The Memorist

Chapter 86

Underneath the Musikverein Concert Hall

Thursday, May 1^st-6:12 p.m.

The light in the cave never changed. It was eternal night no matter what time of the day it was but David was watching the clock carefully. The concert would be starting in approximately an hour. He sensed a kind of elation bubbling up from deep in his chest. The sadness, grief and rage were, at last, almost over. His fingers caressed the small suitcase beside him: regulation size to fit under the seat in a commercial airliner, with wheels and a retractable handle for easy portability. Sometimes on the first night of a trip he’d find a note tucked into the front pocket from one of the kids. A child’s block letters: I miss you already. Hurry home.

No hurrying home now to a house that no longer stood. To kids who were blown up into the night sky, never to come back to earth.

Now the only item in the suitcase was his rain slicker, a little thicker than normal since it was wrapped around a four-inch-long brick of putty that he’d picked up in the Czech Republic on Monday: four hundred grams of somewhat malleable Semtex 1A. Half of this amount was all it had taken to blow Flight 103 out of the air. But the concert hall was bigger. This should be the right amount of the IRA’s favorite explosive to expose the guts of the building to the stars shining down from the sky. All for just four hundred and forty euros, the cost of two very good bicycles for his sons, or a gold bracelet set with turquoise birthstones for his wife, or a new set of woodworking tools for his father.

In the silence before the symphony, David unwrapped his slicker, exposing the two halves of the red block that would have looked like Play-Doh to his middle son.

When he’d inspected his purchase on Monday it had been whole but he’d cut into it to check for another of Tom Paxton’s bugs and, sure enough, had found one. Tossing that device onto the subway rails, he’d thought about Global Security Inc. and how with that one flick of his wrist, he was almost single-handedly dooming the company. Especially after Paxton had been so clever and bribed all those separate arms dealers to inform on their buyers.

But he didn’t feel sorry for Paxton. At the rate the man was expanding his empire, David guessed Paxton didn’t know that the Israeli security company he’d purchased three months earlier had been the one that had failed to protect David’s family.

Unzipping the suitcase’s outside pocket, David reached in and pulled out the rest of the paraphernalia he’d need: a battery pack and a det cord the thickness of a pencil, which would set off the blasting cap, which in turn would set off the Semtex. All he would have to do was stick the cap with the cord rolled around it into the explosive.

The assemblage looked like one of Ben’s science projects but he couldn’t think about that now.

David practiced the actions he’d be taking in approximately seventy-six minutes-the length of time it would take to play to the end of Beethoven’s heroic Third Symphony, depending, of course, on this particular orchestra’s pacing and the length of time between movements.

David had timed his efforts to the moment in the symphony when the minor key music of the third movement comes back in the middle of the triumphant major key third movement. He didn’t just want an ending, but an elegant ending. So during the final coda, when the last notes of the monumental piece rang out, David would activate the detonating cord using the wire connected to the battery pack. With the current applied, the assemblage would become a short circuit, turn red-hot and explode. Like a lightbulb burning out, was the way a top security analyst had explained it to him years ago when David was writing an exposé of terrorist tactics in one of the many Gaza Strip uprisings. Like the light burning out the lives of his wife and each of his children and his parents and his aunts and uncles and cousins. Caressing the wires as if they were strands of his wife’s heavy raven hair, for a moment he could almost imagine the scent of the lemony lotion she uses-used-to counteract the arid desert air.

With a start, David looked around. He’d heard something. A sound. Close by. Not music. Not rats. Not a human voice. It was coming from the air shaft. He heard it again. The sound of rocks crashing. Or a wall collapsing. And then faraway muffled shouts. A disaster? Or an expedition? None of the questions mattered anymore. Only the answers did. And only time would give those up.