The Sacrifice (7 page)

For now, this would be a meeting between the Bomb Squad and the Homicide Squad. Koesler would be kept on ice. He would be needed later.

“There's no doubt, “ Lloyd stated, “where the seat of the blast occurred.”

“The altar,” Tully observed.

“Check.”

“What did he use?”

“Gimme a break. We just got here.”
Detectives!
thought Lloyd;
they want everything yesterday. If we gave 'em what they wanted when they wanted it, they'd still have only half a package.
From experience, he'd learned the simplest way to handle a dedicated professional such as Tully was to take the detective along on the painstaking investigation. He invited Tully, who invited Koesler; the three made up a small procession.

They started at the “seat of the blast”—the altar. The Bomb Squad had already begun its work, starting at the altar and fanning out in concentric circles, establishing the perimeter of the blast.

So far, they had established that the force of the blast had not traveled beyond the front of the altar area. The space between the altar and the first pew was not affected. Dust and debris had settled over the surface, but no damage had been done. Not even to the many religious statues and paintings outside the altar area.

So, very quickly, the squad had narrowed its focus. Although there was almost no damage in front of the altar, there was plenty of wreckage to the rear of it.

“The perp,” Lloyd pointed out, “must have laid the device against this corner of the altar. You see”—he pointed to his team who had worked themselves to the end of the sanctuary and were checking the walls—“my squad is following the path of the explosion.”

With that, one of the crew brought over a box containing a variety of objects that had been all but pulverized by the blast. He placed the box atop the altar and began to reassemble the pieces as best he could.

“Where'd this stuff come from?” Lloyd asked.

“Pretty much a straight line from this table to the rear of the church.” The officer pointed in an imaginary line to the rear wall.

“Okay,” Lloyd said. “Where are we in here?” He looked expectantly at Koesler. “This part of the church has a name, doesn't it?”

“Sanctuary.”

“Sanctuary. I thought that was a place you could go for safety.”

“The name goes a long way. It can mean a particularly holy place in a church. Or a place where you can be safe from the law—but that's mostly medieval. Or a refuge for wildlife—” Koesler stopped, aware that all this information was considerably more than the bomb expert wanted.

“Yeah, okay …” The other officer was taking notes. As he wrote, he spoke aloud. “… found in direct line from altar to rear of … uh … sanctuary.”

“Let's see what we've got,” said Lloyd.

Both men continued to spread the fragments across the altar top. Koesler noted that it was with a look of satisfaction that Lloyd set certain items apart. “This thing is coming together faster than I thought it would.” Lloyd was enjoying their success and making no bones about it. “This,” he said, “is ‘The Building of a Bomb 101.' I'm looking for a timing device and what do I find? The face of a Big Ben pocket watch. Here's the winding stem.”

“And look here,” the other officer said, “here's a battery and wires.” That said, he headed off in search of additional pieces to fit into the puzzle.

Lloyd's latex-clad fingers turned what was left of the battery over and back again. “Plenty of energy to get this limited job done. From here on, I know what I'm going to be looking for. The whole thing fell into place the instant we found the watch. There was a hole drilled in the face and the face is bent, but there's no doubt it's a Big Ben. And that's what gives this business its character.”

“You're sure?” Tully asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Lloyd responded. “What are you looking for when you find a timing device in a bomb?”

“A time bomb!” Koesler had not realized that the question had been rhetorical as far as the other two were concerned. After a brief, awkward silence, Tully tried to redeem the situation. “That's right, Father: a time bomb.”

Lloyd scratched the day-old stubble on his chin. “This puts me in mind of something …” His voice trailed off as his brow knit in an evident attempt to recall—what?

“You've seen your share of bombs,” Tully said. “Something peculiar about this one?”

“Maybe it's the placement …”

Oddly, this scene rang a bell in Koesler's mind. Having just made a virtual fool of himself answering an obviously rhetorical question, he was in no mood to repeat the performance. But, since neither of the other two was offering the elusive example, he thought he'd get his feet wet again. “Could it be,” he ventured hesitantly, “that attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler?”

