The two men searched the lobby for any of the signs of a booby trap—fine trip wires, a gym bag like the one seen on the video, devices plugged into electrical outlets that didn’t seem to belong. Stahl knew their job was especially risky today because dozens of people had evacuated the building in a hurry, and might have left things like briefcases or equipment bags anywhere.
When they made sure the lobby was safe, they began to move from room to room on the ground floor. The first offices they came to were administrative. There were signs that people had been interrupted—pens dropped on half-completed forms, computer screens that had gone dark or displayed screen savers since their users left.
Farther on were medical examining rooms. There were tables in some rooms with white paper on them that was puckered and wrinkled by the last patient, white coats that still hung behind the doors. There were even a couple of telephones left off their cradles.
Stahl and McCrary found nothing dangerous in any of the rooms. They examined the phones, particularly the ones that were left beeping with the off-the-hook signal. This would not have been the first time placing a phone in its cradle had set off a bomb.
They moved across the lobby to the other wing of the building, where there were a few offices with big filing cabinets that looked as though they held medical records. There was a large conference room with a big video screen, video recorders and players, and a computer. They spent some time examining the equipment for suspicious wires or components.
When they finished their sweep they went back to the central lobby. There was a big steel door labeled STAIRS, the reception desks they had already examined, and a pair of elevator doors. McCrary headed for the elevators.
As McCrary reached up toward the panel between them, Stahl shouted, “Freeze! Don’t touch the button!”
McCrary had to turn his whole body to look back. “What is it?”
Stahl hurried close to him. “Something’s wrong,” he said. He pointed up at the panel above the elevator doors. “See that? The number lit up is four. Everybody has been evacuated. There was nobody up there on the fourth floor to hit the button. Both elevator cars should be down here.”
“You think the bomber went up there?”
“Yes. But I don’t think he’s still there. He knew the first ones back in the building would be the Bomb Squad. He knew we’d be wearing eighty-five-pound bomb suits. Probably he even knew that searching the ground floor would tire us out. He knows the last thing we want to do right now is climb stairs under all this weight, but he also knows we have to go up to check, floor by floor.”
“So what do we do?”
“I think he rigged the elevators to explode. So what we should do is climb the stairs to the fourth floor. First, we’ve got to call Curtis and Bolland to explain what we’ve done and what we’re about to do. If we die, no information dies with us, all right?”
“Agreed.” McCrary made the call to his teammates who were waiting outside.
Then Stahl pulled open the door to the stairwell and began to climb. As he did, he took his mind off the sheer dull strain of lifting one foot after the next by thinking about elevators. Since his first years as an EOD man in the army he had studied the ways buildings, bridges, towers, vehicles, ships, and airplanes were constructed. It didn’t matter how much a technician knew about explosives if he knew nothing about the places where they were hidden, how they could be disguised, and the electrical circuits or physical features that could be used to detonate them.
As he climbed he constructed a blueprint of an elevator in his mind. There was a vertical shaft. At the top, above the upper range of the elevator car, there was a motor that turned a wheel called a sheave, which operated a pulley. On one end of the cable was the elevator car, and on the other was a counterweight about equal to the weight of the car. That way the force required to turn the pulley to raise or lower the car was minimal.
He studied the mental image to figure where the gym bag full of explosives would be placed and how it would be triggered. The elevator car was at the top floor right now. The bomber would expect the first bomb technician to arrive at the doors on the first floor and press the up button.
The controller above the fourth floor with the pulley and sheave would switch on the electric motor to simultaneously raise the counterweight toward the fourth floor and lower the elevator car toward the first floor. When the counterweight reached the upper limit switch in its track and the elevator car reached the lower limit switch, the motor would stop. The doors would open, and the passenger would step inside the elevator car. After a few seconds the elevator doors would close, and the elevator would be ready to rise when any of the numbers—2, 3, or 4—was pushed.
Stahl reached the second-floor landing. He and McCrary were both panting. Stahl stopped there and said, “Have you ever worked on a bomb in an elevator before?”
“Never,” McCrary said.
“Okay. I’m going to do something that’s going to look stupid. But it isn’t.”
He began to take off his bomb suit. He put down the heavy helmet with its Plexiglas window and whirring fan. He was drenched with sweat from the exertion of the past couple of hours. “I just realized we’re doing this wrong. The bomb has to be in the shaft. I won’t be able to go into the shaft and climb around with this thing on. And the charges this guy sets for us couldn’t be stopped by a bomb suit anyway.”
“A gym bag full of high explosives? No.”
“The bottom of an elevator car is thick, made of steel to take the weight of the riders. The top of an elevator car isn’t. There’s even a hatch in the ceiling that opens for maintenance.”
“Yeah. I’ve seen those.”
“There are a dozen safety devices on an elevator. It can’t free-fall, even if you cut the cable. It can’t even pick up speed. But there’s no protection from a bomb placed on the roof of the elevator car.”
“You’re right.”
“So if he rigged the elevator, that’s where the device probably is. Now I just have to get up there and see what triggers the charge.”
“Why not the buttons inside the elevator?”
“It’s possible. No matter what the switch is, the charge has to be on the roof of the car.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Go back down to the lobby. Stay near the elevators, but not in front of the doors. If I screw up they’ll blow outward. But guard the buttons. Don’t let anybody get near them. We don’t have proof yet that the bomber has left the building.”
“Yes, sir.”
Stahl removed the suit, took his tool kit, and climbed the stairs. When he reached the fourth floor he studied the area around the two elevators. The elevator shafts were in a recessed rectangular space. He looked for the plain unmarked door that must provide access to the working parts of the elevators, but there was none.
He reentered the stairwell and climbed. There was only one flight, and then, on the next landing, there was the plain steel door he had been expecting. He tried the handle, but the door was locked.
Stahl set the canvas tool bag down and found the electric lock-pick gun. He inserted the tension wrench and the gun’s needle nose into the keyway and pressed the trigger, and when he felt the lower pins jump to make a space below the upper pins, he put pressure on the tension wrench and turned the knob.
The door opened to a level above the two elevator shafts. As he approached the first shaft, he saw an empty black gym bag that had been discarded on the floor a few feet away. Above the shaft, at about waist height, was the platform that held the controller and the motor. He could see downward past the sheave and pulley to the roof of the elevator car.