“And the guys in the squad cars, all in body armor?”
“As per instructions.”
“Good. One call to surrender, then you can shoot,” said Nick.
“Got that. But if they’re not there, those officers fan to the east-side mall entrances and, once deployed, the SWAT mall assaulters hit from the two northernmost entrances and begin to sweep through. Your up-armored FBI team hits from the southern entrance, their job is the Walmart itself. Meanwhile, I’m blocking all mall exits with troopers, who, when signaled, will move in to coordinate with the mall teams. Encountering fire, all will rally to that point. How does that sound?”
Nick turned to Bob, putting his hand over the throat mic.
“You’re supposed to be a consultant. So consult.”
“It’s good,” Bob said. “Two targets, the car, then the mall sweep. He’s got his priorities right, it’s straight-ahead, no fancy timing or tricky feints and bluffs. Plus, these guys will feel better taking instructions from him rather than some out-of-state FBI guy. And these are supposed to be the best guys in the state, so I believe in ’em.”
Nick took his hand away from the mic.
“Real good,” he said to the colonel. “As soon as you hit the vehicle, my pilot will land and drop me off, and I’ll come to you.”
“My Command Center will be with SWAT at the car. I will move in with them if the car is empty. Y’all have raid jackets?”
“We’re in ’em. Ball caps too. Please don’t shoot us.”
“Haven’t shot an FBI agent in years,” said the colonel.
“Okay, give your guys a few more minutes to get settled, then we go. You call it, Hector, you’re on the ground.”
“Roger that, Fed One.”
They could see the squad cars converging on what had to be the target car.
“Take us in,” said Nick to the pilot. With the zooming rotors’ angles shifting, the helicopter banked left like a fighter jet and began the long swoop in, leaving stomachs far behind.
Swagger thought of his last helicopter adventure, which ended with second-degree burns on arm, shoulder, neck, and face.
“Reminds me I hate helicopters,” he said to nobody but himself.
24
Greenville (II)
Juba wanted to destroy America but for one thing: the French fries.
“I like these,” he said.
“You’ve been all over the world, you’ve never had French fries?”
“I was not on tour. I was on jihad.”
“Yeah, busy, busy—I get it.”
They sat in a booth at a McDonald’s halfway down the mall’s hallway. To the right, the broad opening to the shiny paradise of Walmart beckoned. The hall itself was darker, a corridor of dying retail, with a cheesy plastic garden in the middle. A lot of mom-’n’-pop new-media stuff, DVDs and games and phones from obscure networks, a couple of other fast-food troughs, a shoe chain, an Old Navy, the whole place dying. The brick-and-mortar was losing to the ’Net, as Jared knew, but he thought this was not a topic that would fascinate Juba.
“No,” said Juba. “I’ve seen these places, you know? They’re everywhere.”
“I remember when they were just another snake cult,” said Jared.
“What?”
“Nothing. Bad joke.”
“Jihadis do not joke.”
“But they eat French fries?”
“I make the rules.”
“That is true,” said Jared.
Next to Juba on the seat was a hoodie wrapped tight to obscure fourteen inches or so of semi-automatic shotgun stoked to the gills on 12-gauge double-aughts. But the man carried it with such insouciant naturalism, it would never have occurred to anyone that such a package could conceal such a weapon. Juba was completely calm, at peace. He had prayed in the car, something Jared could not get himself to do even now, explaining to himself his attraction to the cause was more identity politics than faith.
They had made the drive down 127 to Greenville without trouble, skipped the Sears mall, found the Walmart mall with equal ease, and realized there was no time frame set up. Jared found a space, close to one entrance.
“Want me to get another phone?” he said. “Maybe they’re here already. Do you know where they were coming from?”
“Detroit, same as us. It’s where they were to pick me up. But then things went wrong.”
“Who are these guys, may I ask?”
“No. Suppose I get away and you get caught. You will give up all your secrets. So, the less you know, the better.”
“Okay, just asking . . . Do we wait in the car? That’s kind of suspicious.”
“I agree. Go inside, one at time, meet at . . . Where will we meet?”
“Hungry?”
“Yes.”
“I see by the sign, the golden arches, there’s a McDonald’s inside. Meet me there? Easy to find.”
“Fine.”
They left the car, each going a different way, eyes hunting the presence of the tan van, neither seeing it. The mall swallowed each and, in time, reunited them at the McDonald’s.
After the meal, Jared said, “So, now get new throwaway?”
“Yes, little boy.”
Juba sat, drinking coffee, appearing uninterested, as Jared went to run his errand. He was a good boy, it turned out, and his cheer and wit, something long missing from Juba’s life, paid off as a small pleasure. He trusted Jared enough at this point that he felt no anxiety as the boy disappeared—and no relief when he reappeared twenty minutes later.
“You get it?”
“Yes.”
“Powered up?”
“Yes. You want to make a call?”
“Not now. We go to the car, wait there. They drive by and we hop in. Who would notice?”
“Nobody.”
