The Bomb Maker Read online

  Watkins considered entering the house by breaking the glass of the dining room window and reaching up to open the latch. But beside the front door he could see the glowing panel of an alarm system. Many alarm systems would trigger at the sound of glass breaking, and a bomb could be connected to the alarm circuit. He took the compact monocular out of his tool kit and focused it on the alarm panel. There was a green light to show that the system had power, but the display said: RDY. Ready. It wasn’t armed. The panel had no visible wires leading from it, but a tie-in could be anywhere in the house, including at the circuit box, which was usually mounted to the interior wall of a closet. But the fact that the alarm was off made Watkins very uneasy. If this Mr. Hill was in Europe and was worried about an extortion scheme, why wasn’t his home alarm system turned on? It didn’t fit. Or had an intruder managed to turn it off?

  Watkins paused by the window for a moment and looked again intently at several things he had noticed. The door to the kitchen was one. Any old-fashioned house might have a swinging door to the kitchen, but he couldn’t recall seeing more than a few like this one in his eight-year career. The door itself was a hazard. It was clad in a layer of sheet metal like the ones in restaurants. It was painted white on the upper half, but the lower half was bare metal. That meant it would conduct electricity. Would a bomber ignore that opportunity?

  Watkins studied the chandelier above the dining room table. It was a bowl shape with three layers above it dripping with dangling crystal drops that kept the bulb invisible. An antipersonnel bomb with ball bearings or screws inside the glass bowl would disperse at the right level to kill anyone in the room—about six feet.

  Watkins took his time. He emptied his mind and stared, trying to notice anything that felt wrong, anything that would inspire a bomber to do something clever. Watkins moved from window to window, following the same procedure. He tried to see what was plugged into each electrical outlet, searching for commercial timers designed to turn lights on and off and make the house seem occupied. Those were about the most reliable timers a bomb could have, and they could deliver 110 volts to a firing circuit.

  Watkins looked for shapes he’d seen bombers use before—pipes, of course, pressure cookers, backpacks, satchels, small suitcases. He scanned for pieces of military ordnance that might have been left inside boxes made for them. Artillery boxes were usually simple, made of half-inch by three-inch wooden laths nailed together and painted olive drab with their contents stenciled on them in black. He searched for the shape, not the color, in case somebody had painted one to look harmless, like a toy box.

  Watkins knew if an expert had set this house to blow, there would be at least two charges—the big one to destroy the building, and a smaller, subtler one just for someone like him.

  When he had stared into the interior through each of the windows, he found himself back at the front steps. He spoke into the helmet radio. “There’s nothing visible from any of the windows. I’m at the front door again.”

  He stood on the steps beside the door, reached over, and turned the knob. The spring pressure felt normal, and he heard no clicks. He sighted along the jamb as he opened the door a crack. There were no signs of anything held in place by the door or the hinges about to fall or spring away or sever a contact. There were no wires.

  He moved his knife along the bottom of the door to locate the magnet embedded in the door to keep the alarm switch under the threshold from tripping. He found it, then took out his own magnet and placed it against the door in exactly the right spot, so when he pushed the door inward the new magnet would replace the one in the door.

  He reached inside and lifted the doormat to check for a pressure pad, and then put the doormat into the doorway to prop the door open. He turned and inspected the alarm keypad on the wall. “I’m in,” he said. “The alarm is off.” A minute later he said, “I don’t see any sign of a device yet. I’m going to look for it.”

  Watkins stepped deeper into the living room, inching ahead in his heavy, hot bomb suit. He had to turn the whole upper part of his body to see anything on either side, because the suit’s helmet didn’t have a neck. He used his bright flashlight to focus on one object at a time. He didn’t want to flip any light switches just yet.

  He moved the beam of his light around the room to pick up the shine of monofilament fishing line or any thin wires that weren’t meant to be there. Next he turned his light off and searched for thin beams of light from an electric eye in the air.

  A glass candy jar filled with multicolored jelly beans drew him to it. The jar was exactly the sort of object a bomb maker would use—harmless looking, transparent, and appealing. He came closer and used his flashlight to search for any hint of an object or a wire hidden among the jelly beans. Maybe it was too obvious for this guy. A professional bomber would know that someone like Watkins would see it as a likely place for the trigger.

  The place a bomber wanted the charge was not the first place you’d look. When you looked at the first place, you were still sharp and watchful. The bomber wanted you to work your way to the less likely places. When you got to the least likely place, there it would be. By then you’d be tired and bored, maybe careless enough to open drawers without first checking for contacts, or to step without looking down ahead of your feet.

  Watkins refused to rush or get lazy. His mind roamed this nightmare of a house, searching for the other mind, the one that had come here to infuse the building with malice. Watkins had seen bombs go off, and he had seen the aftermath, people simultaneously burned to death and torn apart, charred viscera and brain tissue spilled and limbs wrenched from bodies, blood spattered on pavements and dirt roads. He was aware that in a minute he might experience that destruction. He might already have set off an electronic timer when he opened the front door, and a time-delay relay was about to send the electrical current to the initiator. Maybe now. Or now. Or now.

