When Dick Stahl reached the First Street headquarters, Andy had a message for him. The Encino bomb murders had been assigned to Homicide Special. They were meeting to develop strategies for solving the case, and Stahl had been summoned.

Stahl was not surprised that the case had gone to the elite Homicide Special section. The murder of fourteen cops in a fraction of a second was a national tragedy, and the department would do everything possible to ensure that nothing like it ever happened again.

When Stahl was a cop, headquarters had been in the old Parker Center. The new headquarters had been completed since he left, so he was not yet familiar with the building. He walked to the Robbery-Homicide Division and asked the first plainclothes cop he saw where the Homicide Special section was. He could have walked to it with his eyes closed in Parker Center. The plainclothes cop saw Stahl’s captain’s badge at his belt and stood up. “This is the right office, sir. Whom can I get you?”

“I’m Dick Stahl, Bomb Squad. I got invited to a meeting with Homicide.”

The cop said, “I thought I recognized you from television. I’ll take you.”

He led Stahl into an open mezzanine and up to a conference room door. He opened it and stepped inside, then returned with another detective with a captain’s badge and a white shirt.

The captain held out his hand. He was a few inches shorter than Stahl, with expertly barbered black hair and the broad shoulders and thin waist of a wrestler, as though as a young man he had built muscles to make up for his short stature. “I’m Bart Almanzo. Welcome back to the force. You had a hell of a first day yesterday.”

“I’m glad you got the case.” Stahl was sincere. Homicide Special included the best homicide detectives in the department, whoever they happened to be at the moment, and the best was what this case deserved. “Some of those guys were friends of mine, and others were technicians I hired. How can I help?”

Almanzo said, “We’re having a meeting to share the first technical reports on the bombing, and if you’re able to spare the time, we want to hear anything you’d like to say.”

“I’ll tell you the little I know so far.”

They stepped inside and Stahl saw a dozen plainclothes officers in white shirts and ties, some wearing shoulder holsters and others wearing their weapons on their belts. The conference table was crowded with laptop computers, file folders, densely printed papers, and enlarged photographs. There were four women, two more than there would have been years ago when he’d last met with Homicide Special. Otherwise they looked about the same—cops in the middle of their careers, people who had learned a great deal and were ready for the next thing.

Almanzo said, “Captain Stahl, would you like to start?”

“All right. Here’s my interpretation of what I’ve seen. The surveillance tapes from yesterday’s attempted bombing make me think this is one man who works alone, not a political or religious group. This bomb maker is good. He has a sure hand and a very sophisticated sense of what a bomb technician is likely to look for and how he’ll go about making the bomb safe. That argues for some experience. He’s not at a point in his life where he can get military explosives—C-4 or Semtex. He’s had to make his own. That adds to my impression that he’s working alone.”

Stahl looked at the detectives, who were paying close attention. “That’s very bad news, because it makes him more independent and more dangerous. We think the explosive he’s been using is a homemade version of Semtex. Making it is a tricky task, because the main part of the formula is to mix two already powerful explosives, RDX and PETN. Since he can’t buy either of them, he must be making them. But because the ingredients are not perfectly controlled, he can make an unlimited supply. If an ingredient becomes scarce, he can simply move back a step in the process and make the components of the ingredient.”

“What do you suggest we look at first?”

“He used number eight commercial blasting caps for his car bomb. We took some out unexploded, so they can probably be traced to a source using model numbers and lot numbers. I don’t imagine tracing will lead directly to him, but it may give us something else—a licensed contact, a supplier. The car he left at the station has to have a history. He either bought it or stole it from somebody. He was all over it, touching many parts of it to turn it into a bomb. If we’re really lucky he might even have left a fingerprint. His switches are often the simplest kinds of devices to complete a circuit—wires attached to metallic surfaces that will connect for an instant if a door is closed or a spring is released or a button is pressed. But one thing he really loves is a mercury tilt switch. He knows we don’t want to defuse any bombs. What we want to do with a bomb is move it away from a populated area and detonate it. A mercury switch means that trying to move it will kill you.”

“Is he military trained?”

“I don’t know. There are signs he’s self-taught. His designs are eccentric, made for a single use on a single day. He’s good at improvising. He likes to build in redundancies like backup switches and separate charges, so a bomb will have several ways to detonate. That tendency is often part of the amateur mentality. Think of the guys who send mail bombs. The amateurs overwrap them. You know. It would look just like a normal package but it has layers and layers of tape around it. But it’s too early to assume this guy is untrained. He might be doing some of this to point investigators away from himself.”

