John Sandford - Shock Wave

“Hmm,” she said. “I’ll mention that to Willard.”

Virgil shook his head. “It looks like a conspiracy, but it doesn’t feel that way. Everything is too clockwork-like, too precise. If it’s a conspiracy, that would mean that we have two nuts-one here and one in Butternut-who are both absolutely murderous, and who were willing to trust each other, and both intelligent. How did they find each other? How did they get together?”

“Well, maybe on the Internet,” she said. “There are anti-PyeMart and anti-Walmart and anti-Target websites. What if a couple of people cooked up a conspiracy… I mean, one was from Butternut, but the other one could have been from anywhere. He or she moves to Grand Rapids or Lansing and gets a job out at the Pinnacle-gets a job for the sole purpose of blowing up the board.”

Virgil thought about that for a moment, then said, “I’ve got a researcher at the BCA who is really good at the Net. I’ll have her troll those PyeMart sites, see what she comes up with.”

“But we don’t know when they would have met.”

“In the last two years, if there were two of them. PyeMart didn’t start making noises about building in Butternut until two years ago,” Virgil said. “Took them a year to get the permits, and another year to get under way.”

“Have to check,” she said.

“Yeah, but I still… don’t think it’s a conspiracy. We’re missing something. I think it’s one guy, pretty smart, who figured out a way to get into the Pinnacle. Are there tours of the building? If there are, did anyone go missing for a few minutes? That kind of thing.”

“There are tours, but not often-and not one recently,” she said. “McCullough checked that. The ATF guys are really good.”

They speculated, but came up with nothing solid; got to Ford International a few minutes after eight, were off the ground at eightfifteen. After a quick breakfast of Cheerios and sweet rolls, the cabin attendant folded out beds for Virgil and Chapman, and Virgil was asleep in two minutes; he woke again when the wheels touched down in Butternut.

The trip, he thought, might have been time wasted.

But it didn’t feel wasted; it felt, instead, like he’d learned something about the mind of the bomber. He was clever, and had a streak of boldness, even recklessness. He’d somehow gotten into the Pinnacle, and back out, and had never touched any of the trip lines set up by a very professional security system.

Interesting.

The bomber got a little drunk, and he did it deliberately.

He’d been trained as a straight-line thinker, which was good, most of the time, but he was smart enough to recognize the weaknesses of straight-line thinking. Sometimes, you had to get out of the box, out of the geometry. In his experience, nothing loosened up the mind like a pitcher of martinis, drunk alone. He had the pitcher, he had the gin, he had the vermouth. And he certainly was alone.

He mixed up the booze, got a tumbler, and carried it out to his tiny backyard deck, where he sat in a wooden deck chair with plastic cushions, looked up at the stars, and let his mind roam free.

How had he landed here, in Butternut Falls? He should be in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. At Columbia, the University of Chicago, UCLA. He had this recurring image of himself, pushing through some gilded revolving doors somewhere-a big city, probably New York, because he’s wearing a New York kind of hat-and a newsman pushes a microphone in his face and asks, “What do you think of the president’s plan?”

“The president’s a fool, a lightweight,” he’d say, his face sharply outlined, almost like one of those yellow-suited superheroes in the comics.

Like that was going to happen. Every time he’d been ready to make a move, something had jumped up to thwart him. Everything from an ill-timed job recession, to an ill-planned marriage. Barbara had been the worst of it. She’d dragged him out to Butternut and used her family’s influence to get him a job, and the job had nailed his feet to the ground. All so she could be near her mother; though he couldn’t imagine anybody would want to stay close to that witch.

Barbara had dragged him, pushed him. Hectored him.

The power of pussy, he thought. The power of pussy.

And time kept passing. He was hardly aware of it, the days passing so quickly and seamlessly; every time he turned around, it seemed like he was shaving in the morning to go out and waste another day of his life. He felt like he was in his twenties, still a young guy, on the move, with a great future-but somehow, nearly twenty years had slipped away. He was nearly as old as that fool, the president.

Oh, he’d made plans. One of them involved dumping Barbara, but, surprise, surprise, she’d moved first, and he’d found himself with no house and only half an eventual pension. She’d nailed him down with pussy, and then, when she left, nailed him down with economics and legal decrees. She was followed by a couple more mistakes, and finally, he would sit on this patio and he could see the future stretching out in front of him, ending in penury… ending with dog food and a hot plate.

That made him smile: the alcohol talking.

He was in no serious danger of dog food, but he was in danger of something that was probably worse: irrelevance, in his own eyes. He looked at the people around him, at their trivial lives, and he sneered at them, but then he came home to look in the mirror and ask, “How am I different?”

The truth was, he wasn’t. If a Martian landed tomorrow, and was told to sort people into piles of the relevant and the irrelevant, judging by what they did, by what they were, he’d wind up in the same pile as those he sneered at.

Then came PyeMart, and everything that rained down from that.

Loosenup, he thought, loosen up. He poured another martini, and thought about bombs.

Jesus God, he was becoming fond of his bombs. Nobody- nobody -would say that his bombs were irrelevant. He was already the most important element in the lives of two people, in that he’d ended those lives.

Where should the next one go? Where would it do the most good?

There’d been a rumor that the state cops were protecting the city council and the city hall. That there were snipers in town. He wasn’t sure he believed it, but it had to be considered. He considered it, more than a little drunk after the third martini… and there were still two martinis left. He giggled: whoa, boy, he was really gonna be pounded when he finished the last one.

So what about the city council? He went back and forth on them. Could they hurt him more than they could help? If they all went up in an instant of smoke and flame, would that be the beginning of everything? Or the end?

He thought about the council all through the fourth martini, and decided that while he had no objection, in principle, to killing them all, the fallout from such an event was too unpredictable.

No. He’d started out to intimidate PyeMart, to slow them down, and also to lay a trail of bombs that had a seeming purpose. He was not stupid, so the trail was a crooked one, but it would eventually lead the authorities, by the nose, to one certain conclusion. And that still seemed the best way to go.

He’d never had a full set plan for his campaign; a set plan could crack. He’d known from the start that he had to remain flexible, and improvise from time to time. This was one of those times.

If the city council was actually found to be corrupt, if a city councilman could be terrorized into confessing, or if the cops could be pressured into looking at them seriously, then the whole PyeMart deal would go down like the Titanic.

That was a compelling thought.

But PyeMart’s deal couldn’t go down too soon, or too late. Like Baby Bear’s porridge, it had to be just right.