The Bomb Maker Read online

  He had also built in other ways of producing an explosion in a car bomb. He had connected the blasting caps in the bricks of Semtex to the car’s mechanical and electrical switches so they would complete a circuit if any one of several things happened—lifting the trunk lid, opening a door, starting the engine, turning on a light, stepping on the brake pedal. But the bomb technicians had resisted doing any of those things and evaded his traps.

  He hadn’t needed ready-made blasting caps, really. He was good at making initiators too. They could be very simple—two wires soldered to the inner sides of a spent bullet casing, a small amount of explosive material between them—black powder or fulminate of mercury, maybe, and then a seal at the end. He had once even used a small Christmas lightbulb with the tip ground off so he could fill it with acetone peroxide and seal it again. All it took was a nine-volt charge to set it off.

  But he wasn’t experimenting to amuse himself now. He was making bombs to kill people, so using homemade components was just vanity. That was why he had switched to using commercially made blasting caps. They were reliable and safe. They always required a current of 0.25 amp to set them off, not more—and even more important, not less. And he could use a variety of different power sources to produce that current.

  He had plenty of blasting caps. Only a few months ago he’d taken a trip to replenish his supply. A person had to fill out Form 5400 and have a blaster’s license to buy them, so it was much safer to get them in other ways. He had begun by searching for trained and certified blasters who might need money.

  Many blasters worked in coal mines. A few Internet searches gave him a list of coal mines that had closed in the past year or two. There were some in Boone County in western Kentucky; some in Wyoming County, West Virginia; and some in Knox and Pike counties, in Indiana.

  He searched the online newspapers from coal-mining counties. He found his first three prospects by looking at ads placed by people offering themselves for employment. He found three more by looking up “blasting services”—road clearing, stump removal, demolition. They had clearly tried using their best skills on a freelance basis, but he was almost certain there couldn’t be enough work for the number of blasters living there now that the mines had closed.

  When he had ten names of men who had placed ads saying they had blasting licenses and recent coal-mining experience, he flew east and drove into West Virginia. He started with a man named Carl Mazur, who lived in Wyoming County. He called Mazur and met him at a diner.

  Mazur was a big man in his forties who wore a flannel shirt, Carhartt canvas work pants, and a pair of steel-toed boots to the meeting, so he looked like a lumberjack. He handed the bomb maker a neatly typed résumé when they sat down. The bomb maker glanced at it only long enough to see the blaster’s license and said, “I’ll read this later. Right now is our chance to talk.” Then he put the résumé into his briefcase and said, “How do you find yourself out of work?”

  Mazur explained that the Dall River Mine had closed. He said the closing of the mine had been a gradual process. The number of tons shipped had been decreasing for years, and according to the company, so had the profit margin. Closing down had been discussed vaguely from time to time, but then it was brought up one year during contract negotiations. Many miners had insisted it was a hoax, a trick to get them to work for less. In the end, the union tried to save the jobs for a few more years by giving in on health insurance and pensions. All that accomplished was to give the owners a chance to slip in new clauses to make it easier to lay off everybody, starting with the men who had black lung or silicosis or cancer.

  The bomb maker nodded in sympathy, then made his proposal. He said he was a successful developer who had planned to make more money by buying up some wild land in Missouri and building gated housing developments. In order to get started, he would need to clear and level several thousand-acre parcels and build access roads. The land was high and rocky, but beautiful and surrounded by thick forests. Three of the parcels even had lakes on them. The blasting job was big, and would probably take six months to a year. He offered to pay Mazur his regular fee plus an additional fifty percent bonus for working out of state.

  Mazur asked, “Would I be an employee of your company?”

  “Not unless you want to be. It’s always suited me fine if somebody wanted to be an independent contractor. That gives you a chance to get paid by the job, not the hour. I just want your assurance that you won’t be careless and endanger my men.”

  “What kind of explosives are we talking about?” said Mazur.

  “It’s basically a dynamite job. But I figure nearly all of these blasts can be done with nitrate fertilizer mixed with motor oil and set off with blasting caps. We have men to drill the holes for you wherever you say and clear the rock away after. I’ll leave the blasting details up to you, but we’d like to keep the costs down. We have investors, and once they hand me their money they start asking when payday is going to be.”

  Mazur nodded. “I’ll do it.”

  “Does your résumé have all the information I need? Your blaster’s license number and your contact phones and everything?”

  “Yep,” said Mazur. They made a handshake agreement and the bomb maker gave Mazur twenty thousand dollars to start ordering the supplies he would need to clear the first parcels. Then he gave Mazur one of the business cards he’d made for this trip and they parted in the parking lot.

  After a couple of weeks, Mazur called the cell phone number on the card and said he was nearly ready. He had purchased most of the supplies he would need.

  The bomb maker arranged to meet him in a place called Little Blank Lake, Missouri, in four days. He said he had hired a crew to work on the clearance, and they would get started that Monday on the first parcel.

  They met on a remote forest road on Sunday at noon to look the place over. The bomb maker chatted with Mazur about the project and waited until Mazur took out a key and opened the lock on the big built-in storage box on the left side of his pickup. Then he raised his pistol toward the back of Mazur’s head and shot him. The bullet went through and emerged from Mazur’s forehead, spattering the white truck with bright red blood.

