Rules of Vengeance

30

“Keep your eyes on the ground,” shouted Den Baxter, chief of the London Metropolitan Police’s Evidence Recovery Team, as he walked up Storey’s Gate. “The pieces are all here. No one better even think of going home until we find them!”

It was eleven o’clock. The sun had slipped below the horizon ninety minutes earlier. Across London, the curtain of night had fallen. Everywhere except Storey’s Gate.

Along Storey’s Gate, it was as bright as midday. Up and down the 500-meter band of pavement, from Victoria Street to the west to Great George Street to the east, tall halogen work lamps illuminated the area where the car bomb had been detonated twelve hours earlier. There were over one hundred lamps in all, each with a brash 150-watt flood trained on the asphalt. Half again as numerous were the members of the Evidence Recovery Team, or the ERT, as it was better known. Clad head to toe in white Tyvek bodysuits, they swarmed up and down the street with the single-mindedness of army ants.

“Chief, over here!”

Baxter circled the husk of one of the burned automobiles and hurried toward the sidewalk, where a man stood with his hand raised. Baxter was a fireplug of a man, with flaming red hair and a boxer’s broken nose. A thirty-year veteran of the force, he’d arrived at the scene shortly after the first responders-the initial police, firemen, and paramedics called in to deal with the casualties. It was his job to locate, preserve, and catalogue any and all evidence having to do with the blast, and he carried it out with a zeal bordering on the fanatical.

“What’ve you got?” he asked.

The man held up a jagged piece of metal the size of a pack of cigarettes. “Bit of treasure. Piece of the car that went up. Got a nice dab of residue.”

Baxter examined the hunk of metal, quickly spotting the blackened crust on one corner. A scrape of his thumbnail revealed a field of white powder beneath the surface. He walked to the mobile command center at the corner of Victoria Street. The rear doors were open, and he climbed inside. “Got a present for you.”

Two men sat inside at an elaborate bank of instruments. Using a cotton swab, one freed a dab of explosive and prepped it for testing. One of the machines at his disposal was a Thomson gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer capable of analyzing the chemical composition of every commercially manufactured explosive compound known to man, and plenty that were homemade, too.

With an admonition to inform him as soon as any results were received, Baxter jumped out of the van and looked to see where he might be of some use. Twelve hours on the scene and he was still as charged up as a bantam cock.

When he arrived at 11:35, barely twenty minutes after the blast, his first task had been to clear the scene of casualties and establish a secure perimeter. His fellow officers were often his worst enemy. In their haste to help the injured, they stomped around the scene with little regard for evidence. It was three hours before all casualties were cleared from the scene, and another two before the last uniformed policeman had been escorted off-site. Only then was Baxter able to begin his real work.

The perimeter of a bomb site was established by the size of the blast area. The majority of car bombs employed one form or another of plastic explosives which, when detonated, expanded at a rate of nearly five miles per second. Baxter grew angry when he saw movies where the hero outran a fireball emanating from a detonation. Not likely. Thankfully, Storey’s Gate was a narrow street. The blast wave had ricocheted between the buildings, dissipating rapidly, and remained largely confined to its length.

Next Baxter gridded out the area, assigning 20-by-20-meter squares to teams of five men each for examination. Every square inch of the site was photographed, and all debris was studied with an eye to determining whether it was or was not evidence. If so, it was marked, photographed again, catalogued, and bagged.

The ERT looked for two things in particular: elements of the bomb itself-namely a detonator, circuit board, mobile phone, and the like; and any materials coated with a residue of the explosives. A bomb’s architecture spoke volumes about the bomb maker: his training, education, and, most important, his country of origin. Ninety percent of terrorist devices were made by individuals with prior military experience, and many bomb makers (inadvertently) developed a signature that gave them away as surely as Picasso’s script at the bottom of his paintings.

Blast residue indicated the type of explosive used, and often where the explosive was manufactured, and even when. Determining whether a bomb utilized Semtex, C-4, or one of a dozen more arcane explosives was a crucial first step in tracking down the identity of the assailant.

“Boss!” A whistle from the interior of the van drew his attention.

Baxter arrived in record time. “You have a result?” he asked breathlessly.

“Semtex,” declared the technician. “From the home factory in Semtin.” Semtex was a common plastic explosive manufactured in Semtin, Czech Republic.

“Taggants in good condition?”

“Taggants” referred to chemical signatures placed in the explosives denoting the place and date of manufacture.

“Check. We sent them over to Interpol for analysis.”

“And?”

“The Semtex used in the bomb came from a shipment sold to the Italian army. Here’s where it gets interesting: the Italians reported the shipment hijacked en route to a military base outside Rome in late April.”

One of Interpol’s lesser-known responsibilities was to maintain an up-to-the-minute database of every batch of explosives manufactured from legitimate explosives concerns around the world and to keep track of where and to whom they were sold.

“How big was the shipment?”

“Five hundred kilos.”

“Ask Interpol if any of the same batch has shown up somewhere else. Oh, and good work.”

Baxter climbed out of the van and headed back up the street into the glare of the lights. The Semtex was just one piece of the puzzle. He’d need many more before he could begin to make heads or tails of the bomb and, more important, the bomber.

“Evidence,” he shouted to his men. “I want some bloody evidence!”

It was nearing midnight, and Den Baxter’s day was just beginning.