The Bomb Maker

by Thomas Perry

  She’d had an urge to talk to somebody, but nobody who hadn’t been there could understand or have anything useful to tell her. What did she need to know? What was she supposed to expect, to look for, to fear, to do? She realized that what she wanted to know was the future. She knew there was no place to find it, but she also knew the idea wasn’t idle, because there was one person who knew so many other things that he was closer to the future than anyone else. And he had probably learned things dismantling that bomb during the day. She knew he had. Of course she was drawn to him.

  She had gotten ready—perfume, pretty underwear, the skirt and blouse she had been saving. She took a great deal of care with her hair and makeup. She thought clearly about why she was choosing to put forward this version of herself, when she could instead put on a clean, pressed uniform. It was because she needed to look as appealing as she could, and she needed to make it clear that her visit wasn’t an official errand that should have been handled at work.

  She had admitted to herself just as she arrived outside his building that part of the attraction all along had been sexual. She had brought the bottle of Scotch thinking it was an afterthought, but it had really been premeditated. She had thought of it twice in the hour before she left home in the hope that it would set a nonbusiness tone. But the tone was one in which sex would be more likely. In the end she had insisted on the sex—thrown herself at him because sex was the opposite of death, and death might win in a day or so, and because she needed to be as close to him tonight as she could be.

  During the next few feverish days while they fought the bomb maker every day and spent every night in each other’s arms, she felt as though she were living a whole life in an accelerated form. It had been like riding a runaway horse. She was not in charge at all, rather clinging to the horse and trying not to fall.

  Boom. That was the instant everything had changed completely. She woke up six weeks later, on the far side of a chasm. All the unself-conscious abandon and lust and hero worship were knocked into a pile back there with those six days.

  Her limber, athletic animal self was gone. She wondered if she would ever walk right, whether her hearing would ever fully return. Whenever she moved to test for pain, she always found it. The notion of sexual attraction was as far from her mind as it could be. She thought about the discomfort of breathing with so many broken ribs, of regaining the full extension of her limbs.

  She had told Dick she remembered everything that happened between them. She knew that to him it meant she remembered and didn’t regret any of it. What she felt was probably worse. She mourned those times, yet hadn’t found a path back to the way she felt the first week with him.

  One of the things that had made the relationship happen was her confidence that it would be temporary, a few days of madness that would end with the death of one or both of them. Two days ago Dick had felt hurt when she called it a fling, so she promised she wouldn’t.

  But keeping her promise was hard. She didn’t know what would happen now. She didn’t know what could. As the days went on, she had been wanting time to stop so she could catch up with her lost forty-two days. But every day Dick did more to help her and protect her and support her while she recovered. She felt as though she were running up a debt to him.

  She knew she should be leaving him right now and taking a plane to Florida to be with her mother. But the things that made her want to leave were the same things that made her want to stay. He was a better person than she had thought. He cared about her. At the moment she didn’t have anything to offer him in return. She knew much more about him now, and felt closer to him, but it was all so different and so inferior to the way they had started.

  Diane checked her watch. It was already after 6:00 a.m. She looked around her at the kitchen. She got up and wiped the counters, ran the dishwasher Dick had forgotten last night. She got the pans out and set the table for breakfast. Every move she made was slow and careful and self-protective. She held herself erect and bent at the knees to pick things up because her spine seemed tender today. When she ran out of things to do, she went to the guest bathroom and showered.

  She looked around for clothes, then put on a pair of jeans and a new T-shirt Dick had bought for her from May Hedges. She glanced at herself in the mirror, then looked harder. The least she could do was try to look good when he woke up. She opened the makeup kit May Hedges had brought.

  The cell phone Stahl had left on his nightstand was ringing. He picked it up and looked at the screen, but the extension wasn’t familiar. “Stahl.”

  “This is Bart Almanzo, Dick. Have you seen the news?”

  “No,” he said. “What news?”

  “Gloria Hedlund’s car blew up in the Channel Ten parking lot at around one last night.”

  “Just a scare?”

  “She was in it. She’s dead.”

  “And nobody called me when it happened?”

  “Your resignation was already in. I don’t think they could.”

  “Who’s been to look at the wreck?”

  “Your guy Elliot. He’s still at the scene now.”

  “Has he said if this was our bomber or somebody else?”

  “He told my detectives that it was the same guy.”

  “Damn. Elliot is good. He’s seen most of the devices, and he’ll know the guy’s work. But this is a change. The victim should be a member of the Bomb Squad, or at least some kind of cop.”

  “I’m on my way over there now. I’ll pick you up on the way.”

  “I’m not sure I’d be welcome today.”

  “Then I’ll just say you’re with me. It should be sufficient, since you’ll be with me.”

  “Give me ten minutes.”

  Stahl showered and dressed quickly. When he came out into the living room, he saw Diane was in the kitchen.

  “Wow. You’re up early.”

  “I thought I’d make us some breakfast,” she said.

  “I just got a call from Bart Almanzo.”

  “Almanzo? Who’s dead?”

  “Gloria Hedlund, the TV reporter.”

  “The woman who outed us is dead?”