  Shooting Mazur had been a gamble, but he liked to make these small bets with himself about how people would behave in response to a stimulus he’d provided. If he’d been wrong, his penalty would have been to start over again on another licensed blaster. This time he had been right. When he looked inside the big storage box, he found the whole space was neatly packed with new boxes of number eight blasting caps. In the storage box along the other side of the truck bed were reels of insulated wire, a blasting generator, a multimeter, and a toolbox with insulated wire cutters, gloves, wire strippers, and connectors. A hard hat, ear protectors, goggles, one box of dynamite, and four more boxes of blasting caps took up the rest of the truck.

  He left everything but the blasting caps, the dynamite, the money Mazur had left from the twenty thousand dollars he had given him, and the business card he had printed with the name of an imaginary developer.

  9

  Dick Stahl lay on the couch and closed his eyes to ease his headache. He had been too tense, too alert for too many hours. He had spent the time since disarming the car bomb going over all the information he could collect about the two booby-trapped sites of the past two days.

  The trap at the house in Encino that killed Tim Watkins, Del Castillo, and the dozen others had not been an attempt to harm the house’s owner. It had been a way of luring as many bomb technicians as possible to one site and murdering them. The man who had called the 911 line was either the bomber or someone working for the bomber. Stahl knew a bomber called the police only if he was trying to kill the police officers who would respond.

  The car bomb today had been a second attempt to wipe out cops. Chaining the car to the pumps was a sign to the gas station manager that something was going on that was beyond him, and he should call the police. The owners of the gas station in
Studio City and the house in Encino had no connection and nothing in common. The two common elements were the police and the bomber.

  He had listened to the recorded 911 call that had summoned the fourteen to their deaths and watched the video of the man delivering the packed car to the gas station. Both the caller and the video image were unidentifiable, but the evidence did indicate that this was probably a single man, not a group of conspirators. In his experience, terror bombings usually worked this way. There was a single person, usually male and over thirty, who conceived the idea and made the bomb. If there were a second person, he or she drove the explosive-packed car and parked it in a marketplace or in front of a government building, or wore the explosives on his body, or left the briefcase on the crowded floor of the station, or buried the IED in the middle of the dirt road. This time there was no sign of a second person, and there was no hint of why the lone man wanted to do this.

  Stahl had spent years studying explosive devices. He couldn’t think of a single instance of anything resembling these two incidents. Everything was contradictory. The devices themselves were a mixture of the crude and the sophisticated, the rudimentary and the complex.

  The bomber seemed to be an amateur. He had made his own mercury rocker switches, and appeared to have made his own explosive charges. To Stahl this meant the bomber had no access to ready-made materials. On the other hand, only a few professionals were able to make such powerful high explosives. Military demolition people—no matter how deep undercover—seldom had a need to learn practical chemistry well enough to produce explosives from scratch. The al-Qaeda operative who made the shoe bombs and the underwear bomb had been reduced to using peroxide explosives, which were much easier to make than military plastic, but far less safe to work with, and less effective.

  Having an unknown enemy in Los Angeles able to make his own C-4 or Semtex was a disaster. This one understood methods like using shaped charges to penetrate hardened targets, and imploding buildings with dozens of small charges. Stahl had consulted the ATF’s list of recent bomb incidents and found nothing remotely like what he’d seen at the gas station, or what had killed the men in Encino.

  Stahl had not been ready for this. The rescue in Mexico had been a catastrophic case of overconfidence that he’d survived only through ferocity. Before he even had time to catch his breath, there was Dave Ogden.

  It actually crossed his mind that Ogden had come at the head of a squad of cops to arrest him and extradite him to Mexico for murder. Instead, Ogden had come to ask him for a favor that might, ultimately, be worse. And he could not refuse.

  Ogden had been a sergeant when Stahl came out of the police academy. He had been assigned as training officer during Stahl’s probationary period. Because Stahl had enlisted in the army about the time Ogden became a cop, they were almost the same age in spite of the difference in ranks. Ogden had been fair, and Ogden had taught him about police work. Other supervisors had done those things too.

  What had made the difference was one late night in the north Valley. Ogden and Stahl drove past a shipping warehouse in North-ridge, and Stahl saw a moving light under a garage door. They drove around the property and found a spot near the back where the chain-link fence had been cut and rolled up in both directions. The barbed wire at the top had been removed and tossed into a nest of coils nearby.

  Ogden and Stahl went through the breach on foot and saw a dozen men taking cases of liquor out of the back of a big semi and setting them on the tarmac nearby. Rather than attempting to steal the truck, they were loading its cargo into a line of vans, SUVs, and pickups. Ogden called for backup and waited, but someone had already spotted the police car. In less than a minute, the small trucks had begun to pull out through the hole in the fence onto a side street and accelerate onto the boulevard to escape.

