Paulinin went through the contents of his briefcase slowly, making sure that everything was in place. Then the small man rose, once again adjusting his glasses. He turned and looked up at the air vent in the wall. A near rictus crossed his thin lips. He could see the faint glint of light on glass behind the bars of the vent. He had no objection to being videotaped, no more than he objected to Hamilton’s wire, which he had spotted instantly.
Paulinin had a certain level of vanity about his skills, skills he felt only a handful of people-particularly Karpo and Rostnikov-fully appreciated. He would have much preferred to be doing a complex autopsy for his audience of Americans, but from what he had seen of the work of the bomber, outwitting him would earn the admiration of the top experts in the world-if the bomb didn’t go off.
He hoped there was not a timer, set to go off … now.
Paulinin paused for his audience and took off his coat, placing it on the floor near the door. Then he returned to the table, rolled up the unbuttoned sleeves of his faded gray shirt, and leaned over the package, holding his glasses on with one hand. He shook his head knowingly and went to his briefcase.
Karpo had opened the window and turned, arms at his sides, to watch. He knew Paulinin was doing much of this for show, which might cause him to give less than his full attention to the package on the table. That was the second real danger of this venture. The first was an explosion beyond the control of any man.
From his briefcase Paulinin pulled a long, thick rubber band that had been cut in half and looped at either end. He removed his glasses, joined the earpieces with the rubber band, and put the glasses back on. They would not slip off now.
He began to make careful, frequent trips to the briefcase to return or retrieve some object. The first was a steel dental pick. Hands steady, he probed gently at the wrapping of the package. He pried up a very small corner with the dental pick and leaned over to smell the paper.
“Standard glue. High quality to require a bit of effort to open it. That effort would probably be enough to trigger the bomb mechanism, but we must be sure.”
Using the dental tool, Paulinin slowly pried open the flap of the envelope, first dabbing the flap with a cotton ball gently dipped into a clear solution in a small wide-necked purple bottle. Within a minute he had the flap open.
Then he stood up and looked down at the string that still tied the compact wooden box.
“Why the string?” Paulinin said, rubbing his chin the way he had seen someone do in a play when he was a child. He had always liked that gesture. It suggested deep thought. “It, too, could trigger the bomb. Releasing the string could cause a spring to flip up and-boom.”
Hamilton thought of his family. Karpo thought of nothing. They watched and listened while Paulinin suddenly began very quietly to half sing, half hum the American song “Ain’t She Sweet.” His English would have been unintelligible had Hamilton not known the words. The FBI agent could imagine the station chief and others smiling at this moment when they reviewed the video. He hoped he would be alive to enjoy it with them.
Paulinin carefully peeled away part of the envelope, cutting it in other places with surgical scissors, placing each piece on the table till the fragments looked like a light brown jigsaw puzzle. The string was still in place when he finished.
Then he took two broad blue elastic bands from his bag. He slowly, gently lifted one end of the box and carefully slid the band over the side that had been revealed when the paper had been removed. He repeated the procedure on the other side of the box. He then took a small white tube of a gluelike material, which he had developed himself, and squeezed some into the thin lid along the line where the box would normally be opened.
“Tzee hair walken don da street,” he sang softly, waiting for the glue to harden.
It took no more than twenty seconds. Then Paulinin simply cut the string and removed it from the top of the box, making no attempt to pull it out from underneath.
“Like chess, eh, Emil?” Paulinin said, greatly enjoying his moment before microphone and camera.
“I am not skilled at analogy,” Karpo said soberly.
“The bomber makes a move. I make a move,” Paulinin explained, taking another bottle of liquid from his briefcase, wetting a cotton ball with it, and dabbing the liquid over the dried glue.
The next item Paulinin came up with and held high for the hidden camera was nothing more than a hinged wooden clothespin, the handles of which had been finely shaved so that they tapered up to little more than the thickness of a fine sheet of newspaper.
Paulinin now had a small flashlight in his left hand and the clothespin in his right. He leaned over and hummed as he gently inserted the paper-thin double end of the clothespin under the lip of the box. Cautiously he released the clothespin so that the spring began to open the lid. The two bands he had glued to the box kept it from popping open.
With only a sliver of the box open, Paulinin shined his flashlight into the slit, squinted, and looked back and forth slowly, opening the box only a bit more, sliding the clothespin forward gradually so that the opening became just a bit wider.
“Now I esk you wary confidential … hm, hm, hm,” he sang as he removed the clothespin, returned to his briefcase, and brought out a thick white cardboard box. He opened the box and pulled out a small yellow object that looked a bit like a Sony Walkman with a pair of lightweight headphones attached. A thin green insulated wire dangled from the device, and a small screen lit up faintly when Paulinin pushed a button on the strange apparatus.
“Fiber optics,” Paulinin explained. “Built it myself. If I moved to the West, I could patent it, make millions, live like Einstein, get an appointment to a moss league school.”
“Ivy League,” Hamilton corrected.
Paulinin put on his headset and began gently probing with the green wire into the space that he had reopened with his clothespin. He stopped singing, listened on the headphones, and watched the small screen on the yellow device as he very slowly moved the fiber-optic probe inside the small box containing the bomb. His movements were so subtle that if his audience did not watch carefully, they might not perceive any activity.
“Strange,” said Paulinin, a slightly puzzled look on his face that worried Hamilton, who looked at Karpo. Karpo registered nothing.
“There is a trigger spring,” said Paulinin. “There is a mechanism I don’t recognize and what appears to be a rectangle of soft, claylike material that may be the explosive. I don’t have enough information to determine what kind of material it is. I do not have access to or funding for the most sophisticated tools. I must make do with what I can create myself while idiots stare at Japanese technology, American technology, Dutch, German technology and don’t know how to use it. I am put upon, but I shall triumph. It is my move.”
The headphones still on, the probe still inside, Paulinin put down the flashlight without bothering to turn it off and groped around in his briefcase till he came up with a thin metal device that looked like a delicate pliers with a small circular scissor at the end. Cautiously opening the clothespin just a bit more as he watched the small screen on the yellow box, Paulinin inserted the new instrument.
“Contact could break a circuit, create a small spark,” he said more to himself than to either of the men in the room or whomever else might be listening and watching. “How clever is this man I’m playing against?”
Paulinin paused, left hand holding the tool, right hand holding the clothespin. Then he quickly squeezed the tool, and both Hamilton and Karpo could hear the small sound of metal wire being cut.
They stood waiting to die, but death didn’t come, only the resumption of song from Paulinin: “Ain’ she nize. Luck hair over hm, hm, hm.”