The bomb maker was in his garage workshop drawing new designs. Making bombs was imagining, building, and testing. The past few months had been a time of preparation, building devices and planning where and how to use them. Now, he’d realized, he had to incorporate new ideas if he wanted to kill bomb technicians.

The LAPD Bomb Squad had surprised him. They were competent and sure. They were sometimes wrong, but they were never careless or baffled. He had read somewhere they were about the best outside the military. They had invented many of the now standard ways of rendering bombs safe. He had hoped the current technicians were an inferior group living on a dead legacy, but they weren’t. They had found two of his devices, handled them expertly, and destroyed all the work and preparation he’d invested in them.

He had originally decided his best strategy would be to design and install a device that would bring a large portion of the Bomb Squad together and kill as many of them as possible. He’d killed half of them, and he’d been confident the rest would succumb in time.

His problem now was that the survivors were more wary and observant. They knew he was trying to obliterate them, so they were difficult to deceive. Everything that looked like an explosive device was considered to be one, and no device was treated as routine. The next two had been destroyed without mishap or casualties.

He had been working all morning on new designs. He’d drawn schematics and sketched bomb triggers, dreaming up components that didn’t look like what they were, or could be hidden inside the housings of other objects. When he began to get tired and stiff from sitting at his drafting table, he gathered all his diagrams and schematics and took them to his workshop safe. He had to be careful.

He knew anyone who wanted to break into his safe would have to subject it to heat from a cutting torch or blow the lock open with explosives. He had placed a plastic container of white phosphorus inside so any application of high heat would melt the plastic and allow the phosphorus to burn everything in the safe, and probably injure the safecracker.

When he had put his workshop in order he went to his gun cabinet and selected weapons for the afternoon’s trip to Los Angeles. He took an M9 pistol and a .223 Remington Bushmaster rifle with a six-position telescoping stock and a thirty-round magazine. He put the pistol on his belt where it would ride under his sport coat and collapsed the rifle’s stock so it would fit in the briefcase he’d modified to hold the weapon and a second magazine.

He had selected a reusable grocery bag to hold the bomb. As he put the device inside he admired it. His creation looked like a bomb. He had strung together a dozen sticks of Carl Mazur’s dynamite and sewn them into a vest created by cutting away the sleeves of an old denim jacket he’d taken from the lost-and-found basket in a Laundromat. The bomb looked like a suicide vest, and could have been used as one if he’d wanted. He had sewn in lithium-ion batteries and a switch that could be activated by a clock.

The clock had been a wonderful find. If it was possible to have a clock face that looked made for a bomb, this was the one. The clock had been intended to be started and stopped by an electric eye aimed across the finish line on a track. He started the clock manually, so it began to tick and move the hands around the dial. The entire presentation of the bomb was a bit of theater, and it was dramatic enough to make him laugh.

The bomb looked like a bomb, but it wasn’t the kind of bomb it appeared to be. The clock would complete the firing circuit to set off the dynamite and the layer of plastic explosive he’d sewn under it in a few hours. He had also placed a layer of Tannerite next to the main charge. Tannerite was the substance used in exploding targets. It was harmless and inert until a high-velocity projectile hit it, at which point it would explode.

Usually he planted his devices at night, between 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. He was going to plant this one while the afternoon sun was still high, so he could put himself where the sun’s glare would half-blind the eyes of his enemies. Today he would be near enough to the bomb so he would see everything.

He had rented a gray Toyota two days before and then put on it stolen license plates that he altered with black paint, so the numbers were changed. He drove the car to a parking structure off Hollywood Boulevard he’d selected a week ago. The structure was privately owned—and old enough not to have been fitted with security cameras. He walked along Cherokee south to Selma and then near the building that housed the office he had rented. He didn’t stop there, but kept walking. He came back on the other side of the street, and as he passed an alley he took the bomb vest out of the shopping bag, left it in the alley’s mouth, and kept going.

