A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 (13 page)

“Oh? Okay. Go on, then.”

Diaz gave an overview of what transpired in Times Square. He explained that Horn was former army. Paused for effect. “The main charge,” he said, “was C4 tagged to a United States Army batch that was delivered to your base.”

“Wow. How long ago?”

“FBI found out yesterday.”

“No. I mean, when was the C4 delivered to the army?”

“That’s an interesting question. I don’t know.”

“It would have to be the past five years. I don’t think they tagged that specifically before then.”

“Can we narrow that down further?”

“I doubt it. What else can I do for you?”

“What are the chances that someone could’ve stolen C4 from the army?”

“High, I’d say.”

“Really? Ain’t that stuff under lock and key? It was when I was there.”

“Sure it is. So’s a lot of things. Doesn’t mean they don’t turn up missing. These days especially, all these outside contractors with their various clearances coming and going. Do you know how much stuff the army has? My guess is the bean counters don’t even know.”

“But we’re talking about C4 here, one of the most powerful explo—”

“I understand. Let me give you a hypothetical. Army engineers need to raze an old structure of some kind to make way for a new road. So they go to the secure vault where the explosives are held, fill out some forms, remove the material. Say for argument’s sake that it’s fifty pounds of C4.”

“Fifty pounds.” Diaz already knew where this was going.

“At the site, not only are the engineers there, but also the logistical guys, maybe a platoon of regulars for protection, outside contractors, even could be questionable friendlies, if you know what I mean, guys who got their uniforms yesterday morning. Not like blowing up a building to make way for a road would be a high-security need-to-know operation, right?”

“Fifty pounds,” Diaz repeated.

“Now, you’ve been EOD. I don’t have to tell you how accustomed you can get to all this shit. Guy who never saw a plug of C4 is pissing his pants just to have it in the same room with him. Meanwhile, these engineers, they’ve gotten so complacent that they’re using it to stop a leak in their gas tank.”

“Never saw it used for that, but I get your gist.”

“I’m speaking metaphorically, Diaz. Point is when that fifty pounds of C4 is on the truck they’re not watching it every second, right? Maybe one guy goes to take a piss while the other one goes to have a smoke. They come back and the next time they check—which could be never—there’s only forty-nine pounds. What do they do—raise Cain? I doubt it. Unless they have a reason to suspect someone right there, they figure they miscounted at the vault. Am I right?”

Diaz thought back to his army days, all the shortcuts you took in the oppressive heat, just not to have to move another inch. “Probably.”

“You bet your ass. So...what? They’re gonna go back and report it, make a revision to the original form, risk getting called on the carpet, having to fill out more reports? Screw that. Hell, there are nuclear missiles that the air force has mislaid this way, entire tanks. They’re more dangerous than a brick of C4. A little C4 never hurt anybody.”

“Sure it has.”

“Are you smoking dope, Diaz? I’m not saying it hasn’t. I’m explaining how it gets rationalized.”

“Okay.”

“Now, a pattern of theft, that’s a different thing. That may get caught eventually. But a little skim here or there. Don’t kid yourself. I’d bet it happens all the time.”

Diaz reflected. “Well, let me ask you this, Captain. Do you have any record of a theft?”

“Not off the top of my head, but I could check. Albert Horn was the soldier’s name?”

“Yes, but he’s out four years. As far as the theft goes, anyone could be the culprit. What would help me most would be a list of names: everyone who’s authorized to remove C4 from storage. Going back as far as you can.”

“Should be doable but I can’t do it covertly.”

“No sweat. FBI might be asking for the same info through channels. I’m only going outside to expedite things, not because we got anything to hide.”

“Roger that.”

“Call me any time,” Diaz said. “Sooner the better.”

GAVIN LITTEL OVERSLEPT, WAKING BLEARY-EYED
in Brooklyn at half past nine. He called his assistant and said he’d be late. She told him he’d better hurry or he’d miss the 10:30 meeting. Just another day for another mid-level office grunt.

Within half an hour he’d done everything any man must do in the morning. The one exception being that he also strapped on his prosthetic arm and flexed the fingers to make sure he had it aligned properly. It wasn’t responding as usual, so he took it off and put it on twice more, but there was no help for it. He’d have to make a phone call later—couldn’t deal with it now or he’d miss his meeting.

