I stood at the desk and let the shape of Henry shift again. He’d moved from suspect to coerced asset to the man who’d tried to warn Patterson before the pressure arrived. Now he was changing once more. Wiley identified him as a man who couldn’t stop what he was helping to build and wrote small checks to the people trying to dismantle it. Meanwhile, he continued to draft the operational architecture that put eighty people at risk.
Henry was a man hedging in both directions. He might come to us, or he might come apart and do something that couldn’t be taken back. Frightened insiders didn’t stay in the middle. They moved to one pole or the other, rarely quietly.
That was the most important variable heading into Thursday.
“Pull up the wedding guest list,” I said.
Wiley pulled it up.
Eighty attendees. Mostly family. Minimal press. Reduced security at Eleanor Harcourt’s explicit request because she wanted the wedding to feel like a family gathering, not a state function.
I stared at the screen.
“Print all of it,” I said. “Eamon’s here at two. I want it on the kitchen table when he arrives.”
***
Eamon brought the consultant in through the side door. Farrow nixed a few sleeping hours to be there. Six of us gathered around a stack of printouts at the kitchen table.
The consultant was a woman in her fifties, with short gray hair and no jewelry. She carried a single manila folder and didn’t offer her name.
“I’ve reviewed the venue plans,” she said. “Who has questions?”
“Everyone,” Eamon said. “Start from the structure.”
Reed and Collins joined us. They stood in the doorway.
She spread three pages from the folder. The first was an aerial photograph of the compound: the main house, guest cottage, pool house, and a long single-story building set perpendicular to the original structure, connected to it by a glass-walled passage. The second was an architectural drawing of the same compound at ground level, and the third was a structural diagram of the connecting passage and the building it served.
“The main house was built in 1908. It’s shingle-style, three stories, post-and-beam construction with cedar shake siding and a fieldstone foundation, original to the property. The house is sound construction for what it is, coastal, but well-maintained, regularly reinforced against storm damage.”
Her finger moved along the perpendicular structure on the aerial photograph. Farrow shifted off the doorframe and came to the table. He didn’t sit. He stood at Eamon’s shoulder and looked down at the page.
“This concerns me,” she said. “It’s a tent hall. Sometimes called an event pavilion, but in this case purpose-built. They added it in 2017 to host weddings and large gatherings without disrupting the main house. It’s a single-story, two hundred and forty by sixty feet, post-and-beam in keeping with the period aesthetic, with a cedar exterior and a glass curtain wall on the ocean side. The capacity is two hundred seated, three hundred standing.”
She tapped the connecting passage.
“The connection between the main house and the event hall is a glass-walled corridor, ninety feet long and four feet wide. It is steel-framed, with glass on both sides and a glass roof. It’s the only weather-resistant passage between the two structures. The hall has its own rear entrance through a catering vestibule on the inland side, and a set of three glass doors along the ocean wall that open onto a slate terrace, but during a seated event in December, the terrace doors are closed and the only used circulation path between the main house and the hall runs through the glass corridor.”
She paused.
“The connection point where the corridor meets the event hall is the structural problem.”
“Explain,” Eamon said.
“They added the corridor on after the framing of the hall. The connection at the hall end is a steel column embedded in a non-load-bearing partition, which itself ties into the hall’s primary post-and-beam frame at a single fastener point. The fastener is rated for the corridor’s static load, but it was specified for the corridor only. It was not specified for additional loading.”
“What kind of additional loading?” Wiley asked.
“The kind you get from a directional shaped charge placed against the post-and-beam frame on the corridor side of the partition. The charge wouldn’t need to be large because theframe at that joint is doing most of the eastern roof load for the hall. It’s a clear-span design with no interior columns, which is the reason the hall is beautiful and the reason it’s vulnerable. Take out the joint, and you take the eastern third of the roof inside of four seconds. The rest of the structure follows along the long axis as the load redistributes through unsupported spans.”
Eamon’s hand, which had been flat on the table, closed slowly into a loose fist and stayed there.
“You mean a bomb,” whispered Cabot.
The consultant continued. “The device would be placed inside the corridor partition, behind the cedar paneling on the hall side. It’s decorative paneling. It’s quarter-inch tongue-and-groove over a stud cavity. A maintenance worker with a screw gun could open it in three minutes and close it in five. There would be no visible disturbance. The device would be invisible to a visual sweep of the corridor or the hall. You would need a trained dog or a backscatter unit to find it.”
“And what would they use for a trigger?” I asked.