The Bomb Maker

by Thomas Perry

  For the next week his phone received two or three dozen messages a day from Carla. At first she was all hurt and self-righteous innocence. Then apparently someone made her aware of the recordings he’d made in the hotel room. The next calls carried a freight of rage and professions of hatred, tirades that went on long enough to exhaust his interest. There were threats of arrest, which, after a few days, went away because some expert she or her attorneys had hired couldn’t trace the e-mails to him. Next there were detailed recitations of the things about him that had forced her to seek male companionship elsewhere. Finally there were threats that there were “real men” who had heard of his behavior and planned to beat or kill him.

  He recorded all the phone messages, turned them over to his attorney, and in a day they stopped. He kept working and saving, living conservatively and quietly. But all the time he was preparing for a change.

  In the divorce proceedings he refused to amend his filing to apply for simple dissolution of marriage, which was an option in Ohio. Instead he insisted on a divorce on the grounds of adultery. Since there were no children, both had been employed, and no other complications existed, the pair had to agree to a settlement in proportion to how much money the plaintiff and the respondent had brought into the marriage. He ended up with seventy-five percent.

  For some reason Carla felt an irrational urge to end up with the house, either because her lawyer could get it appraised for less than it was worth, or because holding her ground made her feel she had won. He readily agreed, received payment for his share, and moved out. He quit his job in the water valve business and drove a U-Haul truck to California. He was confident that even if she kept her job after the recordings he’d circulated, she would not be able to afford the mortgage and in time would lose the house. That had been about five years ago.

  This morning he thought it might be nice to kill her. They’d had no contact since the divorce, so while he would certainly be a suspect, he wouldn’t be the sort the police longed for—a husband who was a beneficiary of her insurance, a married boyfriend, a neighbor nobody liked.

  He had to think carefully before he took on the project. Carla hated him when he left. And he was sure that over the past five years she would have had some hard times that she blamed on him, which kept the coals glowing.

  But he was sure he could kill her without creating a new connection to her. Her family had originally been from Alabama and, like many Southern women, she was addicted to sweet tea. She used to keep a pitcher of it in the refrigerator. It was sweet enough to hide ethylene glycol. And there would be less difficulty if he left the opened jug of antifreeze in her garage. If the jug was gone, this was murder. If the jug was there, this might be suicide.

  He could always arrange a methane leak and explosion in her house. If she still had a car, he could tamper with her brakes or cause a gasoline fire. That might be fun. If she had a boyfriend these days, he could get the man blamed for her murder. There were so many ways to do any of these things.

  But he was just teasing himself. He wasn’t going to do any of it. If her parents were alive—and he had no reason to believe they weren’t—they would instantly turn police attention on him. And even if they were dead, the fact that she had been part of a nasty divorce would make the police at least find out where he was living. Contemplating her death had raised his mood, but he would just have to let it go—for now.

  He had probably thought of Carla because the person who had ruined his day yesterday had been a woman. But that was yesterday. Today would be different for him and for the woman cop.

  He went through his morning rituals. He ate a breakfast of egg whites cooked in olive oil, drank some herbal tea, lifted weights, ran four miles around the perimeter of his property, then walked for a while to get over the shakes that overexertion caused.

  At home he took a hot bath and soaked until his muscles relaxed, then dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers and went into his workshop to get started. While he was at work, his hours ran as smoothly as a line reeling off a spool. He was alert and completely focused on what his hands were doing.

  At some point that morning he realized he’d been pushing himself in the wrong direction. He had begun to use volatile and unpredictable explosives and exotic means of delivering and detonating them. He had been trying to present the Bomb Squad with devices they had never seen before and were likely to misinterpret. Once he destroyed the first fourteen men, he had hoped to take the others out by demoralizing and intimidating them. They would approach a device without being able to think through the ways it might operate, what touching it might set off, what leaving it alone might give it time to do, or what was protecting it from their interference. But working with more unstable explosives and more sensitive switches was risky for the bomb maker too.

  And his new tactics hadn’t worked. According to the television news, the Bomb Squad was back up to strength with reinforcements from federal agencies. The bomb maker needed something big, another significant bombing, and it had to be flawless, a masterpiece of small deceptions that forced the technicians into making guesses until one of them guessed wrong.

  He put away most of the ingredients he had been preparing to mix today. He was not going to rely on the volatility and unpredictability of the explosive to make the bomb deadly. He had lost his way for a few days, but now he would behave as though he were at war. He would use the best components, the most powerful charges, and the most reliable explosives.

  He would go back to using Semtex. He went to the locked cabinet where he kept the raw ingredients. Semtex was a mixture of two explosives: PETN and RDX. He would have to start by making supplies of these two compounds.

