CHAPTER
36
"It's bigger than we thought," David Ceimo was telling Nick and Jerry Yarden. "Not just three kids getting together and thinking it'd be cool to blow up a shopping mall."
Nick pulled the paper shoe covers on but kept his face mask dangling at his neck. Jerry had geared up completely, reminding Nick of an orange bug. The elastic band that held up the mask made his ears stick out further. And he'd mussed his hair, leaving tuffs sticking straight up. Nick resisted the urge to nudge him, and do a swipe at his own hair like he'd do with his nephew, Timmy, to tell him his hair was all tousled. Instead Nick pulled on a pair of purple latex gloves and followed behind Ceimo and Yarden, staring at Jerry's tufts of orange hair rather than looking down at the trails of blood. Bodies were covered where they lay but he swore he saw what looked like a leg?gnarled fabric and flesh with a loafer?underneath what may have once been a food court table, now twisted metal.
Ceimo was leading them to the first and closest crater. No one paid any attention to them. They continued their slow, painstaking tasks. The buzz and hum and swish of equipment took the place of conversation. Walking amongst the techs in their Tyvek overalls, masks and goggles reminded Nick of walking through a scene of Star Wars, a different planet covered in soot and ash with a distinctive smell of burnt dinner. That's how he tried to think about it. Especially the burnt dinner part. Anything to keep his mind from focusing on it really being burnt flesh and singed hair.
A tech noticed their approach. She shoved her goggles up on top of her short blond hair then picked up the tray of debris she was sifting through.
"Jamie's lead on the crater dig. She's our bomb expert," Ceimo told them.
Nick thought she looked like a college kid. On closer inspection he could see small crinkle lines at the corners of her eyes that revealed she was older.
"Go ahead and tell them what you told me," Ceimo told Jamie.
She pointed with a gloved finger to a pile of debris in the center of her tray.
"When you think of an explosion most people automatically think everything is incinerated. But fire is only one portion of an explosion. The other, of course, is blowing things apart. We end up with fragments. Some actually are decipherable." She poked around the debris and now Nick could see what looked like fibers, obviously scorched but some of the ends were still red.
"The backpack," Yarden said.
"Yes, and this metal piece was part of the detonating mechanism."
"Doesn't look like much of anything," Nick couldn't help saying.
"There're several other smaller fragments here." She gently pushed them out of the ash. "I'll piece them together back at the lab, but I recognize it already. You guys remember the Pan Am flight that went down over Lockerbie, Scotland?"
Everyone nodded. It was a long time ago. Nick figured twenty years at least, but anyone in law enforcement recognized the case. A huge passenger jet blowing up in the air.
"That was a mess," Jamie said like she'd been there. The crinkles weren't that deep. "The debris was scattered over miles and yet investigators were able to determine the exact cause. They found a tiny piece of circuit board from an electronic digital timer. It'd been placed inside a radio-cassette player along with Semtex then placed inside a brown Samsonite suitcase." She paused, noting Yarden's dropped jaw. "Yeah, amazing, huh?"
"Are you saying this piece of metal might be some sort of circuit board?" Nick asked.
"No, it's not. It's a bit different. But what I am saying is that we can determine a lot from fragments. Sometimes they're very definable. The devices used to detonate a bomb are sort of like a black box in an airplane. It can tell us a great deal of things. That circuit board found in the Lockerbie bombing was identified as a particular digital timer manufactured by a company in Zurich. Only twenty of the devices had been made. Special ordered and custom made for the Libyan government."
"Wow!"
Nick glanced at Jerry Yarden. Maggie might have some competition. Looked like Yarden had transferred his awestruck attention and affection to Jamie. Nick thought he saw the beginning of a smile at the corner of her mouth but otherwise she seemed unfazed. Instead, she continued.
"This detonating device is something I've only seen once before."
"So you might be able to track it to its manufacturer?"
She hesitated at Nick's question. "There's a good possibility."
"Wait a minute," Ceimo said for the first time. "You didn't tell me that before."
"I'm just saying it's a possibility. Remember I still have to piece the fragments together. But from what I'm seeing so far, this device looks like it may be specialized enough that we might be able to track its manufacturer. It's certainly different. Not digital. Not a preset. For lack of a better definition, it's wireless. It allows the bomb to be detonated with a remote control."
"Could they have each had a remote control on them at the same time?"
Jamie shook her head. "I'm not finding anything to indicate that, but truthfully," she said, shrugging, "the only reason for a remote control device like this is if you don't want to be anywhere near the bomb when you detonate it."
"Why not just use a digital one?" Nick insisted. "Set all of them for the same time? You wouldn't have to be nearby then, either, would you?"
"That's true. But things can go wrong with the digitals. If you get delayed you can't reset them, at least, not so easily or quickly."
"And if he used a remote control, why not just leave the backpacks where he wanted them to go off?"
"We would have noticed them," Yarden said. "We watch for anything left behind."
"Exactly," Jamie agreed. "Too much of a risk that they'd be found before they exploded."
There was a silence. No one wanted to admit what it all meant that the bombers may have been victims, too.
"There's something else," Jamie finally said. With an index finger she pulled out another piece of metal. "Not conclusive," she warned, "but the backpacks may have had some kind of padlock on them."
Nick rubbed at his jaw. He remembered how much those guys reminded him of his nephew, Timmy. Older versions but ordinary, clean-cut guys. Enjoyed football. Maybe played. The one had on a letterman jacket. He remembered their confident strides on the video. No nervous jitters. No swiveling heads or darting eyes. Just walking up and down the mall.
What the hell did they think they had locked away in those backpacks? And who convinced them to carry them around a crowded mall?
"You said you've seen this type of detonator before," Nick reminded the bomb expert.
Jamie hesitated, looked to Ceimo.
"It's okay," he told her. "The governor wants Al Banoff 's guys up to speed on this."
"I've seen it only in the plans for another bomb. We caught the guy before he completed it. He had the entire blueprint drawn and claimed it was simply a class project. But he'd already begun constructing it. The detonating device was very similar to this one, an advanced wireless system that could be triggered via a remote control. It stood out because it was pretty different from what we're used to seeing. So was the bomb he was planning. That's why he needed to be able to detonate it from as far away as possible."
"What was so different about it?"
"It was supposed to be a dirty bomb."