When the ceremonial talk ended, a police honor guard fired the customary rifle salute, and a lone bagpiper played a sad, wailing tune from a few yards higher on the hillside that looked out over the flat valley below. Stahl waited for the final prayer to end and turned to look behind him. He saw her about fifty feet away with Elliot and Team Three and Team Four. She looked very solemn and beautiful. Her eyes never glanced in his direction as she pivoted and walked along the row of chairs with the others.
At that moment his phone began to vibrate in his breast pocket. He saw the number was his office, and he moved off quickly to be able to talk.
As he hurried toward the road where his car was parked he called Andy. “This is Stahl.”
“Second team is out on a suspicious package call, but Sergeant McCrary, the supervisor, just called to talk to you. He said he’s got something.”
“Can you connect me?”
“Yes. Hold on.”
When he heard the connection go through he said, “This is Stahl. What have you got, Sarge?”
McCrary said, “A pipe bomb. It was left outside the front door of the women’s health building at Kaplan and Steers in Van Nuys this morning. It looked like a routine delivery, but when a security guard went to pick it up, the box was just an empty cover slipped over the bomb. When he ran inside to get something to keep people from touching it, the phone was already ringing at the front desk. It was a guy warning him he had five minutes to clear the building.”
“Did he?”
“Hell yes. He got everybody to go outside like it was a fire drill.”
“Why did the bomber call?” asked Stahl.
“What do you mean?”
“The pipe bomb was right outside the front door, right? The guard lifted the cardboard box and saw there was a pipe bomb under it. The bomber knew one of two things was going to happen: either the guard would blow himself up or he’d know what it was.”
“Yes,” said McCrary.
“So why call?”
“Maybe the guy wanted to scare people, but didn’t want to kill them, or lost his nerve, or just changed his mind. I don’t know. But it’s a routine-looking pipe bomb, put in an unsurprising place. You know how many women’s clinics have had bombs in the past ten years. I’d like to render it safe and then take it out of here in the containment vessel for detonation.”
“Don’t do anything yet,” said Stahl. “Let it sit until I get there. And above all, don’t let anybody back into the building. If this is a bomb that’s not related to the others, we’ll do just as you say. But right now the call doesn’t feel right. It feels like our bomber used the pipe bomb to get them to evacuate the building so he could go inside and plant something worse. And it seems he might have picked a women’s health center to make it seem routine to us.”
“Yes, sir,” said McCrary. Stahl could hear in his voice the patient resignation of a man who was used to obeying superiors because they were superiors, not because they were right.
“You said Kaplan and Steers, right?” Stahl said.
“Right.”
Stahl hung up, trotted the rest of the way to his car, and drove to the women’s health center. The center was a four-story brick building with two rectangular wings and a central lobby with glass doors on the edge of a huge parking lot. Stahl could see the bomb truck, the only vehicle within a hundred feet of the front of the building. There was yellow police tape strung around the building’s entrance, and a second tape beyond the bomb truck to establish a perimeter. Stahl approached the nearest cop and showed his badge so he could pass.
He ducked under the tape, walked straight to McCrary, and shook his hand. “Good,” said Stahl. “You’ve got a good perimeter set up and everybody out of the way. I assume you made a Code Five Edward call to clear the airspace?”
McCrary nodded.
“Then let’s take a closer look.”
McCrary and Stahl walked to the front of the building, where they both paused a few feet from the device. Finally they approached the device cautiously. When they were near it, Stahl could see that the device looked like most pipe bombs. It was a two-inch metal pipe about a foot long with screw-on caps at both ends. Two holes had been drilled on one end and a pair of wires that looked like the leads to an initiator ran out to a lithium-ion battery. The trigger switch was not visible, but a switch could be any size, and there was a layer of tape around the pipe that Stahl could see was thick and lumpy and looked as though it held ball bearings. The tape could also hide the switch.
“It’s too big to detonate here. We’ve got to take it away,” said Stahl. “We still use the Mark V-A1, right?”
“Andros?” said McCrary. “Yeah. We don’t have one with us right now, but I’ll call for one.”
“Okay,” said Stahl. “While we wait we can get the containment vessel ready to take the bomb and start having the officers move the bystanders back another two hundred feet. That device has a couple of layers of shrapnel taped around it.”
While McCrary was on the radio to headquarters and to the police officers guarding the perimeter, they walked to the bomb truck. As they approached the truck, McCrary said, “Gentlemen, you’ve met Captain Stahl.”
Stahl shook hands with the two. “Curtis, Bolland, nice to see you.”
“The captain has given us the go-ahead to get the pipe bomb moved out of here, and I’ve called for an Andros,” McCrary said. “Let’s get the containment vessel moved up close so the robot can get the bomb into it by carrying it a few yards. No bumpy areas, no inclines if we can help it.”
Curtis and Bolland got into the truck and towed the five-thousand-pound containment vessel close to the device lying on the concrete in front of the entrance. They secured it so it wouldn’t roll, then opened the vessel’s hatch. They pulled the truck back to where the others stood in the parking lot, and then began checking with the police officers in the area by radio to be sure all civilians had been moved back to a distance of five hundred feet.
The Team Three bomb truck arrived with the robot. Two of the bomb technicians jumped out and dragged out the ramp at the back while the other, Alice Terranova, brought out a small control device and began using it to direct the robot down the ramp to the surface of the parking lot.
Stahl said, “Thank you, Terranova. Nice to see you, Moss.” He was making a point of addressing everyone directly for the moment. It wasn’t too much to expect for him to remember the names of the living fourteen people on the Bomb Squad, officers who would be risking their lives with him each day. He waved at the man driving the bomb truck. “Hey, Townsend.”
Stahl said, “This is Sergeant McCrary’s operation. I’m just here to hang around and see if I can learn anything about this bomber. Team Two has done a great job of setting up a perimeter, getting everybody back far enough, and so on. The first mistake was mine. Because of me, this bomber has managed to get seven of us here at one time. That’s half the Bomb Squad at current strength. So I’m going to ask Team Three to turn around and return to your station. Team Two will take it from here. Thanks for the robot.”
“Yes, sir.” Terranova handed the control console to Curtis, and she and the others climbed back into their truck and drove off.
Stahl nodded at McCrary, then stepped back to stand by the truck while Curtis maneuvered the robot across the asphalt parking lot toward the entrance to the building.
The work went quickly. The robot’s top speed was three and a half miles an hour, about the normal walking speed of a man. As the robot approached the pipe bomb, Curtis slowed it considerably and transferred all of his attention to the screen of the control box so he was seeing the bomb and the pavement from the point of view of Andros’s video camera.