A Bomb Built in Hell

floor.

Wesley climbed the seven flights of stairs to the top floor. The place was nearly completed. He found himself in a long hall, with doors opening into various rooms. He tried each room, looking across to the Pier with the night glasses until he located the right one. The elevator shafts were already finished, but no cars were installed. There was another staircase at the opposite end of the building parallel to the one Wesley had used.

Wesley stored all his stuff in the room he was going to use and began to retrace his steps. He tried the portable blowtorch on the steel steps first, but quit after a few minutes, only halfway through the first step. He then pulled a giant can of silicon spray out of his duffel and began to carefully and fully spray each individual step, working his way up the steps backwards until he again reached the top floor. Then he went down the parallel staircase to the first floor and worked his way back up again, repeating the procedure.

He looked down the stairs and gently tossed a penny onto the step nearest him. The penny slid off as if it were propelled and kept sliding all the way to the bottom of the flight. Satisfied, Wesley then applied the Permabond to each of the two top doors. He used all the remaining silicon to paint his way back toward the entrance of the room he was going to use.

He walked to the opposite end of the floor and worked his way backward, so that the only clear spot on the floor was in the very middle. Then he stepped inside the door and, without closing it, sprayed an extra-thick coat around the threshold. Finally, he closed the door and applied a coat of the Permabond to the inside.

It was 3:18 a.m. when he finished. Between Wesley and the ground floor were some incredibly slippery stairs, all separated by doors bonded to their frames.

Wesley set his tripod way back from the window, only about three feet from the door. No matter how the sun rose the next day, the shadows would extend at least this far back. Wesley would be shooting out of darkness, even at high noon. He went to the window and leaned out. The street below was narrow and empty. It was a long way to the ground.

Wesley took a long coil of black Perlon 11mm line from his duffel. It would support five thousand pounds to the inch. He anchored it securely to the window frame and tested it with all his strength. He laid the coiled line inside the window and attached the pair of U-bolts to the window frame to make sure.

Wesley spread a heavy quilt on the floor. On it he placed a bolt-action Weatherby .300 magnum. From all Wesley’s research, this one had the flattest trajectory, longest range, and greatest killing power. He’d tried several rifles set up for the NATO 5.56 mm cartridge, but the Weatherby gave him the best one-shot odds. If he put any one of the Nosler 180 grain slugs into Fat Boy, that would get it done.

He and the kid had talked it over for hours. The kid wanted Wesley to go for the chest shot, since it was a much bigger target. But Wesley had showed him the new LEAA Newsletter with its successful field-tests of the new Kevlar weave for bulletproof fabric. The publication said the weave would turn a .38 Special at near point-blank range and Wesley figured Fat Boy to be double-wrapped in the new stuff.

The 2-24X zoom-scope was bolted to the rifle’s top; the whole piece was designed so that the bolt could be worked without disturbing the setting. He put the spotting scope, the altimeter, and a handful of cartridges down on the quilt. No silencer this time; there would only be the one chance, so accuracy ruled over all other considerations.

Wesley removed the deerskin gloves, and the surgeon’s gloves he wore underneath. His palms were dry from the talc. Wesley took the auger with the four-inch bit and drilled sixteen precise holes in the room—in the walls and in the floor. Into each he put a stick of dynamite. The dynamite was connected with fusing material and the whole network again connected to one of Pet’s zinc-lined boxes. It would have been better to take all the stuff with him, but that would cost time he wouldn’t have. Wesley taped the other eight sticks of dynamite together and wired them to the door, with a trip mechanism set just in case the radio transmitter failed to fire—sooner or later, the cops would be breaking down the door, even if they hit him with a lucky shot as he was leaving the window.

It was 4:11 a.m. when Wesley finished this last task. None of the metal in the room gleamed—it had been worked with gunsmith’s bluing and then carefully dulled with a soapy film. All the glass was non-glare, and Wesley was dressed in the outfit he had field-tested on the roof. He was invisible even to the occasional pigeon that flew past. Wesley hated the foul birds. (“I never saw a joint without pigeons; fucking rats with wings!” Carmine had said once.) But it would be too much of an indulgence to even think about killing one now.

Wesley had no food with him, and no cigarettes, but he did have a canteen full of glucose and water and he took a sip just before he went into a fix on the window. He came out of it, as he planned, at 6:30. The city was already awake. Staying toward the back of the room, he took the readings that he needed. The building was one- hundred-and-eighteen-feet high at window level, the Pier was seventeen-hundred-and-fifty feet from where he stood. Wesley stepped behind the tripod and refocused the scope. There was no ship at the Pier, but he swept its full length and he knew he’d have a clear shot no matter where Fat Boy got off.

Wesley went toward the back of the room again, crossed his legs into a modified lotus, and sat focusing on the window ahead of him, mentally reviewing everything in the room and all the preparations inside. The building outside the one room was blocked off completely. There was no way to go back downstairs anyway, so Wesley’s entire mind was focused in the room and out the window. He mentally reviewed the picture of Fat Boy the kid had clipped from Newsweek. It wasn’t all that good, but Wesley knew the target would wear a ton of medals on his fat chest and would be obviously treated like a big deal when he walked down the ramp to the Pier.

77/

The crowd started to assemble well before 10:00 a.m. At first it seemed like it wasn’t going to be such a big event after all; maybe three hundred people total, half of them government agents. But the crowd kept growing, and Wesley saw the white helmets of the TPF keeping people back. Demonstrators ... with the spotting scope, it was easy to read the carefully lettered signs:

THE U.S. DOES NOT WELCOME TYRANTS!

KILLER OF CHILDREN!

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON!

“They should be the ones up here in this fucking window,” flashed through Wesley’s mind. He carefully plucked the thought and tossed it into the garbage can of his brain—the part that already contained questions about his mother and the name of the first institution he had been committed to when he was four years old.

By 11:15, the crowd was good-sized, but not unruly. Traffic was backed up on the West Side Highway as people rubber-necked to see what was going on down at the Pier. The dock, which could accommodate two ocean liners at the same time, was still empty.