The Bomb Maker

by Thomas Perry

  In another four years she was almost thirty-one, and she finally made it to a low-level slot at Channel Ten in Los Angeles. This time the man was the station manager at Channel Ten, Mike Tomlinson. She was grateful for the second chance, and when he asked her out, she went. While they got to know each other better, she even had hopes that they were going to have a nice relationship. But when Tomlinson felt comfortable enough to be frank with her, he told her he expected her to be attentive to his wishes. The next time he asked her out, it was to his apartment. She refused.

  Mike Tomlinson said simply, “Okay.” At first she was relieved. He reverted to being perfectly professional. He met with her only in company with other people, and issued orders to the group together so everyone would know what the others were doing. The rest of the time he never spoke to her. Messages came through underlings and colleagues. Things stayed that way for two years.

  She was thirty-three years old by then, and she understood. The stories she was assigned were the same sort she had been doing as a beginner in Charlotte, and less important than the ones she had done in Kentucky. She was still doing some modeling, but as she aged, there were fewer offers.

  The Fourth of July came on a weekend that year, so the holiday was celebrated on the following Monday. She switched with Claudia Shin so she could do Claudia’s Friday early broadcast and take what amounted to a four-day weekend. She drove to San Diego and checked in at the Hotel del Coronado. She liked it because Channel Ten wasn’t shown in San Diego. People who saw her on the beach seldom recognized her.

  She spent two days lying on the beach—always under an umbrella and wearing 100 SPF sunscreen—walking vast distances morning and evening with her feet in the surf, and thinking. She evaluated her life. She had been a television newswoman for over ten years, and she was still about at the level where she started. She was skilled enough and she was still beautiful enough to be at the network, but her time was nearly over to qualify for the jump. If she didn’t get promoted at Channel Ten to a slot where she’d get noticed within two years, she’d have missed her chance.

  After two days of thinking during the day and drinking on her balcony at night, there had been about three times when she had decided on suicide. Once she had stuck to it long enough to walk to a sporting goods store in town, bring back a nasty-looking fishing knife, and run a warm bath, but she passed out before she’d used it.

  Near the end of the second day she called Mike Tomlinson, the station manager. She was told he couldn’t take her call just then, but someone would call her back in about ten minutes. His secretary had been saying that for two years. Gloria said never mind, and called the private cell phone number he had given her two years ago.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “This is Gloria,” she said.

  “I thought you were off this week,” he said.

  She closed her eyes and made her voice sound cheerful and soft. “I was sitting here on my balcony at the Hotel del Coronado wondering why you never called me again after that one time.”

  He paused for a moment. Maybe he was looking at his phone to switch on a recording and protect himself.

  She thought about it, but she didn’t care.

  He said, “I made overtures because I was attracted to you. You made it clear you weren’t interested. Since I’m not a psycho, and didn’t want to put pressure on an employee, I’ve left you alone.”

  “Well, maybe that wasn’t the last word. Maybe we should get together soon and talk about it. As I said, I’m at the Del Coronado for the next couple of days. What do you think?”

  Within a month she had been promoted to weekend anchor with Todd Tedesco. When Jerry Zingler had a stroke she became a weeknight anchor, a job she’d held all the years since then. The relationship with Mike had gone on for a few years, and she had begun to think he might be planning to marry her, but then he married another woman. When that marriage ended after a few years he was with Gloria a few times, and then married a second wife. Now and then—after a Christmas party or when they were away at a conference—he still occasionally knocked on her hotel room door. She tolerated it and acted cheerful on those occasions.

  She was ashamed. She hadn’t been a naïf right out of college. She had by then been a professional for over ten years. And she had been the one to suggest the arrangement. All it had taken was seeing the situation clearly. She felt she’d been driven into a dead end. She was humiliated and cheated and hated what had happened to her, what she’d had to do. And she was confused. She was a victim who was making three million dollars a year and winning awards, but she felt worthless.

  At the studio today she had felt as if she was reporting her own story. She had been trying to protect that young policewoman from what happened to her. As soon as the police chief ended his press conference announcing that pig Stahl’s firing, she had begun to get nasty e-mails from viewers. Every one used the word “bitch.” The viewers all had other things to say, but that word seemed to be required.

  She knew all about the demeaning crap Diane Hines was being subjected to by her wonderful new boss. Was that supposed to be tolerated from a public official? Apparently. She had begun to screen her e-mails for the word “bitch.”

  Gloria got into her Ferrari, stepped on the clutch and started the engine, let the car coast backward a few feet, and then touched the brake. The bomb kicked the spinning, flaming car upward to light up the night air, turning the dead body strapped into the driver’s seat over and over with it.

  33

  The bomb maker’s special phone rang. Since the terrorists had turned up, he had moved it from the kitchen cupboard and kept it close. He opened his eyes and stretched his arm to the nightstand beside his bed to pick up the phone. “Yes?”

