“Thanks, Welsh.” He turned and ran to the entrance to the subway, then down the steps because the motor had been turned off. When he reached the first floor down, he saw that there was a command area set up just inside the turnstiles where Elliot and another bomb technician were leaning over a video unit.
Stahl stepped close. “Hi, Elliot. Are you the supervisor of the scene?”
“For the moment I am,” he said. “Wyman and Neil are downrange. The damaged train cars are being towed to sidings to the north of the station so they’ll be out of the way. While that goes on, they’re trying to be sure there’s no other explosive device down the track between the location of the crash and the next station, which is Universal City.”
“You’re sure it was an explosive device, and not a crash?”
“Yes,” Elliot said. “The first car was charred, pitted, and scratched from the blast, and the surface tests positive for nitrate compounds. The tracks had been subjected to heat and lateral force. They’re bent and have to be replaced.”
“How far have Wyman and Neil gotten?”
“They’ve got two thousand feet of communication line on a wheel, and there’s plenty left, but they’re past the wreckage.”
Stahl said, “Not to second-guess anything, but why Wyman?”
Elliot shrugged. “No choice. He’s the ranking supervisor on this scene, and he decided to go. I was just suiting up when he got here and took charge.”
“Mind if I hang around?”
“I’d take it as a favor,” Elliot said. “As soon as they reconnect themselves to the line, we can see what else they find.”
“I’m pretty sure there will be something,” said Stahl. “This guy always leaves something for us to disarm. What do you know about the hookup for the first explosion?”
“I think the bomb was fairly small, placed between the left rail going south and the track for a switch to divert a train into another tunnel for maintenance. So when the front wheel of the train passed over the spot, the bomb went off under the front of the first car. It must have killed the driver instantly, and then derailed the first three cars. The railway people were able to tow everything behind that out of the way because it was mostly undamaged. They’re working on clearing the cars that were derailed, but there’s no telling how long that will take. They may have to use cutting torches and move them out in sections.”
There was a sudden change on the screen in front of Elliot. They saw hands appear. Then there was Neil’s voice. “Team One, this is Neil. Wyman says he’s found a second device on the maintenance walkway on the left side of the tunnel.”
“Want to tell him anything?” Elliot asked Stahl.
Stahl said, “Hey, Neil. This is Dick Stahl. Tell him not to touch anything until he’s shown it to us on the video feed. I think I’ll be able to identify what it is.”
Neil said, “He says he’s got it identified.”
Stahl said, “Remember, this isn’t about stopping a subway train to disrupt the morning commute. He’s trying to get us to make a mistake. If you find—”
There was a sudden bump that seemed to come up into the vault of the station from the train level below. It felt like a giant hammer hitting the bedrock foundation, and almost simultaneously there was a rush of air. It was similar to the feel of air forced out of a tunnel ahead of a train when it approached at high speed, but it came harder and hotter, filled with fine particles that stung the skin. And then the sound arrived, a deafening vibration that lasted a couple of seconds, shook solid rock and concrete, and made squares of tile drop from the walls and ceiling.
In another second it was gone, as though it had passed down the tunnel to the rest of the system. Stahl and Elliot looked at each other with the same horrified expression. Wyman had guessed wrong.
38
Late in the afternoon, long after the bomb technicians, firefighters, structural engineers, metro engineers, train specialists, and others had declared the emergency over and the scene safe, the mayor arrived. He came with his entourage—a photographer, a public relations officer, a political spokesman, a driver, and a bodyguard. Both the driver and the guard were on-duty police officers, but the mayor liked them to dress in identical black suits, which were a little like the livery of servants. Both men were muscular and formidable, but neither was quite as tall as the mayor, nor was any other member of the retinue. Experts had advised the mayor never to allow himself to look short in a photograph, because the taller man almost always won an election.
The police chief and Deputy Chief Ogden were both taller than the mayor, but in their uniforms, with their pistols and badges and utility belts crowded with gear in black leather pouches, they looked more like instruments of the mayor’s power than colleagues. He always walked a couple of paces ahead of them, trying to look like their commander in chief.
The flat, paved area above the subway entrance held satellite trucks from the four major local news channels parked at odd angles, each of them with booms and dishes extended and a reporter and camera operator standing by. The reporters needed to stand in the foreground to provide teasers and superfluous commentary while the camera operators followed the mayor around.
Television cameras were like sunlight and water to the mayor. He stood straighter, and his eyes and facial muscles assumed the look his underlings called “resolute.” He seemed to drink power from the microphones.
At this moment he was giving the reporters a somber procession, a portrait of the city’s wise leader walking the scene to survey the damage. The camera operators took in the sight and transmitted it to their studios, and the reporters spoke in reverent tones, knowing the mayor would be out again soon to give them the chance to question him, to ask him respectfully how the people of the city should feel about today’s developments. They knew he was as aware as they were of the need to get the interview transmitted in time to make the early evening news, so they trusted him.
As soon as the entourage had traveled down on the escalator to the platform, the chief checked to be sure the newspeople were too far behind to hear. Then he said to the mayor: “I’m sorry to get into this right now, Mr. Mayor, but we’re on an emergency footing. We’ve lost two officers, an engineer, and three civilians. You’ll recall that when we let Dick Stahl resign, we made an agreement with the police commission to approve a contract with his security company to let us use him as a civilian consultant to the Bomb Squad.”
“I remember the idea, but I never signed off on it,” the mayor said.
“After what happened today, I’m convinced we ought to make a move on this now.”
The mayor got to the bottom of the escalator and waited while the chief and Deputy Ogden glided down. “You’re telling me that having Stahl on the payroll would have prevented this? Would he have put on a bomb suit and gone down there to defuse the bomb himself?”
“I don’t know what he would have done, sir, and that’s exactly the point. He knows the best ways to approach an explosive device, and we don’t have anybody else who knows it as well. We know he personally defused three very large and complicated devices during his few weeks as commander, at least a couple of them so big that there was no point in wearing a bomb suit.”
The mayor’s expression became brooding and resentful. “How do you know he hasn’t been setting these bombs himself and then taking them apart? He would know just how to do it because he put them together. I’m not the first one to wonder about that, either. At least two of the reporters up there have said as much.”
The chief was frustrated, and his voice turned hard. “He’s been cleared of any suspicion. Homicide Special found that there was no chance he did any of these crimes. None. Zero.”
Deputy Chief Ogden said, “He wasn’t even in the country the day the fourteen men were killed. He was in Mexico. I was in his office and saw him arrive from there the day after it happened.”
The chief said, “He’s got alibis for every bomb. He was in front of the TV cameras defusing a bomb when—”