deputies looking at the wreckage.
Virgil asked Barlow, “Anybody hurt?”
Barlow shook his head. One of the civilians, who apparently was with the public works department, said, “Our budget took a hit. I gotta look at our insurance. We’ll get most of the money back, but not all of it. He blew up our shovel and the pipelayer, along with the pipe. I don’t think the pipe can be saved; it’s all screwed up.”
Virgil stepped over to a pile of the blue pipe: some kind of plastic, he thought. Most of the pipes had been blown in half and had split lengthwise. Somebody said to his back, “I was outside and heard it. It sounded like an atom bomb.”
“At least he wasn’t going after people,” Ahlquist said.
Barlow said to Virgil, “This is something new, though. We’ve counted at least sixteen separate explosions, and there are probably more than that. They went off more or less simultaneously, so he was working a seriously complicated firing apparatus. He’s getting more sophisticated.”
“The practical effect is… what?” Virgil asked the civilian. “If you guys got insurance, he delays you for a week or two?”
“Longer than that. More like a couple of months,” the civilian said. “Even if we go with emergency bid procedures, there’s a lot of bureaucracy to go through. Then, we’ve got to get the stuff shipped in from Ohio, and we’ve got to retrain the operators on the new equipment… It’ll be a while.”
“But it won’t stop the building.”
The civilian shook his head. “No. Not unless everybody gets too scared to work. I’ve got to tell you, I’m getting a little nervous, and so are the other guys.”
They stood around and talked about it for a while, and Barlow said that he was going to ask for another technician.
“How’s it going at the trailer?” Virgil asked. “Find anything?”
“Finding all kinds of things, just nothing that’ll get us to the bomber,” the ATF agent said. “Not so far, anyway. There supposedly was some kind of security system, but it either got torn apart in the explosion, or the bomber took it with him.”
“Huh. If he took it with him, he’d have had to spend some time inside.”
Barlow 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. “I’m told it was like an atomic bomb going off.”
“Ah, jeez. Tell me.”
Virgil filled him in, and when he was done, Davenport asked, “You got media?”
“We had media, and now we’re gonna get a lot more,” Virgil said. “This thing is really blowing up, if you’ll excuse the rapier-like wit.”
“So talk to the sheriff, have a press conference, emphasize that you’re making progress, that you expect arrests. That you’ve got some kind of forensic evidence. Say that because of the interstate aspect, the killer can be tried in federal court and get the death penalty. Give the bomber a reason to hunker down, to be careful, to think about it. Try to buy some time.”
“A pageant. Good idea,” Virgil said. “The sheriff likes the whole television routine. I’ll get him to organize it.”
“I never had much to do with bombers, but this Barlow sounds like he knows what he’s talking about-and it sounds like a lot of the other freaks we’ve seen. They like it. You better catch this guy, Virgil.”
“I’ll catch him. I just can’t guarantee that the city hall will still be standing up,” Virgil said. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
Virgil called Ahlquist- the sheriff was still out at the equipment yard-and told him about Davenport’s idea for a press conference. Ahlquist jumped on the idea and said he’d set it up. “I’ve been working on the rest of your list, all morning. I’ll give it to you at the press conference,” Ahlquist said. “Or you can stop by anytime.”
“It’s a mess out there, isn’t it?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, yeah. Is it gonna get worse?”
“Barlow thinks so,” Virgil said.
Virgil dug out the list of contacts that Ahlquist had given him the night before. Ahlquist had suggested that he
