Shock Wave

9

Pye’s pilot was a reassuringly square-chinned, gray-haired man wearing a military-style olive-drab nylon flight jacket over a blue canvas shirt, jeans, with brown leather boots and a long-billed blue hat that said “Pye” in white script. The copilot was a square-chinned man with salt-and-pepper hair, also reassuringly aviator-like, in the same flight jacket, canvas shirt, jeans, boots, and hat, which Virgil took as a uniform dreamed up by a designer with delusions of manhood.

The plane itself was larger than Virgil expected, a blue Gulfstream 550 with the same white “Pye” script as the pilots’ hats. A cabin attendant, an Asian woman in a jade business dress, was putting together a meal in a forward galley when Virgil climbed aboard; she asked, “Something to drink after takeoff?”

“Diet Coke?” Virgil asked.

Chapman said, “The usual.”

Chapman said that the interior of the plane had been customized for long-distance trips; that Pye was expanding in Latin America and Asia, and that they traveled twenty weeks of the year. “He’s pushing really hard, because he’s got nothing else to do. Willard’s wife died six years ago. He’s never gotten over it. He told me that he still talks to her at night, when he goes to bed.”

“That’s tough,” Virgil said; though he really had no idea.

Chapman showed him two private sleeper cabins in the back, with fold-down beds; the center of the plane was taken up with six seats that could be swiveled into a meeting formation, with a folding desk that could be swiveled in front of each. The plane had Wi-Fi and electrical plug-ins for laptops.

Forward of the cabin door, but behind the pilot’s cockpit, was the galley, and a long folding chair for the cabin attendant.

The pilot called back to suggest that they take their seats, and Chapman said, “Come on, I want to show you something.” She led him back to the bedroom suites, leaving the door open behind her, then opened a smaller, shorter door that Virgil thought probably went back to the baggage compartment. Instead, he found himself on his knees in a four-foot-high, four-foot-long compartment.

Chapman, kneeling beside him, said, “Pull on your side,” and Virgil helped peel back a thick plastic cover over two body-length windows set in the fuselage floor.

“This is always a trip,” she said. “The idea is to lie down and look straight down while we take off… It’s like flying.”

And it was. Ten minutes later, they were off the ground, Virgil and Chapman lying side by side with their noses right on the window glass, and Chapman started laughing in delight as the plane banked in a tight turn to the east. They climbed quickly over the summer-green landscape, the trees below throwing long shadows like dark hands over the farm fields, the lakes as dark and hard as granite tiles set in a glowing green carpet.

When they’d finished climbing out, Chapman said, “That’s the show,” and Virgil said, “You were right-it was like flying.” They went back to their seats, and the cabin attendant brought Virgil his Diet Coke, a martini with three olives for Chapman, and a paper menu.

Virgil ordered a cheeseburger with fries and a chopped salad, and Chapman a salmon steak.

“Hell, this is better than what we’d get in Butternut,” Virgil said, when the food came. “We ought to eat here every night.”

As they ate, they chatted about the bombings, and Chapman got out a sketchbook and drew cartoon-like pictures of the Pye Pinnacle, to illustrate the problems a bomber would have getting in. “I’m not an expert on security, but we’ve had all kinds of experts there in the past two weeks. They all talked to Willard, and I took notes,” she said. “It’s almost like a locked-room mystery, but the problem is, how did the guy get in?”

“I was an MP captain in the army, and a lot of MPs wind up guarding prisons,” Virgil told her. “I never did, but I took the course work, and we looked at a lot of prison escapes. The ways people get out of prison are amazing-and they mostly depend on sleight of hand, just like with magicians.”

“Like what?”

“Like guys disguising themselves as guards and walking out. Make the guard uniforms right in their cells. Another guy… See, when trucks come and go, the guards roll mirrors under them to make sure nobody has tied themselves onto the bottom. One guy made a folding papier-mache box and spray-painted it brown and gray that looked like the underside of a Sysco truck. He tied himself on, with the box facing down. The guards looked at it, not expecting to see anything, and they didn’t, and waved the truck through. What the guy hadn’t figured out, though, was that the truck was traveling a long way, and by the time he got to where he was going, he was almost dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. They found him lying on the ground under the truck. He’d managed to cut himself down before he passed out. But, he got out.”

