Shock Wave (5 page)

The production company had rented an apartment for her in West Hollywood, for the duration of the shoot. The duration had recently lengthened, and Coakley had grown evasive on the exact time of her return.

So Virgil called, and her oldest son, David, answered the phone. “Uh, hi, Virg, Mom's, uh, at a meeting of some kind. I don't know when she's getting home.”

He was lying through his teeth, Virgil thought; he was not a good liar. Mom was somewhere with somebody, and you probably wouldn't go too far wrong if you called it a date. “Okay. I've got a deal I'm working on, out of town—a bomb thing. I'm going to bed. Tell her I'll try to give her a call tomorrow.”

“Yeah, uh, okay.”

Virgil hung up. Little rat. Of course, she
was
his mother. If you wouldn't lie for your mom, who would you lie for?

 

 

VIRGIL TOOK OFF HIS BOOTS,
shut off all the lights except the one in the bathroom, lay on his bed, and thought about his conversation with Ahlquist. The bomber almost certainly had a direct tie to some of the protesters—either the people whose livelihoods were threatened by the PyeMart, or the trout freaks.

Of the two, he thought the businessmen were more likely to produce a killer. Some of the people who'd lose out to PyeMart would move from prosperity to poverty, and virtually overnight. Businesses, homes, college plans, comfortable retirements, all gone. How far would somebody go to protect his family? Most people wouldn't even shoplift, much less kill. But to protect his family . . . and all you needed was one.

And then the environmentalists . . .

Virgil had a degree in ecological science, and was a committed green. But he'd met quite a few people over the years who'd come into the green movement from other, more ideologically violent movements—people who'd started as anti-globalization protesters, or tree-spikers as opposed to tree sitters, who thought that trashing a McDonald's was a good day's work, people who talked about Marx and Greenpeace in the same sentence.

The greenest people Virgil knew were hunters and fishermen, with Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited and Pheasants Forever and the Ruffed Grouse Society, and the Conservancy and the National Wildlife Federation and all the rest, people who put their money and their time where their mouths were; but these others . . .

There could be a radical somewhere in the mix, somebody who had twisted a bunch of ideologies all together and decided that bombs were an ethical statement.

A guy sitting home alone, the blue glow of the Internet on his face, getting all tangled up with the other nuts out there, honing himself . . .

Again, all it took was one.

 

 

BEFORE HE WENT TO SLEEP,
Virgil spent a few minutes thinking about God, and why he'd let a bomber run around killing people, although he was afraid that he knew the reason: because the small affairs of man were of not much concern to the All-Seeing, All-Knowing. Everybody on earth would die, sooner or later, there was no question about that: the only question was the timing, and what would time mean to a timeless Being?

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.

T
HE 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 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.