The Bomb Maker E-Book

Thomas Perry

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 576

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

A threat is called into the LAPD Bomb Squad and when tragedy ensues, the fragmented unit turns to Dick Stahl, a former Bomb Squad commander who now operates his own private security company. Just returned from a tough job in Mexico, Stahl is at first reluctant to accept the offer, but his sense of duty to the technicians he trained is too strong to turn it down. On his first day back at the head of the squad, Stahl's three-person team is dispatched to a suspected car bomb. And it quickly becomes clear to him that they are dealing with an unusual mastermind - one whose intended target seems to be the Bomb Squad itself. As the shadowy organization sponsoring this campaign of violence puts increasing pressure on the bomb maker and Stahl becomes dangerously entangled with a member of his own team, the fuse on this high-stakes plot only burns faster. The Bomb Maker is Thomas Perry's biggest, most unstoppable thriller yet.

Leseprobe

‘The intense thrills of Thomas Perry’s The Bomb Maker are almost unbearable . . . There seems to be no pattern to the placement of these “well-designed, insidious and psychologically astute” devices . . . Before they go off, the tension is killing. And when they do, the damage is spectacular’

New York Times Book Review

‘Perry, in this first-rate thriller, proves as cagy as his criminal mastermind: The reader rarely anticipates his next move. He balances breathtaking suspense with romantic intrigue . . . Meanwhile, the bomber is pressured to work harder and faster by circumstances that even he can’t control. His murderous designs, combined with Stahl’s quest to stop him at all costs, ensure that Mr. Perry’s book will have a suitably explosive finale’

Wall Street Journal

‘Perry is a master of plotting and he ratchets up the suspense so tightly that I read this book in one 12-hour run. Most readers know him from his Jane Whitefield “disappeared” series. His thrillers, of which this is one of the best, are even better’

Globe and Mail

‘There are probably only half a dozen suspense writers alive who can be depended upon to deliver high-voltage shocks; vivid, sympathetic characters; and compelling narratives each time they publish. Thomas Perry is one of them’

Stephen King

‘The Bomb Maker will feed your inner paranoia, even if it is securely enclosed in a lockbox deep within your psyche. Thomas Perry, who has demonstrated time and time again over the course of a 35-year career that he is incapable of writing badly, pulls out whatever (invisible) stops he may have had and lets it all flow on this one, from first page to last. Once you start reading, you won’t be able to stop . . . Perry never fails to surprise and entertain, but with The Bomb Maker, he raises the suspense level to teeth-grinding . . . This is a masterwork by an author who always delivers more than is required or expected’

Bookreporter

‘Plenty of character, plenty of emotion, plenty of insider expertise, but most of all plenty of irresistible momentum toward a fantastic climax—in other words, The Bomb Maker is typical Thomas Perry’

Lee Child, #1 bestselling author of the Jack Reacher series

‘An explosive (pun intended) new book from an old pro. Thomas Perry has skillfully captured the super stressful world of the LAPD Bomb Squad, and gotten deep into the head of a mad bomber. This is the ultimate cat-and-mouse game, a story so tense and riveting that you’ll find yourself holding your breath as the timer ticks off the seconds. The Bomb Maker is a unique achievement, a wonderful mix of psychological thriller and high-tech entertainment. Perry always delivers’

Nelson DeMille, bestselling author of The Cuban Affair

Also by Thomas Perry

The Butcher’s Boy

Metzger’s Dog

Big Fish

Island

Sleeping Dogs

Vanishing Act

Dance for the Dead

Shadow Woman

The Face-Changers

Blood Money

Death Benefits

Pursuit

Dead Aim

Nightlife

Silence

Fidelity

Runner

Strip

The Informant

Poison Flower

The Boyfriend

A String of Beads

Forty Thieves

The Old Man

The Burglar

A Small Town

Eddie’s Boy

The Left-Handed Twin

Murder Book

First published in the United States of America in 2018 by The Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2023 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © Thomas Perry, 2018

The moral right of Thomas Perry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 80471 058 6

E-book ISBN 978 1 80471 059 3

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

To Jo, Alix, and Ian, with thanks to Otto Penzler

1

The maker’s fingers were nimble and certain, never trembling or touching any object or surface without intention. His hands were sure because he had designed the parts to be assembled in a precise order. A bomb was a simple machine. Its only moving part was a switch to complete the circuit running from the power source to an initiator and back. But bomb making was mentally demanding. Creating a potent blast required knowing the chemical processes he could produce by combining particular substances in specific proportions. He had to know how to coax them to transform from inert lumps of matter into sound, light, heat, and brute force.

The switch was enormously important. If he kept the switch open while he assembled the parts, nothing was at risk. The device became lethal only in the instant when the switch was engaged and the circuit was closed. Part of the maker’s power was building in the set of conditions that must exist before the switch would close.

He had used barometer switches designed to close when the bomb was at a specific altitude. He’d made time-delay bomb switches from kitchen timers, timers from lawn sprinkler systems, and alarm clocks. He’d made switches that used motion sensors from outdoor lighting fixtures to close a circuit when a person came near. He’d set bombs off with mousetraps, components from children’s toys and games, a pressure pad that turned on a laughing Halloween witch when a child stepped on it. He’d made a few from toasters and thermostats.

When commercially manufactured hardware was available that could perform the function he needed, he preferred to use it, no matter what its original purpose. Such components were tougher and more reliable than those built from scratch, and he could test them repeatedly ahead of time to be sure they worked, and then he could buy more or buy other models that worked better. Most electronic components came already tested, with a UL label on them. All he had to do was subvert the will of their designer to adapt them to his own purpose.

