Текст книги "One by One (Роберт Хантер 5 Поодиночке)"

Автор книги: Chris (2) Carter

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

‘Not surprisingly, Mr. Fisher also took his son’s suicide very badly, and with his wife’s health and sanity fading so quickly he saw no alternative but to quit his job. He then dedicated all his time and effort to taking care of her. She was all the family he had left. Her death, together with Brandon’s suicide, was much more than his psyche could withstand. My guess is that after Margaret Fisher’s death, Graham found himself alone, hurt and very, very angry. Someone in that state of mind armed with his sort of intelligence and enough time on his hands would contemplate anything.’

More hushed murmurs.

‘He methodically made a list of all the people he considered guilty,’ Hunter continued, ‘not for his son’s death but for making a mockery of it. For exposing Brandon’s most intimate psychological and emotional pain to everyone. For transforming his and his wife’s personal loss into a sideshow attraction . . . a public entertainment. And certainly for contributing to the rapid decline in Margaret’s health.’ Hunter paused for breath. ‘After identifying the parties, which I’m sure took some finding, he busied himself engineering and developing his torture and murder devices, before seeking out every name on his kill list, one by one. The problem we have is that there’s no way we can know how many names are on that list. As we all know, three are already dead.’

‘Do we have his picture?’ the SWAT captain asked.

Hunter nodded and pressed the clicker button.

The photograph now showing on the screen was of an attractive man in his early fifties. His robust face suggested both trustworthiness and self-confidence. He had high cheekbones, a prominent brow and a strong chin with a subtle cleft. His light brown hair was worn just off the shoulders, pleasantly tousled. He looked to be broadly built, with sturdy muscles and wide shoulders.

‘No fucking way.’ Everyone in the room heard Garcia cough the words.

‘Something wrong, Carlos?’

‘Yeah,’ Garcia nodded slowly. ‘I know him.’

One Hundred

The man was putting the final touches to his latest torture and murder device. He had spent considerably more time developing this particular apparatus than the previous three, but his work had paid off. He considered this one to be a work of art – ingenious and evil in equal measures. Once the mechanics of it had started working, no one could stop it, not even himself. Yes, this device was something special. Something that would undoubtedly teach ‘that bitch’ an unforgettable lesson.

‘That bitch’ was sitting at the far end of the large open-plan room he was in, still tied up to the same heavy chair. He had to sedate her again, though. Her crying was driving him insane. But her time was coming.

The man had to admit that there was a tiny part somewhere inside of him that wished that she had taken his offer and used the garden scissors to butcher her own hand. He would really have let her go if she had done it. But the truth was he knew that there were very few people on this earth who were mentally and emotionally strong enough. Very few people on this earth who were capable of that sort of self-mutilation, even if it was to save their own life. And ‘that bitch’ wasn’t one of them.

No matter, he thought. What he had in store for her was infinitely better than chopping her fingers off, and it would produce another fantastic Internet spectacle, of that he was sure. That thought brought a grin to his face.

He tightened up the last screw, connecting his device to the electricity supply. It was time to test it.

The man got up from the chair he’d been sitting on for the past two hours, removed his working glasses and gently rubbed his gritty eyes with his thumb and forefinger for a long while. The sensation was soothing. He drank a glass of iced water before reaching inside the groceries bag he had with him, retrieving a large watermelon he had bought that morning.

He’d smiled when the short and round lady at the grocery store told him that the two particular watermelons he was looking at weren’t ripe enough yet.

‘It’ll be at least three days before those are good enough to eat,’ the groceries lady had said. ‘I have better ones right here, look. Nice and juicy, perfectly ripe, good for today.’

The man simply shook his head. ‘These ones will do fine. It’s the size I’m more interested in.’

Approaching his newly finished gadget, the man placed the large fruit on the correct spot before grabbing the remote control from the worktable. He stood back several paces, took a deep breath, readied his stopwatch and finally clicked the red button on the control.

A muffled mechanical grinding noise came from the device, as the many sprockets started turning, bringing his new monstrous creation to life.

The man watched transfixed, as every part worked just as he had designed, but there was one tiny problem. It all happened way too fast. The watermelon lasted exactly 39.8 seconds. True, the human body was much more resistant than any watermelon, but, still, he wanted this to drag on for as long as possible. He wanted his Internet audience to enjoy it, be disgusted and terrified by it, feel pity or anger, laugh at it, comment on it, joke and gossip about it, whatever, but most of all he wanted ‘that bitch’ to suffer.