Lloyd nodded thoughtfully. “World War II, wasn't it?”

“Yes.” Koesler nodded. “The placement of the bomb. As you said …” He paused to allow one or the other of the officers to continue.

Then he recalled ruefully that the incident had taken place almost sixty years ago—in 1944, toward the closing of the European segment of the war. He couldn't count on either of these younger men coming up with the particulars.

Koesler had a singular reason for remembering this attempted murder of the Austrian-born dictator. He preferred that interpretation of history which posited that the war in Europe would have been over much earlier had not Winston Churchill wanted his pound of flesh. The British Prime Minister wanted to make Germany pay for the destruction it had wreaked on England.

Many Germans, particularly of the military, had grown convinced that the war was lost, and wanted to sue for peace. As part of the bargain, the Germans would eliminate Hitler. When the Allies rejected this offer, a core group of German officers concocted a plan to assassinate the Führer, thus presumably clearing the way for a surrender.

The mechanics of that plot had caught Koesler's memory.

Since it was obvious that neither of the others remembered it clearly. Koesler decided to recount that event. He sensed some relevance to the present situation.

He explained first the German need to eliminate Hitler, then how the plot was supposed to work. “It was early on a July morning and Hitler summoned members of his military high command to a meeting at his field headquarters. One of those summoned was a member of the conspiracy—a Colonel von Stauffenberg, if memory serves.

“Stauffenberg carried a bomb, much the same as we have here. It was in a briefcase. The staff assembled around a huge granite table covered with battle maps. Stauffenberg carefully placed the case containing the bomb against the table leg near where Hitler was standing. Then the colonel casually stepped out of the bunker.

“The bomb exploded shortly after that. Stauffenberg assumed he had carried out his part of the plan and that Hitler was dead.”

“Yeah,” Lloyd said, “but somehow Hitler survived it.”

“Yes, he did. Just before detonation someone had moved the briefcase to a spot farther away from where Hitler was standing. He was burned and bruised, but he was alive. Alive and enraged enough to carry out a purge that wiped out several in his high command, including Field Marshal Rommel—probably his most brilliant general. And Rommel was not even actively involved in the murder plot, although he had known about it.”

“Wow!” Lloyd exclaimed. “What a memory!”

Koesler smiled self-consciously. “It's not so much a good memory. I lived through that era, though, thankfully, not on the spot. I was fifteen at the time it happened. It impressed itself upon me as one of the most memorable incidents in twentieth-century history.

“And,” Koesler continued, addressing Lloyd, “when you talked about where the bomb was positioned, it brought back that memory. I mean, in both cases, the bomb was placed so that it would focalize, sort of, the maximum destruction.”

“So”—Tully had become fascinated with the story and its theories—“the colonel wanted to get rid of Hitler. The others in the headquarters didn't matter. It didn't matter how many got killed as long as Hitler bought it … that the idea?”

“Well, I don't really know about that,” Koesler admitted. “If I recall correctly, there was only one death from the bomb. And, while I don't remember who was killed, it certainly was not the intended victim. So, one fatality. And, I think, ten or eleven others were injured.”

“It must have been a time bomb,” Lloyd observed. “No one was near it to detonate it.”

“I assume that's right.”

Tully began to pace in small circles. “And it didn't reach the intended victim because the briefcase containing the bomb had been moved.”

“Right.”

“And,” Tully continued, “ours was a time bomb.”

“That's what this leads up to.” Lloyd fingered the remains of the bomb. “And—what's this?” One of Lloyd's assistants had presented him with more misshapen debris.

Lloyd nodded. “Just what I was expecting … some pipe and synthetic black powder. The ‘ABCs' of Bomb-Making.” He studied the materials. “Look here: See all these surfaces that look discolored. These areas were originally raised. And the raised surfaces carried information that would be vital in identifying where these pieces were made, how they were delivered. In short, the bomber took great pains to make it near impossible to trace any of this stuff back to him.