  “Yes. Somebody wired her car. Elliot thinks it’s our guy.”

  “Do you think I ought to go?”

  The surprised way he looked at her betrayed the fact that it had never entered his mind. “If you want to see it, I’m sure he’ll be glad to take us both. I’m not sure there’s much point in either of us going if Elliot’s at the scene, but he asked.”

  “Then I’ll skip it and see Elliot another time.”

  “Have you got your phone?”

  She turned around so he could see the outline of the phone in the back pocket of her jeans. He leaned close and kissed her. She didn’t turn her body toward him to allow an embrace, but he didn’t notice. He went into the bedroom and came back with a metal box the size of a book with a combination lock built into it. He punched the numbers and it popped open to reveal a Glock 17, two spare magazines, and a box of fifty nine-millimeter rounds.

  “I want to give you this before I go. I know your gun and badge didn’t travel to the hospital with you, and you probably won’t get them back until you’re on active duty again. This is what you’re used to, right?”

  “You know it is,” she said. “Get out of here now.”

  Almanzo had already pulled up outside. Diane watched the security monitor as Stahl trotted out to the street and got into the plain car.

  She sat down at the kitchen table and picked up the Glock. She looked it over, released the magazine, and checked the chamber, then loaded the magazine with the first seventeen rounds and set it down again. It had been typical of Dick Stahl to give her this. He realized that she was going to be unarmed and alone, and that the bomb maker knew she wasn’t dead yet.

  She knew that if she had told him the things she was feeling right now—the disappointment at being left here, no longer considered a police officer because she had been hurt—he would have been shocked
. He would patiently explain why hers was the wrong reaction, explain that she was irrational to imagine an officer who was on medical leave would be included, and explain that a man who cared about her the way he did would never do anything to hurt her feelings intentionally. Several men had told her that in the past, and they’d all found ways to hurt her feelings.

  Almanzo drove the police car along the quiet street toward Century Park East. “How’s Sergeant Hines doing?”

  “Glad to be out of the hospital,” said Stahl. “She isn’t fully recovered, but she’s eager to get back to work.”

  “Do you think she wants to go back to the Bomb Squad?”

  “I wish she wouldn’t,” Stahl said. “But she probably will if she gets back her manual dexterity and nerve control. Getting good at EOD takes a long time and a lot of field experience. It’s hard to let go once you’ve done the work. She made it clear she’d be willing to take a look at the Hedlund scene if we wanted.”

  “You and Elliot both said it was weird that Hedlund was the victim. Why do you think the bomber picked her?”

  “I don’t know. If I were to guess, I’d say our boy has been busy. He hasn’t done anything since the hospital. That must have taken a big charge and a lot of work, risk, and planning. He might be feeling he’s under pressure to keep the tempo up and keep the city off balance while he makes more bombs and prepares for something bigger. He picked a well-known person who has been reporting on him, and on us. So it counts in his mind as a win. That makes it a defeat for us.”

  “You think that way even after she made a big point of getting you fired?”

  “I wish she hadn’t done that. But if I hadn’t done what I did, she wouldn’t have.”

  Almanzo drove in silence for a minute. “Did you and Sergeant Hines stay home all last night?”

  “Yeah.” Stahl studied him. “We did.”

  “Please don’t look at me like that, Dick,” Almanzo said. “It was a murder. Any question that can be asked has to be.”

  “You’re right, of course. We got Diane sprung from the hospital around seven in the evening, and then my assistant, Andy, drove us home in Diane’s car. A cop named Morrissey picked Andy up from my place and drove him home. I had a lady from Bloomingdale’s waiting for us to show Diane some clothes I bought her because there was nothing left of the clothes in her apartment. I still have her business card. Her name is May Hedges. By the time that was over we were both tired. We had a drink and went to sleep. If there’s any doubt we never left, the twenty-four-hour security guys at my building keep a log and retain the recordings from the surveillance system.”

  “Okay,” said Almanzo. “Sounds tight to me.”

  “I can guess where you were last night,” said Stahl.

  “That’s right. I was home asleep until one fifteen, when my guys got called in to look at a murder scene and I learned who the victim was.”

  He pulled up to the Channel Ten studio on Melrose. As he turned up the short drive beside the guard gate, they could both see that the parking lot was full of reporters, photographers, and freelancers held back by a pair of police officers inside the yellow tape. Some of them began to move as soon as Almanzo’s car appeared, instinctively aware that a car like that probably held ranking cops. They hurried to get close while the car was held back by the lift gate. When the bar lifted they were already holding cameras within five feet of the car on both sides, getting shots of the two men inside.

  When Almanzo stopped outside the tape, they began to yell. “Captain Stahl! Didn’t you resign?”

  “Can you tell us what happened?”

  “Are you a suspect?”

  Almanzo nodded to Stahl and stepped forward to head off the small crowd. “My name is Captain Bart Almanzo, commander of Homicide Special. Captain Stahl has come at my request to assist me in this examination of the scene. This is an ongoing homicide investigation, so neither of us will be answering any questions at this time.”