He cleaned the device from the mess the watermelon had made and spent the next forty-five minutes tightening and loosening screws, adjusting the tension on different joints and springs, and calibrating pressured parts until he was satisfied. When he figured he had done enough, he reached for the second watermelon from his groceries bag and ran his device test again.

When, at the end of it, he clicked his stopwatch and checked the time, he smiled.

‘Perfect.’

One Hundred and One

For a quick instant it felt as if Garcia’s words were too surreal to make any sense.

‘What?’ Hunter and Captain Blake asked him at the exact same time.

‘What do you mean – you know him?’ Michelle tagged.

Garcia’s eyes were still fixed on Graham Fisher’s photograph that was being projected onto the screen at the front of the room.

‘I mean.’ He barely mumbled the words, clearly running something over inside his head. ‘I know I’ve seen him before, but I just can’t remember where.’

Hunter looked back at the screen. ‘You’ve seen this face before?’

Garcia nodded slowly. ‘I’m positive I have.’

‘Recently?’

Another slow nod.

A brief tense moment of hesitation went by.

‘Maybe it was at one of the crime scenes?’ a SWAT agent suggested. ‘As we all know, there are always curious people hanging around at the edge of the perimeter. Some killers love to hang back, mingle with the crowd and watch the police work. Some of them get off on that kind of shit.’

Garcia closed his eyes, urging the images to come back to him. What he got was a roller coaster of mental pictures shuffled out of order. The first memory that flashed at him was of his wife, Anna, and her friend, Patricia, in Tujunga Village, just after the killer had privately broadcast the two of them. Garcia tried to remember all the faces he’d seen that day – maybe in the coffee shop where Anna had been waiting for them, or across the road, or maybe even looking out through a shop window.

Nothing.

Tujunga Village wasn’t where he had seen Graham Fisher before.

Garcia then mentally revisited the alleyway in Mission Hills where the body of Kevin Lee Parker, the killer’s first victim, had been found. It had been before dawn, in a hidden-away back street. There were no curious onlookers hanging around that morning. No one except the homeless man who had found the body. Garcia quickly discarded those images as well and moved on.

Next came City Hall Park and the discovery of the camcorder. He and Hunter knew the killer was close by that day. He would’ve wanted to watch the police’s reaction to his little joke. Garcia tried his best to remember everyone he saw around the park.

Rush hour – way too many people.

He pushed himself, concentrating harder. Graham Fisher’s face wasn’t among the ones he could remember.

The second dump scene came next – Dewey Street in Santa Monica. Christina Stevenson’s body had been left by a dumpster in the small parking lot at the back of a two-story office building. Garcia could clearly recall a crowd hanging around the perimeter. Then he remembered the man who had caught his eye that day – tall, lean and spare, dressed in a black hooded sweatshirt and dark blue jeans. Garcia tried to picture his face, and that was when all the memories, except one, vanished from his mind and he finally remembered.

‘Oh my God!’ he whispered, his eyes reopening and instantly widening. ‘The doctor.’

‘What?’ Hunter queried. ‘What doctor?’

‘The one in the park,’ Garcia replied, almost numbed by the memory. ‘I told you about it.’ He addressed Hunter, before turning and looking at Captain Blake and Michelle. ‘Anna and I went for a run in the park close to our apartment a couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday morning,’ he explained. ‘It was my day off. We were on our last lap of the park when some guy, who was riding a bike, had a heart attack right there and then. He was just behind us. Despite a bunch of people gathering around to have a look at what was happening, I was the only one who rushed to help. At least at first. I was just about to start CPR when this other guy turned up, weaving his way through the crowd. He’d also been jogging in the park that morning. I know because I saw him. Well, he saidhe was a doctor and took complete control of the situation until the paramedics got there. I helped him administer CPR. He wasn’t kidding, or faking it. He reallytried to save that man’s life.’

‘And that guy was Graham Fisher?’ the captain asked.

Garcia nodded again, looking back at the photograph on the screen. ‘It was him. No doubt about it.’

A new uncomfortable silence descended onto the room.

‘Shit,’ Garcia said. ‘He was stalking Anna and me because he was already planning on going after her. That incident happened only a couple of days before he pulled that sick stunt of broadcasting Anna and her friend as they were out shopping.’ Anger coated Garcia’s words now. ‘Fuck! I talked to him. I stood next to him. He shook my hand . . . He shook Anna’s hand . . .’