  He brought out ammonium nitrate, acetic anhydride, paraformaldehyde, distilled water, and boron fluoride. He was going to have to do lots of stirring and heating and cooling for the next part of the process, which had to be done within very narrow temperature ranges. When he finished making the PETN and RDX he would have to let them dry completely. The process would take a few days. At the end, he would have to combine the two. He would carefully grind the two substances into fine powder so he could combine them. After a few hours he reached the point where his intermediate explosives were drying and then quit for the day. He spent time ordering a number of chemicals to replace the ingredients he’d used. He ordered them from six different companies under six different corporate names.

  He would spend the days while he waited for the process to be completed on his next project. He had watched the police press conference on television, but had not heard any names. There were just “three brave bomb experts.” But he could see that the one driving the truck was a woman. She had sergeant’s stripes, but she looked young for a sergeant. Her bomb truck had said TEAM ONE. He would find her.

  He questioned the search engines in various ways, asking for images of the LAPD Bomb Squad; news organization reports of any public events attended by members of the squad; any interviews with bomb experts; any reports of public relations visits to schools or job fairs, hospitals or charities. And then, after several days of searching, he found the right image—a picture of a female police sergeant and the bomb-sniffing dog Aristotle at a visit to John Nance Garner Middle School, near the alley where a student had seen a homemade bomb. The text said she had gone there to give the students a lesson on what to do if they saw anything that looked like a bomb.

  The picture was absolutely her. She was talking to kids in front of a glass case displaying inert fireworks, pipe bombs, hand grenades, and other things that went boom and they shouldn’t touch. There was no name given for her. Maybe the service that police unions hired to scrub the Internet of police officers’ names had removed hers, or maybe she hadn’t let it appear in print to begin with. But the paragraph hadn’t omitted the name of the school, the publication, or the woman who had written the article and taken the picture. The writer was also listed on the school paper’s website as an editor.

  He drove all the w
ay into Pacoima to make the call at a pay phone. After a few tries he reached the woman who had written the article. He identified himself as a teacher at Grant High School who wanted to arrange a similar visit. She remembered very clearly the name of the woman police officer. “It was Diane Hines,” she said. “Sergeant Diane Hines. She was so pretty and sweet the kids couldn’t take their eyes off her.”

  Diane Hines had no website, no Facebook page, no Twitter account, no other obvious place where he could learn about her. He knew she had done more than enough to have her name on the Internet over the past few days, but there was no mention of her. She didn’t want to be found. But there was no question now that he could find her.

  18

  When Diane Hines left work the next evening she drove to her apartment. She had been sleeping in Dick Stahl’s condominium for six days now and was delighted to be there, but what she was doing wasn’t exactly living with him. Their relationship was still like a date that never ended, just got interrupted every day during their shift, and then resumed at night. Most of her clothes and her other belongings were still at her apartment in Sherman Oaks, and her mail, usually just bills, was still delivered there.

  She stepped into the foyer of her building, a creamy white-and-yellow place that looked like a lemon meringue pie, climbed the three steps to a small landing, unlocked the room where the mailboxes were, and entered. The mail system was a good one, because the only access to the room was by using an apartment key. It would be very difficult for a mail thief to follow a tenant into the lobby and then into the mail room too.

  Diane unlocked her box, took out the stack of mail, dropped the newsprint ads into the trash barrel, and shuffled through the envelopes as she relocked the door. For a year after college she had been a dealer in Las Vegas working at the blackjack tables. Her dexterity with cards and envelopes still made her fingers feel good, but she had found that the glamour of staying up late under the glittering chandeliers of a casino faded quickly. The job never changed, and when she realized that all she was doing was trading her share of sunlight for money, she quit and drove to Los Angeles.

  She slipped the envelopes into her overnight bag and went to the stairs. She was a believer in incidental exercise. She never took an elevator if she could use the stairs, never sat when she could stand, never drove when she could walk. In the six days since she had unexpectedly found herself drawn to Dick Stahl she had found little time for the kind of physical training she had been doing since the academy. She wondered if she could get Dick to run with her. He obviously was used to getting exercise somewhere.

  As she completed her quick survey of the mail, it occurred to her once again that she could easily have let the mail age in the mailbox for another week. She always paid each bill within a day or two, but every bill she ever got was due, at the earliest, three weeks later.

  On the third floor she walked along the quiet carpeted hallway and tried to remind herself of the things she wanted to pick up while she was here. Maybe she would do a quick load of laundry while she wrote checks for her bills. Then she could mail them on the way home—no, she corrected herself, on the way to Dick’s. This was home. She opened her apartment door and flipped the switch on the wall.

  The light didn’t go on. She was not going to elevate this discovery into an emergency, but she was not going to step farther into the apartment, either. She had a flashlight app on her phone, so she turned it on. The room looked as she remembered it. She turned the phone toward the doorknob and the frame. There was no indication that anyone had been in her apartment. But she still felt odd, and then she realized what was bothering her.

  Most times when she had turned on a lightbulb and it had burned out, it happened right then. It had given a pop, sometimes a flash as its filament burned up and the current couldn’t complete its circuit anymore. It was only when she had lived with other people—her family, her roommates, or someone—that she hadn’t seen and heard the end of each bulb. This was because someone else had done it already, and usually that person was on the way to find a replacement. There was nobody else here. Or there wasn’t supposed to be anyone.

