Something inside him flashed. Someone had tampered with the lock. He opened the window itself and saw the telltale marks left by a flat blade-either a knife or a screwdriver--that had been used to pry the window. He climbed onto the porcelain sink and looked at the lock at the midpoint of the window. It had been forced, then bent back into shape. An intruder had worked well, but not perfectly.
Cochrane placed himself within the mind of Siegfried. Where was he, Cochrane, most vulnerable?
He tore up the stairs and threw on every light in the house. He grabbed pants, a sweater, and a pair of shoes. He did not open any drawer or door that hadn't already been touched. No use springing a booby trap that he had so far been lucky enough to escape.
He stood in the bedroom, his heart pounding. Then he stared at the bed. Logic told him where anyone is most vulnerable.
Gingerly he went to his hands and knees. He crept to the edge of the bed and took a flashlight from the night table. He pushed aside the blankets. The fear was in his throat as he shined the light.
He saw the device, planted in a long black woolen sock. He had little doubt as to who had planted it, when, why, or what the device was.
He also knew that he was not dreaming. Less than a minute later, he was down the stairs and out the door, standing on Twenty-sixth Street, flagging down a police car like a maniac.
Cochrane stood outside, huddled against the November night, when the District of Columbia bomb squad arrived. One man arrived by a police car. The other two came with a truck that looked to be a cross between a tank and a covered wagon. It was covered by six-inch-thick steel cable, and Cochrane, from his days as an ordinance officer in the Army, knew just how much of a wallop the truck could contain if anything inside it exploded.
The three men from the bomb squad donned greenish-brown suits of armor plating. They pulled on square steel helmets that shielded their heads. There was a shatter-resistant visor that allowed them to see right in front of them, but barely to the side at all.
One man, a graying, angular District police lieutenant, who said his name was McConnell, remained outside. The other two men dragged their equipment inside and crept cautiously up the stairs to where Cochrane had located the thing in the black sock.
Fifteen minutes passed. The two men emerged from the house, holding between them two ten-foot poles. An iron basket dangled from the middle of the poles, about three feet off the ground. McConnell opened the rear of the bomb truck and the men eased the poles onto hangers within the truck. McConnell quickly closed the door.
"Now where?" Cochrane asked.
"Fort Meade, Maryland," he said. "Detonation range. Coming? Nice night for it," he added sourly.
Cochrane heaved a long sigh. "Yeah. Coming."
The truck made its way slowly through the quiet avenues of Washington, then onto the new highway that led to Maryland and the Northeast. The trip took an hour. Cochrane followed a quarter of a mile behind the bomb truck, in Lieutenant McConnell's car. All other traffic was diverted from the highway as the truck passed.
At Fort Meade, Cochrane looked at his watch. It was now 3 A.M. and McConnell was the ranking officer on the scene. He told the driver of the bomb truck to take the device to Detonation Range B.
"You're going to blow it up, huh?" Cochrane asked.
"Got a better idea?" McConnell was a twenty-year veteran of the District police. He behaved accordingly.
"I want it defused."
"You want what?"
"There are components in there that might lead to the bomber. There are fingerprints possibly."
"Yeah, and let me tell you, Mr. F.B.I., judging by the weight of that little birthday cake, there could be enough sauce to take out a building and everything living inside it."
"Your squad defuses bombs all the time."
"When we're on an assigned case. Otherwise, we dispose of them." McConnell's irritation was evident.
"Well, I'm on a case,” Cochrane said.
"Then you defuse it, chief."
Cochrane looked at the truck. The driver waited. The vehicle's enormous diesel engine idled noisily in the cold night. "You have a good lab?" Cochrane asked.
"Best within two hundred miles."
"You got an extra suit and helmet?"
"If you're crazy enough."
"Then I'll take it apart."
"One hitch," demanded McConnell. "I need authorization to let you blow yourself up, Who's your superior?"
Cochrane reached to his pocket, pulled out a paper, and wrote out a telephone number.
"Richard Wheeler. Assistant Director, Special Operations. Call him at home."
McConnell took the number and looked at Cochrane with something less than affection. "F.B.I.!" he said. "Always a hassle." Then he instructed his driver to rush the thing in the sock over to the laboratory.
The bomb lab was a converted airplane hanger on the south end of the army base. The actual work area was a room within a room within a room, with extra steel plating against each wall. Cochrane dressed in the outer area, struggling into the unbearably warm anti-explosives suit and pulling on the helmet. He donned the iron-plated gloves, which weighed five pounds each, and passed through the final door to the work area.
The "birthday cake," as Lieutenant McConnell called it, was still in the iron basket, sitting on a long steel table.
The two men who had taken the bomb onto the truck were assigned to work with Cochrane. They, however, would be backups and would not handle the actual device.
"All right," Cochrane told them, at 3:32 A.M. "I'm ready."
They entered the room as a team. There was a large tub of number ten lubricating oil beside the device. Gingerly, feeling the sweat roll beneath his uniform, Cochrane nodded as the other two men held the ends of the poles. Then Cochrane removed the steel lid of the basket and reached in with a five-foot pair of tongs. He lifted the device out and gently submerged it in the tub of oil. Immediately, one of the two assistants immersed the end of a stethoscope into the oil. All three men stepped back to a range of twenty feet and knelt.
The stethoscope had fifty feet of tubing and led behind a partition of four-inch-thick glass. There sat Lieutenant McConnell, who listened. The stethoscope also contained a miniaturized microphone. The oil acted as a sound conductor. If there were any noise from within the bomb, such as ticking and whirring- which could denote a live device-McConnell would hear it.
Cochrane squinted through the glass visor of his helmet. McConnell listened for an unbearably long time-at least ten seconds. Then he shook his head.
No noise. Either the device was dead or set to blow. There was a difference. Cochrane crept slowly forward again, signaling for one of the men to follow him.
The lubricating oil served a second purpose. If the bomb casing was not airtight, the oil would seep into it, clog whatever mechanism was involved, and possibly prevent a blast. Cochrane signaled for the tongs. His assistant picked them up, then reached for the bomb. The device came up out of the oil. Now Cochrane steadied his hands and drew his breath. This was the part that could kill.
He moved in close and touched Siegfried's device, fully aware that no one could survive a blast at that range. With large rubberized shears, he cut away the sock. The wool fell back into the oil. Cochrane saw a hefty section of pipe-potential shrapnel that would tear him and his assistant apart-sealed at each end by iron industrial plugs.
"Put it in the vise," he said to his assistant. The third man left the lab.
Several yards from the worktable was a vise attached to an immovable iron base. The bomb was carried in the tongs to the vise. Cochrane moved quickly to the device, secured it in an upright position, and tightened a wrench horizontally to the upper plug on the bomb. He then threaded a heavy industrial wire through the end of the wrench. Both men retreated. Cochrane unraveled the wire to a distance of twenty feet.