Page 38 of Dark ’N’ Deadly

The entire drive to the office, his mind had been filled with how incredible her soft lips were and how perfectly they’d fit to his. When their tongues tangled, the heat exploding between them was hotter than a bonfire. Halfway through the drive, honking from the car behind him was the only thing telling him he’d been holding up traffic at a green light.

“Eric?” Man, he needed to get his head out of his ass. “Miller?” Dayne began laughing, something his stoic friend rarely did. “When you were talking with Tess at the Marshal’s office, I couldn’t tell if it was an interrogation or a first date.”

“Fuck you.”

“Love you, too, man.”

Eric swore again, inwardly this time. Dayne knew him as well as he knew himself. He tossed a stapled draft of his ops plan in Dayne’s direction. “Let’s go over this.”

Dayne sobered, clearing his throat. “How do you want to play it?”

“Jesse McTavish’s pickup is at the lab, along with the drums. We’ll have the tech guys rig the truck with audiovisual monitors and transmitters so we can record and see and hear everything in real time. Since we don’t know whether the drums will be transferred to another truck and moved again, or remain at the meet location, we’ll have to remain fluid.”

Dayne nodded. “If we see other drums at the meet location—enough to bust the reporting limit for transfers—we could take this thing down on the spot.”

“Agreed,” Eric said. “But if we don’t see any other drums, we’ll have to maintain surveillance on them 24/7. If they move, we follow. Whoever we get on video we can run through facial recognition.”

“I’ll run the tags on any vehicles.”

A message popped up on his screen indicating he had a new email. It was the one he’d been waiting for from the ATF laboratory. He opened the report attached to the email, then scrolled quickly to the end game—the analysis of the drum contents. Even though he’d fully expected it, seeing the words made his heart beat faster.

Ammonium nitrate.

He printed out two copies of the report, handing one to Dayne. “It’s official. All four drums contain ammonium nitrate.”

Eric set his copy on his desk, tapping his fingers on the figures on the last page—the weight of each drum. The lab had also photographed the labels on the outside of the drums, and as he looked at all four images, he began tapping faster. This was bad. Shitastrophy bad.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Dayne looked up.

“Probably.” Eric’s fingers stilled. “None of the drums are full. That’s why they were bouncing around in the back of Jesse’s pickup. The contents of each drum weigh in at less than twenty-five pounds, for a total combined weight of about eighty-five pounds.”

“A bomb that size would be big enough to make a loud noise.” Dayne’s frown deepened. “Why bother trucking such a small amount all the way from Alabama to New Jersey?”

“Exactly.” He nodded. “Alabama’s a thousand miles away. They could easily buy that much here, or in Pennsylvania, New York, or even Delaware, without going to all that trouble.”

His friend massaged his jaw for a few seconds. “Shit.”

“Yeah.” Again, he looked at the photos in the report. “The labels indicate the drums were obtained from four different companies. I think they’re piecemealing. Stockpiling small quantities of ammonium nitrate from different locations to fly under the radar.”

He was well versed on the Department of Homeland Security’s Ammonium Nitrate Security Program regs.

“All transactions involving the sale or transfer of ammonium nitrate greater than twenty-five pounds require a DHS registration number,” he continued, “and a record of the transaction produced at the point of sale. But as long as each purchase was less than twenty-five pounds, they could buy separate and unlimited amounts of AN from anywhere in the country and without a single report being filed. We have no way of knowing how much they’ve already accumulated.”

“And,” Dayne added, “it also means we have no idea how big this bomb will be when they’re done making it.”

A chilled moment of silence passed between them. The Oklahoma City bomber had used 4800 pounds of ammonium nitrate and blown up an entire federal building. This was only eighty-five pounds. What if it was only the beginning?

Damn. He could only imagine the devastation.

He opened up a new email window to send another message up the ATF chain of command. “Since they’re collecting the AN here, the target is probably somewhere in New Jersey or a neighboring state. To be on the safe side, we need to go out with a nationwide alert to all agencies, federal, state, and local.” Given the sovereign citizen propensity to attack government employees, he’d also add a warning specific to all government-occupied buildings.

“I’ll send a message to my SAC. He’ll notify the JTTF.” Dayne pulled a laptop from his gear bag.

Now that the substance in the drums had been officially identified, the Joint Terrorist Task Force would issue warnings around the country, including those for large sales of AN. But ammonium nitrate was only one ingredient of a bomb.

He logged into NCIC. “I’ll do an offline search for reports of stolen explosives.”

“What about booster fuel?” Dayne asked, referring to another component of a typical ammonium nitrate bomb.