The Bomb Maker

by Thomas Perry

  When they made sure the lobby was safe, they began to move from room to room on the ground floor. The first offices they came to were administrative. There were signs that people had been interrupted—pens dropped on half-completed forms, computer screens that had gone dark or displayed screen savers since their users left.

  Farther on were medical examining rooms. There were tables in some rooms with white paper on them that was puckered and wrinkled by the last patient, white coats that still hung behind the doors. There were even a couple of telephones left off their cradles.

  Stahl and McCrary found nothing dangerous in any of the rooms. They examined the phones, particularly the ones that were left beeping with the off-the-hook signal. This would not have been the first time placing a phone in its cradle had set off a bomb.

  They moved across the lobby to the other wing of the building, where there were a few offices with big filing cabinets that looked as though they held medical records. There was a large conference room with a big video screen, video recorders and players, and a computer. They spent some time examining the equipment for suspicious wires or components.

  When they finished their sweep they went back to the central lobby. There was a big steel door labeled STAIRS, the reception desks they had already examined, and a pair of elevator doors. McCrary headed for the elevators.

  As McCrary reached up toward the panel between them, Stahl shouted, “Freeze! Don’t touch the button!”

  McCrary had to turn his whole body to look back. “What is it?”

  Stahl hurried close to him. “Something’s wrong,” he said. He pointed up at the panel above the elevator doors. “See that? The number lit up is four. Everybody has been evacuated. There was nobody up there on the fourth floor to hit the button. Both elevator cars should be down here.”

  “You think the bomber went up there?”

  “Yes. But I don’t think he’s still there. He knew the first ones back in the building would be the Bomb Squad. He knew we’d be wearing eighty-five-pound bomb suits. Probably he even knew that searching the ground floor would tire us out. He knows the last thing we want to do right now is climb stairs under all this weight, but he also knows we have to go up to check, floor by floor.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I think he rigged the elevators to explode. So what we should do is climb the stairs to the fourth floor. First, we’ve got to call Curtis and Bolland to explain what we’ve done and what we’re about to do. If we die, no information dies with us, all right?”

  “Agreed.” McCrary made the call to his teammates who were waiting outside.

  Then Stahl pulled open the door to the stairwell and began to climb. As he did, he took his mind off the sheer dull strain of lifting one foot after the next by thinking about elevators. Since his first years as an EOD man in the army he had studied the ways buildings, bridges, towers, vehicles, ships, and airplanes were constructed. It didn’t matter how much a technician knew about explosives if he knew nothing about the places where they were hidden, how they could be disguised, and the electrical circuits or physical features that could be used to detonate them.

  As he climbed he constructed a blueprint of an elevator in his mind. There was a vertical shaft. At the top, above the upper range of the elevator car, there was a motor that turned a wheel called a sheave, which operated a pulley. On one end of the cable was the elevator car, and on the other was a counterweight about equal to the weight of the car. That way the force required to turn the pulley to raise or lower the car was minimal.

  He studied the mental image to figure where the gym bag full of explosives would be placed and how it would be triggered. The elevator car was at the top floor right now. The bomber would expect the first bomb technician to arrive at the doors on the first floor and press the up button.

  The controller above the fourth floor with the pulley and sheave would switch on the electric motor to simultaneously raise the counterweight toward the fourth floor and lower the elevator car toward the first floor. When the counterweight reached the upper limit switch in its track and the elevator car reached the lower limit switch, the motor would stop. The doors would open, and the passenger would step inside the elevator car. After a few seconds the elevator doors would close, and the elevator would be ready to rise when any of the numbers—2, 3, or 4—was pushed.

  Stahl reached the second-floor landing. He and McCrary were both panting. Stahl stopped there and said, “Have you ever worked on a bomb in an elevator before?”

  “Never,” McCrary said.

  “Okay. I’m going to do something that’s going to look stupid. But it isn’t.”

  He began to take off his bomb suit. He put down the heavy helmet with its Plexiglas window and whirring fan. He was drenched with sweat from the exertion of the past couple of hours. “I just realized we’re doing this wrong. The bomb has to be in the shaft. I won’t be able to go into the shaft and climb around with this thing on. And the charges this guy sets for us couldn’t be stopped by a bomb suit anyway.”

  “A gym bag full of high explosives? No.”

  “The bottom of an elevator car is thick, made of steel to take the weight of the riders. The top of an elevator car isn’t. There’s even a hatch in the ceiling that opens for maintenance.”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen those.”

  “There are a dozen safety devices on an elevator. It can’t free-fall, even if you cut the cable. It can’t even pick up speed. But there’s no protection from a bomb placed on the roof of the elevator car.”

  “You’re right.”

  “So if he rigged the elevator, that’s where the device probably is. Now I just have to get up there and see what triggers the charge.”

  “Why not the buttons inside the elevator?”

