Daredevil Riders

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“Multiple machine guns wouldn’t be exactly inconspicuous,” Gross pointed out.

Herbertshook his head. “If you know what you’re doing you can break down a TEC-9 very quickly and fit it inside a briefcase.”

“We shut things down as fast as we could. But it is what it is.”

“Hopefully, someone at the hotel will remember seeing people leaving, perhaps with a bulky case?” noted Anthony.

Gross didn’t look too confident. “An event they had there was just letting out. Lots of people with briefcases leaving about that time, apparently.”

“That wasn’t a coincidence,” said Stone. “That was good prep work.”

A guy in a hazmat suit walked over to them. He tugged off his head covering. He was introduced as an agent from the ATF, Stephen Garchik.

Gross said, “Good to go?”

Garchik nodded and grinned. “Nothing that’ll kill you.”

Herbertlooked at the tent markers. They were divided between orange and white. The orange were far more numerous and were spread out relatively evenly around the park. The white markers were almost all on the western side of the park.

“Orange is bomb debris and white are locations of found slugs?” Herbertventured.

Garchik nodded approvingly. “Yep, obviously there were far more bomb bits than bullets, emanating from the blast seat.”

“What kind of explosive device was it, Agent Garchik?” Herbertasked.

“Just make it Steve. Too early to tell. But by the size of the debris field and damage to that statue, it was some powerful stuff.”

“C-4, or Semtex maybe?” asked Anthony. “They can both do serious damage in relatively small footprints.”

Garchik said, “Well, this is a lot of damage for a stick of TNT or even a pound of Semtex. Maybe it was a cocktail of components. Maybe HMX or CL-20. That stuff is scary powerful. They’re all in the family of most potent non-nuclear high explosives. But it most likely wasn’t military ordnance.”

“How do you know that?” asked Stone.

Anthony answered. “White smoke on the video. Military grade is oil-based, leaving a black smoke trail. White is usually commercial.”

The ATF agent smiled appreciatively. “You know your stuff. We’re bagging and tagging now. Taking residue from the blast seat.” He pointed at two burly black Labradors being walked around the grounds by their handlers. “Roy and Wilbur,” he said. “Those are the dogs’ names,” he added. “Dogs are the cheapest, most reliable bomb detectors in the world. One of my dogs can screen an entire airport in a couple hours. So they’ll burn through this whole park in no time. Find bomb residue my guys won’t even be able to see with all our fancy techno

“Impressive,” said Anthony.

Garchik continued with enthusiasm. “There aren’t even any machines in existence that can measure accurately the power of a dog’s nose. But I can tell you that people have about 125 million smelling cells in their nasal passages. Our Labs have twice that. We’ll run all the evidence up to our Fire Research Center in Maryland. We can torch a three-story building up there and have a hood large enough to capture every molecule of the burn-off. Be able to tell you exactly what was used.”

Herbertsaid, “Anything left of the guy in the hole?”

Garchik nodded. “Bombs throw debris three hundred and sixty degrees. We’ve pulled body parts out of tree canopies, off surrounding rooftops. Two, three blocks away. Found a piece of a foot on the White House lawn. A partial index finger on the roof of St. John’s Church. Then there was tissue, brain matter, the usual stuff. DNA field day. Guy’s on a database somewhere we’ll know soon enough.” He nodded at the NRT truck. “Of course, the first thing we did was shut down the area and send in our dogs.”

“Secondary strikes,” noted Anthony.

“Right. They’ve made that a fine art in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trigger off a bomb, everybody rushes in to help, and they pop the secondary strike to take out the first responders. But we found nothing.” Garchik added in a proud tone, “And our Labs are exceptional. They’re mostly service-dog-school dropouts that can sniff out nineteen thousand different explosives based on the five major explosive groups, including chemical compounds. We train them with food. Labs are land sharks, do anything for food.”

“They can never be fooled?” asked Anthony.

“Let me put it this way. Roy over there found a four-inch-square C-4 block that was covered in dirty diapers and coffee, packed in Mylar bags in cement-lined crates, sealed in foam and locked in a storage room. And he did it in about thirty seconds.”

“How is that possible?” asked Anthony.

“Smells occur at the molecular level. You can’t seal them up, no matter how hard you try. Plastics, metals, pretty much any container or cover-up method can’t trap molecules because those materials are still permeable. They can hold solids and liquids, and even gases, but smell molecules are something altogether different. They can pass right through those substances. If the detection method is sensitive enough it really doesn’t matter what the bad guys do. Trained bomb detection canines have an olfactory capacity that is humanly impossible to fool, and believe me, lots of people have tried.”

“How do you think this bomb was detonated?” asked Gross.

The ATF agent shrugged. “Basic rule of three. To make a bomb you have to have a switch, power source and the explosive. Bombs are just basically something that can violently expand at extremely fast speeds while trapped in a confined space. You can detonate a bomb any number of ways, but the basic two are via a timer and by what we call command detonation.”

Anthony said, “Meaning the person doing the detonation is present?”