The trailer had two doors: a screen door, not locked, and an inner wooden door, which was locked. He’d forced the inner door, cracking the wood at the lock. Inside, he’d set up the bomb in the light of the flashlight. When he was ready to go, he’d flashed the light once around the inside of the trailer, and caught the reflection off the lens of a security camera.
There had been no effort to hide it. If it worked in the infrared …
He was wearing a face mask, another standard bow-hunting accessory, but he disliked the idea of leaving the camera. He walked back to it, got behind it, and pried it off the wall. A wire led out of the bottom of it, and he traced it to a closet, and inside, found a computer server, which didn’t seem to have any connection going out.
The server was screwed to the floor, but the floor was weak, and he pried it up and carried both the server and the camera outside.
The rest of it had taken two minutes: he placed the bomb on the floor next to the door, reaching around the door, and then led the wires from the blasting cap under the door, and then closed the door.
The switch was a mousetrap, a method he’d read about on the Net. One wire was attached to the spring, the other to the top of the trap’s wooden base. A piece of fish line led from the trap’s trigger to the inside doorknob on the screen door. When the door was opened, the trap would snap, the two ends of the copper wire would slam together, completing the circuit, and boom.
Which was exactly what happened.
He remembered walking away from the trailer, thinking about the lottery aspect of it: Who would it be, who would open the door? Some minimum-wage asshole hired to pour the concrete? Or maybe the building architect?
He’d tracked through the night, enjoying himself, until he got to the river. The camera and server were awkward, carrying them with all the tools he’d brought for the break-in, pushing through the brush along the track. He listened for a minute, then threw the server and the camera out into the middle of the river, a nice deep pool, and continued through the dark to his car.
Hehad the technique, he had the equipment, he had the balls.
Thinking about the earlier missions, he smiled again.
This night would take perhaps even more balls, and he looked forward to it. Creeping through the dark, wiring it up…
One thing: if a single dog barked, he was out of there. The first target was on the edge of town, not many people around. He’d spotted a parking place, at the side of a low-end used-car lot, a block away from the target. There were no cameras at the lot; he’d scouted it carefully. He could park the car, making it look like one of the used cars, cross the road into a copse of trees, and sit there for a bit and watch. Then he’d walk through the trees and across a weedy vacant lot, right up to the target car.
And that’s what he did, at two o’clock in the morning, dressed in camo, with a bomb in a backpack, a gun in his pocket. He’d already killed, and if the owner of the house caught him planting the bomb, he’d shoot him and run for it. Nothing to lose.
The night was warm, for early June, when it could still get cold; but not this night. He left the car, as planned, sat in the trees and listened and watched: a small town, trucks braking on the highway, or speeding up as they headed out; the stars bright overhead; no sirens or dogs to break the silence.
He could see the target car, sitting across the vacant lot like Moby-Dick: there’d been no sign of activity from the house next to it. He gave it the full half hour, then began a slow stalk across the lot.
He was a deer hunter, a stalker rather than a sitter, and he knew how to move slowly. He took ten minutes to cross the hundred-foot lot. He was satisfied that even if there’d been a dog, it wouldn’t have heard him.
At the car, he sat and listened, one full minute, letting his senses extend into the night, and then he slid beneath it, next to the axle. He’d taped the end of a deer hunter’s LED flashlight, so only a single LED could shine through: a red one.
After looking the situation over, he decided the most reasonable thing would be to tape the bomb to the hydraulic line that led toward the back of the car. He did that, fumbling with the tape in the dark, until it was solid. He made sure that the thermostat bulb was hanging straight down, checked it twice-if he got it wrong, he’d be a rapidly expanding sphere of bloody cellular matter. When everything was right, he pulled the circuit wires down the car for a couple feet, looped them around another fluid line, then twisted together the wires that would complete the circuit.
The bomb was live.
He eased out from under the car and, once clear, looked up into the night sky at the billions and billions…
Felt comfortable there, in the smell of the night, the odor of gas and oil, the presence of death.
