The Bomb Maker

by Thomas Perry

  Stahl arrived at Almanzo’s office and knocked on the window. Almanzo was, as usual, working at his desk wearing suit pants and a perfectly pressed snow-white shirt with a .45 caliber pistol in a holster. When he saw Stahl he popped up and stepped to the door. “Come on in, Dick.” He closed the door and waved at one of the empty seats facing his desk. “I was hoping we could talk today.”

  “Me too,” said Stahl. “Have we learned anything since the hospital bomb?”

  “I want to be sure you got my message.”

  “What message?”

  “I guess you didn’t. The crime scene people going through Sergeant Hines’s belongings found some male DNA on her clothes. They’ve been able to identify it.”

  Stahl stared at him for a moment. He felt as though he’d been punched. “Thank you. That explains something I was just wondering about.” He forced himself to hide his shock. “How about the hospital bomb?”

  “We’re waiting to see if anything survived the blast—prints, blood, or something that was shielded from the heat and the power of it. I’m probably kidding myself, hoping something didn’t get burned off or blown away. But there could be a serial number or a marking that will tell us something.”

  Stahl shrugged. “It’s always worth checking. I’ll send some technicians to the lab as soon as I know who’s coming in today. Everybody who wasn’t on duty last night was at the hospital.”

  “Thanks, Dick. What do you think the bomber is doing right now? Will he take another month off?”

  “Month off?”

  “Yeah. After the explosion at Diane Hines’s apartment, he didn’t strike again until last night.”

  “As of last night I don’t think he was taking time off,” Stahl said. “I think what he was doing was resupplying his arsenal. He had used a lot of explosives up to then. I think he was in his workshop or lab or bunker or whatever it is, making more high explosives. His favorites are plastics, usually a homemade version of Semtex. Making it is the hardest part of what he does, and the most dangerous. He has to make most of the ingredients, and then combine them right, or they won’t become Semtex. The ingredients are mostly explosives in their own right. Some are volatile and unstable, so he has to work in slow motion, also making sure they don’t get too hot or too cool, too wet or too dry. He has to heat some of them to make the chemical changes occur, which means he’s got to have a source of heat, one of the things that can set off an explosive. He has to grind some of them from cakes into powders without setting them off. At the same time he’s got to avoid sparks, short circuits, static electricity. He can’t drop things. But the batch he used last night at the hospital means he succeeded in making plenty. So now he’s coming after us again.”

  26

  Diane Hines woke and sat up. She felt disoriented for a few seconds, and then saw the shapes in the room—the table on her left that swiveled over the bed, the open door to the tiny bathroom, the monitors. She was in a hospital. It was another one, but still a hospital.

  She was clearer now. She hadn’t gone over what happened yet, but she was sure the memories were still available to her. She remembered the nurse coming in to tell her that the Bomb Squad was in the waiting area to see her. She remembered trying to make herself presentable. When she had done what she could—a little makeup, brushing her stubble of hair—she wheeled herself to the door of her room and out into the hall. And then there was the terrible noise. All the bomb techs in the world knew that noise because it was the sound they heard when they destroyed a bomb in a controlled detonation. The noise had been in her dreams for years. After that explosion, she remembered Dick above her yelling at an intern to help him put her on a stretcher.

  After a time, she had been wheeled through dark night air, and she remembered a ride in an ambulance, but without being able to see anything except the roof of the vehicle above her. When the ambulance stopped she was pulled out on the stretcher at the back of a building. The back of this hospital looked like the back of every hospital, a roofed-over spot for the ambulances to unload, a set of double doors that huffed open automatically, and then a long series of ceilings and fluorescent lights gliding by overhead.

  She had seen more of the city’s hospitals from the back than most people ever did when she had been a young street cop, taking in injured suspects, victims, and bystanders after some act of violence or poor marksmanship.

  It was night again, so she assumed she must have slept from around 8:00 a.m. for the next twelve hours. Sometimes she thought that with the induced forty-two-day coma and all the other drugged sleep after that, she would never have to sleep again. Staying awake would be the only way to get back all the time she had lost.

  Diane looked at herself. There were bruises, but nothing to indicate she had sustained any serious new injuries—no tubes, no wires except for blood pressure and pulse. She felt her body and found no casts, seriously painful spots, stitches, or bandages. She knew from practice where the nurse’s call button would be, so she felt for it and pressed.

  In a moment, a nurse arrived in the doorway. She was about forty and looked like an athlete, probably a runner. “Hello, hon. Is everything all right?”

  “I don’t know,” Diane said. “What hospital is this?”

  “Valley Presbyterian.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  The nurse stepped closer. “I hope you do.” Diane could see she was joking, but she waited. “You’re Diane Hines. You were transferred from Cedars early this morning.”

  She lifted Diane’s left arm to point to the plastic bracelet. “Are you having trouble remembering things?”

  “No,” Diane said.