  Diane needed more intense light. She reached into her purse and grasped her Glock 17. Over the years she had fired it only during training and monthly requalifying, but it had a special flashlight mount under the barrel, and she carried it in her purse with the flashlight attached. She turned it on. The beam of light was powerful and narrow. She swept the living room quickly, moving the circular beam around the room. Things looked just as she remembered.

  There were no visible electrical devices that she had not bought and placed here. There were no boxes or bags that she didn’t own. There were no new lines of insulated cord, no trip wires, no glowing electric eye beams. She turned her flashlight on the sideboard where she kept her big flashlight. She bent to study the floor as she stepped toward it, moving her weapon’s flashlight beam up and down in front of her to search for thin wires, side to side to spot any sign of unevenness in the surface to indicate a pressure pad switch under the carpet. All was clear.

  She slowly pivoted on the carpet and ran her flashlight around the room again, holding it on anything that might have changed, anything that might hide part of a firing circuit.

  And then she realized that there was one thing she had not looked at, and it was exactly the sort of place where a bomber might hide an antipersonnel weapon. She lifted her pistol toward the light fixture on the ceiling. A bomber might make sure the light wouldn’t go on. He might have predicted that as soon as she noticed the light didn’t work, she would no longer think of that circuit as existing. Without a working bulb, it was useless, so there was no reason to think about it. In her mind it would cease to exist.

  The powerful flashlight beam on her weapon settled on the frosted glass dome of the ceiling light. She didn’t see the round shape of the bulb inside. There was no bulb at all. She backed up to try to shine the light into the side of the frosted dome.

  Something inside the glass dome of the light fixture suddenly gave off a small dull flash, and kept flashing rapidly. She knew what it was—a small metal piece was spinning in the dome. She would never have seen it without the powerful light, but now the metal spinner was reflecting the light as it spun. A bomber had put in a fuze that worked like the ones in some aerial bombs, and wired it into the light circuit. The propeller-like metal spinner was turning and moving up a threaded tube until a striker lined up with the initiator and released the spring to trip it.

  The device had probably been spinning since she’d switched on the light. She looked back at the apartment door and saw she had strayed too far inside. The dome was practically above the doorway, and she saw that the spinner had nearly reached the top. She dashed into the dining room, dived forward on her belly, and rolled to the side to get under the big, heavy maple sideboard. Facedown against the wall, she opened her mouth and clapped her hands over her ears. She spent an instant thinking he had been clever to place the mechanism under the bomb, because when the explosion blasted downward, it would obliterate the fuse and the initiator, turning them into shrapnel along with the glass, and driving them through her skin and into her body.

  The air turned to an invisible hammer, a noise so loud it was felt rather than heard pounded downward into the apartment, and Diane Hines stopped thinking.

  19

  She felt pressure, as though heavy weight had been piled on her. The air seemed gelatinous. It was labor to breathe, and when she tried harder her lungs felt full. There were important things wrong with her body. The animal in her felt that somehow she had wasted her chance to be alive.

  The quiet was frightening. She couldn’t hear her own breathing. She tried a few times, but still didn’t hear it.

  She knew she had been moved somewhere. She began to concentrate on identifying her location, trying to orient herself, but she couldn’t open her eyes. She tried again and again.

  A long time later she awoke again and had th
e impression she was blind. The world was dark except in her dreams. But then she moved her head slightly and she could see a glow. She looked to her left and up toward the ceiling and caught a glimpse of two flat screens on stands with blue backgrounds and yellow numbers. She noticed that the reason she couldn’t move her left hand was that straps held it to the metal rail of a bed, and there were tubes running from the back of it through an intravenous hookup.

  For a time, she had parts of thoughts but lost her grasp of them because they were wisps. When she tried to concentrate on them and let them develop, they shredded and drifted away. She could hear sounds now, people moving around out in the hallway, the rattling of carts. She couldn’t remember why hearing should be such good news.

  The next time Diane awoke, there was a woman in blue scrubs and a white coat in her room. Diane felt she needed to test the impression to see if she was real. “Hi,” Diane said hoarsely.

  The woman said, “Hello.” She had an Indian accent. “How are you feeling, Miss Hines?”

  “Not good,” Diane said. “Are you a nurse?”

  “No. I’m Dr. Majumdar, a neurologist.” She took a small instrument out of her pocket, gently lifted Diane’s eyelid and bent to look into the eye, then released the eyelid.

  “What happened to me?”

  “You were in an explosion.” As she spoke to Diane, the doctor looked at the blue screens above Diane’s head, and then at her. “It’s not necessary to bring that experience back in any detail just yet. I should tell you that there’s a police officer who comes every evening to sit with you and see if you’re ready to talk to him. Your nurses tell me there have been quite a few others too. You have many friends.”

  “I forgot.”