Soft Target

by Stephen Hunter

  Simon himself ran the interrogation, while the forensics and evidence collection team went downstairs, where Andrew lived. As Simon addressed the parents, they all could hear the cracks as the agents used tactical entry battering rams to knock down the locked door.

  “Does Andrew need a lawyer?” asked Nicks.

  “Possibly, sir. Do you want to make a call? We are in a hurry, as you might imagine, but at the same time, I want your son to have the full protection of the law.”

  “No, no, go ahead.”

  In the background, NBC was reporting that the van had arrived from the penitentiary and that the prisoners would file aboard the airplanes within a few minutes.

  “I’m looking at his record now,” said Simon. “Andrew has had some difficulties, I see.”

  “He’s been a hard kid to have around, yes,” said the father. “So bright, so angry. I’ve spent a lot of money on lawyers, just trying to keep him out of jail. He’s my only child, what could I do?”

  “Yes sir. Just scanning here, I see some drug busts, I see that he has been kicked out of three private schools and just barely managed to graduate from the fourth—”

  “He’s got a genius-level IQ.”

  “Somehow he got into Harvard.”

  “I made a very large donation to the school, and that may have had something to do with it. But he was certainly smart enough. He just wasn’t mature enough.”

  “He didn’t stay long?”

  “Less than a year. A very unfortunate year, I’m afraid. He let himself get angry, he sent some unwise e-mails to people, he didn’t invent Facebook because someone else had already, he got lost in writing code, hacking, designing games, stopped going to class, ultimately returned to his drugs and his music and his trendy nihilism. You know the profile: love of destruction, heavy metal, a fantasy life full of violence. I don’t know what’s wrong with that kid. We gave him everything, we supported him through it all. He’s been in psychotherapy since he was twelve. He’s been in every program you could imagine, taken every antidepressant, every ADD drug, Ritalin by the long ton. It works, sometimes, for a while. But he always regresses: rock and roll, computers, violent nihilistic fantasies, anger at . . . I suppose at me. I made a lot of money. Big mistake.”

  “You’re an entrepreneur?”

  “I have a gift for retail,” Jason said. “I just surf the zeitgeist looking for opportunities. I’m not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, believe me, just a storefront guy. I had hippie clothing stores in the seventies, running shoes in the eighties, computers in the nineties, now computer games. That’s the cool stuff. There’s some other stuff too, not so cool. I own several fast-food franchises, the better part of three local strip malls, a complete mall in Kansas, a restaurant and three motels in the Wisconsin Dells, three Sheetzes along I-ninety-two. I own the First Person Shooter shops, do you know what they are?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Shooting games in cyberspace. Andrew grew up with them. He’s probably one of the best in the world when it comes to fighting with your thumbs on a PlayStation. My flagship store is at the mall. Two years ago, I asked Andrew to manage it, and for the first time in his life, he applied himself. He’s run it very well.”

  “And that’s where he is now?”

  “Yes. And every day.”

  “Are you aware that for six months he had a job in a sporting goods store in Twin Rivers?”

  “What? That’s not Andrew.”

  “He used the store’s FFL to acquire sixteen assault rifles, sixteen surplus German pistols, and over ten thousand rounds of ammunition.”

  An agent entered the room.

  “Bill,” he said, “you ought to come see this.”

  “Everybody’s so happy,” said Mr. Girardi.

  “They say it’s almost over.”

  They stood essentially nowhere. They’d been exiled from the press area, and there seemed to be little point in going back to the Red Cross area, especially as it would be buckling down to receive the seriously wounded. They were more or less in between those two stations, about three hundred yards from the bulk of America, the Mall, which was a hub of activity, still surrounded by cops with their lights flashing. A few minutes ago, buses had begun to assemble not at the mall, per se, but a few hundred yards off to the right, so that when given the signal, they could progress to the entrances and load up on freed hostages, who would then be taken to triage stations and then to other destinations. The whole thing was immensely complicated, and it seemed everywhere they looked, they saw vehicles and scurrying men.

  It was cold now, near forty degrees, and the woman shivered.

