Chapter 6
Itold JD and the sheriff, then called Isabella and asked her to track the call.
"I'll see what I can do," she said before hanging up. She sounded busy.
I had no doubt the caller had gone to great lengths to hide the origin of the call. Nobody would be stupid enough to call me directly from a cell phone without routing it through the Internet, using a VPN and multiple proxy servers.
"Deep, Thick, or Thin," Jack said. "Isn't that the name of an adult film?"
"It's pizza, you pervert," the sheriff grumbled.
Jack frowned at him.
“Big Tony’s,” I said.
My next call was to Tony Scarpetti. He was a reformed gangster who ran a high-stakes poker game at the Seven Seas on Friday and Saturday nights.
He also owned a couple of the best restaurants in town.
Anthony's was upscale Italian, and Big Tony’s was authentic New York pie.
You could get a whole pizza or by the slice. It never disappointed.
"You need to clear the pizza joint," I said to Tony after he answered.
"What!?"
"I don't want to cause panic, but there's been a bomb threat.”
He scoffed. "Who'd be stupid enough to do that?”
He had a point. Tony Scarpetti was not a guy you wanted to mess with. He may have been a reformed gangster, but he still had a lot of contacts. One phone call, and you’d find yourself at the bottom of the ocean. I had no doubt about that.
Tony was one of those beloved figures. It didn't matter what he did, you couldn't stay mad at the guy. He was loyal to a fault, and he took care of his people. JD and I had gotten his daughter out of a bad situation once, and ever since then, we were family.
I told him we were on the way, and he said he’d get all the patrons and employees out of the restaurant.
By the time we got over there, Tony had the place evacuated. Patrons stood on the sidewalk across the street, still munching on slices of cheesy goodness.
Tony didn’t look happy.
Lights flickered and flashed as patrol cars screeched onto the scene. Deputies hopped out and cleared the perimeter, keeping onlookers at a safe distance. Without knowing how powerful the bomb was, a safe distance was just an estimate.
The bomb squad arrived, and news crews followed.
Resources were stretched thin as it was. The department struggled to manage multiple simultaneous events.
Jack parked the Porsche. We hopped out and found Tony.
"You better find a bomb, and you better diffuse it. I just evacuated all these people in the middle of a meal, and I promised I would comp their food.” Tony didn't like losing money.
You would think a bomb would scare people away. That they would move in the opposite direction.
But the crowd grew.
I'm sure quite a few of them wanted to see the damn thing go off.
The guys in the Bomb Disposal Unit grabbed the robot out of their vehicle and prepped it, then cut power to the building.
Many IEDs can be triggered with a cell phone.
A simple call or text and BOOM! Short of jamming the cell tower, there was no way to limit interference.
Everybody and their brother had their cell phone out, taking pictures and uploading to the Internet.
Any one of the onlookers could have been the bomber, just waiting to detonate the device.
BOB (the Bomb Operations Bot) was a prototype, bipedal robot on loan from A.R.I.S.
for field testing. It wasn’t autonomous like their Maximus line.
This was more of a remotely operated device with enhanced AI and 8K optics.
You could turn it loose, and it would do its thing, but it wasn’t going to cook you breakfast. It was purpose built and had one task only—bomb detection and disposal.
Gone were the days of clunky robots with tank treads and a single articulated arm. The times were changing.
The robot was capable of sniffing out most explosive devices. BOB could respond to verbal commands and give status updates. BOB stood about four feet tall with a silver exoskeleton and black joints.
The robot walked to the entrance of the pizza joint, opened the door, and stepped inside.
Sergeant Hartman operated BOB by remote. He wore special gloves with motion trackers and a VR headset that gave him BOB’s point of view. Hartman could override BOB at any time and control his every motion.
Hartman mirrored BOB’s view to the sheriff’s phone, and we huddled around, watching.
BOB walked around the pizza joint, looking in all the nooks and crannies.
The robot’s highly tuned sensors didn't pick up any trace explosive compounds. The smell of bread, red sauce, mozzarella cheese, and Italian seasonings wouldn’t mask trinitrotoluene, RDX, or potassium chlorate, among others, from the robot.
BOB’s advanced optics had AI tracking with object recognition.
It allowed him to identify objects quickly.
The bot moved through the pizza parlor, checking out the tables and booths, looking in crevices and corners.
The AI tracking identified slices of pizza, take-home boxes, soda glasses, the jukebox, and other items with blazing speed and accuracy.
In the far corner, affixed to the underside of the table of the last booth, BOB spotted the device.
His optics zoomed in, and we got a closer look.
The sheriff's face twisted with confusion.
We'd all seen a lot of pipe bombs and improvised explosive devices, but nothing like this.
The minister of death was a small, cylindrical device.
Maybe 7 inches wide and 2 inches deep. A few blinking lights surrounded a central, semi-spherical core.
It looked like a tiny flying saucer or a futuristic land mine.
Made of aluminum or some type of composite alloy, it could have been anything. Had there not been a previous explosion at the Crab & Claw, we all might have doubted the veracity of the threat.
"How do you want to handle this?" I asked the sheriff.
The feds hadn’t arrived yet. For now, it was our show, but that wouldn’t last long.
"Try not to blow us all up,” he said dryly.
BOB crawled under the table to get a closer look. His onboard AI processor scanned the device and compared it against known explosive devices.
"It's not in the database anywhere," Sergeant Hartman said after BOB reported back to him. "We’re looking at an original, one-of-a-kind device.”