‘Wow, the motherfucker’s got balls, I’ll give him that,’ a tall and muscular SWAT agent said.

‘What are you, a fucking fan now, Luke? The guy is a psycho,’ another SWAT agent shot back. This one was a little shorter but just as muscular.

New murmurs erupted.

‘OK,’ Hunter said loudly, quieting everyone down again. ‘Graham Fisher still lives in the same house he shared with his wife and son in Boyle Heights. The address and the house schematics are all inside the folders on your desks. And we already have a warrant for his arrest. So how about we go take this sonofabitch down?’

One Hundred and Two

The police convoy was made up of two black SWAT SUVs, three unmarked police cars and two black and white units. Four SWAT agents occupied each of the SUVs. Hunter, Garcia and Captain Blake were in the first unmarked car, heading the convoy. Michelle Kelly was in the vehicle just behind them, together with two LAPD SIS agents. Three more SIS agents occupied the third unmarked car. The two black and white units were there just as a backup precaution.

The LAPD Special Investigation Section (SIS) was an Elite Tactical Surveillance squad that has existed for more than forty years, despite efforts from various human-rights and political groups to shut it down. Their kill rate was higher than that of any other unit in the department, including SWAT. SIS teams were mainly used to stealthily watch apex predators – individuals suspected of violent crimes who would not cease until caught in the act. Masters of surveillance, SIS officers waited to observe a suspect committing new crimes before moving in to make arrests. Lethal force was often used, and they were all expert marksmen.

The address they had took them to a small hilly street in the west quadrant of Boyle Heights, a working-class neighborhood just east of downtown Los Angeles.

All the houses were set back from the street but without any foliage. The street was devoid of trees. It was an unusually uninviting place. In the summer the heat probably turned the street into a relentlessly dusty place, where tensions and angers multiplied with the same intensity that bacteria did.

Graham Fisher’s house, number 21, was tucked away right at the top of the hilly street. The house itself was much the same as all the others in that road, a medium-sized, two-story, three-bedroom home, with air conditioners hanging from a couple of windows. Three narrow steps led up to the concrete front porch. The house was painted a faded blue, with the number 21 hand-painted in white near the front door. All the windows were shut. All the curtains were drawn. All appeared quiet. The front yard had a neglected look to it, streaks of dirt sidling up against grass choked with weeds. A white, thigh-high steel fence circled the property. The back alleyway that serviced the entire street wasn’t wide enough for any of the vehicles to drive down. The convoy parked at the bottom of the road.

‘OK, listen up,’ the SWAT captain said in an authoritative voice as everyone gathered by the two SUVs. ‘Alpha team – Morris, Luke and myself – will blast in through the front door. We’ll clear the living room, the dining room and the downstairs washroom, here.’

As he spoke he indicated the locations on the house schematics that he had spread open over the hood of one of the cars.

‘Beta team – Johnson, Davis and Lewis – will come in through the back door that leads directly into the kitchen. They will clear that room first before moving on upstairs, where they will clear both bathrooms and all three bedrooms. Gamma team – Lopez and Turkowski – will follow Alpha team inside through the front door and then proceed to the basement.’ He paused and looked up at Captain Blake. ‘SIS agents and HSS detectives will onlyenter the house once wehave radioed in that we’re all clear inside. Is that understood?’ He made harsh and determined eye contact with everyone who wasn’t part of the SWAT team, hammering his point through.

‘Roger that,’ Hunter, Garcia and the SIS agents replied back.

The SWAT captain turned and faced his team.

‘OK, badasses. We have everything in our favor this morning. This sick puppy doesn’t know we’re coming for him today. So let’s hit the house fast and hard and give him the surprise of his sorry-ass life. We all know he’s a psycho, but not the gun-slinging kind of psycho. So even though he might have a firearm in the house, chances are it won’t be close at hand. Nevertheless, watch your six.No mistakes. No hesitations. This guy is as clever as they come, full of fucking surprises, and you all know that the only surprises I like are the ones we spring up on them. As soon as a room is cleared, radio it on. If anyone spots the target, arrest the fucker. Lethal force only, and I repeat, onlyif called for. No happy triggering today. Are we all clear?’

‘Clear, Captain,’ all seven SWAT agents replied in unison.

