The Bomb Maker Read online

  “The friends?”

  “That I was a police officer.” She paused. “Everything, really.”

  “That’s normal. You had a traumatic brain injury. There was bleeding and you had an operation to relieve that. You were put into an induced coma to speed up the healing. You’re doing very well.” As she spoke, she wrote notes on the clipboard that held Diane’s chart.

  She set it aside and then lifted the blanket. She moved her light, thin fingers to Diane’s arm, her side, her leg. It was like a small bird landing, only to fly to the next spot and rest for a moment.

  Diane said, “What’s the bottom line?”

  “The bottom line? You mean the cost?”

  “No. I’m alive, but what have I lost that I won’t get back?”

  “I think you’ll have a good recovery.”

  “I have a brain injury and a broken arm and what else?”

  The doctor sighed. “Several fractures, ribs, fingers, a shoulder dislocation, which was corrected immediately. Much of your body was bruised by the concussion, and there are abrasions and a few burns along your back. You were slammed against a wall by the explosion, so your nose was broken, but it was reset by a plastic surgeon. The bones, I’m told, are doing well.”

  “Thank you,” Diane said.

  “Dr. Hollskein is the attending in your case, and he’ll talk to you at length and answer all your questions in a day or so. In the meantime you’re going to feel discomfort. When you feel that way, buzz the nurse, and she’ll give you something for the pain.”

  “Thank you.”

  Later a nurse came in, and Diane realized she already knew her. At some point she had simply gotten used to the nurse without being really aware of her. She looked at her this time and felt accustomed to her without any memory of meeting her.

  Diane said, “You’ve been taking care of me. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. But it’s a team of people, around the clock.”

  “I know. But you’re here now.”

  “Anything you need?”

  “I want to call my mother and tell her I’m alive.”

  “Okay. But that could be an anticlimax. She calls every day to see how you’re doing.”

  “Only once?”

  The nurse smiled, went to retrieve the telephone, and then set it on the tray table where she could reach it. “Dial nine.” She walked out. Diane called and she and her mother spent a long time crying, so only the two of them could have understood each other. Her mother had flown to Los Angeles from Miami and come to see her every day for a month, just sitting in the room and then returning to her hotel. In the end she’d had to go back. She’d been back in Miami for only a short time. They laughed and talked until Diane was tired, and her mother had run out of things to say. When they hung up, Diane fell asleep.

  Hours later the nurse came in and gave Diane a sponge bath. When Diane had been changed, the nurse said, “You have a visitor waiting. His name is Captain Stahl. Are you okay to see him?”

  “I don’t want him to see me like this.”

  The nurse smiled. “Oh, come on, Diane. The last of your facial bruises and the swelling and burns cleared up weeks ago. You look great.” She went into the bathroom and brought a hand mirror. “Here.” She held the mirror and folded Diane’s hand around the handle carefully, because some of the fingers on that hand were still splinted with metal braces.

  Diane didn’t look just yet. “Weeks ago?”

  “Three at least. And the captain has been here at least once a day for as long as you have. He’s seen you many times when you looked a lot worse than this.”

  Diane looked at the mirror. The discoloration, scrapes, and adhesive tape she expected were gone. Her hair must have been shaved, but it had grown in to about half an inch. Her skin looked scrubbed and devoid of makeup, but there was nothing else. “It looks like I lost some weight, anyway.”

  “He’s waiting. Can I bring him in?”

  “Okay.”

  The nurse went out, and the door had barely closed behind her before it opened again and a tall, trim man about forty-five years old stepped in.

  “I’ve seen you before,” she said.

  She saw his face go flat. He said, “Yes, you have. Do you remember who I am?”

  “Of course I do,” she said.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t. How are you feeling?”

  “My memory started coming back pretty quickly. It’s odd, though. Things seemed all to be there, but I didn’t want to start digging through them. That felt like such a big job. Somebody mentioned I was a police officer, and that seemed so foreign to me. But pretty soon there were bits and pieces—images, memories, like a dream. What I remembered didn’t make any sense. None of it seemed like anything I would do.” She paused. “Are you my supervisor?”

  “Yes. Temporarily, anyway.”

  “The nurse says you were here every day.”

  “I was.”

  “How many days?”

  “Forty-two, I think.”

  “Oh, my God. It doesn’t feel that way. I would have guessed a week.”

  “They put you under for a while.”

  “They told me,” she said. “Just not how long.”

  “They needed to. You’ve been through a lot.”

  “So why have you been coming here?”

  His face seemed to go blank. “It’s complicated.”

  “I’ll pay close attention. I’ve got all day.”

  “I’ll start with the easy answers. Several reasons. You’re a very highly skilled bomb technician. The bomber we’re after tried to kill you by planting a device in your apartment. You obviously figured out the mechanism in time to take shelter in the only place where you would be somewhat protected. You were lucky to survive, but you were also smarter than the bomber.”

  “I feel like shit. Does he?”