For similar reasons, he preferred to use commercially made initiators, preferably blasting caps. Usually he could not obtain manufactured explosives for the main charges of his bombs. Military explosives like C-4 were safe and reliable, but they were tightly controlled. Dynamite was far less powerful, but easier to buy or steal. The drawback of factory-made explosives was that they could be traced. Dynamite even contained tiny identifying tags that would be blown all over the blast area.

His only choice had been to learn to make his own. The planet was full of substances that could be made to explode. Many common materials could be induced to blow up—natural gas, wheat flour, coal dust, nitrate fertilizer. One of the biggest industrial explosions in history had been in a molasses plant. The cars people drove were propelled by small explosions of gasoline in the engine’s cylinders that pushed down pistons and turned a crankshaft. A bomb maker’s practical problem wasn’t that explosions were too difficult. Most of them were if anything too easy, too unpredictable.

Much of the challenge in his current project came from the miniaturization necessary to make a complex set of devices that would work in sequence, but not be noticed before detonation. He had to work with a magnifier on a small stand designed for jewelers and fly fishermen so he could do the delicate work without error.

The idea was to make a device small and familiar enough to be ignored, or at least to remain unsuspected. Right now his stand held a sturdy phone-size black plastic box bearing the white letters of a company logo: Canon, a name people knew. He popped open the case and studied the circuitry. He was pleased. This was an excellent piece of equipment. He could use it. He picked up his soldering gun to make the connections between the device’s circuitry and the electrical wires he was expecting the device to supply with power. Each of the wires was stripped to the copper at the end, and the rest of its length was white insulator. Most of the house where he wanted to use the small black box had white walls and white woodwork, so he had decided to start with white. He was intending to keep the device’s batteries charging on a wall socket until it was time. And then, even if the AC power source got cut off, the effect would be the same.

After two hours he finished and looked at his device. The circuit was as he had intended, and the solder connecting his twenty-four firing wires looked perfect. He turned off the intense desk lamp, rubbed his eyes with his hands, took a deep breath, and blew it out again. He had been working at this iteration of his idea for most of the day.

He stood and left the garage he had converted into a workshop, went out through the house and into the backyard. He thought of it as a backyard, but it was much too big to be called that. The land was fifty acres of sand mounds, dry brush and pebbles, rocks and yuccas, surrounded by miles more that didn’t seem to belong to anyone, and then a range of dry brown mountains on each side like the rim of a bowl.

It was late afternoon, and he looked out on the open land and assessed the period of daylight he had left. The shadows of the Joshua trees were long, but he might still get to his next device after he completed this test.

He had lived alone in the desert for over four years. The desert was a place where he could set off small charges, most of the time without anybody hearing them. Anybody who did hear would attribute the noise to a neighbor taking rifle practice. He did that sometimes too, and the sound was much louder than most of his experiments.

This time he didn’t need to make any noise. He had built a silent test device for the circuits he was making for this project. He went back into the shop in his garage and placed the small black box on one end of his long workbench. It had twenty-four coils of white wire attached to it. His test device was a six-foot board that held twenty-four five-watt lightbulbs. He connected each set of wires to one of the light fixtures.

He checked the adjustments on the small black box. Next he set the device to trigger when the electric eye detected motion near it.

He plugged the device into the nearest socket, stepped back about seven feet—too far away to touch it—and brought his hand down like a conductor eliciting the first note from an orchestra. The black box began to tick. With each tick, one of the five-watt bulbs went on. One by one, each of them lit and then went out, so it looked as though the light were a single bright object moving down the board. The effect reminded him of the marquee in front of the old Palace Theatre in Indianapolis during his childhood. He smiled. All twenty-four bulbs had lit and gone out.

He repeated the test, this time with the speed increased, so the light moved down the board much faster, taking only about a second to move the six feet down the board. He slowed it down and played with the timing control until he felt that the speed and rhythm were perfect. He disconnected the wires from the board and gently placed his small black box in a cardboard carton, taking care not to put any strain on the wires protruding from it. He went outside again, feeling he had accomplished something today.

The bomb maker was thirty-five and average looking, with short, dirty blond hair; a thin, sinewy body; and a flat stomach he kept that way with moderate habits and runs in the desert at dawn when it wasn’t too hot out. He stretched his back and arms and felt taller than his five feet ten inches. He took a deep breath as he stretched, enjoying the sun and the clear air and the endless blue sky and then decided he still had enough sunlight left to run his next test.

He went back to the workshop, retrieved another device, and set it up a hundred feet away on the range. The last thing he did was make the final connection to bring a blasting cap into the circuit. He retreated to the workshop and picked up the radio transmitter he had taken from the remote controller of a motorized toy car. He had rigged the transmitter to switch on when he stepped on a homemade pressure pad. He set the nearly flat object down at his feet and stepped on it. Instantly the receiver from the toy car received the signal and he heard the satisfying bang of the blasting cap.

Setting off a detonator from a distance wasn’t the whole game, but it was a necessary condition for a particular explosion he was planning. He was satisfied. He had five more toy cars in his garage, and tomorrow morning he would begin dismantling the controllers and taking the receivers out of the toys to begin modifying them for his purpose.

As he walked, he congratulated himself on his success. He made weapons, but didn’t consider himself a warrior. He was a bomb maker, a person who killed unseen and from a safe distance. All bombs came from a small, scheming, self-protective part of the mind. No bomb came from bravery. At most, bombs were cunning or imaginative, cleverly disguised as something harmless—or even appealing. The Russians used helicopters to drop small delayed bombs designed to look like toys so Afghan children would try to pick them up. The monumental cynicism that led to the design of those devices still excited and amazed him.

