by Noel Hynd
He wondered if Reverend Fowler was making love to Laura right then, as he stood in the kitchen finishing his ice water. He tossed the cubes into the sink, then thought of his own late wife. He had put Heather's photograph away recently, but now missed seeing her. Maybe he would get the picture out, try to cull more warmth than sadness from the memory, then go back to bed.
Then sleep, maybe.
He set down the glass in the sink. He turned, then noticed something. He looked again. The window over the sink was closed but crooked. Cochrane eyed it closely, leaned forward, and inspected it. Then he reached for the lock above the lower panel of the window and felt it.
Something inside him flashed. Someone had tampered with the lock. He opened the window itself and saw the telltale marks left by a flat blade-either a knife or a screwdriver--that had been used to pry the window. He climbed onto the porcelain sink and looked at the lock at the midpoint of the window. It had been forced, then bent back into shape. An intruder had worked well, but not perfectly.
Cochrane placed himself within the mind of Siegfried. Where was he, Cochrane, most vulnerable?
He tore up the stairs and threw on every light in the house. He grabbed pants, a sweater, and a pair of shoes. He did not open any drawer or door that hadn't already been touched. No use springing a booby trap that he had so far been lucky enough to escape.
He stood in the bedroom, his heart pounding. Then he stared at the bed. Logic told him where anyone is most vulnerable.
Gingerly he went to his hands and knees. He crept to the edge of the bed and took a flashlight from the night table. He pushed aside the blankets. The fear was in his throat as he shined the light.
He saw the device, planted in a long black woolen sock. He had little doubt as to who had planted it, when, why, or what the device was.
He also knew that he was not dreaming. Less than a minute later, he was down the stairs and out the door, standing on Twenty-sixth Street, flagging down a police car like a maniac.
Cochrane stood outside, huddled against the November night, when the District of Columbia bomb squad arrived. One man arrived by a police car. The other two came with a truck that looked to be a cross between a tank and a covered wagon. It was covered by six-inch-thick steel cable, and Cochrane, from his days as an ordinance officer in the Army, knew just how much of a wallop the truck could contain if anything inside it exploded.
The three men from the bomb squad donned greenish-brown suits of armor plating. They pulled on square steel helmets that shielded their heads. There was a shatter-resistant visor that allowed them to see right in front of them, but barely to the side at all.
One man, a graying, angular District police lieutenant, who said his name was McConnell, remained outside. The other two men dragged their equipment inside and crept cautiously up the stairs to where Cochrane had located the thing in the black sock.
Fifteen minutes passed. The two men emerged from the house, holding between them two ten-foot poles. An iron basket dangled from the middle of the poles, about three feet off the ground. McConnell opened the rear of the bomb truck and the men eased the poles onto hangers within the truck. McConnell quickly closed the door.
"Now where?" Cochrane asked.
"Fort Meade, Maryland," he said. "Detonation range. Coming? Nice night for it," he added sourly.
Cochrane heaved a long sigh. "Yeah. Coming."
The truck made its way slowly through the quiet avenues of Washington, then onto the new highway that led to Maryland and the Northeast. The trip took an hour. Cochrane followed a quarter of a mile behind the bomb truck, in Lieutenant McConnell's car. All other traffic was diverted from the highway as the truck passed.
At Fort Meade, Cochrane looked at his watch. It was now 3 A.M. and McConnell was the ranking officer on the scene. He told the driver of the bomb truck to take the device to Detonation Range B.
"You're going to blow it up, huh?" Cochrane asked.
"Got a better idea?" McConnell was a twenty-year veteran of the District police. He behaved accordingly.
"I want it defused."
"You want what?"
"There are components in there that might lead to the bomber. There are fingerprints possibly."
"Yeah, and let me tell you, Mr. F.B.I., judging by the weight of that little birthday cake, there could be enough sauce to take out a building and everything living inside it."
"Your squad defuses bombs all the time."
"When we're on an assigned case. Otherwise, we dispose of them." McConnell's irritation was evident.
