Tick Tock - James Patterson [6]
In the center of the table was what looked like a white laptop. Then I saw the nails and wires and claylike plastique explosive where the keyboard should have been, and shivered.
On the screen, the chilling and redundant words I AM A BOMB flashed on and off before the scrolling message:
THIS WASN’T SUPPOSED TO GO BOOM, BUT THE NEXT ONE WILL. I SWEAR IT ON POOR LAWRENCE’S EYES.
“This guy has style,” Cell said, looking almost admiringly at the bomb. “It’s basically like a Claymore mine. Two K’s of plastique behind all these nails, one huge mother of a shotgun shell. All wired to a nifty motion-sensitive mercury switch, only the second one I’ve ever seen. He even glued it to the desk so someone would have to open it and spill the mercury.”
“How… interactive of him,” I said, shaking my head.
By far, my least favorite part of the message was the ominous reference to the next one. I was afraid of that. It looked like somebody wanted to play a little game with the NYPD. Considering I was on vacation, unless it was beach ball, I really wasn’t that interested in games.
“He used a real light touch with a soldering gun to wire it up to the battery. He must know computers as well, because even though the hard drive is missing, he was able to program his little greeting card through the computer’s firmware internal operating system.”
“Why didn’t it go off?” I said.
“He cut one of the wires and capped both ends in order for it not to go off, thank God. Security guy said the room was packed, like it is every Saturday. This would have killed a dozen people easily, Mike. Maybe two dozen. The blast wave itself from this much plastique could collapse a house.”
We stared silently at the scrolling message.
“It almost sounds like a poem, doesn’t it?” Cell said.
“Yeah,” I said, taking out my BlackBerry and speed-dialing my boss. “I’ve even seen the style before. It’s called psychotic pentameter.”
“Tell me what we got, Mike,” Miriam said a moment later.
“Miriam,” I said, staring at the flashing I AM A BOMB. “What we got here is a problem.”
Chapter 6
THE ALEXANDER HOTEL just off Madison on 44th was understaffed, overpriced, and excessively seedy. All the grim, peeling walls, off-white towels, and pot smoke and piss stench $175 a night could buy.
Sitting cross-legged on the desk that he’d moved in front of his top-floor room’s window, Berger slowly panned his camera across the columns and entablatures of the landmark marble library seventeen stories below.
The $11,000 Nikkor super-zoom lens attached to his 35-millimeter digital camera could make faces distinguishable at up to a mile. At a block and a half, with the incredibly vivid magnification, Berger could see the sweat droplets on the first responders’ nervous faces.
Beside him on the desk was a laptop, a digital stopwatch, and a legal tablet filled with the neat shorthand notes he’d been taking for the past several hours. Evacuation procedures. Response times. He’d left the window open so that he could hear the sirens, immerse himself in the confusion on the street.
He was meticulously photographing the equipment inside the open back door of the Bomb Squad van when someone knocked on the door. Freaking, Berger swung immediately off the desk. He lifted something off the bed as he passed. It was a futuristic-looking Austrian Steyr AUG submachine gun, all thirty 5.56 NATO rounds already cocked, locked, and ready to rock.
“Yes?” Berger said as he lifted the assault rifle to his shoulder.
“Room service. The coffee you ordered, sir,” said a voice behind the door.
No way anyone could be onto him this quickly! Had someone in another