“But they’ve got all these cameras at the Pinnacle.”

“The point is, they see what happened, but they don’t understand it,” Virgil said.

“The guys who were looking seemed smart,” Chapman said. “I think they would have made allowance for that.”

“Maybe,” Virgil said. “But everybody knows magicians do tricks, and they still don’t see it. If you’re good enough… but who knows? Maybe it was an insider, who was cooperating with somebody from Butternut Falls. Did anybody look at the insiders and ask about relatives from Minnesota?”

“That’s something I don’t know,” she said. “You’d have to ask Barlow.”

They spent the rest of the flight talking about how they’d gotten where they were-she’d worked as a reporter for a while, hadn’t liked the money, wrote for a couple of magazines as a freelancer, then caught on doing research for a Washington, D.C., public relations company, and worked for a Michigan congressman for a while. After a couple years with the congressman, she ghostwrote, for the congressman, a moderately successful book about Washington lobbying. The congressman introduced her to Pye, after Pye mentioned to him that he was looking for an unusual kind of assistant.

She said, “When I was researching you, I found a lot of stuff about shoot-outs you’d been in, and then I found out you were a writer. You’ve even written for the New York Times Magazine.”

“I have,” Virgil admitted. “I don’t like to talk about it, for fear of offending my straight friends.”

“I read the articles,” she said. “You’re really good. Why would you continue to do… this?”

“Because I like it. It’s extremely interesting,” Virgil said. “I like writing, too, but in small doses. Sitting in a room, alone, for six hours a day, like a full-time pro writer… that’s no way to go through life.”

She was attractive, articulate, and liked to talk about writing: she made Virgil nervous. His sheriff was still out there, somewhere, and she was heavily armed.

They arrived at Gerald R. Ford International Airport outside of Grand Rapids at ten o’clock at night, eastern time. As they turned, just before they started down, Virgil could see the faint orange glow of sunlight to the west. On the ground, it was full dark. They were met by a man in a large blue Chevy Tahoe, with the Pye script on the doors.

“Fast as you can get there, Harry,” Chapman told the driver, and he said, “Yes, ma’am.”

A few minutes later, they were headed east on I-96, and Harry put the speedometer on eighty. Virgil sat in front, and Chapman dozed in the back. Thirty minutes later, Harry said, “There she is.”

The Pye Pinnacle came up as a shaft of shimmering light that, a few miles later, had resolved itself into hundreds of brightly lit windows climbing up into the sky. The highway ran just to the south of the building; but all around the building was a puddle of pitch darkness.

Harry took an off-ramp that seemed to go nowhere but the Pinnacle; and then a couple of right turns got them on an approach road, and they drove through a parking lot, stopped at a railroadstyle guard arm, which Harry opened with a key card, and then they rolled up a gentle ramp to an entrance door on the side of the building. Chapman, yawning, said, “VIP entrance. Thanks, Harry.”

As they pulled up, three men in suits stepped out through the glass doors, and Virgil and Chapman got out and Chapman said, “Hey, guys,” and they said, “Marie,” and Chapman said, “This is Virgil Flowers,” and then, “Virgil, this is Bob Brown, head of security, David McCullough, he’s with the ATF, and Barrett Newman runs the building systems.”

They all shook hands and Virgil said, “You know what I’d like to do? Right now, I’d just like to walk around the outside of the building and look at stuff. You mind?”

They didn’t and Virgil said, “Just a minute,” and walked over to the door, and pulled on it, and it opened. “The door isn’t locked,” he said.

“The inside one is,” said Brown. “You can wave at the cameras while you wait for the guard to unlock it.”

“Okay,” Virgil said.

“So the idea is,” Brown said, “that a guy with a skateboard, which can be quiet, is waiting at the bottom of the ramp, under a car. A VIP truck comes up, and he rolls out and grabs the bumper, and they tow him up the hill, right to the glass. He’s got a key card, which he stole off a careless employee… But how does he get past the guard? And why didn’t we see him on the cameras?”

“I didn’t think of the skateboard idea,” Virgil said. “Hadn’t gotten that far.”

