Read Shock Wave for Free Online Page A

sensitive, but no more so than ordinary shotgun primers, which tens of thousands of people had sitting around in their houses—there were whole racks of them at sporting goods stores.
    No, the pieces were essentially inert, until they got put together. Then, watch out.
    He’d taken hours to make each of the first few bombs, until he got some traction. He’d done his research on the Internet, and figured out his materials. He’d cracked the supply shed at Segen Sand & Gravel in the middle of the night and removed the cases of Pelex and the boxes of blasting caps. He’d been sweating blood when he did that, his first real crime, creeping around the countryside in camo and a mask. After all the planning and preparation, and after an aborted approach when a couple kids parked in the quarry entrance to neck, the break-in had been routine. The explosives shed had been secured with nothing more than a big padlock.
    He’d found the bomb pipe under a cabin at a lakeside resort, where it had been dumped years before, when the owner put in plastic pipe. He got that at night, too, and had taken it down to the college for the cut. That had taken a little gall, but he hadn’t committed himself to anything at that point, and when the cutting went off without a hitch, he was good. If he’d been caught, he would have said he was making fence posts, and then started over....
    His first bombs were small. He didn’t need a big bang to know that they worked. When he finished 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?
     
     
    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