by Robert Pobi
Lucas took a breath and forced himself to be civil when he asked, “Have you sent a bomb unit over to Eighth Avenue?”
Chawla was in a trench coat and looked like he had been rousted from naptime. “No. Why?”
“There are two main internet hubs on the island.” He jabbed a green metal finger at what used to be a building. “That is one of them.”
Chawla’s expression flat-lined. “And the other is on Eighth?”
“Yes.”
Chawla stared at him for a few dead seconds that he didn’t bother to fill with any sort of a protest. When he finished connecting the dots, he excused himself and disappeared into the command vehicle.
Lucas turned back to the half-eaten building. Firemen faded in and out of the smoke wafting off the structure. “If that guy ever tries to think, he’s going to hurt himself.”
“He’s right, you know. The guy promised precisely this: we are going to burn it all down—his words, not mine.” Whitaker narrowed her eyes and tried to peer through the smoke. “Did you see the people with their cell phones? Their shit was fucked up.”
“Chawla is only correct on the surface. Go back to that letter, which is entirely ripped off from the Unabomber—Kaczynski wanted to start a revolution by exposing the dangers technology posed to civilization. He was convinced that if he could highlight the dehumanization brought about by what he called the technological-industrial system, there were enough like-minded people out there to join him in destroying it. He wanted to turn the clock on progress back.” Lucas pointed at the building. “This fits that narrative. But the Guggenheim bombing? It doesn’t make any sort of sense. Especially since the corporation hosting the gala was involved in environmental stewardship. He might have disagreed with their approach, but at least their goals toward nature would have meshed with his. It was a half measure.”
Chawla called out to Whitaker from somewhere behind them and she slid away, leaving Lucas to stare at the firemen.
Lucas clipped his shield onto his pocket and headed down the block. There was not much he would learn here, and even less he could contribute, but he knew that neither of those things mattered because he was now committed. He would have doubts. He and Erin would probably exchange words—well, he’d offer words, she’d offer silence. He’d butt heads with Chawla. Probably even get pissed off with Whitaker. Definitely get pissed off with Kehoe. But he’d stick it out because that was how he was built.
The scene was busy but not chaotic, and Lucas had to admit that Chawla was effective with logistics, if somewhat stunted in his creativity. But even if the investigation was Chawla’s, the bureau was Kehoe’s, and the underlying form of the institution would ensure that things unfolded in a certain way. Which Lucas could at least work with. Or make work for him.
The flames were now dead and even the smoke that rose from the charred husk of the building was weak and tentative. Everything that was flammable had been converted into cinders. Firemen scuttled around the scene, but there was no urgency in their movements; there was no need to rush anymore. They still wore turnout coats, pants, and boots, but the oxygen tanks and masks had been shed and a few had abandoned their helmets in exchange for caps.
Along with the firemen, there were a few cops inside the perimeter, and Lucas saw them automatically checking his badge. Some nodded. Some didn’t. All of them looked unhappy.
There was debris everywhere and Lucas had to watch where he stepped, paying special attention to avoid puddles, because the New York City streets were famous for potholes that could swallow a hatchback. He stepped over hoses, bricks frosted with mortar, twisted ducting, and lengths of cable. Once he passed the final line of cops, no one paid any attention to him, and he slowly made his way to the corner of Worth and Hudson, to what used to be a parking lot and was now a pile of crushed cars and bricks wrapped in chain-link fencing the shock wave had peeled off its posts.
When he surveyed the damage, Lucas was amazed that there hadn’t been hundreds of casualties. If the explosion had been triggered during business hours, the death toll would have been greater by orders of magnitude. Just the people driving by would have totaled an easy two hundred.
It was amazing what igniting the correct molecules could do.
Kehoe’s words on the beach a million years ago came back to him: basic physics and chemistry.
Basic.
Physics.
And.
Chemistry.
He stared up at the mess and felt himself slip away. Into the space where only he could go.