He came around the next block and into the rear of the office building. Then he climbed the back stairs to the office he had rented. He opened the window and looked down at the sidewalk to be sure the vest was still where he left it. He opened his briefcase, took out his rifle, adjusted the length of the stock to fit him, inserted the loaded magazine, and looked through the scope. Then he positioned the desk so he could stand on top at the proper angle to see the vest from above, but far enough back from the window not to be seen from below. He pushed the conference table in front of the desk, and then tipped it up on its end to serve as a blind. He could rest the rifle on the edge of the table and steady his aim while his body was hidden behind it. When he was ready and comfortable, he sat down by the window to wait.

The 911 call came in at 4:57 p.m. Team Two was out, and Team Three and Team Four were scheduled to come on shift in two hours. Team One would take the call.

Today Team One meant Elliot; Hines; John Crowell, one of the agents on loan from the FBI; and ATF agent Judy Welsh. Since Dick Stahl was moving from team to team to observe the replacements, Elliot had by seniority inherited Stahl’s slot as supervisor of Team One for the day.

The team scrambled into the bomb truck and Hines took the wheel. As they left the headquarters building, most of the traffic was flowing north through Hollywood toward the Valley, in the same direction they were going. They could hear a constant stream of radio chatter, with the regular patrol units announcing that they had arrived and closed off one intersection after another to incoming traffic. When Hines reached the final block, there were already two police cars parked at angles at each end of the street. They pulled apart only long enough to let the bomb truck pass.

Hines parked the truck a hundred feet up the street from the alley entrance, and the four bomb technicians climbed out. Elliot looked through binoculars and said, “The responding officer was right. It looks like a suicide vest.” He handed the binoculars to the nearest technician, Agent Crowell.

Agent Crowell said, “I’ve seen a couple of them before. There was a guy named Hamid who made them for Hamas while I was in Israel years ago. It’s good to see one that’s not strapped to anybody.”

Agent Welsh said, “Maybe somebody got cold feet?”

“Maybe,” said Crowell. “And maybe it’s fake.”

“Time to go downrange and take a closer look,” said Elliot. “Anybody else ever work a bomb vest?” There was silence. “I guess you’re it, then, Crowell.”

“Honored,” said Crowell.

Elliot said, “I’m going to suit up too, and go with you for the first look.”

The two began putting on their heavy EOD suits. As he stepped into his, Elliot said, “Hines, as soon as we go, get the truck into position at least two hundred feet back. Better call in a Code Five Edward too. We don’t want any helicopters hovering over us if this goes bad.”

“Will do.”

“Welsh, let the officers in the area know we’re going downrange. They should get ready to get people out of these buildings if we have to disturb the vest.”

“Yes, sir.” Welsh stepped off down the block with a hand radio, checking to see where the units were and which buildings might have to be emptied.

Diane Hines moved the truck back two hundred feet. Then she ran tests on the communication equipment in the helmets of the two men wearing the suits. “This is Hines, testing. Please respond.”

“Elliot here.”

“Crowell here.”

“I’m reading you both,” she said. “You’re good to go. Hines out.” She turned on the recorder and checked to be sure the truck’s camera was running. She listened to the talk between Elliot and Crowell as they clumped along toward the alley entrance.

“There seems to be a manual switch over there on the right side of the vest.” That was Crowell’s voice. “See the wire and then the plastic oval with the thumb switch? Beside the pocket.”

“I see it. That would support the idea that it really was intended as a suicide vest,” Elliot said. “But it’s odd that it has a clock.”

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s a backup. If the bomber got disabled or killed, the vest would still go off.”

There was a pause, and then Elliot said, “Move back a little so I can photograph the device out of your shadow.” Then he added, “Can you see the place where the clock is connected to the firing circuit?”

Crowell said, “It’s got to be this wire here. And there’s one on the other side of it too. Want me to cut it?”

“I’d love to get the timer issue off the table at the start, but no. We’re not dismantling it unless we have to. The clock looks as though it’s set for seven o’clock, and that gives us time.”

His voice rose. “Hines? The vest isn’t attached to anything bigger. Let’s get Andros out to pick up the device and put it into the containment vessel.”

