When the number of students had dwindled to a trickle, he walked casually up the sidewalk into the building and into the administrative offices. A middle-aged woman with thick glasses and a negative expression sat behind the counter.
“Ms. Laramie needs some paper for the copy machine near her office,” the student said.
“That machine was filled up yesterday,” the woman replied.
The student shrugged. “I was staying late to catch up on some work I've missed, and she asked me to get some copy paper from the supply closet in the hall. It was locked.”
“Of course, it's locked,” the woman snorted. “We keep it locked all the time.”
The student attempted to be respectful. “Do you have a key I could borrow?”
“Yes, I guess so.” The woman selected a key from a pegboard on the wall behind the counter. “Bring it back before you take her the paper. And make sure you lock the door behind you.”
The key in his hand, the student walked down the hallway to the supply room. He unlocked the door and went inside. The storage closet contained boxes of paper, toner, and chemicals for all the copy machines in the school. It was located in the center of the buildings that made up the campus and was well stocked with supplies. There must have been a recent delivery. The student took a ream of paper from an open box. As he closed the door, he was careful not to push in the button that engaged the locking mechanism.
Paper in hand, he returned to the office. The aide was on the phone, so he put the key on the counter.
As he was leaving, she hung up the receiver and called out, “Wait!”
The student froze for a second before turning around.
“Tell Ms. Laramie to complete a requisition form for that paper and turn it in to the office tomorrow. We have to account for every sheet.”
“Uh, okay.”
The bomber returned to his vehicle and put the largest of his three components in an old backpack that he hadn't used in a couple of years. Hoisting it on his shoulders he went back inside the school and walked directly to the supply room. He was about to open the door when a science teacher came around the corner. Their eyes met. The student had sat in the back row of the teacher's class in ninth grade. He could tell the teacher recognized his face and wondered if he had forgotten his name.
“Taking a lot of books home, aren't you?” the teacher asked.
“Yeah, I've been out some in the past couple of weeks.”
The student took a few more steps forward, opened a locker that had been left ajar, and pretended to be looking for something. It belonged to a girl who had covered the inside with pictures of herself and her boyfriend. The teacher passed, and the hallway was clear. The bomber returned to the supply closet and went inside. He put his load behind the boxes, then started to leave. He stopped and picked up another ream of paper. Coming from the supply closet empty-handed would be out of the ordinary; carrying paper would not arouse suspicion. Several students passed him in the hallway. No one paid any attention to him.
In a few minutes, he returned with his second load of explosive material. This time he made his delivery without interruption. After depositing the material, he picked up a bottle of toner and walked down the hallway and out of the building to the parking lot. This was his last load. He carefully placed the detonator, the power source, and a digital clock in the backpack. He opened a zippered pouch and put in a screwdriver, pliers, and wire strippers.
Once again, the hall was deserted. He pulled on the doorknob. This time it didn't open. He pulled harder and tried to turn the knob. The door didn't budge. He must have locked the door by mistake. The student silently swore and debated his next step. There was only one thing to do. He had to go back to the office and get the key.
The office aide was still at her post. The student tried to adopt a nonchalant attitude that was completely at odds with his feelings and appearance.
“I'm back again,” he said. “The light on the copier that shows that the machine is low on toner came on. I saw some bottles of toner in the supply room when I got the paper.”
“We don't give toner to students,” the woman replied. “I'll make a note and have someone service the machine tomorrow. Tell Ms. Laramie to use a different copy machine. She can bring the material here to the office if she wants to.”
Stymied, the student went back into the hallway. The explosive material was inside the supply room ready to be activated, but without the key he couldn't close the circle of destruction. He went to his locker and opened the door. He considered putting the backpack in the locker until another opportunity. But each day would increase the chance that the explosive material in the supply closet would be discovered. If only he'd made sure not to lock the door.
At that moment the bomber got a break.
A female student came out of the administrative offices and walked directly to the supply closet. The bomber closed his locker door and drew closer. In the student's hand was the key. She unlocked the door and went inside. The bomber appeared in the doorway.
“I need to get some paper for Ms. Laramie,” he said.
At the sound of his voice, the student jumped. “You scared me.”
The bomber ignored her reaction. “You can take the key back to the office,” he said. “I'll lock the door.”
The female student left. He went inside and shut the door. Moving the boxes to the side, he sat down on the floor and began connecting the detonator to the two power sources and the packets of explosive. He had practiced the procedure many times in the private place where he kept the components of the bomb, but to do it for real made him perspire. He had memorized the function of each colored wire. It was an exciting moment when he got out the clock and prepared the final connections. Included in the configuration were several dummy wires that served no function and two tripwires that would automatically cause the bomb to detonate if an effort was made to disarm it. He took a deep breath and looked over the assembled device. It was beautiful. Everything was neat and organized. He wired the clock to the detonator and checked his watch. Holding his fingers on the buttons, he advanced the numbers to the correct settings. He released his control. The time flashed and began its downward descent. The bomb was alive.
In less than twenty-four hours the clock would reach zero. There would be a faint click followed by an earth-shattering boom that no one within two hundred feet of the copy room would ever remember. The secondary effects of the explosion farther away from the supply room were harder to predict, but he knew that the effect of falling debris would be significant. Now that the bomb was operational, the student didn't want to leave. He wanted to sit with the bomb, watch the clock, and anticipate the moment of detonation. He carefully double-checked every connection. Three minutes had already passed. He knew he had to leave. He arranged several boxes of paper and chemicals so that everything was concealed. He wouldn't see it again until he stood in the midst of the firestorm that would destroy everything and everyone in its path.
A date which will live in infamy.