He was in the now.
And then.
He was in some other point in time that could only be the before.
And a building that no longer existed in any material way appeared in front of him, pulled from the past by some inexplicable force that he could not command any more than he could ignore. The numbers started creating calculations he couldn’t stop, and dimensions appeared, forcing values like mass and volume and distance into their respective places in the equation.
He was at another point in time—one where the building still existed in its entirety—when there was a thunder strike from deep inside and the structure bulged, the far corner near Thomas Street distending like a swollen belly. It happened in slow motion, and for a few beats of his heart the bricks and mortar and concrete simply bent. Then the surface could no longer hold together, and the mortar pulled apart at the seams, and a bright yellow light shot through in a million slices of light.
Then the bulge twitched—actually contracted—before belching out at the speed of sound.
A hundred tons of brick flew toward him, and he ducked, and—
—just—
—like—
—that—
—he was back in the now. In the after.
And it was all over and he was once again standing in what used to be a parking lot surrounded by insurance claims.
A voice from somewhere behind him said, “Dr. Page, you all right?” in a southern accent.
Lucas turned to see Calvin-Wade Curtis standing behind him. Curtis wore white coveralls and an FBI cap. Along with that annoying grin of his.
“Yeah. I was just—” And he realized he had no reasonable response to the question.
Curtis came over. “You were doing that thing, weren’t you?” His grin dialed up by ten points with the question.
“That thing?”
“Yeah—the thing you did at the Guggenheim—the one that impressed the shit out of all of us,” he said, pronouncing it shee-it.
Lucas nodded up at what was left of 60 Hudson Street. “Have you figured out what caused the explosion?”
Curtis stared at him for a few moments before answering with a question of his own. “Have you figured out what caused the explosion?”
Curtis seemed like a decent guy, so Lucas decided that he’d play nice. Besides, he needed more allies in the bureau. “Without swabs, I don’t know what kind of device was used, but it had a moderate detonation velocity, somewhere around thirty-two hundred meters a second. The explosion originated over there,” he said, pointing at the corner of Hudson and Thomas. “Below street level. It was a single blast, but the following fire and black smoke and the smell of the fumes down wind make me think it was bolstered by a fuel of some sort—probably diesel, which makes sense if they have a generator on site. But it would have to be mixed with an oxidizer.”
Curtis smiled up at him and Lucas wondered if that grin had ever gotten the guy punched. “Pretty good, Dr. Page.”
“Pretty good what?” Whitaker asked as she stepped into the former parking lot.
Curtis smiled over at her. “Dr. Page was sharing his thoughts on the explosion.”
“Which means showing off,” Whitaker offered.
Curtis nodded back at the building. “Our scanners picked up a little carbon monoxide and nitrogen, which means we’re looking at ANFO. Or a refined fuel explosion. There were 80,000 gallons of diesel on site that multiplied the effect. There w
ere about thirty people in the building that we know about. No survivors. Yet. And no witnesses. Yet.”
Whitaker held up a hand. “Eighty thousand gallons of diesel fuel?”
“Spread out in thirty 3,000-gallon tanks on three floors.”
Whitaker’s tone dropped an octave when she asked, “Why the hell would they store 80,00 gallons of diesel fuel in such a sensitive location?”
Curtis put his hand down on the hood of a used-to-be-a-car. “If the power goes down, people need their internet. Everything from alarm systems to cell phones to Netflix needs the web to run. And people can’t live without their Netflix.”
Lucas was starting to like the man.
Curtis leaned over and spat, and even in the dark, it was the color of charcoal. “And to keep the internet up and running, you need power. So they had a 10,000 amp power plant in there that ran on a pair of twenty-cylinder generators. And those puppies take a lot of fuel. Apparently someone thought that 80,000 gallons made sense.”
Whitaker whistled at that. “People never cease to amaze me.”
