"I got it now," he said to his remaining assistant. The man withdrew from the lab. Cochrane stood across the room from Siegfried's concoction. Beneath his iron-plated gloves, his hands were soaked. The wire that linked him to the bomb was taut in his palms. He pulled until it was tight as piano wire.
His eyes were glued on the bomb. He half expected… at any moment…
He wondered if he were crazy. Why was he here? What did he hope to gain? It was the middle of the night and he had forgotten. Adrenaline was giving way to exhaustion. Slowly, Cochrane began to move. He took the first steps of a grand circle around the bomb. The wrench gave a slight tremor, then, pulled by the wire, followed. Cochrane moved cautiously but resolutely. He circled the device one full time. Then a second. Then a third. Lieutenant McConnell and his two squad members watched from behind the plate glass. Cochrane continued to move. Each step was an eternity. The route around the bomb seemed larger than the Bluebirds' fifty-mile radius on the map of New Jersey.
Midway through the seventh revolution, the plug came loose from the pipe. It fell with a horrible clatter onto the copper sheeting on the laboratory floor. Cochrane dropped the wire, turned toward the device, and crept forward, cautiously but quickly. No properly constructed bomb remained dormant forever.
Cochrane moved to within ten feet of the open pipe. Then five feet. Then two. Now speed was paramount, as long as he did not jar the thing into detonating.
He reached toward the bomb and unscrewed the vise. He turned and eased the bomb onto the copper sheeting of the floor. He lay flush to the ground and lifted the closed end of the bomb upward so that the mechanism slid out.
Behind his visor, his eyes widened. Before him was the craft of his homicidal madman: a charge of black TNT in a large capsule, a tiny wristwatch with one hand broken off, a flash bulb, a battery, and copper wire to form an electrical circuit.
Without looking, Cochrane knew what Siegfried had done: a small hole had been bored in the face of the watch and one end of the wire protruded through it. The other end of the wire was linked to the hour hand, with the TNT, the flash bulb, and the battery in between. Had the hour hand come around to the 2 on the watch, the circuit would have completed and the bomb would have detonated. Currently, the hour hand was seven-eighths of the way from 1 to 2.
Cochrane felt his heart in his mouth. He threw the lead pipe across the room and he reached for the rubberized shears. He poked the tip of them to the battery and he clipped the wires from both battery terminals. He took the battery in his hand and moved it five feet from the TNT and copper wire. The circuit was broken.
Then he leaned back. He reached to his helmet and pulled it off. It had to have been one hundred degrees within the suit. He looked to the plate-glass window and the four men-Dick Wheeler had arrived-who watched him through it.
"Done!" he said breathlessly. "It’s defused. Get someone in here for fingerprints."
As the four men came around from the window and entered the work lab, Cochrane looked down at what he had gained. A few ounces of powder. Some common bits of hardware. Some routine copper wire. Elements that added up to death, surely, but ordinary ingredients.
The bulb, the battery, the wire, and the watch could have come from anywhere. The TNT was untraceable. It could have been mixed in any of a thousand places in North America.
Cochrane glanced across the room to where he had tossed the pipe. Siegfried was no fool. Most assuredly the metal had been wiped clean of fingerprints. What had even possessed him to risk his life like this, Cochrane wondered.
He did not move. Wheeler and the bomb squad officers approached him. Sitting on the copper sheeting, his helmet beside him, he felt like some beached hard-hat diver from the 1920s.
He looked up.
"Fella," said McConnell, "you got balls the size of watermelons, you know that?"
"A lot of good it did," Cochrane answered.
Dick Wheeler seemed very pale, with dark crescents under his eyes. He gazed down at Cochrane, then at the components of the bomb. He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves.
"What are you doing?" Cochrane asked.
"May I?" Wheeler motioned toward the bomb.
"You're asking my permission? I work for you, remember?"
Wheeler rested a hand on Cochrane's shoulder, then reached down to the watch. He picked up the bomb's timing mechanism, held it to his ear, then set it back down.
"I'll tell you one thing, Billy Boy," he said portentously and with tired, raised eyebrows. "I think you're getting on Brother Bomber's nerves."
"Is that a fact?" Cochrane looked upward at Wheeler and suddenly felt all of his patience depart him. "What does that mean?" he snapped. "Would you stop talking in riddles? It's four A.M. What's going on?"
"Siegfried," Wheeler explained silkily, "forgot to wind that watch. It stopped at one fifty-two. I reckon that's why you're alive."
With wide, confused eyes, Cochrane turned and assessed again the components that he had just separated. "I defused it," he said.
"It was already dead. Lucky for everyone, of course." Wheeler spoke calmly and gracefully. Cochrane was suddenly aware that the bomb squad members were now forming a small audience. "I defused it!" he insisted again.
"Yes, Bill. I know."
Cochrane's head shot upward and he glared furiously at Wheeler. "Well, sure enough, he's starting to make mistakes!” Cochrane insisted. “That proves it! I'm closing in on him! I'll have him in another week. You'll see!"
"Bill…"
"You tell Hoover that! One more week and I'll give him Siegfried's head on a plate."
Wheeler eased to a crouching position, then sat down next to Cochrane.
"Bill, a decision has been made at headquarters,” Wheeler said. “There's going to be a change."
For several long seconds, Cochrane stared at Wheeler. "What are you talking about?"
"I want you to go home and get some rest. Be in J. Edgar's conference room not this morning, but tomorrow morning. We'll run through everything then. Don't do anything further on the case."
"No, I will not go home and get some rest! Would you tell me what's going on?"
Wheeler looked away, then looked back. "You're being dismissed," Wheeler said. It was too absurd to comprehend. It had to be another of those wretched dreams. He began to laugh.
"That's nonsense! Dismissed from Siegfried just when I'm lining him up? Idiotic! Hoover wouldn't dare!"
Wheeler appeared truly uneasy with what followed. But he managed the words, anyway. "You're being dismissed, Bill. And it's not just the case. It's dismissed from theBureau. Do you understand that? You've been fired."
THIRTY-THREE
Hoover sat at the head of the table and glared when Cochrane entered. They were in the second-floor conference room again, arranged at proper intervals around the oval table, and if the last meeting had been a war party, this was to be the burning at the stake.
Lerrick was two seats away from Hoover to the right and Wheeler was three empty spaces to the left, almost suggesting that Cochrane take a seat directly across from the Chief.
"Come in! Sit down!" Hoover growled, drumming his fingers on the table, his round swollen face getting redder by the second. "Let's get on with it!"
Cochrane noted that he was ten minutes early and the other three men were already there. Usually Hoover was the last to enter. The door was still open.
Hoover glanced over his shoulder. "Where's Adam?" he asked. And suddenly an entire vista of disbelief overtook Cochrane.
Adam Hay padded softly into the room and closed the door behind him. He looked at Cochrane, then approached a seat directly next to Hoover, with Lerrick on his other side. Cochrane had the notion of watching a small boy called into a meeting of adults, taking up a position between his parents.