  “I don’t think we should get any closer. They’ll try and stop us,” she said.

  “We’ll just stay here. It’ll only be a little while longer, I’m sure.”

  “You see,” said Colonel Obobo to his friend David Banjax of the New York Times, as they sat on folding chairs outside America, the Mall, with Mr. Renfro hovering over Obobo’s shoulder. Behind them the buses to transport the freed hostages pulled into position. “I’m of the belief that we in law enforcement shouldn’t be bullies or tough guys or sucker punchers. I’ve believed that since I walked a beat in Boston all those years ago.”

  Banjax knew the colonel had walked the beat in Boston for less than three weeks before being snatched up to more glamorous duty, as befit his spectacular personage, but he wrote it down anyhow, while his tape recorder purred away, even though Obobo had used the same line when he’d interviewed him before, for the magazine.

  “I’ve always thought of force as the least and last part of law enforcement’s job. Rather, guidance, advice, steady presence, absolute fealty to the letter of the law, but also patience and compassion and discipline, all of it driven forward by a commitment to diversity. No one should look at a policeman and feel fear. That’s the law enforcement I hope I embody and I hope I represent.”

  “Sir,” said Banjax, “I’m hearing that there were elements in your command who wanted to go in guns blazing. Is that right?”

  “We discussed many ideas, David, many possibilities. But sometimes courage comes in doing nothing. Sometimes it comes in not applying pressure and in letting the alleged perpetrators understand the absurdity of the situation they’ve engineered and letting them see that the sensible solution saves lives rather than takes them. Most people aren’t killers. Most people are simply trying to make themselves heard, to have a selfhood, an identity, whatever you want to call it. And once that is permitted, it defuses the situation. I’m sure these folks consider their cause right and just, and who’s to say, really, that it isn’t? There’s room here on earth for different ideas; that’s why we treasure diversity as a value and I’ve tried to increase it wherever I’ve been and wherever I may go.”

  “Well said, sir, if I may. But speaking of ‘wherever you may go,’ is it true that you’re in consideration to become director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation? The successful closure of this emergency certainly can’t hurt that.”

  “Well, we’ll let the future take care of itself, David. It will be what it will be. Yes, it would be a great challenge to be in charge of the FBI and to see my ideas applied on a national scale, but—”

  Mr. Renfro leaned in. “I hate to break this up, but we’re receiving word the Kaafi brothers have arrived at the airport and been trucked to the plane. Doug, we have to make you available to TV now.”

  The colonel and Banjax turned. A monitor had been set up, and indeed the screen showed the three prisoners, still in their orange jumpsuits, all twitchy and excited, climbing up the steps to the giant airliner one by one.

  “You should be proud to see that,” said Banjax.

  “I am. Off the record, I had people who wanted to explode bombs underneath the floor and go in shooting. Jesus Christ, can you imagine the carnage? For what, to save three measly bank robbers who’d be out in a few years anyway?”

  “We’d never be at this moment.”

/>   “No, and we’d have to send out for more body bags. I don’t think there are enough in Minnesota for something like that.”

  Simon walked through the shattered door into Andrew Nicks’s large, paneled bedroom on the bottom floor of his father’s mansion. The first thing he saw were posters from a group calling itself Megakill on the walls, jagged images of rockers made up as the angels of Armageddon, with crazed screwball makeup, long black nails, coils of hair to the shoulders, lips red as blood, electric instruments like weapons, faces contorted into the pagan killing mask, like Conan on a good day outside the walls of some doomed Hyborian city-state. Other pix: smiling shots of Dylan and Eric of Columbine fame, a solemn loner named Seung-Hui Cho of Virginia Tech, the great Charles Manson, Charles Whitman, a strange guy with haunted eyes and a bushy ’40s haircut, even two little squirts in period outfits he recognized finally as Bonnie and Clyde. All screwball shooters, little men with big guns, artists of destruction and mayhem. Then the guy in the haircut clarified for him as he realized it was Howard Unruh, who’d taken a Luger for a walk in 1948, murdering thirteen, first of the big-kill maniacs.

