The command center was already humming with activity when Faye arrived, despite the fact that the sun was barely up.
“Good morning, Madame Archaeologist,” Ahua said, handing her a cup of coffee the size of a medieval tankard. “I’m glad you’re here. I want to pick your brain about the paintings in that room we saw yesterday. Actually, I want to pick your brain about the room itself.”
She took the humongous cup in both hands. “For coffee? No problem! My professional opinion can absolutely be bought with coffee.”
“You don’t have to work for coffee. I told you yesterday that I want to hire you as a consultant, like Bigbee did last summer. Just invoice me by the hour for your time spent. And that includes yesterday’s underground adventure.”
“A budget? With money in it? And coffee, too? You, sir, just hired an archaeologist.”
“Okay, then. Today is the day you help me figure out what’s been going on beneath this building for the past century.”
“Well, we weren’t exactly beneath this building—” she began.
“Agreed,” he said. “We have no evidence of chambers directly beneath the Gershwin, except for a small portion of the staircase. I put some of my graphics people on the night shift and I woke up to this. They do good work.” He tapped the keyboard of a nearby computer and a map appeared on its very large display.
The person who made the map had considerately included an arrow pointing north, like any ordinary map, but Faye couldn’t relate that to what she’d seen underground. North doesn’t mean much when you can’t see the sun or a city’s street grid.
The map, though, was helpful in other ways. She could see that Ahua’s mapmakers had outlined the staircase and the landing at its foot in black. The site of the explosion was marked with a big “X.”
They had also marked the landing at the bottom of the staircase, where she knew that two doorways existed. One door led into a space labeled “Painted Room,” and the location of the metal door into the sewer was marked on the far wall. The other doorway opened left into apparent nothingness. A graphic artist with a flair for history had labeled it “Terra Incognita.”
Faye pointed at the upper portion of the stairway. “This is the only part that’s underneath the Gershwin, right?”
“Right. If he thought he was carrying a bomb that would take down the building over it, then the hotel wasn’t his target. Based on laser measurements, the downstairs room to the left of the stairs starts a few yards south of the Gershwin’s lobby and extends toward the river. If there’s a room beyond it, it goes under a street and a park. Eventually, it would go under the convention center, and wouldn’t a convention hall full of oil executives be a great target?”
“Is that what’s going on there now?”
“Yeah, but the bomb went off two hours before their first session.”
He tapped a key and a second map, drawn in red, overlaid the first one. It was a regular, ordinary map of the surface. The north arrow pointed away from the river, and that helped because Faye knew where the river was.
“I don’t know why else you’d want to set off a bomb down there.” Ahua stared at the map like the answer was written on it.
“To destroy the children’s bodies?”
“Why now? They’ve been down there more than twenty years. A bomb would only call attention to them, which suggests that the bomber wasn’t involved with putting them there. Maybe he didn’t know about them.”
This was true, and Faye was disappointed. She’d hoped that there was a link between the bombing and the bodies. Otherwise, they represented a very cold case and cold cases were hard to solve.
“Okay,” she said. “There’s no reason to link the bodies to the bombing other than geography. We don’t know why they’re lying underneath downtown Oklahoma City and we don’t know why the dead man took a bomb down there, either.”
“Whatever his goal was, he died for it. Maybe he was hoping to take down a building, then got cold feet, came back upstairs, and accidentally detonated the bomb. Maybe he intended to take out a lot of people in the Gershwin lobby, terrorist-style, but the bomb went off before he got it into position.”
“There weren’t all that many people there.”
“True. Maybe he was going to hide the bomb, wait until there was a bigger crowd, and detonate it remotely, but he screwed up. But if so, why go downstairs? There are plenty of ways to connect the dots on the facts we have, but none of them make sense.”
Faye agreed. “So what do you want me to do for you?”
“I hired you because, as an archaeologist, you can help me get my mind around the underground structure itself. When was it built? How was it built? Is there anything in the past that’s connected to the bombing or those bodies?”
