The Bomb Maker Page 13

  “What do you think he’s doing right now?” she said.

  “Right now? He’s thinking about us.”

  13

  In the morning the alarm on Stahl’s nightstand woke him, and he realized he was instantly alert because he had been dreaming about ways the bomb maker might be devising firing mechanisms. The bomber had not used any mechanical methods yet—no spring-loaded percussion hammers, no pull-out pins, no burning fuses—so Stahl’s mind had been devising some in his sleep. He sat up and saw Diane was already gone from the bed. He heard the shower start, and he got up.

  He cooked their breakfast, and this time they sat next to each other at the table to be closer together. He said, “Do you plan to come back tonight?”

  “If I’m not taking up the next girl’s turn.”

  “Good. I left a spare remote control by your purse over there with your keys, and I put a key to the door on your key chain.”

  “You’re so sweet,” she said. “And I promise to return them after I’ve used you up and left you a hollow husk of a man in your lonely condo.”

  “Very considerate of you.”

  She leaned close and gave him a lingering kiss. “I’d better go. I want to stop at my apartment on the way to work and get some clothes and stuff.”

  “All right.” Then he said, “Look, if you want to leave some clothes here, there’s a closet I don’t use.”

  “Thanks. I’ll have to think about it,” she said. She picked up her overnight bag, put the remote control into her purse, and went to the door.

  “What’s there to think about?”

  “What I would need clothes for if I’m over here. I’m always taking them off.” She opened the door and closed it behind her. He heard her put the key in the dead bolt lock and then heard the bolt snap into place.

  A few minutes later Stahl went out the same door and headed for police headquarters downtown. On the way he called Almanzo’s office at Homicide Special and asked Almanzo’s assistant whether there had been any developments overnight. But he was told there was nothing new.

  When he reached headquarters he spent the first half hour going over the reports filed in the last shift, then listened to Andy explain the details of the temporary transfers of the federal bomb technicians. Andy had worked out their individual schedules and prepared the paperwork for Stahl’s signature.

  They were still at it when the new people came in. They were ten men and four women, all in their thirties or forties. Eight of them were on loan from the FBI and six from the ATF. He led them into the large conference room to talk.

  “I’m Dick Stahl, acting commander of the squad. Thank you all for agreeing to fill in for a while. I just looked over the information about you that your home agencies have shared with us, and I’m pleased to serve with all of you.

  “What I’d like to do is get you out on the line as quickly as possible. A normal LAPD shift is twelve hours, three days a week. For this week only I want each of you to stay on the schedule you’re used to: work five eight-hour shifts. We have two teams on duty at all times. You’ll work the first four hours with one team and the second four with the other. The next day you work four with the third team and four with the fourth. So after two days you will have met everyone and seen how all four teams operate.

  “At the end of the first week you’ll form your own teams. The only exceptions will be the six of you who have come from offices in other cities. We’ll want to attach each of you to a team of our own officers for a bit longer. I have no doubt about anyone’s qualifications. But this is a city that’s essentially eighty miles east to west and sixty north to south, and some of it is more densely populated than New York. The term ‘rush hour’ isn’t used here anymore, because the roads are packed every hour of every day and night. You’ll need some time to get your bearings, learn the map, memorize the LAPD radio codes, and get used to our equipment.”

  None of the bomb technicians betrayed surprise or doubt or discontent. They were professionals, ready to get to work.

  “Just a few quick remarks on our situation. I’m a temporary recruit also. As you know, you and I were brought in because of the worst disaster in LAPD history. We lost half the Bomb Squad, including its commander, in a single explosion. Based on video recordings and a similarity of explosives and methods, I believe that we’re up against one bomb maker who is systematically targeting the Bomb Squad, and he’s tried twice more in the past two days. The bombs he makes are designed to force us to take risks and make guesses instead of doing what we were taught.” He looked around at their faces.

  He said, “While this is going on, there are also about three routine calls each day to render a suspicious device safe. About twenty percent to one-third of the calls involve devices capable of producing an explosion. For now, we’re trying to detonate devices in place if we can, and transport and detonate if we can’t. Do not take any unnecessary risks. Anything you see that looks amateurish might be an amateur’s work or it might be this guy trying to fool you. Do not get fooled.”

  He nodded and Andy came to the front with the schedules. As Stahl turned and walked out of the conference room there was a wave of applause. He ignored it, walking away as though it were an unrelated noise from down the hall. He supposed the agents must have seen the excessive news coverage of his two render-safe incidents. But the last thing he wanted was a squad built around loyalty to him. In a week he could be dead, and what they needed to trust wasn’t a boss. They needed to rely on their training and each other.

  Stahl kept going all the way to Almanzo’s office in Homicide Special. When he got there Almanzo wasn’t at his desk, so he looked for the nearest detective. There was a tall black cop in a summer-weight suit sitting in a cubicle with his phone to his ear. “We’re trying to speak with all of the merchants and professional offices in the neighborhood to find out if you have any video recordings from surveillance cameras. The period we’re most interested in is yesterday from midnight until noon. Yes, sir. Anything. It might be extremely important in a homicide case. We’d like to see it all. No, sir. There won’t be anybody who would harm you, and your name would not be made public. We don’t even have a suspect yet. We’re trying to get one.”