  Then he saw the elaborate computer setup, and an agent had called up MEMTAC 6.2, which Simon knew to be the software package that controlled America, the Mall’s, security system. An immensely detailed and possibly impenetrable flowchart seemed to be on display. On a table across from the unmade bed were stacks of blueprints, all of them from Oakland Engineering and Architectural, one of the firms that had constructed the mall in 1992. On many of them, red pencil lines tracked pathways, corridors, stairways, choke points, areas in square footage.

  The bookshelf held a variety of texts—classic revolutionary strategy by Mao, Debray, Guevara, and Trotsky, to say nothing of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, Dave Cullen’s Columbine, a variety of US Army and Marine Corps insurgency and counterinsurgency manuals, sniper guides, improvised explosive handbooks, psywar op pamphlets, ambush tactics and man-tracking guides from various survivalist or radical publishers.

  “Mentally, he was getting ready for war,” said someone.

  “Mentally, he was nuts,” someone else said.

  “Oh God,” somebody said, “look at this.”

  He held up a batch of newspaper clippings on a Reverend Reed Hobart, of a Church of the Redeemer in some outlying community, who had been famously demonstrating at downtown mosques with a group of his followers but then had suddenly vanished without a trace.

  “Maybe Andrew made the Reverend Mr. Reed go bye-bye,” said someone.

  “Okay,” said Simon, “I think that pretty much tears it. I’ll call Kemp, and meanwhile let’s get this stuff photoed, tagged, and removed. It’ll all have to be looked at.”

  “What’s in the closet, I wonder,” another agent said, and opened the door.

  The detonation represented itself even before it was a blade of light as a wall of immense energy that stopped time for a split second, and in the next everybody in the room had been blown back until they hit something that stopped them. The noise was stupendous, and shards of wood flying viciously through the air opened a hundred or so wounds in the men and women so blasted.

  Simon, who had been deeper in the room at the time of the blast and thus missed its killing force, found himself the new owner of three broken ribs. He fought the terrible, suppurating lassitude that leadened his limbs and tried to shut down his brain. He blinked, exhaled a plume of acrid air, looked about, and through the smoke that hung everywhere in the room, noted a young agent against another wall so still he had to be dead, and grew angry at himself that he could not remember the young man’s name just now. He tried to pull himself up, get himself together, take charge, make a report, get medical and ATF bomb people out here, all at once.

  Then he saw, through the fog, the boy’s father standing in the doorway.

  “Oh God, Andrew,” he was screaming, “what have you done!”

  Tick tock, tick tock, Jeff Neal thought. He looked around, saw the eyes of all the leaners-in boring in at him. But he was trying to put pieces together. Somehow “perverts” and “mall” and . . . and what? He thought he had an idea, an inspiration, a possibility, a—

  “Sorry. I thought I had something. I didn’t.”

  “Well,” said Dr. Benson, “I guess you ought to just run penetration programs on it again, and just maybe—”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” said Neal suddenly, again very fast. “Stay with me on this. We track pervs, right?”

  “That seems to be the consensus,” someone said.

  “Now, I do have a California guy in my crosshairs. His name is Bruce Wyatt, thirty-four. I’ve been all over his hard drive. Kids dressed as cowboys, you don’t want to know more. Okay. Okay, he works, I think, at a RealDeal in Sacramento. So I’m going to get on his drive, search for links. He’s computer-savvy, sort of, so he’s got a link to RealDeal Corporate. So from him I can get into RealDeal Corporate. I get into that, their main setup, not the bullshit public website, I get into their guts, where all their maintenance and security and financial programs are, and maybe there’s a link to each branch, even if it’s only e-mail. So maybe I somehow figure out which of the fifty or so branches—”

  “Jeff, there’s probably over five hundred of them.”

  “So I get into their operating system and from there I get to the system here at this mall, at their big fourth-floor store and maybe, depending on who built it and how much money they spent, maybe, maybe maybe there’s some kind of undocumented portal from it into the bigger SCADA thing and I can get in through that. And I can take it down that way.”

  “Go for it,” said Dr. Benson.

