Dick Stahl walked into the four-story redbrick office building on Sepulveda Boulevard. The double doors on the ground floor opened into a glass atrium about forty feet high that enclosed wide concrete steps that looked as though they ought to be outdoors. Somewhere in the glass panels above there were leaks, so drips of water had fallen from above and formed puddles in front of the steps. He could see it must have rained here too while he was gone.

Stahl took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked down the hallway to the steel door he’d had installed. The sign on it said: NO-FAIL SECURITY.

He had a jumpy, uncomfortable feeling today, a hot sensation on his spine. In Mexico he had listened only for the sound of sirens, and then after he and the others had crossed into the United States he’d kept the radio off so he could listen to his own thoughts about his rescue of Benjamin Glover. But a few minutes ago, while he was in his car on the way to the office, he heard something on the radio that shocked him. He thought now that he must have heard it wrong and was anxious to get inside and turn on the television set in his office.

He pushed the door open and entered the outer office. He could see his office manager, Valerie, at the desk behind the glass wall. She was blond and about forty, a person who always moved as though an emergency had been declared, chewing gum as she darted from place to place swooping to pick up papers that had to be fixed or finished. As he watched her she stopped and typed something into the computer at the reception desk, then moved out of the field of the big bulletproof window. He’d had the bulletproof glass installed when he started the business seven years ago and it had no nicks in it yet, but it made him feel better about having employees sitting in plain sight.

Stahl stepped in and caught a movement in his peripheral vision. He looked at the row of leather chairs along the wall of the reception area and saw he had a visitor. David Ogden stood and stepped toward Stahl. Today he was wearing his LAPD uniform with the three stars of a deputy chief on the collar. But there was black tape across his badge.

“Hi, Dick,” said Ogden. “Valerie said you’d be back this morning.”

“David,” said Stahl. “What’s going on?” His eyes were on the badge. “I heard something on the radio, but I—”

“It’s bad,” said Ogden. “It’s really bad, Dick. Yesterday afternoon there was a call to a house in Encino. The caller said he was the owner. He said he was away in Europe, and that he’d gotten a threat that his house was all primed to blow up. Tim Watkins and his guys took the call. Tim went in, but they couldn’t save the house. Later, when half the Bomb Squad was searching the rubble for unexploded ordnance, a secondary bomb went off, a big one.”

“Who got hurt? How many?”

“Not hurt. They’re dead, Dick. Fourteen men. Half the bomb techs on the force. Gone. They’re calling it the biggest massacre of police officers in national history.”

“Tim Watkins? Who else?”

“Maynard, Del Castillo, Capiello, Graham. I have a list.” He took a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Stahl.

Stahl stared at it.

Ogden said, “This seemed like a routine call at first. Tim and his crew responded, and then when the place blew up, the ones who went to help clear the scene were the senior people, the most experienced. We lost everybody who was there.” He paused. “I came to ask for your help.”

“You’re asking retired techs to fill in?” said Stahl. “I’ll be willing to help out for a few days, until reinforcements arrive. It’s been a while, but I’ve kept my certification current. You can run into anything in the security business.”

Ogden said, “The reinforcements aren’t arriving. You know how many bomb techs Ventura County has right now? Two. Whenever anybody in Southern California has a situation, they count on reinforcements from us.”

“Have you called the FBI?”

“First call we made. The FBI techs stationed here are going to pitch in. Same for ATF. But transferring anybody to us long-term means taking them from other cities. They’re going to put a rush on getting the first twenty officers on our waiting list trained, but you know how long that takes.”

Stahl knew. The first part of the course that used to be at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama had been moved to Fort Lee, Virginia, a couple of years ago and was still at least six weeks. The part after that in Florida was thirty-nine weeks. Stahl said, “It’ll be a year before the first one is back here ready to work.”

“All we can do is get started today. We’re also asking police forces all over the country for lists of bomb techs who retired within the past three years and might still be certified.”

“What a mess.”

“That’s why we need you.”

“Sure. I said I’d help out for a while.”

“We need more than that, Dick,” said Ogden. “You trained Watkins, Capiello, Del Castillo, and half the other senior technicians. You ran the squad for five years.”

“Two years.”

“Nobody else who’s alive has done it for a day. We need you to run the squad for a while, until we can get a permanent commander. I can get you a rank of acting captain.” He frowned. “Whoever did the bombing is still out there. We lost fourteen cops, and we don’t know a thing about who did it. No group has taken credit. The recording Tim Watkins left told us nothing.”

“Just let me think about it, and we can talk tomorrow.”

“There isn’t time. My car’s outside. You don’t have to do anything now but introduce yourself.”