F
RANKLIN
D
ELANO
R
OOSEVELT
E
ach day dawns filled with the unknown. Sometimes a day arrives pregnant with anticipated importance. At other times, a routine day takes on a significance that no one anticipated. But most days are neutralâ neither good nor bad, notable or memorable.
There had been many Wednesdays at Catawba High School since public education began in Blanchard County. Wednesday usually held no special place in the school calendar. It wasn't a Monday when the week's activities were communicated through faculty memos and homeroom meetings, or a Friday filled with tests during the day and athletic contests at night. Wednesday was a vanilla segment of twenty-four hours.
When Tao arrived at the school, he went to the cleaning closet to retrieve his copy of the yearbook. He'd spent several days praying for the same two students and wanted to ask the Lord if he had another assignment for him. The yearbook was gone. The janitor carefully looked behind the bottles and jugs in the closet but couldn't find it. Puzzled, he went into the break room where the maintenance staff ate lunch to see if he had left the book on the table. It wasn't there either. It was time to begin work. The search for the yearbook would have to wait.
Tao had time to clean two rest rooms before the students arrived for the school day. When he finished, the sinks shone, the floor was spotless, and the mirrors didn't have any streaks. He would clean two other rest rooms after the students left in the afternoon.
Dr. Lassiter had a breakfast meeting with the local Kiwanis club and arrived at the school later than usual. On a chair in his office were Tao's yearbook and the piece of paper left by Larry Sellers. The principal repeated the process of comparing the names on the list to the missing pictures in the book and decided Larry should call a meeting of the janitorial staff and ask about this yearbook.
Lester Garrison returned to school. Before opening his locker, he looked up and down the hallway. No one was paying attention to him. News of Monday's events in court had not yet filtered out into the school population. Soon, what the students at Catawba High School said or thought about him wouldn't matter.
Kay used her morning free period to decorate the faculty dining room for the lunch with Scott and the mock trial students. At 12:05 P.M. she would stop by the dining room for a last-minute check before meeting Scott at the office.
Frank Jesup Jr. called the school office and told the woman who answered the phone that he was sick. It was a true statement. The night before Frank had stayed up late to battle his unseen on-line adversaries. He didn't hold back. There was no use concealing his best strategies any longer, and it was a time of major victory for him. He tracked down his most formidable adversary and cut him to pieces in a deluge of blood-red images. The enemy signed off with a string of profanity and threats about the future. Frank didn't respond. In his mind, success had been a foregone conclusion.
The weakest link in Frank's plan was the possibility that the boxes of paper or supplies might be removed late Tuesday afternoon or early Wednesday morning and the bomb discovered. This almost happened at 10:45 A.M. on Wednesday. The copy machine in the athletic offices was out of paper, and Coach Leonard sent two boys to get a couple of boxes of paper. They stopped by the office to borrow a key.
“Make sure he files a requisition form,” the aide said. “I'm tired of people getting paper and not reporting it.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“What's her problem?” one of the boys asked when they were back in the hall.
Each student picked up a box of paper. When the second box was removed, it exposed the face of the clock that was resting on the floor.
One of the boys noticed the red numbers and said, “Someone left a clock in here.”
“Leave it alone,” the other student responded. “Coach Leonard told us to get two boxes of paper. That's it.”
They closed the door and returned the key. The door was unlocked.
While Kay made last-minute preparations for the luncheon and Tao helped set up chairs in the gym, the clock connected to the detonator steadily counted down the minutes and seconds. As his last act on the computer, Frank ran a set of several computer projections of the damage the bomb might cause. The results ranged from partial destruction of building A to total destruction of buildings A, B, and the cafeteria. In his mock-up, he also predicted the appearance of the high school from the air after detonation. He left the pages beside his computer.
Frank hadn't seen his father in two days. Frank Sr. was spending almost every night at his girlfriend's condominium. Vivian Jesup had left a message on the answering machine that she wouldn't be bringing Jodie by for her scheduled visit. She didn't give a reason. Frank didn't care what they did. They had no control over him; he held his future in his own hands.
At 11:45 A.M. he walked out of the house carrying a duffel bag that contained an old, single-shot deer rifle that had belonged to his grandfather. He sat in the driveway for several minutes before starting his car's engine. Frank didn't know anything about the list of names on the wrinkled sheet of paper in Dr. Lassiter's office. It had been prepared as a prank by a tenth grader who picked all but one of the names at random and slipped the note into the locker of a classmate whose name he put at the top of the list. That student never saw the page because it fell out of his locker the first time he opened it. It was then kicked around the hallway for a couple of days before becoming lodged in the doorway of the cleaning closet.
Frank could have prepared a list, but his act was general, not specific. If he saw a few individuals that particularly deserved extermination, he would use the rifle. Otherwise, he trusted in the impersonal selection process of the bomb and would fire gunshots at random.
Frank knew that he didn't have to go to the school. The bomb was in place, and the devastation and death it would produce would not be significantly affected by his presence. He could easily dispose of the para- phernalia that might link him to the blast and casually watch the report on the national news shows later in the evening. But Frank didn't want anonymity. He wanted his act to be connected with his name. Frank would be dead, but he knew that after today, his name would not be forgotten. He didn't want to live and read about his deed. He wanted to stand in the fire.
He started the car and backed out of the driveway.
As the morning progressed, Tao became slightly agitated. He took out one of the pictures he was carrying in his pocket and looked at it. It was a young man. He studied the student's features. He was a good-looking boy, but as always the eyes revealed the heart. The eyes told Tao that the student was troubled. How deeply was not clear. So, he prayed. The agitation didn't leave. Tao wanted to be alone, but it was over an hour before his lunch break. He didn't know how to ask his supervisor for permission to take an early lunch.