CHAPTER NINETEEN

The fucking Rotunda? Are you shitting me?”

No, I explain to the chief. For real.

He’s in the makeshift operations room with the rest of the terrorism brain trust, hoping for a miracle and waiting for the worst.

I explain to L.D., who puts me on speakerphone, about the drawing.

“You’re sure it’s the Rotunda?”

It’s pretty damn hard to mistake it for something else, 1 tell him. When Thomas Jefferson had the thing built as the centerpiece of his new University of Virginia almost two hundred years ago, he meant for it to attract attention. Cindy tells me it’s a World Heritage Site, which sounds impressive.

Whatever it is, it apparently seemed like a fine spot for Randall Heil and his merry band to make something go boom.

And I’m not just conjecturing about the “boom” part. In Bug’s artwork, above the Rotunda is a cartoonish starburst radiating outward and, honest to God, the word “boom” with an exclamation point.

The feds are here in twenty minutes.

They seem to take the drawing seriously. When I suggest that maybe some sharp-eyed G-man might have spotted that notepad in the dirt below the back porch, they are noncommittal.

“Doesn’t say when,” one of them mutters.

Since we’re pretty sure it’s sometime today, I suggest that it might be a good idea if somebody, local, state, or federal, made a quick run up to Charlottesville before the pride and joy of the University of Virginia, along with a bunch of students and faculty, gets blown to smithereens. We’re more than eight hours into what seems like a day that could live in infamy.

“We’re already on it,” I am assured.

I get back in the Honda.

“Where are we going?” my beloved asks.

“You’re going back to the Prestwould,” I inform her.

“Not fucking likely,” she informs me. “You get to have all the fun. I know you’re headed to Charlottesville, and I’m going with you.”

It does no good to explain that people are very likely to get hurt or killed before this whole mess is over.

She reiterates that she is not budging.

“Well, if you’re going to be so damn bullheaded, the least you can do is drive.”

So she takes the wheel. It’s a little over an hour to C’ville from the farm, time for me to make the newsroom aware of the latest developments.

I call Sarah, because I knew she’d be there bright and early, not one to let a little thing like yesterday’s shooting keep her away.

“Good news,” she says before I can tell her anything. “They’re not going to charge me.”

“Well, they shouldn’t.”

“My thoughts exactly, although the police did give me a stern warning about going around shooting people.”

“Unless they deserve to be shot.”

“They seemed to want to reserve the needs-to-be-shot option for trained professionals.”

“Yeah,” I say, “I understand. It’s like if some civilian tried to tell you he could run a newsroom better than you.” “Not a good analogy. They do that all the time anyhow.” Luther Gates will live, I’m told, but it might not be a very happy life.

“So,” Sarah says, “were you just calling to see how I was doing?”

I inform her that this is not the case.

“Holy fucking shit,” our assistant managing editor says. “The Rotunda? How dare they?”

Sarah is a University of Virginia graduate, and she seems to take special umbrage at the Purifiers’ choice of target.

I explain that it isn’t a certainty, but based on what I’ve found, it seems extremely likely.

She says she’ll dispatch a photographer.

“And I assume you’re on the way too.”

“Already a few miles from the Gum Spring exit. We’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

She asks me if I have any idea when the big bang might occur.

No, I explain. We just figure it’s sometime today.

“The Rotunda,” Sarah repeats. “I’d like to shoot those bastards.”

I note that maybe she’s done enough shooting for one week.

“I only shoot the guilty,” she says.

By the time we get to the exit for the U.Va. campus, it’s after nine. I’ve talked with L.D. once already. He beat us there by about ten minutes.

“It’s a clusterfuck up here, Willie,” he says. “I don’t know if you’re going to be able to get in. But they’re pretty sure they’ve found something.”

The chief is right. I can’t drive any closer to the Rotunda than the parking garage on Emmett Street. It’s about a quarter of a mile away, uphill all the way. Cindy says she doesn’t think I’m allowed to smoke on the campus, or the Grounds as they say up here. While lighting up, I tell her that I think the authorities have bigger issues today than me and my Camels.

It takes a while to get close to the scene. I have to talk my way past all kinds of law enforcement folks, most of whom don’t seem to take my Virginia Press Association card very seriously.

Finally, though, closing on ten o’clock, we are able to make our way to University Avenue, with the Rotunda looming over us to our right. Ahead, a little ways up the hill, I see a cluster of people in law-enforcement uniforms and suits. They are looking toward the Rotunda. More specifically, they seem to be attracted to a vehicle of some kind, parked in the shadow of the building, maybe three hundred yards away.

It is some kind of truck, like the kind you see maintenance crews use to keep college campuses looking so good that nobody minds going into eternal debt just to attend classes there. Whoever drove it up there must have used the brick pathway the truck sits beside.

Once we’re able to sneak and cajole our way into the general vicinity of the cops, I find L.D., who has no jurisdiction here but understandably felt like he should be at the scene anyhow.

“They say somebody left the truck there overnight,” he says, not turning away from it. I notice that we’re standing close to a poplar tree so big that, if something goes boom, maybe we can duck behind it and save ourselves. Or it’ll fall on us. “Nobody saw anybody move it there. It was just there this morning. Nobody knows whose it is. It doesn’t belong to the university.”

I move in front of Cindy, as if that’d help.

What the authorities do know is that the truck isn’t carrying a load of mulch.

