“I lost my head. Can you blame me?”
“Maybe my tactic wasn’t the best.” She seethed, but that was all the apology she was going to get. “Ready to listen?”
Her eyes were still murderous. “Is this your scheme to prevent me from doing that interview tomorrow night?”
“This is about something a hell of a lot bigger than that.”
She continued to breathe heavily and angrily, but at least he had her attention. She had calmed to a simmer. “I want my hands back.”
“Are you going to pound at me like a crazy woman?”
“Maybe.”
He released her, but she didn’t go manic again. She settled into her seat. “All right, I’m listening.”
He opened the driver’s window a crack so he could safely leave the engine running, but he switched off the headlights. He organized his thoughts and decided to simply lay it out there.
“Kerra, twice in your life, you’ve narrowly escaped being killed. And both times you were with The Major. Now, you can lie to yourself, talk around it, rationalize, theorize about fickle fate, karma, and whatever other crap you want to throw into the mix, but you know, I know, there’s only one explanation. The two of you survived the bombing, and somebody is scared of what will come of you and The Major putting your heads together and comparing notes on what you saw and heard that day.”
“A generally speaking somebody?”
“A particular somebody. Which is why I kept going back to it.”
She shook her head in confusion and stroked the bruise above her brow.
The reflexive motion concerned him. “Kerra, are you dizzy? Feeling sick? Does your head hurt?”
“Yes. No. I’m fine.”
“You shouldn’t have been flailing around like that.”
“You shouldn’t have kidnapped me.”
“Do you want me to take you back?”
“Not until I’ve heard this. I’m all right. Tell me what you meant when you said you kept going back to ‘it.’ The bombing?”
“I studied it from the inside out.”
“While you were with the ATF?”
“In my spare time.”
“To what end? The case was solved.”
“‘Solved’ isn’t the word I would use,” he said. “There was never a mystery as to who’d done it or why. The guy confessed, said that he and two other men carried the bombs into the Pegasus Hotel and set them to detonate because they held a grudge against the hotel’s parent company.”
“The petroleum company.”
“Yes. Everything he confessed to was substantiated by the FBI and ATF’s investigations. The blasts were devastating in terms of casualties and destruction of property. But as far as bombs go, they were nothing fancy, and nothing fancy was needed for a building only sixteen stories tall. C-4, a high explosive. Blasting caps. Timers. One of them, swear to God, was an egg timer.
“The blast radius of each wasn’t that large, but it didn’t have to be. What made the Pegasus bombs effective was that they were strategically placed. You know like when an old building is imploded, the explosives are set near support beams, either around the perimeter or in the center? Same principle. Collapse the infrastructure, building crashes down.”
“That sounds scarily simple.”
“It doesn’t take a genius. Nowadays we’re conditioned to be on the alert for stray backpacks and the like. But two decades ago, three men dressed as businessmen carrying briefcases and rollaboards into a hotel wouldn’t have been given a moment’s notice.
“The confessor was an architect. He’d acquired a set of plans, all the schematics of the building, knew how to access the areas they needed to get to, and he had his escape route mapped out.”
“Remember, I’ve studied the bombing, too,” Kerra said. “One of the things I found incomprehensible was that he was the one who set the timers, then lied to the other two about how much time they had to get clear before detonation.”
“Exactly,” Trapper said quietly. “He planned it so he would be the sole surviving bomber. But only so he could confess? Does that make sense to you?”
“That’s what bothered you, what got you interested?”
“It was one of the things,” he said. “When I first got into the ATF, I was merely curious to learn more about the event that had dominated my life since age eleven. I wanted to tackle it, like a foe, and now I had access to files, reports, information that the general public is never exposed to because it’s either too technical or too graphic, horrific, gruesome. I was like a scholar deprived of books who suddenly finds himself locked inside the Library of Congress. But for all the access I had, the deeper I dug, the more curious I became.”
“Why?”
“It takes years for specialists to recreate a catastrophic event like that. They do it bit by minuscule bit, but even when they’ve fit together all the pieces available, it’s common for questions to remain. The laws of physics apply to explosions, but anomalies occur that defy logic and/or science. How did that human ear wind up a quarter mile away while its mate was discovered six blocks in the opposite direction? Why didn’t that one window blow out like all the others on that side of the building? Why did that can of Coke remain intact when everything around it was blown to smithereens?
“But with the Pegasus, everything was neatly wrapped up. No ambiguities. Every t crossed, every i dotted. No loose ends. Not even the culprits. The guy who confessed didn’t make it to his sentencing trial. He died of stomach cancer, which had been diagnosed months before he carried those bombs into the Pegasus.”
“Leading you to conclude what?”
“He didn’t bomb the place to settle a score with the petroleum company that had gouged him at the gas pump.”
“He claimed that he and his friends were making a statement.”
“That’s what he claimed, but what was the statement? I’ve read the transcripts, watched the videos of his sessions with the investigating agents. He rambled, he groused, but he never gave a clear-cut explanation of their gripe. He had the world’s attention, but didn’t step up on the soapbox?” He shook his head, negating the reasonableness of that.
“There was no indication of religious fanaticism, no white supremacy or anti-establishment leanings. No saber wielding, no screamed threats of annihilation, no swastikas. All the same,” he said, lowering his voice, “three men who, on the surface, were perfectly ordinary, were indoctrinated into committing mass murder.”
“Indoctrinated? That connotes the opposite of what you just said. They didn’t have a cause.”
“They had one. I just don’t know what it was. I was stopped before I could find out.”
“Is this where the aforementioned ‘somebody’ comes in?”
“He’s the indoctrinator. I was close. This close,” he said, holding his thumb and finger an inch apart, “to nailing him. But before I had all the evidence I needed, the plug got pulled. I was making a nuisance of myself, so I got called on the carpet and was reminded that the Pegasus Hotel was a closed case. Sure, my interest in it was understandable; it was deeply personal.”