So they ambled out, headed down the mall amid strangers who paid them no attention at all, came to the entrance that yielded the car and headed out.
It was all fine—and then it wasn’t.
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” said Jared, pulling the larger man back just inside the doors.
Juba wheeled on Jared, caught off guard by the physical contact.
“See out there,” Jared said quickly, “a mile out? That helicopter?”
He pointed. Above the trees, a speck moved horizontally through the air, its faintest of buzzes only barely reaching their ears.
“Yes . . .”
“I saw it fly by when we headed in a half hour ago. It’s still there. Farther out, but still. Could they have us?”
“Are you sure?” said Juba.
“Yes.”
“Go out, look about,” said Juba.
The boy sauntered out, pretending nonchalance, headed back.
“Okay,” he said. “I see the white roofs of police cars at major intersections. As if they’re . . . waiting for a signal.”
“How will they come?”
“God, I don’t know. Go to the car first, then sweep the mall.”
From far off, five squad cars punched out in a squeal and roar as they raced into the lot and blazed toward the sector where the Impala was parked, led by what looked like an Abrams tank but was some kind of black SWAT thing, moving too fast for its treads but clearly a war machine. All over the perimeter, gumballs lit up as officers moved to restrict access at intersections. The helicopter roared inbound.
“Okay,” said Juba, slipping his hand into the package he carried. “Little boy, you run away. When this is over, you surrender. You are no longer jihadi, you are kidnap victim.”
Jared was struck by this sudden mercy. The man had human graces after all and didn’t require of Jared his pointless death. But he knew it wouldn’t work.
“Not with my size tens on Oprah’s face. Come on, we can still make it out
.”
He pulled the larger man to him, back to the main corridor, where they veered toward the Walmart at the end of the mall, while Jared said, “Call your friends, tell them we’ll be at the south end, down where the shopping carts are. The mall is hot, it’s about to be cop city.”
“No. I stay and fight. I take as many infidels—”
Jared saw his man walking down the corridor, methodically blowing up housewives and baby buggies and old guys with walkers until the State cops hosed him down with full auto. He’d have two hundred bullets in him.
“You don’t have to die today. Call them!”
As they moved, Juba dialed the number and spoke rapidly to the responder.
They reached the maw of the big store and plunged into Walmart, skidded past people loading up for the next seven months, past the Chinese menswear and the Filipino furniture and the Japanese electronics and the Brazilian shoes, turned hard, past many shoppers, skipped sideways and through the lines at the cash registers in front, hit the exit.
But instead of bulling his way directly out, Juba sidled up to a woman pushing a large shopping cart and said, in English, “I help,” and smiling, showed a crown of white teeth. It was there that Jared noticed something for the first time: Juba was a strikingly handsome man, square of face, strong of jaw, and regular of feature, and, with the baseball cap off, his shock of thick dark hair turned him almost debonaire.
The woman—she hadn’t been looked at by a man in decades, Jared guessed—lit up and instantly yielded to his charm. The two of them walked out into chaos, Jared a little behind but clearly a part of the same triad.
Sirens. Rushing, careening squad cars. Jared glanced northward, observed the Impala, surrounded by ninjas in black armor with subguns who’d just poured from a giant black armored truck, while squad cars with flashers and shotgun cops set up at every entrance.
They turned right, unconfronted, because as a self-contained, inward-directed family unit, they were off the cops’ radar. They went to the curb, the feds too forward-oriented to look peripherally, too busy setting up exactly as ordered, too hungry for a genuine terrorist to notice them.
It would be seconds before more cops flooded the area, and now the olive chopper took over the auditory universe as its rotors beat the air on the descent. Risking a peek back, Jared saw it land two hundred feet from the Impala, and two more men hurtled out of it.
They stood there, naked to all eyes yet rendered invisible by the beaming woman, who was having the time of her life.
A van materialized before them.
“My dear, I must leave,” crooned Juba, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She sighed, having had a wonderful date, if a bit of a truncated one.
Men pulled them in and flattened them out.
“Lie in here,” someone said, opening a hatch in the floor like the lid of a coffin, and they rolled in, seeing the light disappear as the hatch was closed behind them.
But Jared had gotten a glimpse of the save team.
They were Mexicans.
25
Greenville (III)
The sweep was done, and they had nothing.
“Fuck,” said Nick.
“This guy’s the best,” said Bob.
“I know my people were on plan,” said the colonel who supervised Ohio’s Highway Patrol and stood with them near the garden at the center of the mall under plastic palm fronds and next to gurgling toxic water in a filthy open sewer among the palms’ fake terra-cotta pots. “Nobody got out after we commenced our operation. There was just a few seconds there where the cars hadn’t quite gotten to all the exits.”
“Colonel, your people did fine, I’m sure,” said Nick. “And a nod to Greenville, they helped too. I’m just thinking I should have sent the cover cars in first, without siren and flashing lights. When they were in position, we hit the Impala with SWAT.”
“There was hardly time to consider everything,” the colonel said. “The doors were covered within two minutes, maybe one. I don’t know how anybody could have made it out.”