  “It’s possible. No matter what the switch is, the charge has to be on the roof of the car.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Go back down to the lobby. Stay near the elevators, but not in front of the doors. If I screw up they’ll blow outward. But guard the buttons. Don’t let anybody get near them. We don’t have proof yet that the bomber has left the building.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Stahl removed the suit, took his tool kit, and climbed the stairs. When he reached the fourth floor he studied the area around the two elevators. The elevator shafts were in a recessed rectangular space. He looked for the plain unmarked door that must provide access to the working parts of the elevators, but there was none.

  He reentered the stairwell and climbed. There was only one flight, and then, on the next landing, there was the plain steel door he had been expecting. He tried the handle, but the door was locked.

  Stahl set the canvas tool bag down and found the electric lock-pick gun. He inserted the tension wrench and the gun’s needle nose into the keyway and pressed the trigger, and when he felt the lower pins jump to make a space below the upper pins, he put pressure on the tension wrench and turned the knob.

  The door opened to a level above the two elevator shafts. As he approached the first shaft, he saw an empty black gym bag that had been discarded on the floor a few feet away. Above the shaft, at about waist height, was the platform that held the controller and the motor. He could see downward past the sheave and pulley to the roof of the elevator car.

  The bomb on the elevator roof didn’t look like much. There were three separate metal canisters, each about the size of a liter of liquid, taped onto the access hatch with insulated wires connecting them.

  Stahl lowered himself onto the roof of the elevator and followed a thicker wire toward the top of the shaft where it was attached to the stationary platform that held the motor. He followed the wire back down to the roof of the elevator. There he could see that a switch had been installed. The double wire of the firing circuit had been split and its two copper strands were screwed onto the two contacts of the switch. It was a simple knife switch with a metal lever that when closed would be pinched between two copper
contacts and complete the firing circuit.

  But the switch had been modified to work in reverse. The lever, the “knife” of the switch, had been removed, and the two contacts had been squeezed together so they would always touch. Then the knife had been replaced by a thin sheet of fiberboard insulator between the contacts that held them apart. Attached to the insulator was a coil of wire that would uncoil as the elevator descended. Just as the elevator reached the first floor, the wire would reach its limit, and the fiberboard insulator would be tugged from between the two contacts.

  Stahl looked to see what else was in the circuit and saw a small electric timer set at seven seconds. It gave the person on the first floor seven seconds to enter the elevator and let the doors close. And then the timer would run out and the bomb would detonate.

  The power for the firing circuit was a splice that tapped into the circuit that powered the elevator’s lights and switches. But he was not positive that was the only source of power. With this bomber there could be other secondary firing circuits powered by batteries. This bomb maker was obsessed with backups.

  Stahl took a screwdriver, loosened the screws that held one of the wires to the firing circuit, and pulled it out. He capped the end. Then he disconnected and capped the other wire. He had now disabled the main switch, but he was beginning to know this man’s work. There would be a second circuit somewhere designed to kill any bomb tech who neutralized the first one.

  Stahl found it almost immediately. If he had been in a hurry to lift the canisters of explosives he would have set them off. Lifting any canister two inches from the elevator roof would have pulled another nonconductive fiberboard strip from between two contacts, and the internal batteries in the canister would have set off the blasting cap inside.

  He disconnected each wire that led to a power source and capped it, removed all of the switches and canisters from the roof of the elevator, set them on the concrete floor away from the shaft, and climbed up after them.

  He sat still for a moment, collecting his thoughts. Then he stood and went to the top of the second elevator shaft. The knife switch attached to the counterweight’s track was the same. The backup switches under the three canisters were the same. There was no new switch that was designed to make a bomb technician who had gotten this far get overconfident and kill himself. He supposed the bomber had needed to come in with everything ready to take out of the gym bag and attach to the two elevators and then go.

  When Stahl brought the explosives out of the elevator maintenance room and set them on the floor outside the steel door, he called McCrary. “Hello, Sergeant.”

  “Should I still be holding my ears?”

  “Not anymore. I’ve got six canisters of explosives and some disconnected wires and switches on the roofs of the two elevators. Your team can come and get them now.”

  When Stahl hung up, he went to the fourth-floor elevator doors and pressed the DOWN button. The elevator doors opened to show him a pair of pristine, empty elevator cars. He took the first, pressed 1, and watched the doors close. In a moment it was taking him down.

  The doors opened at the lobby and he stepped out to see McCrary and Curtis walking in around the false wall with their bomb suits on. As he walked past them toward the gaping hole that had been the front entrance he said, “Thanks, guys. It’s safe to take the easy way up, but clear the upper floors before you let anybody back into the building.”

  12

  As soon as Stahl made it back to the office, he began to work with frantic determination. He couldn’t let this bomber keep probing the Bomb Squad’s defenses, booby-trapping one spot after another and waiting to see whom he could kill.

