The Bomb Maker

by Thomas Perry

  Dick Stahl pulled his car into the parking structure of a nearby supermarket and trotted to the mouth of the subway. When he got there he saw Judy Welsh, the agent from Raleigh who had been assigned to Team Four.

  She was near the parked bomb truck talking on a device with a wire that ran down into the escalator pit. Stahl assumed they had set up a hard connection for communication so they could maintain a no-cell-phones zone. Cells didn’t work very well belowground anyway. As he stepped up to her she looked up. “Captain Stahl!”

  Someone on the other end said something, and she replied, “Yeah, it’s him, big as life.”

  She heard something else and she said, “Captain, they want you downstairs.”

  “Thanks, Welsh.” He turned and ran to the entrance to the subway, then down the steps because the motor had been turned off. When he reached the first floor down, he saw that there was a command area set up just inside the turnstiles where Elliot and another bomb technician were leaning over a video unit.

  Stahl stepped close. “Hi, Elliot. Are you the supervisor of the scene?”

  “For the moment I am,” he said. “Wyman and Neil are downrange. The damaged train cars are being towed to sidings to the north of the station so they’ll be out of the way. While that goes on, they’re trying to be sure there’s no other explosive device down the track between the location of the crash and the next station, which is Universal City.”

  “You’re sure it was an explosive device, and not a crash?”

  “Yes,” Elliot said. “The first car was charred, pitted, and scratched from the blast, and the surface tests positive for nitrate compounds. The tracks had been subjected to heat and lateral force. They’re bent and have to be replaced.”

  “How far have Wyman and Neil gotten?”

  “They’ve got two thousand feet of communication line on a wheel, and there’s plenty left, but they’re past the wreckage.”

  Stahl said, “Not to second-guess anything, but why Wyman?”

  Elliot shrugged. “No choice. He’s the ranking supervisor on this scene, and he decided to go. I was just suiting up when he got here and took charge.”

  “Mind if I hang around?”

  “I’d take it as a favor,” Elliot said. “As soon as they reconnect themselves to the line, we can see what else they find.”

  “I’m pretty sure there will be something,” said Stahl. “This guy always leaves something for us to disarm. What do you know about the hookup for the first explosion?”

  “I think the bomb was fairly small, placed between the left rail going south and the track for a switch to divert a train into another tunnel for maintenance. So when the front wheel of the train passed over the spot, the bomb went off under the front of the first car. It must have killed the driver instantly, and then derailed the first three cars. The railway people were able to tow everything behind that out of the way because it was mostly undamaged. They’re working on clearing the cars that were derailed, but there’s no telling how long that will take. They may have to use cutting torches and move them out in sections.”

  There was a sudden change on the screen in front of Elliot. They saw hands appear. Then there was Neil’s voice. “Team One, this is Neil. Wyman says he’s found a second device on the maintenance walkway on the left side of the tunnel.”

  “Want to tell him anything?” Elliot asked Stahl.

  Stahl said, “Hey, Neil. This is Dick Stahl. Tell him not to touch anything until he’s shown it to us on the video feed. I think I’ll be able to identify what it is.”

  Neil said, “He says he’s got it identified.”

  Stahl said, “Remember, this isn’t about stopping a subway train to disrupt the morning commute. He’s trying to get us to make a mistake. If you find—”

  There was a sudden bump that seemed to come up into the vault of the station from the train level below. It felt like a giant hammer hitting the bedrock foundation, and almost simultaneously there was a rush of air. It was similar to the feel of air forced out of a tunnel ahead of a train when it approached at high speed, but it came harder and hotter, filled with fine particles that stung the skin. And then the sound arrived, a deafening vibration that lasted a couple of seconds, shook solid rock and concrete, and made squares of tile drop from the walls and ceiling.

  In another second it was gone, as though it had passed down the tunnel to the rest of the system. Stahl and Elliot looked at each other with the same horrified expression. Wyman had guessed wrong.

  38

  Late in the afternoon, long after the bomb technicians, firefighters, structural engineers, metro engineers, train specialists, and others had declared the emergency over and the scene safe, the mayor arrived. He came with his entourage—a photographer, a public relations officer, a political spokesman, a driver, and a bodyguard. Both the driver and the guard were on-duty police officers, but the mayor liked them to dress in identical black suits, which were a little like the livery of servants. Both men were muscular and formidable, but neither was quite as tall as the mayor, nor was any other member of the retinue. Experts had advised the mayor never to allow himself to look short in a photograph, because the taller man almost always won an election.

  The police chief and Deputy Chief Ogden were both taller than the mayor, but in their uniforms, with their pistols and badges and utility belts crowded with gear in black leather pouches, they looked more like instruments of the mayor’s power than colleagues. He always walked a couple of paces ahead of them, trying to look like their commander in chief.

  The flat, paved area above the subway entrance held satellite trucks from the four major local news channels parked at odd angles, each of them with booms and dishes extended and a reporter and camera operator standing by. The reporters needed to stand in the foreground to provide teasers and superfluous commentary while the camera operators followed the mayor around.