“We did,” Brown said.

“Any of the regular employees check in, who should have been on vacation?” Virgil asked.

“Two did. Both had reasons,” Brown said. “We checked the reasons. Neither one went above the fiftieth floor. To go higher than that, you have to have a specially authorized key card, which they didn’t.”

“So you checked.”

“Yes, we did.”

“Anybody’s houses get broken into? When the key cards might have been compromised?”

“Not in the last month,” Brown said.

Virgil asked, “Did you check all the board members?”

“We did,” Brown said.

“Are there cameras inside the stairwells above the fiftieth floor?”

“No, nothing like that, though the access doors are locked at the fiftieth. But if you had a key card to get through those doors, you could go all the way to the top.”

Newman, the building systems man, said, “There’s another crack in the security, too. Years ago, there was a deck up on the top floor, and the employees were allowed to go to sixty, on the elevator, without a key card, and then out the doors to the deck. But not many people went, and maintenance got expensive, so that was eventually ended. But if you had one of those old key cards, you could still get to sixty. Then, you could go outside, and down the interior stairs to the fifty-to-fifty-nine levels without anybody seeing you. But you’d have to have that old key card… and we don’t know that anybody does.”

“Custodians?”

Brown said, “When everything is said and done, there are at least two hundred and fifty-one insiders who could get up to fifty-five and place the bomb. We’ve talked to every one of them. That’s pretty much gotta be how it happened, but boy, it’s tough. We’ve found anger, and grudges, and resentment, and whatever-but nothing like what you’d need to plant a bomb. At least, not that we’ve been able to detect.”

McCullough, of the ATF, said, “We are, by the way, looking at all the video for the last month, after Barlow called us. He told us about the pipe, about finding that piece of pipe at the college, and the possibility that the bomb might have been detonated by cell phone.”

“Huh,” Virgil said. “Let’s take that walk.”

They walked around the building, looking at exterior doors, at the loading dock, at the outlets for a package sewage-treatment plant, at storm-water drains; all of it was lit by heavy exterior lighting, which, though designed to enhance the building’s aesthetics, also made it impossible to get close to the building unseen. When they were done, Virgil was ready to concede that the building would have been difficult to penetrate from the outside-as difficult as it would be to penetrate a prison. Even if it had been possible to penetrate the building because of some regular security lapse discovered by an intruder, he’d still be on the comprehensive video, and he wasn’t.

“So you’re now where we’re at,” Brown said. “It’s an insider.”

“Who must have some connection to a bomb maker in Butternut Falls,” Virgil said. “Has to be a tight relationship. Probably not a relative, now that I think about it. Probably an ideological connection.”

Done with the inspection of the building’s perimeter, the group took Virgil inside, through the front doors, past a guard desk with two guards, and through an electronic gate operated with a key card. Brown pointed out an array of cameras that covered the doors and the reception area, showed him how the elevators worked, and finally took him up to the fifty-fifth floor, where the bomb had been set off.

The boardroom was still a mess, though sheets of Plexiglas had been fitted into the gaps left by blown-out windows, and the furniture pushed into a corner. “What about the woman who was killed?” Virgil asked.

“Angela ‘Jelly’ Brown, Mr. Pye’s secretary,” Brown said. “What about her?”

“Have you checked her out?”

After a moment of silence, McCullough said, “Yeah, to a certain extent. Not much to check. Quiet, routine life. Husband works as a driver at a data-services place. No politics that we could find-registered Republicans, but not active. They live in Grand Rapids. We didn’t, uh, go through her apartment or anything.”

Virgil said, “Huh.”

McCullough said, “I suppose we could have done that, but to tell the truth, I’d bet my job on the idea that she’s innocent. That she had no connection with the bombing. She liked Pye, a lot, and she liked her coworkers, and they liked her… and if she placed the bomb, why in God’s name would she have been standing one foot away when it blew?”

“Could she have been moving it?”

“No. We’ve established that it was inside the credenza, on the upper shelf, above four reams of paper, when it blew. The credenza door was closed.”