"Well, I'm on a case,” Cochrane said.
"Then you defuse it, chief."
Cochrane looked at the truck. The driver waited. The vehicle's enormous diesel engine idled noisily in the cold night. "You have a good lab?" Cochrane asked.
"Best within two hundred miles."
"You got an extra suit and helmet?"
"If you're crazy enough."
"Then I'll take it apart."
"One hitch," demanded McConnell. "I need authorization to let you blow yourself up, Who's your superior?"
Cochrane reached to his pocket, pulled out a paper, and wrote out a telephone number.
"Richard Wheeler. Assistant Director, Special Operations. Call him at home."
McConnell took the number and looked at Cochrane with something less than affection. "F.B.I.!" he said. "Always a hassle." Then he instructed his driver to rush the thing in the sock over to the laboratory.
The bomb lab was a converted airplane hanger on the south end of the army base. The actual work area was a room within a room within a room, with extra steel plating against each wall. Cochrane dressed in the outer area, struggling into the unbearably warm anti-explosives suit and pulling on the helmet. He donned the iron-plated gloves, which weighed five pounds each, and passed through the final door to the work area.
The "birthday cake," as Lieutenant McConnell called it, was still in the iron basket, sitting on a long steel table.
The two men who had taken the bomb onto the truck were assigned to work with Cochrane. They, however, would be backups and would not handle the actual device.
"All right," Cochrane told them, at 3:32 A.M. "I'm ready."
They entered the room as a team. There was a large tub of number ten lubricating oil beside the device. Gingerly, feeling the sweat roll beneath his uniform, Cochrane nodded as the other two men held the ends of the poles. Then Cochrane removed the steel lid of the basket and reached in with a five-foot pair of tongs. He lifted the device out and gently submerged it in the tub of oil. Immediately, one of the two assistants immersed the end of a stethoscope into the oil. All three men stepped back to a range of twenty feet and knelt.
The stethoscope had fifty feet of tubing and led behind a partition of four-inch-thick glass. There sat Lieutenant McConnell, who listened. The stethoscope also contained a miniaturized microphone. The oil acted as a sound conductor. If there were any noise from within the bomb, such as ticking and whirring- which could denote a live device-McConnell would hear it.
Cochrane squinted through the glass visor of his helmet. McConnell listened for an unbearably long time-at least ten seconds. Then he shook his head.
No noise. Either the device was dead or set to blow. There was a difference. Cochrane crept slowly forward again, signaling for one of the men to follow him.
The lubricating oil served a second purpose. If the bomb casing was not airtight, the oil would seep into it, clog whatever mechanism was involved, and possibly prevent a blast. Cochrane signaled for the tongs. His assistant picked them up, then reached for the bomb. The device came up out of the oil. Now Cochrane steadied his hands and drew his breath. This was the part that could kill.
He moved in close and touched Siegfried's device, fully aware that no one could survive a blast at that range. With large rubberized shears, he cut away the sock. The wool fell back into the oil. Cochrane saw a hefty section of pipe-potential shrapnel that would tear him and his
assistant apart-sealed at each end by iron industrial plugs.
"Put it in the vise," he said to his assistant. The third man left the lab.
Several yards from the worktable was a vise attached to an immovable iron base. The bomb was carried in the tongs to the vise. Cochrane moved quickly to the device, secured it in an upright position, and tightened a wrench horizontally to the upper plug on the bomb. He then threaded a heavy industrial wire through the end of the wrench. Both men retreated. Cochrane unraveled the wire to a distance of twenty feet.
"I got it now," he said to his remaining assistant. The man withdrew from the lab. Cochrane stood across the room from Siegfried's concoction. Beneath his iron-plated gloves, his hands were soaked. The wire that linked him to the bomb was taut in his palms. He pulled until it was tight as piano wire.
