Diane Hines had finally reached the stage in her recovery when she was able to do exercises. The designers of Stahl’s condominium building had equipped the subbasement with a workout room full of weights and exercise machines and a twenty-five-yard indoor swimming pool. She could see that Stahl had been right about the designers. They had misjudged their buyers. During Diane’s first fifteen visits she never saw anyone in the pool or the workout room but Stahl.
The rest of the owners were not people who spent much time in the building. Many of them occupied their condominiums only about ten days a year, when they were in Los Angeles on business, and lived in other countries the rest of the time.
The building was perfect for Diane. There was a short hallway off the entrance to the condominiums with an elevator that worked with a key. She took it to the subbasement level of pool, showers, locker rooms, and exercise room. When the elevator arrived and the doors opened, the lights and air-conditioning came on automatically, and she would go in and do her workout. In the third week of workouts, she had begun making noticeable progress toward the way she had always been.
Stahl had spent most working hours at his security company lately, but when he came home he would go down to the subbasement with Diane to lift weights, hit the heavy bag, and swim before dinner.
Today she had done more work than usual in the morning, partly to beat the loneliness she felt when Stahl was away.
After Diane moved in, she had gone online and bought a stack of manuals to help her prepare for the police detective exam. She didn’t exactly hide the manuals, but she didn’t show them to Stahl, either. She kept them on the dresser in the spare bedroom. She knew she was delaying a conversation because she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say to him about it. She wasn’t sure she really wanted to transfer. She just didn’t want to be declared unfit to be a bomb technician and have her career end for lack of alternatives.
Now Diane carried her books into the kitchen. She set the books on the table, but didn’t open one immediately. She realized that what she was fighting was her transformation from a trained and trusted professional to a kept girlfriend. What she had to do was to keep from fighting him about it. She checked the time on the big white face of the wall clock. One thirty. Then she gave in to the temptation to turn on the television.
There were helicopters at different altitudes circling above a tree-choked park. There was a parking lot like a gash in the green, with the herringbone pattern of diagonal stripes to define parking spaces. And across the lot was a black bomb truck with a containment vessel on a tow rig behind it, and all the windows blown in.
The bomb maker was back in his garage workshop, taking dried cakes of highly explosive PETN and gently rolling them into powder on a wooden board, like a baker working in slow motion. Every minute or two, he reached up and touched a device that looked like a trapeze suspended from two wires that led to a bracket in the ceiling, then out through the back wall of the garage. The wire ran to an iron spike he had driven a couple of feet into the ground outside. Each time he touched the device, any buildup of static electricity bled off him to ground.
Things seemed to him to be improving steadily now. Apparently the hype about the legendary Dick Stahl had some truth to it. For weeks it seemed that nothing the bomb maker could do was good enough. Stahl destroyed every device. But he was disgraced and under suspicion now, kept away from the Bomb Squad, and the odds, the numerical rules of the universe, had reasserted themselves. People could be deceived, even induced to deceive themselves, more often than not. He had just done it twice—in the subway and at the park.
The ring of the cell phone he kept plugged in deflated his good feeling. What the hell did they want now?
He stepped to the long workbench by the wall and picked it up. “Hello?”
“We’re at the end of your driveway.”
He hung up, went to the front closet, turned off the mine circuits, then closed the door, went to the entrance, and unlocked the door.
He watched the three big cars make the turn into the driveway, switch off their headlights, and navigate the long gravel drive using the lights of his house. It was usually two cars, not three. He didn’t know what the reason for the extra car might be, but he felt a mixture of dread and annoyance.
Didn’t they think three big SUVs driving along the desert highway and up to his house might cause people to wonder? Even on desert roads, people drove past once in a while. When they saw anything unusual, they were less likely to miss it or overlook it than they would be in a city.
He opened the door and waited for the men to get out and come to the house. He listened harder than ever for non-English words, for whispers or signs. In the light from the doorway he studied them. He looked for jewelry, for print or script stenciled on anything. He looked for tattoos, sniffed for alcohol or food. He detected nothing that identified them as coming from a particular part of the world—or eliminated any part of the world.
As they came in he stood in front of them and said, “I need to remind you to use extra caution when you are in my house. The whole house is full of detonators, large charges, and chemicals that explode or burn. Watch where you step, where you sit, what you touch.”
The man with the shaved head came inside just then. He called out: “Did everyone hear what he said? Were you listening? Don’t touch things. If you don’t know what it is, leave it alone.”
The fifteen men crowded into the living room and overflowed into the dining room and even into the hall. All gave a nod or a thumbs-up, but none of them spoke. They clearly had been trained to function as an infantry platoon, traveling in silence except when the platoon leader asked a question that required an answer.
The bomb maker noticed that the first four men in the door had come in and checked for unseen people behind furniture and doors. Then they’d taken positions by the windows, looking outside from beside the curtains now and then.
His observations told him very little. The men were terrorists, or guerrillas, or jihadists, or special operations troops, or insurgents, or something. They clearly wanted to bring death and destruction to Los Angeles, but he had no idea why. It was usually some sort of revenge or anger, wasn’t it? They were undoubtedly wise not to tell anyone like the bomb maker the exact nature of their motives or their mission. If a person they needed didn’t agree with them, then it was possible he might opt out, or even betray them.