“Okay,” Virgil said. The room still stank of death, though the carpet had been taken away. A bunch of thin waxy pink and blue birthday candles were scattered along the base of one wall. Virgil asked about that, and Brown said, “They were going to have a birthday party for Mr. Pye. The board was. Almost died at his own birthday party.”

There were no security cameras on the fiftieth floor, the barrier floor, Brown said, because there were cameras at every access point.

“Except the elevator… going up the elevator to sixty, and then coming down the stairs,” Chapman said.

“And just climbing the stairs if you had a key card,” Virgil said. “If you had a card for the door at the fiftieth floor… right?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Brown said. “It’s like we said-we can see the possibility that an insider could have planted the bomb. The complication is, we don’t see any way an outsider could have done it, and everything you guys developed in Minnesota suggests that there’s an outsider involved. Whoever planted that bomb in Willard’s limo out there… he wasn’t from here. Whoever cut the pipe at the college, he wasn’t from here, either. We started checking as soon as we heard about it-where everybody was, who worked here. So it’s either a conspiracy, or we just don’t know what happened.”

“Is there any possibility that the bomb was there a long time?” Virgil asked. “If it had a cell phone as a detonator…”

McCullough said, “Not really. The cabinet was used to store office supplies-notebooks, file folders, reports, that kind of thing. You couldn’t tell when it was going to be opened, but it was opened often enough. I know it’s possible, but I really don’t think there was a cell phone. I think it was set off by the clock, and it was placed inside the twenty-four-hour period before it went off.”

“Another thing,” said Newman, the building systems guy, “is that whoever planted the bomb had to know exactly when and where the board meeting was, and had to know something about the building layout, and how to get into the room.” He turned to Brown: “ Has to be an insider. Has to be a conspiracy.”

After leaving the boardroom, Virgil was shown what McCullough called Pye’s inner sanctum, a small but comfortable office behind a large outer office, with a big desk, “in” and “out” boxes, a computer, and a view of the interstate.

“We’ve wondered why the bomber didn’t put it in here, but it’s possible that Jelly Brown locked the outer office doors at night. We don’t know that she did, but we can’t ask her.”

Virgil looked through the office suite, which included a conference room, a small bedroom with a bathroom, and a sitting area with a wide-screen television. When he was finished looking, he asked to be taken up the stairwell to the roof. He noticed that the doors into and out of the stairwell were not locked-“Because of nine-eleven,” Brown said. “Willard considered us something of a target out here, and we did a review of what we could do to get people out in case we were hit by a plane. One thing we could do is allow people to go down one stairwell or the other-there are four of them, one on each side of the building-and then cross over and go down another one. So you could zigzag down through the building if you needed to. If you’re below fifty, you can’t go up, but if you’re above fifty, you can go out.”

The roof was big and flat and had the usual ventilation equipment and a big shed for window-washing equipment. Virgil asked about that, and Brown said, “Nobody used the window-washing grooves. They begin thirty feet above ground level, and even if you managed to get at them, unseen, it’d take you hours to climb the building. You’d be in plain sight all the time.”

There wasn’t much of a view from the top. Virgil could see the glow of Grand Rapids on the horizon to the west, another glow to the southeast-Lansing? Virgil thought-and headlights and taillights on the highway to the south. To the north there was nothing but darkness.

Chapman looked up into the night sky and said, “If you parachuted onto the roof…”

Brown said, “Right. You get a pilot and a skydiving plane to fly you over the building in the middle of the night with a bomb in your arms, and then you base-dive off the building when you’re done… I don’t think so. If you’re gonna have a conspiracy, it’s a thousand times more likely that it’s an insider.”

McCullough said, “I bet Ford International has a radar track tape for that night… Maybe we ought to check.”

Brown said, “Sure, check.”

They came off the roof and took the elevator down to the third floor, where the company had set up overnight suites for visitors, and a lounge. They sat in the lounge, and the three men detailed the investigation, and again, Virgil had a hard time faulting it. When they were done, Brown asked, “What do you think?”

“I’m glad I saw it, so it wasn’t a total waste of time coming out,” Virgil said. “I gotta say, the place seems pretty tight. I mean, maybe, maybe there’s some way a guy could have ridden in, inside a UPS truck or something, with a key card, and gotten up there… but I don’t see it. He’d have to know too much. Too much small detail. He’d have to have done a lot of surveillance.”

