Revenant

Chapter 25

If there's one thing you don't ever want to rush, its putting together an explosive device.

Oh sure, right after my encounter with GQ I was definitely moving quickly. I was zipping around my apartment a bit faster, packing up things of import, hurriedly gathering this and that, my mind frantically racing through some of the more likely scenarios I might have to deal with that evening. However, by the time I'd entered The Room and was seated at my workbench I was calm and relaxed, moving at the sort of slow, measured pace that would have frustrated a three-toed sloth.

I'm never, ever sloppy or cavalier when it comes to the building of bombs or the handling of their raw materials. This is because I've seen first hand what happens to people who do get sloppy, or fail to treat explosives with the respect they're due.

The first thing I did was consider exactly what sort of explosive to use. If this were an ordinary job I would have gone with C4 or Semtex, but I knew both of those are manufactured in such a way that they leave a very specific, very traceable chemical signature behind. I figured I needed something different than run-of-the-mill plastic explosives, because finding trace evidence of that nature at the blast site that would most certainly raise some suspicions. Oh sure, any explosion is suspicious, but some can be more suspicious than others.

In the end, I opted to go with Tovex, a fairly common alternative to TNT. It's an ammonium nitrate gel explosive mixed with aluminum powder in order to sustain a longer positive blast wave, which makes the resulting explosion stronger and more powerful. All of the actual explosive agent gets used up upon detonation with that stuff, and any traceable chemical residue left behind would be consistent with industrial demolition material, which would likely cause investigators to waste a fair chunk of time ruling out some sort of unfortunate shipping accident or other work-related mishap. Not the most common thing to happen down at the docks, but it does happen.

Once I'd decided on the payload, I gathered up all of the other necessary bomb components and spent the better part of a nerve-jangling afternoon putting the whole thing together. Really, there's not much more to say about it than that - it's not exactly riveting stuff, nor is it particularly fun or description-worthy. Suffice it to say that I'm both very careful around explosives, and I'm quite good at my job, thus I didn't end up blowing myself or my apartment to smithereens.

As boring as that summary may sound, I suppose it is worthwhile to mention that whenever I'm building a bomb I usually lock myself up tight inside The Room, and I always make certain I've left one of the windows open for Myrrh, because you just never know.

In the end what I ended up with was a featureless twenty-eight pound wooden cube roughly the same size as two boot boxes. The inner-workings were pretty standard - remotely armed, remotely detonated, core tightly packed in an aluminum case, and with lots of loose metal lining the outside to ensure there would be plenty of shrapnel zipping away from it at roughly five kilometers per second. It possessed everything necessary in order to call it a 'bomb'.

To me, however, the most important thing about this particular bomb was the featureless wooden structure that housed it, the fact that it didn't actually look like a bomb.

Putting together an explosive device that actually looks like a bomb is one of those things I don't think I'll ever understand. It may seem pretty obvious when you think about it, but here it is anyway; if your plan hinges on someone standing right next to something that is going to explode, putting together a suspicious-looking device that looks like it might explode is kind of counter-productive.

Oh sure, if you cracked this particular wooden box open and took a peek inside, you'd probably think to yourself "Hey, that's a bomb!" and make a point of hurriedly getting someplace far, far away from it. However, given that this box had no lid, and that the only way someone could see inside of this wooden cube was to smash it open, the likelihood of that sort of chance discovery was almost zero.