“Anybody couldn’t have. But this guy, he could have,” said Nick.
The search continued, but now at a slower pace. Closets opened by heavily armed police, civilians cleared and let go, aisles and bins explored and probed, storerooms and break rooms penetrated. It might, it could, maybe it would, yield something—but neither Nick nor Bob held out much hope.
Meanwhile, FBI techs dusted the car for prints and in a fast first pass had come up with two of Juba’s right thumb, and lots of others, which meant that one trophy of the operation—a consolation prize, to be sure—would be a whole set of prints. They also noted a pile of plastic grit in the well of the backseat and half the butt of a shotgun.
“He’s cut it down for practicality,” said Bob. “He can hide it better, pull it out fast.”
Nick nodded, then he had to go back to the phone for the tenth time. This round, he was on it with D.C. for a long time, explaining, taking responsibility, offering his resignation twice, both times turned down, because the people there only were interested in one thing: what does Swagger think?
“They think you’re a god. Don’t worry, I won’t tell them the truth. Anyway, talk to them.” He handed the phone over.
“Swagger.”
“You’re on speakerphone with the Director and four Assistant Directors and the head of the Counterterrorism Division,” said the voice.
“What can I do?” said Swagger.
“Your read, please, Mr. Swagger.”
“We almost got him. We know he was there. In my humble, Director, Memphis put together a brilliant plan on the fly and—”
“Swagger, no, leave that for later. Tell us where you think we are and what you think is next.”
“I would just add that we have consistently underestimated this guy.” Oops, maybe that was selling out Nick. Can’t do that. “I mean, I have continually underestimated this guy. Everything we throw at him is nothing new. He’s done it before. He doesn’t panic, he doesn’t quit, he improvises. He’s a pro’s pro.”
“Your next move would be . . . ?”
“Well, I wouldn’t set up roadblocks. He’ll never give in to that. On top of that, we don’t know who helped him split, and in what vehicle. He may be with another cell—four guys with light machine guns and RPGs, and if some country cops out in the haystacks bounce them, it could go to guns in a bad way, with a lot of people—cops and civilians—going down. The one thing we know is, he’s got a cut-down Remington 1100 on him, and that’s a big, bad toy. You don’t want him going Remington on you, which is what he’ll do if you corner him. You have to ambush him. You have to be there first, and let him walk into it, and take him hard, with overwhelming force. Still dangerous, but maybe one degree less so. So I’d go back to the brainiac stuff.”
“Our analysts?”
“I think some hard thinking by your top people should come up with some possibilities that would narrow the search areas. Given what we think he’s going to do, he’s got to have certain things. We have to anticipate him. Along those lines, Nick wants to set me up with a computer genius. I think that’s a good idea. I have a series of attributes he will need to have at his disposal to move on to the next step, maybe you could use that as some kind of index or filter, or something.”
“All right, taken into consideration. Put Memphis back on.”
So Nick talked to them for a few more minutes, and then a Greenville detective came up, whispered to a sergeant, who whispered to the colonel, who indicated something to Nick.
Nick ended the call.
“We’ve got them on surveillance footage from McDonald’s. You guys want to take a look?”
* * *
• • •
It was him, no doubt. Not in the center of the frame, not in the cone of focus, but definitely a man of intimidation and d
anger. He sat in a booth just off the cash register and delivery counter and, by a twist of fate, facing toward the camera, while his companion, sitting across from him, was just the back of the head.
He wolfed down two burgers and a soft drink, seemed to savor the French fries, and looked to be engaging in conversation with the boy. Meanwhile, in a box in the corner of the frame, integers raced by that indicated number of frames and time of day.
“Looks like McDonald’s has a fan,” said Nick.
“Nobody don’t like them fries,” said Bob. “Freeze it, please.”
They were in the mall security office, amid a bank of video screens, all of them recording and feeding from various key spots around the installation. The McDonald’s had three cameras, because ruckuses were most likely to start in spots where teenagers gathered. Thus, all things considered, it was a pretty good show.
“We’ll need to ASAP this to D.C. Our labs can enhance. Maybe we’ll get a clearer picture, something we can put out. That would cut way down on his maneuverability and operational freedom.”
Bob looked at the blurred image.
“Can you bring it up?”
“No, sir,” said the mall security boss. “It’s mainly meant for figuring out what kid hit what other kid.”
“Got it,” said Bob.
He stared at the image, but the more he bored into it, the more incoherent it became, until it was just a fuzzy mess of pixels, losing all form and content. What he saw was what he expected, but nothing actionable. His head was big; it went with his big frame and big hands, which were seen dwarfing the individual French fries as he ate them. He was clearly in command, but, in actual point of fact, he didn’t look particularly fierce: a big guy, but no different than a million other men in other malls. Not bad-looking. Baseball cap—black, no insignia—a hoodie, jeans, the shoes not visible. Clean-shaven, not that fake tough look movie stars and podiatrists affected these days. Everybody wanted to look tough, while this guy, and all true tough guys, just wanted to blend in.
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