“If this was our guy, he used a charge as a detonator—either TNT or maybe even C-4. It would have ignited the diesel fuel, which, as Dr. Page pointed out, had to have been mixed with some other oxidizing agent, and there you go.”
“There we go,” Lucas repeated as he looked over at Whitaker. “What did Chawla want?”
“To let me know he put the bomb unit in motion. Those guys have been running all over the city, checking soft targets. They’re on the way to the other internet hub on Eighth.”
27
111 Eighth Avenue
The bomb squad that arrived on site was a specialized unit that served all seventy-seven police precincts on the island. The twenty-five-man team showed up a few minutes after the security detail, in a command vehicle not dissimilar to the ones used by the FBI.
Besides the humans on the team, there were eight German shepherd K9 units, and a new experimental program—a troop of six giant pouched rats, gifted to the bureau by the government of Belgium. These rats had a unique personality bent that made them easily trained to sniff out explosives (initially land mines—a skill that had been expanded to include other types of devices). Technically, these specific rodents had been banned from entering the United States since 2003, when an outbreak of monkeypox put them on the no-fly list. But this troop had been quarantined under a special grant from the DHS, and allowed entry for their genetically predisposed purpose. The rats and their handlers were affectionately known inside the unit as the Rat Bastards, while the rats themselves were known as HeroRATs.
After the building was secured, and all personnel escorted from the area, the bomb squad—along with the eight dogs and six trained rats—went to work. The building manager, a solid guy named Mike D’Antonio who resembled a mailbox in pants, pulled the short straw and did the walk-through with them. He didn’t bother trying to hide his discomfort at the prospect of being blown up, and the men in the unit were kind enough not to spook him with their usual dark humor.
The team split up—the humans doing a visual scan, utilizing basic tools like mirrors, flashlights, nitrogen swabs, and long-reach exploratory cameras. The K9s were walked through by their handlers, looking for scents too esoteric for their masters to detect. The rats were tethered to long fiberglass poles for the hard-to-get-to places—mostly above and below the endless miles of fiber-optic lines, lower bandwidth copper cables, and utility wiring.
Unlike the hub on Hudson Street, the owners of the building on Eighth did not see fit to store a few swimming pools’ worth of diesel fuel on the premises. But that is not to say they did not store any: there were two 3,000-gallon tanks in the basement, and this was the unit’s priority.
Donald Jones was the first one in the generator room with his bomb-sniffing rat, whose name was Binky. Binky was no more accurate than any of his compadres—all of them were trained to, and performed to, the same standards. But Binky had an edge in that he was a little smaller than his compatriots. Which meant that he was better suited for confined spaces (his smaller mass also lessened the chances of his weight setting off a land mine out in the field). For some unknown reason, Binky was also faster at his job; the average HeroRAT clearance rate was approximately 3,000 square feet per half hour—a rate that Binky doubled when he hit his groove.
Like any trained animal, Binky was motivated by food—his standard treat being banana chunks and peanut butter. But Binky really lost his shit over green olives; there was nothing that little sucker loved more. Jones gave Binky a small piece as soon as he hit the floor, and the promise of more would have him scampering his little bomb-sniffing ass off.
Jones directed Binky behind the diesel tank between the door and the giant twenty-cylinder generator. He fed the Kevlar line out between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, feeling the tension for Binky’s I-found-a-bomb dance. The Kevlar micro braid was specifically designed to transfer vibration, similar to expensive fly-fishing lines, and after nearly two years of working with Binky, Jones felt that the line was more like a nerve ending than an inanimate object.
Jones double-thumbed his training clicker and Binky came out, looking up to him for food. Jones clicked the device again, pointed behind the second tank, and Binky scampered in, looking for something that was completely unimaginable to his tiny brain.
Jones was about to click Binky back when the braid twanged as Binky did his little success tango.
He got down on his hands and knees and shone his tactical flashlight under the belly of the tank. Binky’s whiskered face was an inch from an improvised explosive device.