  He went down on his stomach and swept the flashlight beam along the boards of the hardwood floor, trying to spot a single board that was higher or lower than the others. A misfit board could have been lifted and something placed under it.

  The floor was perfectly level. Watkins looked up at the ceiling and along the crown molding. He reminded himself that if there was a bomber, he had never seen this person’s work before, and didn’t know his specialties, his quirks, his favorites. He kept looking.

  Bombs were not just weapons. They were something more, expressions of the bomber’s thoughts about you, his predictions of your behavior—what you would see, even what you would think and feel. He’d staged a presentation designed to fool you. He didn’t even know your name, but you were the one he was really after. Bombs were acts of murder, but they were also jokes on you, riddles the bomber hoped were too tough for you, chances for you to pick wrong when it was almost impossible to pick right.

  Watkins turned his attention to the furniture. First he moved his flashlight along the bottom edges of the furniture and then behind it, and then he moved to the couch. The easiest place to put a charge was in one of the seat cushions. The cushions usually had a zipper in the back or underneath so the cover could be cleaned or the stuffing replaced. One couch cushion could hold a pretty big bomb. Three of them could blow pieces of the house all over the neighborhood.

  He touched the front of each cushion with his fingers, palpating it to sense whether there was anything hard, or if the stuffing was too full, or there were any empty spaces. He cautiously pushed the spaces between two cushions apart to detect any wires. He worked his way to lifting them up to be sure they weren’t too heavy.

  Next he moved to the big armchairs and repeated the process. After each piece was cleared, he slid it over beside the couch. When he had moved everything to one side, Watkins surveyed the newly bare part of the room to be sure he had missed nothing. He looked at baseboards and molding, sockets, light fixtures, and lamps. He announced, “The living room is clear.” Then he picked up his tool bag and went to the kitchen door. />
  He took out his mirror and extended its telescoping handle. He slipped it into the thin crack between the swinging door and the jamb, moved it up and down, and rotated it. There was nothing connected to the door. There was nothing on the floor. He adjusted his mirror to reflect the kitchen counters. There were a toaster, a blender, a row of spices, a couple of bottles. One was olive oil.

  He saw a small black rectangular box on the kitchen counter. What was that, a phone? A radio? Either could be bad for him. There seemed to be a very thin white cord leading from the countertop to a plug on the wall behind the juicer. He withdrew the mirror, put it away, and picked up the monocular from his tool bag. He leaned into the kitchen, aimed the monocular at the device, and read the brand name. Canon. A camera? No lens, but it looked like camera equipment. As he stared at it, a tiny red indicator on the end came on.

  In that silent moment Watkins identified the device on the counter. It was a photographer’s intervalometer, a device often planted in the wild to detect movement of an animal on a trail and trigger a camera many times in succession as the animal passed by.

  Watkins half turned his body toward the front door to go back, then realized he was not going to make it. The first electrical impulse would be for a charge near the front door, and the next impulses would race around the house, each one setting off a charge where he might take shelter, tearing the house down over him one explosion at a time. “No,” he thought. “Toward it.”

  Watkins pivoted back toward the kitchen, pushed off with his legs and heard the first click of the intervalometer as it sent the first impulse, but there was no explosion. He burst through the swinging door, building speed as he lumbered across the kitchen, dashing for the back door.

  The intervalometer’s second click set off an explosion at the front of the house, the one designed to kill him if he’d retreated to the front door. The shock shook him and his ears hurt, as though it had damaged his eardrums. He flung the back door open and launched himself off the back porch to the lawn. He managed to remain on his feet in the heavy bomb suit, still struggling to run.

  The second explosion punched out the kitchen windows behind him and showered him with glass, and the third took out the windows over his right shoulder. One after another, the charges blew, the next set at the corners of the house. Watkins kept moving, not able to turn and look back, but he heard a crash he believed was the collapse of the roof over the living room.

  The house was being imploded, the way demolition teams imploded skyscrapers and apartment complexes. He knew the only thing that had kept him alive for the past ten seconds was the necessity that the last charge to blow was the one near the intervalometer that set off the charges. The kitchen charge would be the biggest.

  In another half second it came, knocking him off his feet onto the grass, clapboards and two-by-fours striking his back. Then clouds of white dust obscured the world.

  3

  Watkins lay still for a few seconds while the debris fell around him, then listened. There was a strange, terrible silence that made him wonder if he’d lost his hearing.

  “I’m alive,” he said into the microphone, and was relieved to hear himself speak.

  “We heard somebody breathing,” said Maynard’s voice in his earpiece. “Are you hurt?”

  “I think I’m okay,” said Watkins. It wasn’t a perfunctory answer. Some bomb victims had fatal internal injuries and bleeding they didn’t detect at first. “Let’s get the area roped off before we get overrun.”

  He recognized Graham’s voice. “We’re on it.”

  The voices and the incidental noises in Watkins’s earpiece went away. Watkins pushed himself up to his knees, examined his bomb suit for holes or tears, but found it intact. He stood and the layer of debris on his suit fell in a puff of dust at his feet.