“It’s an insider,” McCullough said.

“And a conspiracy,” Brown said. “But that’s weird. How did they hook up? What’s the relationship?”

“I don’t know, but that’s what we’re going to focus on,” McCullough said. “There has to be a link between here and Butternut Falls. We have to push until we find it.”

Virgil was shown into a room a little before two in the morning. He lay awake for a few minutes, thinking about this and that, and for a while about God, and then almost went to sleep. But not quite asleep. Eventually, he crawled out from under the sheet and got out his laptop and linked into the Pinnacle’s Wi-Fi system, and went out on the Net, researching “Pye Pinnacle.”

It took a while, but he eventually found a PyeMart promotional video about the building that included a shot of a much younger Willard Pye greeting board members as they got off the elevators. When the doors opened, Virgil could see a metal “55” set in the edges of the elevator doors.

He said, “Huh.”

In twenty minutes, he had the information he needed to plant a bomb in the boardroom; he even knew he could plant it in the credenza.

But he still had no way in, or up.

He checked his e-mail before he went to sleep and found a message from Lee Coakley, his sheriff in Malibu, or West Hollywood, or wherever it was. The note said: I tried to call you several times on your cell, but got no service. Talk to you soon.

He checked his phone: she’d called while he was in the air, with the phone turned off.

He got to sleep a little after three, and the alarm woke him at seven. At seven-twenty, he was in the Pye truck with a sleepy Chapman, who said, “We’ll have breakfast on the plane, and then I’m gonna crash again. I feel like somebody put a Vulcan nerve pinch on me.”

“Sounds right,” Virgil said, yawning.

“You figure anything out?” she asked.

“I spent some time online. There’s enough information about the Pinnacle that you could figure out where the boardroom is, and you can also figure out when the board meetings are, and where. The last board meeting, before the bomb, was in Dallas. I don’t know where the next one will be, but I could probably find out a few days before it happens… It’s deep in the business news, but it’s in there.”

“Hmm,” she said. “I’ll mention that to Willard.”

Virgil shook his head. “It looks like a conspiracy, but it doesn’t feel that way. Everything is too clockwork-like, too precise. If it’s a conspiracy, that would mean that we have two nuts-one here and one in Butternut-who are both absolutely murderous, and who were willing to trust each other, and both intelligent. How did they find each other? How did they get together?”

“Well, maybe on the Internet,” she said. “There are anti-PyeMart and anti-Walmart and anti-Target websites. What if a couple of people cooked up a conspiracy… I mean, one was from Butternut, but the other one could have been from anywhere. He or she moves to Grand Rapids or Lansing and gets a job out at the Pinnacle-gets a job for the sole purpose of blowing up the board.”

Virgil thought about that for a moment, then said, “I’ve got a researcher at the BCA who is really good at the Net. I’ll have her troll those PyeMart sites, see what she comes up with.”

“But we don’t know when they would have met.”

“In the last two years, if there were two of them. PyeMart didn’t start making noises about building in Butternut until two years ago,” Virgil said. “Took them a year to get the permits, and another year to get under way.”

“Have to check,” she said.

“Yeah, but I still… don’t think it’s a conspiracy. We’re missing something. I think it’s one guy, pretty smart, who figured out a way to get into the Pinnacle. Are there tours of the building? If there are, did anyone go missing for a few minutes? That kind of thing.”

“There are tours, but not often-and not one recently,” she said. “McCullough checked that. The ATF guys are really good.”

They speculated, but came up with nothing solid; got to Ford International a few minutes after eight, were off the ground at eightfifteen. After a quick breakfast of Cheerios and sweet rolls, the cabin attendant folded out beds for Virgil and Chapman, and Virgil was asleep in two minutes; he woke again when the wheels touched down in Butternut.

The trip, he thought, might have been time wasted.

But it didn’t feel wasted; it felt, instead, like he’d learned something about the mind of the bomber. He was clever, and had a streak of boldness, even recklessness. He’d somehow gotten into the Pinnacle, and back out, and had never touched any of the trip lines set up by a very professional security system.

Interesting.