AJ’s eyes were shut. He kept his breathing calm and measured and even managed to prevent his heart from racing. First day on a new job was something he was intimately familiar with. Far more familiar than he would have liked. And yet he still struggled with his nerves. Maybe this job would be the one that would last, that he could get comfortable in, get to know the other people. He wondered, but he did not have much hope for that possibility.

At last he opened his eyes. The building before him was tall for this part of town, a dozen stories high at least. It’s drab concrete exterior was dark and wet and AJ was suddenly aware of the smell of the recent rain and the occasional plip of water dripping somewhere unseen.

He stood there in the parking lot for a few more moments. There were hardly any vehicles parked there and only a single window inside was illuminated. He was plenty early, maybe a bit too early, but that was always better than being late. A duffel bag at his feet contained, he knew, a change of clothes and the tools he’d need for his work.

He bent down and picked up the bag and finally began to make his way over to the building entrance. The door was, of course, locked. That was to be expected. He pulled out the name badge he had and swiped it over the scanner. A satisfying click as the lock disengaged sounded and he pushed the door open.

Now that he was inside, he knew he didn’t have energy to waste on worrying so he pushed his nerves the rest of the way down. He had a job to do, and he wanted to do it well even if this was going to be just like his other jobs and only last a short while.

He walked confidently across the empty reception area and over towards the back stairs. He hated elevators and avoided them whenever he could. The stairwell echoed with his footfalls as he descended the stairs, skipping every other step as he went. Once at the bottom he found the door leading from the stairwell into the basement was also locked but had no card scanner. He fished in his bag until he came out with a set of keys. He tried one, then another, and so on until he found the one that worked and the door popped open. It was dark down there and it took him a moment to find the light switch.

Pipes and insulation covered the ceiling, the air was heavy and humid, and the soft hissing of flowing water and steam was ever present.

AJ closed the basement door behind himself and did a quick look around through the basement. It wasn’t a very large space, given the overall size of the building above. The network of pipes, pumps, heaters, and other mechanical systems made it quite a maze but it didn’t take him very long to figure out the different pathways. He checked his watch and set a small timer to let him know when he should take his first break. A lot of jobs liked to gloss over the fact that he was entitled to two fifteen minute breaks, in addition to his half hour for lunch. It was a little thing, really, and not one he’d ever had any trouble with past employers over. He doubted they ever knew he took his breaks. Regardless, it was important to him and so he always made sure he got them.

That done, he began to inspect the pipes and machinery, looking for signs of wear, of rust, and anything else he might be able to use. Exploiting natural weaknesses was always better than inventing them since the latter were much harder to conceal. Often times, no one would ever think to come down here unless something broke. Inspections were suppose to catch these sorts of things, of course, but they were bothersome. If something was found to be out of order, the company would have to pay to fix it and such expenses were often viewed as unnecessary. With the right contacts, the right payments, inspections could be ignored for years and it was far cheaper paying those bribes than paying for the actual maintenance.

Like many old building, there were plenty of options he found. There were rusted pipes, worn belts and corroded wires practically everywhere he looked. AJ sighed in disappointment. This would be another short job. Possibly just a single day.

He went back to his duffel bag and removed the change of clothes, a pair of coveralls, and changed into them. Then he pulled out a collection of sealed jars from the duffel bag. Certain acids could accelerate the deterioration of the steel pipes. The advantage to using them was that once the pipe failed and began spraying water everywhere it would rinse away the acid. The surrounding rust would be enough to make most inspectors assume it had failed naturally.

AJ set to work, building the cradle that would surround the pipe and hold the acid. Glass was ideal for the task, but he had to make sure it was not too strong. It would have to break away and shatter into small enough fragments that no one would suspect what he’d done should they find any of the pieces. That meant using thin, brittle sheets of glass, lightly fused together with his hand torch. It was a process he’d perfected over the years and had yet to have any trouble with it.

He built multiple cradles with the aim of causing multiple failures. That was risky, since if one of them failed to penetrate the pipe and cause it to burst, it could be found out. However, the compromised pipes were already so thin from rusting and ready to burst that he doubted it would take very long at all for the acid to eat through them. He could probably just bang them with a wrench and burst them that way if he didn’t mind getting soaked. Well, soaked and caught.

It took the better part of the morning to make his acid cradles. He just finished the last one when his alarm went off. He sat down on a small folding chair he’d found and put his feet up on one of the sturdier pipes to take his first break. Looking around at the construction, materials used, he guessed that the building was probably around forty years old. The most recent repair work he’d come across, a patch on a pipe, looked to be about fifteen years old. That lined up with the time the current owners purchased the building. The old owners would have had to pass inspection before selling and so they’d done what few repairs they were required to make. The current owners didn’t seem to have bothered ever since.