“Could this man be a former Bomb Squad member who has a grudge?”

Stahl shrugged. “I can’t rule it out yet. I would definitely take a look at a rejected applicant who was angry, or a person who has served time for planting a bomb or possessing explosives in Los Angeles. It won’t hurt to look at the lists of men and women who have been in the FBI bomb tech school at Redstone, Alabama, or Fort Lee, Virginia, particularly if they washed out. But first I’d look at people who have been through demolition school in a foreign military service. An American graduate might make C-4, because he’s used to handling it. A graduate from some other country might make Semtex for the same reason. Semtex was bought and used by all of the former Communist countries, the Irish Republican Army, and terrorist states like Libya. You might say any country where soldiers were issued Kalashnikov rifles probably used Semtex for demolition.”

“Any indication of what he’s trying to accomplish?” Almanzo asked.

“He made a phone call to report the rigged house in Encino. There was no reason to report his own bomb unless he wanted bomb technicians to come to the scene. I think chaining the car to the gas pumps yesterday was also intended to lure bomb technicians to a trap. If what he wants is to kill every bomb technician, he’s halfway to total success already.” He paused for a second. “We’re losing. I can honestly say that my own team of three is about as good as any bomb team I’ve ever seen. But it’s unlikely we would be able to pull off what we did yesterday a second time. This bomb maker knows that, and he’ll keep giving us opportunities to fail.”

The homicide detectives looked shocked. There was a brief silence while they stared at Stahl. Almanzo said, “Do you have a plan?”

“I’m hoping we’ll get reinforcements from the FBI and ATF, but they’re not going to be any better than the technicians we already have. Their presence is welcome, and they’ll give me a chance to keep my teams from getting exhausted and making mistakes. But some of the reinforcements won’t have served here before, and learning to be a good LA cop takes longer than training to be a competent bomb tech. Our only possible strategy is to try to keep this guy from killing us as long as we can.”

Almanzo said, “We’ve been told that often bomb experts can recognize a bomb maker’s work. Any chance some bomb squad in some other city has seen this guy before?”

“It’s made national news and no agency has called. I spent part of last night looking through the ATF’s summary descriptions of explosive-related crimes, but there’s nothing listed that’s remotely like this guy’s work. I went back about ten years.”

There was a buzz and Stahl looked at the screen of his phone. “That’s my alarm.”

Almanzo looked at his watch. “I guess that’s all we can cover for now.” He reached to the back of his chair for his coat. “Anybody else who’s going to the funeral, it’s time. The rest of you, keep at it.”

Stahl drove to Forest Lawn alone and joined the mourners already assembled. There were a large number of civilians who continued to arrive for a long time—fourteen dead men had many friends and relatives—and the police presence was overwhelming. There were contingents from various parts of the state, and even from a few other states that touched California on the north and east. Parked on a single winding piece of pavement were a dozen news vans with satellite dishes on booms, and camera people recording with telephoto lenses.

Stahl had been present at too many funerals of men in uniform—men who had served with him in the army, police officers who had died chasing getaway cars in LA traffic, victims of shootings. They had become almost interchangeable to him, casualties of battles that seemed to be parts of one struggle. During the previous evening he looked at the photographs taken at the scene in the hope that his practiced eye would see something new, but they were the same as what he’d seen in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places. High explosive shock waves tore people apart and heat burned them. He recognized a couple of the victims as old friends, but there was little to be learned from this horror that he hadn’t already known.

Stahl listened to the words of the chaplain, the several priests, and the ministers who were there to represent their versions of God. He listened to the mayor and the police chief. His cell phone was in his shirt pocket. He was aware it might vibrate with an incoming call related to a new bomb threat at any time and felt relief with each passing minute when it didn’t.

He had scanned the ranks of uniformed police officers in the cemetery when he arrived, but he didn’t spot Diane Hines. She was probably somewhere in the rows behind him. The fourteen technicians who had not been at the Encino house would all be sitting together.

When the ceremonial talk ended, a police honor guard fired the customary rifle salute, and a lone bagpiper played a sad, wailing tune from a few yards higher on the hillside that looked out over the flat valley below. Stahl waited for the final prayer to end and turned to look behind him. He saw her about fifty feet away with Elliot and Team Three and Team Four. She looked very solemn and beautiful. Her eyes never glanced in his direction as she pivoted and walked along the row of chairs with the others.