  The thing to worry about now was unexploded ordnance. He began to walk across the backyard looking for surprises among the pieces of the house. It was unlikely this bomber would have made any bad electrical connections and left a charge unexploded. He was too highly skilled for that. But his work was also devious and premeditated, so it was important to Watkins to be sure he had not left anything intentionally.

  As Watkins surveyed the scene he saw the thoroughness of the bomber’s work. There were a great many small pieces blown from the house—roof shingles, mostly from the corners of the building, windows and frames, glass, a few sections of clapboard. But the main part of the structure had collapsed into a pile.

  Some of the studs and roof timbers he could see had been drilled and wired for charges, so the house would fall in on itself. He found the front door out on the lawn near the street with forty round holes punched through it. He looked at the angles of impact and realized there must have been a bomb or two with ball bearings taped to them placed above the gypsum board of the ceiling to kill him if he tried to run out that way.

  He watched his team’s black bomb truck stop in the street. It was emblazoned with bright gold paint that said BOMB SQUAD in the hope it would keep at least some bystanders at a distance. Hitched to the back of the truck was a containment vessel on wheels, a steel ball about five feet in diameter with a hatch that could be sealed and a valve for the release of gases. Graham and Maynard got out and began to string yellow tape to keep people away until the scene was found safe and the pieces were examined for evidence.

  The team’s truck had been only five hundred feet away, so it reached the bombed house immediately, but now other vehicles began to arrive. The patrol cars that had blocked off the street on both ends before he entered the house now admitted two fire trucks, an ambulance, and then another bomb truck towing a containment vessel.

  Captain Victor Del Castillo, the commander of the Bomb Squad, jumped down from the truck and trotted up to Watkins. He was lean and tall, a long-distance running enthusiast, and spent months each year trying to recruit his squad members for the annual police endurance races. He said, “Tim, are you all right?”

  “A little stressed,” said Watkins.

  “Stressed? That’s it? Then I won’t waste my sympathy on you. Did you see anything inside we ought to be looking for?”

  “The kitchen was at the back. An intervalometer was on the counter.”

  “A what?”

  “An intervalometer, like photographers use. It was a black box about the size of a cell phone, with the name Canon on it in white letters. I think it was the kind that has a motion sensor that sets off the camera if you want to take pictures of lightning or moving animals or something. I leaned into the kitchen and saw a small red light go on. Then I heard a click. Once the power was on, it ran through a sequence of clicks, each one setting off a charge.”

  “I’ll have the guys start looking for pieces of it. If there’s anything left, it could have a serial number or something. The main thing right now is to be sure we don’t still have live explosives.”

  Del Castillo had come with a three-man team of bomb techs, and he assigned them to search the scene for explosives, pieces of detonators, or other bomb components. He repeated Watkins’s description of the intervalometer and added it to the list. In another ten minutes two more trucks arrived bringing three-man teams, who were added to the sweep. They had to make sure the danger was over before a crime scene crew could come in and collect evidence.

  Their search was difficult and painstaking. Any scrap of metal might be part of one of the bombs. It was essential to clear the area of anything that might explode, and this had to be the priority.

  The scene was not quite like any Watkins had seen before. Where the house had been was now a pile of lumber, some of it charred near the ends where small charges had been placed. The roof was collapsed over the pile of wood and siding, its gutters now about three feet above the ground and its peak less than six feet high. The lots on this street were not large, but the houses on either side of this one appeared to be intact.

  Watkins looked over the area and realized there were fourteen techs w
orking this scene—exactly half of the LAPD Bomb Squad. After a short time, Del Castillo waved to summon Watkins to the bomb truck parked on the street.

  He was carrying a laptop now, and he opened it on the hood of the bomb truck. “Hey, Tim,” he said. “Take a look. I got the plans for this house from Building and Safety.”

  They stared into the screen, shading their eyes from the afternoon sun. The first image was a diagram of the house from above, showing the locations of walls, doors, and windows. Watkins noticed a rectangle with a row of thin horizontal lines. “Is that a staircase?”

  Del Castillo looked at it. “Yeah. Looks that way.”

  “I didn’t see any staircase.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was a one-story house. Why would there be stairs?” Watkins looked closely and then clicked on the second view of the house’s plan, and saw a side-view rendition. The stairway was below ground level.

  It took Watkins a second to identify this part of the diagram. There was an underground space, almost square. He spread his fingers on the touchpad to enlarge the image.

  A dozen things came clear in an instant. He had not seen the stairs because they were underground, extending down to a small basement. A basement was unusual in Los Angeles, but some old houses had them. The basement was why the charges had all been relatively small, placed high in the skeleton of the house to take it apart and collapse the roof onto the floor. Virtually none of the energy had been focused downward. The bomber was protecting something down below. The bomber hadn’t been demolishing some businessman’s house; he’d been making it into a trap for the police.

  Watkins shouted, practically screamed, “Stop!” He ran a couple of steps toward the wreckage that had been the house as he yelled. “Stop! Don’t move! Everybody freeze! Stay where you—”