“I’m on it. I’ll do whatever it takes to help you put away anybody that helped the bomber. And if we find out that somebody murdered those children—” Faye flailed for the right words but there were none. “I’ll do whatever you need to catch the person who did that.”
“That, Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth, is the right answer.”
Faye studied the layered map some more. It rekindled the claustrophobic feeling of being far underground with no light except the light they had brought with them. “If you wanted to make an anti-government political statement like McVeigh did, an industrial trade show just isn’t sexy enough to fire up a bunch of malcontents. But check out this IRS office. It’s just as close to the Gershwin as the convention center. For a political statement, that would be at the top of a lot of people’s lists, but it’s in the wrong direction.” She pointed to a spot on the map. “The chambers don’t go anywhere near it?”
“Not that we know of.”
Ahua clicked another key and dark blue lines appeared on a map that was growing more confusing by the moment. “Here’s the layout of the stormwater system. Some of those sewer lines are really old. The brick pipes we were in aren’t the only ones under Oklahoma City. I think that’s true in a lot of cities.”
The computer screen looked like somebody had thrown a fistful of multicolored spaghetti at it. “That’s…um…complicated.”
“Well, yeah. You’re looking at everything we know, from the surface all the way down. It’s like we’ve stumbled onto an archaeological site where you don’t even have to dig. You’re the archaeologist. What do you think we’ve uncovered?”
“I don’t see an obvious answer, but old maps aren’t always reliable. Maybe he got down there and didn’t see what he thought he’d see. That might have made him turn around and try to abort the mission. But the bomb had other ideas.”
“We’ve got video that suggests you’re right. Just minutes before the blast, the bomber came into the hotel lobby carrying a backpack.”
“You’ve got video of his face? That’s great!”
“Well, his hat was low and his collar was flipped up and he was wearing sunglasses. And he never looked directly at any of the cameras, so I think he’d done some reconnaissance on where they were. You or I might not recognize him if he passed us on the street, but the bureau has facial recognition software that may help with that.”
She remembered a man in a cowboy hat spreading his arms and taking flight. “I think I remember him. I think I remember seeing him die. But that’s all I remember. What did the video show?”
“He wandered around for a few minutes, then went into the alcove.”
“It was right above the underground stairs, wasn’t it?”
“You got it. The cameras weren’t positioned for a clear view, but he touched the wall a couple of times and then disappeared. We think he opened a hidden panel. The Evidence Response Team is still sifting through the rubble, but they haven’t found the latch to prove the secret panel theory. I believe it was there anyway.”
Faye stared at the screen as if the answer was going to appear there in bold print. “So how much time passed between when the bomber opened the panel and when the bomb blew?”
“Not much. He only had time to go down the stairs, open the door to the painted room and walk through it, then turn around and climb back up the steps. The bomb went off just as he stepped back into the lobby. We ran the fingerprints. No criminal record. No identification. Nothing.”
Faye remembered the condition of the body. She didn’t even want to think about how it had been possible to recover his fingerprints.
Ahua answered the question she hadn’t asked. “We got complete prints off the door downstairs. There was a good enough match on what was left of his hands to know they were his.”
“Nobody’s claimed responsibility?”
“Nope. Not even any fakers trying to ride on the dead guy’s coattails. Oklahomans have very strong feelings about bombers since McVeigh. It seems that there are no radical groups of any stripe who want to be hated that bad.”
“What do you know about the bomb?”
“My miraculous crime scene investigators actually found lots of pieces of the pressure cooker he used to make it. One of them carried the serial number.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Oh, but I am. They’re that good.”
Faye thought of her own pressure cooker, neatly stored in a kitchen cabinet, and tried to make herself believe that it was a deadly weapon. “How does that kind of bomb even work? My pressure cooker doesn’t heat up by itself. Without a stove, it’s just a really heavy pot. He wasn’t carrying a stove.”
“You just answered yourself. A pressure cooker is a really heavy pot that’s designed to withstand high pressure. And its lid is sealed with a gasket that keeps steam from the cooking food from escaping until the pressure inside rises. When you’re cooking, it’s designed to release the pressure before it gets too high, so it’s perfectly safe. But if you push it past its design parameters using something like gunpowder…”
“Boom.”
