Shock Wave

work; and maybe not. He’s not so much of a social investigator, like you,” Ahlquist said.
    “I didn’t even know that’s what I was,” Virgil said.
     
     
    VIRGIL GOT BACK to the Holiday Inn after dark. He unloaded the loose stuff in his boat, locked it in the back of the truck, dug his pistol out of his gun safe, and carried both the pistol and the shotgun into the motel room. A pistol was as good as money on the street; he was determined not to contribute.
    When he was settled in, he looked at the clock—nearly ten—and called Lee Coakley, in Los Angeles. He and Coakley had been conducting a romance for six months or so, until a production company began making a TV movie about Coakley’s part in breaking up a huge, multi-generational child-abuse ring in southern Minnesota. Coakley, as the local sheriff, had been the media face on the whole episode.
    The production company had rented an apartment for her in West Hollywood, for the duration of the shoot. The duration had recently lengthened, and Coakley had grown evasive on the exact time of her return.
    So Virgil called, and her oldest son, David, answered the phone. “Uh, hi, Virg, Mom’s, uh, at a meeting of some kind. I don’t know when she’s getting home.”
    He was lying through his teeth, Virgil thought; he was not a good liar. Mom was somewhere with somebody, and you probably wouldn’t go too far wrong if you called it a date. “Okay. I’ve got a deal I’m working on, out of town—a bomb thing. I’m going to bed. Tell her I’ll try to give her a call tomorrow.”
    “Yeah, uh, okay.”
    Virgil hung up. Little rat. Of course, she was his mother. If you wouldn’t lie for your mom, who would you lie for?
     
     
    VIRGIL TOOK OFF HIS BOOTS, shut off all the lights except the one in the bathroom, lay on his bed, and thought about his conversation with Ahlquist. The bomber almost certainly had a direct tie to some of the protesters—either the people whose livelihoods were threatened by the PyeMart, or the trout freaks.
    Of the two, he thought the businessmen were more likely to produce a killer. Some of the people who’d lose out to PyeMart would move from prosperity to poverty, and virtually overnight. Businesses, homes, college plans, comfortable retirements, all gone. How far would somebody go to protect his family? Most people wouldn’t even shoplift, much less kill. But to protect his family . . . and all you needed was one.
    And then the environmentalists . . .
    Virgil had a degree in ecological science, and was a committed green. But he’d met quite a few people over the years who’d come into the green movement from other, more ideologically violent movements—people who’d started as anti-globalization protesters, or tree-spikers as opposed to tree sitters, who thought that trashing a McDonald’s was a good day’s work, people who talked about Marx and Greenpeace in the same sentence.
    The greenest people Virgil knew were hunters and fishermen, with Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited and Pheasants Forever and the Ruffed Grouse Society, and the Conservancy and the National Wildlife Federation and all the rest, people who put their money and their time where their mouths were; but these others . . .
    There could be a radical somewhere in the mix, somebody who had twisted a bunch of ideologies all together and decided that bombs were an ethical statement.
    A guy sitting home alone, the blue glow of the Internet on his face, getting all tangled up with the other nuts out there, honing himself . . .
    Again, all it took was one.
     
     
    BEFORE HE WENT TO SLEEP, Virgil spent a few minutes thinking about God, and why he’d let a bomber run around killing people, although he was afraid that he knew the reason: because the small affairs of man were of not much concern to the All-Seeing, All-Knowing. Everybody on earth would die, sooner or later, there was no question about that: the only question was the timing, and what would time mean to a timeless Being?
    But a bomb brought misery. A nice quiet death at age eightyeight, with the family gathered around, not so much.
    He’d have to read Job again, he thought; not that Job seemed to have many answers.
    Then he got up, peed, dropped on the bed, and was gone.

4
    T HE BOMBER SAT in his basement—it had to be a basement—looking at the stack of bombs. He’d already packed the Pelex, which had a rather nice tang about it: like aftershave for seriously macho dudes. He’d packed