  “I hope so, but we haven’t caught him yet.” He looked closely at her. “You’re the only trained tech I’ve known who lived through anything that big. You might know something or have seen something that will help us catch him.”

  “This bomber was why you came here yourself? Every day?”

  “Well, no,” he said. “I could have sent other people to talk to you. Our third teammate, Elliot, for instance. He’s a very good cop and a very good bomb tech.”

  “So why?”

  “You said you remembered me.”

  “I do.”

  “We were close,” he said. “But I think we should talk about that another day, when your memory tells you it’s the right time.”

  “I thought so. I just wanted to make you say it in case I imagined it or got you mixed up with somebody else,” she said.

  “You didn’t,” he said. He took a card out of his wallet. “They probably have a few dozen of these lying around here, but here’s another.” He set it on her tray table. “Call me anytime you want to talk. About anything.”

  20

  The bomb maker read another article about himself in the Los Angeles Times. It was around thirty percent true. Everybody seemed to have figured out that the bomb maker was working alone—the police, the newspapers, the television newspeople, the FBI. They were right about his preference for relying on himself, but not about his purpose. He was doing all the work alone, but he’d had a backer since the beginning.

  For half his life he had read and watched news reports about terrorist groups. Some were from the Middle East, some in Asian countries, some in Europe or South America. He had begun to keep track of radical factions in all of those places. The Internet was full of reports about them.

  One day about two years ago, he had decided to reach out to them. He began by composing a draft communication to the leaders of terrorist factions explaining what he could do for them. He offered to obliterate the Los Angeles Police Department’s Bomb Squad. He explained that he was a businessman, not a person with religious or political motives of his own. He simply wanted ten million dollars. He figured that his
frankness would keep everything simple and unambiguous.

  He used Tor to get into the dark web and began his search. He spent a long time exploring the dark web on his home computer. By definition, the invisible web was all of the sites that search engines didn’t detect, so he had to manage without search engines. He found bulletin boards and sites and communications for a great many groups, and for individuals who claimed to have connections or colleagues or followers. He found killers for hire, people selling themselves or others for sex, offers of drugs of every kind and quantity, and guns. He had no way of knowing who or what was real, so he searched for bits of information he could verify by reading neutral sources, and made lists of contacts he could revisit to check for consistency. Whenever he found a new one, he wasn’t sure if it was a criminal enterprise or a police agency from an unknown country searching for criminals. When a group disappeared, he didn’t know if the members had been caught or if the group had detected a trap and moved on.

  Most people on the dark web had or wanted bitcoins. He wanted cash. After a few months he had made contact with thirty-nine groups who declared themselves enemies of the United States and who he believed were real, or had channels to real groups.

  After he made contact a few began to try to recruit him. The tone of his responses was tentative and cautious. He was patient, and eventually some of the groups began to send him literature, announcements of meetings, and other information that indicated they weren’t imaginary. Others disappeared.

  He waited months before the first serious and relevant query reached him. It was from a person who called himself the Messenger. It seemed to him a name like that hinted at a Middle Eastern group, but there was no telling. The Messenger offered to send emissaries to discuss his offer. They would meet with the bomb maker in Canada. When the Messenger specified the exact time and place of the meeting, the bomb maker bought his plane ticket.

  The bomb maker met the pair of emissaries at a restaurant in Niagara Falls, Ontario, on a terrace overlooking the cataract. It was a fair, warm, sunny day in July, and they took a table far from any other. The emissaries were a pair of men who seemed to be enjoying their visit to the falls. Both wore what looked like golf clothes—T-shirts, one yellow, one blue, pressed khaki pants—and low-heeled Italian driving shoes and aviator sunglasses. They talked about the water hurling itself off the cliff into the gorge and watched the tourists from many countries who were spending the afternoon swarming the steps and paths above the falls and taking pictures. He tried to start a conversation about business twice, but each time one of the men would put a hand on his forearm and shake his head.

  At some point he realized they were not alone. There were at least three similarly dressed men standing at various points where they could watch the bomb maker and his companions outside the restaurant. One of them wore a backpack, and he wondered what was in it.

  When they finished eating, the two men asked for the check, paid, and stood up. They took a terse leave of the bomber and then walked off in the direction of the parking lots a distance from the river. Two other men, including the one with the backpack, arrived and conducted him to a viewing area close to the crest of the falls. They could barely hear each other over the roar of the rushing water. At that point he realized the expected order of things was reversed. The first two men had been security specialists evaluating him. They had probably screened him for insanity or fraud, checked him for weapons with a magnetic device, and given any opposition forces a chance to move in.

  One of the two men who took him close to the water handed him a business card. It had a phone number written on it. He said, “When you’re ready to begin, call the number. The one who answers will arrange your payment.”

  “I want the money delivered to me.”

  The man shrugged. “All right, then tell him that and give him the location when it’s time.”