A balky arm, however, was better than no arm at all. He knew that from experience. So he had it attached when he left his house a few minutes after ten.

Wearing a pinstriped suit and a foulard tie, Littel walked down his block and turned south onto Utica Avenue, moving along briskly. He had the
Wall Street Journal
tucked under his arm—home delivery. Some of the stores were just opening, shopkeepers cranking up their awnings with long poles or rolling up the gates in front of their windows. Other establishments had been open for hours.

Littel stopped into the bakery between a shuttered Caribbean music store and the fresh fish store, where an employee stood hosing down the sidewalk, steam rising. Inside the bakery, he bought a morning glory muffin and a cup of coffee with cream and light sugar. He walked out clutching the bag with the muffin and the newspaper in his balky prosthetic hand. With his good hand he sipped the coffee.

Pretty soon he came to a point approximately sixty feet from the intersection of Utica Avenue and Eastern Parkway. Right across the street from a ground-floor Subway sandwich shop with a US Armed Forces Recruiting Station upstairs, something happened. Bag and muffin took flight in a rush of decompressing air. The forearm of Littel’s prosthesis disintegrated, puncturing his chest with shrapnel while the mechanical hand flew diagonally across the street.

On the sidewalk, the explosion perforated the left eardrum of a seventy-five-year-old woman on her way to the grocery store, a flying ball bearing punctured her left eye, and more shrapnel caused contusions of her neck and face. A twenty-year-old man lost his left testicle to a fragment of titanium, traveling near the speed of sound. The owner of a bodega, standing outside having a smoke, lost part of his right hand.

The blast threw Gavin Littel onto his back on the sidewalk like a rag doll, one leg splayed across the curb, his foot coming to rest at an unnatural angle in the street. He lay there twitching while blood spurted from his chest.

By the time the paramedics arrived, he’d bled to death from a tear in his heart.

KAHN CALLED THE LIEUTENANT AS
he and Diaz screamed to the scene in an unmarked squad car. Diaz could hear Cap cursing through the phone.

“We don’t know anything yet,” Kahn said. “Just that it’s another rather small explosion, one dead again, presumably the bomber from preliminary reports. And there’s a recruiting office right there.”

He paused and Diaz heard Cap barking again.

“Okay,” Kahn said. “I’m hanging up. We’re there.”

This time they’d beaten Burbette to the scene. Cops from the local precinct had cordoned off the area for a block in each direction and the injured were being loaded into ambulances. A team from the coroner’s office and CSU had only begun to evaluate the corpse, so the two Bomb Squad detectives didn’t get too close to him at first.

Sun shone up Utica Avenue—an egg-yolk yellow February sun, low in the sky. Diaz shaded his eyes with his hand in the middle of the avenue and looked around.

“Once again, minimal property damage,” he said, as Kahn returned from his own brief tour.

“Yeah,” Kahn said. “Look at what one of the POs noticed.”

He escorted Diaz over to the front window of a Bank of America branch office, where the prosthetic hand, having penetrated the glass, hung like a missile that had suddenly lost thrust.

“Something out of an action movie,” Diaz said.

“Make sure the photographers don’t miss that,” said Kahn.

“Roger. Who’s joining us?”

“Cai and Higgins.”

Diaz fetched a spindle of string from the car and began to mark off quadrants. The assistant ME was still working around the corpse when the detective approached. She handed him the suspect’s wallet and he slipped on a pair of gloves and took it from her, removing the driver’s license.

“Nice of these guys to carry identification,” he said half to himself. “This one lived right around the corner.”

“Jesus, look at that,” one of the photographers said. “Blew his arm clean off at the humerus.”

“No.” Diaz bagged the wallet. “That happened some time ago and a world away.”

“How do you mean?”

“Take a closer look. See around the stump?”

“I’ll be damned.” The photographer resumed shooting.

“Gavin Littel,” Diaz muttered. “Tell me. Why did this happen?”

Littel’s mouth gaped open, silent. His tongue had slid into the back of his throat and his jaw had been pierced with shrapnel. His right ear was torn off completely.

