The bomb maker had been sleeping soundly for several hours. He had worked longer and harder than he considered wise. For several weeks he’d been stockpiling all the Semtex he could make. Since the night the terrorists said they were ready, he had been building explosive devices.
He had not wanted to deal with these men any longer than he had to. He was sure the terrorists were getting more volatile and dangerous each day. They’d been waiting for a year, and now that they had the guns and ammunition and had practiced in the desert, they were terribly impatient. They could hardly wait to kill someone.
He would once have said they could hardly wait to die but was no longer sure they were a suicide squad. During the last visit the bald man had told him they’d assembled things intended for survival—cars and food. Dead men didn’t need food. They seemed to have some notion that they could attack Los Angeles and live. It wasn’t a likely outcome, since the city was protected by about ten kinds of local, state, and federal cops, and the terrorists’ ignorance about that seemed to be causing cognitive dissonance among them. It seemed to him the reason they were so eager to launch their attack must be that the longer they waited the more likely they would be to lose their nerve.
For the past few days he had been working to shape and wire the immense new batch of Semtex into the right containers. He wanted the smaller ones to look like harmless objects, so they would be easy to leave in the open. Waste containers could go almost anywhere. Luggage could be left in and around airports, train stations, parking lots, bus depots. Potted plants could be placed near houses or in public buildings. Cardboard boxes inside shopping bags with the names of stores printed on them could be left in or around malls, stores, or restaurants. He had been collecting containers ever since he’d begun leaving bombs for the police. He had a good supply of yard ornaments, birdbaths, plaster trolls and statues, electrical fixtures and appliances. He had toys and games, basketballs and hollow aluminum bats. He had a few dozen orange traffic cones that could be filled and armed. He had bought two fire hydrants from a scrap yard and left their faded paint jobs intact so they wouldn’t be noticed. All of these devices required extra work, and all required that he see the object as part of a scene and an action, almost like a small play, ending in the triggering of the initiator.
Some of the larger devices had taken the most effort for him. They needed to contain very large quantities of Semtex—tens of pounds and up. They had to be delivered to sites, but some were too heavy to carry. He had loaded one charge into a portable electric cement mixer that had a tow hitch and wheels. He put one batch into a generator made for construction projects. Another he built into the van he used, all set into the bay and then covered with a false floor. There were seven blockbusters in all, each containing five hundred to a thousand pounds of high explosives. He was ready to blow up bridges and buildings, not just a few curious civilians.
But he was still not finished, not ready. He had at least two more weeks of very hard work ahead, and when he dozed off in his chair last evening after watching the news on television, he had forced himself to wake up only long enough to go straight to bed.
Stahl followed the red dot on the phone’s GPS map onto the 134 Freeway toward Glendale and Pasadena. He could see from the map that at least the black SUV carrying the corpse was staying on the freeway. As soon as it passed the junction with the Golden State Freeway he was sure it was still heading east. The Golden State could have taken them north toward Oregon or south toward Mexico.
Stahl kept driving, going faster now. He didn’t want to gain on them enough to be visible, but he also didn’t want to allow them too much distance. At some point they could simply stop, abandon those three vehicles, and take others. If they left the body inside one, he would have no way to find them again. Or they might just stop and dump the body somewhere. He had to be able to catch up with them in a minute or two. He and Diane had been lucky so far—lived through the attack and placed a phone among the assassins—but luck was never limitless.
He needed to be alert, be aware of their speed, and watch carefully for stops. They were on a freeway before 4:00 a.m., and they were in sparse traffic. There should be no need for stops unless something new was happening.
Diane’s phone rang. He didn’t want to do anything to interrupt the tracking of the corpse, but he knew he had to answer.
“Hello?”
“Dick? It’s Bart Almanzo.”
“Hi. I’m using the tracking program that’s installed in Diane’s phone to track the GPS on mine. We’re on the 210 Freeway heading east. I just passed Indian Hill Boulevard near Claremont.”
“I know. She installed the same program on my phone, so we’re tracking you and the body.”
“Good. If you call ahead, make sure the cops ahead of us don’t block them off. We’ve got to see where they’re going.”
“I know,” said Almanzo.
“How far behind me are you?”
“About forty-five minutes, maybe more.”
“I’ll let you know when I get where we’re going.”
“Do that,” said Almanzo.
Stahl ended the call and put the phone back on its stand. Then there it was, the red dot with the circle around it, still moving along Interstate 210.
They passed Victorville, then got off the interstate and moved onto Route 18. They moved along the road at almost freeway speed through Lucerne Valley and then turned north onto a nameless road.
Stahl could tell the road must be good because it was straight and their speed didn’t change. Out here that probably meant it was smooth and level. A road curved only if it had obstacles to get around or if it was on a steep hill.
Ten minutes later, the dot on the map stopped.