THE HUNTERS FOUND THEIR quarry right where he was meant to be, the place he had picked with the same care he brought to his other handiwork. Lincoln, Montana, sits as close as you can get to the spine of the western hemisphere and still have a post office and a library within walking distance. Theodore John Kaczynski lived at heaven's back door, just below the largest stretch of unbroken wilderness in the continental U.S. There are no cars, no roads, no buildings beyond a shelter or two, and on any given day more grizzly bears than people. This is America as the explorers found it, still sealed, unlit, unwired, resembling most perfectly the place the Unabomber wanted America to be.
Maybe it wasn't really so lonely at night in the woods at the edge of the Scapegoat Wilderness, where the trees sound like a crowd waiting for the curtain to rise. It is a place where a man who hates technology and progress and people would have plenty of time to practice what the Unabomber preaches. He could listen to the forest rustle and hum, the larches and ponderosa pines hundreds of years old, hundreds of feet high, the tamaracks and the lodgepoles that totter when the wind rubs up against the Continental Divide. What he didn't know was that for the past few weeks, the trees were listening back.
The agents were everywhere, disguised as lumberjacks and postal workers and mountain men. They had draped the forest with sensors and microphones, nestled snipers not far from the cabin, even summoned satellites to keep watch for a man practicing blowing things up. When they raided the mountain cabin last week, ending the longest, most expensive hunt for a serial killer in U.S. history, the agents finally got to look into the shaggy face of a man they had imagined and profiled and tracked like a grizzly for the past 18 years.
They restrained themselves from saying they had finally caught the Unabomber. After 200 suspects, thousands of interviews, visits with clairvoyants, 20,000 calls to 800-701-BOMB, the agents were not about to rush to judgment. But when they finally, carefully entered the cabin, fearing booby traps, they found a whole bomb factory, including a partially built pipe bomb, chemicals, wire, books on bombmaking and hand-drawn diagrams. The cache even included components bearing, a source told TIME, the unique signature of the Unabomber. (Every bombmaker, experts say, develops a hallmark: he may loop wires in a certain way, or set his switches at a certain angle or, in this case, create his contraptions out of wood.) On Friday, a law officer said, investigators defused a live bomb found in the cabin.