by Sarah Lovett
His voice startled her. “I told them about it . . .” He swallowed with difficulty, running his tongue over dry lips. “About Simon.”
She recognized the confusion that was caused by the drug and by stress. But there was something else—something underlying the chemically induced disorientation. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was; not yet.
“I told them . . . worked together . . . that’s what . . . they want.”
A nurse was preparing to remove the IV. Sylvia knew she had a very small window with the drug; she wanted to make use of the time, but she could feel the gulf that had opened up between them.
“Why are you lying to them, Dantes?”
“Not up . . . to this one . . . are we, Dr. Strange?”
“The Getty bombing was a calculated massacre—it targeted civilians.” She shook her head. “I don’t believe you killed those children.”
“It went . . . wrong.”
“Tell me the truth.” She gripped the metal rails of the seclusion bed. “You owe me that.”
“Because you kept . . . the faith?” He closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath. “Nobody listens . . . until children die.”
“I know you’re lying,” Sylvia whispered. The room suddenly felt cold and very dark. “But I don’t know why.”
His eyes were on her, reading her thoughts—and the eerie sense returned that another animal, calculating and predatory, was hiding inside the skin of this man.
“Dr. Strange . . . wants . . . a fallen . . . hero.”
The nurse, who had been hovering nearby, pulled the needle from his arm.
Sylvia leaned toward Dantes, whispering, “What’s M got on you?”
He closed his eyes. “It’s over.”
7:49 A.M. The sharp tang of chemicals permeated the bomber’s workshop.
This is the lair of Simon Mole, of M, Sweetheart thought, but it feels like a prison.
He stood dead center, still as a tree, while forensics experts worked around him.
He was aware that the choppy gray sea of LA Harbor was lapping at the footings of the factory, perhaps a hundred yards away.
But for all the silence a man could be in the middle of the Sahara.
The fourteen-by-twenty-foot space was neat to the point of sterility; anal retentiveness was a good trait for a bomber who wanted to stay alive.
It occurred to Sweetheart that he was looking at the outer skin of the bomber. Next to a pair of goggles, a heavy welding hood rested on one of two wooden tables. A sleeved apron of thick leather hung from a hook. The rubber boots that fishermen wear were side by side on the floor beneath the apron. Gloves—thick leather gloves; rubber gloves; an unopened box of surgical gloves—lined one small shelf.
This paraphernalia was sized to fit a man of medium height, average weight.
Another shelf was stocked with vials and beakers of various shapes and sizes. When Sweetheart carefully sniffed the top of one, he recognized sulfuric acid.
Bags of Kitty Litter had been stacked along the base of two walls.
Another shelf hosted rolls of string: inflammable fuse cord, detonating cord, nylon and cotton cord. And wire—both insulated and bare—of various thickness.
The contents of drawers could have come from any kitchen: baking soda, baking powder, sugar, potassium chlorate, aluminum wrap, and wax paper, and countless plastic bags. White plastic mixing tools were hung from a rack.
A fume hood and a flue had been installed; the job was carefully executed, by a man who knew what he was doing, a man who knew how to stay alive.
Then there was the hardware: miscellaneous pipes, joints, nails, screws, vises, wrenches, sharp knives, and other tools.
The investigators hadn’t been lucky enough to stumble upon bombs in midconstruction. That’s because Simon—or M—was smart. He would complete one job and then clean up after himself.
And although there were agents posted surreptitiously outside, Sweetheart doubted M would return—the bomber’s instincts were too sharp.
He found himself feeling grudging respect.
He closed his eyes, struggling to catch elusive thoughts darting here and there in his mind. He could feel M’s presence—but there was very little of the schoolboy they called Simon in this space.
Sweetheart took the steps up to ground level. At the edge of the basement door, a flash of color caught his eye. He reached down and captured one blue-green feather.
When he straightened he saw Sylvia standing a few feet away. He wasn’t surprised; he felt relief, and perhaps pleasure, at her presence. “What do you think?” he asked, tipping his head toward the room.
