He had, of course, assumed that this would be the reaction of the authorities, but he hadn’t considered it brilliant. Maybe it was. He noticed that two of the men were surreptitiously looking around his workshop in the garage. They weren’t searching, just snooping. He said, “Please remember this is my workshop. You’re surrounded by high explosives, some of them in very volatile stages of manufacture.”
The one who usually did the speaking looked around at his comrades. “Did you hear and understand?”
The others muttered affirmative words and nodded, but the bomb maker reflected that he still had no idea what their first language was. It made sense that a sophisticated conspiracy would avoid sending people to the United States who couldn’t speak English, but he was disappointed and frustrated. Maybe they were from several countries that spoke different languages, and English was their only common language.
He was exhausted. He also hated the fact that his clients had presumed to take the right to drop in on him whenever they felt like it. He couldn’t let them feel welcome at all hours, but he couldn’t risk a confrontation of any kind with these four men. Anything violent they did in overpowering him might set off an explosion. He thought hard, but he could think of only one thing he could do that might help keep them friendly and under control.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Three nineteen. What difference does it make?”
“I asked for a couple of reasons. One is that I haven’t had much sleep. The other is that I have a surprise I’ve been saving for you, and I think this might be a good time to give it to you.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll show you.”
The bomb maker went to a seven-foot cabinet at the end of the room, but instead of opening it he reached up and took a small padlock key off the top. He walked to the row of steel storage boxes along the wall and unlocked two of the padlocks and removed them.
The men gathered around him as he lifted the first lid and revealed the nineteen AK-47 rifles and a couple of layers of loaded thirty-round magazines. He stepped back, and the four men surged in and picked up four rifles. They handled the rifles as though each had spent years carrying an identical one at all times. They ejected the magazines, opened the chambers, and examined them. Then they looked down the insides of the barrels, using the light of the open chambers to see the condition of the rifling. A couple of them took a bullet out of the cardboard ammo boxes and used it to partially dismantle the weapons and touch the inner surfaces to be sure they were clean, were oiled, and showed no worrisome wear or corrosion. The more they looked, the happier they appeared to be. Just over two-thirds of the weapons were new and the others were barely broken in. They sighted down the weapons and a couple of them made hasty guesswork adjustments to the unused sights before they set down one rifle and examined another.
The spokesman held up his rifle so the bomb maker could see the lower receiver, and pointed at the line of drilled-out steel. “Did you do this?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s where the serial number was. If one is lost or stolen, we don’t want the authorities to be able to identify it or where it came from.”
“But isn’t drilling a serial number a crime?”
“Yes. Having a weapon like this is a crime anyway.”
The man nodded. “Yes.” He examined the selector lever. “Have you modified these yet to be fully automatic?”
“Yes,” said the bomb maker.
The man handed the rifle back. “Test them.”
He took the rifle, as though he were agreeing to do the tests. “It will take some time, and I’m working with bombs now.”
“Then we’ll do it. There’s no point in getting the bombs ready if we don’t have the weapons for what happens afterward. Do you have the pistols?”
The bomb maker hesitated for a second. He had wanted to hold back something so he could delay them if he needed to. It was clear that he couldn’t. He opened the second storage box and the four men examined the pistols. They were satisfied with those. They held them up, pointed at the ceiling, and one of them gave a whoop, but he didn’t fire. The others answered the whoop and laughed, but didn’t fire.
For a moment he could picture these men raising their weapons and firing celebratory volleys into the sky above a desert city. But as he watched them, he also could imagine them in a tropical jungle on a rounded mountain stronghold wearing dark green fatigues and T-shirts. One who was larger and heavier might easily have been from the Balkans or central Asia.
“If you want to move them, the roads out here are empty from the time the bars close until just before dawn.”
The leader of the group said, “Oh, I almost forgot. We came to congratulate you, but also to bring you some more money.” He turned to one of his men and said, “Go get the money.”
The bomb maker waited while the men carried the weapons to the door and out to the cars. Then one of the men came back in and set a shopping bag down on the floor at his feet, turned, and went out to join his companions. The bomb maker could see it was the usual piles of hundred-dollar bills, so he didn’t bother to pick up the bag. He went and stood by the door until he saw the vehicle pause at the end of his driveway, then turn and drive off.
He was wide awake now. He was always tense in the presence of those men, but this time he had been actually afraid. There was a hint of pent-up violence in them. He realized that giving them guns was making them a hundred times more powerful, but he was too afraid of them not to. What did he have left to appease them next time?
34
Morning came earlier at Stahl’s condominium than it had in the days before the explosion in Diane’s apartment. She was awake and out of the bedroom by five. She put on the bathrobe he had ordered for her, went to the kitchen, and made coffee. She liked the fact that there were skylights above and windows opening onto a narrow garden with a fountain, which made the stone wall outside look as though it were made of water. She was too much of a cop to be uninterested in how the security was maintained. She had to go all the way to the window to look up and see that there were horizontal bars above the garden to prevent intruders, and she supposed there were bars or barriers on the roof to prevent anyone from reaching the skylights.
She sat down in the kitchen with her coffee and played with her new phone. It was late enough in Florida to call her mother, so she did. Her mother’s number rang a few times, and she decided she must be too early. Her mother’s phone was still turned off. That was the way she left it for the night because it made noises while she was trying to sleep. She sent her mother a text to tell her she’d try again later.
She thought about Dick now, and as always thinking about him seemed to release strong feelings of affection. The response still surprised her, but it also pleased her. She hoped it meant that the direction her life had taken was right. She wasn’t quite ready to formulate a more confident statement for herself. That would be too close to saying the words aloud. Once people said things aloud, what they said tended to become sure and settled.
Not much was sure or settled. The reason she had become a bomb technician was not that she was cocky or had no fear of death. It was the opposite.
She wanted to live to be old and had always worked hard to deserve to be alive. A person who risked his life every day for others and who worked to gain the knowledge and skills to do it well must have a claim to living. She had not been overconfident, but she had been optimistic—until the evening after the car bomb in the Valley. That night, she had lost that feeling.