Two hours later Stahl sat on the desk outside the newly emptied Bomb Squad commander’s office. He was wearing the clothes he had put on to go to the No-Fail Security office this morning—a black sport jacket, a light blue oxford shirt, and a pair of gray slacks. The surviving members of the LAPD Bomb Squad wore work uniforms, essentially dark blue fatigues with badges printed on them. They sat on chairs taken from the conference room down the hall, or sat on desks, or stood.

He said, “I’m Dick Stahl. Like you, I would have given a lot not to be here right now. We all lost friends yesterday. Some of you have lost teachers and supervisors, people who have saved you from dying or taught you how to save yourself. Like you, I want to get whoever did this to them. I’m sure we will. But right now, the highest priority has to be not losing anybody else.”

Deputy Chief Ogden, commanding officer of the Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau, was visible to Stahl in the hallway. He gave Stahl a solemn nod, and then walked off down the hall.

Stahl said, “From now on we will proceed the way we were taught at tech school. A team is three officers—two technicians and one supervisor. Every officer downrange will wear the suit. In most cases that will be one officer only. We’ll rely on the dogs to detect explosives, and use robots as much as we can to lift or disrupt them.”

He looked at the ten men and four women in the room. “Beginning today, we will work under the assumption that we are not defusing anything, no matter how simple and straightforward a device looks. Everything that can’t be detonated in place goes into a containment vessel to be taken to a range and detonated there. I know you want to be able to render the device safe, trace the components to their sources, and convict the bug-eyed creep who assembled them. I’d love that. We just can’t be in that business right now. I don’t think it’s likely this bomber killed fourteen bomb technicians by accident. I think he devised the situation so he could. I don’t know why. But we can’t let it happen again. Questions?”

A big man around forty years old with black hair and the hint of a tattoo peeking from his left shirt cuff raised his hand. As his shirt came down Stahl could see the design was a rattlesnake coiling up his arm.

Stahl nodded. “Can you identify yourself for me, please?”

“Sergeant Ed Carmody. I was going to ask you the same. You’re a friend of Deputy Chief Ogden, right?”

“Yes. He asked me to help out for a while.” He shrugged. “I also have other friends on the force, and until yesterday I had more.”

“Are you a bomb tech? Everybody here has been through the FBI course at the Redstone Arsenal and Eglin Air Force Base, and then recertified every three years.”

“Yes. I was an army EOD man. I did tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, then worked out of Germany on a rapid deployment team for a while. Then I was the NCO in charge of the practical training range at Eglin for a couple of years. Then I came here and ran this squad. Some of the guys we lost yesterday are techs I selected and trained—Watkins, Del Castillo, Maynard, and Capiello.”

A small, pretty woman with light skin and her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun said, “How long will you stay?”

“I haven’t had time to figure that out. For now let’s just say I’ll try to help you through this, and then I’ll go away. About a half hour ago the chief swore me in. Here’s my badge.” He took it out and held it up in its identification wallet. “The day you’re back at full strength and running right I’ll give it back to him.”

He took a folded sheet of paper from his coat pocket and consulted it. “Your team supervisors will be the same. If you were one, you still are. There are four teams consisting of three officers, and one team with only two. For now, I’ll join that one to fill in. We’ll call it Team One.” He looked at the sheet of paper. “With officers Elliot and Hines. Raise your hands.”

He saw a couple of the techs look at each other and raise their hands—the small dark-haired woman who had spoken and the tall athletic-looking African American man in his early thirties beside her.

The radios clipped to all fourteen of the uniforms spat and crackled, and the female dispatcher’s calm voice said, “Bomb technician team requested eleven thousand two hundred Moorpark Avenue in Studio City. Officer reports suspicious vehicle chained to the pumps at a gas station.”

Stahl said, “My team will take this one. That will give the rest of you time to return to your stations and stand by for the next. Remember there’s a group or a person out there who seems to want us all dead. Don’t assume what you’re looking at is what it seems to be. Take care of each other.”

Stahl walked quickly out of the squad room with Hines trying to get ahead of him. Elliot followed a few feet behind, on the radio. “This is Sergeant Elliot. Team One is responding,” he said. “ETA approximately fifteen minutes.”

As he followed Sergeant Diane Hines outside to the parked truck, Stahl looked at the new LAPD headquarters building. It was all glass and knife-edge corners, many empty multilevel spaces and hallways with their own views of the Civic Center. The building had won awards, and it had a row of sculptures along its Spring Street side that looked to him like a line of hippos lying down beside a river. The array was interesting, but he knew they were there to keep somebody from driving a truck into the building—maybe somebody like the person who had wired up that house yesterday.

He got in the bomb truck and moved to the back, so Elliot and Hines would take the two front seats. Hines claimed the driver’s seat and started the engine while Elliot climbed in. Then she flipped on the lights and siren and accelerated onto First Street. Hines drove with a cop’s aggression and speed, and won the game of chicken at each intersection.

It had been a long time since Stahl had been in a speeding bomb truck, but it could never be long enough.