“Office,” she said.
We went up to the second floor and pooched through his office. And by pooched, I mean we tore it apart. In filing cabinets, we found trusts and estates folders, take-home work from his job probably. One of the walls was covered with photos of Francis at high-profile charity events. There were quite a few framed Vanity Fair and Avenue magazine pages. A business card in a side drawer said Mooney was something called a Philanthropy Consultant. To high-net-worth individuals, no doubt, by the gala events he was often photographed at.
One of the commandos called to us excitedly from downstairs.
“I think I found something, Em,” Chow said as we arrived in the basement. He pointed his gun-barrel-mounted flashlight at an open door. I reached in and flicked on the light switch.
I stood there, blinking, but not at the light. Against cement walls stood stack upon stack of newspapers and books. They were six feet high in some places. It looked like a pretty eclectic collection. There was a whole section of anti-Bush nonfiction. Well-thumbed tomes of Spinoza. A book called Quantum Geometry of Bosonic Strings sat on top of an autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I spotted some French-language Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville volumes that had margin notes handwritten in French. There were many books by Jean-Paul Sartre and the modern French philosopher Michel Foucault.
“This guy might be a killer and a kook,” Emily said, “but at least he’s a well-read one.”
In a metal filing cabinet drawer we found a laptop. Emily pulled on surgical gloves before she turned it on. The laptop’s whole screen was filled with numbered Word documents.
Emily clicked on a random one. It was random, all right.
“‘They must be shown,’” she read. “‘Communication is futile. Like Malcolm X, I, too, am branded with the philosophy of any-means-necessary. I, too, am a free-willed, informed human being who has gifts that transcend the ordinary. I, too, have responsibilities that transcend the ordinary. I, too, have—’”
“‘A mental disease that transcends the ordinary,’” I finished for her.
“It goes on and on,” Emily said, scrolling with the mouse. “Oh, my God, it’s five hundred pages. There must be a hundred of these documents. It’ll take months to dredge through this nonsense.”
That’s when we heard the barking.
It was the bomb dog. He was at the top of the basement stairs, barking down at us, going absolutely crazy.
“I don’t think he needs to be walked,” Chow yelled. “Clear it! Now! Everybody out!”
He didn’t have to tell us twice. We were across the cordoned-off street on the safe side of the SWAT truck when the bomb guys came out ten minutes later. Each of them was holding a cardboard box.
The older, mustached bomb tech waved me over to the back of his van. I swallowed. I didn’t think he was inviting me to tailgate with him.
“Better you than me, Mike,” Emily said, sticking her fingers in her ears.
“Found it in the crawl space next to the basement office,” the bomb cop said as I approached. I gingerly looked into the box he was holding. Inside was a stack of long white blocks that looked like they were made of Crisco.
“Relax. It’s C-four,” the veteran cop said with a dismissive wave. “Well, actually, I’m pretty sure it’s PE-four, the very similar British version of the plastic explosive. It’s totally stable. You could play stickball with it. Hell, you could light it on fire and nothing would happen. Nothing happens unless you wire it to . . .”
He paused while he showed me the other box, which contained a reel of what looked like thick green clothesline.
“A detonator. This one here is called Cordtex. It looks like rope, acts like rope, but it has an explosive core that makes it one long mother of a blasting cap. You can fell a tree with six feet of it. Or a building if you connect it with enough of the PE-four from box number one.”
The bomb cop stroked his mustache and sighed in a way that raised the hair on the back of my neck.
“What?” I said.
“The problem is the box,” he said.
“The box?” I said.
“The PE-four came in a twenty-five-pound box. There’s only six or seven pounds here. Also, I’d say about half the reel of det cord is missing.”
I didn’t have a mustache, so I rubbed my temples instead as I turned and took in the 360-degree city vista of buildings and buses and pedestrians. Targets as far as the eye could see. Mooney could be anywhere at all.
“Shit,” I said.
“You said it,” the bomb cop said.
Chapter 79