“I believe it’s M.” She frowned. “But he’s evolved way beyond Simon Mole.”
“This is no deshi,” Sweetheart said, nodding. “No apprentice. This is the home of a makuuchi—a master.”
Sylvia nodded toward the feather that Sweetheart held delicately between two fingers. “A master with a parrot.”
“There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles per hour.”
“How fast was I going, Officer?”
“I’d say about ninety.”
From the screenplay Double Indemnity
7:50 A.M. M is at the wheel of a two-and-a-half-ton bomb.
He maintains a sedate fifty miles per hour in the right lane of I-10, the San Bernardino Freeway. As he drives, he’s surrounded by city—the urban she-devil who devours open space the way the tide eats sand.
An hour ago, he’d stopped just east of San Berdu. The flat brown terrain reminded him of other deserts, always at the edge of the world. An apt spot to trade in his loner for this shiny silver food service truck.
He checks his bearings; he’s about thirty miles from downtown LA, which is excellent. No time to check on his friends—the Thief and the hooker. Doesn’t matter; they’ll keep.
He does have time to drop off the truck. Later a man who needs a few bucks will drive it to its final destination. No questions asked.
Only a fool would want to know that this load of ANFO is primed with commercial-grade explosives that come all the way from New Mexico; a hitch in the state’s antiquated blasting laws encourages a healthy trade in stolen explosives. Pick up the right form at your local county office. One page printed up courtesy of the Land of Enchantment. Fill it out, smile at the clerk, banter around a few names of folks in the business, and you walk out with permission to buy yourself a truckload of death—“all nice and legal like.”
Exhausted miles and minutes evaporate behind the truck. The landscape fills in like a jigsaw puzzle until the whole board is covered—with urban condensation: malls piled on outlets on industrial parks on condos on apartments on high-rises on barrios.
I-10 pierces downtown LA and then it’s a straight shot to the 101 north, the Hollywood Freeway.
M’s bright and shiny snack truck will end up parked in the middle of an underground garage, shades of the WTC.
Jesus, those jerk-offs came so close to taking down the Twin Towers, blowing them to kingdom come . . . Piece o’ cake and they blew it . . . Guess that’s what you get when the blind lead the dumb.
To keep the security guards from getting too nosy, a little paper sign will decorate the truck’s windshield: BROKE DOWN, BACK ASAP, MANNY.
Manny, the regular driver of the real lunch truck, will take the day off.
But M is getting ahead of himself.
He changes lanes now to snig-snag onto the Hollywood.
After a mile or so, he takes Echo Park to Sunset—too bad there’s no time to cruise Elysian Park and wave to Dodger Stadium; he’s an avid baseball fan.
Just across Sunset, he slows, turning left into the parking lot of Ralph’s. Grocery shoppers are out in full force, and the lot is full. He parks the truck in a shaded slot. A kid walks by, his radio blasting angry bass: “Going back to Cali, Cali, Cali, I’m going back to Cali—I don’t think so.”
M walks the two blocks to his own truck.
&n
bsp; Once inside, he snaps open his laptop, boots up, types in a brief e-mail message, and sends it off to his sweetheart in cyberspace.
That should whet their appetites.
He’s been up all night and he feels great. Primed. Ready.
Soon it will be time to step down to the seventh circle.
To do that, M must shut down operations in one of downtown’s busiest buildings.
At least we know the famous triad—fire setting, bed-wetting, cruelty to animals—doesn’t hold up.
Special Agent Mackavoy, FBI Crime Lab
10:03 A.M. It was Gretchen who discovered the cyber-message that had landed on Sweetheart’s mainframe.
* * *
lost yr way? new city stnds on ruins old dust to dst 7th crcle awatz—M
It set in motion a chain of events, which was certainly what M had anticipated. The Feds were talking to Sweetheart again; they asked him to focus his team on the rudimentary map that had shown up in Dantes’ cell three days earlier. The consensus: M’s next move—the seventh circle—would be directly connected to information contained on that single sheet of paper.