  “So we wait till it’s all clear,” asked Lavelva Oates, “then we come out, is that what they’re saying?”

  “That’s what they’re saying. It’s over, the bad guys won. Hostages for prisoners. The prisoners go, then the hostages go.”

  “What happens then?”

  “I don’t know,” Ray said. “We’ll let the geniuses figure it out.”

  “It ain’t right,” said Lavelva. “It ain’t right all those people dead and messed up, and they git what they want.”

  “But do you kill a thousand innocent to punish fifteen or so bad? I don’t know the answer but I thought the point of all these special police units was to set it up so you could kill the fifteen without the thousand. But it didn’t seem to work out here today, did it?”

  “No, it didn’t.”

  “The one that was choking on me, you punished him but good. So there’s a little justice here today, and you’re the one who brought it, and you should be proud of yourself for the rest of your life for that one.”

  “It still ain’t right,” she said, disturbed.

  They sat behind the rear counter of a store called Perfumaria, amid odors so sweet they had a gaggy quality to them. Cruz felt like throwing up. But he had his orders, and he would sit tight and make explanations later. There was no percentage in any other line of action.

  The vibrator on his phone buzzed.

  He fished it out of his pocket, slid the bar to answer.

  It was all of them: McElroy but also Webley and, from far away, Nick Memphis.

  Memphis did the talking.

  “Where are you, Cruz?”

  “In a perfume store still on the second floor. We killed one more bad guy, but I don’t think anybody’s caught on to that.”

  “Okay, we have an ID on the big man, a kid actually, twenty-two. He manages a store in the mall called First Person Shooter. He ordered the weapons through a dodge, he’s got the computer chops, and maybe he’s trying to do Columbine on steroids.”

  “So it’s just some little fuck?”

  “He would have access to the mall, he’d know all security arrangements, all the corridors and tunnels, and he has a record of disturbing behavior, from drug arrests to Internet harassment to arson, always quashed by Dad’s money. He’s been under a psychiatrist’s care for years and it was thought he was ‘get
ting better.’”

  “Guess not,” said Ray.

  “You’re the only asset we have in the mall. What we need you to do, Ray, is find a way to the fourth floor and to the Rio Grande corridor. This First Person Shooter is there, Rio Grande 4-312. It’s where his headquarters would have to be, we think, where he’s got this thing wired. When you get there, you set up outside. If everything goes well, we may not need you. If it goes bad, you may have to bust in there and cap him and whoever else is there fast. Sorry I can’t get you body armor or anything. I suppose you don’t even have to go if you don’t want, but on the other hand, if any man in America would go on this one, it would be you.”

  Yeah me, he thought. I, warrior. I, hero. I, marine. I, sniper.

  “Cruz, are you okay?” asked Memphis.

  “I’m on my way,” said Ray.

  “Look,” said Memphis, “I get it. You thought you were out of it, and it followed you home and it’s still trying to kill you. You have a beautiful fiancée and a thousand job opportunities and it’s all looking swell, and then these guys come along with their little thing. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

  Stay away from the W-word, Cruz told himself. There is no why in this world. There is only is, that is, what has to be done next, and this has to be done next. His father would do it without a second thought, and if he got killed in the very last seconds, he would not die tainted by bitterness. There is no why, there is only is.

  “Cruz, are you okay on this one?”

  “It’s past my nap time,” he said, “but I think I have one more day without a nap in me.”

  “Cruz, when this is over, I’ll buy you a mattress store and you can nap all day long.”

  “I’ll take you up on that,” Cruz said.

  Wearily, he rose.

  “Don’t know where you’re going,” said Lavelva, “but I’m going too.”

  Some things hadn’t worked out. For one, the gun cameras. Now and then, as in the execution footage, they yielded something very interesting. But mostly they just tracked the random imagery that the muzzles covered as the gunmen haphazardly wielded them, at a speed that increased the abstraction to near totality and the information to almost nothing. Rather quickly, Andrew had ceased paying attention to them. They were like lava lamps mounted on the wall, nice if you’re high and feeling kinda groovy, otherwise useless.