Deputy Chief Ogden, commanding officer of the Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau, was visible to Stahl in the hallway. He gave Stahl a solemn nod, and then walked off down the hall.
Stahl said, “From now on we will proceed the way we were taught at tech school. A team is three officers — two technicians and one supervisor. Every officer downrange will wear the suit. In most cases that will be one officer only. We’ll rely on the dogs to detect explosives, and use robots as much as we can to lift or disrupt them.”
He looked at the ten men and four women in the room. “Beginning today, we will work under the assumption that we are not defusing anything, no matter how simple and straightforward a device looks. Everything that can’t be detonated in place goes into a containment vessel to be taken to a range and detonated there. I know you want to be able to render the device safe, trace the components to their sources, and convict the bug-eyed creep who assembled them. I’d love that. We just can’t be in that business right now. I don’t think it’s likely this bomber killed fourteen bomb technicians by accident. I think he devised the situation so he could. I don’t know why. But we can’t let it happen again. Questions?”
A big man around forty years old with black hair and the hint of a tattoo peeking from his left shirt cuff raised his hand. As his shirt came down Stahl could see the design was a rattlesnake coiling up his arm.
Stahl nodded. “Can you identify yourself for me, please?”
“Sergeant Ed Carmody. I was going to ask you the same. You’re a friend of Deputy Chief Ogden, right?”
“Yes. He asked me to help out for a while.” He shrugged. “I also have other friends on the force, and until yesterday I had more.”
“Are you a bomb tech? Everybody here has been through the FBI course at the Redstone Arsenal and Eglin Air Force Base, and then recertified every three years.”
“Yes. I was an army EOD man. I did tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, then worked out of Germany on a rapid deployment team for a while. Then I was the NCO in charge of the practical training range at Eglin for a couple of years. Then I came here and ran this squad. Some of the guys we lost yesterday are techs I selected and trained — Watkins, Del Castillo, Maynard, and Capiello.”
A small, pretty woman with light skin and her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun said, “How long will you stay?”
“I haven’t had time to figure that out. For now let’s just say I’ll try to help you through this, and then I’ll go away. About a half hour ago the chief swore me in. Here’s my badge.” He took it out and held it up in its identification wallet. “The day you’re back at full strength and running right I’ll give it back to him.”
He took a folded sheet of paper from his coat pocket and consulted it. “Your team supervisors will be the same. If you were one, you still are. There are four teams consisting of three officers, and one team with only two. For now, I’ll join that one to fill in. We’ll call it Team One.” He looked at the sheet of paper. “With officers Elliot and Hines. Raise your hands.”
He saw a couple of the techs look at each other and raise their hands — the small dark-haired woman who had spoken and the tall athletic-looking African American man in his early thirties beside her.
The radios clipped to all fourteen of the uniforms spat and crackled, and the female dispatcher’s calm voice said, “Bomb technician team requested eleven thousand two hundred Moorpark Avenue in Studio City. Officer reports suspicious vehicle chained to the pumps at a gas station.”
Stahl said, “My team will take this one. That will give the rest of you time to return to your stations and stand by for the next. Remember there’s a group or a person out there who seems to want us all dead. Don’t assume what you’re looking at is what it seems to be. Take care of each other.”
Stahl walked quickly out of the squad room with Hines trying to get ahead of him. Elliot followed a few feet behind, on the radio. “This is Sergeant Elliot. Team One is responding,” he said. “ETA approximately fifteen minutes.”
As he followed Sergeant Diane Hines outside to the parked truck, Stahl looked at the new LAPD headquarters building. It was all glass and knife-edge corners, many empty multilevel spaces and hallways with their own views of the Civic Center. The building had won awards, and it had a row of sculptures along its Spring Street side that looked to him like a line of hippos lying down beside a river. The array was interesting, but he knew they were there to keep somebody from driving a truck into the building — maybe somebody like the person who had wired up that house yesterday.
He got in the bomb truck and moved to the back, so Elliot and Hines would take the two front seats. Hines claimed the driver’s seat and started the engine while Elliot climbed in. Then she flipped on the lights and siren and accelerated onto First Street. Hines drove with a cop’s aggression and speed, and won the game of chicken at each intersection.
It had been a long time since Stahl had been in a speeding bomb truck, but it could never be long enough.
6
It was shortly before noon when Hines coasted off the freeway at the Laurel Canyon exit, covered the last couple of blocks, and then pulled up in front of the gas station. The pair of officers who had arrived at the scene first had strung yellow tape across one entrance and parked their patrol car across the other, and the young male officer was now guarding the scene while he spoke on a hand radio. He lowered the tape to let Hines drive the bomb truck in over it, and then secured it again.
Hines stopped the truck in front of the small store at the edge of the station and she, Elliot, and Stahl jumped down. Elliot knelt to follow the chains from a pump to the car and then to the other pump, examining but not touching anything.
“That’s it,” said the cop. “There are chains running from each axle and around both gas pumps, so the car stays put.”
Stahl said to the cop, “Where’s your partner?”
“She’s in the store with the owner.”
Stahl said to Hines and Elliot, “I’ll go in and find out what I can.”
He stepped into the small station. There was a counter with a cash register, and behind it a small room that looked like an office. A blond female officer was inside speaking with the owner.
When the cop heard Stahl set off the chime as he came in the door she pivoted. “Sir, the station is closed right now. You’ll have to—”
He held up the identification wallet with the captain’s badge. “I’m Stahl, the Bomb Squad commander.”
“Yes, sir. I was just reviewing the surveillance tapes with Mr. Wertheim. He’s the owner.”
“Very good. Do they show the car being driven here?”
“The car was towed here about three a.m. The tape shows the car being towed behind a pickup. Then a man steps out of the truck, goes to the cameras, and smashes them, one by one, with a tire iron. He also broke into the store, but I don’t think he found anything he wanted. Mr. Wertheim says nothing’s missing. He doesn’t keep any cash here overnight.”
“Okay, thank you, officer. Now, take Mr. Wertheim and your partner and put at least five hundred feet between you and the station. Take the surveillance equipment with you so the recordings are preserved. And please radio a request to stop traffic from coming into this intersection. We’ll wait for you to call us before we touch the car.”
“Yes, sir.”
Stahl stepped outside and walked around the car and gas pumps at a distance of about six feet as he spoke into his handheld radio. “This is Bomb Squad Team One. We have a suspected car bomb at the gas station. Please clear the airspace above Laurel Canyon and Moorpark. And we’ll need at least a block on each side of us cleared of vehicular and pedestrian traffic. And please be prepared to evacuate the apartments and businesses on both streets.” He signed off and completed another circle of the car, stopping now and then to squat or kneel and look under the car or study the chain without touching it. “A Chevy Malibu, twenty thirteen. Let’s get a set of manuals for it on the laptop and get familiar with the parts breakdown, particularly the schematics for the electrical system.”