His eyes were glued on the bomb. He half expected… at any moment…
He wondered if he were crazy. Why was he here? What did he hope to gain? It was the middle of the night and he had forgotten. Adrenaline was giving way to exhaustion. Slowly, Cochrane began to move. He took the first steps of a grand circle around the bomb. The wrench gave a slight tremor, then, pulled by the wire, followed. Cochrane moved cautiously but resolutely. He circled the device one full time. Then a second. Then a third. Lieutenant McConnell and his two squad members watched from behind the plate glass. Cochrane continued to move. Each step was an eternity. The route around the bomb seemed larger than the Bluebirds' fifty-mile radius on the map of New Jersey.
Midway through the seventh revolution, the plug came loose from the pipe. It fell with a horrible clatter onto the copper sheeting on the laboratory floor. Cochrane dropped the wire, turned toward the device, and crept forward, cautiously but quickly. No properly constructed bomb remained dormant forever.
Cochrane moved to within ten feet of the open pipe. Then five feet. Then two. Now speed was paramount, as long as he did not jar the thing into detonating.
He reached toward the bomb and unscrewed the vise. He turned and eased the bomb onto the copper sheeting of the floor. He lay flush to the ground and lifted the closed end of the bomb upward so that the mechanism slid out.
Behind his visor, his eyes widened. Before him was the craft of his homicidal madman: a charge of black TNT in a large capsule, a tiny wristwatch with one hand broken off, a flash bulb, a battery, and copper wire to form an electrical circuit.
Without looking, Cochrane knew what Siegfried had done: a small hole had been bored in the face of the watch and one end of the wire protruded through it. The other end of the wire was linked to the hour hand, with the TNT, the flash bulb, and the battery in between. Had the hour hand come around to the 2 on the watch, the circuit would have completed and the bomb would have detonated. Currently, the hour hand was seven-eighths of the way from 1 to 2.
Cochrane felt his heart in his mouth. He threw the lead pipe across the room and he reached for the rubberized shears. He poked the tip of them to the battery and he clipped the wires from both battery terminals. He took the battery in his hand and moved it five feet from the TNT and copper wire. The circuit was broken.
Then he leaned back. He reached to his helmet and pulled it off. It had to have been one hundred degrees within the suit. He looked to the plate-glass window and the four men-Dick Wheeler had arrived-who watched him through it.
"Done!" he said breathlessly. "It’s defused. Get someone in here for fingerprints."
As the four men came around from the window and entered the work lab, Cochrane looked down at what he had gained. A few ounces of powder. Some common bits of hardware. Some routine copper wire. Elements that added up to death, surely, but ordinary ingredients.
The bulb, the battery, the wire, and the watch could have come from anywhere. The TNT was untraceable. It could have been mixed in any of a thousand places in North America.
Cochrane glanced across the room to where he had tossed the pipe. Siegfried was no fool. Most assuredly the metal had been wiped clean of fingerprints. What had even possessed him to risk his life like this, Cochrane wondered.
He did not move. Wheeler and the bomb squad officers approached him. Sitting on the copper sheeting, his helmet beside him, he felt like some beached hard-hat diver from the 1920s.
He looked up.
"Fella," said McConnell, "you got balls the size of watermelons, you know that?"
"A lot of good it did," Cochrane answered.
Dick Wheeler seemed very pale, with dark crescents under his eyes. He gazed down at Cochrane, then at the components of the bomb. He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves.
"What are you doing?" Cochrane asked.
"May I?" Wheeler motioned toward the bomb.
"You're asking my permission? I work for you, remember?"
Wheeler rested a hand on Cochrane's shoulder, then reached down to the watch. He picked up the bomb's timing mechanism, held it to his ear, then set it back down.
"I'll tell you one thing, Billy Boy," he said portentously and with tired, raised eyebrows. "I think you're getting on Brother Bomber's nerves."
"Is that a fact?" Cochrane looked upward at Wheeler and suddenly felt all of his patience depart him. "What does that mean?" he snapped. "Would you stop talking in riddles? It's four A.M. What's going on?"
"Siegfried," Wheeler explained silkily, "forgot to wind that watch. It stopped at one fifty-two. I reckon that's why you're alive."
