by Chris Mooney
‘Until the lab analyses it, I’m thinking triacetone triperoxide.’
Darby felt her scalp prickle. ‘TATP,’ she said.
‘You’ve come across it before?’
‘No, thank God. But I’ve read about it.’
‘It’s an incredibly potent explosive, the de facto choice for suicide bombers in the Middle East when they can’t get their hands on TNT or C-4. It doesn’t produce any flames, creates an outward force of 1.5 tons per square inch.’
Darby heard Coop mumble ‘Jesus’ under his breath as she grabbed the pad and pen in front of her and started writing.
‘It’s not difficult to make,’ Scott said. ‘All you need is drain cleaner, bleach, acetone and a few other easily available items. But it’s notoriously difficult to mix properly, and it’s notoriously unstable. You’ve got to be crazier than a shithouse mouse to make this stuff, let alone want to use it.’
Darby slid the pad to Coop. She had written a single line: Do not turn up heat in lobby. Turning up the heat was a popular tactic with hostage negotiators, to make the gunman feel physically uncomfortable and shed clothing.
Coop got to his feet and darted around the table, heading for the door.
‘What if you’re a chemist or had a chemistry background?’ Darby asked.
‘Then you’re talking a surprisingly simple process,’ Scott replied. ‘Like I said, the real danger isn’t in making this stuff, it’s in handling it. TATP is highly susceptible to friction, shock and heat – that’s why they call it the ‘Mother of Satan’ over there in camel country, the shit is so unpredictable. The fact that this guy carried it in a backpack should say a lot about his state of mind. How close did you get to him when you were in the lobby?’
‘Pretty close.’
‘You catch a whiff of bleach? See the explosives?’
‘I didn’t see or smell anything. The coat covered most of his vest.’
‘If his suicide vest is made with TATP – he could sneeze and it could blow up. Who’s the hostage negotiator?’
‘Alan Grove, out of the FBI’s Boston field office. I’ve walked him through my conversation with the gunman.’
‘Tell him under no circumstances is he to turn up the heat in the lobby. In fact, I’d suggest cutting the heat entirely, let the place cool down. It’ll help keep the TATP stable – and that needs to be our top priority. You don’t want that shit to go off.’
‘I just sent word.’
‘You said Commissioner Donnelly is there?’
‘He’s sitting right across from me.’
‘Good. I need to explain to you both what will happen if, God forbid, one or both of those bombs in the lobby go off.
‘The lower floors of the station, especially the lobby, were constructed with an explosive-resistant concrete. It has a higher cement count and is mixed with very fine silica sand and sets of narrow steel fibres, giving it a tensile strength roughly ten times higher than normal steel-reinforced concrete. Those blocks of bevelled glass at the front of the lobby contain a new type of woven cloth soaked with liquid plastic and bonded with adhesive – the same stuff used on the president’s limo. If the bombs go off, the glass won’t explode, and the concrete and tile, which is also bomb-resistant, will absorb most of the blast, and prevent debris from scattering. We’re still talking major structural damage, but the explosion can be somewhat contained, which will allow my people and, if necessary, SWAT to remain closer to the building in the event they’re needed.’
‘Your guys find any IEDs near the building?’ Darby had been told that Scott had dispatched bomb-sniffing dogs to search all the cars and city garbage cans.
‘The dogs haven’t found anything yet,’ Scott said. ‘But here’s the problem: If the guy left an IED using TATP somewhere in a car or in a city garbage can, whatever, that shit’s odourless, even the bomb dogs won’t be able to detect it. And I don’t want my people towing cars and poking in garbage cans because of TATP’s inherent instability. We need to increase the evacuation radius, pull people out of the surrounding buildings.’
‘It’s being done as we speak. Ted, this part about him having the vest hooked up to his heartbeat, is that real or Hollywood movie bullshit?’ asked Donnelly.
‘Totally real and totally doable. Which brings me to the portable router you saw.’
