Stahl looked at the brush and the ground beside the highway. It was dark enough to risk leaving the car and walking. There were yucca plants and tumbleweed, lots of thick, dry spiky plants high enough to disguise the shape of a car, at least until dawn. He released the brake on Diane’s car, shifted it into neutral, and let it coast into the brush.
Motion was what the eyes noticed most easily. He walked directly toward the house instead of along the road, and tried to stay among the Joshua trees, which looked a bit like human shapes. He tried to make the best use of the landscape and the darkness.
Soon he was at the edge of the open land around the house. The grounds had been cleared of random desert weeds and brush, so the land looked like white sand under the night sky. Someone had planted dark-colored drought-resistant shrubs in tight rows that circled the house. This was an arrangement that Stahl had never seen anywhere. From the air, the house must look like a huge target. Was that a psychopath’s private joke? No, he thought. This man’s jokes were cruel.
He couldn’t move his attention past the arrangement of shrubs. The rows were about ten yards apart, going from almost the edge of the highway all the way to a spot about fifteen yards from the house.
Stahl walked close to the outer row and knelt just outside the giant circle. He began to brush away the coarse sand from between two shrubs to see anything hidden there. The sun had been down for at least eight hours, but the sand was still warm to his touch. He dug a little bit deeper, where the sand felt cooler and less dusty. He felt a length of insulated wire. He kept digging, unearthing more and more of the wire.
The wire was thick, about a quarter inch, jacketed with a rubbery plastic like coaxial cable. The wire ran along the same course as the shrubs, but just outside them. After a few feet he found a pair of thinner insulated wires that had been spliced to the cable.
He followed them a couple of feet, where they entered a plastic box. He dug around the box with great care, because even working by feel, he thought he knew what must be inside. The boxes were there to keep the rainwater, the burrowing animals, the shifting sand away from the electrical wiring and the explosives. He was kneeling at the edge of a minefield.
He kept digging until he could lift the plastic box out of its hole, set it down on the warm surface sand, and open it by stripping away a layer of duct tape that ran along the side seam. He disconnected the thick wire that carried the electrical power that probably fed off the house’s 110-volt circuit, and then explored with his fingers what was left in the box. It was a blasting cap stuck into a few pounds of Semtex with one of its two wires connected to the power wire and the other back out. The way the charge was wired, a switch in the house could set off a mine, or maybe blow a whole row at one time.
He dug at the next place where he found thin wires spliced to the main cable, which was about ten feet away, then disconnected them and unearthed another box. He took up a third, and realized it was not going to be possible to disconnect them all before dawn. Out of caution he examined the next row of shrubs, and realized this row had very thin wire strung about two inches above the ground between very small eye screws in the trunk of each shrub, so a man walking through would trip the wire and be blown up.
If he hadn’t been here looking for booby traps, he probably wouldn’t have suspected that the wires were a trigger. They looked like the sort of guide a gardener might string to show him where to plant his shrubs.
He studied the second row. There would be a number of buried bombs here. He guessed there would be bounding mines, like the ones that had been used to kill Ed Carmody. A whole assault squad of cops could be killed that way without an explosion big enough to do much harm to the house. Stahl decided that if he lived, he would blow them up in place.
The lights in the house were on, but the shades and curtains were drawn. He was positive now that this was the place he guessed months ago must exist somewhere. He had favored the theory that the bomber was a loner rather than a terrorist, someone acting out of personal malevolence. The men Stahl had followed here had proved the loner theory wrong.
He stacked the three boxes of explosives, picked them up, and carried them along the trail of footprints he had made coming from Diane’s car. When he got there he set them down carefully, opened the hood of the car, and began to work. He was pleased to see that the tape the bomber had used to seal the plastic boxes was still very sticky and functional. He also noted that this bomber always used more tape and wire than he needed, possibly to avoid the chance of having a circuit’s wires get jostled taut and disconnect. It wasn’t just the device’s high explosive and blasting caps that could be reused.
48
The bomb maker was lying on the garage floor, his wrists and ankles bound with heavy-gauge wire and duct tape from his own workshop.
The terrorists had completed their inventory of his munitions, his supplies, and his devices. They were carrying the devices, one by one, from the garage into the three black vehicles and his van and his sedan.
As they worked, he tried to talk to them. “You don’t have to do this. There’s no reason to panic and think we have to launch the attack right away. If they had found you or traced you here, they would never have let you get this far. What you’re trying to do is very dangerous for you. I can do it safely.”
One of the men, who was with some trepidation carrying a device that weighed about eighty pounds, said, “Shut up.”
The bald man came out of the kitchen eating a sandwich he had made from food in the bomb maker’s refrigerator.
The bomb maker felt a hot wave of irritation wash over him, but reminded himself he didn’t need any of that food. He had always planned to get out of Southern California the minute the first charges began to explode all over the city.
The bald man stared at him, chewing thoughtfully.
The bomb maker knew he had to be strong and prove he was still valuable, not a sad, craven victim, if he wanted to live through this. He said, “I’ve forgiven you for losing control of your emotions before. That was understandable. If you’ll give me the money I was promised, I’ll still set all the big devices and place them. They’ll be set at the most strategic spots and they’ll demolish their targets. They’ll be incredible. I guarantee a thousand or more dead.”
“Forget the money,” the bald man said. “Do you see ten million dollars on me? It’s not here, and I have no way to get it. The money is over. Everything goes today.”
“You won’t be able to do it.”
The bald man smiled. “Why do you think we would hire you to kill off the Bomb Squad and not, say, the SWAT team, or the chief, or something? We’re all trained in demolition. We can set a bomb ourselves.”
“That’s even better. Pay me whatever you can, and let me go, and I’ll tell you how each device works.”
“I’ll take the chance of setting the big charges off by putting little ones beside them. That’s simple enough even for men who aren’t geniuses like you.”
“But you don’t have to do this yourself. I’ll do it better because I’ve spent years studying it, and I designed all of them,” said the bomb maker. “Every one of them is designed to fool the Bomb Squad. You could have men killed with our own devices.”
The bald man finished his last bite of sandwich, chewed it, and swallowed. “I once saw a man kill a dog in a desert. He didn’t need to shoot it or poison it. He took duct tape just like the kind wrapped around your arms. Then he taped the dog’s mouth shut so he couldn’t cool his body temperature. It’s hot outside here too.”