Sylvia left her suitcases in one of several guest rooms in Sweetheart’s house. As she retraced her steps along a hall, the first person she encountered was Gretchen, who handed her several books; from the titles, histories of Los Angeles.
“‘New city stands on ruins old,’” Gretchen quoted. Behind thick tortoise spectacles, saucer-shaped baby blues sized up Sylvia. “I almost forgot.” She turned to retrieve a stack of computer printouts from a desk. “Bella Dantes. You wanted to know about her suicide, so I focused on medical history, for example, possible psychiatric commitment. Nothing under Bella Dantes . . . which is why the press never got wind.”
Gretchen tapped her glasses. “So I ran Caldini, her maiden name.” She grinned. “Bingo. Bella Caldini spent two weeks at County General in the locked ward. And she was recommitted about six weeks before she drowned herself. The docs thought she was a high-functioning schizophrenic.”
“You’re a genius,” Sylvia said, stacking the pages on top of the books.
“I know.” Gretchen winked. “We’ve got a desk set up for you in the office next to the guest room where you’ll be sleeping. Or you’re welcome to claim your territory out here. There’s a fresh pot of espresso. You know the drill.”
In the main work area, Sylvia chose the wide leather armchair that occupied a corner. Opposite her, Gretchen was at work analyzing M’s latest message for verbal content, syntax, anomalies, and patterns.
The large room was awash with sunshine. Both the Jack Russell terrier and the English bulldog were stretched blissfully on the rug. Sylvia tried to focus on the history books, but the light was giving her a headache. Thinking a jolt of espresso might help, she poured herself a cup.
While she sipped the coffee, she found herself replaying her brief phone conversation with Leo Carreras: “Why didn’t you tell me about the amytal interview? A knock on the door, a phone call? Either would’ve worked.”
Leo hadn’t hesitated. “If the FBI wants to keep you informed, that’s their job, not mine.”
“This isn’t about the FBI’s conduct. It’s about you and me. I trusted you.”
“And I’m in love with you. But that’s nothing new . . . we’ve both known how I felt . . . since the day I first saw you. Good old Leo, the fallback guy. Things don’t always turn out the way we want.”
“Leo . . .”
What had she wanted to say to him?
“Are you sure you aren’t trying to save Dantes’ soul?” Leo had finally asked. “Good guys and bad. Choose sides, Sylvia.”
The memory dissolved; she found herself studying the enlarged map of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno that still decorated one wall. A red pushpin now occupied the inner edge of the sixth circle, the cusp of the seventh circle, where someone had carefully printed, SINS OF VIOLENCE. From the seventh circle, hell deepened to the eighth—and finally, it fell into the deep pit of the ninth and final circle.
12:39 P.M. In contrast to blinding daylight, Luke’s office was the long polar night. The green-violet glow from a half dozen monitors did little to disturb the cavelike darkness.
He had the glazed expression of a man running on half rations of sleep. His blond hair was sprouting like a new wheat crop. His tattooed flying fish hovered airborne on his buffed biceps. His feet were tapping to an inaudible rhythm.
Sylvia knew just how he felt: frustrated, manic, wired.
At the moment he was staring, transfixed, at a wide computer screen. Over his shoulder she studied the symbols, searching for familiar urban topography, something that resembled Los Angeles.
Without looking up he said, “This is the county’s primary maintenance map.”
“Then it’s underground?”
“LA’s subterranean infrastructure.” Luke offered a weary smile. “Inferno.”
She leaned closer, trying to find points of orientation. The bangle on her left wrist trapped a splinter of light, then set it free. “So where’s downtown?”
He pointed to an area in the upper right quadrant of the monitor. “Think of it as a skyscraper, only going down instead of up. You’ve got your electric and phone casings a few feet below the pavement. Your utility vaults start at that level, too, and go down about eight feet. Then, on the next level down, you’ve got your gas lines; then the water lines and mains; then steam; then sewers. The subway vaults could be anywhere from fifteen feet to twenty stories underground; and down below it all run the storm drains, the storm tunnels, which are also the biggest conduits.”
