“I don’t know if this means you have good or bad timing,” Wallenford said, “but thanks to your government at work, 20 million dollars worth of 1960’s era state-of-the-art equipment is right this second up for surplus auction at pennies on a dollar.”
“What? Right now? We’ve got to stop the auction!”
In the gym, the auctioneer waved his gavel. On the small stage sat lot 112, a mass of two-inch videotape recorders, spectrographs, cameras, and racks of time-base correctors — the former subliminal research equipment now on forklift skids. “3,800 going once … going twice … sold! To the esteemed gentleman in the plaid jacket from Boris Reclamation Services.”
Nearly as soon as the word sold reverberated off the gym’s tiled walls and hardwood floor, Hiccock and Wallenford walked up to the recycling czar in plaid who just won the lot. Hiccock immediately sized this guy up as the A/V monitor from high school, now all grown up. “Excuse me, Sir?”
“Yes?”
“We arrived here late. We need this equipment.”
“Who’s we?”
“My name is Hiccock. I work for the president of the United States, and all I can tell you is that this equipment is needed for a matter of national security.”
“I just bought this from the government as scrap. Why didn’t you just hold onto it while you had it?”
“I’m willing to reimburse you for it.”
As they walked away, Hiccock placed his checkbook back into his vest pocket with prejudice. “I can’t believe I just paid 20,000 dollars for that pile of junk.”
“One man’s junk is another man’s dubious obsession, I gather,” Wallenford said wryly.
“I wonder if I can claim this as an expense,” Hiccock thought aloud while fingering the receipt and dreading the inevitable reams of paperwork to follow.
A huge crate and six pallets of what the untrained eye would categorize as junk were conspicuously plopped in the center of the FBI’s Electronic Crimes Lab. Hansen, returning from lunch, was shocked to see Hiccock standing beside the pile.
“What are we supposed to do with this junk?”
“Hook it up and test the computers,” Hiccock directed.
“How?”
Hiccock grabbed a curled, yellowed manual as thick as a phone book and slapped it into Hansen’s chest. “Here. Partial assembly required.”
Tommy was not concerned that the rear quarter panels of his Camaro were rotted out as he sat in the diner parking lot. It matched the rest of his life. Seemed ever since the seventies ended, his life was just a big pile of rot. He tried a few different get-rich-quick schemes: phone cards, Nutralite products, at-home distribution of cleaning products, and ten others that turned out to be stay-poor-longer schemes. At this point, the notion of lashing out, getting even with anything, had struck a receptive chord in his twisted mass of internal wiring. Three days ago he waited outside the Sperling Plant and decided that truck number seven was his baby. For the next three mornings he followed number seven, studying the driver’s habits. The teamster religiously stopped at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Sunrise Highway. Lunch, however, would present the real opportunity.
The twenty-six-foot truck that Sperling used was a Freightliner M2-106, the same make and model that anyone with a driver’s license and a pocket full of non-traceable cash could hire from most any truck rental company. He went to Ryder. Scanning the application, he smiled inside when he came across the section requesting information regarding “materials to be transported.” Tommy dismissed the application and asked the clerk if he could see the truck, his well-rehearsed cover story being that he had to deliver custom cabinets to a client down poorly maintained roads and he needed to measure the clearance before renting. The clerk, who could not give a shit, said, “Yeah, go ahead. Knock yourself out.”
Out in the lot, Tommy crawled under the truck and measured not the clearance, but the area right ahead of the rear wheels and the distance between the main chassis rails, which ran the length of the truck. Those rails had facing flanges that formed a natural shelf support.
Twenty-four sticks of dynamite were stashed under the oil drum out back in his yard. He had accumulated them one stick at a time from uprooting jobs. His design was quite ingenious. He filled a four-inch-wide cardboard mailing tube with the twenty-four sticks. Precisely packaged in six bundles of four, they were wired to a kitchen timer set for ten hours from now. He then went to buy a pack of cigarettes, even though he didn’t smoke.
Setting the charge in broad daylight wouldn’t have been his first choice. Doing it at night, however, would have necessitated breaking and entering, since the trucks were garaged and locked then. That would have brought with it a whole slew of issues and risks he was not prepared to deal with.
With the loaded tube in the trunk of his car, Tommy sat in the diner’s parking lot waiting while the driver lunched. Five minutes earlier, he dropped a matchbook with a lit cigarette sticking through it into the dumpster on the side of the diner. The glowing tobacco reached the first match tip, igniting the book and in short order the grease-drenched paper products that filled the container.
Within two minutes, everyone who was outside the diner and anyone coming out of it turned away from Tom and his car to look at the burning dumpster.
He walked between the Sperling truck and his Camaro. Squatting down, he fitted the black spray-painted tube between the rails. He attached the bungee cord from the tube to two of the many holes along the rails, one to each side. The bungee spanned the other end of the tube that was resting on the far rail flange. This last piece of ingenuity would hold the tube in place as it bounced and rumbled through its last day.
Twenty seconds later, he was up from under the truck. He quickly surveyed the location and determined that no one had been watching him. He walked off without looking back, confident that, unless the truck was to go in for rear-end service, no one would ever notice the tube. He got into his car and pulled away.
Do I call and cancel or bring flowers? Hiccock toiled extra hard through the afternoon in an attempt to avoid making that decision, until it was too late to call and maintain any shred of decency. Having cornered himself into a no-choice situation, he showed up at 8:30 at the Watergate Apartments, sans flowers. Carly came down looking great. That made him smile and change his whole attitude about the night. They took a cab over to M street. Carly had picked the place. It was a quiet establishment where politicians and lobbyists could converse in relatively secure high backed booths significantly minimizing the risk of being overheard. To him, this practical setting played against the notion that this was somehow intended to be a romantic encounter.
Dinner was pleasant enough and off the record. Then, Carly asked if they could go “on record.”
“Sure,” Hiccock responded.
“Is there a rift between you and the FBI?”
Hiccock thought long then said, “My area of expertise is the scientific ramifications of these attacks. The FBI is the investigative arm of the Justice Department. They have their methods and practices which have served this country well for the last century.”
“Fair enough, but is there a rift?”
“There might be occasional disagreements as to the value of certain data.”
“What would be some examples of data you disagree on?”
“I think that’s as much as I want to say.”
“Is there any cooperation between you and the bureau?”
“Yes, in fact I have an old friend there and he and I get along like ‘old friends.’”
“Are you close to finding the culprits of these attacks?”