At that moment his phone began to vibrate in his breast pocket. He saw the number was his office, and he moved off quickly to be able to talk.

As he hurried toward the road where his car was parked he called Andy. “This is Stahl.”

“Second team is out on a suspicious package call, but Sergeant McCrary, the supervisor, just called to talk to you. He said he’s got something.”

“Can you connect me?”

“Yes. Hold on.”

When he heard the connection go through he said, “This is Stahl. What have you got, Sarge?”

McCrary said, “A pipe bomb. It was left outside the front door of the women’s health building at Kaplan and Steers in Van Nuys this morning. It looked like a routine delivery, but when a security guard went to pick it up, the box was just an empty cover slipped over the bomb. When he ran inside to get something to keep people from touching it, the phone was already ringing at the front desk. It was a guy warning him he had five minutes to clear the building.”

“Did he?”

“Hell yes. He got everybody to go outside like it was a fire drill.”

“Why did the bomber call?” asked Stahl.

“What do you mean?”

“The pipe bomb was right outside the front door, right? The guard lifted the cardboard box and saw there was a pipe bomb under it. The bomber knew one of two things was going to happen: either the guard would blow himself up or he’d know what it was.”

“Yes,” said McCrary.

“So why call?”

“Maybe the guy wanted to scare people, but didn’t want to kill them, or lost his nerve, or just changed his mind. I don’t know. But it’s a routine-looking pipe bomb, put in an unsurprising place. You know how many women’s clinics have had bombs in the past ten years. I’d like to render it safe and then take it out of here in the containment vessel for detonation.”

“Don’t do anything yet,” said Stahl. “Let it sit until I get there. And above all, don’t let anybody back into the building. If this is a bomb that’s not related to the others, we’ll do just as you say. But right now the call doesn’t feel right. It feels like our bomber used the pipe bomb to get them to evacuate the building so he could go inside and plant something worse. And it seems he might have picked a women’s health center to make it seem routine to us.”

“Yes, sir,” said McCrary. Stahl could hear in his voice the patient resignation of a man who was used to obeying superiors because they were superiors, not because they were right.

“You said Kaplan and Steers, right?” Stahl said.

“Right.”

Stahl hung up, trotted the rest of the way to his car, and drove to the women’s health center. The center was a four-story brick building with two rectangular wings and a central lobby with glass doors on the edge of a huge parking lot. Stahl could see the bomb truck, the only vehicle within a hundred feet of the front of the building. There was yellow police tape strung around the building’s entrance, and a second tape beyond the bomb truck to establish a perimeter. Stahl approached the nearest cop and showed his badge so he could pass.

He ducked under the tape, walked straight to McCrary, and shook his hand. “Good,” said Stahl. “You’ve got a good perimeter set up and everybody out of the way. I assume you made a Code Five Edward call to clear the airspace?”

McCrary nodded.

“Then let’s take a closer look.”

McCrary and Stahl walked to the front of the building, where they both paused a few feet from the device. Finally they approached the device cautiously. When they were near it, Stahl could see that the device looked like most pipe bombs. It was a two-inch metal pipe about a foot long with screw-on caps at both ends. Two holes had been drilled on one end and a pair of wires that looked like the leads to an initiator ran out to a lithium-ion battery. The trigger switch was not visible, but a switch could be any size, and there was a layer of tape around the pipe that Stahl could see was thick and lumpy and looked as though it held ball bearings. The tape could also hide the switch.

“It’s too big to detonate here. We’ve got to take it away,” said Stahl. “We still use the Mark V-A1, right?”

“Andros?” said McCrary. “Yeah. We don’t have one with us right now, but I’ll call for one.”

“Okay,” said Stahl. “While we wait we can get the containment vessel ready to take the bomb and start having the officers move the bystanders back another two hundred feet. That device has a couple of layers of shrapnel taped around it.”

While McCrary was on the radio to headquarters and to the police officers guarding the perimeter, they walked to the bomb truck. As they approached the truck, McCrary said, “Gentlemen, you’ve met Captain Stahl.”

Stahl shook hands with the two. “Curtis, Bolland, nice to see you.”

“The captain has given us the go-ahead to get the pipe bomb moved out of here, and I’ve called for an Andros,” McCrary said. “Let’s get the containment vessel moved up close so the robot can get the bomb into it by carrying it a few yards. No bumpy areas, no inclines if we can help it.”