Like, he thought, Ka – boom.
TIME TO MOVE.
The second site wasn’t quite as big a deal, in terms of risk, though it was a lot more work. The site was in a warehouse district on the backside of town, and there was a spot where he could park his car, off the road, where it wouldn’t be seen. There was a fence, but he had the cutters with him. In his scouting trips, he’d seen no cameras.
He timed the traffic until he was alone, made the turnoff, pushed back into the trees. Got out and listened again. Nothing.
The construction yard was a two-minute walk through the brush to the back fence, but he had twenty-two bombs to move, and they were heavy. He took them five at a time, in a Duluth pack. He cut through the fence with the bolt cutters, and was in.
His target was the water and sewer pipe that would be used to feed the PyeMart.
The water pipe was stacked across the construction yard, in bundles, five pipes high, five pipes wide, made out of some kind of blue plastic stuff. The sewer pipe was reddish brown, and seemed to be of some kind of ceramic, though he could be wrong. He had the bombs in place after four trips, then made a fifth trip for the firing harness, the batteries, and the two bombs he’d use on the shovel and the pipelayer. He used lantern batteries for the heavy-equipment bombs, and an old car battery for the pipes. Three mechanical alarm clocks would serve as switches. The clocks were ready to go.
It took almost an hour before he was finished wiring up the bombs-longer than he’d expected, but within his planned limits: and he was very, very careful, tracing and retracing his work.
When he was done, he carefully, carefully set the three clocks to trip in two hours, which would be a little after five-thirty in the morning. Two of them would take out the heavy equipment, the third would wreck most of the pipe, he thought. He was a little unsure about that, so he made the bombs bigger than he might otherwise have. He would have liked to watch the handiwork, but that would be too risky.
When he was finished, he squatted next to the fence and thought about it for a minute, scanning the yard. Had he left anything behind? He inventoried his gear: everything was there. He’d probably have left footprints, but there were footprints all over the yard, and the area around the fence was covered with heavy weeds, so there wouldn’t be much for the police to work with.
Don’t go yet, he thought. What are you forgetting?
Thirty seconds later, satisfied that he was good, he walked out of the construction yard and back to his car. He took off the camo jacket and mask, threw them on the floor of the backseat. A minute after that, satisfied that no traffic was coming, he was back on the road.
He didn’t drive home-he worried that the neighbors might hear him come in. Instead, he drove down toward the Twin Cities, to an all-night diner off I-494, and had breakfast.
At five thirty-five, halfway through a stack of pancakes and sausage, he looked at his watch, smiled, and closed his eyes, and said to himself, for the second time that night,
Ka – boom.
5
The bombs in the two pieces of heavy equipment went off first, in quick sequence, boom… boom. A few seconds later, the pipes went, the whole bunch fired with a single impulse from the car battery: BOOM .
&
nbsp; Virgil heard the motel windows flex and rattle, but barely woke up; from his bed, it might have been a motel door slamming. Instead, he rolled over, facedown, and fell deeper into sleep.
The bombs were heard by most of the people awake at that hour, but because there was nobody in the equipment yard, and the yard was away from any main streets, and no businesses were really open yet, nobody knew quite where the blasts had come from, until they saw the dust.
There was no fire, but there was a lot of dirt in the air. A cop drove down the street toward the dust cloud, which had formed a mushroom, not quite certain of where he was going until he got there. When he got there, he was not quite certain of what he was seeing. There was still a lot of dust in the air, but the corrugated-iron equipment building was still standing, and looked fine.
Not until he walked down the length of chain-link fence to peer into the yard, and saw the pipe strewn around like jackstraws, did he understand what had happened-and even then, he didn’t realize that the two large pieces of heavy equipment had been turned into a pile of scrap, frames bent, engines dismounted, transmissions ruined. He did see that two windows had been blown out on the back of the building, and when he looked across a narrow street, more seemed to be missing from a sign-company building.