  Television cameras were like sunlight and water to the mayor. He stood straighter, and his eyes and facial muscles assumed the look his underlings called “resolute.” He seemed to drink power from the microphones.

  At this moment he was giving the reporters a somber procession, a portrait of the city’s wise leader walking the scene to survey the damage. The camera operators took in the sight and transmitted it to their studios, and the reporters spoke in reverent tones, knowing the mayor would be out again soon to give them the chance to question him, to ask him respectfully how the people of the city should feel about today’s developments. They knew he was as aware as they were of the need to get the interview transmitted in time to make the early evening news, so they trusted him.

  As soon as the entourage had traveled down on the escalator to the platform, the chief checked to be sure the newspeople were too far behind to hear. Then he said to the mayor: “I’m sorry to get into this right now, Mr. Mayor, but we’re on an emergency footing. We’ve lost two officers, an engineer, and three civilians. You’ll recall that when we let Dick Stahl resign, we made an agreement with the police commission to approve a contract with his security company to let us use him as a civilian consultant to the Bomb Squad.”

  “I remember the idea, but I never signed off on it,” the mayor said.

  “After what happened today, I’m convinced we ought to make a move on this now.”

  The mayor got to the bottom of the escalator and waited while the chief and Deputy Ogden glided down. “You’re telling me that having Stahl on the payroll would have prevented this? Would he have put on a bomb suit and gone down there to defuse the bomb himself?”

  “I don’t know what he would have done, sir, and that’s exactly the point. He knows the best ways to approach an explosive device, and we don’t have anybody else who knows it as well. We know he personally defused three very large and complicated devices during his few weeks as commander, at least a couple of them so big that there was no point in wearing a bomb suit.”

  The mayor’s expression became brooding and resentful. “How do
you know he hasn’t been setting these bombs himself and then taking them apart? He would know just how to do it because he put them together. I’m not the first one to wonder about that, either. At least two of the reporters up there have said as much.”

  The chief was frustrated, and his voice turned hard. “He’s been cleared of any suspicion. Homicide Special found that there was no chance he did any of these crimes. None. Zero.”

  Deputy Chief Ogden said, “He wasn’t even in the country the day the fourteen men were killed. He was in Mexico. I was in his office and saw him arrive from there the day after it happened.”

  The chief said, “He’s got alibis for every bomb. He was in front of the TV cameras defusing a bomb when—”

  “What about Gloria Hedlund? What was he doing when she blew up?”

  “He was at the station, from the time of the press conference until seven, with other police officers present while he cleared his office. And then he was with Sergeant Hines all night until morning, when Captain Almanzo woke him.”

  “She’s Stahl’s girlfriend, for Christ’s sake. And she had reason to hate Gloria too. You call that an alibi?”

  “She’s a sergeant on the police force. And she’s also a victim of the bomber with severe injuries.”

  “I don’t believe having Richard Stahl inside our government and giving his advice to our police would have done anything to prevent this.”

  “We just lost a bomb technician supervisor with twenty-two years of experience. He wasn’t good enough to outsmart this bomber. Stahl has done it repeatedly. We have the best explosives expert in the West still willing to help us. We’d be foolish not to take his help.”

  “I’ll do better than that,” said the mayor. “Call the FBI again and ask them for their very best man to be assigned here on temporary duty. We’ll pay his salary and expenses, and he can be in charge of all bomb-related activity. We’ll give him all the support he wants.” The mayor shrugged. “Problem solved.”

  As the mayor moved ahead, Deputy Chief Ogden said to the chief: “Mind if I go back up for a minute?”

  “No,” said the chief. “Calling Stahl?”

  “Yes. I think I should tell him.”

  “Right. But let him know we’re going to keep trying.”

  39

  Steve and Debbie Garrick drove into the parking lot beside the picnic area in Fern Dell at 12:15 p.m. on Saturday. They were in their Suburban, and when all the seats were installed and the kids were strapped in, they could carry both of them, six of the boys from the baseball team, their equipment, and the picnic supplies. Haley and Ron Steiner had the rest in their van, and they would be along in a few minutes.

  They had been practicing all morning at a field in Griffith Park, and now they were all hungry. Debbie tugged at the big cooler of food she had made before dawn and pulled it toward the back door. Then she tapped it on top so the boys knew she wanted it out. As the two Morales boys and Henry Cooper lifted it, she watched her son, Dennis, try to help. He wasn’t as strong as those boys, but at least he had the alertness and hustle to get in on the work.

  Debbie stifled the feelings that surfaced unexpectedly. She had been a star softball player in high school and college, and later she played in a women’s hardball league for three years. She had gotten used to keeping to herself the fact she was so much better at baseball than her husband, Steve, and now their son too. But that didn’t mean she’d forgotten.

