Shock Wave

nodded. “Be pretty bold. And you’d have to ask, why? If you’re sneaking around with a big goddamned bomb under your arm, it’s not like you’d be more noticeable if you wore a mask. So why not wear a mask?”
    “You think there might have been something else that was identifiable?”
    “Could be,” Barlow said. “Maybe something about his size, like he’s really fat, or maybe he’s got a disability, a limp or a missing arm, or maybe he’s six-eight or something. But if we don’t find that camera, and we haven’t found anything like it, then we sort of wonder why.”
    “How about a camera mount?”
    “Should be one, can’t find it,” Barlow said. “We were hoping the video was cycled out to the Internet, but it wasn’t that sophisticated. It apparently was fed through a wire to a digital server, which cycled every twenty-four hours. The recorder might still be there, somewhere, but we haven’t found it yet. Now we got this one to work. . . .”
    Virgil looked around at the mess, shook his head. “Good luck with that.”
     
     
    BARLOW GESTURED TOWARD the metal building, and they stepped away from the group looking at the blown shovel. Barlow said, quietly, “Listen . . . I spent some time talking to the sheriff last night, and he says you’re pretty much the BCA’s golden boy. That’s fine with me. I’ve got no connections with the locals. I can do all the technical stuff, but nobody’s gonna sit around and eat macaroni and cheese with me and tell me what’s what. So I gotta lean on you.”
    “I can work with that,” Virgil said. “If you could get me what you find . . .”
    “You’ll know in ten minutes,” Barlow said.
    “Good. I’ve already got some people I need to talk to—I’m going to do that now.”
    “Keep me up,” Barlow said. “The trailer bomb was a big break, though that sounds awful, with the dead guy and all. If the bomber had kept trying up in Michigan, we’d have never figured out where he was from. Hell, an hour after the bomb went off, we were ankledeep in Homeland Security and FBI guys. They wanted to investigate every Arab in the state, and there are something like a half million of them. This is a little more manageable.”
    Virgil nodded. “Yeah. Not a hell of a lot of Arabs around here. Maybe a few, but a lot more Latinos.”
    “I’ll tell you something else, Virgil. These guys do one or two bombs, and it gives them a serious sense of importance,” Barlow said. “We see it when we catch them and debrief them. They’re usually people who feel like they should be important, but they aren’t. When the bomb goes off, they get all kinds of attention, and they’re all kinds of important . . . and they don’t want to quit. It’s like cocaine: the high goes away after a while, and they want another hit.”
    “You’re telling me he’s going to do it again,” Virgil said.
    “He made a whole batch of bombs for this attack. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got another one tonight. Something else: he’s got enough material to blow up a building. If he decides to go big, he could turn the city hall into a pile of brick dust.”
    “That’s not good,” Virgil said.
    They exchanged cell-phone numbers, and e-mails, and then Virgil headed back downtown to the motel.
     
     
    VIRGIL HAD HEARD of the ticking-time-bomb theory of building up stress in the movies—Bruce Willis rushing around New York to keep the schools from blowing up—but this was ridiculous. Now he had a ticking time bomb, and the biggest expert around said that more were on the way.
    At the motel, he got cleaned up, put on clean clothes, and headed to Bunson’s, the restaurant.
     
     
    AT BUNSON’S, THE HOSTESS SAID, “I’ll buy that shirt if you want to sell it.”
    Virgil was wearing his most conservative musical T-shirt, a vintage Rolling Stones “Tongue” that he’d found on America’s Fence. “I’m sorry, I have an emotional attachment to it,” Virgil told her. “I was wearing it when my third wife told me she wanted a divorce.”
    “Oh, well, in that case . . .” She smiled, and led him back to a booth overlooking the lake.
    He had the sweet-butter pancakes with bacon and maple syrup; at eight-thirty, which was still way too early, he called Davenport at home. “I hope this is a goddamn emergency,” Davenport said, when he picked up the phone.
    “The guy just set off at least sixteen bombs at once, and wrecked God-only-knows how much stuff,” Virgil said.