  “We’re up the road about five kilometers. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

  He looked at the phone. “It’s three a.m. What do you want at this hour?”

  “We want to talk to you.” The man hung up.

  All the bomb maker could do was put on the clothes he had taken off only a couple of hours ago and prepare for an unpleasant talk with them that was sure to culminate in some awful new task or condition they wanted to add to the bargain. He went into the living room to wait.

  In a minute he saw the same two cars with what seemed from a distance to be two men in each. They pulled up at the end of his driveway, and the phone rang again.

  “Yes?”

  “We’re coming in. Turn off anything you have that will hurt us.”

  “What would that be?” He was hurrying to his front closet to switch off the mines, but he didn’t want them to know there was anything to switch off.

  “You tell me.”

  “I don’t have anything like that. Come ahead.” He had reached the closet, and now he swept the side of his hand down the toggle switches to turn off the firing circuits and closed the door. As he completed the action he saw their headlights brightening and coming closer. He shut the closet door to hide the panel.

  The headlights went off and he opened the front door.

  The car doors swung open and the four men hurried to the porch in the darkness and filed inside. They were smiling, but it was the same kind of smile he expected to see if they were about to kill someone in a particularly cruel way. In a moment they had crowded into his foyer. The man who was in the habit of speaking for the others hugged him. “Wonderful night,” he said. “You pulled off another one.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said impatiently.

  “The woman! That television reporter. Tomorrow the newspapers and television stations will be full of stories about it. We heard about it on the radio.”

  The bomb maker had felt a half second of hope that something had happened he knew nothing about. Now he knew it was only the television reporter, so they’d brought him no information at all. He had needed to bomb something to keep the panic growing in the city, and he hadn’t been ready to do anything more difficult. He expected people
in the city might think this meant something, but he hadn’t anticipated any reaction from his clients.

  He said, “She was nothing. Easy. While I’m busy working I need something to keep the pot boiling. Do you know that expression?”

  The four men were pleased. “Brilliant,” one of the men said. “They’ll be confused, and not know where to look next.”

  He had, of course, assumed that this would be the reaction of the authorities, but he hadn’t considered it brilliant. Maybe it was. He noticed that two of the men were surreptitiously looking around his workshop in the garage. They weren’t searching, just snooping. He said, “Please remember this is my workshop. You’re surrounded by high explosives, some of them in very volatile stages of manufacture.”

  The one who usually did the speaking looked around at his comrades. “Did you hear and understand?”

  The others muttered affirmative words and nodded, but the bomb maker reflected that he still had no idea what their first language was. It made sense that a sophisticated conspiracy would avoid sending people to the United States who couldn’t speak English, but he was disappointed and frustrated. Maybe they were from several countries that spoke different languages, and English was their only common language.

  He was exhausted. He also hated the fact that his clients had presumed to take the right to drop in on him whenever they felt like it. He couldn’t let them feel welcome at all hours, but he couldn’t risk a confrontation of any kind with these four men. Anything violent they did in overpowering him might set off an explosion. He thought hard, but he could think of only one thing he could do that might help keep them friendly and under control.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Three nineteen. What difference does it make?”

  “I asked for a couple of reasons. One is that I haven’t had much sleep. The other is that I have a surprise I’ve been saving for you, and I think this might be a good time to give it to you.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  The bomb maker went to a seven-foot cabinet at the end of the room, but instead of opening it he reached up and took a small padlock key off the top. He walked to the row of steel storage boxes along the wall and unlocked two of the padlocks and removed them.

  The men gathered around him as he lifted the first lid and revealed the nineteen AK-47 rifles and a couple of layers of loaded thirty-round magazines. He stepped back, and the four men surged in and picked up four rifles. They handled the rifles as though each had spent years carrying an identical one at all times. They ejected the magazines, opened the chambers, and examined them. Then they looked down the insides of the barrels, using the light of the open chambers to see the condition of the rifling. A couple of them took a bullet out of the cardboard ammo boxes and used it to partially dismantle the weapons and touch the inner surfaces to be sure they were clean, were oiled, and showed no worrisome wear or corrosion. The more they looked, the happier they appeared to be. Just over two-thirds of the weapons were new and the others were barely broken in. They sighted down the weapons and a couple of them made hasty guesswork adjustments to the unused sights before they set down one rifle and examined another.

  The spokesman held up his rifle so the bomb maker could see the lower receiver, and pointed at the line of drilled-out steel. “Did you do this?”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s where the serial number was. If one is lost or stolen, we don’t want the authorities to be able to identify it or where it came from.”

  “But isn’t drilling a serial number a crime?”

  “Yes. Having a weapon like this is a crime anyway.”

  The man nodded. “Yes.” He examined the selector lever. “Have you modified these yet to be fully automatic?”

  “Yes,” said the bomb maker.

  The man handed the rifle back. “Test them.”

  He took the rifle, as though he were agreeing to do the tests. “It will take some time, and I’m working with bombs now.”