‘OK, badasses, let’s lock and load. I want this whole thing wrapped up in sixty seconds or less. Take positions, and let’s bring Judgment Day to this piece of shit.’

Twenty seconds later the SWAT captain heard the first status update through his earpiece.

‘Beta team is in position. Ready to blast some doors, Cap.’

Beta team was the only team traveling down the back alley. Alpha and Gamma teams were coming in through the front door.

To reduce the chance of pre-warning the subject, a SWAT agent slowly drove one of the SUVs up the hilly street. The remaining agents, forming teams Alpha and Gamma, crouch-ran together with the vehicle, hiding on the other side of it.

‘Roger that,’ the SWAT captain replied via his helmet microphone. ‘We’ll be in position in less than ten.’

‘Roger that, Captain.’

‘OK, let’s move,’ the captain ordered teams Alpha and Gamma.

They moved fast and stealthily. The captain took point while the other agents assumed standard 2x2 cover formation. They all cleared the steel fence by jumping it instead of going for the gate with rusty hinges – no noise, no warning.

At the porch the captain updated the teams’ status.

‘Alpha and Gamma are in position.’

‘Roger that, Cap,’Davis from Beta team replied.

Agent Morris, Captain Fallon’s second in command, quickly slid a small fiber-optic tube under the front door. The tube was a fiberscope, connected to a three-inch screen monitor.

Davis did the same at the back door.

There was no movement coming from anywhere inside.

‘Kitchen is dead,’Davis transmitted. ‘No one here.’

‘Negative for movement at the front room too,’ Morris confirmed.

‘We’ve got a very sturdy lock back here, Captain,’Davis reported. ‘We’ll need to blast the whole thing off with the breaching shotgun.’

The captain quickly checked the lock and the hinges on the front door. So did Morris, who nodded back at Captain Fallon, agreeing with Beta team’s assessment.

A breaching shotgun is nothing more than a regular shotgun loaded with breaching rounds, also called ‘TESAR’ or disintegrators. These are shotgun shells specially designed to destroy door deadbolts, locks and hinges without risking injury or lives by ricocheting or by flying on at lethal speed once they get through the door. The rounds are frangible, made of a dense, sintered material, most commonly metal powder, in a binder, such as wax. The round will destroy a lock or hinge and then immediately disperse. Jokingly, SWAT agents have nicknamed these rounds ‘master keys’ and their use is referred to as ‘Avon Calling’.

‘Roger that and agreed,’the SWAT captain replied, signaling Luke, one of the agents, who was carrying a breaching shotgun.

Luke moved forward, readying the weapon. From a distance of about six inches, he aimed it at the door’s top hinge. A very subtle head nod told Captain Fallon that he was ready.

‘OK, Beta,’ the captain said into the microphone. ‘Avon Call on my three count . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .’

BOOM.

One Hundred and Three

The shots exploded through the otherwise quiet morning, echoing off the other houses. At the front door, Luke had blasted off two hinges and the deadbolt lock in less than three seconds. As soon as the last shot was fired, Captain Fallon kicked the door hard, throwing it flying into the living room.

At the rear of the house, Johnson had also blasted the hinges and the deadbolt lock off the door in just as many seconds. Davis was the one who kicked the door in.

All eight SWAT agents were carrying Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns – a 9mm compact weapon exceptionally powerful and accurate in close-quarters combat. All eight of them had been expertly trained for such situations.

Still crouch-running, all three teams moved forward into the house with immense agility, their MP5s’ red laser target sights bouncing around the room like disco lights.

The front door led directly into a small, rectangular-shaped living room. With the curtains shut, all the light came from the now wide-open door. Plumes of smoke and dust danced in the air, spotlighted by uneven streaks of sunlight.

In a three-man wedge-shaped assault formation, Alpha team stormed into the living room, checking every corner and possible hiding place with incredible speed and accuracy. There were two armchairs, a couch, a television on a wooden module and a low coffee table. The walls were bare, save for a single, stiffly posed wedding photo.

It took Alpha team four seconds flat to take control of the room.

‘Living room is clear,’ Captain Fallon announced through his microphone before crossing the room and exiting it through the door at the other side.

Gamma team simply followed them in.

At the rear of the house, Beta team took no time to clear the small kitchen, made even smaller by the square wooden table pushed up against the east wall.

‘Kitchen is clear,’agent Davis called through his mike.