  Stahl saw Almanzo’s head pop up from a cubicle where he had been talking with another detective. As Almanzo approached, Stahl reflected again that Almanzo’s short, sturdy frame showed the results of a great deal of effort. It occurred to Stahl that there must be a long succession of suspects in Almanzo’s career who had found resisting arrest brought unwelcome surprises.

  Almanzo said, “Glad you’re here. The number eight blasting caps were purchased by a licensed blaster named Carl Mazur. He bought eight hundred with that lot number in February. He had worked in coal mines for seventeen years.”

  “Coal mines?” Stahl said. “What coal mines?”

  “He spent most of his career in West Virginia. He’s dead. His wife told the FBI he was hired by a man who wanted him to clear land for a housing development, and he was supposed to start by blasting the way for a road to the site. The man gave him money and he ordered a supply of explosives, including the blasting caps.”

  “What are the other explosives?”

  “Dynamite and different kinds of electrical initiators and timers. He loaded up his truck and drove to meet the contractor in a relatively remote area of the Ozarks in Missouri. He was shot and his supplies were stolen.”

  “Of course they were,” Stahl said. “Damn. We’ll probably be seeing whatever else was taken before long. Do the Missouri cops have anything?”

  “Nothing yet,” Almanzo said. “They were thinking it had been a robbery, and the thieves who got the explosives weren’t looking for anything in particular. When we told them about the blasting caps turning up in bombs here, they said they’d start looking for people who might have seen the victim and another man together, or any pictures of them in the same truck on the interstates.”

  “This happened in Febr
uary. Three months ago?”

  “I know. There’s not much hope of anybody suddenly remembering anything now, but it happens.”

  Stahl said, “Has the FBI found anything on the people who attended the advanced bomb course at Eglin while I taught there?’

  “Not yet,” Almanzo said. “Is there somebody you have in mind? Are you remembering somebody who didn’t seem quite right?”

  Stahl shook his head. “No. But this guy thinks the way insurgents think. He’s hiding booby traps, building in antiwithdrawal mechanisms, setting bombs that attract technicians and secondary bombs to kill them. Bombs are crude, brutal weapons. What’s complex is the deception, using people’s mental habits against them.”

  “Is bomb technician training the only way he could have learned that?”

  “You can teach people a hundred ways of making bombs so they’ll watch for them. I don’t know if you can teach a person to love murder so much that he’ll risk the danger to himself to keep doing it.”

  Stahl felt his phone vibrating and looked at the screen.

  “I know,” said Almanzo. “You’ve got to go. Me too. Good luck to both of us.”

  14

  The bomb maker was in his garage workshop drawing new designs. Making bombs was imagining, building, and testing. The past few months had been a time of preparation, building devices and planning where and how to use them. Now, he’d realized, he had to incorporate new ideas if he wanted to kill bomb technicians.

  The LAPD Bomb Squad had surprised him. They were competent and sure. They were sometimes wrong, but they were never careless or baffled. He had read somewhere they were about the best outside the military. They had invented many of the now standard ways of rendering bombs safe. He had hoped the current technicians were an inferior group living on a dead legacy, but they weren’t. They had found two of his devices, handled them expertly, and destroyed all the work and preparation he’d invested in them.

  He had originally decided his best strategy would be to design and install a device that would bring a large portion of the Bomb Squad together and kill as many of them as possible. He’d killed half of them, and he’d been confident the rest would succumb in time.

  His problem now was that the survivors were more wary and observant. They knew he was trying to obliterate them, so they were difficult to deceive. Everything that looked like an explosive device was considered to be one, and no device was treated as routine. The next two had been destroyed without mishap or casualties.

  He had been working all morning on new designs. He’d drawn schematics and sketched bomb triggers, dreaming up components that didn’t look like what they were, or could be hidden inside the housings of other objects. When he began to get tired and stiff from sitting at his drafting table, he gathered all his diagrams and schematics and took them to his workshop safe. He had to be careful.

  He knew anyone who wanted to break into his safe would have to subject it to heat from a cutting torch or blow the lock open with explosives. He had placed a plastic container of white phosphorus inside so any application of high heat would melt the plastic and allow the phosphorus to burn everything in the safe, and probably injure the safecracker.

  When he had put his workshop in order he went to his gun cabinet and selected weapons for the afternoon’s trip to Los Angeles. He took an M9 pistol and a .223 Remington Bushmaster rifle with a six-position telescoping stock and a thirty-round magazine. He put the pistol on his belt where it would ride under his sport coat and collapsed the rifle’s stock so it would fit in the briefcase he’d modified to hold the weapon and a second magazine.

  He had selected a reusable grocery bag to hold the bomb. As he put the device inside he admired it. His creation looked like a bomb. He had strung together a dozen sticks of Carl Mazur’s dynamite and sewn them into a vest created by cutting away the sleeves of an old denim jacket he’d taken from the lost-and-found basket in a Laundromat. The bomb looked like a suicide vest, and could have been used as one if he’d wanted. He had sewn in lithium-ion batteries and a switch that could be activated by a clock.