What it seems to be packed with, the chief tells me, is ammonium nitrate, aka fertilizer, along with some other stuff that, when it all goes off, is likely to leave a big-ass crater right where the Rotunda won’t be standing anymore.

“It’s like what that McVeigh asshole did in Oklahoma City,” L.D. says. “And from what the feds tell me, it’s just about that big.”

I instinctively start edging back a bit, pulling Cindy with me.

“So what are they doing about it?”

It turns out that there’s one very brave son of a bitch from some federal agency who’s trying to disarm it before he and everything around him is atomized.

I can see him up there. He’s the only one close to the truck. All the faculty and staff anywhere near the Rotunda have been scrambled, along with a goodly number of students, a few hundred of whom are standing maybe one hundred yards in back of us, between us and the bars and joints along the street below.

The crowd seems more giddy than uneasy, confident as only the young can be that nothing bad could possibly happen to them or their beloved campus.

“Do they know what time the thing’s supposed to go off?” I ask.

“They said it was set to go at five minutes until eleven.”

Yeah, that’d be about right, if you were going for maximum death and destruction. Lots of students and faculty pouring out, between classes.

“Bastards,” Cindy observes.

I don’t think the students know the timetable. If they do, they aren’t terribly concerned. The cops are having a hell of a time keeping them at least marginally out of harm’s way.

I look at my watch: 10:46.

“C’mon, man,” I hear the chief mutter.

And then, when I look up, the guy is rising from the underside of the truck. He gives the thumbs-up.

A big roar arises from the students behind us, who’ll maybe think more kindly of people with badges, for the next day or two at least.

An impressive array of media folk has gotten word of our little drama. By the time I work my way through the advancing students and get to the base of the Rotunda steps, there are at least half a dozen TV camera crews here, plus several still photographers. I see our guy Chip Grooms, among them. There are reporters from all the TV stations and the local paper plus the Washington Post guy who’s their one-man Richmond bureau.

Nothing like a dramatic news story with a happy ending, except maybe one with an unhappy ending.

The FBI’s lead guy is holding forth in front of the Rotunda, five steps from the bottom. In typically gracious federal employee fashion, he says the bureau got a lead this morning from a source and closed in quickly to save the day. He doesn’t mention, quelle surprise!, that the tip came from a tired-ass newspaper reporter who found something the G-men had overlooked.

Somebody asks if they know who the perpetrators are.

This leads to a groan or two from the idiot’s compatriots. Anybody with a working brain knows Purity has been planning this little fireworks display, had already taken credit for it prematurely, as a matter of fact.

I ask a question.

“Have Randall Heil or any of the Purifiers been apprehended?”

The fed frowns.

“We are working on that right now. I can’t talk about it, because it’s …”

“… an ongoing investigation.” I complete the sentence for him. He does not seem appreciative.

Well, the sun is shining, nobody died, and the Rotunda is still standing. Not a bad day, considering the alternative.

But those guys are still out there.

A student has just returned to stand outside his room on the Lawn, where they let the really smart kids live in nineteenth-century squalor. I ask him if I can borrow the chair that’s next to him.

He’s accommodating. I file what I can for our online readers while he gives Cindy a tour of his modest dwelling.

“Were they really going to blow up the Rotunda?” he asks when they come out.

“That was the plan,” I tell him.

“Man,” he says, “why didn’t they stop those guys sooner? We could’ve been killed.”

It probably does no good, but I do point out to him that his glass is a good bit more than half full this fine day.

My biggest coup probably is getting an interview with the guy who actually defused the bomb. The chief fed, who does not seem to really like me much, pulls me aside and asks if I’d like to talk to the guy. Solo.

“Our way of saying, ‘thank you’,” he says, leaving me uncharacteristically speechless.

The guy, who’s with Homeland Security, is maybe ten years older than the college kids watching the drama unfold like it was a damn football game. He is a tad on the laconic side. You’d expect that of someone who makes a living doing something that gets yourself and a lot of other people killed if you do it wrong. He probably has a pulse rate of forty.

“How big a hole would it have made if that thing had gone off?” I ask.

“Oh,” he says, “if it’d exploded, there’d probably be eighteenth-century bricks raining all over Charlottesville.”

He estimates that the crater would have been about fifty feet deep, “but that’s just an estimate.”

I have to ask:

“Don’t you get nervous, doing what you do?”

He frowns at me.

“Nervous? Hell, no. What’s to be nervous about? If I screw up, I won’t be alive long enough to suffer.”

He says he’s already done two tours of Iraq. He’s seen a bomb or two.

“When one of these things does go off, it can mess up our whole damn day.”

As Cindy and I are getting ready to hoof it back to Richmond so I can start filling up some column inches for tomorrow’s paper, I see L.D. among the law enforcement types. He and they look more animated than they should, I think. I see several of them talking on their cell phones and moving rather briskly.

“What is it?” I ask the chief.

He stops for a moment, considering the downside of telling a nosy-ass reporter anything.

“They think they’ve got a bead on them,” he says.

I ask for details.

“Some farmer, over at the store at Zion Crossroads, called the cops and said he’d seen a couple of guys who looked like the description of the Purifiers, turning down a county road just south of there off US 250.

Holy shit. The coincidence is too great to be a coincidence.

“L.D.,” I say, “would you like to know where exactly those bastards are right now?”

I was all set to take Cindy to the Riverside for the best burgers in the state of Virginia. I tell her she’s going to have to wait.

“Quit your bitching,” I advise. “You were the one who insisted on coming with me.”