‘I don’t know if it was, in fact, a mobile hotspot. It could very well be a portable jamming unit. Did Cooper tell you about the lobby cameras?’
‘He did. If the gunman has, in fact, planted IEDs in and around the city, he’s got to have a way to communicate with them. He could be using a cell signal or the city’s public Wi-Fi – maybe he even tapped into BPD’s Wi-Fi.’
‘Or he could have armed everything before he walked inside the building.’
‘That would be the smart play. But if what he told you is true – that he’ll shut down the devices once you bring him Briggs, or if he’s killed the suicide vest will go off along with all the other IEDs – then he’s got some sort of communication system already in place. There’s some way all the IEDs can talk to each other.’
‘I don’t think he’d rely on Wi-Fi, either BPD’s or the city’s. I think he’s too smart for that. I think he’d know that would be the first thing that we would shut down. Are they shut down?’
‘We’re in the process.’
‘And that router, or whatever it was, looked battery-operated. He knows – or suspects – we’re going to cut power to the building at some point.’
‘I passed along my recommendation to have the governor shut down the city’s Wi-Fi in case our man’s using it. Right now our EOD vehicles are strategically positioned near the building, jamming everything in that area – cell signals, Wi-Fi, radio frequencies.’
Darby had been told the bomb vehicles positioned near the building were equipped with the same military-grade jamming units used to locate and disarm bombs over in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Scott said, ‘If I can get a closer look at his vest, the router and whatever equipment he might be using, it’ll give us a better idea of what we’re dealing with, maybe even find a way to locate the IEDs and shut them down. Maybe.’
‘We’re working on something,’ Darby said.
‘Get back to me as soon as you know.’
‘Ted, before I let you go … your people, they have access to the building’s junction box, right?’
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘The lobby phones are landlines. We can reverse-engineer the line and turn the phones in there into listening devices, pick up on his conversations.’
‘My people are already on it,’ Scott said, and hung up.
Darby was already on her feet and moving around the table when Donnelly said, ‘We need to talk.’
‘We will. Later.’
‘We’ll do it now. Grab a chair, this’ll only take a minute.’
Darby moved past him and slipped through the door.
10
+01.39
Darby ducked into a narrow hall with aeroplane-type bathrooms on either side and stepped into the command area, the heart of the MCP, where half a dozen or so federal agents were seated in front of computer screens and speaking over their headsets to the agents and officers in the field. Boston SWAT officers and snipers, cameras mounted to their helmets and tactical scopes, were positioned a safe distance away from the building, and out of the jamming range of the bomb vehicles, in order to provide encrypted, real-time footage back to the agents in this room. A flat-screen showing a timer hung on the wall, the timer synched to the countdown on her watch.
Darby moved to the baby-faced agent monitoring the lobby cameras. All six feeds were still filled with snow. ‘Any change?’
The agent shook his head and moved a can from one ear. ‘I keep having the building manager set the cameras to different frequencies, but so far he’s got them all jammed.’
‘Sound?’
‘Nothing. We’re still deaf, dumb and blind.’
&n
bsp; She thanked him and patted him on the shoulder, feeling the ridge of hard and knotted muscle created from frustration, and then opened the door to conference room B. This one was smaller, boxy and didn’t have a conference table, just a narrow desk that faced a grey wall. Howie Gelfand, the SAC for the Boston field office, sat there, hunched forward, his back to her. He was on the phone and she could see him rubbing his forehead.
Gelfand looked over his shoulder, saw her, and motioned for her to join him. He returned to his conversation. She shut the door behind her and turned to the wall-mounted screen tuned to Channel 5 news.
The sound was muted, but the closed-caption scroll was on, the reporter talking about ‘the developing siege’ at Boston police’s main headquarters building at One Schroder Plaza on Tremont. There was no information about the bombs, but the ‘sky camera’ mounted inside their news copter was providing live, aerial footage of the bomb dogs sniffing the cars parked along the streets.