  The group could not have failed to notice that Stahl was walking off while Almanzo was keeping them occupied. Almanzo stopped when Stahl was far inside the yellow tape. Then he ducked under the tape and trotted to catch up.

  Elliot was beside the burned wreck. He had the hood up and he was taking photographs of the engine compartment. He looked up. “Captain!” He stepped closer to him to take off a glove and shake his hand.

  Stahl said, “I hear you think this is our guy again.”

  “I’m pretty sure it is. It doesn’t make sense to me as a strategy, but there it is. We found fragments of a homemade mercury rocker switch on a stand like the one he used at the gas station. So I started to look for his other trademarks, and I found that two backup charges had gone off too. There was one using the circuit for the brake lights, and another backup with a set of lithium batteries using the solenoids that locked the doors as the switch. It was a toss-up which circuit would go first.”

  Stahl turned to Almanzo. “That’s him, all right.” He said to Elliot, “Where did the car go up?”

  He pointed at a spot behind a reserved parking space. “Over there.”

  “It figures. Backups to the backups, and far more explosive than he needed.”

  When Almanzo went to talk with his two detectives, Stahl said to Elliot, “I’m sorry I had to resign, but I won’t abandon you guys. I’m trying to come back to work as a consultant, which is probably what I should have been in the first place. If you need me before then for any reason, call me. The same for the other teams.”

  “Thanks, Captain.”

  “Not captain anymore, and that’s one part that won’t be coming back. It’s just Stahl now.”

  35

  The bomb maker had a bad start that morning because of the night before. First he had needed to spend the evening making a main charge of the right sort. He had seen the target in publicity pictures at the wheel of a silver Ferrari. At first he thought the car must be part of an advertisement, but it appeared again in a shot on her personal website. She had parked it in the garage of a house. Only the open garage door and a part of a brick facade were visible, so the house could be anywhere. But the plate number began with GH, so it had to be Gloria Hedlund’s.

  He scrapped the design he had been drawing, and designed a smaller version that could be made flatter and attached under the chassis of the low sports car. Then he decided to use a few yards of wire and two more detonators to connect the charge to the brake light and to the solenoids that locked the doors electronically.

  He knew that studio lots were expert at keeping people out, so he hot-wired the tow truck parked in back of a closed gas station where he’d stopped a few times in Bakersfield. He set the sun visor at a low angle to block a security camera’s view of his face, then drove the truck to LA and up to the gate. He angled his hat’s brim down to obscure his features. He said he was there to jump a battery in the television parking lot, although the explanation would probably not have been necessary, because a tow truck was its own explanation. The guard waved him in, and he drove to the television station’s parking lot.

  He had no trouble finding her parking space behind the station because of the distinctiveness of the silver Ferrari. He had no real trouble setting the main charge or running the secondary wires to the brake light through the trunk and to the solenoid that controlled the right rear-door lock. The process took five minutes.

  He was able to drive off the lot in the tow truck over forty minutes before the explosion. Then he drove back to the gas station, popped the ignition lock back into the column, and walked away. His car was parked a block from the station. The hardest part for him had been driving home from Bakersfield.

  It couldn’t have been more than two hours after he was in bed when his employers, the terrorists, had come for their night visit. This time he had gotten rid of them by giving them the guns and ammo he’d been saving. It had been a costly tactic for him. He had hoped to use the terrorists’ lack of guns as a way to keep them fairly harmless and peace
ful while he completed his plans and mixed the rest of the explosives necessary to carry them out. He’d planned to string them along for a month or more while he gave them one or two weapons at a time, then doled out the ammunition as slowly as possible. But when he assessed the situation that night, he decided to give in.

  They had been jumpy and emotional. They were on a mission in the middle of a crowded city surrounded by an enormous metropolitan area patrolled by about twelve thousand police, twelve thousand sheriffs, and an unknown number of FBI, ATF, border police, airport police forces, and Homeland Security. They had asked him for arms for fifteen men. The numbers were small enough to persuade him that they didn’t intend to accomplish anything but an hour or two of slaughter before they died. They were a suicide squad, whether they knew it or not. How could he be sure they paid him before it was too late?

  He was tired and had a pounding headache, and his schedule had him working with difficult chemicals in big batches today. He wished he could close everything down and take a nap, but he couldn’t. Now that they had the weapons he’d bought for them, there would be no way to keep them controlled, or even predictable. If they were motivated by religion, one of them could have a vision. If they were motivated by politics, or even were being paid for murdering people, one of them could develop the notion that a neighbor was suspicious and was spying on them or something.

  He had never seen any of them engaged in anything that looked like a religious practice. They didn’t bow to the east in front of him, or cross themselves, or wear religious medals or talismans. They never wore anything with writing on it, or read books in front of him.

  When he was searching for a sponsor he had tried to reach the leaders of any group that identified itself as having committed a terrorist act anywhere in the world. But he had not been told which group these men belonged to. They could be on some familiar mission, or they could be doing something never done before. They could be working to weaken an American city so Russia, China, North Korea, or some other country would be accused. Or they might be a small secret group that wanted to draw out some other group that was a threat in their own country. They could be anything or its mirror opposite.