David Ellis - The Wrong Man

I huddled with Shauna, and we decided to use six of our ten peremptories, the automatic challenges we are allowed to bounce potential jurors. We didn’t want to use them all, because it was unlikely that we’d draw our jury completely from this pool. There would be another thirty-person pool next, and we wanted to reserve some peremptory challenges for them.

We gave our list to Wendy, who gave us hers, and we submitted them to the judge. We’d go back to his chambers now and see how many of these thirty people made the cut. Then we’d grab another thirty and do the same winnowing process until we had fifteen-twelve plus three alternates.

But I had a moment to check my phone. Bradley John had called me four times.

“Those initials,” he told me when I called him.

“Yeah? You figured out who AN and NM are?”

“No,” he said. “I figured out what they are.”

Judge Nash kept us in court until after five o’clock, and with the third thirty-person venire panel, we completed our set of fifteen jurors, three of whom would be alternates. Of the twelve regular jurors, eight were women. Five were African-American. One was Pakistani and another half Chinese. They ranged in age from nineteen to sixty-one. One was a podiatrist, one a caterer. There was a waitress and an industrial painter, two stay-at-home moms, a daycare operator, a human resources manager, an accountant, a pharmaceutical salesman, a product manager for medical supplies, and then my favorite, Jack Strauss. He was retired.

Retired military, that is. A colonel in the U. S. Marines who saw action in Grenada and limited time in Operation Desert Storm in the early nineties.

Wendy had run dry of her peremptory challenges with the second venire panel. She’d gambled that we’d be done after that panel, but she lost-four spots remained, the twelfth spot on the regular jury and the three alternates. And when we opened up the third panel, juror sixty-one was Jack Strauss. Wendy did her best to probe for bias, but the guy wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet, and there was no cause to exclude him. It was the first break I got in this case to date.

I had to find a way to get Tom on the stand to talk about Iraq. I needed Colonel Jack Strauss to know that Tom was a war veteran and a hero.

…

Shauna and I made it back to the office by a quarter to six, with Shauna’s security detail, a guy who looked like a pro wrestler, along for the ride. (Cowboy that I was, I didn’t have a security guy; then again, I also owned my own gun.)

Bradley John was waiting for us in the conference room.

“She was an organic chemistry major,” he said to us.

“What?”

“Kathy Rubinkowski. She was getting a master’s in organic chemistry, right? I never factored that in.”

Bradley had a copy of Kathy’s handwritten scrawl on the back of the document she mailed her father: AN NM??

“The symbol AN stands for ammonium nitrate,” he said. “It’s the primary compound in fertilizer.”

“Which Global Harvest sold, obviously,” I said.

“Right. And NM stands for nitromethane,” said Bradley. “Nitromethane is used in drugs, cleaning solvents, pesticides. But here’s the really big thing: You put ammonium nitrate together with nitromethane and you get one of the most powerful mixtures of explosives known to man.”

I looked at Shauna. “Explosives,” I repeated. “Jesus.”

I checked Kathy Rubinkowski’s note again. It made sense. A chemistry student would have used the shorthand terminology.

“ That’s why the federal and state governments monitor sales of fertilizer,” said Bradley.

I steadied my hands. My juices were flowing, but I had to synthesize this into a formal presentation in court. “Let’s take this slow,” I said. “Ammonium nitrate, there’s no doubt Global Harvest sold it. I mean, that’s their business-fertilizer, right?”

“Sure.”

“But what about nitromethane? Does Global Harvest sell that?”

He shook his head. “Not as far as I can tell, no.”

“Then-where’s the connection? Why did Kathy write down NM at all?”

“I don’t know, Jason, but we have to assume that if she wrote-”

“No, no, no. We can’t assume anything, Bradley. All we know right now is the universally acknowledged and entirely unsurprising fact that Global Harvest International sells fertilizer. I can’t roll with this. Connect some dots for me and I can use it. See what I’m saying?”

He looked downcast, but he wasn’t giving up. “I do, yeah.”

I shook his shoulder. “This could be what we’re looking for, my friend. But I need more. Start with Summerset Farms. They were the ones receiving the fertilizer. Maybe they were getting the nitromethane, too.”

“I’m on it.”

“Oh, and Bradley,” I called to him. “Remember I said it’s a marathon, not a sprint?”

“Yeah?”

“Now it’s a sprint.”

“Got it.” Bradley left Shauna and me standing in the conference room.

Shauna raised her eyebrows at me. “Look at what we’re getting into,” she said.

“After the other night, seeing them doing target practice, I thought they were gunrunners,” I said. “I figured the fertilizer shipments were some kind of cover for smuggling of weapons. But maybe I have it wrong.” I looked over the symbols scribbled by Kathy Rubinkowski.

“Maybe they’re building a bomb,” I said.

Inside the domed building on the property of Summerset Farms, Randall Manning and Stanley Keane stood on the small balcony overlooking the ground-level floor space that typically housed the farming equipment. Tonight, some of the equipment had to be moved out, because there was work to do. Manning and Keane watched as their six soldiers-they were eight before they’d lost Cahill and Dwyer-got down to business.

The You-Ride rental trucks drove in. They had been rented by Bruce McCabe last week, before his unfortunate passing, using a fictitious name and bogus corporate credit card. McCabe had even worn a disguise in case a security camera was present. The You-Ride trucks were, as far as Manning could determine, entirely untraceable to him or the Circle.

They started with the first You-Ride truck. With a cordless electrical drill, a soldier bored two holes in the truck’s main cabin area in a concealed space under the seat. Then he ran a cannon fuse through each hole, sending the fuse through the floorboard and underneath the truck itself, where it spooled onto the concrete floor. The fuse was wrapped in plastic tubing conduit to protect it while in transit.

Then he got out of the cab and slid underneath the cargo area of the truck. He drilled two more holes into the floor of the cargo space. He reached over and took the plastic tubing that dangled beneath the cab area and pulled it over to him. He fed the tubing into the cargo area and slid back out from under the truck.

The cabin and cargo areas of the truck were now connected by the two fuses.

The soldier then climbed into the rear cargo area and attached each fuse to a blasting cap. To the extent there was slack in the tubing- they had measured carefully, but it was better to overestimate than to underestimate-he duct-taped the tubing against the cargo wall to prevent the accidental detachment of the fuses from the blasting caps in transit.

Now for the fun part.

From flatbed trucks, the crew unloaded two hundred fifty bags of high-grade ammonium nitrate fertilizer weighing fifty pounds each. They unloaded seven fifty-five-gallon drums of liquid nitromethane as well.

The crew carted empty fifty-five-gallon barrels into the rear cargo areas of the truck. They nailed boards onto the floor to hold sixteen barrels in place. They loaded into the cargo area one hundred bags of the ammonium nitrate fertilizer and three of the nitromethane drums. They mixed the chemicals using plastic buckets and industrial scales and filled each of the barrels with the cocktail. Each barrel would ultimately weigh about five hundred pounds.