  “I guess you’re checking up on us. We hardly ever mix up names and give anybody the wrong operation—just when things get slow and we need a laugh. Are you feeling all right? Any dizziness, vertigo, or nausea?”

  “No,” said Diane. “I was in an explosion and got blown around, but I seem to be getting used to that.”

  “Yeah, I saw that in your paperwork. Let me bring you some water.” She glided out of the room on silent rubber shoes.

  A moment later she was back with a plastic pitcher of water and a paper cup. She swung the side tray beside Diane’s bed and showed her a smaller paper cup with a pill in it. “Your chart says you can have a sedative if you want it.”

  “Can I hold on to it for later if I need it?”

  “Sorry, we’re not allowed to do that. Just press your call button and I’ll bring it whenever you want.”

  “I won’t. Have I had any visitors?”

  “There was a man from the police department who called about the visiting rules around an hour ago. Let me see if I can remember his name.”

  “Was it Captain Stahl?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What are the rules?”

  “If you want to see somebody, visiting hours are twenty-four hours a day. If you don’t, then there are no visitors allowed. You’re under observation, and they’ll keep up your physical therapy, but you’ll probably be out of here tomorrow or the next day.”

  “What time is it? After the first explosion they took my watch and phone.”

  “It’s almost ten. If you want a phone, there’s one right over here.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Press the call button if you need me.” The nurse left and closed the door.

  Diane remembered being afraid to call Dick from a hospital room, but that seemed like a minor issue now. She dialed Dick’s cell phone number. It was interesting to her that she had remembered those eleven digits so easily. Her hands seemed to do the remembering, even though in the first blowup she had lost the names of close friends, childhood pets, and probably her memory of several college courses her parents had scrimped to pay for.

  She was aware that the ringing noise she heard was not the actual sound of his phone ringing, just a ring-like signal to reassure the caller that the system was trying to complete a connection. The ringing stopped. “T
he party you are calling is unavailable at this time,” said another female voice. The voice was better than Diane’s, a little lower and softer, a mature but sensual voice. It made her jealous for a second; even though it was a recording triggered by a computer with a database of sentences, the words were somebody’s voice. “If you would like to leave a message, wait for the tone.”

  “Hello, Captain,” she said. “This is Sergeant Hines. I’ve been moved to Valley Presbyterian hospital. My number here is,” and she read the number off the phone’s sticker and then hung up. She set the phone on the swivel table beside the bed where she could reach for it without spilling her water pitcher.

  The door opened and Dick Stahl came in. He was looking at his phone. “Hey, Diane. Did you just call me?”

  “About a second ago,” she said.

  He stepped up to her bedside, leaned over, and kissed her on the cheek—an easy, friendly peck. “What did you want?”

  “That, for starters.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “Since I woke up I’ve been kind of lonely.” She looked at him. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Likewise. They tell me you didn’t get hurt much worse by the bomb this time. How did you accomplish that?”

  “I haven’t figured it out yet,” she said. “I had just left my room and given a big push to the wheels of my chair toward the waiting room, when I felt that hard puff of air hit the back of my head, back, and shoulders. And the noise came, and it was insane, and I was moving fast, and then I was down and things were flying along the hall past me. All this was in the first half second, you know?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I didn’t see anything we can use, did you?”

  “I don’t think so. I never saw the device or any kind of trigger. The area behind the nurses’ station appeared to me to be the most likely location.”

  “Did you see who brought the cake and drinks?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Just for the record, you didn’t have anything to do with arranging that get-together at Cedars, did you?”

  “Me?” she said. “No. I thought it must be you. When the nurse told me about it I was a little annoyed. The last thing I would ever have wanted was to have the whole squad come at once. But now I think it must have been the bomber.”

  He frowned. “That’s what it looks like.”

  She said, “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you, but I had this really disturbing visit from Captain Almanzo yesterday.”

  “He told me,” said Stahl.

  “Well, it seemed important to tell you about it before anything else happened, and then, when I kept getting calls from the police department, I thought it must be on the same subject—maybe even calling me in to talk about it. I ducked the calls. I told the nurses to make an excuse for me. But it must have been Andy.”

  He gently rubbed her arm. “We’ll deal with this if it gets to be a problem. Until then, forget it. They know you survived, so there’s no reason for them to investigate your private life.”

  He pulled the lone visitor’s chair beside her bed and they sat together and talked for two hours. Stahl got quieter and quieter until Hines realized he’d dozed off. She said, “Hey, Dick?”

  He blinked his eyes. “Hmm?”

  “You’re exhausted. Have you even slept since the explosion?”

  “I got a couple of hours this morning.”

  “Go home and get some sleep. You don’t know what you’ll have to face tomorrow. Please.”

  He stood and stretched, then leaned over and gave her a soft, gentle kiss. “See you tomorrow.” He walked out the door and closed it.

