AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You’re… You’re the man who was watching baseball in the waiting room… You’re the US intelligence operative?”
It’s the same middle-aged Caucasian man in the black cap who had been idly watching the ball game on TV earlier.
“My ID says I’m the office janitor, though.”
He grabs the name tag on his chest and shows us.
“So what are two busy detectives from the Armed Detective Agency doing here?”
Dazai and I exchange glances.
“You knew?”
“It’s my job to gather information on issues occurring in this country, and when an organization of skill users starts making a fuss first thing in the morning, you can bet word has already reached halfway around the world. We’ve had our eye on you ever since you walked into the embassy.”
It seems the omniscience of intelligence agencies isn’t limited to movies and novels after all.
“We’re looking for the person who set a bomb in the city. They’re also responsible for a similar bombing overseas that claimed the lives of over a hundred people. Is there anyone like that in your records? The offender said, ‘The everlasting flames and blinding corona made it seem as if the sun itself had fallen out of the sky,’ and—”
“Oh… I figured it was him.” The intelligence operative shakes his head.
“You know who’s behind this?”
“‘An everlasting fire and blinding white light’ sounds just like Alamta and his aluminum powder–based explosives. Here’s his file.”
The intelligence operative pulls out a stack of papers from within the cabinet.
“A man of Japanese descent, Zadkiel Alamta was a bomb purveyor for a Middle Eastern terrorist organization. We’ve been keeping tabs on him ever since he entered the country a year ago.”
“Without even telling the authorities in Japan?” I retort as I pore over the documents.
“We had our reasons. We wanted to capture him ourselves. Not only is he a bomber, he also sells explosives to terrorists of the same trade. If only we had his list of customers, we could arrest countless anti-American terrorists.”
I flip through the pages where I see Alamta’s photograph and the details of his past crimes.
“There honestly couldn’t be a worse bomb composition.”
I tightly clench my jaw.
“There are going to be a lot more than a hundred dead if this thing goes off in Yokohama.”
Alamta specializes in railroad car bombs that contain a mixture of aluminum powder in slurry explosives. After placing a few hundred pounds of explosives in the passenger car, he lights the fuse remotely using a small electronic transmitter, such as a cell phone. He uses ammonium nitrate as his main raw material and acetone peroxide as an auxiliary material. Both ingredients are cheap, so bombs can be manufactured in high volumes.
Judging by the composition detailed in the documents, anyone within a radius of about 650 feet of the blast would die instantly, and people out of range would be showered in the liquefied aluminum and exposed to the extreme temperatures from the blast wave.
The only reason Alamta uses aluminum is to make sure he kills as many people as possible. Aluminum is a combustion promoter, which emits a blinding white light and increases the intensity of the explosive flames when it burns. Simultaneously, the blast waves would carry it, creating a cloud of extremely hot dust reaching over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, which could burn the flesh right off a human body. To make matters worse, aluminum reacts with water to create a flammable hydrogen gas, meaning any contact with water would make more fire. Therefore, using the water from a fire hydrant to put out the blaze would only worsen it, making rescue operations difficult.
“The everlasting flames and blinding corona made it seem as if the sun itself had fallen out of the sky.” He wasn’t exaggerating.
The bomb is as dreadful as it sounds. If a bomb goes off in a densely populated place in the city, casualties could exceed a thousand when considering secondary disasters such as blackouts and other fatal accidents. Moreover, a train bomb could easily sneak past the police and into the city. We absolutely cannot allow it to be detonated in Yokohama.
“Where is Alamta right now?”
“He threw my colleague off his trail and went into hiding two days ago. We figured he was getting ready to do something.”
Damn it. It looks like we’ll have to start searching for Alamta before we can find the bomb. I guess learning the bomber’s name and background is a step forward, though. It is highly likely that Alamta and the Azure Apostle are one and the same. However, it’s still unclear why he would threaten the detective agency. If he does have a grudge against us, then perhaps looking into the agency’s past solved cases could lead to some clues.
“So, Mr. Spy, what do you want in return for this information?” Dazai chimes in with a chuckle.
