Shock Wave

a few minutes, thinking about this and that, and for a while about God, and then almost went to sleep. But not quite asleep. Eventually, he crawled out from under the sheet and got out his laptop and linked into the Pinnacle’s Wi-Fi system, and went out on the Net, researching “Pye Pinnacle.”
    It took a while, but he eventually found a PyeMart promotional video about the building that included a shot of a much younger Willard Pye greeting board members as they got off the elevators. When the doors opened, Virgil could see a metal “55” set in the edges of the elevator doors.
    He said, “Huh.”
    In twenty minutes, he had the information he needed to plant a bomb in the boardroom; he even knew he could plant it in the credenza.
    But he still had no way in, or up.
     
     
    HE CHECKED HIS E-MAIL before he went to sleep and found a message from Lee Coakley, his sheriff in Malibu, or West Hollywood, or wherever it was. The note said: I tried to call you several times on your cell, but got no service. Talk to you soon.
    He checked his phone: she’d called while he was in the air, with the phone turned off.
     
     
    HE GOT TO SLEEP a little after three, and the alarm woke him at seven. At seven-twenty, he was in the Pye truck with a sleepy Chapman, who said, “We’ll have breakfast on the plane, and then I’m gonna crash again. I feel like somebody put a Vulcan nerve pinch on me.”
    “Sounds right,” Virgil said, yawning.
    “You figure anything out?” she asked.
    “I spent some time online. There’s enough information about the Pinnacle that you could figure out where the boardroom is, and you can also figure out when the board meetings are, and where. The last board meeting, before the bomb, was in Dallas. I don’t know where the next one will be, but I could probably find out a few days before it happens.... It’s deep in the business news, but it’s in there.”
    “Hmm,” she said. “I’ll mention that to Willard.”
    Virgil shook his head. “It looks like a conspiracy, but it doesn’t feel that way. Everything is too clockwork-like, too precise. If it’s a conspiracy, that would mean that we have two nuts—one here and one in Butternut—who are both absolutely murderous, and who were willing to trust each other, and both intelligent. How did they find each other? How did they get together?”
    “Well, maybe on the Internet,” she said. “There are anti-PyeMart and anti-Walmart and anti-Target websites. What if a couple of people cooked up a conspiracy . . . I mean, one was from Butternut, but the other one could have been from anywhere. He or she moves to Grand Rapids or Lansing and gets a job out at the Pinnacle—gets a job for the sole purpose of blowing up the board.”
    Virgil thought about that for a moment, then said, “I’ve got a researcher at the BCA who is really good at the Net. I’ll have her troll those PyeMart sites, see what she comes up with.”
    “But we don’t know when they would have met.”
    “In the last two years, if there were two of them. PyeMart didn’t start making noises about building in Butternut until two years ago,” Virgil said. “Took them a year to get the permits, and another year to get under way.”
    “Have to check,” she said.
    “Yeah, but I still . . . don’t think it’s a conspiracy. We’re missing something. I think it’s one guy, pretty smart, who figured out a way to get into the Pinnacle. Are there tours of the building? If there are, did anyone go missing for a few minutes? That kind of thing.”
    “There are tours, but not often—and not one recently,” she said. “McCullough checked that. The ATF guys are really good.”
     
     
    THEY SPECULATED, but came up with nothing solid; got to Ford International a few minutes after eight, were off the ground at eightfifteen. After a quick breakfast of Cheerios and sweet rolls, the cabin attendant folded out beds for Virgil and Chapman, and Virgil was asleep in two minutes; he woke again when the wheels touched down in Butternut.
    The trip, he thought, might have been time wasted.
    But it didn’t feel wasted; it felt, instead, like he’d learned something about the mind of the bomber. He was clever, and had a streak of boldness, even recklessness. He’d somehow gotten into the Pinnacle, and back out, and had never touched any of the trip lines set up by a very professional security system.
    Interesting.

10
    T HE BOMBER GOT a little drunk, and he did it