Curtis and Bolland got into the truck and towed the five-thousand-pound containment vessel close to the device lying on the concrete in front of the entrance. They secured it so it wouldn’t roll, then opened the vessel’s hatch. They pulled the truck back to where the others stood in the parking lot, and then began checking with the police officers in the area by radio to be sure all civilians had been moved back to a distance of five hundred feet.

The Team Three bomb truck arrived with the robot. Two of the bomb technicians jumped out and dragged out the ramp at the back while the other, Alice Terranova, brought out a small control device and began using it to direct the robot down the ramp to the surface of the parking lot.

Stahl said, “Thank you, Terranova. Nice to see you, Moss.” He was making a point of addressing everyone directly for the moment. It wasn’t too much to expect for him to remember the names of the living fourteen people on the Bomb Squad, officers who would be risking their lives with him each day. He waved at the man driving the bomb truck. “Hey, Townsend.”

Stahl said, “This is Sergeant McCrary’s operation. I’m just here to hang around and see if I can learn anything about this bomber. Team Two has done a great job of setting up a perimeter, getting everybody back far enough, and so on. The first mistake was mine. Because of me, this bomber has managed to get seven of us here at one time. That’s half the Bomb Squad at current strength. So I’m going to ask Team Three to turn around and return to your station. Team Two will take it from here. Thanks for the robot.”

“Yes, sir.” Terranova handed the control console to Curtis, and she and the others climbed back into their truck and drove off.

Stahl nodded at McCrary, then stepped back to stand by the truck while Curtis maneuvered the robot across the asphalt parking lot toward the entrance to the building.

The work went quickly. The robot’s top speed was three and a half miles an hour, about the normal walking speed of a man. As the robot approached the pipe bomb, Curtis slowed it considerably and transferred all of his attention to the screen of the control box so he was seeing the bomb and the pavement from the point of view of Andros’s video camera.

Stahl stood by the truck and called his assistant, Andy, at the station. “Andy, this is Dick Stahl. Get in touch with the building manager of the women’s health center at Kaplan and Steers and find out what you can about the security cameras outside the building and inside. Find out how we get the footage. What I need to know immediately is whether, after the people were evacuated from the building, the bomber went inside. Thanks.”

He hung up and called Bart Almanzo at Homicide Special. He told Almanzo what was happening and said, “I think this is our guy again, but don’t send anybody here until we’ve checked the whole building. If I’m right, this isn’t going to be safe for a while. But we know this bomber was here in person. If there’s any surveillance footage that will help identify him or his car or any witness, it might make the difference. Our people have already requested whatever this building has to help us clear the place. But any building in the neighborhood might have caught something.”

“Thanks,” said Almanzo. “We’ll get people collecting it. Good luck.”

Stahl hung up and watched the robot. The robot was equipped with a two-thousand-foot cable, but they were using the remote control for the moment. Either this would work or it wouldn’t, but it would be quick.

The robot was directly over the bomb now, and Stahl and the technicians studied the video image closely, scrutinizing the bomb for anything that might be a trap’s trigger: a wire or filament, a sensor of some sort, a pressure device or spring that would hold the switch at the OFF position until it was lifted, a remote control receiver.

“Anybody see anything?” said Curtis.

“No,” said Bolland.

“Nope,” said McCrary.

Stahl said, “Agreed.”

The robot reached down, closed its grasping claw over the pipe, and lifted.

There was a bright flash as the bomb tore itself apart and fired hundreds of projectiles in all directions, blowing the glass front into the building and sending a shock wave toward Stahl. A half second later the sharp bang slapped his ears and collided with his body, a flat, hard force that felt to him like something solid pounding his chest and stomach.

At the same time, he saw the robot thrown outward from the building into the parking lot. It flew about fifty feet—not lifted but swatted—spinning and hitting on its side. Then it slid across the pavement to a stop. Some part of his mind noted that the arm was missing.

Immediately Stahl’s eyes sought the sight of Curtis, McCrary, and Bolland. When he spotted them, Curtis was lying prone on the pavement of the parking lot and the others were kneeling over him. Stahl gasped and took a running step toward them, then saw they had not been hit. They got Curtis up, then stood. McCrary brushed invisible dust off his uniform pants from his knees to his waist and then the front of his shirt while Curtis picked up the control unit. After a few seconds he turned it off. Bolland began walking toward the front of the building to see if there was any part of the bomb left to be collected for evidence.

