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
The bomber got a little drunk, and he did it deliberately.
He’d been trained as a straight-line thinker, which was good, most of the time, but he was smart enough to recognize the weaknesses of straight-line thinking. Sometimes, you had to get out of the box, out of the geometry. In his experience, nothing loosened up the mind like a pitcher of martinis, drunk alone. He had the pitcher, he had the gin, he had the vermouth. And he certainly was alone.
He mixed up the booze, got a tumbler, and carried it out to his tiny backyard deck, where he sat in a wooden deck chair with plastic cushions, looked up at the stars, and let his mind roam free.
How had he landed here, in Butternut Falls? He should be in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. At Columbia, the University of Chicago, UCLA. He had this recurring image of himself, pushing through some gilded revolving doors somewhere-a big city, probably New York, because he’s wearing a New York kind of hat-and a newsman pushes a microphone in his face and asks, “What do you think of the president’s plan?”
“The president’s a fool, a lightweight,” he’d say, his face sharply outlined, almost like one of those yellow- suited superheroes in the comics.
Like that was going to happen. Every time he’d been ready to make a move, something had jumped up to thwart him. Everything from an ill-timed job recession, to an ill-planned marriage. Barbara had been the worst of it. She’d dragged him out to Butternut and used her family’s influence to get him a job, and the job had nailed his feet to the ground. All so she could be near her mother; though he couldn’t imagine anybody would want to stay close to that witch.
Barbara had dragged him, pushed him. Hectored him.
The power of pussy, he thought. The power of pussy.
And time kept passing. He was hardly aware of it, the days passing so quickly and seamlessly; every time he turned around, it seemed like he was shaving in the morning to go out and waste another day of his life. He felt like he was in his twenties, still a young guy, on the move, with a great future-but somehow, nearly twenty years had slipped away. He was nearly as old as that fool, the president.
Oh, he’d made plans. One of them involved dumping Barbara, but, surprise, surprise, she’d moved first, and he’d found himself with no house and only half an eventual pension. She’d nailed him down with pussy, and then, when she left, nailed him down with economics and legal decrees. She was followed by a couple more mistakes, and finally, he would sit on this patio and he could see the future stretching out in front of him, ending in penury… ending with dog food and a hot plate.
That made him smile: the alcohol talking.
He was in no serious danger of dog food, but he was in danger of something that was probably worse: irrelevance, in his own eyes. He looked at the people around him, at their trivial lives, and he sneered at them, but then he came home to look in the mirror and ask, “How am I different?”
The truth was, he wasn’t. If a Martian landed tomorrow, and was told to sort people into piles of the relevant and the irrelevant, judging by what they did, by what they were, he’d wind up in the same pile as those he sneered at.
Then came PyeMart, and everything that rained down from that.
Loosenup, he thought, loosen up. He poured another martini, and thought about bombs.
Jesus God, he was becoming fond of his bombs. Nobody- nobody -would say that his bombs were irrelevant. He was already the most important element in the lives of two people, in that he’d ended those lives.
Where should the next one go? Where would it do the most good?
There’d been a rumor that the state cops were protecting the city council and the city hall. That there were snipers in town. He wasn’t sure he believed it, but it had to be considered. He considered it, more than a little drunk after the third martini… and there were still two martinis left. He giggled: whoa, boy, he was really gonna be pounded when he finished the last one.
So what about the city council? He went back and forth on them. Could they hurt him more than they could help? If they all went up in an instant of smoke and flame, would that be the beginning of everything? Or the end?
He thought about the council all through the fourth martini, and decided that while he had no objection, in principle, to killing them all, the fallout from such an event was too unpredictable.
No. He’d started out to intimidate PyeMart, to slow them down, and also to lay a trail of bombs that had a seeming purpose. He was not stupid, so the trail was a crooked one, but it would eventually lead the authorities, by the nose, to one certain conclusion. And that still seemed the best way to go.
He’d never had a full set plan for his campaign; a set plan could crack. He’d known from the start that he had to remain flexible, and improvise from time to time. This was one of those times.
If the city council was actually found to be corrupt, if a city councilman could be terrorized into confessing, or if the cops could be pressured into looking at them seriously, then the whole PyeMart deal would go down like the Titanic.
That was a compelling thought.
But PyeMart’s deal couldn’t go down too soon, or too late. Like Baby Bear’s porridge, it had to be just right.
He considered the thought, and drunk as he was, it was a slippery thing to hang onto. The problem was, the local cops couldn’t be counted on to cooperate with the city council. Basically, they couldn’t find their own balls with both hands and a radar unit. A serious investigation was unlikely.
The ideal thing would be to bring in the state cops, or the FBI. The ATF was in town, but the ATF wouldn’t be much interested in doing a political corruption investigation.
Stray thought: somebody had been distributing a bumper sticker in town-he’d seen three or four of them-that said: “Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms… What’s not to like?”
Anyhoo…
Whoa, really drunk now. He struggled to stay on track.
The state cops were in town; state cop, that is. One guy, and all he apparently was thinking about was finding the bomber.
What you really needed, the bomber thought, was a whole bunch of cops, pulling the whole town apart. If that happened, they’d eventually get around to the city council.
The Bomber sat on his deck, drunk and plotting, and at some point well into his last martini, too drunk to even consider getting up and making more, an out-of-the-box plan began to form.
Take brass balls, but he had brass balls. No question about that. Not anymore.
He needed to think about it sober; couldn’t do it tonight, anyway. There was too much action right now, too many people with an eye out. Paranoia was a good thing, in the bombing business. So tonight he’d sleep it off, and tomorrow, he’d make the bomb. Make the bomb, and plant it tomorrow night.
Bring in a whole swarm of cops.
Guaranteed.
Or was that just the alcohol talking?
Billions and billions of stars shone down at him, twinkling their asses off, but they didn’t say shit.