  The clock had been a wonderful find. If it was possible to have a clock face that looked made for a bomb, this was the one. The clock had been intended to be started and stopped by an electric eye aimed across the finish line on a track. He started the clock manually, so it began to tick and move the hands around the dial. The entire presentation of the bomb was a bit of theater, and it was dramatic enough to make him laugh.

  The bomb looked like a bomb, but it wasn’t the kind of bomb it appeared to be. The clock would complete the firing circuit to set off the dynamite and the layer of plastic explosive he’d sewn under it in a few hours. He had also placed a layer of Tannerite next to the main charge. Tannerite was the substance used in exploding targets. It was harmless and inert until a high-velocity projectile hit it, at which point it would explode.

  Usually he planted his devices at night, between 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. He was going to plant this one while the afternoon sun was still high, so he could put himself where the sun’s glare would half-blind the eyes of his enemies. Today he would be near enough to the bomb so he would see everything.

  He had rented a gray Toyota two days before and then put on it stolen license plates that he altered with black paint, so the numbers were changed. He drove the car to a parking structure off Hollywood Boulevard he’d selected a week ago. The structure was privately owned—and old enough not to have been fitted with security cameras. He walked along Cherokee south to Selma and then near the building that housed the office he had rented. He didn’t stop there, but kept walking. He came back on the other side of the street, and as he passed an alley he took the bomb vest out of the shopping bag, left it in the alley’s mouth, and kept going.

  He came around the next block and into the rear of the office building. Then he climbed the back stairs to the office he had rented. He opened the window and looked down at the sidewalk to be sure the vest was still where he left it. He opened his briefcase, took out his rifle, adjusted the length of the stock to fit him, inserted the loaded magazine, and looked through the scope. Then he positioned the desk so he could stand on top at the proper angle to see the vest from above, but far enough back from the window not to be seen from below. He pushed the conference table in front of the desk, and then tipped it up on its end to serve as a blind. He could rest the rifle on the edge of the table and steady his aim while his body was hidden behind it. When he was ready and comfortable, he sat down by the window to wait.

  The 911 call came in at 4:57 p.m. Team Two was out, and Team Three and Team Four were scheduled to come on shift in two hours. Team One would take the call.

  Today Team One meant Elliot; Hines; John Crowell, one of the agents on loan from the FBI; and ATF agent Judy Welsh. Since Dick Stahl was moving from team to team to observe the replacements, Elliot had by seniority inherited Stahl’s slot as supervisor of Team One for the day.

  The team scrambled into the bomb truck and Hines took the wheel. As they left the headquarters building, most of the traffic was flowing north through Hollywood toward the Valley, in the same direction they were going. They could hear a constant stream of radio chatter, with the regular patrol units announcing that they had arrived and closed off one intersection after another to incoming traffic. When Hines reached the final block, there were already two police cars parked at angles at each end of the street. They pulled apart only long enough to let the bomb truck pass.

  Hines parked the truck a hundred feet up the street from the alley entrance, and the four bomb technicians climbed out. Elliot looked through binoculars and said, “The responding officer was right. It looks like a suicide vest.” He handed the binoculars to the nearest technician, Agent Crowell.

  Agent Crowell said, “I’ve seen a couple of them before. There was a guy named Hamid who made them for Hamas while I was in Israel years ago. It’s good to see one that’s not strapped to anybody.”

  Agent Welsh sa
id, “Maybe somebody got cold feet?”

  “Maybe,” said Crowell. “And maybe it’s fake.”

  “Time to go downrange and take a closer look,” said Elliot. “Anybody else ever work a bomb vest?” There was silence. “I guess you’re it, then, Crowell.”

  “Honored,” said Crowell.

  Elliot said, “I’m going to suit up too, and go with you for the first look.”

  The two began putting on their heavy EOD suits. As he stepped into his, Elliot said, “Hines, as soon as we go, get the truck into position at least two hundred feet back. Better call in a Code Five Edward too. We don’t want any helicopters hovering over us if this goes bad.”

  “Will do.”

  “Welsh, let the officers in the area know we’re going downrange. They should get ready to get people out of these buildings if we have to disturb the vest.”

  “Yes, sir.” Welsh stepped off down the block with a hand radio, checking to see where the units were and which buildings might have to be emptied.

  Diane Hines moved the truck back two hundred feet. Then she ran tests on the communication equipment in the helmets of the two men wearing the suits. “This is Hines, testing. Please respond.”

  “Elliot here.”

  “Crowell here.”

  “I’m reading you both,” she said. “You’re good to go. Hines out.” She turned on the recorder and checked to be sure the truck’s camera was running. She listened to the talk between Elliot and Crowell as they clumped along toward the alley entrance.

  “There seems to be a manual switch over there on the right side of the vest.” That was Crowell’s voice. “See the wire and then the plastic oval with the thumb switch? Beside the pocket.”

  “I see it. That would support the idea that it really was intended as a suicide vest,” Elliot said. “But it’s odd that it has a clock.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe that’s a backup. If the bomber got disabled or killed, the vest would still go off.”