“Do you have any metal on you, sir?” he asked in lightly accented English.
“Metal?” al-Hassan said. “No. The other detector didn’t—”
The young man smiled. “They are temperamental sometimes.” He held up a metal wand. “May I?” Before al-Hassan could respond, he began to wave the handheld detector over the attendee. The wand hummed steadily until the guard passed it over alHassan’s arm.
“Ah,” he said. “I broke my arm. There is a metal plate in there.”
The guard nodded. He gently fingered the cloth sling again, and then waved al-Hassan through.
“Can you believe the security here?” said a woman who appeared suddenly beside him.
Marwan al-Hassan knew immediately that this was a Jew. Only his training kept the look of disdain off his face. “Necessary, I suppose.” He turned away from her.
“Well, no need to be rude, Mr. al-Hassan,” the woman said. “Are you saying you don’t remember me?”
Marwan looked at her calmly, but he felt his heart pound against the side of his neck. Could he be undone so quickly? “I’m sorry?” “Amy Weiss.” The woman laughed. “I interviewed you on Thursday about the conference.” “Ah, of course,” he said apologetically. “I’m so sorry. The last few days have been very hectic.”
“I’m sure,” Amy Weiss said. “That’s just twice now, after I did that story on your peace efforts after the ’93 bombing.”
Marwan fought the urge to squeeze her neck until her head popped off. “We all have our failings,” he said sweetly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
Boo McElroy had never picked up his room as a kid, so now he was stuck picking up trash on Interstate 5. Boo (his real name was Bradley, but no one called him that) didn’t have the vocabulary to use the word irony, but that’s what he felt. He’d always told his mom she could go stuff herself every time she tried to get him to clean up. He was a tough kid, independent, doing his own thing.
Until he got caught robbing a 7-Eleven, his third robbery since turning eighteen. Now he was serving a year in county, and working off some of that time wearing an orange vest and raking up trash along the freeway with a crew of cons.
He couldn’t believe how much shit people tossed out of their cars. Come on, he tossed a bottle or can now and then, but his own personal shit couldn’t amount to much. It was all these other bastards who treated the city like it was a toilet.
He used his poker to jab a can and then lift it up into his trash bag. He moved on and saw a large canvas bag. It was his size and half covered in dust and leaves. It looked full. Well, hell, he thought, no way was he picking up that big thing. They couldn’t make him—
He stopped mid-gripe and blinked. He used his poker to push aside some leaves.
There was a cold, gray hand sticking out of the bag.
Jack saw Harry Driscoll waiting outside the door of the forensics lab.
“What couldn’t you tell me over the phone?” Jack asked, slightly annoyed.
“Inside,” Harry said. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. You have to see it.”
Jack followed Harry inside, where they were both greeted by a woman in a lab coat who introduced herself as Dr. Siegman. She looked astounded and fascinated and was clearly eager to get back to the autopsy room. Outside, they donned surgical masks, then entered.
The naked corpse of the priest lay on the examination table. Its left arm had been cut open and splayed out.
“This is why we wanted you to come down,” the coroner said. “Look at the arm.”
Jack approached the table and looked at the sickeningly butchered arm. The bone was exposed, but along the bone there was a steel plate, around which had been packed strips of what looked like very wet putty.
“C–4?” Jack asked. Siegman shrugged. “That’s not my field, but from what the detective tells me, that may be the case.”
Siegman picked up a probe and used it to push aside some of the dead tissue. “Look how it’s designed. A plate like this is normally used to brace a badly broken bone. But this one is a lot weaker. And look how the explosives are packed in there. I think if this were to explode, all this metal would go flying outward.”
“Show him the receiver,” Harry said.
Siegman used a pair of tongs to lift a small circuit. “Again, not my field, but if this is an explosive, I’m guessing this is a receiver.”
The ramifications of what he was seeing were instantly clear to Jack. Father Collins had turned himself into a human bomb. Jack’s knowledge of ordnance wasn’t strong enough to estimate the power of the blast, but he’d just seen what a brick of C–4 could do to a packed earth wall.
The small room seemed eerily silent with the three of them staring at the mutilated corpse. Finally, Harry Driscoll said something to break the dead quiet. “This is the most twisted thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, I’ve heard of suicide bombers, of course—”
“It’s not that far off,” Jack cut in. “Either way, the bomber is going to die. This delivery system—”
“Delivery system!” Dr. Siegman gasped, horrified. “This is a human being!”
But Jack was beyond her sense of morality, assessing the threat. “It’s not as efficient as a suicide vest. You can pack that with more C–4, and use nails, bolts, other stuff to make yourself a claymore mine. But this would be undetectable.”
“There’s that metal plate, though,” Harry pointed out.
Siegman was finding the same page Jack was on. “It wouldn’t matter. Most metal detectors aren’t set to go off when they find that density of metal. The plates are made that way. And even when they are, what would the security guard do, ask you to open your arm?”
“Was the transmitter on him?” Jack asked.
They searched through the few possessions that had arrived with the corpse, but found nothing of interest. “It might be anything,” Jack said. “A cell phone. The keyless entry on a car. Anything.”
“He wasn’t going after anything when I arrested him,” Harry said. “Man, he played that cool. But I guess if you’re willing to have a bomb planted in your arm, you can handle a few questions from a cop.”
Jack stepped back from the corpse, as though the physical distance might lend him mental perspective. The discovery lent him a small sense of relief— whatever Collins had been planning to do, it clearly wasn’t going to happen now. And at least now they knew why Driscoll’s attackers had wanted to reclaim that body. But it also raised a hundred questions, and at least a dozen of them were urgent. What had been the intended target? Who had helped him with the horrific surgery? Was there a connection between Father Collins, the human bomb, and Father Collins, the child molester? Other questions swirled around in Jack’s brain. He needed to organize them.
“Background check on Collins,” he said out loud, reciting the first thing he needed. “We need to know who this guy was. This has got to be the C–4 missing from the — oh, damn.” A depressing thought struck him. He looked at Siegman. “I don’t suppose there’s ten pounds of the stuff in there.”
Siegman looked at the arm. “I can give you an exact weight in a little while,” she said, “but no way. Whoever did this did it well, but there’s no ten pounds. They did this well. Look, there’s a sterilized wrap around the explosive, so it doesn’t break off and start moving around in the body and get reactions from the immune system. But I guarantee you, this guy was feeling even this amount. He must have been in some serious pain. The human body doesn’t like a lot of foreign objects invading it.”