“Gear,” she said.
“Yeah, I heard that, but what kind of gear?”
“You know, fun stuff with our letters on the back. Windbreakers, a couple of flak jackets.”
“Gift shop shit.”
“Sure.”
“Here you go,” Fisk said. Her phone thrummed and her laptop chimed, and then she had the new image in front of her.
Did I leave it here?
She couldn’t honestly remember. It was a terrible thing to lose track of, but she might have done exactly that. The problem was, she hardly ever had to use one in her line of work.
“Is anything missing?” Joe asked.
“Fisk, on the floor of the closet, is there a clear space in front of the locker?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, before you opened it, did you have to kick anything out of the way first?”
“No. There’s some shoes, but they weren’t in the way that I can remember. You guys should get a maid, y’know; I bet this building has a service.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Something’s missing, isn’t it?” Joe repeated.
Come on Maggie, was it here, or did you leave it in your apartment?
“Maggie, talk to me,” Joe said.
“Detective White, I’m going to be honest with you. It’s possible I kept a handgun in that locker.”
The Prudential Tower—the Pru—was the second tallest building in the city after the nearby Hancock, although it was difficult to see any real height difference from most perspectives. The Pru was somewhat more recognizable, and demonstrably more popular, both for the observation deck on the top floor (although it was closed almost all the time) and the shopping mall at its base.
The mall was no more or less spectacular than any other mall in the state—the stores were perhaps a touch more upscale, the products a little more current—but the scale seemed greater. That may have been because the indoor arcade that included the mall also had a convention center, two hotels, and a church. It was also attached to another mall: the even more upscale Copley Place (with a third hotel above it). From end to end, it was possible to walk ten city blocks without setting foot outside, which was particularly useful when shopping in the winter.
It was exactly the sort of place Corrigan avoided under any and all circumstances, outside of the job. He would rather a city street, which may be at times no less busy, but where cars had a boundary condition that prevented them from moving sideways or up. Crowds of people were far less predictable, and their futures were a nightmare because of it.
He stood at the edge of the mess, near one of the doors.
It was hard to breathe and harder to focus. This was a Sunday afternoon, and despite four days of active, public concern regarding bombs in public places, the mall was full: solo shoppers, couples, families, tourists. Everyone had a cell phone, and Corrigan had no cover. He couldn’t anticipate somebody recognizing him and calling the police and didn’t have a way to prevent it from happening short of wearing a mask, which would have drawn more attention. He had to assume the police were going to be notified, and soon.
No, he thought, as he spotted three police officers in different parts of the promenade. It’s worse than that.
Uniformed law enforcement’s presence in the mall was definitely up. That wasn’t so bad, because Corrigan could avoid the ones he could see; it was the ones dressed in plainclothes that were going to be a problem. He didn’t know if there were any, but it seemed like a reasonable assumption.
He had, after all, left them a map. If they knew about all the other jobs he’d marked on it already, they had to know this was the only location he hadn’t been to yet. Especially if Maggie explained to the cops how this worked.
It was sort of okay. He wondered if an unconscious mechanism in his head decided it would be best if he left the map behind, to give the cops an opportunity to show up at the Pru, without their presence being Corrigan’s fault. Because it was definitely the case that something bad was going to happen in this mall; it was probably better that the police were there for it, if only to help with the evacuation.
Or they can take it from here and I’ll go home, he thought.
He was kidding. It was going to be a bomb, and he was going to have to stop it himself. He already knew this.
He took a deep breath, adjusted his jacket, and headed in.
When it was only Corrigan Bain the Boston Police were looking for, the tip line was reliably busy. It was worse, certainly, after Bain had been connected with the assault of police officers, but not all that much more reliable for it. But when the chief held a press conference Sunday morning asking for help to identify the guy the FBI found—the nameless man in the background, wearing a camera—it tripled the call volume immediately. European-looking white guys with dark hair and pointy noses were apparently the second-largest population of white male humans in the city after big, burly guys who looked like Corrigan.
By Noon, the police had a list of fifty names to follow up on, which was great except they had exactly two detectives free to perform those follow-ups. Joe White was one of the two, and he wasn’t really all that free.
“Send them to the feds,” he told Doris, when she brought him the first set of names. “Have ‘em run it against what they’ve got, save us the door-to-doors.”
The phone banks were in the building, two floors down from Joe’s desk. Most of the 911 service was remote, in conjunction with the phone company support, but tip line calls got forwarded directly. Every now and then, he’d head down there to listen to the noise of the city trying to help him stop a bomber. Sometimes it was reassuring.
An hour after Doris’s first visit of the day, right past one in the afternoon, she called his desk.
“I think we have something, you want to come down here?”
A few minutes later he was looking at a map of the city. There were red pins stuck all over it. He already knew each pin represented a possible Corrigan Bain sighting. There were a lot of them. There were also blue pins on the map, but only a few.
“Blue’s our mystery man,” Doris said.
