Shock Wave

it. This is your day off. Tough titty,” Ahlquist said. He turned to the crowd coming up behind him. “You know Jack LeCourt? He’s our top man here in the city. Jack, this is Virgil Flowers from the BCA, and, Virgil, this is Jim Barlow, he’s with the ATF outa the Grand Rapids field office, he’s been working the first bomb up in Michigan.... This is Geraldine Gore, the mayor.”
    The sheriff made all the introductions and they all shook hands and had something to say about Virgil’s pink shirt, and then O’Hara said, “We got a jet just landed at the airport, Chief. I think Pye’s here.”
    “Aw, man,” Barlow said. He was a tall dark man, with hooded dark brown eyes, salt-and-pepper hair, and a neatly trimmed black mustache. He was wearing khaki slacks, a blue button-down shirt, and a dark blue blazer.
    “He hasn’t been that much help?” Virgil asked.
    “First thing he did was offer a one-million-dollar reward leading to the arrest and conviction,” Barlow said. “Then he gave his secretary’s family a two-million-dollar gift from the company, and gave the food-service lady, who was cut up, a quarter-million-dollar bonus. All the millions flying around meant he got wall-to-wall TV, and every time he went on, he bitched about progress. When we told him what we were doing, he leaked it. When I heard about this bomb, I thought, Now we’re getting somewhere. At least we know where the guy’s from. But you watch: it’ll be wall-to-wall TV here, too, in about fifteen minutes.”
    “I can handle that. No need for you to get involved,” Ahlquist said, and from behind his back, O’Hara winked at Virgil.
    Virgil said, “So, as the humblest of the investigators here . . . can somebody tell me what happened?”
    The mayor unself-consciously scratched her ass and said, “I’d like to know that myself.”

3
    B ARLOW KNEW HIS BOMBS.
    The explosive, he said, had the same characteristics as the first one, so he was assuming that it was again the stuff called Pelex, as in the Michigan bomb. “That’s basically TNT, which is 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene. To make Pelex, they mixed in about fifteen percent aluminum powder, which makes the TNT faster—increases the speed with which it develops its maximum pressure.”
    “To give you a bigger pop,” Virgil said.
    “Exactly. The bomber put this stuff, I think, inside a good-sized galvanized steel plumbing pipe,” Barlow said. “The pipe was sitting on the floor, just inside the door. The trigger could have been something as simple as a string down from the handle to a mousetrap.”
    “Mousetrap?”
    “Yes.” Barlow gestured at the techs working inside the trailer. “We found a wire spring that looks like it came from an ordinary mousetrap. We don’t know if there were mousetraps set inside the trailer to catch mice, but it would have been an effective way to fire the switch on the bomb. You get a battery, an electric blasting cap, a switch worked through the mousetrap, and there you go. Move the door, fire the mousetrap, and boom.”
    “That sounds dangerous . . . to the bomber,” Ahlquist said.
    “You’d need good hands,” Barlow agreed. “The bomb in Michigan used a cheap mechanical clock as a switch, and was a lot safer. But that was a time bomb, and this was a trigger-set. Of course, we haven’t found all the pieces of the switch here.... It might not have been all that dangerous. For example, there could be a safety switch in the circuit that wasn’t as touchy as the mousetrap. So he’d set the trap, and then only close the safety switch when he was sure the mousetrap was solid and he was on his way out.”
    “So is that sophisticated, or unsophisticated?” Virgil asked.
    “Interesting question,” Barlow said. “We occasionally run into guys who are bomb hobbyists and take a lot of pride in building clever detonation circuits. Using cell phones, and so on. They’re nuts, basically, but their engineering can be pretty clever. These bombs look as if they’re made by a guy working from first principles. That is, he doesn’t know the sophisticated ways of wiring up a weapon like this, but he’s smart enough to figure out some very effective ways of doing it. That means—this is just my opinion—that he’s a guy who learned how to build bombs for this single mission. He’s not bombing things to hear the boom and make his weenie hard, he’s bombing PyeMart because he’s got a grudge against PyeMart.”
    “How much of this Pelex