Detective Cross

Chapter 13

We dove to the ground and covered our heads. Bits of gravel rained down on my back. When it stopped, I lifted my head to see a thin plume of charcoal-gray smoke rising to the right of a walkway that led toward King’s Memorial.

“Jesus,” Mahoney said, getting up and dusting his suit off. “How’d we miss that?”

Bree, rattled but fine, said, “The dogs were just through there.”

The lead dog handler shook his head in bewilderment. “If there was a bomb they would have smelled it.”

“Well, they didn’t,” Mahoney snapped, before calling for a forensics team to gather the bomb debris for analysis.

We all put on blue hospital booties and moved toward the explosion site, everyone seeming jittery and uncertain. Yesterday he’d put two bombs on the National Mall. If the dogs didn’t smell the first one, couldn’t there be another?

No more than a foot across and five inches deep, the smoking crater was two feet off the pedestrian walkway, on the other side of a slack black chain fence. The bomb had been hidden under a low juniper, now charred and broken.

A mangled, burnt metal casing lay on the ground several feet away.

“Looks like a camera body,” Bree said. “Or what used to be one.”

That spooked me. How many tourists in DC carry a camera? It would never be noticed, at least not while the bomber was carrying it. He was smart. He was creative. But something about the explosion bothered me.

“It didn’t do a lot of damage,” I said. “I mean, it could have been bigger, made more of a statement.”

“He wounded two agents yesterday,” Bree said.

“I’m not discounting that. It just seems like this should have been an escalation.”

“Or at least two bombs,” Mahoney said.

“Exactly.”

Before Bree could reply, one of the dog handlers yelled. He’d found something on the north side of the memorial.

“Is your dog on scent?” Mahoney shouted as we hurried toward them.

“No,” the handler said when we got close. “I saw it in that clear trash bag there, a black fanny pack.”

Bree triggered her radio and said, “Bring the bomb team up.”

Within five minutes, FBI bomb squad commander Peggy Denton had arrived. We watched her iPad screen, showing the Andros robot’s camera feed and monitoring several electronic sensors. She shook her head. “We’re not picking up on a radio or cell phone. No timer, either. We can X-ray it.”

Mahoney nodded. Another tense three minutes passed while they moved a portable X-ray into position and looked inside the fanny pack. Aside from a water bottle and a shirt, there was an irregular rectangular item roughly three inches long, two inches wide, and two thick.

“Too wide for a Snickers bar,” I said. “Brownie?”

“Too dense for either of them,” Denton said. “Can’t see any triggering device, no blasting caps, or booby trap lines.”

“Your call,” Mahoney said.

The commander put on her hooded visor, walked the thirty yards to the garbage and retrieved the fanny pack. She unzipped it, reached in and pulled out the object, which was loosely wrapped in dull-green wax paper.

“Shit,” Denton said through her radio headset. “I need a blast can here, ASAP.”

Another of the bomb squad agents hurried toward Denton with a heavy steel box.

“What’s going on?” Bree asked.

“It’s C-4 type plastic explosive,” Denton radioed back as her partner opened the box’s lid. She set the bomb material inside and screwed the lid shut. “Yugoslavian Semtex by the markings on the wrapper.”

“Why didn’t the dogs smell it?” I asked. “Isn’t there something added to plastic explosives so they can be detected?”

“They’re called taggants,” Denton said, taking off her hood and visor, and coming back over. “I suspect this C-4 is old. Pre-1980, before taggants were required under international law.”

Bree shook her head. “Yesterday, the dogs smelled the bombs. Why make just one bomb out of it, but not four? And why leave the uncharged C-4 at all?”

“My guess is he left it as a warning,” I said. “He used plastic explosives with taggant the first time, but that game’s over. He’s saying we can’t sniff him out now. He’s saying he can bomb us at will.”