One of his specialties was making bombs that came from his observations about human impulses and temptations. He liked small, routine-looking bombs that would beguile a bomb technician and tempt him to try to defuse it. The technician’s efforts would then set off a bigger bomb he hadn’t seen or imagined was hidden nearby.

He loved the power. He had the ability to obliterate anything he wanted. And he liked the perversity of bombs, the way he could make his enemies use their own skill and intelligence and selflessness and bravery—especially bravery—to kill themselves. When he wanted to be, he was death.

2

Tim Watkins was the senior officer of the team that got the call from the police dispatcher. He and Maynard and Graham had been out to pick up lunch in the truck, and they were within blocks of the address. Watkins had picked up the radio mic and said, “One Zebra Sixty-Three. We’re in the vicinity. We’ll take it.” Bomb Squad teams consisted of two bomb techs and a supervisor, and on this team that was Watkins.

The emergency call had come from David Hills, the owner of the house, who was in France on business. He said he had received a threatening call from a phone in the Los Angeles area. Hills had called the LA police and asked them to check on his house, because the caller had said he was about to blow it up. The suspect had persuaded Hills he was serious: he had the address and described the house—a light gray clapboard one-story traditional Cape Cod with a black front door and white trim, and a Toyota Corolla in the driveway.

The car had clinched it. Hills said he’d rented the car and left it there to make it look as though the house were occupied. That meant this wasn’t somebody who had simply looked online and found a picture of his house. Hills had been competing for a big contract with three eastern European rival companies, and he had been getting vague threats from two of them for over a week before the final call.

Watkins stood on the steps of the house and looked at the black front door. He knew this was going to be the last moment when his feet would stand on anything he trusted. The steps were solid concrete, so they were safe. But he was about to enter another universe alone. For a moment he thought about his wife, Nora; and his daughter, Kelly. The resemblance between the two was uncanny. He could see them in his memory, having dinner last night. He was grateful for the sight but then pushed it away so he could keep his attention on what he was doing.

The other two members of the team were sitting in the truck five hundred feet away, the standard distance. Watkins didn’t let himself envision Maynard and Graham, because he was intent on clearing his mind of distractions and images that competed for his attention. That was also why he didn’t allow any back chatter while he was going downrange on a scene. He reported over the radio built into his bomb suit’s helmet, and they listened.

He knelt on the porch in his olive-drab bomb suit. The Kevlar and steel plates made the suit heavy and stiff, but he managed to get down to eye level with the knob of the front door. The boots were like the rest of the suit. The one part of him that could have no protection was his hands, but he seldom let himself think about that because it made him uneasy. He opened his black canvas tool kit and used the lock pick and tension wrench to line up the pins of the cylinder. Then he tried turning the knob. It offered no resistance. He put away the tools. “I’ve got the door unlocked. Now I’m going to look for reasons not to open it.”

His statement brought another memory, this one the image of Dick Stahl, the retired Explosive Ordnance Disposal expert who had promoted him to the Bomb Squad. That was the sort of thing Stahl used to say. He supposed his subconscious was reminding him to make every move the way Stahl had trained him to. He gave himself a few seconds to clear his mind again.

He stood and squinted into the fisheye peephole set at chest height in the shiny black door, but saw no shadows or lines that might be wires—only a miniature image, like a view through the wrong end of a telescope. He saw a sunny room with a brown leather easy chair under a window with translucent white curtains.

Watkins went down the steps and around the house, looking at the lawn in front of him, selecting the places where he could safely put his thick-booted feet free of trip wires or light beams. If there was a bomb, the mind behind it wasn’t familiar to him. He couldn’t predict or eliminate anything. There could be an electric eye that would set off the initiator if the light beam to its receiver unit was interrupted. There could be a piece of thin wire or transparent fishing line stretched across his path at a level just below the tops of the blades of grass. The trap could be any of a thousand things, or several of them at once, or there could be no trap, and no bomb.

He came to a window that opened onto a dining room furnished with a maple table and chair set. There were two entrances to the room, one a narrow swinging door to the kitchen, like what a restaurant might have, and the other a broad arch that led to the living room. He could see the inner side of the front door of the house from here, and he saw nothing ominous. Once a couple of years ago he had peered in at the inner side of a door and seen a shotgun propped on a coffee table, set up with a wire to fire at the level of a bomb technician’s groin. He had wondered why. He still did.

Watkins considered entering the house by breaking the glass of the dining room window and reaching up to open the latch. But beside the front door he could see the glowing panel of an alarm system. Many alarm systems would trigger at the sound of glass breaking, and a bomb could be connected to the alarm circuit. He took the compact monocular out of his tool kit and focused it on the alarm panel. There was a green light to show that the system had power, but the display said: RDY. Ready. It wasn’t armed. The panel had no visible wires leading from it, but a tie-in could be anywhere in the house, including at the circuit box, which was usually mounted to the interior wall of a closet. But the fact that the alarm was off made Watkins very uneasy. If this Mr. Hill was in Europe and was worried about an extortion scheme, why wasn’t his home alarm system turned on? It didn’t fit. Or had an intruder managed to turn it off?

Watkins paused by the window for a moment and looked again intently at several things he had noticed. The door to the kitchen was one. Any old-fashioned house might have a swinging door to the kitchen, but he couldn’t recall seeing more than a few like this one in his eight-year career. The door itself was a hazard. It was clad in a layer of sheet metal like the ones in restaurants. It was painted white on the upper half, but the lower half was bare metal. That meant it would conduct electricity. Would a bomber ignore that opportunity?

