Crowell said, “It’s got to be this wire here. And there’s one on the other side of it too. Want me to cut it?”
“I’d love to get the timer issue off the table at the start, but no. We’re not dismantling it unless we have to. The clock looks as though it’s set for seven o’clock, and that gives us time.”
His voice rose. “Hines? The vest isn’t attached to anything bigger. Let’s get Andros out to pick up the device and put it into the containment vessel.”
“Roger,” said Hines. She opened the truck door and climbed down, then opened the rear of the truck to pull down the ramp. She climbed up and detached the robot’s mountings, then picked up the control unit, steered the robot down the ramp to the street, and lifted the ramp back up. The robot was an older model that had been refurbished to replace worn parts. To Hines, the control mechanism seemed slightly stiff, and she knew that in this situation she was most likely to be the one to pilot the robot. She tested the control by making the robot wheel around in a circle and zigzag. She moved its arm and opened and closed its gripper, looked at the image that appeared on its screen, and then brought it back to the rear of the truck.
Across the street from the bomb, the maker looked out the window and watched the two men in bomb suits. They knelt close to the vest. He could tell they were communicating as they studied his device. He kept hoping one of them would reach out and try to cut one of the obvious connections he had made, and then try to remove components. He couldn’t see their hands because the suits exaggerated their bulk, and their hands were in front of them. All he could see were their elbows.
When the two technicians turned their bodies to look at something down the street, he moved back in the shadows, then to the side of the window so he could see what they were looking at. The Bomb Squad truck was near the end of the block. It faced in the direction of the bomb vest. That was unusual, but he decided it was because the street was too narrow to turn a truck sideways. A moment later he saw what the technicians were watching for. The Bomb Squad robot came around the back of the truck and rolled past it. Someone was operating the remote control to bring the robot forward.
The robot meant the bomb maker was running out of time. Things were happening too soon. This had just begun. The two men standing near the bomb had just begun to examine the vest. They hadn’t so much as opened a tool bag. They weren’t trying to render it safe or carry it to the containment vessel.
He had to do something. He climbed onto the desk behind the upended table, rested his rifle on the edge, and looked through the scope. He could see they both wore new-style EOD suits, the very best available. The helmet could withstand a bullet traveling 2,000 feet per second. The front of the torso would stop a projectile at 4,500 feet per second. The arms and legs would not be penetrated at 1,850 feet per second, and the joints all overlapped. There was no point in shooting at a man in a bomb suit. What the bomb maker had to do was set off the high explosive in the vest, which would propel shrapnel at them at 26,000 feet per second from just a few feet away.
The maker took careful aim at the bomb. He had embedded a blasting cap in each of the twelve sticks of dynamite. He had attached a plastic container of mercury fulminate to the inside of the clock behind the face. All he had to do was hit the clock, and everything would explode. Even if he missed the clock, he would hit the Tannerite, set it off, and the shock would set off the main charges. The two technicians would be torn apart.
He watched them through the scope. The two oafs were standing in front of the alley, blocking his view of his bomb vest. He must get them to move. He decided he’d have to bet on their reflexes and impulses. He squeezed the trigger.
The man who had been blocking his view was hit on the ankle, and the impact made him fall onto his side. There was no hope the bullet had pierced even the outer layer of the suit, but it had hurt him. The problem now was that the damned idiot had fallen in front of the vest, so his stupid body still blocked the bomb maker’s view.
He fired again and the bullet hit the arm of the suit. The man clutched the arm, but didn’t get up. But the shot made the man’s companion squat, bring his arms around the man’s torso, and practically lift him to his feet. They turned, as though to look for the shooter, so he fired four more shots, hitting the tall one who had helped the other in the front of his helmet, his leg, and his helmet again. They hobbled out of his way.
The bomb maker placed the crosshairs on the clock face and fired, but there was no explosion. The blast should have been instantaneous. He tried to adjust his aim, but all he could see through the scope was a featureless black surface.
He lowered the rifle to look over the scope and saw what had happened. In front of him, blocking his view, was the bomb truck. Another bomb technician had heard his shots, seen the two men in suits under fire, and driven the bomb truck forward to put it between him and his bomb.
He had to get the bomb technician in the truck to panic and drive away. He fired on the truck’s cab. The first bullet slammed into the truck’s door. The second shattered the side window, and then he saw the driver. It was a young, dark-haired woman dressed in a navy-blue police uniform. She ducked down, slithered out the passenger side door, and disappeared.
He collapsed the rifle’s stock, put the rifle in its case, closed it, and ran to the stairwell. In seconds he was out the back door of the office building. He moved down the alley behind the building and reached the parking lot on Cherokee where he had left his rental car. He got in and drove up Hollywood Boulevard toward Laurel Canyon and the San Fernando Valley, spitting out a string of twenty expletives about the woman who had taken away his kill.
15
Stahl watched the footage from the bomb vest incident for the third time. This was a completely different kind of attack from the others. The fact that Stahl had predicted a change in methods didn’t reassure him. He had guessed the bomb maker would keep presenting the squad with new kinds of devices in new locations. Right in the middle of Hollywood was not like the other crime scenes.
The idea that there would be a person with a suicide vest just off Hollywood Boulevard was chilling to a bomb technician. The crowds that gathered in front of the Chinese Theater to see the hand-and footprints of movie stars, or at the Hollywood and Highland complex, would make a mass murderer drool. The plan had worked exactly the way the bomb maker wanted. He’d had four bomb technicians there within fifteen minutes after the bomb turned up.
The device itself was worse than a suicide vest. There were about five ways to get it to detonate, and while the vest had twelve sticks of dynamite displayed, the explosives hidden inside the vest were much more powerful.
Only two aspects of the event pleased Stahl. The technicians of Team One had sent for the robot and had not been tempted to dismantle the vest. And when they came under fire, a quick-thinking technician had reacted instantly to put the truck between them and the shooter. What didn’t please him was that in order to do it she’d had to put herself in the line of fire, where she could have been shot. And it didn’t please him that the one who had put herself in danger was Diane Hines. He wondered if he would have the same contradictory feelings if it had been another bomb tech—say, Crowell. Probably not.
Andy knocked on the door frame to announce his presence, and Stahl stopped the image on his computer. “What’s up?”
“Deputy Chief Ogden wants you for a conference.”
Stahl stood and started for the door. “Where?”
“Room Two Thirty-Nine.”
“What’s that?”
“The pressroom.”
“Get Ogden on the phone for me, will you?”