The deputy called back to the city station. The duty officer woke up the sheriff, who said he’d be along, and said to call Virgil. A minute later, the sheriff called back and told the duty officer to call Barlow, as well.
A phone doesn’t ring before six in the morning unless there’s trouble. Virgil woke, checked the clock, said, “Man…” and picked up the phone. The duty officer said, “We’ve got a bomb out at the city equipment yard. Blew up some pipe. Agent Barlow is on his way out.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“Don’t know for sure, but I don’t think so. I don’t think anybody was out there.”
“How do you get there?” Virgil asked.
The duty officer gave him instructions, and he rolled out of bed, put on yesterday’s clothes, and then headed out. The morning was crisp, the sky was a flawless blue: a good day, not counting the bombing.
A bunch of patrol cars and a few civilian vehicles were lined up on the road beside the equipment yard when Virgil got there. He ID’d himself to the deputy standing by the entrance, then walked through the equipment building and out the back door, where he found the sheriff, Barlow, a couple of civilians, and two or three other deputies looking at the wreckage.
Virgil asked Barlow, “Anybody hurt?”
Barlow shook his head. One of the civilians, who apparently was with the public works department, said, “Our budget took a hit. I gotta look at our insurance. We’ll get most of the money back, but not all of it. He blew up our shovel and the pipelayer, along with the pipe. I don’t think the pipe can be saved; it’s all screwed up.”
Virgil stepped over to a pile of the blue pipe: some kind of plastic, he thought. Most of the pipes had been blown in half and had split lengthwise. Somebody said to his back, “I was outside and heard it. It sounded like an atom bomb.”
“At least he wasn’t going after people,” Ahlquist said.
Barlow said to Virgil, “This is something new, though. We’ve counted at least sixteen separate explosions, and there are probably more than that. They went off more or less simultaneously, so he was working a seriously complicated firing apparatus. He’s getting more sophisticated.”
“The practical effect is… what?” Virgil asked the civilian. “If you guys got insurance, he delays you for a week or two?”
“Longer than that. More like a couple of months,” the civilian said. “Even if we go with emergency bid procedures, there’s a lot of bureaucracy to go through. Then, we’ve got to get the stuff shipped in from Ohio, and we’ve got to retrain the operators on the new equipment… It’ll be a while.”
“But it won’t stop the building.”
The civilian shook his head. “No. Not unless everybody gets too scared to work. I’ve got to tell you, I’m getting a little nervous, and so are the other guys.”
They stood around and talked about it for a while, and Barlow said that he was going to ask for another technician.
“How’s it going at the trailer?” Virgil asked. “Find anything?”
“Finding all kinds of things, just nothing that’ll get us to the bomber,” the ATF agent said. “Not so far, anyway. There supposedly was some kind of security system, but it either got torn apart in the explosion, or the bomber took it with him.”
“Huh. If he took it with him, he’d have had to spend some time inside.”
Barlow nodded. “Be pretty bold. And you’d have to ask, why? If you’re sneaking around with a big goddamned bomb under your arm, it’s not like you’d be more noticeable if you wore a mask. So why not wear a mask?”
“You think there might have been something else that was identifiable?”
“Could be,” Barlow said. “Maybe something about his size, like he’s really fat, or maybe he’s got a disability, a limp or a missing arm, or maybe he’s six-eight or something. But if we don’t find that camera, and we haven’t found anything like it, then we sort of wonder why.”
“How about a camera mount?”
“Should be one, can’t find it,” Barlow said. “We were hoping the video was cycled out to the Internet, but it wasn’t that sophisticated. It apparently was fed through a wire to a digital server, which cycled every twenty-four hours. The recorder might still be there, somewhere, but we haven’t found it yet. Now we got this one to work…”
Virgil looked around at the mess, shook his head. “Good luck with that.”