“Exactly. They’re very simple to make. Terrifyingly so, actually. You pack the pressure cooker with black powder for the blast. Add a heavy load of something small and deadly like nails or ball bearings for the shrapnel. Then you need something to light it up, which you can improvise with the guts of a cell phone. Or some Christmas lights.”
“Christmas lights. You’re kidding.”
Ahua was describing something that you could build out of parts you bought at a yard sale. This creeped Faye out, almost more than the bomb itself.
“I wish I was kidding. You can use a timer, but the really slick operators use modified cell phones to generate the spark. They get total control over the timing of the blast, and they can set it off from a safe distance with a simple phone call. We can’t assume that this guy intended to be a suicide bomber.”
“If all you have to do is call a specific number, you could set it off from anywhere in the world.”
“Exactly. We found mangled cell phone pieces in the rubble and a heavily damaged phone in his pocket. We think he intended to get away from the blast radius, then let his cell phone tell the thing to blow.”
“But you don’t know where his plan went wrong.”
“Not a clue.”
“What about the serial number Goldsby’s people found? Will it tell you anything about the pressure cooker? Where it was bought? When?”
“When it was bought? That’s the problem. According to the serial number, it’s twenty years old. Even if we could trace it back to its purchase, the bomber could easily have bought it at a garage sale.”
There was proof of Faye’s garage sale theory.
“Or inherited it from his grandmother…” Ahua continued, “or stole it from a friend…or got custody of it in a divorce…”
“I get the point. Twenty years is too long for the serial number to help us trace the thing to a single person.”
She thought of pressure cookers she’d used in her life. Sooner or later, they all started to leak. “You know what? Twenty years is too long to trust that the original gasket is still good. If I were gonna build a bomb, I’d want to know for sure that it was going to blow. Is there any way to find out whether somebody bought a gasket for that model recently?”
“That is an excellent angle. I’ve got people who love to do that kind of deep-dive research. Consider it done.”
“So what do you really need me to do? Somebody in the FBI would have thought of the gasket angle eventually. It’s just dumb luck that I like to keep my small appliances for a ridiculous period of time.”
“I’m really interested in what you can tell me about the room we saw. It feels important.”
Faye remembered the vivid paintings on the wall and the odd little door. Yes. It did feel important.
He fastened his eyes on her and gave her that FBI-approved “Now you’re going to tell me everything you know” look. “Do you think it was built when the Chinese people built the other chambers, eighty or a hundred years ago? Or did somebody else built that room later—like maybe in the 1990s—and paint its walls and cut that door into the sewer?”
Faye had already suggested that he try to date the paint and she couldn’t think of anything else useful. This could be the shortest consulting job ever. “Um…what if one of the pictures showed a television? Then we’d know it wasn’t painted in 1920.”
Now she was truly flailing for ideas.
“Well, yeah. That would be a big help. Why don’t you wish for a miracle and hope the TV shows the World Series, complete with team names and score?”
This image made Faye laugh out loud.
“Well,” he said, “we won’t know if there’s a painting of the 1994 World Series down there unless we look. Here are the pictures Goldsby took yesterday. They’re preliminary, but they’re all we’ve got for now. When the Evidence Response Team releases the room, he’ll go back in with proper lighting and better equipment.”
He called up a photo slide show and clicked through it, one photo at a time.
“We also have these.” He clicked one more time and six images filled the computer screen, four walls, the ceiling, and the floor. “I asked my techs to piece together the photos Goldsby took from the bottom of the stairs with the ones we saw him take from the storm sewer. They’re a little wonky, since they were pieced together from photos taken from two angles, but you can see the painted images pretty well.”
He motioned for her to sit in front of the computer. “I want you to take a good long look at these photos while I go talk to Goldsby’s crew about what they’re finding. When I get back, please meet me at the door and tell me that you found a television screen painted on one of those walls, complete with the score of the 1994 World Series. Or even 1992 will do.”