Dick Stahl drove up the road slowly, alerted by the GPS that he must be very close to the place where the three black vehicles had stopped. As soon as he saw the house at the end of a long driveway that led far back from the road, he switched off his headlights and pulled off the pavement. He took Diane’s phone from its stand, and called Bart Almanzo.
“Almanzo.”
“Hi, Bart. It’s me. They’ve stopped. Do you have my location?”
“Yes. We’ve been tracking your phone. You’re on a road that heads north from Route 18, right?”
“Right. This seems to be where they were headed. We passed a thousand places where they could have stopped if they just wanted to lose a tail or dump the body.”
“Can you describe the place?”
“The house is ranch style, one story, not big. There are lights on inside. It’s maybe two thousand square feet, but it has an attached garage that’s about a thousand square feet. It’s got space for at least four cars, and a few extra feet besides. I can’t really tell the color in the light from inside, but it’s white or pale yellow. The three black SUVs are parked behind the garage right now. In front of the house is a long gravel driveway—maybe two hundred feet, and there’s a lot of land in the back. It could be a hundred acres, most of it desert brush. I can’t tell what’s behind that, but along the horizon I see a line like mountains.”
“All right. We’re still maybe forty minutes behind you,” said Almanzo. “The best thing to do is back up and put a few miles between you and that house. We’ll be there.”
“I’m pretty sure this is the place we’ve been hoping to find all this time. It’s the perfect place to make bombs. There are no neighbors for a mile or two, no sign that people go by here much. It’s dark as the basement of hell, with no electric lights to be seen in any direction except the ones in that house.”
“Just wait. I’ll call the county sheriff’s office and some of the local police. We’ll cut off the road from both ends and move in.”
“We’ll lose these guys, and we’ll lose him.”
“Do you still think it’s one bomber?”
“It’s always one bomber. Somebody designs the devices, and he’s usually the only one who puts his hands on them until they’re assembled and ready. I’m really surprised he’s got all these men with him, but this is where they came. I’ll talk to you soon.”
Stahl hung up and sat in the car watching the house from a distance. The night seemed to have reached its darkest hour already, but that meant he was running out of time. He would have to accomplish some things before daylight changed everything.
He had to know what was waiting in that house for Almanzo and the local police. He needed to know if a dozen men with automatic weapons and unlimited ammunition were waiting to ambush them, or if they were rushing to change cars and leave for an airport. He couldn’t let them do either. Stahl wished there were some way to find out other than walking up and looking. There wasn’t.
Stahl looked at the brush and the ground beside the highway. It was dark enough to risk leaving the car and walking. There were yucca plants and tumbleweed, lots of thick, dry spiky plants high enough to disguise the shape of a car, at least until dawn. He released the brake on Diane’s car, shifted it into neutral, and let it coast into the brush.
Motion was what the eyes noticed most easily. He walked directly toward the house instead of along the road, and tried to stay among the Joshua trees, which looked a bit like human shapes. He tried to make the best use of the landscape and the darkness.
Soon he was at the edge of the open land around the house. The grounds had been cleared of random desert weeds and brush, so the land looked like white sand under the night sky. Someone had planted dark-colored drought-resistant shrubs in tight rows that circled the house. This was an arrangement that Stahl had never seen anywhere. From the air, the house must look like a huge target. Was that a psychopath’s private joke? No, he thought. This man’s jokes were cruel.
He couldn’t move his attention past the arrangement of shrubs. The rows were about ten yards apart, going from almost the edge of the highway all the way to a spot about fifteen yards from the house.
Stahl walked close to the outer row and knelt just outside the giant circle. He began to brush away the coarse sand from between two shrubs to see anything hidden there. The sun had been down for at least eight hours, but the sand was still warm to his touch. He dug a little bit deeper, where the sand felt cooler and less dusty. He felt a length of insulated wire. He kept digging, unearthing more and more of the wire.
The wire was thick, about a quarter inch, jacketed with a rubbery plastic like coaxial cable. The wire ran along the same course as the shrubs, but just outside them. After a few feet he found a pair of thinner insulated wires that had been spliced to the cable.
He followed them a couple of feet, where they entered a plastic box. He dug around the box with great care, because even working by feel, he thought he knew what must be inside. The boxes were there to keep the rainwater, the burrowing animals, the shifting sand away from the electrical wiring and the explosives. He was kneeling at the edge of a minefield.
He kept digging until he could lift the plastic box out of its hole, set it down on the warm surface sand, and open it by stripping away a layer of duct tape that ran along the side seam. He disconnected the thick wire that carried the electrical power that probably fed off the house’s 110-volt circuit, and then explored with his fingers what was left in the box. It was a blasting cap stuck into a few pounds of Semtex with one of its two wires connected to the power wire and the other back out. The way the charge was wired, a switch in the house could set off a mine, or maybe blow a whole row at one time.
He dug at the next place where he found thin wires spliced to the main cable, which was about ten feet away, then disconnected them and unearthed another box. He took up a third, and realized it was not going to be possible to disconnect them all before dawn. Out of caution he examined the next row of shrubs, and realized this row had very thin wire strung about two inches above the ground between very small eye screws in the trunk of each shrub, so a man walking through would trip the wire and be blown up.
If he hadn’t been here looking for booby traps, he probably wouldn’t have suspected that the wires were a trigger. They looked like the sort of guide a gardener might string to show him where to plant his shrubs.
He studied the second row. There would be a number of buried bombs here. He guessed there would be bounding mines, like the ones that had been used to kill Ed Carmody. A whole assault squad of cops could be killed that way without an explosion big enough to do much harm to the house. Stahl decided that if he lived, he would blow them up in place.
The lights in the house were on, but the shades and curtains were drawn. He was positive now that this was the place he guessed months ago must exist somewhere. He had favored the theory that the bomber was a loner rather than a terrorist, someone acting out of personal malevolence. The men Stahl had followed here had proved the loner theory wrong.
He stacked the three boxes of explosives, picked them up, and carried them along the trail of footprints he had made coming from Diane’s car. When he got there he set them down carefully, opened the hood of the car, and began to work. He was pleased to see that the tape the bomber had used to seal the plastic boxes was still very sticky and functional. He also noted that this bomber always used more tape and wire than he needed, possibly to avoid the chance of having a circuit’s wires get jostled taut and disconnect. It wasn’t just the device’s high explosive and blasting caps that could be reused.