“Roger,” said Hines. She opened the truck door and climbed down, then opened the rear of the truck to pull down the ramp. She climbed up and detached the robot’s mountings, then picked up the control unit, steered the robot down the ramp to the street, and lifted the ramp back up. The robot was an older model that had been refurbished to replace worn parts. To Hines, the control mechanism seemed slightly stiff, and she knew that in this situation she was most likely to be the one to pilot the robot. She tested the control by making the robot wheel around in a circle and zigzag. She moved its arm and opened and closed its gripper, looked at the image that appeared on its screen, and then brought it back to the rear of the truck.

Across the street from the bomb, the maker looked out the window and watched the two men in bomb suits. They knelt close to the vest. He could tell they were communicating as they studied his device. He kept hoping one of them would reach out and try to cut one of the obvious connections he had made, and then try to remove components. He couldn’t see their hands because the suits exaggerated their bulk, and their hands were in front of them. All he could see were their elbows.

When the two technicians turned their bodies to look at something down the street, he moved back in the shadows, then to the side of the window so he could see what they were looking at. The Bomb Squad truck was near the end of the block. It faced in the direction of the bomb vest. That was unusual, but he decided it was because the street was too narrow to turn a truck sideways. A moment later he saw what the technicians were watching for. The Bomb Squad robot came around the back of the truck and rolled past it. Someone was operating the remote control to bring the robot forward.

The robot meant the bomb maker was running out of time. Things were happening too soon. This had just begun. The two men standing near the bomb had just begun to examine the vest. They hadn’t so much as opened a tool bag. They weren’t trying to render it safe or carry it to the containment vessel.

He had to do something. He climbed onto the desk behind the upended table, rested his rifle on the edge, and looked through the scope. He could see they both wore new-style EOD suits, the very best available. The helmet could withstand a bullet traveling 2,000 feet per second. The front of the torso would stop a projectile at 4,500 feet per second. The arms and legs would not be penetrated at 1,850 feet per second, and the joints all overlapped. There was no point in shooting at a man in a bomb suit. What the bomb maker had to do was set off the high explosive in the vest, which would propel shrapnel at them at 26,000 feet per second from just a few feet away.

The maker took careful aim at the bomb. He had embedded a blasting cap in each of the twelve sticks of dynamite. He had attached a plastic container of mercury fulminate to the inside of the clock behind the face. All he had to do was hit the clock, and everything would explode. Even if he missed the clock, he would hit the Tannerite, set it off, and the shock would set off the main charges. The two technicians would be torn apart.

He watched them through the scope. The two oafs were standing in front of the alley, blocking his view of his bomb vest. He must get them to move. He decided he’d have to bet on their reflexes and impulses. He squeezed the trigger.

The man who had been blocking his view was hit on the ankle, and the impact made him fall onto his side. There was no hope the bullet had pierced even the outer layer of the suit, but it had hurt him. The problem now was that the damned idiot had fallen in front of the vest, so his stupid body still blocked the bomb maker’s view.

He fired again and the bullet hit the arm of the suit. The man clutched the arm, but didn’t get up. But the shot made the man’s companion squat, bring his arms around the man’s torso, and practically lift him to his feet. They turned, as though to look for the shooter, so he fired four more shots, hitting the tall one who had helped the other in the front of his helmet, his leg, and his helmet again. They hobbled out of his way.

The bomb maker placed the crosshairs on the clock face and fired, but there was no explosion. The blast should have been instantaneous. He tried to adjust his aim, but all he could see through the scope was a featureless black surface.

He lowered the rifle to look over the scope and saw what had happened. In front of him, blocking his view, was the bomb truck. Another bomb technician had heard his shots, seen the two men in suits under fire, and driven the bomb truck forward to put it between him and his bomb.

He had to get the bomb technician in the truck to panic and drive away. He fired on the truck’s cab. The first bullet slammed into the truck’s door. The second shattered the side window, and then he saw the driver. It was a young, dark-haired woman dressed in a navy-blue police uniform. She ducked down, slithered out the passenger side door, and disappeared.

He collapsed the rifle’s stock, put the rifle in its case, closed it, and ran to the stairwell. In seconds he was out the back door of the office building. He moved down the alley behind the building and reached the parking lot on Cherokee where he had left his rental car. He got in and drove up Hollywood Boulevard toward Laurel Canyon and the San Fernando Valley, spitting out a string of twenty expletives about the woman who had taken away his kill.