The bomb maker’s special phone rang. Since the terrorists had turned up, he had moved it from the kitchen cupboard and kept it close. He opened his eyes and stretched his arm to the nightstand beside his bed to pick up the phone. “Yes?”

“We’re up the road about five kilometers. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

He looked at the phone. “It’s three a.m. What do you want at this hour?”

“We want to talk to you.” The man hung up.

All the bomb maker could do was put on the clothes he had taken off only a couple of hours ago and prepare for an unpleasant talk with them that was sure to culminate in some awful new task or condition they wanted to add to the bargain. He went into the living room to wait.

In a minute he saw the same two cars with what seemed from a distance to be two men in each. They pulled up at the end of his driveway, and the phone rang again.

“Yes?”

“We’re coming in. Turn off anything you have that will hurt us.”

“What would that be?” He was hurrying to his front closet to switch off the mines, but he didn’t want them to know there was anything to switch off.

“You tell me.”

“I don’t have anything like that. Come ahead.” He had reached the closet, and now he swept the side of his hand down the toggle switches to turn off the firing circuits and closed the door. As he completed the action he saw their headlights brightening and coming closer. He shut the closet door to hide the panel.

The headlights went off and he opened the front door.

The car doors swung open and the four men hurried to the porch in the darkness and filed inside. They were smiling, but it was the same kind of smile he expected to see if they were about to kill someone in a particularly cruel way. In a moment they had crowded into his foyer. The man who was in the habit of speaking for the others hugged him. “Wonderful night,” he said. “You pulled off another one.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said impatiently.

“The woman! That television reporter. Tomorrow the newspapers and television stations will be full of stories about it. We heard about it on the radio.”

The bomb maker had felt a half second of hope that something had happened he knew nothing about. Now he knew it was only the television reporter, so they’d brought him no information at all. He had needed to bomb something to keep the panic growing in the city, and he hadn’t been ready to do anything more difficult. He expected people in the city might think this meant something, but he hadn’t anticipated any reaction from his clients.

He said, “She was nothing. Easy. While I’m busy working I need something to keep the pot boiling. Do you know that expression?”

The four men were pleased. “Brilliant,” one of the men said. “They’ll be confused, and not know where to look next.”

He had, of course, assumed that this would be the reaction of the authorities, but he hadn’t considered it brilliant. Maybe it was. He noticed that two of the men were surreptitiously looking around his workshop in the garage. They weren’t searching, just snooping. He said, “Please remember this is my workshop. You’re surrounded by high explosives, some of them in very volatile stages of manufacture.”

The one who usually did the speaking looked around at his comrades. “Did you hear and understand?”

The others muttered affirmative words and nodded, but the bomb maker reflected that he still had no idea what their first language was. It made sense that a sophisticated conspiracy would avoid sending people to the United States who couldn’t speak English, but he was disappointed and frustrated. Maybe they were from several countries that spoke different languages, and English was their only common language.

He was exhausted. He also hated the fact that his clients had presumed to take the right to drop in on him whenever they felt like it. He couldn’t let them feel welcome at all hours, but he couldn’t risk a confrontation of any kind with these four men. Anything violent they did in overpowering him might set off an explosion. He thought hard, but he could think of only one thing he could do that might help keep them friendly and under control.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Three nineteen. What difference does it make?”

“I asked for a couple of reasons. One is that I haven’t had much sleep. The other is that I have a surprise I’ve been saving for you, and I think this might be a good time to give it to you.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll show you.”

The bomb maker went to a seven-foot cabinet at the end of the room, but instead of opening it he reached up and took a small padlock key off the top. He walked to the row of steel storage boxes along the wall and unlocked two of the padlocks and removed them.

The men gathered around him as he lifted the first lid and revealed the nineteen AK-47 rifles and a couple of layers of loaded thirty-round magazines. He stepped back, and the four men surged in and picked up four rifles. They handled the rifles as though each had spent years carrying an identical one at all times. They ejected the magazines, opened the chambers, and examined them. Then they looked down the insides of the barrels, using the light of the open chambers to see the condition of the rifling. A couple of them took a bullet out of the cardboard ammo boxes and used it to partially dismantle the weapons and touch the inner surfaces to be sure they were clean, were oiled, and showed no worrisome wear or corrosion. The more they looked, the happier they appeared to be. Just over two-thirds of the weapons were new and the others were barely broken in. They sighted down the weapons and a couple of them made hasty guesswork adjustments to the unused sights before they set down one rifle and examined another.

The spokesman held up his rifle so the bomb maker could see the lower receiver, and pointed at the line of drilled-out steel. “Did you do this?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s where the serial number was. If one is lost or stolen, we don’t want the authorities to be able to identify it or where it came from.”

“But isn’t drilling a serial number a crime?”

“Yes. Having a weapon like this is a crime anyway.”

The man nodded. “Yes.” He examined the selector lever. “Have you modified these yet to be fully automatic?”

“Yes,” said the bomb maker.

The man handed the rifle back. “Test them.”

He took the rifle, as though he were agreeing to do the tests. “It will take some time, and I’m working with bombs now.”

“Then we’ll do it. There’s no point in getting the bombs ready if we don’t have the weapons for what happens afterward. Do you have the pistols?”

The bomb maker hesitated for a second. He had wanted to hold back something so he could delay them if he needed to. It was clear that he couldn’t. He opened the second storage box and the four men examined the pistols. They were satisfied with those. They held them up, pointed at the ceiling, and one of them gave a whoop, but he didn’t fire. The others answered the whoop and laughed, but didn’t fire.

For a moment he could picture these men raising their weapons and firing celebratory volleys into the sky above a desert city. But as he watched them, he also could imagine them in a tropical jungle on a rounded mountain stronghold wearing dark green fatigues and T-shirts. One who was larger and heavier might easily have been from the Balkans or central Asia.

“If you want to move them, the roads out here are empty from the time the bars close until just before dawn.”

The leader of the group said, “Oh, I almost forgot. We came to congratulate you, but also to bring you some more money.” He turned to one of his men and said, “Go get the money.”

The bomb maker waited while the men carried the weapons to the door and out to the cars. Then one of the men came back in and set a shopping bag down on the floor at his feet, turned, and went out to join his companions. The bomb maker could see it was the usual piles of hundred-dollar bills, so he didn’t bother to pick up the bag. He went and stood by the door until he saw the vehicle pause at the end of his driveway, then turn and drive off.

He was wide awake now. He was always tense in the presence of those men, but this time he had been actually afraid. There was a hint of pent-up violence in them. He realized that giving them guns was making them a hundred times more powerful, but he was too afraid of them not to. What did he have left to appease them next time?