Since the bombing, the details of Vance Roycroft’s life had been put on public display. It was a long disjointed story of disasters and bad choices. Roycroft’s childhood home had been squarely on the Rim. The first Startup had leveled the house; his father’s body had never been found. It had been assumed that his father had been shattered down to atoms when Pittsburgh had been transferred to Elfhome. His mother suffered a nervous breakdown and had been deported. Vance had been put into foster care on Earth. Roycraft’s life never recovered from that first Startup. Early brushes with the law exchanged foster care for juvenile detention centers. When he turned eighteen, he was given a clean slate. Shortly after that he’d joined Earth for Humans.
It must have been then that he was chosen to be a tool. He “started” a business importing and exporting goods from Pittsburgh. The media took it at face value since, as a native Pittsburgher, Roycroft had had the privilege of being able to come and go without having to constantly go through the visa process. Louise suspected that Ming had set Roycroft up with a strong line of credit and a list of customers. There was no other way someone could go from absolute nothing to being able to lease trucks, fill them with gas, and drive them to another world.
The authorities claimed that all the explosives had been purchased on Earth and taken to Elfhome, where Roycroft assembled it inside the packing crate for a large ironwood chest. Because of the nature of traffic out of Pittsburgh, the terrorists would have been unable to predict the exact time of delivery. For some reason, Roycroft didn’t use a cell phone as a simple trigger. Instead he’d used a fairly sophisticated AI-driven trigger that had been programmed to do detailed safety checks prior to the explosion. If it had worked properly, it wouldn’t have obeyed the command to explode before being delivered to the correct location. No wonder the authorities hadn’t considered the terrorist “dangerous” enough to try and lock down the city.
There had been a flaw, however, in the code that used the GPS coordinates range that the device used to check to see if it was properly delivered. What the designer took to be several inches in any direction actually translated to dozens of feet. A simple stupid mistake had cost people’s lives.
Roycraft had been a high school dropout with no real aptitude for technology. He couldn’t have created the trigger.
No one at Perelman fit the FBI profile. Assuming that Roycroft’s accomplices designed the trigger, then Tristan’s choices made sense. Everyone he ran background checks on could have possibly created the device. He focused mostly on the teachers who had military backgrounds. Tristan, though, was unfamiliar with the school. He didn’t realize that there was only one person with unlimited access to the one piece of equipment necessary to make the trigger: the 3D printer in the technology annex. When Louise had checked the print history a few days after the bombing, Mr. Kessler was the only teacher who had printed anything for weeks prior to her creating the magic generator.
“No. No. This is wrong. What could have happened?”
On the day of the bombing, Mr. Kessler had dashed up twelve flights, in a rush to start a program running on his desk computer. Of all the teachers, only he had been overcome with horror, unable to react. Was it because he was responsible for all the carnage he could so clearly see from the annex window? He’d carefully designed a humane bomb, one that was careful not to kill anyone, and instead he unleashed it on children.
If he had made the trigger, then the record should be in the print history.
Louise logged into the school’s administrative system via their back door and accessed the printer. It had been wiped clean. Nothing remained. The lack of evidence was just as damning.
Louise felt Tristan’s stare. She made the mistake of glancing up and meeting his eyes. He looked puzzled. She realized that her reactions to what she’d found must have shown on her face.
She ducked her head, heart pounding. Mr. Kessler was a horrible self-centered man but she didn’t want to get him killed. What were they going to do?
* * *
First period, they had their final in math. Louise raced through the questions, scribbling out the work with her stylus. She turned in the test slickie ten minutes into class.
“What? No artwork this time?” Mr. Nakagawa asked. Normally she spent the entire class doodling in the margins when they had a test; it amused her that the software allowed an array of colors and line thickness.
“Can we use our tablets?” Jillian joined her at his desk. For some weird reason they weren’t allow to use their phones at school but tablets supported the same texting software.