  “Then we’ll do it. There’s no point in getting the bombs ready if we don’t have the weapons for what happens afterward. Do you have the pistols?”

  The bomb maker hesitated for a second. He had wanted to hold back something so he could delay them if he needed to. It was clear that he couldn’t. He opened the second storage box and the four men examined the pistols. They were satisfied with those. They held them up, pointed at the ceiling, and one of them gave a whoop, but he didn’t fire. The others answered the whoop and laughed, but didn’t fire.

  For a moment he could picture these men raising their weapons and firing celebratory volleys into the sky above a desert city. But as he watched them, he also could imagine them in a tropical jungle on a rounded mountain stronghold wearing dark green fatigues and T-shirts. One who was larger and heavier might easily have been from the Balkans or central Asia.

  “If you want to move them, the roads out here are empty from the time the bars close until just before dawn.”

  The leader of the group said, “Oh, I almost forgot. We came to congratulate you, but also to bring you some more money.” He turned to one of his men and said, “Go get the money.”

  The bomb maker waited while the men carried the weapons to the door and out to the cars. Then one of the men came back in and set a shopping bag down on the floor at his feet, turned, and went out to join his companions. The bomb maker could see it was the usual piles of hundred-dollar bills, so he didn’t bother to pick up the bag. He went and stood by the door until he saw the vehicle pause at the end of his driveway, then turn and drive off.

  He was wide awake now. He was always tense in the presence of those men, but this time he had been actually afraid. There was a hint of pent-up violence in them. He realized that giving them guns was making them a hundred times more powerful, but he was too afraid of them not to. What did he have left to appease them next time?

  34

  Morning came earlier at Stahl’s condominium than it had in the days before the explosion in Diane’s apartment. She was awake and out of the bedroom by five. She put on the bathrobe he had ordered for her, went to the kitchen, and made coffee. She liked the fact that there were skylights above and windows opening onto a narrow garden with a fountain, which made the stone wall outside look as though it were made of water. She was too much of a cop to be uninterested in how the security was maintained. She had to go all the way to the window to look up and see that there were horizontal bars above the garden to prevent intruders, and she supposed there were bars or barriers on the roof to prevent anyone from reaching the skylights.

  She sat down in the kitchen with her coffee and played with her new phone. It was late enough in Florida to call her mother, so she did. Her mother’s number rang a few times, and she decided she must be too early. Her mother’s phone was still turned off. That was the way she left it for the night because it made noises while she was trying to sleep. She sent her mother a text to tell her she’d try again later.

  She thought about Dick now, and as always thinking about him seemed to release strong feelings of affection. The response still surprised her, but it also pleased her. She hoped it meant that the direction her life had taken was right. She wasn’t quite ready to formulate a more confident statement for herself. That would be too close to saying the words aloud. Once people said things aloud, what they said tended to become sure and settled.

  Not much was sure or settled. The reason she had become a bomb technician was not that she was cocky or had no fear of death. It was the opposite.

  She wanted to live to be old and had always worked hard to deserve to be alive. A person who risked his life every day for others and who worked to gain the knowledge and skills to do it well must have a claim to living. She had not been overconfident, but she had been optimistic—until the evening after the car bomb in the Valley. That night, she had lost that feeling.

  The new captain, the middle-aged man who had come from nowhere that day to sta
nd in for the fourteen men who’d been murdered—an absurdity in itself—had behaved as though the substitution were natural. He had stepped in and taken charge. He had begun to study the booby-trapped car at once. He looked at the car as a single explosive device and saw the device in three dimensions and all its complexity, approaching it from above, below, all sides. He had picked up alterations and signs she hadn’t seen at first, and provided ways around the traps that she didn’t know.

  She had realized within fifteen or twenty minutes that her only chance of making it to the end of watch that night was to do what he asked and to make herself be what he wanted. She had to see with her perfect vision into a dim space and extract the component he wanted out, reach into the hell-made contraption farther because her hands and arms were smaller and thinner, remove the component more gently because her tactile sense was keener and her fingers were less callused. She had concentrated on seeing exactly what he saw and thinking what he thought. Sometimes she watched his eyes to see what they were focusing on.

  By the time they had worked their way down to the heart of the contraption—the shaped charge so big it was intended to blow a crater into the pavement and set off the gasoline tanks—she was practically an extension of his mind. It made perfect sense to her that he would strap the charge to his chest and take the long, lonely walk into the concrete riverbed. She was fully aware that carrying the charge was crazy, even suicidal. But taking it below street level was the most effective way to render the bomb harmless, and he was the only one who had enough experience to have a chance of doing it successfully.

  At the end of that day, after she was safe and clean and sitting in her apartment alone, she had felt lost. She was relieved and afraid at the same time. She knew that what had saved them—saved her—was that he’d been able to practically read the bomb maker’s mind. She had seen how he did it, followed his steps, but was positive she could not have initiated them. If she came upon a similar device tomorrow, she would probably die.