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building them, he’d taken them out in the country, deep in the woods, buried them, and fired them from fifty feet away, with a variety of triggers. There’d been a thump, which he’d felt more than heard, but the thump had proved the pudding: he could do it.
    The bombs worked.
    After that, the bomb-making was the least of it. Everything he needed to know about switches he could find on the Internet, with parts and supplies at Home Depot.
    Getting into the Pye Pinnacle had been simple enough; in fact, he’d done it twice, once, in rehearsal, and the second time, for real.
    Having the bomb go off too early . . .
    He’d made the assumption that a ferociously efficient major corporation would have run their board meetings with the same efficiency. When he learned that the board members had been in the next room drinking—the Detroit newspaper hadn’t said they were drinking, but had implied it clearly enough—he’d been more disgusted than anything, even more disgusted than disappointed. What was the world coming to? Cocktails at nine o’clock in the morning? All of them?
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    THE SECOND BOMB, planted at the construction site, had been much, much better. Everything had gone strictly according to plan. He’d come in from the back of the site, carrying the bolt cutters, the pry bar, a flashlight, and the bomb. In his bow-hunting camo, he was virtually invisible.
    The trailer had two doors: a screen door, not locked, and an inner wooden door, which was locked. He’d forced the inner door, cracking the wood at the lock. Inside, he’d set up the bomb in the light of the flashlight. When he was ready to go, he’d flashed the light once around the inside of the trailer, and caught the reflection off the lens of a security camera.
    There had been no effort to hide it. If it worked in the infrared . . .
    He was wearing a face mask, another standard bow-hunting accessory, but he disliked the idea of leaving the camera. He walked back to it, got behind it, and pried it off the wall. A wire led out of the bottom of it, and he traced it to a closet, and inside, found a computer server, which didn’t seem to have any connection going out.
    The server was screwed to the floor, but the floor was weak, and he pried it up and carried both the server and the camera outside.
    The rest of it had taken two minutes: he placed the bomb on the floor next to the door, reaching around the door, and then led the wires from the blasting cap under the door, and then closed the door.
    The switch was a mousetrap, a method he’d read about on the Net. One wire was attached to the spring, the other to the top of the trap’s wooden base. A piece of fish line led from the trap’s trigger to the inside doorknob on the screen door. When the door was opened, the trap would snap, the two ends of the copper wire would slam together, completing the circuit, and boom .
    Which was exactly what happened.
    He remembered walking away from the trailer, thinking about the lottery aspect of it: Who would it be, who would open the door? Some minimum-wage asshole hired to pour the concrete? Or maybe the building architect?
    He’d tracked through the night, enjoying himself, until he got to the river. The camera and server were awkward, carrying them with all the tools he’d brought for the break-in, pushing through the brush along the track. He listened for a minute, then threw the server and the camera out into the middle of the river, a nice deep pool, and continued through the dark to his car.

    HE HAD THE TECHNIQUE, he had the equipment, he had the balls.
    Thinking about the earlier missions, he smiled again.
    This night would take perhaps even more balls, and he looked forward to it. Creeping through the dark, wiring it up . . .
    One thing: if a single dog barked, he was out of there. The first target was on the edge of town, not many people around. He’d spotted a parking place, at