Dantes' Inferno Read Free Page A

antiproperty explosives capable of massive structural damage; a linguistic clue that would implicate a bomber.
    Sweetheart’s body stiffened. “The gates of hell,” he whispered harshly. He lifted his eyes to the massive columns marking the entrance to the public courtyard. A synthesis of pipe bomb and a more powerful antiproperty device . .  .
    He pivoted to face Church. “Have you checked for additional devices?”
    â€œWe’re still searching the grounds—”
    â€œThe columns? Those pillars ,” Sweetheart interjected. “Did you check the internal structure for bombs? It’s been two hours since the explosion. If there’s a second device targeting response personnel—” Sweetheart broke off, barking out a command: “Move everybody away from the scene. Now .”
    Church hesitated only an instant, then the decision to act telegraphed across his face, and he wheeled around to head off an ATF agent. The alarm went up. The evacuation of investigative and emergency personnel took less than four minutes.
    Sweetheart and the others were five hundred yards away—at the bottom of the hill—when detonation occurred. The explosion was deep and sharp, and it shot tons of concrete, rock, steel—the flesh and bone of the structure—in a quarter-mile trajectory. Immediately, a cloud of dust debris swirled up, almost as if it were deliberately covering such obscene devastation. The whole thing seemed to occur in an instant, while everyone dropped for cover.
    Everyone except Edmond Sweetheart, who stood immovable, staring into the eye of the beast. He didn’t even flinch when a ten-pound marble missile missed his left ear by inches.
    Instead he recognized the quickening, the potent cocktail of adrenaline and dread; he’d come to identify it as a chemical threshold, a gateway to the altered state of terror. It was as pungent as the chemicals that make a bomb. It happened on the inside. Outside, all around him, the signs of disaster were familiar: panic on the faces and in the eyes, a heightened surreal atmosphere of smoke, gas, and fumes.
    The reverberation of the blast faded as emergency crews and investigators went into high gear for the second time in two hours. The worst of the damage had knocked out three pillars, but the building face was intact. Through the smoke, the cries, the chaos, Sweetheart remembered other words of the great poet.
    â€œPerched above the gates I saw more than a thousand of those whom heaven had cast out like rain, raging: ‘Who is this approaching? Who, without death, dares enter the kingdom of the dead?’”
    He felt, rather than saw, Detective Church at his side. When he turned to stare at the man, his eyes were dull, unnerving. He spoke in a lifeless monotone. “Six centuriesago, Dante Alighieri wrote the Inferno , the most famous book of the three-part Commedia .”
    Confusion showed on Church’s sunburnt, freckled face. “Are we talking about Dantes’ Inferno? ” he asked, taking a logical mental leap to the four-hundred-page manifesto written in the 1990s, published in 1999. He was referring to its author, John Dantes, a twenty-first-century fugitive bomber who had claimed responsibility for a dozen crimes spanning more than a decade, causing immense property damage and, most important, taking lives.
    Forget long-dead Italian poets, however famous; unless you believe in ghosts, they don’t set bombs .
    â€œYes,” Sweetheart said grimly. “We’re talking about John Freeman Dantes.”
    â€œMaybe.” Church looked skeptical. “Dantes has been known to leave a secondary device—”
    â€œHe’s killed before.”
    â€œIt’s not his style to target schoolkids—he hasn’t been tied to a bombing for three, almost four years.”
    â€œHe went underground,” Sweetheart said sharply. “Now he’s resurfacing.”