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“Are you going to pound at me like a crazy woman?”
“Maybe.”
He released her, but she didn’t go manic again. She settled into her seat. “All right, I’m listening.”
He opened the driver’s window a crack so he could safely leave the engine running, but he switched off the headlights. He organized his thoughts and decided to simply lay it out there.
“Kerra, twice in your life, you’ve narrowly escaped being killed. And both times you were with The Major. Now, you can lie to yourself, talk around it, rationalize, theorize about fickle fate, karma, and whatever other crap you want to throw into the mix, but you know, I know, there’s only one explanation. The two of you survived the bombing, and somebody is scared of what will come of you and The Major putting your heads together and comparing notes on what you saw and heard that day.”
“A generally speaking somebody?”
“A particular somebody. Which is why I kept going back to it.”
She shook her head in confusion and stroked the bruise above her brow.
The reflexive motion concerned him. “Kerra, are you dizzy? Feeling sick? Does your head hurt?”
“Yes. No. I’m fine.”
“You shouldn’t have been flailing around like that.”
“You shouldn’t have kidnapped me.”
“Do you want me to take you back?”
“Not until I’ve heard this. I’m all right. Tell me what you meant when you said you kept going back to ‘it.’ The bombing?”
“I studied it from the inside out.”
“While you were with the ATF?”
“In my spare time.”
“To what end? The case was solved.”
“‘Solved’ isn’t the word I would use,” he said. “There was never a mystery as to who’d done it or why. The guy confessed, said that he and two ot
her men carried the bombs into the Pegasus Hotel and set them to detonate because they held a grudge against the hotel’s parent company.”
“The petroleum company.”
“Yes. Everything he confessed to was substantiated by the FBI and ATF’s investigations. The blasts were devastating in terms of casualties and destruction of property. But as far as bombs go, they were nothing fancy, and nothing fancy was needed for a building only sixteen stories tall. C-4, a high explosive. Blasting caps. Timers. One of them, swear to God, was an egg timer.
“The blast radius of each wasn’t that large, but it didn’t have to be. What made the Pegasus bombs effective was that they were strategically placed. You know like when an old building is imploded, the explosives are set near support beams, either around the perimeter or in the center? Same principle. Collapse the infrastructure, building crashes down.”
“That sounds scarily simple.”
“It doesn’t take a genius. Nowadays we’re conditioned to be on the alert for stray backpacks and the like. But two decades ago, three men dressed as businessmen carrying briefcases and rollaboards into a hotel wouldn’t have been given a moment’s notice.
“The confessor was an architect. He’d acquired a set of plans, all the schematics of the building, knew how to access the areas they needed to get to, and he had his escape route mapped out.”
“Remember, I’ve studied the bombing, too,” Kerra said. “One of the things I found incomprehensible was that he was the one who set the timers, then lied to the other two about how much time they had to get clear before detonation.”
“Exactly,” Trapper said quietly. “He planned it so he would be the sole surviving bomber. But only so he could confess? Does that make sense to you?”
“That’s what bothered you, what got you interested?”
“It was one of the things,” he said. “When I first got into the ATF, I was merely curious to learn more about the event that had dominated my life since age eleven. I wanted to tackle it, like a foe, and now I had access to files, reports, information that the general public is never exposed to because it’s either too technical or too graphic, horrific, gruesome. I was like a scholar deprived of books who suddenly finds himself locked inside the Library of Congress. But for all the access I had, the deeper I dug, the more curious I became.”