  When she was alone again she kept thinking about him. The day after the fourteen men were killed and he showed up to take over, she thought he was probably a good, simple guy. By then she had spent a year being trained on military bases and more years working in police stations, and had met a lot of men like him. They seemed to find their way to those places in abnormally large numbers. They were mentally resilient and brave and physical, and not very hard to understand. But later that first day, while she was working with him on the car bomb in the gas station, she started to realize he was more complicated than they had been.

  She had spent most of that day watching him work and serving as another set of hands for him, always following his calm, clear instructions. She had become intrigued by him. At the end of the day, she had seen him take the last and worst and deadliest part of the device into his arms and carry it all alone. Her emotions—fear, admiration, gratitude—overwhelmed everything else.

  And then she had openly, unabashedly thrown herself at him that same night. She had some trouble remembering what had happened before she met him. She had no problem remembering everything that happened that first day. Usually if she’d been drinking, details would be a little hazy the next day. But that night, after she’d had two powerful glasses of single malt Scotch, the inebriation sharpened her impressions and sensations rather than dulling them. The liquor had removed the surrounding distractions. The night had occurred in a mental tunnel. Her eyes had seen only him, and her ears had heard only his voice and hers.

  Lately she had been going over the six days after that in her memory. It felt as though she were holding a piece of fabric in her hands and moving it slowly, inch by inch, examining it so closely that she was able to follow each horizontal thread as it went over the first vertical thread and under the next all the way from one seam to the other.

  The part that remained remarkable to her was that on the first night they had both known they were very likely to die in days or weeks, and they had each accepted the other as the ideal person with whom to share those days and nights. Her impulsive attraction to the nearest wise and brave man had turned into something huge and real.

  When she got blown up in her apartment, she had been more than injured. The doctors had switched her brain off artificially, and her consciousness ceased to exist for all that time. Dick had lived those forty-two days, but she had not. The doctors saved her by giving her a taste of death.

  What now? She had been trying to ask that question since she was allowed to come back. Since she was revived. That was just the right term. She had been allowed to live again. What was supposed to happen next? What did she want to happen?

  She thought back to the day when she opened her apartment door intending to face the dull necessity of doing her laundry and paying her bills. What had she been thinking just before thinking was cut short? She had not been making any decisions about the future. She had been intending to move a few more outfits to Dick’s place on that trip. That was it. She had not seen the need to make bigger decisions. She had known only that her shift for the day was over and she was planning to spend the night with Dick. Everything in her mind was about the next few hours.

  She had made a choice. She’d thought, “Don’t think about the man who may kill you. He’s been there all along, and he’ll always be there. Think about paying your bills and getting clean clothes, and dinner tonight, and Dick. Be alive now.” And then she’d actually thought, almost making a joke on herself, “Boom.”

  27

  The bomb maker saw the cars coming a long way off. The road was flat and broad and straight, a model highway. But a strong east wind had been blowing for a couple of days, and now the wind had stopped, leaving sand and dust across much of the black asphalt and on the shoulders, so all he saw at first was two tan clouds like long tails. His mind had to supply the vehicles ahead of them like the heads of comets, but then he could see them, two black cars moving fast.

  He stared at them, trying to make out any features he could. They could be the FBI or the ATF or some other agency. This was certainly the way they would come, fast and obvious as they traveled up the road from Los Angeles. Probably there would be other vehicles from the opposite direction, and then off-road vehicles crawling over the hills from behind his land on the old mine roads. When they converged to surro
und him, they would probably bring in a helicopter so he would know there was no way to be unseen, and no way to outrun them.

  He went to the control box he had mounted on the wall of the coat closet near the front door, looked out the peephole toward the road, and waited. On three walls of the closet he had put steel plates from the floor to the six-foot level. The inner side of the closet door had a steel plate on it too, so they couldn’t just fire at the house with high-penetration rounds and hit him through the walls. The peephole was hidden behind the upper part of the black metal mailbox he had mounted on the porch wall outside, so he could look without anyone seeing the lens.

  He opened the control box, where he had installed a board of toggle switches that activated the firing circuits of mines he’d planted in various places. One set was where the driveway met the highway, and there were others in rings around the house at a hundred yards, seventy-five, fifty, and twenty-five. He had mines down the center of the driveway every ten feet. He could activate any of the mines individually, or sweep down a whole row of toggle switches with the side of his hand.

  He believed in explosives. They were reliable and instantaneous and merciless. He didn’t have to aim them; he just had to look out and watch to see when an attacker reached the particular rows of shrubs he had planted at various distances from the house. He had planted the rows of shrubs in front of his mines so attackers would choose them as places to take cover.

  The bomb maker had also prepared in other ways for an attack. He had a pair of H&K MP5 rifles that he modified to restore them to fully automatic fire, and several thirty-round magazines for each. He had only one pistol in the closet, a Sig Sauer .45 with two magazines.

  He didn’t imagine that if this turned out to be a visit from federal agents he would escape. He wouldn’t, but getting him would cost them a great deal. The number of corpses he made would be an expression of his value.