Watkins studied the chandelier above the dining room table. It was a bowl shape with three layers above it dripping with dangling crystal drops that kept the bulb invisible. An antipersonnel bomb with ball bearings or screws inside the glass bowl would disperse at the right level to kill anyone in the room—about six feet.

Watkins took his time. He emptied his mind and stared, trying to notice anything that felt wrong, anything that would inspire a bomber to do something clever. Watkins moved from window to window, following the same procedure. He tried to see what was plugged into each electrical outlet, searching for commercial timers designed to turn lights on and off and make the house seem occupied. Those were about the most reliable timers a bomb could have, and they could deliver 110 volts to a firing circuit.

Watkins looked for shapes he’d seen bombers use before—pipes, of course, pressure cookers, backpacks, satchels, small suitcases. He scanned for pieces of military ordnance that might have been left inside boxes made for them. Artillery boxes were usually simple, made of half-inch by three-inch wooden laths nailed together and painted olive drab with their contents stenciled on them in black. He searched for the shape, not the color, in case somebody had painted one to look harmless, like a toy box.

Watkins knew if an expert had set this house to blow, there would be at least two charges—the big one to destroy the building, and a smaller, subtler one just for someone like him.

When he had stared into the interior through each of the windows, he found himself back at the front steps. He spoke into the helmet radio. “There’s nothing visible from any of the windows. I’m at the front door again.”

He stood on the steps beside the door, reached over, and turned the knob. The spring pressure felt normal, and he heard no clicks. He sighted along the jamb as he opened the door a crack. There were no signs of anything held in place by the door or the hinges about to fall or spring away or sever a contact. There were no wires.

He moved his knife along the bottom of the door to locate the magnet embedded in the door to keep the alarm switch under the threshold from tripping. He found it, then took out his own magnet and placed it against the door in exactly the right spot, so when he pushed the door inward the new magnet would replace the one in the door.

He reached inside and lifted the doormat to check for a pressure pad, and then put the doormat into the doorway to prop the door open. He turned and inspected the alarm keypad on the wall. “I’m in,” he said. “The alarm is off.” A minute later he said, “I don’t see any sign of a device yet. I’m going to look for it.”

Watkins stepped deeper into the living room, inching ahead in his heavy, hot bomb suit. He had to turn the whole upper part of his body to see anything on either side, because the suit’s helmet didn’t have a neck. He used his bright flashlight to focus on one object at a time. He didn’t want to flip any light switches just yet.

He moved the beam of his light around the room to pick up the shine of monofilament fishing line or any thin wires that weren’t meant to be there. Next he turned his light off and searched for thin beams of light from an electric eye in the air.

A glass candy jar filled with multicolored jelly beans drew him to it. The jar was exactly the sort of object a bomb maker would use—harmless looking, transparent, and appealing. He came closer and used his flashlight to search for any hint of an object or a wire hidden among the jelly beans. Maybe it was too obvious for this guy. A professional bomber would know that someone like Watkins would see it as a likely place for the trigger.

The place a bomber wanted the charge was not the first place you’d look. When you looked at the first place, you were still sharp and watchful. The bomber wanted you to work your way to the less likely places. When you got to the least likely place, there it would be. By then you’d be tired and bored, maybe careless enough to open drawers without first checking for contacts, or to step without looking down ahead of your feet.

Watkins refused to rush or get lazy. His mind roamed this nightmare of a house, searching for the other mind, the one that had come here to infuse the building with malice. Watkins had seen bombs go off, and he had seen the aftermath, people simultaneously burned to death and torn apart, charred viscera and brain tissue spilled and limbs wrenched from bodies, blood spattered on pavements and dirt roads. He was aware that in a minute he might experience that destruction. He might already have set off an electronic timer when he opened the front door, and a time-delay relay was about to send the electrical current to the initiator. Maybe now. Or now. Or now.

He went down on his stomach and swept the flashlight beam along the boards of the hardwood floor, trying to spot a single board that was higher or lower than the others. A misfit board could have been lifted and something placed under it.

The floor was perfectly level. Watkins looked up at the ceiling and along the crown molding. He reminded himself that if there was a bomber, he had never seen this person’s work before, and didn’t know his specialties, his quirks, his favorites. He kept looking.

Bombs were not just weapons. They were something more, expressions of the bomber’s thoughts about you, his predictions of your behavior—what you would see, even what you would think and feel. He’d staged a presentation designed to fool you. He didn’t even know your name, but you were the one he was really after. Bombs were acts of murder, but they were also jokes on you, riddles the bomber hoped were too tough for you, chances for you to pick wrong when it was almost impossible to pick right.

Watkins turned his attention to the furniture. First he moved his flashlight along the bottom edges of the furniture and then behind it, and then he moved to the couch. The easiest place to put a charge was in one of the seat cushions. The cushions usually had a zipper in the back or underneath so the cover could be cleaned or the stuffing replaced. One couch cushion could hold a pretty big bomb. Three of them could blow pieces of the house all over the neighborhood.

He touched the front of each cushion with his fingers, palpating it to sense whether there was anything hard, or if the stuffing was too full, or there were any empty spaces. He cautiously pushed the spaces between two cushions apart to detect any wires. He worked his way to lifting them up to be sure they weren’t too heavy.

Next he moved to the big armchairs and repeated the process. After each piece was cleared, he slid it over beside the couch. When he had moved everything to one side, Watkins surveyed the newly bare part of the room to be sure he had missed nothing. He looked at baseboards and molding, sockets, light fixtures, and lamps. He announced, “The living room is clear.” Then he picked up his tool bag and went to the kitchen door.

