In the end, the solution to his problem was delivered to him via the World Wide Web. While browsing the Internet on a friend’s computer, Stoner had stumbled upon the formula for an explosive called RDX. With a force one hundred and fifty times that of TNT, a modified version of RDX could be molded like C-4 into a shaped charge. That stuff, Stoner thought, would be ideal for cutting through the concrete and steel pillars that he often visited in his dreams. Like a slow burning fuse, Dale Stoner’s trail of Biblical justice was ignited.

On this day he had no need to pause or survey the cavernous store room. Stoner had already worked out the details, in his mind, time and time again. So he was able to go quickly from pillar to pillar. At each of them he brought his cart to a stop, removed one of the boxes with the small arrow from the center of the stack, and placed it on the floor, right up against the pillar at its base with the small arrow pointed at the pillar. Around each of these boxes he piled the boxes of real paper. While this would do little to direct the blast, since the hollowed out, inverted cone shape of his explosives would already do that, Stoner felt that it just might help the blast along, if just a little.

He didn’t have enough explosives for all the pillars. He knew that beforehand. To compensate for this, he selected those that stood in what he thought was the center of the building. At the base of each of them, he placed one of his homemade shaped charges, setting it so that each of the detonations would blow in, against the pillar and toward the middle of the building. Not only would this collapse the pillars inward, but the force of each of the devices would converge in the center where it would be vented up and through the floors above. If the loss of the supporting pillars didn’t bring the floors above down, then the gaping hole left by the upward blast might.

Placement went quickly since there had been no need to set individual fuses. All the tinkering and experimentation needed to make them function properly had all been painstakingly worked out well in advance. The actual setting and initiation of the fuses had been done the night before, when he had connected the small, battery operated alarm clocks to the model rocket engines he was using as primers. All of these items, as well as the ingredients for his explosives, had been purchased over the months from supermarkets and department stores. Unlike the Oklahoma affair, none of his purchases were of such a quantity that they would attract attention. Nor did he buy everything at once. Like the crippling series of illnesses that robbed him of his health, then his family, and finally his dignity, Dale Stoner took his time.