With wide, confused eyes, Cochrane turned and assessed again the components that he had just separated. "I defused it," he said.
"It was already dead. Lucky for everyone, of course." Wheeler spoke calmly and gracefully. Cochrane was suddenly aware that the bomb squad members were now forming a small audience. "I defused it!" he insisted again.
"Yes, Bill. I know."
Cochrane's head shot upward and he glared furiously at Wheeler. "Well, sure enough, he's starting to make mistakes!” Cochrane insisted. “That proves it! I'm closing in on him! I'll have him in another week. You'll see!"
"Bill…"
"You tell Hoover that! One more week and I'll give him Siegfried's head on a plate."
Wheeler eased to a crouching position, then sat down next to Cochrane.
"Bill, a decision has been made at headquarters,” Wheeler said. “There's going to be a change."
For several long seconds, Cochrane stared at Wheeler. "What are you talking about?"
"I want you to go home and get some rest. Be in J. Edgar's conference room not this morning, but tomorrow morning. We'll run through everything then. Don't do anything further on the case."
"No, I will not go home and get some rest! Would you tell me what's going on?"
Wheeler looked away, then looked back. "You're being dismissed," Wheeler said. It was too absurd to comprehend. It had to be another of those wretched dreams. He began to laugh.
"That's nonsense! Dismissed from Siegfried just when I'm lining him up? Idiotic! Hoover wouldn't dare!"
Wheeler appeared truly uneasy with what followed. But he managed the words, anyway. "You're being dismissed, Bill. And it's not just the case. It's dismissed from theBureau. Do you understand that? You've been fired."
THIRTY-THREE
Hoover sat at the head of the table and glared when Cochrane entered. They were in the second-floor conference room again, arranged at proper intervals around the oval table, and if the last meeting had been a war party, this was to be the burning at the stake.
Lerrick was two seats away from Hoover to the right and Wheeler was three empty spaces to the left, almost suggesting that Cochrane take a seat directly across from the Chief.
"Come in! Sit down!" Hoover growled, drumming his fingers on the table, his round swollen face getting redder by the second. "Let's get on with it!"
Cochrane noted that he was ten minutes early and the other three men were already there. Usually Hoover was the last to enter. The door was still open.
Hoover glanced over his shoulder. "Where's Adam?" he asked. And sud
denly an entire vista of disbelief overtook Cochrane.
Adam Hay padded softly into the room and closed the door behind him. He looked at Cochrane, then approached a seat directly next to Hoover, with Lerrick on his other side. Cochrane had the notion of watching a small boy called into a meeting of adults, taking up a position between his parents.
The chair squeaked as Adam Hay pulled it out and tucked himself into the table. Dick Wheeler made a comical sour face, and even Frank Lerrick turned his head away to mask a grin. Cochrane, confronted with the absurd, was not smiling. Seated, the small archivist was the same height as when he had been standing.
Hoover was all business.
"Listen to me very carefully, Special Agent Cochrane. This is an unpleasant meeting, but you deserve your own say before any departmental action is taken."
Meaning, it's already decided, Cochrane thought bitterly.
"Mr. Hay," Hoover began, "has been a very valuable member of this Bureau since 1931. I dare say, Special Agent Cochrane, that our archives would not function without him. Yet, Mr. Hay has reported to Personnel"-Cochrane's eyes shifted to Lerrick, who seemed to be memorizing something invisible on the table- "that you've been engaged in bullying, abusive behavior toward him. What have you to say?"
"Behavior of what sort?" Cochrane asked.
Hoover stared at him, then, with evident displeasure, opened a file in front of him. He read a thorough account of Cochrane's efforts to pry Otto Mauer's name, town, and state from him. The account mentioned Arlington Park, the hours up in the archives, and visits from various unnamed other members of the Bureau, i.e., the Bluebirds.
"What have you to say?" Hoover asked.
"Substantially accurate," Cochrane answered.
Hoover flipped the file shut. "Any explanation?"