But a bomb brought misery. A nice quiet death at age eightyeight, with the family gathered around, not so much.
He’d have to read Job again, he thought; not that Job seemed to have many answers.
Then he got up, peed, dropped on the bed, and was gone.
4
THE BOMBER SAT in his basement—it had to be a basement—looking at the stack of bombs. He’d already packed the Pelex, which had a rather nice tang about it: like aftershave for seriously macho dudes. He’d packed in the last of the blasting caps, which looked a bit like fat, metallic ballpoint pen refills, and he’d already wired up all the batteries except the last one, because he was afraid of that one: afraid he’d blow himself up.
He’d given himself two missions this night: the first would be to take out the water and sewer pipe the city was planning to run out to the PyeMart, as well as the heavy equipment that’d be used to lay the pipe.
The second one . . .
FOR THE SECOND ATTACK, he needed a bomb that would blow with motion—and since he didn’t have access to sophisticated detonators, he’d made do with an old mercury switch. To use it, he’d have to do the final wiring on-site, in awkward conditions, wearing gloves, with a flashlight in his mouth. Possible, but tricky.
The trickiness gave him a little buzz. If anything went wrong, of course, he’d never know it, with his face a foot from the bomb. When they identified him, wouldn’t they be surprised? Wouldn’t they wonder?
Made him smile to think about it.
THE BOMBER WAS SLENDER and tough and smart. He worked out daily, ninety minutes at a time. He had a sense of humor, he often looked in a mirror and thought, Pretty damn good.
But pretty damn good wasn’t enough. Time was passing; he wasn’t old, but age would come, and then what? Twenty years on Social Security? There were very limited opportunities ahead, and he had to seize the ones that presented themselves.
And there was the competitive aspect to the challenge: Could he beat the cops and the federal government? He knew they’d all come piling in when the bombs started going off.
He shook off the intrusive thought, and picked up the latest bomb, and turned it in his hands. Very, very simple; and deadly as a land mine.
Not particularly delicate, though. He’d read that he could mold the Pelex into a ball and whack it with a golf club, with no effect. The blasting caps were a little more sensitive, but no more so than ordinary shotgun primers, which tens of thousands of people had sitting around in their houses—there were whole racks of them at sporting goods stores.
No, the pieces were essentially inert, until they got put together. Then, watch out.
He’d taken hours to make each of the first few bombs, until he got some traction. He’d done his research on the Internet, and figured out his materials. He’d cracked the supply shed at Segen Sand & Gravel in the middle of the night and removed the cases of Pelex and the boxes of blasting caps. He’d been sweating blood when he did that, his first real crime, creeping around the countryside in camo and a mask. After all the planning and preparation, and after an aborted approach when a couple kids parked in the quarry entrance to neck, the break-in had been routine. The explosives shed had been secured with nothing more than a big padlock.
He’d found the bomb pipe under a cabin at a lakeside resort, where it had been dumped years before, when the owner put in plastic pipe. He got that at night, too, and had taken it down to the college for the cut. That had taken a little gall, but he hadn’t committed himself to anything at that point, and when the cutting went off without a hitch, he was good. If he’d been caught, he would have said he was making fence posts, and then started over....
His first bombs were small. He didn’t need a big bang to know that they worked. When he finished building them, he’d taken them out in the country, deep in the woods, buried them, and fired them from fifty feet away, with a variety of triggers. There’d been a thump, which he’d felt more than heard, but the thump had proved the pudding: he could do it.
The bombs worked.
After that, the bomb-making was the least of it. Everything he needed to know about switches he could find on the Internet, with parts and supplies at Home Depot.
Getting into the Pye Pinnacle had been simple enough; in fact, he’d done it twice, once, in rehearsal, and the second time, for real.
Having the bomb go off too early . . .
He’d made the assumption that a ferociously efficient major corporation would have run their board meetings with the same efficiency. When he learned that the board members had been in the next room drinking—the Detroit newspaper hadn’t said they were drinking, but had implied it clearly enough—he’d been more disgusted than anything, even more disgusted than disappointed. What was the world coming to? Cocktails at nine o’clock in the morning? All of them?
THE SECOND BOMB, planted at the construction site, had been much, much better. Everything had gone strictly according to plan. He’d come in from the back of the site, carrying the bolt cutters, the pry bar, a flashlight, and the bomb. In his bow-hunting camo, he was virtually invisible.
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.
HE HAD 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 bac
kpack, 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.
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?”