“The belly of the city,” Sylvia said softly.
“I got sucker-punched in the gut once,” Luke said, leaning back in his chair, arms behind his head. He glanced up at Sylvia and grinned. “It was weird. There I was on my back staring up at this biker asshole. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. I just kept thinking he had a nicer tattoo than me.”
“Tattoo of what?” Sylvia smiled back.
“An angel . . .” He mimed generous female curves. “Hey, I was semiconscious.”
“So, what if a city gets sucker-punched?”
“Back when we were chasing Ben Black—after he escaped the Iraqis—we got our hands on some intelligence: he’d figured out the schematics to attack New York.”
Luke shifted in the chair, making leather stress and give. “We’re not just talking the level of the 1993 World Trade Center and Sheik Rahman or Oklahoma City . . . It was going to be a simultaneous hit, multiple targets, enough to shut the city down for days—to impair functioning for months—perhaps to alter economic power structures.”
“And?” Sylvia prodded.
“Obviously it never happened,” Luke said. “New York still stands. We heard that report two weeks before U.S. missiles destroyed the training camp.”
“And if Black hadn’t been killed?”
“One of these days a major U.S. city will be hit. A variation on the WTC bomb—or the more likely scenario, biological weapons.”
“Would you have caught up with Black without MOSAIK?”
“MOSAIK only took us so far.”
“Explain.” Sylvia leaned on Luke’s desk, inches from his face.
Luke focused in on his screen, shifting images—plunging to an even deeper stratum below Los Angeles. He shook his head, his voice low. “Let’s just say luck didn’t hurt.”
4:21 P.M. The sun’s heat lidded Los Angeles, agitating molecules, compressing, reacting, tinting the city’s sky a dirty white.
Inside the professor’s house on Selma it might have been midnight in Anchorage: the lights were achingly bright, the air conditioner iced the atmosphere, computers hummed compulsively.
Sweetheart had disappeared into his inner sanctum.
Sylvia’s eyes ached from staring at pages, early maps of the Los Angeles pueblo. She was startled by a hand on her shoulder.
“Time for a break.” Luke smiled. “Follow me.”
The map man led her into new territory. As they passed through a wide hall where framed monotypes and etchings decorated the walls, she caught glimpses of early rural London, Paris in the 1800s, New York, and Los Angeles at the turn of the last century and back in the days of Spain’s rule.
A floor-to-ceiling print of Los Angeles covered one wall. The old was melded with the new, a network of early Spanish aqueducts, crisscrossing railways and streetcars from the booster period, deco to postmodern functionalism. Animistic oil wells, movie billboards, and palm trees grew in place of other vegetation. The impression was of a city of invention instead of history.
Sylvia was studying the image so intently she almost bumped into Luke. He’d come to a standstill. Now, to her right, she noticed a door; at first she thought it must lead to a closet. But he opened it and stepped through.
She followed him up two flights of a narrow twisting stairwell that led to a eight-by-eight widow’s walk. Except for a massive evergreen, a magnolia, and an old willow, they were above the tree line. To the west, Los Angeles stretched from hillside to coastline; blocks in miniature were laid out as rough rectangular grids; main thoroughfares crisscrossed the city like ribbons over a package.
“We’ve all got our reasons for working on this project,” Luke said, leaning his hips against the railing. Sylvia turned to study him, and he shrugged. “Gretchen’s cousin was one of the demolition experts who helped excavate the network of booby-trapped tunnels left from World War Two. Both sides used tons of mines and other explosives. You know that even today they’re disarming those bombs on a daily basis?” He took a deep breath. “Her cousin died last year. Blew up and was buried under a ton of rock. They still can’t decide if the bomb was German or English. Does it fucking matter?”
“And you?” Sylvia asked softly. “What’s your reason?”
“The way the world is going—with the Internet, the crazies, all the access to materials, all the mean thinking.” He shrugged, sorrow aging his face. “I won’t forget Jason. I want kids someday. I want them to grow old, have kids of their own.”
