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 ‘getting 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 fiancee 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.
He sat in his command chair in the back room of First Person Shooter before a wall of such imagery. On the other wall, more important to monitor, were all the image feeds from the security cameras. They at least communicated security responses to his event. He could see in the exterior exit cameras, for example, that the murky black-clad ninjas known as SWAT teams had pulled back, or at least out of the picture, and that at each entrance a line of buses had pulled up. According to Andrew
’s instructions, each bus driver had opened his doors and left his bus and now stood in front of it, arms held upward and without jacket to display his unarmed status.
Ho-hum, another day at the office. It was all going swell.
The big board, which had the hacked SCADA pictorial of the MEMTAC 6.2 security program, showed nothing. Everything that was supposed to be locked down was still locked down; everything that wasn’t, wasn’t.
“What is going on with number six?” asked the imam.
“I don’t-”
“He is still. He is on the ground. What is wrong with him?” Andrew looked back to number six on the gun camera wall. It took him a while to make any sense of it, but then he realized it was an inverted image, and twisting his head to find the proper orientation, he saw that it was a floor-level observation of nothing, that is to say, not ceiling, not hallway, nothing containing data, but rather what, upon concentration, appeared to be the lower foot or so of wall beneath the window of a retail outlet, on a level with the floor.
“The gun is on the floor,” Andrew said. “Like the kid just dumped it and went and got himself some ice cream. Or maybe the camera fell off in some roughhouse and it landed on the floor sideways. He wouldn’t notice it. He didn’t even know it was there.”
“Or someone killed him, left the gun on the floor, and it’s just lying there, showing nothing.”
“Call him,” said Andrew.
The imam spoke in Somali. “Number six, Hanad, are you there? Hanad? Has anybody seen Hanad?”
The imam listened to the return messages and then reported, “Hanad went up on the second floor with Feysal.”
“Which one was he?”
“Number eight.”
He looked at number eight. Hmm, it seemed okay, just more blur and dazzle as the muzzle bounced about, pulling the camera with it.
“Asad? Where is Asad?” asked the imam. “I sent him to get the babies an hour or so ago. Where is Asad?”
Asad was number three. They both looked at that image and for a second it seemed to show nothing much, just the same blur and dazzle. But then it stabilized. It seemed to show a door. Then it went up to the ceiling and a man’s hand reached around from the left and both the imam and Andrew watched as something large and irregularly shaped was crushed over the muzzle until it was held secure.
Andrew almost laughed. It looked like a potato.
Then the muzzle was lowered and it reacquired the door, settling just over the computer-controlled lock. The muzzle leaped, the irregular object-it was a potato! — dissolved in a blast of mist, and the doorjamb was blown out of the door frame, freeing the lock bolt. Hmm, interesting. The shooter had known not to fire into the lock itself-unbudgeable-but into the door frame, which was wooden and vulnerable to high-velocity energy. This fellow-was he a professional? It was like the moment when Dirty Harry leaps onto the school bus roof from the rail trestle, driving Scorpio nuts!
On the monitor, the muzzle dropped to the floor, displaying a pair of New Balance cross-trainers, and Andrew was aware that the owner had just moved through the door he had shot open and begun to climb some steps.
It suddenly made sense. Somebody in the mall was hunting his people. Some vigilante had killed Asad silently, gotten the rifle, and then improvised a suppressor from the potato-that was straight out of Marine Field Manual MC-118-341, “field-expedient suppression techniques.” Now that person had shot his way into one of the locked stairwells and was headed upstairs, that is, upstairs toward him, Andrew. Was it Bronson, the young Eastwood, Bruce Willis? Or was it some clumping cheese eater who had disobeyed the mall’s privately imposed law and brought a carry piece inside and now waged war?
No. He knew how to blow the lock; he was a professional. Maybe Delta, maybe SEAL, maybe some real good FBI HRT guy.
He hadn’t counted on that, but at the same time, instead of being scared, he was exhilarated. This is really interesting. Oh, this will be so cool in the final document. Every story needs a tragic hero; this guy would be it. This would also give the story another narrative strand to twist in and out. It revved him way up.
He realized he must have, in his voluminous recording stick, the actual moment when the mystery man took out Asad and Feysal and Hanad and whoever else he’d taken out. He also realized that the hunter was now carrying the rifle, not having yet figured out that it was camera-equipped.
He went to his software screen, found the elevator on switch on the menu, and turned the elevators back on.
“Tell Maahir to send two guys up to the fourth floor by elevator and set up in a storefront across from us. They’ll be getting visitors soon. Oh,” he continued, “this is going to look so cool in the game!”
“There it is,” said Renfro. “That’s it, that’s the ball game.”
