By this time both twins had gotten the message. The lieutenant could see the recognition, an identical expression in both pairs of eyes. Then came the decision. The two pairs of eyes were guarded for a moment as they considered how to do it. Then they became serene. Both Pattersons nodded, and that was that.
“You boys be careful now. Jail can be a very dangerous place.” The lieutenant rose to summon the jailer. If asked, he’d say that – after getting their permission to talk to them without a lawyer present, of course – he’d wanted to ask them about a robbery in which the Pattersons had not been involved, but about which they might have some knowledge, and that he had offered them some help with the DA in return for their assistance. Alas, they’d professed no knowledge of the robbery in question, and after less than five minutes of conversation, he’d sent them back to their cell. Should they ever refer to the actual content of the conversation, it would be the word of two career criminals with an open-and-shut murder charge hanging over their heads against the word of a police lieutenant. At most that would result in a page-five story in the Mobile Register, which took rather a stern line on violent crime. And they could scarcely confess to a double murder whether done at police behest or not, could they?
The lieutenant was an honorable man, and immediately went to work to hold up his end of the bargain in anticipation of the fact that the Pattersons would do the same. Of the four bullets removed from the body of Elrod McIlvane, one was unusable for ballistic-matching purposes due to its distortion-unjacketed lead bullets are very easily damaged – and the others, though good enough for the criminal case, were borderline. The lieutenant ordered the bullets removed from evidence storage for re-examination, along with the examiner’s notes and the photographs. He had to sign for them, of course, to maintain “chain of evidence.” This legal requirement was written to ensure that evidence used in a trial, once taken from the crime scene or elsewhere and identified as significant, was always in a known location and under proper custody. It was a safeguard against the illicit manufacture of incriminating evidence. When a piece of evidence got lost, even if it were later recovered, it could never be used in a criminal case, since it was then tainted. He walked down to the laboratory area, but found the technicians leaving to go home. He asked the ballistics expert if he could recheck the Patterson Case bullets first thing Monday morning, and the man replied, sure, one of the matches was a little shaky, but, he thought, close enough for trial purposes. He didn’t mind doing a recheck, though.
The policeman walked back to his office with the bullets. The manila envelope which held them was labeled with the case number, and since it was still in proper custody, duly signed for by the lieutenant, chain of evidence had not yet been violated. He made a note on his desk blotter that he didn’t want to leave them in his desk over the weekend, and would take them home, keeping the whole package locked in his combination-locked briefcase. The lieutenant was fifty-three years old, and within four months of retirement with full benefits. Thirty years of service was enough, he thought, looking forward to getting full use from his fishing boat. He could scarcely retire in good conscience leaving two cop-killers with eight years of soft time.
The influx of drug money to Colombia has produced all manner of side effects and one of them, in a stunningly ironic twist, is that the Colombian police had obtained a new and very sophisticated crime lab. Residue from the Untiveros house was run through the usual series of chemical tests, and within a few hours it had been determined that the explosive agent had been a mixture of cyclotetramethylenetetranitramine and trinitrotoluene. Known more colloquially as HMX and TNT, when combined in a 70-30 mixture, the chemist wrote, they formed an explosive compound called Octol, which, he wrote on, was a rather expensive, very stable, and extremely violent high explosive made principally in the United States, but available commercially from American, European, and one Asian chemical company. And that ended his work for the day. He handed over his report to his secretary, who faxed it to Medellín, where another secretary made a Xerox copy, which found its way twenty minutes later to Félix Cortez.
The report was yet another piece in the puzzle for the former intelligence officer. No local mining operation used Octol. It was too expensive, and simple nitrate-based explosive gels were all that commercial applications required. If you needed a larger explosive punch to loosen rocks, you simply drilled a wider hole and crammed in more explosives. The same option did not exist, however, for military forces. The size of an artillery shell was limited by the diameter of the gun barrel, and the size of a bomb was limited by the aerodynamic drag it imposed on the aircraft that carried it. Therefore, military organizations were always looking for more powerful explosives to get better performance from their size-limited weapons. Cortez lifted a reference book from his library shelf and confirmed the fact that Octol was almost exclusively a military explosive… and was used as a triggering agent for nuclear devices. That evoked a short bark of a laugh.
It also explained a few things. His initial reaction to the explosion was that a ton of dynamite had been used. The same result could be explained by less than five hundred kilos of this Octol. He pulled out another reference book and learned that the actual explosive weight in a two-thousand-pound bomb was under one thousand pounds.
But why were there no fragments? More than half the weight of a bomb was in the steel case. Cortez set that aside for the moment.
An aircraft bomb explained much. He remembered his training in Cuba, when North Vietnamese officers had briefed his class on “smart-bombs” that had been the bane of their country’s bridges and electrical generating plants during the brief but violent Linebacker-II bombing campaign in 1972. After years of costly failures, the American fighter-bombers had destroyed scores of heavily defended targets in a matter of days, using their new precision-guided munitions.
If targeted on a truck, such a bomb would give every appearance of a car bomb, wouldn’t it?
But why were there no fragments? He reread the lab report. There had also been cellulose residue which the lab tech explained away as the cardboard containers in which the explosives had been packed.
Cellulose? That meant paper or wood fibers, didn’t it? Make a bomb out of paper? Cortez lifted one of his reference books – Jane’s Weapons Systems. It was a heavy book with a hard, stiff cover… cardboard, covered with cloth. It really was that simple, wasn’t it? If you could make paper that strong for so prosaic a purpose as a book binding…
Cortez leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette to congratulate himself – and the norteamericanos. It was brilliant. They’d sent a bomber armed with a special smart-bomb, targeted it on that absurd truck, and left nothing behind that could remotely be called evidence. He wondered who had come up with this plan, amazed that the Americans had done something so intelligent. The KGB would have assembled a company of Spetznaz commandos and fought a conventional infantry battle, leaving all manner of evidence behind and “delivering the message” in a typically Russian way, which was effective but lacking in subtlety. The Americans for once had managed the sort of subtlety worthy of a Spaniard – of a Cortez, Félix chuckled. That was remarkable.
Now he had the “How.” Next he had to figure out the “What For.” But of course! There had been that American newspaper story about a possible gang war. There had been fourteen senior Cartel lords. Now there were ten. The Americans would try to reduce that number further by… what? Might they assume that the single bombing incident would ignite a savage war of infighting? No, Cortez decided. One such incident wasn’t enough. Two might be, but not one.
So the Americans had commando teams prowling the mountains south of Medellín, had dropped one bomb, and were doing something else to curtail the drug flights. That became clear as well. They were shooting the airplanes down, of course. They had people watching airfields and forwarding their intelligence information elsewhere for action. It was a fully integrated operation. The most incredible thing of all was that it was actually working. The Americans had decided to do something that worked. Now, that was miraculous. For all the time he had been an intelligence officer, CIA had been reasonably effective at gathering information, but not for actually doing something.