Stahl walked up to Curtis, smiled, and patted his back gently. “Don’t worry about the robot. That’s what it’s for. This guy’s objective was to take us all out and maybe incinerate a few civilians as a bonus. He got nobody.”

Curtis managed a faint smile as Stahl passed him on the way to McCrary.

Stahl said, “We still have to clear the building before we let anybody in.”

“I know,” said McCrary. “This time that’s got to be my job. I’ll get suited up.”

“Have you got a suit I can borrow?”

“Sure, but I thought we were going to send only one tech downrange from now on.”

“This time looks like an exception. I think this might be the same guy who did the house in Encino and the car at the gas station. What you see is something simple—today, an ordinary pipe bomb. But in the other two what we got was a second charge that was bigger. I want to see if there’s something else in the building.”

McCrary shrugged. He went to the truck and took out a suit with his name stenciled on it and found another labeled with the number 2. He handed it to Stahl.

While they put on the bomb suits, Stahl called Andy at the station. “It’s Stahl. What do we know?”

“We’ve got some video from the building across the street from you. You were right. A man went into the clinic building during the evacuation. He was wearing some kind of uniform, maybe a janitor’s uniform—dark blue shirt and pants, no badge. About five ten or six feet tall, average weight and build, baseball cap. Nobody stopped him or even looked closely at him. He was going in as they were going out.”

“Of course,” said Stahl. “Was he carrying anything?”

“Yes. It looks like a gym bag. That size, anyway. Dark, probably black.”

“Any luck getting the interior video from the clinic?”

“Not yet. The security guy who has access to the system took charge of evacuating people, so now a unit is working with him and with the equipment manufacturer to set up a remote feed from the Van Nuys station.”

“All right. Keep trying.”

Stahl cut the connection and left his phone with Curtis. “If there’s a call, answer it. If it’s about the indoor surveillance cameras, call me on the helmet radio frequency.”

As Stahl and McCrary walked toward the building, Stahl told McCrary what he’d learned. When Stahl and McCrary reached the entrance they examined the damage. There were impact holes in the concrete like a pattern of little craters where ball bearings had hit. Stahl said, “Antipersonnel. I guess he was hoping for a few extra bodies. But he mainly wanted everybody out, so he could go in alone.”

McCrary said, “What kind of trap do you think he put inside?”

“Something new,” Stahl said. “Something we haven’t seen him do before. We’ll have to go through each room and clear it. He knows there won’t be more than one or two bomb techs inside the building at first. Maybe he wants to injure us so more cops have to go in before he drops the roof on our heads. We’ll have to take our time and look at everything.”

When Stahl stepped in over the fallen glass, he appreciated the architectural design of the women’s health building. The concrete and steel stanchions in a row in front of the glass entrance had apparently been intended to keep a vehicle from crashing through. The freestanding wall behind the glass front of the building had provided more protection from the blast.

The wall had been covered in a layer of plasterboard and painted like plaster, but behind that layer was structural concrete. The bomb’s ball bearings and pipe fragments had swept the glass inward. They chewed up the plasterboard, but did nothing to the wall behind it. The reception area inside looked untouched and intact.

“One more thing just occurred to me,” said Stahl. “Nobody has said they’ve seen video of this guy leaving the building. We’ve been assuming he left as quickly as he could, because bomb makers do that. But he could still be in here. The building has four floors to hide in.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” McCrary said.

The two men searched the lobby for any of the signs of a booby trap—fine trip wires, a gym bag like the one seen on the video, devices plugged into electrical outlets that didn’t seem to belong. Stahl knew their job was especially risky today because dozens of people had evacuated the building in a hurry, and might have left things like briefcases or equipment bags anywhere.

When they made sure the lobby was safe, they began to move from room to room on the ground floor. The first offices they came to were administrative. There were signs that people had been interrupted—pens dropped on half-completed forms, computer screens that had gone dark or displayed screen savers since their users left.

Farther on were medical examining rooms. There were tables in some rooms with white paper on them that was puckered and wrinkled by the last patient, white coats that still hung behind the doors. There were even a couple of telephones left off their cradles.

Stahl and McCrary found nothing dangerous in any of the rooms. They examined the phones, particularly the ones that were left beeping with the off-the-hook signal. This would not have been the first time placing a phone in its cradle had set off a bomb.