He and the colonel stood in the Command trailer, watching the network feed from NBC. It showed the three Kaafi boys bounding up the stairs into the Air Saudi plane. Joy pulsed through their limbs and loins, three young men who two hours ago faced ten years of incarceration in an antiseptic, dreary Western prison, now able to dream and plan and feel freedom and anticipate the softness of a woman’s flesh, the awareness of Allah’s approval, the congratulations of imams and mullahs, and, eventually, another chance to strike and bring death to the infidel beast and vengeance for the murder of the Holy Warrior.
“You did it,” said Mr. Renfro.
“You did it,” said the colonel.
“We both did it,” said Mr. Renfro. “And now, look out, world, here we come.”
“It’ll only be another half hour before they clear airspace and they’re home free. Our people would never shoot them down and the Saudi pilots would never obey orders to turn back. The hostages will be freed, the Kaafi brothers will be in Yemen and shortly Mogadishu, and I think I’ll let the mopping up devolve to my good friend Mike Jefferson, who likes the bang-bang stuff so much, he can go in and have his little gun battle with the bad guys. They’ll all be punished that way, my hands are clean, and as you say, look out, world, here we come.”
“Colonel, you have a one-on-one now with ABC. It’s the only major you haven’t hit yet. Oh, and Fox-”
“My good friends at Fox,” said the colonel.
“Even they will kowtow to the colonel on this day.”
“Okay, let’s-”
But like a bad dream, someone stood between him and the doorway, beyond which lay the ABC team, with its lights and camera and love.
It was the FBI hotshot, Will Kemp. “I thought he was off running the investigation,” the colonel muttered to Mr. Renfro, but as Kemp drew within hearing distance, he blossomed into his wise, cool public personality and said, “Will, your people were unbelievably fast and proficient on the Andrew Nicks ID, really, and that’s such a help once we get those citizens out of there and go in and take the little bastard down.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Kemp.
“I’ll be sure to tell the director how well you and your team operated and under what great pressure. I’m sure he’ll be pleased, and I’m sure you’ll be pleased.”
“Yes sir,” said Kemp, “but if you’ll forgive, I want to discuss something else.”
“Will, I’m on my way to a media thing, unpleasant but, unfortunately, it goes with the territory.”
“Yes sir, but just let me express myself quickly, if I may.”
“Sure, Will, shoot. But please make it snappy.”
“Sir, I’m wondering if it was wise to pull the SWAT people so far back. Equally, I’m worried that it was unwise to give these people in the mall so much operational freedom. I mean they start shooting hostages, we’re a good five to six minutes away from confronting them with force, and they could do a great deal of killing in that time. Our intelligence says they have at least ten thousand rounds of ammunition in there and sixteen fast-firing assault weapons.”
“Will, you know, that troubles me too. Troubles me immensely, in fact. But the truth is, you have to take some ri
sks in operations. I decided to take this one. I think the Muslims will be content with their propaganda victory, hollow though it is. I mean, these are basically thirteenth-century minds we’re dealing with, and they’re easily distracted. The glory that awaits them in this life, the chance to be heroes to their coreligionists, that’s too much for them to give up on.”
“Sir, it’s not them I’m worried about. It’s this goddamned white kid, with his crazy nihilism and bloodlust, his love for Eric Harris and Seung-Hui Cho, he could do anything, anything. I’d feel so much better if we had a sniper put a bullet in his head.”
“Will, your concern is well placed and admirable. But by now, if we move SWAT back into place and authorize the rooftop snipers to get through the glass, I’m worried that we’ll set him off. So my judgment is to stay passive, just a little longer. Then we’ll let the SWAT boys off the leash and teach this kid a thing or two.”
He turned, smiling, and went out to face the ABC cameras.
Up they climbed, up the steel steps in the unlit shaft of the stairwell, slowly, Cruz in the lead, tough little Lavelva behind, from the second floor to the third.
“Sir?” she said.
“Call me Ray. Not sir.”
“Is this a machine gun? I haven’t fired no machine gun before.”
She was gripping the AK-74 that Ray had snatched up from the jihadi Lavelva had conked with her eight iron and he had finished with a bayonet. It made him realize: she knows nothing about that gun except what she’s seen in the movies, but she’s going on anyhow.
“It’s not a machine gun, no. Here, I better show you how to use it.”
They knelt, and he talked to her in whispers.
“Okay, this one fires as fast as you pull the trigger. No machine gun. Thirty times. But it’s got to be loaded, the safety has to be off, it has to be cocked, and it’s much better if you’re aiming it.”
He pushed the magazine release and snapped out the magazine.
“This orange banana-shaped thing is full of the cartridges. You know what a cartridge is?”
“The bullets.”
“Yeah, close enough. You can see them held by the lips of the magazine, showing.”
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