The trap at the house in Encino that killed Tim Watkins, Del Castillo, and the dozen others had not been an attempt to harm the house’s owner. It had been a way of luring as many bomb technicians as possible to one site and murdering them. The man who had called the 911 line was either the bomber or someone working for the bomber. Stahl knew a bomber called the police only if he was trying to kill the police officers who would respond.
The car bomb today had been a second attempt to wipe out cops. Chaining the car to the pumps was a sign to the gas station manager that something was going on that was beyond him, and he should call the police. The owners of the gas station in Studio City and the house in Encino had no connection and nothing in common. The two common elements were the police and the bomber.
He had listened to the recorded 911 call that had summoned the fourteen to their deaths and watched the video of the man delivering the packed car to the gas station. Both the caller and the video image were unidentifiable, but the evidence did indicate that this was probably a single man, not a group of conspirators. In his experience, terror bombings usually worked this way. There was a single person, usually male and over thirty, who conceived the idea and made the bomb. If there were a second person, he or she drove the explosive-packed car and parked it in a marketplace or in front of a government building, or wore the explosives on his body, or left the briefcase on the crowded floor of the station, or buried the IED in the middle of the dirt road. This time there was no sign of a second person, and there was no hint of why the lone man wanted to do this.
Stahl had spent years studying explosive devices. He couldn’t think of a single instance of anything resembling these two incidents. Everything was contradictory. The devices themselves were a mixture of the crude and the sophisticated, the rudimentary and the complex.
The bomber seemed to be an amateur. He had made his own mercury rocker switches, and appeared to have made his own explosive charges. To Stahl this meant the bomber had no access to ready-made materials. On the other hand, only a few professionals were able to make such powerful high explosives. Military demolition people—no matter how deep undercover—seldom had a need to learn practical chemistry well enough to produce explosives from scratch. The al-Qaeda operative who made the shoe bombs and the underwear bomb had been reduced to using peroxide explosives, which were much easier to make than military plastic, but far less safe to work with, and less effective.
Having an unknown enemy in Los Angeles able to make his own C-4 or Semtex was a disaster. This one understood methods like using shaped charges to penetrate hardened targets, and imploding buildings with dozens of small charges. Stahl had consulted the ATF’s list of recent bomb incidents and found nothing remotely like what he’d seen at the gas station, or what had killed the men in Encino.
Stahl had not been ready for this. The rescue in Mexico had been a catastrophic case of overconfidence that he’d survived only through ferocity. Before he even had time to catch his breath, there was Dave Ogden.
It actually crossed his mind that Ogden had come at the head of a squad of cops to arrest him and extradite him to Mexico for murder. Instead, Ogden had come to ask him for a favor that might, ultimately, be worse. And he could not refuse.
Ogden had been a sergeant when Stahl came out of the police academy. He had been assigned as training officer during Stahl’s probationary period. Because Stahl had enlisted in the army about the time Ogden became a cop, they were almost the same age in spite of the difference in ranks. Ogden had been fair, and Ogden had taught him about police work. Other supervisors had done those things too.
What had made the difference was one late night in the north Valley. Ogden and Stahl drove past a shipping warehouse in North-ridge, and Stahl saw a moving light under a garage door. They drove around the property and found a spot near the back where the chain-link fence had been cut and rolled up in both directions. The barbed wire at the top had been removed and tossed into a nest of coils nearby.
Ogden and Stahl went through the breach on foot and saw a dozen men taking cases of liquor out of the back of a big semi and setting them on the tarmac nearby. Rather than attempting to steal the truck, they were loading its cargo into a line of vans, SUVs, and pickups. Ogden called for backup and waited, but someone had already spotted the police car. In less than a minute, the small trucks had begun to pull out through the hole in the fence onto a side street and accelerate onto the boulevard to escape.
Three SUVs pulled up near the police car—one behind, one in front, and one to the side. They found the police car was empty, so they kept coming. They swept the area outside the fence, and then pulled in through the opened section of fence. Ogden and Stahl retreated toward the warehouse for cover, but the first shots were fired before they could reach it. Within the next three minutes, Ogden had been wounded in the leg, and Stahl was using up their supply of ammunition trying to keep the attackers’ heads down on the other side of the lot. Then, without warning, Ogden drew a .380 backup pistol from his ankle holster and fired over Stahl’s shoulder. The man who had crept up behind Stahl to kill him fell dead. Other police units arrived in another three minutes, too late to affect the outcome.
He knew that when David Ogden came to his office he’d had mostly noble motives. But there had been a little bit of self-protection too. As of this morning Ogden couldn’t be held responsible for whatever happened next. Nobody could blame him, because he had immediately brought in a former commander of the Bomb Squad, and turned the problem over to him.
On the way home from the station this evening Stahl had already heard a radio news report giving him credit for outsmarting the car bomber. That was unspeakably stupid. Moving a bomb and detonating it didn’t defeat the bomber. The bomber was fine. He wasn’t in custody, nobody knew anything about him, and he was probably busy building his next bomb right now.
While Stahl had been at the scene the mayor had apparently been interviewed and given his amateur diagnosis of the bomber as “insane, mentally ill.”
In Stahl’s experience, men like this bomber never showed any sign whatever that they were mentally ill. They looked like anybody else. They exerted great self-control. They had to obtain substances and devices that were hard to find, hard to buy, and hard to use. They were patient and careful. They had to be the ones who weren’t noticed, weren’t seen, and weren’t remembered.
And this one scared Stahl. He wasn’t sending out grandiose messages or threats. He hadn’t issued demands. If he had a plan, it was hard to figure out what it was. Stahl was sure he was actively trying to kill off bomb technicians, but why? And what did he have in mind after that?
Stahl knew he couldn’t sleep. He wanted a drink to loosen his muscles, get rid of his tension headache, and make his eyelids heavy. But if the next call came tonight he would still be under the influence. He had to endure whatever his mind did to him tonight. He was in a fight.
His cell phone rang and he looked at the display. He didn’t recognize the number, but he had moved into a new environment today, so it could be anyone. “Stahl,” he said.
The voice was female. “Hi, boss. This is Diane Hines. You’re not asleep.”
“Apparently you’re not either.”
“No. I tried taking a hot bath until my fingers and toes got all wrinkled and the water got cold. I tried watching television, but they kept interrupting my sitcoms and showing us at the gas station and the riverbed. You have any ideas?”
“I’m surprised you’re asking me.”
“You’re my team supervisor. It’s your job to get your troops through.”
“What I’d normally recommend in these situations is to have a glass of single malt scotch to take away the agitation and relax the tension. But that only makes sense when the danger is over.”