He took out his mirror and extended its telescoping handle. He slipped it into the thin crack between the swinging door and the jamb, moved it up and down, and rotated it. There was nothing connected to the door. There was nothing on the floor. He adjusted his mirror to reflect the kitchen counters. There were a toaster, a blender, a row of spices, a couple of bottles. One was olive oil.

He saw a small black rectangular box on the kitchen counter. What was that, a phone? A radio? Either could be bad for him. There seemed to be a very thin white cord leading from the countertop to a plug on the wall behind the juicer. He withdrew the mirror, put it away, and picked up the monocular from his tool bag. He leaned into the kitchen, aimed the monocular at the device, and read the brand name. Canon. A camera? No lens, but it looked like camera equipment. As he stared at it, a tiny red indicator on the end came on.

In that silent moment Watkins identified the device on the counter. It was a photographer’s intervalometer, a device often planted in the wild to detect movement of an animal on a trail and trigger a camera many times in succession as the animal passed by.

Watkins half turned his body toward the front door to go back, then realized he was not going to make it. The first electrical impulse would be for a charge near the front door, and the next impulses would race around the house, each one setting off a charge where he might take shelter, tearing the house down over him one explosion at a time. “No,” he thought. “Toward it.”

Watkins pivoted back toward the kitchen, pushed off with his legs and heard the first click of the intervalometer as it sent the first impulse, but there was no explosion. He burst through the swinging door, building speed as he lumbered across the kitchen, dashing for the back door.

The intervalometer’s second click set off an explosion at the front of the house, the one designed to kill him if he’d retreated to the front door. The shock shook him and his ears hurt, as though it had damaged his eardrums. He flung the back door open and launched himself off the back porch to the lawn. He managed to remain on his feet in the heavy bomb suit, still struggling to run.

The second explosion punched out the kitchen windows behind him and showered him with glass, and the third took out the windows over his right shoulder. One after another, the charges blew, the next set at the corners of the house. Watkins kept moving, not able to turn and look back, but he heard a crash he believed was the collapse of the roof over the living room.

The house was being imploded, the way demolition teams imploded skyscrapers and apartment complexes. He knew the only thing that had kept him alive for the past ten seconds was the necessity that the last charge to blow was the one near the intervalometer that set off the charges. The kitchen charge would be the biggest.

In another half second it came, knocking him off his feet onto the grass, clapboards and two-by-fours striking his back. Then clouds of white dust obscured the world.

3

Watkins lay still for a few seconds while the debris fell around him, then listened. There was a strange, terrible silence that made him wonder if he’d lost his hearing.

“I’m alive,” he said into the microphone, and was relieved to hear himself speak.

“We heard somebody breathing,” said Maynard’s voice in his earpiece. “Are you hurt?”

“I think I’m okay,” said Watkins. It wasn’t a perfunctory answer. Some bomb victims had fatal internal injuries and bleeding they didn’t detect at first. “Let’s get the area roped off before we get overrun.”

He recognized Graham’s voice. “We’re on it.”

The voices and the incidental noises in Watkins’s earpiece went away. Watkins pushed himself up to his knees, examined his bomb suit for holes or tears, but found it intact. He stood and the layer of debris on his suit fell in a puff of dust at his feet.

The thing to worry about now was unexploded ordnance. He began to walk across the backyard looking for surprises among the pieces of the house. It was unlikely this bomber would have made any bad electrical connections and left a charge unexploded. He was too highly skilled for that. But his work was also devious and premeditated, so it was important to Watkins to be sure he had not left anything intentionally.

As Watkins surveyed the scene he saw the thoroughness of the bomber’s work. There were a great many small pieces blown from the house—roof shingles, mostly from the corners of the building, windows and frames, glass, a few sections of clapboard. But the main part of the structure had collapsed into a pile.

Some of the studs and roof timbers he could see had been drilled and wired for charges, so the house would fall in on itself. He found the front door out on the lawn near the street with forty round holes punched through it. He looked at the angles of impact and realized there must have been a bomb or two with ball bearings taped to them placed above the gypsum board of the ceiling to kill him if he tried to run out that way.

He watched his team’s black bomb truck stop in the street. It was emblazoned with bright gold paint that said BOMB SQUAD in the hope it would keep at least some bystanders at a distance. Hitched to the back of the truck was a containment vessel on wheels, a steel ball about five feet in diameter with a hatch that could be sealed and a valve for the release of gases. Graham and Maynard got out and began to string yellow tape to keep people away until the scene was found safe and the pieces were examined for evidence.

The team’s truck had been only five hundred feet away, so it reached the bombed house immediately, but now other vehicles began to arrive. The patrol cars that had blocked off the street on both ends before he entered the house now admitted two fire trucks, an ambulance, and then another bomb truck towing a containment vessel.

Captain Victor Del Castillo, the commander of the Bomb Squad, jumped down from the truck and trotted up to Watkins. He was lean and tall, a long-distance running enthusiast, and spent months each year trying to recruit his squad members for the annual police endurance races. He said, “Tim, are you all right?”

“A little stressed,” said Watkins.

“Stressed? That’s it? Then I won’t waste my sympathy on you. Did you see anything inside we ought to be looking for?”

“The kitchen was at the back. An intervalometer was on the counter.”

“A what?”

“An intervalometer, like photographers use. It was a black box about the size of a cell phone, with the name Canon on it in white letters. I think it was the kind that has a motion sensor that sets off the camera if you want to take pictures of lightning or moving animals or something. I leaned into the kitchen and saw a small red light go on. Then I heard a click. Once the power was on, it ran through a sequence of clicks, each one setting off a charge.”

