-ins.”

  “What did this guy Schrader do?”

  “Basically, just cut me off at the knees. Clearly doesn’t want any input from anyone outside the Bureau. But he also dismissed everything that Cole had discovered or hypothesized. As near as I can tell, Schrader made his report, which was fast and inaccurate. Then President Anderson and Vice President Dandridge came swooping in, got their photo ops, declared the whole thing a suicide bombing, and went off wherever presidents and future presidents go when they’re not acting tough or raising money.”

  “But you don’t think it is a suicide bombing, do you?”

  “I can’t prove it. . but no, I don’t.”

  Justin sighed. “It’s not on this level, Chuck, but I’m having my own problems with the Feds. And it opens up a few questions, too.”

  “Hey, as long as we’re sharing. .”

  So Justin told him about the local plane crash. Billings said he had read about it in the East End newspaper but assumed it was an accident. As Justin gave him some of the details, Billings whistled in amazement.

  “The weirdest thing is, I thought the Feds would be all over this thing. Just because of the proximity to Harper’s. I mean, it’s a long shot that there’s a connection, even if the plane was tampered with, but still. .”

  “You’d think they’d want to see for themselves.”

  “Yeah.” Justin shook his head. “But nothing. No contact. They got their info from the FAA, and that info is. . let’s say skewed. . at best.”

  “And they’re blocking the identity of the pilot?”

  “It’s what it looks like,” Justin said.

  “Why?”

  “Why the hell are they getting in your way? Because they can, because they’re idiots, because they’ve got something to hide. .”

  “You know where the plane came from, Jay?”

  Justin shook his head. “The guy who runs the airport here, he thought it was a drug-running plane. Maybe up from Florida.”

  Billings cocked his head and his eyes narrowed.

  “That mean something?” Justin asked.

  Billings shrugged. “Could mean just about anything,” he said.

  “Well, why don’t you tell me one thing you think it might mean.”

  “You know, my imagination seems to be running wild these days. I think I’m getting paranoid. And what I think doesn’t really matter anymore. I’m outta here tonight.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “They don’t want me. Said I did a great job, but my job’s over. So I’m heading back to Providence tonight. Got a meeting tomorrow morning with your old pal Ms. Chinkle. Gonna see if she’s got any insight into what the hell’s going on with her fellow federal employees.”

  “You driving
up?”

  “The Feds are very generous. They let me rent a two-door Ford. Why, got a better suggestion?”

  “Yeah. Dump the Ford. I’m going up tonight, too. Having dinner with Wanda. You can come with me and even join us tonight.”

  “And your mode of transportation is. .?”

  “Chartered a plane. You can drop your car off at the airport.”

  “I always forget you’re filthy rich, Jay. I knew there was a reason people didn’t like you.”

  “Fly up with me. Plane’s gonna leave at six sharp.”

  “You know what? That’s too good a deal to pass up. I got a meeting here, kind of a debriefing, total bullshit, then I’ll go back to my motel, pick up my notes and files. I’ll show some of it to you on the plane and we can talk a little more.”

  “Deal.”

  The two men shook hands.

  “I’m looking forward to the flight, Chuck,” Justin said.

  “Me too,” Chuck Billings said. “But then, I look forward to anything I don’t have to pay for.”

  10

  Justin was not in the mood to sit and interview someone to fill the vacancy in the East End PD. He wanted to blame his lack of interest on the frustration he was feeling over the stonewalling surrounding his investigation of the small plane crash and the information he’d learned from Chuck Billings-information he was still trying to absorb-but he realized that it wouldn’t have mattered what he’d done or discovered over the last few days, he’d never be in the mood to sit and interview someone for a job. Unfortunately, he’d promised Leona Krill that he’d talk to this woman, Regina something, he couldn’t even remember her name, but what the hell kind of first name was Regina? He sighed because. . well. . because everything that had happened over the past week made him sigh. . but he’d made the appointment with this Regina woman and he knew he couldn’t break it.

  He didn’t want to interview her at the station, it just didn’t feel right with all the other guys around, so he’d told her to meet him at Duffy’s. Not the classiest place in town but if she wanted to be a cop she might as well get used to cop hangouts. Also, unless you put away quite a few drinks, Duffy’s was not a place to linger. He was hoping his choice of venue would keep the session short and sweet. Their meeting was set up for two o’clock. Justin was hoping to be back at his desk by two-thirty.