When they came crowding in tonight he hated it as much as he always did, and maybe more this time because having fifteen of these men in his house was dangerous. Five were a crowd for his small, clean, quiet house. Fifteen were worse than three times as much trouble. There were not enough places for them to sit. There was no reason for them to be here. This was an awful imposition.
He hated them, but he wasn’t going to betray them. They couldn’t be expected to know that, but it was true. Before he left for California he had cut himself loose from all loyalties, and he’d never formed any in Los Angeles. He had come from the Midwest and was still as much a stranger in LA as these men were. He’d had no political or abstract opinions since he was in middle school. He had learned during his adulthood that the only goal that made much sense was having money, and even that had limits. He didn’t want an enormous fortune. He simply wanted enough.
He studied the men who came close to him, paying special attention to the ones he had never seen before. It brought him no closer to discovering their nationality.
He had no interest in knowing their ideas. All he wanted was enough money so he would never have to do anything again to get more. He didn’t want these men to distrust him on the basis of his principles or beliefs, because he didn’t have any. He was the most trustworthy conspirator of all, a man who didn’t think about utopia or heaven but thought just about having money.
The bald man edged close to him in the crowded space and leaned near his ear. “You’ve done it twice this week. First you killed the ones in the tunnel, and then the one in the woods. That’s four more kills for you.”
“I know,” the bomb maker said. “Did you bring me information I don’t know?”
“Yes, we did,” the man said. “We’ve tested all of the guns you bought for us, and sighted in the rifles for three hundred meters. They’re all excellent weapons.”
“That’s good,” said the bomb maker. For the first time since his shopping trip, he thought about the danger he had been in. If the weapons had been defective or damaged, he might be dead. Then it occurred to him they might be about to ask him to buy more guns. He clenched his teeth and waited.
“We’ve been training for over a year, and spending time getting familiar with the region. We’ve rented houses where we stored supplies, clothes, food, and cars. If things go wrong we can stop, rest, and start over again. When we came back from the desert, we learned you had killed more bomb technicians.”
“I did,” he said. “I’m trying to cut them down to the level where the best ones, and the ones who know the city, are gone.”
“You’ve done very well. Who is the best one left?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I not only killed most of them, but I got the best bomb expert they had fired.”
“Is that Richard Stahl?”
“Yes,” he said. “But he’s gone.”
“Gone? Has he moved to another city?”
“It doesn’t matter where he is. They made him resign, and they won’t let him go near a bomb ever again. You came all the way here again. This time you interrupted some very delicate and dangerous work. You must have something else you wanted to talk to me about.”
“We came to tell you we think it’s time.”
“For what?”
“I told you we tested the guns. We have what we’ll need—ammunition, supplies, cars, safe houses. We’re ready now.”
The bomb maker’s heart began to speed up. “I didn’t get you enough for a battle.”
The bald man made a gesture as if to brush away a cobweb. “We didn’t want to make you do everything. We sent out men to buy much, much more ammunition. Now we’ll each have as many loaded magazines as we can carry, and still more in cars nearby. We’re ready.”
The bomb maker was nervous. “We’ve never talked about when you’d be ready, or what you want to do. I assume you have a detailed plan.”
The bald man nodded. “We would never tell anyone in advance what we’re going to do. You’ve done very well so far. Now we need you to plant a great many bombs in many places, and very large ones in a few particular places. This is the remaining thing we have to ask. It will have to be done within a short period, so you’ll be busy.”
The bomb maker said, “Well, those are things I will be able to do. What you want is smaller than what I’ve already done. But—”
“But? But what?”
“Before the big day comes, you’ll need to deliver to me the ten million dollars your group promised me.”
“We’ll get it for you as soon as you’ve planted the bombs and set the detonators.”
“That wasn’t the agreement I made with you in Niagara Falls. I must have the ten million dollars before the final day begins. Once I have it, I’ll make this city into a little corner of hell for you. Until I have it, I’ll keep making my preparations, as before.”
“What’s going to stop us from killing you tonight and taking your bombs?”
“My bombs are all designed to fool the best set of civilian bomb technicians in the world. You already know that. If you think you can do anything with them, go ahead. If you make a mistake, the detonator initiates the explosive, but you have lots of men.”
The bald man’s eyes were on his, and they never blinked or turned away. The bomb maker kept his gaze steady, robbing the bald man’s stare of power by counting seconds to distract himself.
The bald man said, “All right. We’ll give you your money first.”
The bomb maker said, “Then I’ll do the rest of the job. I’ll need time to assemble the devices I’ve been working on, and mix the rest of the explosives. We should agree on a day when everything will happen.”
“When will your preparations be ready?”
“Three weeks. You can use the time to go over all of your plans, fix anything you’re worried about, and obtain the money.”
“We can get the money by then,” the bald man said. “You realize that once we give you the money, I’ll have to assign men to watch you twenty-four hours a day until bombs begin to explode?”
“I suppose I can accept that.”
“You will.”