“I’ll have the guys start looking for pieces of it. If there’s anything left, it could have a serial number or something. The main thing right now is to be sure we don’t still have live explosives.”

Del Castillo had come with a three-man team of bomb techs, and he assigned them to search the scene for explosives, pieces of detonators, or other bomb components. He repeated Watkins’s description of the intervalometer and added it to the list. In another ten minutes two more trucks arrived bringing three-man teams, who were added to the sweep. They had to make sure the danger was over before a crime scene crew could come in and collect evidence.

Their search was difficult and painstaking. Any scrap of metal might be part of one of the bombs. It was essential to clear the area of anything that might explode, and this had to be the priority.

The scene was not quite like any Watkins had seen before. Where the house had been was now a pile of lumber, some of it charred near the ends where small charges had been placed. The roof was collapsed over the pile of wood and siding, its gutters now about three feet above the ground and its peak less than six feet high. The lots on this street were not large, but the houses on either side of this one appeared to be intact.

Watkins looked over the area and realized there were fourteen techs working this scene—exactly half of the LAPD Bomb Squad. After a short time, Del Castillo waved to summon Watkins to the bomb truck parked on the street.

He was carrying a laptop now, and he opened it on the hood of the bomb truck. “Hey, Tim,” he said. “Take a look. I got the plans for this house from Building and Safety.”

They stared into the screen, shading their eyes from the afternoon sun. The first image was a diagram of the house from above, showing the locations of walls, doors, and windows. Watkins noticed a rectangle with a row of thin horizontal lines. “Is that a staircase?”

Del Castillo looked at it. “Yeah. Looks that way.”

“I didn’t see any staircase.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was a one-story house. Why would there be stairs?” Watkins looked closely and then clicked on the second view of the house’s plan, and saw a side-view rendition. The stairway was below ground level.

It took Watkins a second to identify this part of the diagram. There was an underground space, almost square. He spread his fingers on the touchpad to enlarge the image.

A dozen things came clear in an instant. He had not seen the stairs because they were underground, extending down to a small basement. A basement was unusual in Los Angeles, but some old houses had them. The basement was why the charges had all been relatively small, placed high in the skeleton of the house to take it apart and collapse the roof onto the floor. Virtually none of the energy had been focused downward. The bomber was protecting something down below. The bomber hadn’t been demolishing some businessman’s house; he’d been making it into a trap for the police.

Watkins shouted, practically screamed, “Stop!” He ran a couple of steps toward the wreckage that had been the house as he yelled. “Stop! Don’t move! Everybody freeze! Stay where you—”

Later, the video from the camera mounted on Captain Del Castillo’s truck that had been recording the search showed Sergeant Timothy Watkins running toward the rubble, and picked up what he was shouting. Nobody was able to see later what, exactly, triggered the second device precisely at that moment.

Every bomb technician standing on the lot at 12601 Valkrantz Street could have listed five or six ways to wire that kind of booby trap, but the one who touched the wrong thing didn’t see it. This was the big charge, the one Watkins had been expecting but had not found. He’d failed because the large cache of explosives had been, not inside the house, but under it.

The main charge turned the air hard, the shock wave bursting up and out, converting the detached pieces of the house into weapons that cut down bomb technicians where they stood and hurling some of their bodies so they came down on lawns together with the boards, bricks, and hardware they’d been examining.

Watkins, Maynard, Del Castillo, Capiello, and ten others were dead. Many of the police officers who were parked at the ends of the block to keep away the curious, and the firemen who had parked ambulances and pumper trucks farther off, were knocked off their feet by the force of the blast, and a few had minor injuries. The bomb truck Del Castillo had brought was blown onto its side, but its camera kept recording the unchanging image of the blue Los Angeles sky.

4

Dick Stahl had been both a soldier and a cop, two professions that never left a man unchanged. He was forty-four now, but in a suit and open-collared shirt he was still straight backed and walked with a physical authority that made him seem taller than his six feet. He had the sort of tan men like him had—darkened forearms, face, neck, and hands—wherever his shirt didn’t cover. His tan was color acquired as wear, one of the things his work had done to him.

He got into his black BMW and looked back at the big house perched near the top of the hill overlooking the ocean. The woman who lived there was standing above him behind a floor-to-ceiling window watching him go. He gave her an unsmiling half wave and then drove.

Stahl’s mind was already working on Sally Glover’s problem. She and her husband had lived in that house for thirteen years. Every morning Glover had driven to his company offices in Calabasas, and she’d spent her days on the things the wives of successful men did— volunteer work for the homeless, the hungry, and the victims of a couple of favorite diseases—directing the spending of the couple’s small charitable foundation. Stahl was aware that the things people distrusted a rich wife for—keeping herself beautiful and capable of intelligent conversation, keeping the big house tastefully decorated and provisioned to entertain her husband’s colleagues and customers—were also just chores. The money didn’t change that.

The money had brought on their current problem. Her husband had begun to work on expanding his business into Mexico. He had wanted to build a facility for manufacturing and shipping medical imaging machines, and for the past few months he’d been spending weeks at a time in the small towns east of Mexicali, where he had been choosing a site and securing the land leases, permissions, licenses, and permits.

Two days ago Mrs. Glover had received a call from Mr. Glover’s cell phone. When she answered, a man with a thick Spanish accent told her that her husband would not be coming home until she had paid for his freedom. If she wanted him back, she should mail a hundred thousand dollars in cash to a mailbox rental business in Mexicali. She was skeptical until the man put Benjamin Glover on the line. He said he had been dragged from a taxicab, beaten, and taken somewhere. He was all right, if a bit hurt and shaken, but she should do as the man asked.