  The problem she faced had been being a woman. She had fallen in love with Steve at the age of twenty-four, and in a year Steve had passed the bar exam. He wanted to marry her, but she knew if she married him she would have to drop out of the league. She couldn’t be his wife and travel with a baseball team. Her team had played in a championship series in Venezuela the previous season, and there were signs that they were good enough to keep competing at a high level. But baseball was a game, and being Steve’s wife was a future. She tried various methods of putting him off. She told him she was perfectly happy to keep having sex with him regularly while she was home without getting married, and would even live with him for the entire off-season. She made an argument that this would probably be the future pattern for most male-female relationships. But he was a good lawyer. He lined up all his arguments and then marched them past her in review—children, house, financial security, shared risks and rewards, and the near certainty that if they remained single, one of them would meet someone else and move on.

  She still had a better arm than Steve, and she was fairly sure she could still outrun him, maybe even by a larger margin than she could at twenty-six, because of her jogging and taking care of the kids every day. When she and Steve were coaching the baseball team she always took the secondary role. Steve would instruct and give pep talks and she would demonstrate. She pitched batting practice, popped fly balls into the outfield for the fielders to drop, and hit grounders for the infielders to bobble.

  Her life had not been a disappointment. It was just that her hands still longed for the feel of the horsehide in the precise diameter of the regulation ball. She loved the smell of the glove leather, the grass, and the exact shade of reddish dust in the infield. None of those things had anything to do with Steve.

  She was in her mid-thirties now and would have been at the end of her career, probably already a step slower toward first base. And women’s baseball had not grown into the sensation everyone used to assure each other it would be by now.

  She moved close to the place where the cooler sat on the other table and reached to open it. Her glance passed over a shiny cylinder shape on the ground beyond the table, and she thought the boys must have knocked one of the stainless steel thermos bottles off the table or dropped it while unloading. As she walked around the table to pick it up, it looked less like one of hers. Then she saw wires and looked more closely.

  “Okay, guys,” she called out. “I’d like you to step back to the car. Walk exactly the way you came, in a straight line, and then go to the side door and get in.”

  She called out, “Steve, can you help me, please? We need to move the picnic to another spot.”

  She could tell he heard something in her voice that nobody else’s ears would pick up and that something was off. And here he came.

  The bomb truck arrived with a police cruiser in front and another about two hundred yards behind. Sergeant Ed Carmody got out of the passenger side of the truck and looked in each direction. He spotted a family of—no, too big to be just a family. There were three mothers and two fathers. All boys. Baseball.

  He moved toward them smartly. He saw one mother in particular whose blond hair was in a ponytail that protruded through the back of her baseball cap. She had great legs and when she threw a ball to one of the boys at the far end of the lot she threw like a guy, with a little snap to the release at the end and a loud smack when it hit leather.

  She saw him long before he got near, and trotted up to him. “Did you see it yet?” she said. “Is it a bomb?”

  He read in her eyes a concern for the boys who were her responsibility. She looked along her shoulder at them like a pitcher holding runners on base.

  He said, “I haven’t seen it yet. My men are taking a preliminary look before I go in and deal with it.” He hadn’t realized he was gong to deal with it until just then, but now he was.

  “Do you go in with those big bomb suits?”

  “That will depend on what we see. Sometimes there’s something to worry about, and sometimes there isn’t.” He looked into her eyes.

  “How far should we pull back?”

  He smiled. “Far enough so that if this weren’t LA, you’d be a couple of towns away, ma’am. I’d suggest you take the boys home now.”

  “Really?”

  “If you don’t, then later one of the mothers will take you to task for it, and I’ll bet you know just which one already.”

  She smiled and cupped her right hand beside her mouth. “Steve!” she shouted. “Let’s round them up now. We
’ve got to get out.”

  Her husband made a couple of arm-swing herding gestures and the boys scrambled in the open door of the Suburban and the sliding door of the van. They began the business of buckling seat belts and settling in.

  The woman said, “Good luck with that thing.”

  “Thanks,” Carmody said. “Good luck with the team. What’s their record?”

  “Four and six, but we’re building.”

  He watched her trot off to join her husband. He waited while the three vehicles took a slow turn like elephants forming trunk-to-tail into a caravan and then lurched up the gravel incline to the road and headed for Los Feliz. This time when they reached the city street, the second police car moved across the opening in the gate and stayed there.

  Carmody was over forty, and he had been in uniforms most of his life. He had been a marine until he was wounded in Fallujah in the Iraq War. Then he went to EOD school and served two more tours, which was what he’d calculated he owed the country in exchange for the training. After that he became a Los Angeles police officer.

  He’d had a theory once that he would be happy if he married a good woman. But when he became a civilian, he tried it three times and it never worked out. He kept throwing his marriages away, and then being surprised that he’d been so easily distracted.

  He would run into a woman who was very pretty, usually married, but had that small spark of interest anyway. He would try to charm her, succeed, get caught by his wife, and end up signing papers. He’d been much happier, but for shorter periods of time, since then.

  These days most of the women were like that baseball mom, except that they had been interested in Ed Carmody, which she wasn’t. But who knew? Maybe the sight and sound of him would grow on her too. It had happened before. The ones who didn’t seem interested would show up in a day, a month, or even a year, having experienced a change of some kind, and be in a playful mood.