afterward. There had been no answers until he had read in The Philadelphia Inquirer that the Vice President was going to arrive in Philadelphia and depart from Philadelphia by train, at the 30th Street Station.
Then, of course, it had all become quite clear. The reason the lockers had been dumped on the farm was because the Lord wanted him to have the lockers to use when he disintegrated the Vice President.
The moment this had popped into his mind, Marion knew that it was true. There was no need to get on his knees and beg the Lord for a sign. The Lord had already given him a sign, back in ’Nam. Marion had personally gone to the locker room of the Hotel de Indochine to investigate the explosion that had taken the lives of twenty-six American civilian technicians. The Vietcong had set off explosives, almost certainly Composition C-4, in half a dozen lockers. He thought that each charge had probably been a half pound of C-4, around which chain had been wrapped. Each charge had functioned like an oversize fragmentation hand grenade. The American civilians had literally been disintegrated.
The lockers in the Hotel de Indochine were not identical to the ones that had been dumped in the depression—they had been eighteen inches by five feet, not three feet square. But that was a detail that didn’t seem to matter.
There were rows of lockers like the ones that had been dumped all over 30th Street Station. All he was going to have to do was install a device in one locker in each of the rows. And then be in a position to see the Vice President, so that he could detonate the explosive device that would disintegrate him.
It was possible, even probable, Marion knew, that people who had not offended the Lord would also be disintegrated. But there were two ways to look at that. It couldn’t be helped, for one thing, and certainly the Lord would somehow compensate in Heaven those whose premature deaths had been made necessary in order to carry out His will.
Marion had realized that it was becoming more and more clear why the Lord had chosen him as His instrument to carry out His will. There were not that many people around with his level of expertise in making lethal devices from readily available material. And there were not very many people around with access to a testing area. You can’t cause an explosion in very many places without causing a good deal of curiosity. The farm, in the middle of the Pine Barrens, was one of the very few places where an explosion would not be heard.
After Marion had put the garbage from the meal into the paper bag from the grocery store, he turned off the Coleman lantern in the kitchen and went into the bedroom.
He made the bed, laid out fresh underwear and socks for the morning, took off his clothes, and then turned off the other Coleman lantern. He dropped to his knees by the side of the bed, and prayed the Lord’s grace on himself as he began to carry out His will, and then for the souls of the boys who the Lord had taken into Heaven from Vietnam, and then he got in bed and was almost instantly asleep.
Marion woke at first light. He changed into the linen he had laid out the night before, and then made his breakfast. Bacon, two fried eggs, fried “toast,” coffee, and a small can of tomato juice. After he ate he washed the dishes and pots and pans, and added the refuse to the garbage from supper.
He then began to lay out on the table everything he would need to make the devices. There were two large rolls of duct tape, approximately thirty feet of one-inch link chain, the shortwave receivers from Radio Shack, and an assortment of tools, including a large bolt cutter. Then he went out to the car and brought in the Composition C-4.
The basic device would be two quarter-pound blocks of Composition C-4, which looked not unlike sticks of butter, except of course they were gray in color, and had a hole to accommodate the detonator. He didn’t have as many detonators as he would have liked to have had, so for the testing, he would use one detonator per device. The devices he would install in the lockers in 30th Street Station would have two detonators per device. Redundancy was the term. The chances of two