Jones thumbed the clicker three times, and Binky came running out. He sat down obediently, waiting for olives from heaven.
Jones gave Binky an affectionate scratch under the chin before handing his little friend an olive.
Then he sent a text out to his unit.
Binky scored.
28
111 Eighth Avenue
The captain of the bomb squad walked Lucas, Whitaker, Curtis, Chawla, and his wingmen down to the sub-basement, where Binky the rat had earned himself a bagful of olives. The captain’s name was Sanchez, and he had the basic presentation of his kind down cold—flat top, yellow shooter’s glasses, and arms that looked like they were cast out of discarded mortar shells. Sanchez wasn’t big on dialogue, but he explained that they had found an explosive device beneath a fuel tank in the generator room. Calvin-Wade Curtis was doing a poor job of hiding his excitement—at least judging by his smile.
When they got to the generator room, the device was on a foldout table with a roll of tools. It looked like a Hollywood interpretation of what an improvised bomb should look like—a metal box containing a compact chunk of putty with a blasting cap wired to a receiver that had a cell phone attached. The cap and wires had been removed, leaving the underlying form alone.
“It’s a basic IED,” Curtis said as they approached the table. “Cell-phone-activated trigger that in turn sets off the circuit which fires the cap, detonating the putty. Once it’s back at the lab, I’ll run the taggants and we’ll know the manufacturer—you don’t mix up C-4 in your basement, so that’s something. The charge is lens-shaped, which means it was designed to cut through the outer wall of the tank, which in turn would theoretically detonate the contents. You can find instructions all over the web—anyone with mechanical skills, access to the components, and a little patience could build this thing. It’s your basic insurgent dummy box, but we don’t see a lot of them stateside. This one was built by a right-handed individual.”
“Diesel alone is barely flammable, let alone explosive,” said Lucas.
Curtis smiled over at him. “It will burn. It lets off a lot of smoke. But you’re correct, it’s difficult to ignite. And even if it does, it’s not explosive. Not unless you mix it with ammonium nitrate or some other oxidizing agent.”
“If this had been detonated, would the explosion have been comparable to
the one on Hudson?”
Curtis’s smile faded out and he turned to Sanchez. “You tested all the fuel tanks on site?”
One of Sanchez’s people, a skinny woman whose name tag identified her as Bastille, held up a tablet. “Pure diesel—nothing else mixed in.”
Curtis’s face scrunched up and he asked, “And you’re sure there are no other explosives in the building? No caches of C-4 hidden away? Nothing else that would have multiplied the effect of this device?”
Sanchez was too professional to look offended—he understood that everyone was just being cautious—and he nodded at his team. “We swept the entire building. Other than that one charge, the place is clean.”
Curtis pointed at the tank. “And it was hidden underneath the tank, there?”
Sanchez answered with a nod.
Curtis seemed to think things through for a few seconds before he turned back to Lucas. “All this would have done was rupture the tank and add about six inches of diesel to the floor. That much C-4,” he said, indicating the open device on the foldout table, “wouldn’t even have blown a hole in the wall.”
Chawla put his hands into his pockets and rocked up on the balls of his feet, which was a move he had stolen from Kehoe. “Maybe he’s not as smart as you think he is and made a mistake.” He pointed at Lucas. “And we got lucky.”
Lucas looked at Whitaker, who shrugged.
Lucas looked down at the dismantled explosive device on the plastic table and thought about the Guggenheim. And about the building on Hudson that had been reduced to landfill. “Sure,” he said. “Lucky.”
29
The Upper East Side
Whitaker pulled up in front of the brownstone. It was a little past six in the morning and the city was awake but still an hour off from peak traffic. Lucas felt like he was a hundred years old, in bad shape, and hungry. He sat there with his aluminum fingers threaded through the door handle for a few moments, not saying anything.
Whitaker turned off the engine and hooked her elbow out the open window. “Are you going to tell me the bad news?”
