“Four and six, but we’re building.”
He watched her trot off to join her husband. He waited while the three vehicles took a slow turn like elephants forming trunk-to-tail into a caravan and then lurched up the gravel incline to the road and headed for Los Feliz. This time when they reached the city street, the second police car moved across the opening in the gate and stayed there.
Carmody was over forty, and he had been in uniforms most of his life. He had been a marine until he was wounded in Fallujah in the Iraq War. Then he went to EOD school and served two more tours, which was what he’d calculated he owed the country in exchange for the training. After that he became a Los Angeles police officer.
He’d had a theory once that he would be happy if he married a good woman. But when he became a civilian, he tried it three times and it never worked out. He kept throwing his marriages away, and then being surprised that he’d been so easily distracted.
He would run into a woman who was very pretty, usually married, but had that small spark of interest anyway. He would try to charm her, succeed, get caught by his wife, and end up signing papers. He’d been much happier, but for shorter periods of time, since then.
These days most of the women were like that baseball mom, except that they had been interested in Ed Carmody, which she wasn’t. But who knew? Maybe the sight and sound of him would grow on her too. It had happened before. The ones who didn’t seem interested would show up in a day, a month, or even a year, having experienced a change of some kind, and be in a playful mood.
There was still the bomb—if it was a bomb. Carmody made his way to the end of the parking lot near the picnic tables where the vans must have originally parked, and watched his two teammates study the device from about ten yards away. Marshall was carrying the video camera and documenting the scene, using the zoom lens to get a better look.
Carmody got into the truck and watched the video screen to see what had caused all the concern. When he saw it, the image was more than familiar. The object looked just like an M904 nose fuze for a five-hundred-pound aerial bomb. He knew all about that model. When he was in the military it had been the standard fuze for the standard bomb dropped by fixed-wing aircraft. The M904 held a powerful explosive charge for initiating the trinitrotoluene, but it was safe and reliable.
He said, “Okay, you guys. Do you recognize the fuze?”
Marshall said, “It looks like an M904 nose fuze.”
“What’s it attached to?”
“It looks like it’s inserted into a canister about the size of a big thermos.”
“As long as it’s not screwed into an Mk 82 five hundred pounder, we ought to be able to take it out.”
Rogers said, “Maybe we ought to just blow it up, like Captain Stahl said in his e-mail. This isn’t a bad place to do it. Nothing but trees and a parking lot.”
“There’s no need to scare the crap out of everybody in Los Feliz. I’ll suit up and disconnect it. Come on back.”
He was already breaking out his suit, and Rogers and Marshall returned and helped him get it on. They helped lift the helmet up and over his head, and Carmody heard the small ventilator fan begin to whirr to clear his vision screen and cool his head and face. He walked to the place where the others had been looking.
Now that he was in the suit he had to communicate by radio. He knelt down and said to the transmitter, “It looks just like an M904. I’m going to take it out and then render the device safe. Please double-check to be sure the area is clear of bystanders.”
“Check,” said Rogers.
“Is the road clear? No cars allowed in or out?”
“Clear,” said Marshall.
“Code Five Edward called?”
“Code Five Edward in effect.”
Ed Carmody turned his body to bring the clear plate in front of his eyes around to sweep the parking lot and the foliage surrounding it. The three bomb technicians were alone in this beautiful, quiet place. “I’m going to remove the fuze.”
He knelt and touched the fuze. It wasn’t screwed in, just inserted and taped to stay there. He looked at it closely. It wasn’t quite the way he remembered the M904. Was its housing a lighter metal? He cut the tape that held it to the canister, and then lifted the fuze away. There was a sudden resistance. It was only then that he saw the thin lines of wire under the fuze, like a spiderweb gleaming in the sunlight that leaked through the canopy of the tree above him. He realized that the fuze was a decoy. The canister was too.
He set it back down, but lifting the wires had set something off. He saw a small disk fly up from the dusty ground a few feet away, spinning like a flipped coin and revealing a round hole in the ground. A cylinder shape shot out of the tube in the hole. It rose six feet into the air and then hung, poised there for a second before it would fall.
Carmody half turned and shouted, “Get down!”
Then, at the top of its arc, the bounding charge detonated. There were nine bounding charges in the air, each wrapped in tape that held ball bearings in place until its charge made them fly outward in all directions.
The nine bounding charges had been made by hand, and they were intentionally not uniform in weight, size, or power. Some rose only three feet, others seven, and the charges detonated over a period of nearly two seconds as Carmody saw light for the last time.
40
Diane Hines had finally reached the stage in her recovery when she was able to do exercises. The designers of Stahl’s condominium building had equipped the subbasement with a workout room full of weights and exercise machines and a twenty-five-yard indoor swimming pool. She could see that Stahl had been right about the designers. They had misjudged their buyers. During Diane’s first fifteen visits she never saw anyone in the pool or the workout room but Stahl.
The rest of the owners were not people who spent much time in the building. Many of them occupied their condominiums only about ten days a year, when they were in Los Angeles on business, and lived in other countries the rest of the time.
The building was perfect for Diane. There was a short hallway off the entrance to the condominiums with an elevator that worked with a key. She took it to the subbasement level of pool, showers, locker rooms, and exercise room. When the elevator arrived and the doors opened, the lights and air-conditioning came on automatically, and she would go in and do her workout. In the third week of workouts, she had begun making noticeable progress toward the way she had always been.
Stahl had spent most working hours at his security company lately, but when he came home he would go down to the subbasement with Diane to lift weights, hit the heavy bag, and swim before dinner.
Today she had done more work than usual in the morning, partly to beat the loneliness she felt when Stahl was away.
After Diane moved in, she had gone online and bought a stack of manuals to help her prepare for the police detective exam. She didn’t exactly hide the manuals, but she didn’t show them to Stahl, either. She kept them on the dresser in the spare bedroom. She knew she was delaying a conversation because she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say to him about it. She wasn’t sure she really wanted to transfer. She just didn’t want to be declared unfit to be a bomb technician and have her career end for lack of alternatives.