Detective Danny Cavanaugh 01 - The Brink

two sides he could see from his position. He ran over to the first one, slid along its side, and turned the corner. A mixture of dread and adrenaline rocked his body as he nearly ran into a bomb attached to the back of the column.
    He raced around the other columns. Eight bombs had been attached to the backs and sides of the four columns. Danny returned to the first one he saw and studied its guts. Four sets of red, green, yellow, and blue wires ran from a small silver box to what looked to be a 25-pound brick of C-4 explosives. Another thick, black wire ran from the silver box to a smaller black box. The absence of anything that looked like a timer made Danny’s heart drop even further. These devices were controlled by a remote. They could go off at any time.
    Although he had seen C-4 bombs before, Danny didn’t have the first clue about how to deactivate them. Besides an antenna, the silver box undoubtedly also contained an amplifier to reach through the thick concrete walls of the Capitol, ready to receive its detonation signal. The smaller black box tied to it housed a fail-safe switch that tripped the device in case it was tampered with.
    How in the hell am I going to deactivate all these bombs in the next few minutes?
    Danny checked his watch. The House chamber had to be near its scheduled capacity by now. I’ve got to find Cannon , Danny thought.
    He ran for the ladder and raced up it. He tore across the platform to the hatch and stuck his head up. The service bay was still empty. Danny swiped his cell phone from his pocket and dialed in Cannon’s number.
    “Cannon,” he answered breathlessly.
    Danny yelled into the phone. “Where the fuck are you?!”
    “Right around the corner.” Danny heard it both in the phone and in his other ear. Cannon raced toward him with another officer hot on his heels.
    “Come on!” Danny shouted, waving his arms. “I found the bombs!”
    The officer behind Cannon began sprinting toward the hatch. He was dressed in a bomb squad outfit, complete with full body armor and a helmet. “Name’s O’Brien,” he called. “I’m with the Capitol Police Bomb Squad.”
    “Get down here now!” Danny ordered as he collapsed back down inside the hatch. “These things could go off any second!”
    O’Brien wriggled out of his backpack and handed it to Danny through the hatch. “Take this,” he said.
    Danny took it from him and then scurried over to the ladder. O’Brien was right behind him but instead of taking the ladder, the baby-faced bomb expert jumped down to the concrete floor. He walked to the nearest bomb and examined it for only a moment before walking back to Danny.
    “I need the backpack, please,” O’Brien said. His words were calm, as if he was asking Danny to pass him a wrench to do an oil change.
    He unzipped the backpack and pulled out a laptop. He turned it on and then reached back into the pack. He unfurled a long cord and stuck it into the back of the computer. He typed in his password, and the laptop automatically launched some kind of scanning program.
    O’Brien dug into the backpack one more time and produced a small tripod with a silver ball at the end. He plugged the other end of the cord into it, hit the “Enter” button, and then gazed into the laptop’s screen.
    Eight green dots popped up on the screen in the same formation of the explosives in the room. O’Brien fingers flew across the keyboard. Numbered and lettered codes appeared on the screen. O’Brien turned to Danny and grinned wide as he hit “Enter” again. All eight green dots turned red.
    “We’re good to go. All the bombs have been suspended.”
    A sense of relief washed over Danny. “What the hell is that thing?”
    “We call it the Terrorist Trap. It’s a bomb jammer. It uses open-ended RF architecture to interrupt signals as low as 20 megahertz and as high as 2,000 megahertz. We’ve got a bigger unit on the top of the Capitol dome, but it seems that its signal can’t quite reach down here.”
    “So what now?”
    “Well, let’s see.” O’Brien left the laptop and walked back over to the closest explosive. “I’m glad as hell you didn’t try to deactivate these bad boys.” He pointed to the black box. “See this little jewel? It’s a tamper relay, what we call a tinker blinker. If you had cut any of the wires on this one device, it would have sent a signal to the rest of its buddies here and boom.” O’Brien gave the tinker blinker a second look. “Looks