  The five men he saw all had dark hair and dark eyes, but they spoke with no accents. They never introduced themselves. They made no reference to any country, religion, organization, or government. A couple of times they spoke to each other, but the roar of the rushing water was so loud and they had their faces so close together that he heard nothing. They could have been speaking any European language, or Farsi or Hindi or Pashtun, or Tagalog, or anything else.

  The only questions they asked were practical. How far was he in his plan to eliminate the Bomb Squad? Did he want some of his payment in merchandise? Drugs or diamonds? How much money did he need right away for supplies? Would one hundred thousand dollars be enough?

  He said he wanted nothing to do with drugs or diamonds. Money for expenses would speed things up, but he could still do his work without it. Yes, a hundred thousand would be a big help.

  The other man took off the backpack he was wearing and set it down. They talked for a few more seconds, and then the first man said, “We’d better be going. Call the number when it’s time.” The two men turned and walked away.

  The bomb maker felt his heart beating with excitement, and his mouth was dry. He stood still until they were out of sight, then picked up the backpack and put it on. When he went to his rental car to leave for the American side of the river he was agitated. He decided to sit in his car for a few minutes and wait for his breathing to return to normal before he started the engine.

  He was tempted to open the pack, but he knew what was inside. It would be a hundred thousand dollars, because these guys were the real thing. They were emissaries from the leader of a powerful faction. But then he remembered he had to drive back across the border. He unzipped the pack and confirmed what he already knew. Inside was a stack of bundled American money. At the bottom was a cell phone in its box, the protective cellophane gone, but the phone clearly new.

  This car had rear seats that could be tipped forward to extend the trunk by a few feet for carrying long loads. He tipped them forward and hid the money in the spaces in the back under the rear seats, then restored them to the upright position. He folded his jacket and stuffed it into the backpack to replace the money, then set the pack on the passenger seat. He knew the customs officials at the border would not be unaware of the places for hiding contraband, but they would have no reason to suspect him of anything.

  He thought about the men who had given him the money. He assumed they were genuine terrorists. Everything the men had done made him respect them more. He was in an alliance with them, but at this moment he had no idea who they were or where they were from. All they had needed to accomplish their purpose was to give him a business card with a phone number, but they had gone much further. They had staked his work.

  The number on the business card was an American phone number. There was no country code, and the area code was 213. That was Los Angeles. As he drove back toward the bridge that arced over the river, he thought about the implications. They had people in the United States already. They were ready, waiting for his call.

  The men they had in the United States had to be sleeper agents. That was very wise. They were probably training for an attack. Maybe they would mount attacks in other cities at the same time as his, so everything happened at once. Maybe their people were out in the desert in Arizona, New Mexico, or Nevada firing weapons and perfecting battle tactics, concealment, and escapes. Maybe they were even training in explosives.

  He hoped they weren’t. He had a proprietary feeling about explosives. He was their expert, and he didn’t want to be easily replaceable. He hoped they weren’t fanatical. When fanatical groups got involved, it was usually to perform suicide attacks. Fanatics gave him the creeps. They didn’t seem to think anything was a victory unless they got killed doing it. But this group seemed calm and polite.

  After he crossed the border at the end of the bridge, the US customs officials glanced at him and waved him on. It was a beautiful day, and the bridges were packed with cars inching their way home from Canada. He drove to his hotel. During the drive he had been hoping that when he got a chance to really examin
e the money and the backpack, there would be something besides the currency. He had seen paper bands around each ten thousand dollars. Maybe there would be a bank’s mark on one or a notation from the counting that would give him an idea of his sponsors’ location or language. But the money was like the men. It told him nothing. He packed the money into a priority mail shipping box and mailed it to himself in California.

  He drove to the Buffalo Niagara International Airport, turned in his rental car, and flew back to Los Angeles. The next morning he returned to his workshop and began to concentrate on his work again. As he made more Semtex he assessed his progress.

  It had been over a year, and he was still at the same task, but he wasn’t unhappy. He was going to be paid ten million dollars for doing what he would have done for free. He was enjoying being a bomb maker. He had not obliterated the female bomb technician in her apartment, but he had essentially killed her. She wouldn’t be defusing any explosive devices again. The news reports had been vague about her injuries, but he knew she must have used up all her luck just to be alive. She must have broken bones, internal injuries—certainly no ability to hold a hand steady. No doubt she was held together by pins and screws.

  Thinking about her distracted him, and he felt the urge to find out about her. He found a photograph of her in the newspaper, and then another, but they were both out of date now—taken before he had blown her up. She had been pretty. That would be over too, like her career.

  He found some more articles, and read them. They were just rephrasing the same information. Then he found one that quoted Dr. Devi Majumdar, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “She’s in stable condition, doing as well as a person can do with such severe injuries.”

  He repeated, “Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.”

  21

  The man who came into Diane’s hospital room the next morning was easy to spot as a police detective. He was short and broad shouldered but had a narrow waist. He wore a sport coat and a necktie, something few men did during Southern California summers, particularly when the sun was hot and the sky that deep cloudless blue.