Barlow gestured toward the metal building, and they stepped away from the group looking at the blown shovel. Barlow said, quietly, “Listen… I spent some time talking to the sheriff last night, and he says you’re pretty much the BCA’s golden boy. That’s fine with me. I’ve got no connections with the locals. I can do all the technical stuff, but nobody’s gonna sit around and eat macaroni and cheese with me and tell me what’s what. So I gotta lean on you.”
“I can work with that,” Virgil said. “If you could get me what you find…”
“You’ll know in ten minutes,” Barlow said.
“Good. I’ve already got some people I need to talk to-I’m going to do that now.”
“Keep me up,” Barlow said. “The trailer bomb was a big break, though that sounds awful, with the dead guy and all. If the bomber had kept trying up in Michigan, we’d have never figured out where he was from. Hell, an hour after the bomb went off, we were ankledeep in Homeland Security and FBI guys. They wanted to investigate every Arab in the state, and there are something like a half million of them. This is a little more manageable.”
Virgil nodded. “Yeah. Not a hell of a lot of Arabs around here. Maybe a few, but a lot more Latinos.”
“I’ll tell you something else, Virgil. These guys do one or two bombs, and it gives them a serious sense of importance,” Barlow said. “We see it when we catch them and debrief them. They’re usually people who feel like they should be important, but they aren’t. When the bomb goes off, they get all kinds of attention, and they’re all kinds of important… and they don’t want to quit. It’s like cocaine: the high goes away after a while, and they want another hit.”
“You’re telling me he’s going to do it again,” Virgil said.
“He made a whole batch of bombs for this attack. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got another one tonight. Something else: he’s got enough material to blow up a building. If he decides to go big, he could turn the city hall into a pile of brick dust.”
“That’s not good,” Virgil said.
They exchanged cell-phone numbers, and e-mails, and then Virgil headed back downtown to the motel.
Virgil had heard of the ticking-time-bomb theory of building up stress in the movies-Bruce Willis rushing around New York to keep the schools from blowing up-but this was ridiculous. Now he had a ticking tim
e bomb, and the biggest expert around said that more were on the way.
At the motel, he got cleaned up, put on clean clothes, and headed to Bunson’s, the restaurant.
At Bunson’s, the hostess said, “I’ll buy that shirt if you want to sell it.”
Virgil was wearing his most conservative musical T-shirt, a vintage Rolling Stones “Tongue” that he’d found on America’s Fence. “I’m sorry, I have an emotional attachment to it,” Virgil told her. “I was wearing it when my third wife told me she wanted a divorce.”
“Oh, well, in that case…” She smiled, and led him back to a booth overlooking the lake.
He had the sweet-butter pancakes with bacon and maple syrup; at eight-thirty, which was still way too early, he called Davenport at home. “I hope this is a goddamn emergency,” Davenport said, when he picked up the phone.
“The guy just set off at least sixteen bombs at once, and wrecked God-only-knows how much stuff,” Virgil said. “I’m told it was like an atomic bomb going off.”
“Ah, jeez. Tell me.”
Virgil filled him in, and when he was done, Davenport asked, “You got media?”
“We had media, and now we’re gonna get a lot more,” Virgil said. “This thing is really blowing up, if you’ll excuse the rapier-like wit.”
“So talk to the sheriff, have a press conference, emphasize that you’re making progress, that you expect arrests. That you’ve got some kind of forensic evidence. Say that because of the interstate aspect, the killer can be tried in federal court and get the death penalty. Give the bomber a reason to hunker down, to be careful, to think about it. Try to buy some time.”
“A pageant. Good idea,” Virgil said. “The sheriff likes the whole television routine. I’ll get him to organize it.”
“I never had much to do with bombers, but this Barlow sounds like he knows what he’s talking about-and it sounds like a lot of the other freaks we’ve seen. They like it. You better catch this guy, Virgil.”
“I’ll catch him. I just can’t guarantee that the city hall will still be standing up,” Virgil said. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
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