She had called the head of security at her husband’s company, who made some calls to friends of his in the narrow world of security and private investigation and found a name and a phone number. There was a man named Stahl who was known to have made some successful extractions from Mexico.

Stahl had come to see the prospective widow and told her to prepare the hundred thousand dollars. He gave her a blue cardboard box and assured her it would hold a hundred thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. She must give him the address of the post office box and send the money right away. He took several pictures of the box.

She said she could get a hundred thousand dollars from a personal bank account. Was that all it would take? No, he told her. This was just the kidnappers’ way of beginning the negotiations. It would persuade them her husband was worth keeping alive while they prepared to make their next demand. In time they would ask for much more, so she should begin selling stocks, bonds, or property. She had to be ready to respond right away, or they might feel the need to send her an ear or a finger to motivate her.

Stahl said, “I’ll leave today for Mexico. I’ll do this as quickly as I can.” Then he listed some items he would need immediately. One was her husband’s most recently expired passport. Another was a collection of photographs of her husband. The third was her current passport.

When she asked about his fee, he said, “I have a flat rate for kidnappings in foreign countries. It’s five hundred thousand dollars.”

“What if you find you can free him for the cost of a trip to Mexico?”

“I don’t give refunds. But if it costs ten times as much to get him back, I won’t ask you for more. And no matter what it takes, I won’t quit or give up. Here’s my card. You can send the check to my office when you have the money in your account. Of course, you can do this another way or contact somebody else.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve been told you’re the one, and if that’s your fee, I’ll pay it. This is my husband’s life.”

As soon as he was on the road he made a telephone call to a man in Ensenada named Antonio Garza, and then another to a woman in Mexico City named Esmeralda Cruz. Next he dropped his car off in the underground parking structure at his condominium building and called to reserve a rental car. He bought all the insurance the rental company would sell him, and packed. A cab took him to the rental lot, and he put his two suitcases into the trunk.

Stahl was on the road to Mexico by noon. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry or uncomfortable when he crossed the border at San Ysidro. He told the border cop he was headed for a resort at the tip of Baja. The police made him open his trunk, but they didn’t go any further. They just watched him to see if he was nervous, and then waved him on. A man who had spent years rendering bombs safe was not easily flustered. And as a rule, people didn’t smuggle anything to the south. It was on the way home that the authorities would be more thorough. He met Antonio Garza in Ensenada, where Garza had set aside a room for him in his house.

Garza was a longtime colleague whom Stahl paid a retainer to remain available to help him in any operations in Mexico. Like Stahl, he had been a soldier and a cop and then had formed his own security company. He had a number of regular clients who paid his company to protect things of value—often a family business, but increasingly, as kidnappings had become more common, their sons and daughters. Garza was about six feet three and 240 pounds, and he conveyed the peculiar impression that he was in life as a kind of referee.

When Stahl and Garza walked into a restaurant near the beach for dinner, Garza took the manager aside and pointed out the spot that would be the best place for him to seat them. The manager seemed to believe this was good advice. During dinner the two men spoke in only the most general terms about the operation. It was only later at Garza’s house that they discussed the specific plan. Garza had people watching the mailbox rental store in Mexicali for the blue box, and each of them had Stahl’s photograph of the box on his cell phone. There would be a constantly changing group—some men, some women. As soon as they saw the box, they would follow the person who picked it up and try to find the place where Benjamin Glover was being held. When it was time to act, Stahl would do the work and Garza would be the driver. Stahl had been with a great many people in frightening situations. He had learned Antonio Garza was a man who would not let fear overpower his pride. Garza wouldn’t get nervous and drive off without him if things turned bad. Stahl knew that if he failed, he wouldn’t be alone when he died.

The call came after three days. A man in his thirties had picked up the blue box in Mexicali. He had walked around a corner and gotten into a pickup truck. He drove south and east to the town of Corazón de Maria, then delivered the box to a house in the center of town in the oldest section, near the old church and the town square.

Stahl and Garza left for Corazón de Maria the next morning. Corazón de Maria was a market town with a considerable population, but because there were no luxury hotels, it wasn’t a place where American tourists were common. If the kidnappers were expecting an American operative, Stahl would be spotted immediately. Garza dropped Stahl off at a ranch owned by a friend of his and went on alone. He arrived in late morning and rented an office on the top floor of a commercial building across the city square from the house where the money had been taken and then went back for Stahl.

They returned late at night. Garza helped move Stahl into the office and unload the items he expected to need and then drove off to Mexicali to wait. Stahl began his own surveillance. He placed a sixty-power marksman’s spotting scope a few feet back from the window so it was enveloped in shadows, and he watched from his vantage point high across the square.

The house was one of the colonial-era buildings that lined some of the streets radiating from the square. There was a wall with a rounded door set into it. The place was like others of that period he’d seen in market towns. Through the portal on the inner side was a garden enclosed by the wings of the house. The rooms were situated in a row, all of the doors opening onto the long covered porch that surrounded the garden.

Whenever the thick wooden door opened, he used the few seconds to stare through it and learn more. Then he focused on whoever went in or out. By the end of the first day he had seen six men and memorized their faces. He had also noticed they brought in a large quantity of groceries, including cases of beer and tequila, and brought out a large number of garbage bags, which they hauled away in a truck. He saw no women or children.