AJ popped a stick of gum into his mouth and began chewing. He was careful to make sure the wrapper made it back into his duffel bag. The less he left behind, the better. The mint of the gum was sharp and burned his nose slightly. He wasn’t usually a gum chewer but the acid smelled even worse and the mint would help to dull his sense of smell.

His watch chimed again and he reset it for his lunch break and went back to work. He put on his safety goggles, respirator, and gloves, and began attaching the cradles to the pipes and filling them with the acid. In most movies they made out such processes as being fast but in reality it would take hours to wear through even these thin pipes.

Footsteps in the stairwell.

AJ froze. There was always the possibility during a job like this that someone would come across him. He had contingencies and alibis, but those were never guarantees. As it was, he had no where to really hide and his equipment was all spread out. He’d never have enough time to put it all away. Besides, the smell of the acid would be obvious by this point in time.

Voices carried down to the basement now, though the echo of the stairwell garbled what they were saying and so AJ had no idea who they might be or why they would be coming down here.

A moment passed and AJ heard a key slide into the doorknob.

Without hesitating any further, AJ stepped away from the pipes and over to his duffel bag.

The door opened and two men stepped in. Immediately they were hit by the smell of the acid and they shied back, waving their hands in front of their faces and squinting their eyes against the irritation.

“Hey guys,” AJ called over to them, “You’re not suppose to be down here right now. I’m running the chemical tests on the water pipes today and the fumes can be pretty harsh.”

The two men looked at AJ in utter surprise. For a second they looked like they were going to question him but the acid fumes forced them back. They waved to him and then left.

This wasn’t good. Even if they weren’t suspicious of him, they would probably talk about it, ask their bosses about it, and then that could lead to someone else coming down who knew that there was no such thing as chemical tests for water pipes. That left him with few options moving forward. He’d have to accelerate his plans. Burst water pipes were easy and relatively safe, but they took time. Electrical shorts and gas leaks, however, were both fast. Unfortunately they were also dangerous. AJ was a number of things, arsonist and saboteur being the two foremost among them, but he was not a killer. He’d have to make sure everyone got out and that meant sounding the alarm.

His employers wouldn’t like that. They wanted this to look like an accident, not intentional, but at this point AJ couldn’t risk assuming that his water pipe plan would go off unnoticed.

He left the cradles and the acid where they were, no point wasting time trying to remove them, and he began pulling out a series of small, homemade devices he’d prepared for just such an occasion. They were simple brackets with drills attached to them and AJ began clamping them onto the main natural gas line that fed into the building. When activated, these would drill into the pipe, thus beginning the gas leak. AJ also pulled out a large pair of wire cutters and he began nipping around the insulation of the high voltage wires that ran along the ceiling until he had a good amount exposed. From there, he attached a couple of wires he’d pulled from his bag and pinned them up to the insulation for the time being. Next he pulled from the duffel bag was a small track and motor. Two sliding plates sat on either side of the track and a belt connected them together so that as one plate slid towards the center, so did the other plate. AJ attached the motor to the belt and then taped the wires to the opposing plates.

The last thing AJ removed from his duffel bag was a small, compact computer board. There was no screen, no keyboard or mouse, just a few sensors and open USB ports. The clamped drills and the motor each plugged into one of the open USB ports and, finally, AJ attached a small battery pack to the computer board. The programming in the computer would do the rest.

AJ quickly stowed the rest of his gear, leaving on the gloves and left the basement. He hurried back up to the main level, skipping every other step on his way. He had just a few minutes before the drills would pierce the pipes. Then the sensors would detect when the mixture of gas and air was perfect for ignition and the computer would activate the motor, bringing the two wires together where they would spark and ignite the whole thing in one big conflagration.

The fire alarm in the stairwell was easy enough to pull. He waited behind the stairwell door, listening as out in the lobby called out in surprise as the alarm began to blare and flash. Some voices asked if it was a fire drill, others seemed to just bemoan the interruption to their day.

AJ waited just a few moments and then stepped out of the stairwell. He acted frustrated and confused like everyone else but didn’t engage in any of their conversations as they asked if anyone knew what was going on. They made their way into the parking lot but AJ just kept walking. No one paid him any attention as he left. It was a big building and no one knew who he was. No one cared.

He was a good number of streets away when he heard the unmistakable THOOMM of the gas igniting and blowing up the basement. Soon afterward he heard the wail of sirens and, looking back, could see the smoke rising.

With a tinge of regret, he turned on his cell phone and sent a quick text.

Finished a bit early.

Maybe some day he’d have a normal nine-to-five job where he can get to know his co-workers and really feel like he can settle down, but not today. Today was just another one day job.