They moved across the lobby to the other wing of the building, where there were a few offices with big filing cabinets that looked as though they held medical records. There was a large conference room with a big video screen, video recorders and players, and a computer. They spent some time examining the equipment for suspicious wires or components.

When they finished their sweep they went back to the central lobby. There was a big steel door labeled STAIRS, the reception desks they had already examined, and a pair of elevator doors. McCrary headed for the elevators.

As McCrary reached up toward the panel between them, Stahl shouted, “Freeze! Don’t touch the button!”

McCrary had to turn his whole body to look back. “What is it?”

Stahl hurried close to him. “Something’s wrong,” he said. He pointed up at the panel above the elevator doors. “See that? The number lit up is four. Everybody has been evacuated. There was nobody up there on the fourth floor to hit the button. Both elevator cars should be down here.”

“You think the bomber went up there?”

“Yes. But I don’t think he’s still there. He knew the first ones back in the building would be the Bomb Squad. He knew we’d be wearing eighty-five-pound bomb suits. Probably he even knew that searching the ground floor would tire us out. He knows the last thing we want to do right now is climb stairs under all this weight, but he also knows we have to go up to check, floor by floor.”

“So what do we do?”

“I think he rigged the elevators to explode. So what we should do is climb the stairs to the fourth floor. First, we’ve got to call Curtis and Bolland to explain what we’ve done and what we’re about to do. If we die, no information dies with us, all right?”

“Agreed.” McCrary made the call to his teammates who were waiting outside.

Then Stahl pulled open the door to the stairwell and began to climb. As he did, he took his mind off the sheer dull strain of lifting one foot after the next by thinking about elevators. Since his first years as an EOD man in the army he had studied the ways buildings, bridges, towers, vehicles, ships, and airplanes were constructed. It didn’t matter how much a technician knew about explosives if he knew nothing about the places where they were hidden, how they could be disguised, and the electrical circuits or physical features that could be used to detonate them.

As he climbed he constructed a blueprint of an elevator in his mind. There was a vertical shaft. At the top, above the upper range of the elevator car, there was a motor that turned a wheel called a sheave, which operated a pulley. On one end of the cable was the elevator car, and on the other was a counterweight about equal to the weight of the car. That way the force required to turn the pulley to raise or lower the car was minimal.

He studied the mental image to figure where the gym bag full of explosives would be placed and how it would be triggered. The elevator car was at the top floor right now. The bomber would expect the first bomb technician to arrive at the doors on the first floor and press the up button.

The controller above the fourth floor with the pulley and sheave would switch on the electric motor to simultaneously raise the counterweight toward the fourth floor and lower the elevator car toward the first floor. When the counterweight reached the upper limit switch in its track and the elevator car reached the lower limit switch, the motor would stop. The doors would open, and the passenger would step inside the elevator car. After a few seconds the elevator doors would close, and the elevator would be ready to rise when any of the numbers—2, 3, or 4—was pushed.

Stahl reached the second-floor landing. He and McCrary were both panting. Stahl stopped there and said, “Have you ever worked on a bomb in an elevator before?”

“Never,” McCrary said.

“Okay. I’m going to do something that’s going to look stupid. But it isn’t.”

He began to take off his bomb suit. He put down the heavy helmet with its Plexiglas window and whirring fan. He was drenched with sweat from the exertion of the past couple of hours. “I just realized we’re doing this wrong. The bomb has to be in the shaft. I won’t be able to go into the shaft and climb around with this thing on. And the charges this guy sets for us couldn’t be stopped by a bomb suit anyway.”

“A gym bag full of high explosives? No.”

“The bottom of an elevator car is thick, made of steel to take the weight of the riders. The top of an elevator car isn’t. There’s even a hatch in the ceiling that opens for maintenance.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen those.”

“There are a dozen safety devices on an elevator. It can’t free-fall, even if you cut the cable. It can’t even pick up speed. But there’s no protection from a bomb placed on the roof of the elevator car.”

“You’re right.”

“So if he rigged the elevator, that’s where the device probably is. Now I just have to get up there and see what triggers the charge.”

“Why not the buttons inside the elevator?”

“It’s possible. No matter what the switch is, the charge has to be on the roof of the car.”

“What can I do to help?”

“Go back down to the lobby. Stay near the elevators, but not in front of the doors. If I screw up they’ll blow outward. But guard the buttons. Don’t let anybody get near them. We don’t have proof yet that the bomber has left the building.”