Stahl watched the house most of the time for six days, noting everything that went on. Late on the sixth night, when his office building was empty and there was no chance of being overheard, he called Antonio Garza. “I’m going in tomorrow night. Has Esmeralda arrived yet?”

“Two days ago. I picked her up at the airport.”

“Can you be here at two a.m.?”

“Yes. Why tomorrow night?”

“For the past couple of days, men have been leaving and not coming back. It looks like they’re getting started on another operation or something. There seem to be only two men guarding the house tonight. It’s not going to get better than that.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“They’re not taking precautions. They don’t hide, and they don’t seem to have any defense. I haven’t seen lookouts with cell phones watching the place from outside, and nobody seems to guard the door. You know what that could mean.”

“Yes. They could have somebody else protecting them. And what about Glover? You haven’t seen him yet. How do you know he’s not already dead?”

“If he were dead, there wouldn’t be much point in leaving any men here, not even two.”

“Maybe.” Garza didn’t sound convinced.

Stahl added, “It’s supposed to rain tomorrow night. Rain covers sounds and keeps people at home staying dry. The clouds cover the moon.”

“Where do you want the car?”

“Drive up the street by the back of the church, and wait for me to call.”

“All right. I’ll be there at two.”

At 2:00 a.m. the next night, Stahl walked in a light rain on the cobbled street leading off the square past a row of old colonial houses. When he reached the right house, he picked the front door lock, eased it open to keep its hinges from squeaking, and slipped inside. He was wearing a baseball cap to keep the rain out of his face and a gray raincoat to cover the items he was carrying—a short Steyr AUG-3 automatic rifle on a sling that let it hang muzzle downward, a pistol in his belt, and a razor-edge marine KA-BAR fighting knife with a black blade.

He stepped into the garden, which looked as he had expected from his distant surveillance. A low porch with a roof surrounded the grassy space, with tall leafy trees. The porch roof was covered with climbing bougainvillea that had scaled the beams and hidden the clay tiles. He moved along the covered porch, looking in each window.

Stahl was willing to take his time moving through the dark house. If he’d made a noise as he came through the door in the wall, he knew a sleeping man would probably ignore it unless there was another noise that indicated some sort of a pattern. Stahl felt ceramic tile beneath his feet. It made him happy, because he could walk across it silently.

He had gone about two-thirds of the way around when he found the first occupied room. There were two men asleep on beds. The beds were smaller than a twin bed and each consisted of a steel frame with a single layer of interlocking wire links covered by a thin stuffed mattress and a single loose army blanket.

Their quarters were so spare that if he had not seen both men during the week going in and out, he might have mistaken them for prisoners. He thought about the fact that they had bunked together. Every room had its window and door opening onto the courtyard, and he’d looked into every one he’d passed. The house was large, and none of the other rooms had any occupants. Why would both guards sleep here? It made sense only if the man they were guarding was very near. Stahl closed his eyes, waiting a few minutes so they would adjust to the dark, and then he studied the room. He saw a door with a padlock on it. That had to be it.

He couldn’t do anything before he made sure the rest of the rooms were empty. He resumed his prowl around the building. He found the second occupied room only two doors away. The man in this room was asleep too, but he looked as though he’d gotten the first choice of beds. His bed was wider and thicker, with box springs, two white pillows, and white sheets. The man had taken off a suit and hung the pants and coat on a single hanger on the door to the bathroom. Stahl could see that the breast pocket of the coat had a leather wallet with a police badge flapped open, the way plainclothes cops sometimes wore theirs to be identified during raids. Now Stahl was sure he knew why the men of this building didn’t seem to fear anyone. They had connections.

Stahl paused. He knew he was going to have to get the policeman out of the way before he could return to the room with the two guards. He slowly and carefully opened the door and stepped into the policeman’s room. He went to the man’s suit on its hanger to see if the cop’s gun was in his coat or in a holster. As he touched the coat there was a sudden motion in his peripheral vision.

The cop whirled in bed, his hand coming up from under his pillow with a pistol.

He was reacting like a cop, but Stahl had been a cop too. He had anticipated that this move was one possibility, so he was ready. Under his raincoat, his hand was poised to use the rifle, and he swung it up into the man’s face and hammered it butt downward on the cop’s head.

Stahl wrenched the pistol out of the man’s hand and held it on him for a moment. The man didn’t move. He examined the man’s skull, then shook him. Stahl was shocked. The blow with the butt of the rifle seemed to have killed him. Stahl had never intended to kill. He had planned to handcuff him with his own cuffs and gag him.

Stahl knew he had to hurry. It was critical now that he get Benjamin Glover out of this house—and out of this town. In a few seconds he was in the other bedroom.

The two men were still asleep. When he came here, he had expected to do what he had done several times before. He had entered a house at night, pointed an ugly-looking automatic weapon into a kidnapper’s face, and asked him to consider accepting a smaller ransom than he’d demanded. Stahl had confirmed each time that a few thousand dollars sounded much better to a man who was about to die than it had earlier.

Stahl raised his Steyr rifle with his left hand and prepared to turn on the light. As he reached up, he heard a shuffle, a movement behind him. He turned and a big dark shape hurtled through the doorway behind him and clutched him in a bear hug, trying to pin his arms to his sides. The cop now had the crazy strength of an enraged, hurt man. He swung Stahl around into the wall, but it didn’t loosen the cop’s grip on him.

Stahl had not forgotten that the man had just awakened. He was still barefoot. Stahl stomped on the cop’s instep, and used the second of intense pain to break free. He grasped his razor-sharp commando knife and spun around, slashing the man’s throat. The cop fell to the floor bleeding.