Jameson Rook was mighty pleased with himself about his trip to the spy store when the wireless monitor came out of the pantry and he played back the video from his NannyCam. He scrolled backward through the ghosty images, not having to go far, just about an hour, until he came to movement. A man in a cable company logo cap entered with a large toolbox, then left the frame as he roamed off into the hallway. “Great coverage,” said Nikki. “You could work for C-SPAN.”
But a moment later the man returned and moved to the living room, where he knelt and opened his toolbox in front of the TV. “Look at that,” said Rook. “Dead center in the frame. I’m better than C-SPAN. I could work for C-SPAN2.”
They zapped through the next fifteen minutes as the visitor worked at the cable box. When he was done, he fastened the snaps on his toolbox and left the apartment in the quadruple speed of video time-lapse. Rook hit stop and wandered from the counter over to the living room. “What do you know. It’s like Freud said. Sometimes a cable guy is just a cable guy.” He picked up the remote and said, “Unless it’s Jim Carrey, and then—”
Nikki threw a tackle on Rook, on the way down running her hand up his arm and stripping the remote from his grasp. When they both hit the floor, he said, “What the hell was that for?”
Nikki walked back to the counter, cradling the remote, and said, “This.”
Rook picked himself up and joined her as she rolled back the NannyCam video and froze it on the face of the cable guy as he passed under the camera on his exit. The freeze was of the man Heat and her squad had been trying to ID and locate from the Pleasure Bound security video.
The man with the coiled snake tattoo.
* * *
An hour later, after the bomb squad had cleared her building and those in the surrounding area, a hero in an eighty-pound blast suit emerged with the cable box and placed it in the Mobile Containment Unit on the trailer in the center of the street. When he was clear of the opening, his sergeant pressed a remote control button and the hydraulic actuator whirred, gently closing the armor-plated hatch and sealing the cable box inside.
Heat made her way to the cop who was being helped out of his protective suit by a detail from Emergency Services. As soon as he had his right hand free of his heavy glove, she shook it and thanked him. In spite of his nonchalant “Hey, you’re welcome,” his hair was sweat-matted to his forehead. The look in his eyes was enough to tell her that handling the real deal was never taken casually by those guys, no matter how much they brushed it off. As he described the bomb to her, Rook joined the circle, as did Raley and Ochoa, who had heard the call go out and dropped everything to get down there.
After his K-9 had sniffed the apartment and confirmed the cable box as a hit, he did his X-ray. The trigger device was a simple mercury switch poised to be detonated by battery when someone pressed the power button of the TV remote control. “What kind of explosive?” asked Nikki.
“Evaporation sample of the taggant was positive for C4.”
Ochoa whistled. “Plastic explosive.”
“Yeah, it most definitely would have spoiled somebody’s night,” said the man from the bomb squad as he took a long drink of water from a bottle. “They’ll lab it, but, by my calc, it’s going to test out as military grade. Not so easy to come by.”
Rook turned to Heat. “Not from what I’ve learned over the last month. Especially if you have connections to the military—however unofficial.”
* * *