The bomb maker had a bad start that morning because of the night before. First he had needed to spend the evening making a main charge of the right sort. He had seen the target in publicity pictures at the wheel of a silver Ferrari. At first he thought the car must be part of an advertisement, but it appeared again in a shot on her personal website. She had parked it in the garage of a house. Only the open garage door and a part of a brick facade were visible, so the house could be anywhere. But the plate number began with GH, so it had to be Gloria Hedlund’s.
He scrapped the design he had been drawing, and designed a smaller version that could be made flatter and attached under the chassis of the low sports car. Then he decided to use a few yards of wire and two more detonators to connect the charge to the brake light and to the solenoids that locked the doors electronically.
He knew that studio lots were expert at keeping people out, so he hot-wired the tow truck parked in back of a closed gas station where he’d stopped a few times in Bakersfield. He set the sun visor at a low angle to block a security camera’s view of his face, then drove the truck to LA and up to the gate. He angled his hat’s brim down to obscure his features. He said he was there to jump a battery in the television parking lot, although the explanation would probably not have been necessary, because a tow truck was its own explanation. The guard waved him in, and he drove to the television station’s parking lot.
He had no trouble finding her parking space behind the station because of the distinctiveness of the silver Ferrari. He had no real trouble setting the main charge or running the secondary wires to the brake light through the trunk and to the solenoid that controlled the right rear-door lock. The process took five minutes.
He was able to drive off the lot in the tow truck over forty minutes before the explosion. Then he drove back to the gas station, popped the ignition lock back into the column, and walked away. His car was parked a block from the station. The hardest part for him had been driving home from Bakersfield.
It couldn’t have been more than two hours after he was in bed when his employers, the terrorists, had come for their night visit. This time he had gotten rid of them by giving them the guns and ammo he’d been saving. It had been a costly tactic for him. He had hoped to use the terrorists’ lack of guns as a way to keep them fairly harmless and peaceful while he completed his plans and mixed the rest of the explosives necessary to carry them out. He’d planned to string them along for a month or more while he gave them one or two weapons at a time, then doled out the ammunition as slowly as possible. But when he assessed the situation that night, he decided to give in.
They had been jumpy and emotional. They were on a mission in the middle of a crowded city surrounded by an enormous metropolitan area patrolled by about twelve thousand police, twelve thousand sheriffs, and an unknown number of FBI, ATF, border police, airport police forces, and Homeland Security. They had asked him for arms for fifteen men. The numbers were small enough to persuade him that they didn’t intend to accomplish anything but an hour or two of slaughter before they died. They were a suicide squad, whether they knew it or not. How could he be sure they paid him before it was too late?
He was tired and had a pounding headache, and his schedule had him working with difficult chemicals in big batches today. He wished he could close everything down and take a nap, but he couldn’t. Now that they had the weapons he’d bought for them, there would be no way to keep them controlled, or even predictable. If they were motivated by religion, one of them could have a vision. If they were motivated by politics, or even were being paid for murdering people, one of them could develop the notion that a neighbor was suspicious and was spying on them or something.
He had never seen any of them engaged in anything that looked like a religious practice. They didn’t bow to the east in front of him, or cross themselves, or wear religious medals or talismans. They never wore anything with writing on it, or read books in front of him.
When he was searching for a sponsor he had tried to reach the leaders of any group that identified itself as having committed a terrorist act anywhere in the world. But he had not been told which group these men belonged to. They could be on some familiar mission, or they could be doing something never done before. They could be working to weaken an American city so Russia, China, North Korea, or some other country would be accused. Or they might be a small secret group that wanted to draw out some other group that was a threat in their own country. They could be anything or its mirror opposite.
There just wasn’t any way to know whether their plan was rational, let alone comprehensible. He supposed nothing intended to end in a suicidal battle was rational. The whole suicide dimension put him at a terrible disadvantage in dealing with them. In any confrontation, he was the one who would be bluffing. They would be the ones prepared to push their point of view to the extreme of death: you must do as I say or I will kill you even though it kills me too.
It bothered him that they had a kind of sincerity he didn’t. A man who was planning to die for a cause might be crazy or deluded, but he wasn’t cowardly or selfish. The bomb maker acknowledged himself to be both.
No matter how useful he was to them, how good he was at the job he had undertaken, he was not their brave and noble comrade in arms. He was a mercenary, a person whose loyalty must be bought on a continuing basis. And in this case they also saw him as a traitor to his country. That undoubtedly made him even less deserving of respect. They ordered him around without much regard for his dignity. There was even a danger that they might kill him because they thought he was contemptible.
He began to consider various ways of getting out of California, which he would have to do whether things went badly or they went well. He could buy airline tickets for flights leaving each day from the four major airports—Los Angeles International, Ontario, Long Beach, and Burbank. He supposed the safest way would be to reserve one flight from each airport each day. The flights didn’t have to be long, so he could cut the cost by picking cheap flights—say, a hundred dollars. That would bring it down. If he had a ticket for one cheap flight at one airport every day, it would be $36,500 a year. If he booked all four of them for three months it would be the same price, $36,500. There might be some sort of open-ended ticket he could keep renewing for even less, or something else that was less likely to be noticed by the authorities. He decided to work out a travel plan and implement it. He would also look into the idea of having flights from airports farther away from Los Angeles, in case he needed an airport after an attack, when local ones were likely to be shut down. He would also have to think about hidden cars and other ways to get to an airport.
Maybe his house was his call to a bluff, as it always had been. He was comfortable spending most hours of every day inside this enormous bomb. Think you’re tough? You’re a pure-souled fearless fanatic who smiles as he provokes death? Come stand beside me while I work in this munitions dump.
He kept at it all day and into the evening, making the substances he would need. When he finally gave himself permission to rest, he meticulously cleaned, locked up, and showered, then put on clean clothes before he washed the ones that might have specks of volatile substances on them. When he played back the evening news, he was shocked.
The news anchor said, “A source close to the mayor’s office said today that a preliminary investigation had begun in the murder of Channel Ten’s Gloria Hedlund. The source confirmed that one person of interest is former police captain Richard Stahl, the subject of Miss Hedlund’s final on-air exposé.”