John Sandford: Shock Wave

Virgil took off his boots, shut off all the lights except the one in the bathroom, lay on his bed, and thought about his conversation with Ahlquist. The bomber almost certainly had a direct tie to some of the protesters-either the people whose livelihoods were threatened by the PyeMart, or the trout freaks.

Of the two, he thought the businessmen were more likely to produce a killer. Some of the people who’d lose out to PyeMart would move from prosperity to poverty, and virtually overnight. Businesses, homes, college plans, comfortable retirements, all gone. How far would somebody go to protect his family? Most people wouldn’t even shoplift, much less kill. But to protect his family… and all you needed was one.

And then the environmentalists…

Virgil had a degree in ecological science, and was a committed green. But he’d met quite a few people over the years who’d come into the green movement from other, more ideologically violent movements-people who’d started as anti-globalization protesters, or tree-spikers as opposed to tree sitters, who thought that trashing a McDonald’s was a good day’s work, people who talked about Marx and Greenpeace in the same sentence.

The greenest people Virgil knew were hunters and fishermen, with Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited and Pheasants Forever and the Ruffed Grouse Society, and the Conservancy and the National Wildlife Federation and all the rest, people who put their money and their time where their mouths were; but these others…

There could be a radical somewhere in the mix, somebody who had twisted a bunch of ideologies all together and decided that bombs were an ethical statement.

A guy sitting home alone, the blue glow of the Internet on his face, getting all tangled up with the other nuts out there, honing himself…

Again, all it took was one.

Before he went to sleep, Virgil spent a few minutes thinking about God, and why he’d let a bomber run around killing people, although he was afraid that he knew the reason: because the small affairs of man were of not much concern to the All-Seeing, All-Knowing. Everybody on earth would die, sooner or later, there was no question about that: the only question was the timing, and what would time mean to a timeless Being?

But a bomb brought misery. A nice quiet death at age eightyeight, with the family gathered around, not so much.

He’d have to read Job again, he thought; not that Job seemed to have many answers.

Then he got up, peed, dropped on the bed, and was gone.

The bomber sat in his basement-it had to be a basement-looking at the stack of bombs. He’d already packed the Pelex, which had a rather nice tang about it: like aftershave for seriously macho dudes. He’d packed in the last of the blasting caps, which looked a bit like fat, metallic ballpoint pen refills, and he’d already wired up all the batteries except the last one, because he was afraid of that one: afraid he’d blow himself up.

He’d given himself two missions this night: the first would be to take out the water and sewer pipe the city was planning to run out to the PyeMart, as well as the heavy equipment that’d be used to lay the pipe.

The second one…

For the second attack, he needed a bomb that would blow with motion-and since he didn’t have access to sophisticated detonators, he’d made do with an old mercury switch. To use it, he’d have to do the final wiring on-site, in awkward conditions, wearing gloves, with a flashlight in his mouth. Possible, but tricky.

The trickiness gave him a little buzz. If anything went wrong, of course, he’d never know it, with his face a foot from the bomb. When they identified him, wouldn’t they be surprised? Wouldn’t they wonder?

Made him smile to think about it.

The bomber was slender and tough and smart. He worked out daily, ninety minutes at a time. He had a sense of humor, he often looked in a mirror and thought, Pretty damn good.

But pretty damn good wasn’t enough. Time was passing; he wasn’t old, but age would come, and then what? Twenty years on Social Security? There were very limited opportunities ahead, and he had to seize the ones that presented themselves.

And there was the competitive aspect to the challenge: Could he beat the cops and the federal government? He knew they’d all come piling in when the bombs started going off.

He shook off the intrusive thought, and picked up the latest bomb, and turned it in his hands. Very, very simple; and deadly as a land mine.

Not particularly delicate, though. He’d read that he could mold the Pelex into a ball and whack it with a golf club, with no effect. The blasting caps were a little more sensitive, but no more so than ordinary shotgun primers, which tens of thousands of people had sitting around in their houses-there were whole racks of them at sporting goods stores.

No, the pieces were essentially inert, until they got put together. Then, watch out.

He’d taken hours to make each of the first few bombs, until he got some traction. He’d done his research on the Internet, and figured out his materials. He’d cracked the supply shed at Segen Sand amp; Gravel in the middle of the night and removed the cases of Pelex and the boxes of blasting caps. He’d been sweating blood when he did that, his first real crime, creeping around the countryside in camo and a mask. After all the planning and preparation, and after an aborted approach when a couple kids parked in the quarry entrance to neck, the break-in had been routine. The explosives shed had been secured with nothing more than a big padlock.

He’d found the bomb pipe under a cabin at a lakeside resort, where it had been dumped years before, when the owner put in plastic pipe. He got that at night, too, and had taken it down to the college for the cut. That had taken a little gall, but he hadn’t committed himself to anything at that point, and when the cutting went off without a hitch, he was good. If he’d been caught, he would have said he was making fence posts, and then started over…

His first bombs were small. He didn’t need a big bang to know that they worked. When he finished building them, he’d taken them out in the country, deep in the woods, buried them, and fired them from fifty feet away, with a variety of triggers. There’d been a thump, which he’d felt more than heard, but the thump had proved the pudding: he could do it.

The bombs worked.

After that, the bomb-making was the least of it. Everything he needed to know about switches he could find on the Internet, with parts and supplies at Home Depot.

Getting into the Pye Pinnacle had been simple enough; in fact, he’d done it twice, once, in rehearsal, and the second time, for real.

Having the bomb go off too early…

He’d made the assumption that a ferociously efficient major corporation would have run their board meetings with the same efficiency. When he learned that the board members had been in the next room drinking-the Detroit newspaper hadn’t said they were drinking, but had implied it clearly enough-he’d been more disgusted than anything, even more disgusted than disappointed. What was the world coming to? Cocktails at nine o’clock in the morning? All of them?

The second bomb, planted at the construction site, had been much, much better. Everything had gone strictly according to plan. He’d come in from the back of the site, carrying the bolt cutters, the pry bar, a flashlight, and the bomb. In his bow-hunting camo, he was virtually invisible.

The trailer had two doors: a screen door, not locked, and an inner wooden door, which was locked. He’d forced the inner door, cracking the wood at the lock. Inside, he’d set up the bomb in the light of the flashlight. When he was ready to go, he’d flashed the light once around the inside of the trailer, and caught the reflection off the lens of a security camera.