‘Stay right where you are, I don’t want your signal to drop again,’ Gelfand said into the phone. He had grown up in Long Island, New York, and his voice still carried traces of his accent. He had been the SAC for less than two years. ‘I’ll make all the arrangements and call you back.’
‘Briggs?’ she asked, hopeful, after he hung up.
‘The man himself. He and his family are hitting the slopes in Vermont – northern Vermont, right near the Canadian border.’
‘Shit.’
‘It gets worse. Vermont’s getting clobbered by a nor’easter – the same one that’s supposed to hit us later this afternoon. We can’t fly him out but we can drive him to the nearest helicopter pad.’
‘New Hampshire?’
‘No, they’re getting hit now. The closest pad is on the Mass. border. Probably he’s at least two hours from there – probably more like three in this weather. But if we can get him there in time and ahead of the storm, we can fly him out. If we can’t, then we’re going to have to wait for the man to arrive by car. Under normal circumstances, we’re talking a five-hour drive. In this weather, with these road conditions, we’re probably looking at more like seven or eight. Some of the roads near the lodge are shut down.’
Seven hours. In that time two more IEDs would detonate with a third one on its heels. Eight hours, and three IEDs would have gone off.
Darby was imagining body counts and severed and missing limbs when she said, ‘The gunman didn’t ask for a specific reporter or cameraman. If we can get Briggs to go in there, we can have SWAT go in disguised, maybe one of the bomb guys.’
‘Way ahead of you, Doc. I talked to Ted Scott, the commander of the Mass. State Troopers’ Bomb Squad. He volunteered.’
‘One other thing – two things, actually. I want a paramedic with combat experience on standby.’
‘Done. What else?’
‘An OBGYN who’s willing to go into the station,’ Darby said. ‘I want to be able to bring them both into there to examine Laura.’
‘Laura?’
‘The hostage. The pregnant woman. I don’t know her last name.’
‘Okay,’ Gelfand said. ‘Now let’s talk about Briggs. He’s –’
Gelfand cut himself off when the door opened.
Boston Police Commissioner Peter Donnelly was impossibly tall – six foot six, a big, lumbering and jowly man who had started out as a beat cop in Lawrence and worked his way up through the ranks, to superintendent, before being tapped for Boston police commissioner. The man had to duck through the doorway.
Gelfand got to his feet, his knees cracking. He was a heavy man with thinning blond hair he combed straight back across his scalp, and he always seemed to have a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth, even when he was angry or, like now, under tremendous pressure.
‘Briggs has agreed to talk with the gunman during the drive,’ Gelfand said to her.
‘Ted Scott is jamming all the cell signals in the area,’ Darby said.
‘Two choices: throw-phone or a satellite phone.’
‘You want me to go back in there and deliver it.’
‘You’re the one he wants to talk to. You think you can sell our guy on it?’
Donnelly spoke up, ‘I can’t allow that.’
Gelfand looked at him.
‘She’s a civilian, for starters,’ Donnelly said.
Darby knew the real reason: she had broken BPD’s blue wall of silence when she came forward about police corruption and the murder of her father. She couldn’t be trusted – and now because she was no longer a member of the tribe, Donnelly couldn’t exert any influence over her. That and the fact that the moment the media found out she was involved, it would dredge up BPD’s history of corruption, all of which involved Donnelly’s predecessor, Christina Chadzynski, may the bitch not rest in peace. The woman had played an integral part in her father’s murder.
Donnelly didn’t voice this, of course; he was too smart for that. Instead, he threw down the one card he knew would get Gelfand’s undivided attention. ‘And there’s the issue of liability,’ he said.
Darby turned to him, anger jumping into her voice before she could catch it. ‘We’re really going to have this conversation right now?’
Donnelly didn’t look at her; he spoke only to Gelfand. ‘If she gets hurt or injured – or, God forbid, killed – the city of Boston would be liable. You let her in there without her signing off, then the Bureau is liable, not us.’
Darby brushed past Gelfand and moved to the corner desk.