“Yes, sir.”

Stahl removed the suit, took his tool kit, and climbed the stairs. When he reached the fourth floor he studied the area around the two elevators. The elevator shafts were in a recessed rectangular space. He looked for the plain unmarked door that must provide access to the working parts of the elevators, but there was none.

He reentered the stairwell and climbed. There was only one flight, and then, on the next landing, there was the plain steel door he had been expecting. He tried the handle, but the door was locked.

Stahl set the canvas tool bag down and found the electric lock-pick gun. He inserted the tension wrench and the gun’s needle nose into the keyway and pressed the trigger, and when he felt the lower pins jump to make a space below the upper pins, he put pressure on the tension wrench and turned the knob.

The door opened to a level above the two elevator shafts. As he approached the first shaft, he saw an empty black gym bag that had been discarded on the floor a few feet away. Above the shaft, at about waist height, was the platform that held the controller and the motor. He could see downward past the sheave and pulley to the roof of the elevator car.

The bomb on the elevator roof didn’t look like much. There were three separate metal canisters, each about the size of a liter of liquid, taped onto the access hatch with insulated wires connecting them.

Stahl lowered himself onto the roof of the elevator and followed a thicker wire toward the top of the shaft where it was attached to the stationary platform that held the motor. He followed the wire back down to the roof of the elevator. There he could see that a switch had been installed. The double wire of the firing circuit had been split and its two copper strands were screwed onto the two contacts of the switch. It was a simple knife switch with a metal lever that when closed would be pinched between two copper contacts and complete the firing circuit.

But the switch had been modified to work in reverse. The lever, the “knife” of the switch, had been removed, and the two contacts had been squeezed together so they would always touch. Then the knife had been replaced by a thin sheet of fiberboard insulator between the contacts that held them apart. Attached to the insulator was a coil of wire that would uncoil as the elevator descended. Just as the elevator reached the first floor, the wire would reach its limit, and the fiberboard insulator would be tugged from between the two contacts.

Stahl looked to see what else was in the circuit and saw a small electric timer set at seven seconds. It gave the person on the first floor seven seconds to enter the elevator and let the doors close. And then the timer would run out and the bomb would detonate.

The power for the firing circuit was a splice that tapped into the circuit that powered the elevator’s lights and switches. But he was not positive that was the only source of power. With this bomber there could be other secondary firing circuits powered by batteries. This bomb maker was obsessed with backups.

Stahl took a screwdriver, loosened the screws that held one of the wires to the firing circuit, and pulled it out. He capped the end. Then he disconnected and capped the other wire. He had now disabled the main switch, but he was beginning to know this man’s work. There would be a second circuit somewhere designed to kill any bomb tech who neutralized the first one.

Stahl found it almost immediately. If he had been in a hurry to lift the canisters of explosives he would have set them off. Lifting any canister two inches from the elevator roof would have pulled another nonconductive fiberboard strip from between two contacts, and the internal batteries in the canister would have set off the blasting cap inside.

He disconnected each wire that led to a power source and capped it, removed all of the switches and canisters from the roof of the elevator, set them on the concrete floor away from the shaft, and climbed up after them.

He sat still for a moment, collecting his thoughts. Then he stood and went to the top of the second elevator shaft. The knife switch attached to the counterweight’s track was the same. The backup switches under the three canisters were the same. There was no new switch that was designed to make a bomb technician who had gotten this far get overconfident and kill himself. He supposed the bomber had needed to come in with everything ready to take out of the gym bag and attach to the two elevators and then go.

When Stahl brought the explosives out of the elevator maintenance room and set them on the floor outside the steel door, he called McCrary. “Hello, Sergeant.”

“Should I still be holding my ears?”

“Not anymore. I’ve got six canisters of explosives and some disconnected wires and switches on the roofs of the two elevators. Your team can come and get them now.”

When Stahl hung up, he went to the fourth-floor elevator doors and pressed the DOWN button. The elevator doors opened to show him a pair of pristine, empty elevator cars. He took the first, pressed 1, and watched the doors close. In a moment it was taking him down.

The doors opened at the lobby and he stepped out to see McCrary and Curtis walking in around the false wall with their bomb suits on. As he walked past them toward the gaping hole that had been the front entrance he said, “Thanks, guys. It’s safe to take the easy way up, but clear the upper floors before you let anybody back into the building.”