“We just asked for an ID.”
“Sure, but we get what we get. We’re getting sightings.”
“Okay.”
“In the past thirty minutes, we’ve received fifteen calls about Bain. Five of them put him here.”
She stuck a new red pin in a spot on the map that had been almost blank.
“That’s near the Prudential Center,” Joe said. “Isn’t it? It’s one of the three possibles.”
“It’s near, yeah.”
The Pru was the worst of the possibles, the one he hoped was incorrect, like maybe Corrigan’s black magic marker slipped when he put that particular dot on the map.
There were three locations on the map they couldn’t account for, meaning they couldn’t confirm that Bain had been there in the past, so he might still be going there in the future. Joe pulled some of the resources busy following up on the tip line calls, and stationed officers at each of the three.
Since the other two locations were outside a hospital, and at the mouth of the harbor, he’d been very much hoping to hear that Corrigan had been spotted at one of them instead. Or anywhere else, really; anywhere other than the biggest indoor mall in the city.
“I’ll reach out to the uniforms on the scene,” Joe said.
“Do that,” Doris said, “but that’s not why I called. At the same time we were getting those calls about Bain, we got three for our mystery guy, and all three of ‘em put him here.”
She stuck a blue pin a few inches from the red one.
“I’m not seeing what you’re seeing, Doris.”
“That’s because you shop for clothes at Goodwill, Joe. This spot here? Copley. That one there is the Hynes. They connect in the middle.”
“You’re telling me both of these men have been spotted at the same time, and in the same place.”
“I’m saying,
they might be meeting in the middle. I mean, I don’t have a vector on them or anything, but if I were betting, it would be that they’re heading toward each other, not away.”
“How good is this information, do you think?” he asked.
“I’m not going to ballpark it for you. That’s what you get paid for. For every five calls I have saying Corrigan Bain is around here, I have another five putting him in five other parts of the city.”
The various sales corridors converged on a central point, appropriately labeled Center Plaza, and it appeared Corrigan’s feet were leading him there, but before he even got halfway he noticed that one of the police officers was following him.
He was able to confirm this by stopping, and looking into one of his futures. In that future, immediately after making eye contact with the cop—he was baby-faced, and looked like he graduated high school at the same time as the Academy—the officer would shout at him to stop and raise his hands. Then Corrigan would turn back around and start running.
Corrigan didn’t like that future very much, so he picked the one where he didn’t turn around.
That the officer hadn’t attempted to detain Corrigan reflected a certain prudence on everyone’s part, considering he’d disabled a team of four the last time around. Whatever was going to happen next wasn’t going to involve only four cops. It was going to be a large response team.
But first, there was going to be a gunshot.
It wasn’t the cop. The shot would come from in front of him, from somewhere not yet in view. Even with the tremendous ambient noise in the mall, the gun report would be loud and recognizable. The people around him would be looking around with confusion.
Was that a gun?
Ahead, the shoppers close enough to the noise to feel threatened by it would begin to run towards Corrigan, the people wondering if they heard what they thought they heard would figure out that they had, and the stampede would begin.
That was a few seconds away, still; Corrigan began to run toward the noise before it was a noise.
This had a predictable immediate consequence. The cop, assuming the suspect he was tailing was attempting to get away, shouted: “Corrigan Bain, don’t move!”
The people between them parted, and the ones in front of Corrigan got out of the way too, and for about two seconds it was just Corrigan and the police officer running through the mall.
When the gun ahead of them went off, Corrigan made sure both his hands were visible, just in case the kid thought his suspect was the one firing something. Corrigan didn’t have time to deal with him drawing the wrong conclusion at the wrong time.
It might have worked.
“Shots fired, shots fired,” he heard the cop shout into his shoulder microphone just before both of them were overwhelmed by the crowd fleeing the middle of the mall. Corrigan had a little trouble stepping around the stampede—the future was always a mess in the middle of a panic—but surely the policeman was having much more of a problem.
If Corrigan wanted, he probably could have circled around, run with the crowd, and gone right past the cop and out the exit.
Instead, he pressed on, until he reached Center Court.
Under normal circumstances, this area would have been full of people crisscrossing their way to various sales corridors from other sales corridors. Its centerpiece was an Information desk and a map of the mall.
Most of the people had cleared out already, because of the man with the gun. He was standing next to a terrified-looking woman Corrigan felt like he should recognize. Both of them were next to the information desk, which was either unmanned or occupied by someone who had ducked out of sight.
The man with the gun had on an odd contraption. It was some sort of exoskeleton, with metal rails running down his arms, meeting at circular joints. It looked like his legs had the same thing going on, too. On his head, he was wearing a steel headband with an eyepiece over his right eye.
It looked like something between a rehabilitative support system and a device from a science-fiction movie. Corrigan wasn’t sure if he was supposed to take him seriously or not. The gun in his hand said yes, but it was really hard to look past the cyborg suit.
