Once again, he stopped and listened. Nothing. He knelt beside the nosewheel, took a small but very powerful lithium-powered flashlight from his pocket, and carefully examined the well into which the nosewheel would be retracted during flight. Once again, he stopped, looked around, and listened. Still nothing to disturb him.

He removed the explosive device he had built and, for the first time, connected the wire from the detonator to the cell phone that would activate it. He opened the clamshell phone and taped the top flap to the bomb, then he stuffed the bomb all the way up into the wheel well and taped it to the shaft of the nosewheel. He examined the installation carefully, then, satisfied that all was well, he switched on the bomb’s cell phone.

—

SEVERAL MILES AWAY, in a bar no more than a block from Harry’s Venice Beach house, a screenwriter named Aaron Zell sat on a stool and rattled the ice in his empty glass. “One more, Phil,” he said.

“Coming up,” the bartender replied. He filled a clean glass with ice, then filled it with the twelve-year-old scotch that his customer had been drinking since three A.M. and set it in front of him. “What’re you doing here alone tonight?” Phil asked. “Where’s your girl?”

“We had a fight,” Zell said. “I don’t even know what about.”

“I’ve had fights like that with women,” Phil said, fulfilling his role as sympathetic bartender. “You never know what’ll set ’em off.”

“Too fucking right,” Zell replied. He took his cell phone from his pocket and began to dial a number.

“So you’re going to fix things by waking her up in the middle of the night?” Phil asked.

“She never sleeps after a fight,” Zell said. “We once made a pact that we’d never go to sleep angry with each other.” The numbers on the cell phone were a little blurred, given how much he had drunk, and he got the number wrong. “Call failed,” the on-screen message said.

“Shit, dialed it wrong,” Zell said. He tried picking out the number again, and put the phone to his ear. This time, the phone rang once, stopped. “Now what?” he said.

—

HARRY GREGG STUCK his head as far up into the Mustang’s wheel well as he could, switched on his flashlight, and made a final inspection of his bomb. Then he heard something he had not expected. The cell phone that he had just taped to the explosive rang once.

—

HALF A MILE AWAY, on the other side of the runway, at Santa Monica Airport, a sleepy security guard sat in his patrol car, smoking a cigar and watching the moon rise over Los Angeles. He was suddenly jolted fully awake by a brilliant flash across the runway, followed a millisecond later by the noise of an explosion.