He and the two other agents in Beta team proceeded fast across the kitchen and through its door, which took them to a hallway, leading to the front of the house and the stairs that would give them access to the second floor of the property. As they reached the top of the staircase, Alpha team came through the door at the opposite end of that same hallway.

Alpha team immediately turned left into the dining room. The door was already open. This room was smaller than the living room, and most of it was taken by a square, four-seat, glass and steel dining table and two large bookshelves. More bare walls. The room was empty, and there was no place for someone as tall and as well built as Graham Fisher to hide.

‘Dining room is clear,’ the captain announced.

Morris, one of the two other agents in Alpha team, had already kicked open the door to the downstairs washroom, smashing it against the white-tiled wall. Two of the tiles cracked with the impact. The room was empty.

‘Downstairs washroom is clear,’ he called.

The staircase had taken Beta team onto a twenty-three-foot-long hallway upstairs. There were five doors – two on the right, two on the left and one at the far end of the corridor. From the house schematics, all three agents knew that the first door on the right gave them access to a small storage room. That door was closed. The second door on the right would lead them into the first of the three bedrooms, a medium-sized one, probably the one that used to belong to Brandon Fisher. That door was also closed. The first door on the left was the first bathroom. That door was open. The second door on the left would take them into a smaller bedroom. Door closed. The one at the far end would lead them into the master bedroom, inside which they would find the second bathroom. That final door was also open.

The team moved lightning fast, clearing the first room on the left – the bathroom – and the first room on the right – the small storage room – in two seconds. Both empty.

While Davis and Lewis pushed open the second door on the left side of the corridor, the one that led into the smallest of the three bedrooms, Johnson held fast on the hallway, covering their backs.

The room had been transformed into a simple study. It was a barren space – a pressed wood desk with a computer and a printer, a black-leather desk chair, a crammed bookcase and a beige-metal filing cabinet, nothing else. The room was empty.

‘Bedroom one clear.’

Both agents exited the study and moved on to the second room on the right – bedroom number two. Johnson tried the door – locked. The lock didn’t look too strong.

‘Breach it,’ Johnson said, stepping back.

Launching his body forward, Lewis rammed the heel of his boot against the door lock. That was all that was needed. The door slammed back hard, splintering the frame. The room was dark and smelled of age and disuse.

Johnson immediately reached for the light switch. As the light came on, he and Lewis entered the room, leaving Davis to cover their backs this time.

They’d been right. This was the room that had belonged to Brandon Fisher, and it looked like not a single thing had been touched since his suicide. The walls were covered with posters of music groups, cars, sport stars and girls in tiny bikinis. There was a large chest of drawers with a black stereo on it to the right of the door. Next to it, a two-door wardrobe. An old and scratched desk with a laptop computer and a printer was positioned by the window. A nicely made up twin bed had its headboard pushed up against one of the walls. Everything was covered by a thick layer of dust, as if the room hadn’t been entered in years.

The agents quickly checked everywhere, including the wardrobe.

No one.

‘Second bedroom is clear,’ Johnson radioed it on.

From there Beta team moved with purpose toward the end of the corridor and the last bedroom. This one was much larger than the previous two, with a king bed, an ottoman, a leather armchair in one corner, an old-fashioned wooden dresser with a rectangular mirror by the window and a sliding-door wardrobe taking the whole of the west wall. There was a sweaty smell lingering in the air, as if the room hadn’t been cleaned and the bedding hadn’t been washed in months.

They checked every corner, under the bed and inside the wardrobe.

No one.

The en suite bathroom door was ajar, and it was hastily kicked fully open by agent Davis.

The bathroom was empty.

They had cleared the whole second floor of the house in less than twenty-two seconds.

‘We’re all clear up here, Captain,’ Davis called down. ‘The psycho ain’t upstairs.’

One Hundred and Four

Team Gamma had followed team Alpha into the house, crossed the living room, and as team Alpha turned left into the dining room once they reached the corridor downstairs, team Gamma veered right. The door that led down into the basement was locked with a military-grade padlock.

‘We need to blast the basement door open,’ agent Turkowski said into his mike, alerting the other teams that a loud blast was coming.

‘I’m on it,’ agent Lopez, the second half of Gamma team, replied, readying the breaching shotgun he had strapped to his back.

Turkowski took a step back and held fast. ‘Do it.’

BOOM.

The loud blast sent shock waves throughout the house.

The padlock disintegrated.