Gelfand cut to the chase. ‘You guys don’t want any more shit smeared on your faces, I get it,’ he said. ‘But the guy elected the good doctor here as his spokesman. If we send someone else in there, it could set him off.’
‘Or she could set him off. Dr McCormick is not a professional hostage negotiator.’
‘So you want me to send in Grove.’
‘The city of Boston can’t allow her to go into the lobby until Legal has signed off.’
‘Give me the forms.’
‘Legal is drafting them.’
How convenient, Darby thought, as she wrote on a pad of paper.
‘We have an hour and twelve minutes until the first bomb goes off,’ Gelfand said. ‘What do you suggest I do? Sit around and do nothing while we wait for the paperwork to come through?’
‘Send in a professional hostage negotiator,’ Donnelly replied.
‘And if Grove goes in there and it provokes our guy to do something drastic, then what? The city will pick up the tab instead of the federal government? Is that what you’re proposing?’
On the pad, Darby wrote that she waived all liability, for injury or death, for both the BPD and the Bureau. She slapped the pad against Donnelly’s expansive gut and opened the door.
11
+01.50
Darby didn’t have to look far for Coop. She found him on his phone in the parking lot, standing near the back doors beside a federal SWAT vehicle.
Almost all the civilian vehicles in the college parking lot had been removed. The sky seemed darker, the air colder, and the traffic sounds from Huntington Ave were drowned out by the steady thump of the news copters circling overhead and by the constant throbbing purr of the gas generator powering the MCP.
Coop hung up and turned, surprised to see her. ‘I was just about to come get you,’ he said. White plumes of breath scattered in the wind. ‘That was Ted Scott. His people hit the junction box to reverse-engineer the lobby phones.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing. The gunman either cut the lines or unplugged the phones.’
Shit. ‘The hostage negotiator, whatshisname,’ she said. ‘Where is he?’
‘Alan Grove, and he’s waiting for you in there.’ Coop jerked a thumb over his shoulder, at the back of the federal SWAT van. His gaze swept across her face. He had known her for a long time and knew how to read the nuances of her expressions and moods.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You can’t be –’
‘I’m the only one he’
ll talk to.’
‘He’s not looking for a business partner. You go back in there, he’ll kill you.’
‘Trust me, Coop. He won’t kill me.’
Coop took in a deep breath, about to mount a defence when she stepped on the van’s rear bumper and opened the door. Inside, the back was crammed with shelves holding various electronic equipment and gear, she saw a lithe, bald man seated at a corner table, a phone pressed against his ear. Alan Grove had shut down BPD’s automated calling system and voicemail but had kept one line open, hoping the gunman would answer.
Grove moved the receiver away from his mouth. ‘He refuses to pick up. That, or he cut the phone lines,’ he said. His tone and body language gave no indication that he was feeling any pressure.
Darby told him what Coop had just shared with her about the phone lines. Then she explained what was going on with Briggs and the strong possibility of the gunman using TATP. Grove listened, his expression impassive.
‘Howie wants me to go in and talk with him, put him on the line with Briggs,’ she said.
Grove nodded. She couldn’t read anything in the man’s face, couldn’t tell how he felt about it. He had a hawkish nose and the colourful tie he wore elegantly matched his finely textured suit. He reminded her of a concierge at a luxury hotel, a man who could satisfy every need or desire with a single phone call.
Coop climbed into the back and shut the door. The truck’s engine was no longer running, but the air was still warm and smelled of oil, lubricants and metal.
‘How much time do we have?’ Grove asked.
‘One hour and eight minutes,’ Darby replied.
‘Then we better get on with it – unless you have any reservations, Dr McCormick.’
‘I don’t have much of a choice.’
‘You can say no – and I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest. If this man is, in fact, using TATP in his suicide vest, there’s a strong chance that it can go off at any moment – well, I don’t have to explain to you what will happen. Does Mr Gelfand want you to wear a bomb suit?’