“And, if he went to the trouble of filing down the raised surfaces, I'd be willing to bet my pension that there won't be a fingerprint anyplace on this stuff.

“Same undoubtedly will go for where he brought the parts. We'll look into various distributors, retail and wholesale stores. But our guy probably bought the stuff at different stores in different states.

“In short,” Lloyd concluded, “what you see here is probably what you're going to get. It's a time bomb. Very simply constructed. Probably could learn how to put a thing like this together in high school. Also very carefully disguised so it couldn't be traced back to our perp.”

“But it didn't work …” Tully had ceased pacing and was studying the bottom corner of the altar that had been gouged by the blast. “What do you think, Gil? How close do you think this bombing could come to being almost a copy-cat replay of the bomb that was intended to take out Hitler?”

Lloyd resumed scratching the stubble on his chin. “I don't know, Zoo. It would pretty much depend on how powerful the bombs were. We assume Hitler's table was pretty solid. We know what we've got here. We don't know what was put together there. We could try to find out for sure. Maybe the Germans kept some sort of record …”

“Give it a try, would you?” Tully stood and brushed the dust from his suit. “I've got a hunch—although I may never get to check it out. I've got a feeling that the guy who put this together did his homework on that field headquarters and the MO for getting rid of Hitler—”

“But,” Koesler broke in, “neither bombing worked the way it was intended to—” He stopped short; how could he know what the present bomber had intended?

“Well,” Tully said, “we know why the Germans failed: The bomb was moved. As far as the human damage was concerned, the body count was at least one dead and”—he nodded at Koesler—“ten or eleven injured.”

“But our bomb failed,” Lloyd said, “because there wasn't anyone here. Except for that unlucky bast—uh, priest. I saw them carry him out, poor guy. He gonna make it?”

“He was alive when they took him,” Tully said. “But he didn't look good.” He turned to Koesler. “A friend of yours? I saw you talking to him.”

“An old friend,” Koesler said. “I hadn't seen him in ages.” Koesler was startled that Tully had been aware of their conversation. Either the lieutenant was extraordinarily perceptive or he had been bored out of his mind. Or both, Koesler concluded.

Tully turned back to Lloyd. “Let me know, will you? I mean, whichever way it turns out. Whether you come up with any parallel between the German bombing and what we've got here? And, whatever you turn up in this bombing. Maybe the perp overlooked something. He wouldn't be the first to figure he thought of everything, but goofed up.”

Gil Lloyd nodded and returned to his investigation as Tully and Koesler left the scene and headed for the rectory.

As they passed down the aisle of the church they noted many police officers, some in uniform, others in plain clothes, interviewing possible witnesses. The police were being fed more than they ever wanted to learn about the cataclysm that was the Second Vatican Council, how the Church had abandoned the spirit of that Council, and the pros and cons of ordaining women. But as time went by, it was becoming increasingly clear that virtually no one had seen or heard anything helpful.

For now, Tully and Koesler were going to talk to the main players in this drama.

As they excused themselves through the crowd, Tully mused, “Hitler escaped death because the bomb was moved—by someone who didn't know that the briefcase he was moving contained a bomb. Whoever was the target of today's explosion just wasn't there when this bomb went off.” He turned to Koesler. “Why was that, do you think?”

The thought crossed Koesler's mind that they were taking it for granted that Father Farmer had not been the intended target—that his maiming had been unwitting. There was that word again. The bomb meant for Hitler had been unwittingly moved, putting Hitler out of harm's way—presumably Joe Farmer had unwittingly moved into harm's way. Or …?

“QED,” Koesler said to himself … that would have to be ascertained.

For now, he returned to Lieutenant Tully's question. “They were late. I don't know why. But for some reason they were late.”

“I thought so. You seemed nervous about missing the procession.”