  Three SUVs pulled up near the police car—one behind, one in front, and one to the side. They found the police car was empty, so they kept coming. They swept the area outside the fence, and then pulled in through the opened section of fence. Ogden and Stahl retreated toward the warehouse for cover, but the first shots were fired before they could reach it. Within the next three minutes, Ogden had been wounded in the leg, and Stahl was using up their supply of ammunition trying to keep the attackers’ heads down on the other side of the lot. Then, without warning, Ogden drew a .380 backup pistol from his ankle holster and fired over Stahl’s shoulder. The man who had crept up behind Stahl to kill him fell dead. Other police units arrived in another three minutes, too late to affect the outcome.

  He knew that when David Ogden came to his office he’d had mostly noble motives. But there had been a little bit of self-protection too. As of this morning Ogden couldn’t be held responsible for whatever happened next. Nobody could blame him, because he had immediately brought in a former commander of the Bomb Squad, and turned the problem over to him.

  On the way home from the station this evening Stahl had already heard a radio news report giving him credit for outsmarting the car bomber. That was unspeakably stupid. Moving a bomb and detonating it didn’t defeat the bomber. The bomber was fine. He wasn’t in custody, nobody knew anything about him, and he was probably busy building his next bomb right now.

  While Stahl had been at the scene the mayor had apparently been interviewed and given his amateur diagnosis of the bomber as “insane, mentally ill.”

  In Stahl’s experience, men like this bomber never showed any sign whatever that they were mentally ill. They looked like anybody else. They exerted great self-control. They had to obtain substances and devices that were hard to find, hard to buy, and hard to use. They were patient and careful. They had to be the ones who weren’t noticed, weren’t seen, and weren’t remembered.

  And this one scared Stahl. He wasn’t sending out grandiose messages or threats. He hadn’t issued demands. If he had a plan, it was hard to figure out what it was. Stahl was sure he was actively trying to kill off bomb technicians, but why? And what did he have in mind after that?

  Stahl knew he couldn’t sleep. He wanted a drink to loosen his muscles, get rid of his tension headache, and make his eyelids heavy. But if the next call came tonight he would still be under the influence. He had to endure whatever his mind did to him tonight. He was in a fight.

  His cell phone rang and he looked at the display. He didn’t recognize the number, but he had moved into a new environment today, so it could be anyone. “Stahl,” he said.

  The voice was female. “Hi, boss. This is Diane Hines. You’re not asleep.”

  “Apparently you’re not either.”

  “No. I tried taking a hot bath until my fingers and toes got all wrinkled and the water got cold. I tried watching television, but they kept interrupting my sitcoms and showing us at the gas station and the riverbed. You have any ideas?”

  “I’m surprised you’re asking me.”

  “You’re my team supervisor. It’s your job to get your troops through.”

  “What I’d normally recommend in these situations is to have a glass of single malt scotch to take away the agitation and relax the tension. But that only makes sense when the danger is over.”

  “The danger is over for tonight. I don’t know if they had the rule when you were still working, but neither of us is supposed to go on another call for the next shift.”

  “I doubt that applies now. We’re too short staffed.” He paused. “By the way, I don’t know if I had the presence of mind to say this earlier, but you and Elliot did a terrific job today. You’re smart, you have great self-discipline and composure, and I was proud to work with you.”

  “What a nice thing to say. Thank you.”

  “I’ll write it down and put it in your files tomorrow.”

  “Thanks. But I was hoping the next thing you’d say was that you were inviting me over for that drink. I kind of need to talk.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m your commanding officer, at least for now. If you were with Elliot, then it could b
e a team meeting, but—”

  “Not likely. Elliot is married, has two kids, and doesn’t drink.”

  “Diane,” he said. “You know there are police regulations about conduct between us.”

  “Of course. Do you think any female cop doesn’t have Police Regulation 271 memorized? But this is an exception. I’m scared shitless. I could die tomorrow. And you told us all you’re just filling in for a while. I’m not worried that your two-week second career in police work is going to be ruined by having a drink with me. Are you?”

  “To be honest, no. I’m not.”

  “And you have a security company that must pay really well, judging from what your condo is worth.”

  “How do you know what my condo costs?”

  “I have a good eye, and I know the neighborhood,” Diane said. “I’m in my car sitting outside your window. I’ve been watching you pacing in there while we’ve been talking.”

  “If you’re already here, then you might as well come in.”

  She walked up the steps to the high iron security gate and looked into the camera while he buzzed her in. Then she climbed the steps to the steel security door that had been shaped and colored to look like wood. She reached up to knock on his door, but Stahl opened it first.

  She stepped inside and he closed the door behind her. Diane Hines didn’t look much like the woman he had seen in uniform today. She was wearing a gray skirt and black silk blouse that might have seemed plain except the fitted cut emphasized her breasts and thin waist.

  “You look very nice in civilian clothes,” he said.

  “Everybody looks fat in a bomb suit.” She smiled at him, reached into the oversize bag she carried, and pulled out a bottle.

  “Macallan,” he said. “Very thoughtful of you.” He didn’t take the bottle. “Come in and sit.” He pointed at the couch. She walked over and sat, then watched him take two glasses from a cupboard and an identical bottle of Macallan Scotch from a cabinet. “This one’s already open. Ice? Water?”