The man looked at Corrigan and smiled.
“Is it you?” he asked. He reached up and pulled another lens down, to cover his left eye. “We’ve been waiting.”
In the future, the man fired a shot at Corrigan, which he evaded easily. The bullet shattered a glass display and gut-shot a mannequin.
The future caught up, and the man fired, the mannequin went down, and the guy smiled because Corrigan had stepped aside.
“It is you,” he said.
Then the man’s future disappeared.
Corrigan took a step back, instinctively. An armed man was standing in front of him, and Corrigan couldn’t predict what that armed man was going to do next, and that was a bad situation indeed.
“How are you doing that?” Corrigan asked.
“I’m a magician,” he said. “OFFICER! STOP RIGHT THERE!”
The cop had reached the scene. Corrigan turned around to see that the kid had already gotten his gun out, but didn’t look all that clear on who he should be pointing it at.
“Drop the gun,” the cop said.
“I don’t think I’m going to, no. Do you see the girl on my right?”
The woman looked utterly terrified. She was short, with spiky black hair and an incongruous overcoat. She was sweating. Corrigan didn’t think the overcoat was entirely to blame for that.
“Miss, are you okay?” the officer asked.
She shook her head no.
“It’s all right, Monica, you can show them now,” the man said.
The girl named Monica nodded quickly and took off the coat. Underneath, she had on a T-shirt, a loose pair of jeans, and a large explosive device.
“Help me, please…” the girl said quietly.
Maggie was about to head to her apartment, to hunt down that missing gun, when David burst into her office.
“Something’s going on at the Pru,” he said.
Ten minutes later they were racing across town in his car, lights flashing, trying to catch up with a convoy of other police cars heading in the same direction.
She got a call through to Joe White on only the tenth try.
“Bad time to talk, agent,” he said.
“Gimme the short version.”
“Your boyfriend, your mystery man, and a big thing that goes boom. Did you find that gun?”
“Didn’t get a chance to look yet,” she said.
“We’re considering him armed right now, Maggie.”
“I know. Tell me about the other guy.”
“I don’t have details yet. I’ll let you know.”
The man’s future kept blinking in and out. It wasn’t clear to Corrigan whether he even knew it was happening, or if he had any control over it. One second he was about to move his arm, and then he did move his arm, and then the next motion vanished and Corrigan saw him the same way everyone else did. It was like watching a television channel whose signal was getting interrupted arrhythmically, except it was in 3-D, and felt much more immersive.
It was having downstream effects all around. The girl with the bomb, for instance, still had a definite future, but that future was in part reacting to the future of the man beside her. Since his future was hidden part of the time, it looked as if her future-self was wrestling with a ghost.
Corrigan wondered if this was what vertigo felt like.
“What should I call you?” Corrigan asked. He desperately wanted to look away, before he started throwing up right there, but knew taking his eyes off the armed man with the unpredictable future was a bad idea.
“Bernard,” the man said.
“All right, Bernard. What do you want?”
He laughed.
“You got the message already,” he said. “Free them. HEY! KID!”
He was shouting past Corrigan. Corrigan turned around to chec
k on the trailing cop, who had taken cover behind a free-standing kiosk selling microwaveable pillows. He was speaking furiously into his mic, and his gun was still drawn. He didn’t know he was being spoken to.
“KID!” Bernard repeated. He turned back to Corrigan. “Well, anyway, that’s my demand, and that’s why we’re here. Free them. He knows. When everyone else gets here I’ll tell them the same thing.”
Corrigan had no idea who was supposed to be getting freed, but had a strong suspicion that whoever it was, the demand wasn’t getting met and the bomb was going to be set off. What he didn’t know was what Bernard planned to do with himself when that happened. Corrigan could still remember what it felt like to experience the last bomb, and was pretty positive the only reason he survived was because Bernard didn’t end up setting it off.
Was he hoping to survive that last blast? Because standing right next to the girl wasn’t the best place to be when this detonation happened. But suicide bombers don’t usually need hostages.
“I don’t know who they are,” Corrigan said. “What does she have to do with any of it?”
“Oh, she’s for you! Don’t you recognize her?”
He did, but he wasn’t sure why. He looked her in the eyes.
“Did I save you once?” he asked.
“I run…” she said quietly. “I run a website…”
“She’s your biggest fan, Corrigan Bain,” Bernard said. “I couldn’t think of a better person to bring along.”
“So the plan is…I’m sorry, Bernard, I’m trying to get the whole picture here.” It was so hard to look at him. “If the police don’t free someone for you, you’re going to blow all of us up? It doesn’t sound like a really great plan.”
“Oh, no, no, that demand was yesterday’s demand. We contacted the media with it, and nothing happened. Today is the consequence of not meeting yesterday’s demand.”
“You’re going to set off the bomb?”
“Unless you can stop me.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“The world is a complicated place.”
Fixer Redux Page 14