O’Shea arrived just as the body went off in a bag. “Whaddya know?”

“Same shit, different corpse.”

“Prosthesis?”

“An arm this time. And right there’s the recruiting station. Very little property damage. A few more injuries than last time, nothing life threatening, I’m told.” He handed O’Shea the wallet. “Dude lived in the neighborhood.”

“I’d better go check it out. You’ll send a response vehicle?”

“Already radioed. They’ll meet you there.”

Soon as he left, Burbette walked up. “One of the witnesses says black smoke.”

Diaz nodded knowingly. High explosives.

Burbette helped him finish laying the quadrants, and by the time they did so the whole team was there in their Tyvek suits. In three hours they found something like what they’d found around Horn, prosthetic parts and some of the interior workings of a cell phone.

Stoltz of ATF arrived, but no one would give him the time of day. When he stalked off, Kahn turned to Burbette. “You called him?”

“Had to.”

“What a dick.”

“Don’t get me started.”

Burbette crouched down and used his ETK on the burn in the sidewalk. He held up the test tube and confirmed. “RDX. That means C4.”

No one looked even mildly surprised.

WITH THE DAY NEARLY FINISHED
, Kahn glanced at his watch. He’d let too much time pass but the lieutenant hadn’t called him to yell. That was strange. He took himself away from the group and dialed.

Jill answered.

“Hey, sorry to bother you. How’s the patient?”

“Asleep. You need him?”

“Afraid so.”

“Something big?”

“Sometimes two smalls make a big.”

Cap came on quicker than Kahn would’ve expected. Maybe the ringing phone had already awakened him.

Kahn didn’t waste any time. “It’s the same pattern, Lieutenant.”

“A guy with no legs?”

“One arm this time. The rest fits the same.”

“What kind of explosive?”

“C4.”

There was a long silence on the line. “Aw, hell. I just told Gowen this morning that it looked like a lone nut.”

“That was a reasonable working theory, Cap.”

“Reasonable but wrong.”

“Not necessarily. Could be two nuts stirred up with the same inspiration.”

“And they share a supplier?”

“Maybe.”

“Their very own blind sheik?”

“Could be.”

“Gowen’s gonna brief the chief, who’s gonna brief the Commissioner, who’s gonna brief the mayor. Who’s gonna brief the press, no doubt. What do I tell him?”

“One bomber signifies a lone nut and three makes a pattern. Two—it’s possible that could be no more than coincidence.”

“No, it isn’t. Not with prosthetics and C4 at the center of two bombings over less than seventy-two hours.”

Kahn twisted his lower lip between two fingers. “Truth be told, I didn’t believe it as I was saying it. Let’s see. You could tell them we’re doing everything in our power.”

“Great, Kahn. And you’d better be.” Kahn heard him swallow hard. “I’m gonna go take an aspirin.”

For the lieutenant’s sake, Kahn hoped he could keep it down.

TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK

6.

DAY THREE—Dark

THAT NIGHT CAPOBIANCO SAT EXPECTANTLY
at the kitchen table for his first meal in three days.

“Here you go,” Jill said.

He looked down at a bowl of steaming dark water with some dry toast on the side. “What is it?”

“Beef consommé.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“You have to ease your way back into it.”

Capobianco took a cautious sip of the soup and a bite of the toast. He chewed slowly and swallowed. “How am I supposed to gain enough strength for work eating like this?”

“You’re not going to work tomorrow and you know it. Doctor says another forty-eight hours.”

“I’ll be mad by then.”

“Not as mad as I’ll be if you sneak out earlier.”

The phone rang. Jill looked at the caller ID and handed it to him. She mouthed the word: “Gowen.”

Capobianco held it to his ear. “Hi, Hank,” he said. “Calling to see how the patient is feeling?”

“You wish. But I can tell you how the mayor is feeling.”

“Disappointed?”

“And then some.”

“Let me guess. He’s scheduled a press conference on the site of one of the bombings.”

“I talked him out of that. It would only inflame people. We’re keeping it low-key for now, urging the press and the public not to jump to any conclusions.”

“That makes sense.”

“All of the NYPD is on high alert for the next one, and the Commissioner will ask the public for any information.”