  Stahl recorded a computer presentation for all four teams, and put them through a quick online course that would show them everything he’d learned about this bomber so far. He showed them the surveillance video from the car bomb at the station and the one at the women’s health clinic. “We can’t see his face, but we can see the way he moves, and roughly his height and weight. This is definitely the same man. He’s about five ten to six feet, and weighs around a hundred and seventy. Here is his voice.” Stahl played the audio recording from the 911 call that had lured the team to the Encino house. Next Stahl played the audio recording of Tim Watkins’s voice as he walked his way through the house, describing each thing he saw.

  Stahl hoped, not only that the remaining bomb techs would develop a sense of the way the bomb maker’s mind worked, but also that watching him move around on the dim, grainy surveillance videos would trigger a memory if any of them ever saw him. Stahl included the photographs that were taken of every component of the devices that had been removed intact, including the ones on the elevators he found only hours ago.

  Stahl concluded: “When you’re on a call, look for anything that reminds you of these pictures. He likes devices that look conventional, but actually have something bigger behind them or under them or inside them. Most of his components are simple, and nearly all are homemade. You notice I avoid the term ‘improvised.’ He never improvises. He plans each device meticulously and thoroughly. And so far he’s made nothing that wouldn’t have worked. He’s been planting devices at the rate of one a day. I’m hoping it’s impossible for him to keep up that pace much longer.

  “At the LAPD most of the calls you’ll get are still going to lead to devices made by somebody who thinks he was cheated by the phone company, or wants his business partner out of the way, or hates the government. About two-thirds of them won’t work.

  “But while you’re handling those calls, look for signs that you’re dealing with this bomber. He’s been using a handmade version of a plastic explosive resembling Semtex. His main signatures are a secondary charge and multiple ways of triggering his initiator. In the last two devices, I’ve seen number eight blasting caps. Study the pictures of the lead wires in these photographs so you’ll spot them easily. Take no chances. If you see an obvious way to render one of his devices safe, you’re probably wrong. We will continue the policy of detonating devices in place or, if you can’t do that, removing them for detonation elsewhere. Good luck.”

  Stahl ordered Andy to be sure that every member of the Bomb Squad saw the e-mail with the online presentation attached. Then he walked briskly to Almanzo’s office in Homicide Special. He gave Almanzo a thorough description of what happened at the women’s health center and sat down at a computer in the Homicide Special section and transferred to Almanzo the photographs of the devices hidden on the roofs of the elevators.

  Almanzo and two of his detectives had been studying the video recordings of the man at the health center. One thing that had not turned up, he said, was anything indicating how the man had gotten out of the building. It must have been a door or window at the side of the building where there were no security cameras. The man apparently had worn surgical gloves, because no prints or DNA had been found on any of the components in the car at the gas station or the health center. A detective was trying to find a single car that had been photographed in the neighborhoods of more than one crime, but so far none had turned up. The next task was to see if the bomber had rented cars to come and go. They were also working with cab companies and with Lyft and Uber to gather information on men who got rides at the right times on the right days. In the midst of Almanzo’s recitation, he stopped. “You holding up all right?”

  “I’m okay,” said Stahl. “You?”

  “Seriously, three bombs in three days.”

  “Three days could be just the start. I’ve worked shifts longer than that.”

  “Where?” Almanzo asked.

  “Iraq, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, England.”

  “England?” said Almanzo. “Really?”

  “London, two thousand and five,” said Stahl. “I was part of an EOD team that flew out of Germany whenever a big one happened. We’d work a scene until there was no point in working anymore.”

  “And then you decided to become a cop?”

  “It ma
de sense at the time. The pay was better than army pay, and I hadn’t been at home much. The department Bomb Squad needed somebody who was already trained, and at that time I was one of the guys who trained people at Eglin.”

  Almanzo nodded. “You mind if I ask why you left the department after only a few years?”

  “It took a couple of years to hire and train a bunch of guys like Watkins and Del Castillo, guys who had the temperament and minds for the work. Then there were a couple of years taking black powder letter bombs out of mailboxes in the suburbs and blowing up a lot of empty suitcases left on the sidewalk at LAX. I got restless. By then we had plenty of guys who could handle just about anything.”

  Almanzo nodded. “I’m sorry we lost those guys. I know it hurts.”

  “It hurt worst in the first couple of hours, but it still hurts. I wake up at night thinking about them. And I get mad.”

  “I wish we had a breakthrough to tell you about, Dick. We’re trying hard, following up on everything we have. We’ve got detectives working on the car he rigged. It was stolen, of course. But we’ve got the car’s history, backgrounds of the owners, the maintenance records. The crime scene people are examining every single thing on it from the prints to the road dust. We’ve set up a hotline, and the city council is offering a hundred-thousand-dollar reward. Within a week it’ll be half a million. We’re getting video of the route he must have taken after he stole the car, and more of the routes he could have taken to tow the rigged car to the gas station a day later. The FBI is interviewing the best bombers in federal custody to see if any of them ever gave anyone lessons. We’ve got other detectives following up on calls and tips. Eventually we’ll get him. It’s early yet.”

  Stahl glanced at his watch. “But tonight, it’s getting late. I’d better get going.”

  “I’m going home soon too. We’ll try again tomorrow.”