Turkowski kicked the door open, and they were immediately slapped across the face by a breath of musty, stale-smelling air. It had a fetid and sickly quality to it, aged and filthy, charred by the daily Californian heat. Despite the obnoxious odor, neither agent even blinked.

Wide wooden steps led down to the pitch-black basement.

‘Lights, lights,’ Turkowski called without lowering his MP5, his laser sight searching for a target at the bottom of the stairs, but finding nothing.

‘I’ve got it,’ Lopez replied, reaching for the thin light-switch cord that hung from the ceiling.

The light was terribly weak.

Crude brick walls ran against both sides of the staircase, creating an oppressing and claustrophobic down-running corridor.

‘I’ve got a real bad feeling about this,’ Turkowski said, as he and Lopez quickly took the stairs down in cover formation.

The steps were sturdy, but almost every one of them creaked under the strain of their weight. They cleared the last step and entered the dimly lit, wide-open basement room, their breathing labored, their laser sights doing a crazy crisscross dance everywhere, looking for the slightest sign of a threat, before finally homing in on the west end of the hall.

‘Holy shit!’ Lopez breathed out before radioing in. ‘Basement is clear. Psycho ain’t down here either.’ He paused for a gulp of putrid air. ‘But I guess you’re going to want to see this, Captain. And so will the homicide detectives.’

One Hundred and Five

Graham Fisher waited patiently for the red light to turn green before turning right onto East 4th Street in Boyle Heights. The traffic was as slow as it’d always been at that time in the morning, trickling through like water through a funnel. A few seconds later he hung a left onto South St Louis Street, and as he did so he tensed. About seventy-five yards ahead, just at the bottom of the hilly street he lived on, he could see a cluster of seven vehicles hastily parked; two of them were LAPD black and white cruisers. Gathered in a tight group by the first vehicle was a crowd of law-enforcement agents.

Graham immediately reduced his speed, but not in a panicky way, and signaled a left turn onto the next street along. He calmly parked by the first house on the right before reaching inside his glove compartment for his sunglasses. Pushing his baseball cap low over his forehead, he exited his car and leisurely walked up to the top of the road, where a white van was parked. Using the van for cover, he peeked at the cluster of vehicles and at the tightly gathered crowd of agents at the bottom of his street.

The first person he recognized was Detective Robert Hunter. The second was Detective Carlos Garcia. Together with them Graham saw an eight-men-strong SWAT team, two females, four other intimidating-looking males and four uniformed police officers. Twenty people in total. They all looked to be heavily armed. They were clearly getting ready for a surprise assault, and Graham had no doubt which house they’d be storming into in the next few seconds.

Graham knew that this day was coming. In fact, he was expecting it. He just wasn’t expecting it so soon, at least not before he was done.

With his eyes still fixed on the group, Graham’s mind started going over his plan once again. It was still perfect, he decided. The only difference was that he now needed to speed things up, move things forward a little, and improvise, at least a little bit. But that would be no problem. He knew exactly what to do.

As he returned to his car, Graham broke into a slightly manic giggle, a high-pitched sound that joined nervousness and joy all at once.

‘Let’s see how prepared you are for what’s coming to you, Detective Hunter,’ he said to himself, trembling with excitement, before jumping back into his car and driving away.

One Hundred and Six

Hunter, Garcia, Captain Blake and Michelle Kelly all wrinkled their noses at the sickening smell that hit them as they started down the wooden steps that took them to Graham Fisher’s basement. None of them could explain the strange feeling they got as they entered the house. As if they were all stepping into a house of horrors, where pain, fear and suffering were as much a part of it as its walls.

As they reached the basement floor, they all stopped dead. It was a large and damp room, surrounded by bare brick walls. There was a single glowing yellowish light bulb encased in a wire screen at the center of the ceiling. Its weak light struggled to illuminate the room, while at the same time casting shadows just about everywhere. The floor was made of concrete, and it was covered in stains, some new, some old and some larger than others.

Pushed up against the east wall was a long wooden worktable. On it, electronic components such as circuit boards, decoder modules, capacitors, potentiometers, microprocessors and oscilloscopes. A few blueprints had been matter-of-factly pushed to one end of the worktable. On the northeast corner of the room they found a large handmade tools cabinet, housing an impressive collection of tools, including several special glass-cutting drills and saws. But not every space or hook was taken. Some of the tools seemed to be missing.