Slowly he tracked the stores, stopping every once in a while to check for signs of threat. He saw none. And then he came to it. For about thirty feet, the gaudy glass windows of the storefronts yielded to glass brick, and a double door stood in the center. Above, a sign must have announced the purpose of the location, though he could not read it. He slid to the glass doors and peered in, and soon his eyes made out toys on the floor, children’s furniture tilted sideways, that sort of thing. This had to be where the babies were. But it was quiet. Maybe they had moved the babies, but he didn’t see how. Maybe they were inside, in hiding.
He slipped in, his eyes in full search mode, scanning what lay before him in semidarkness, and everywhere he looked, he swept with the muzzle of the baby Kalashnikov, his finger on the trigger, a full orange magazine clicked solidly in place.
Then he saw her.
She was dark, like him. She stood, facing him, twenty-five feet away. Her face was a stone mask. He read her bones and saw that she was not Somali, thin-nosed and — lipped, high-foreheaded, like him, but still of Africa, with that stoic face of the sub-Saharan peoples, broad of nose. She wore her hair in the African style, in tiny ringlets all over her head.
“Sister,” he said in Somali, and she replied in English, two words he knew.
“Fuck you,” she said.
Nothing worked. When you busted kiddie porn, you pierced. You fought your way through pretty elementary protection schemes, worms, predatory malware, you looked for back doors, baited and phished, you ran decoding or password-finding programs, and eventually, with stamina and creativity and a strong stomach, you got in. Then the deal was trying to put a network together, finding out who was buying the stuff, who was distributing the stuff, who was producing the stuff. Then you penetrated, playing the role of John A. Smith, corporate lawyer, father of five, country club member, Kiwanis, Rotary, bar association vice president with a hunger for watching children violated, and you put all that together, documented the linkages, and you took it to whichever fed or state prosecutor in whichever state had the most juice and eagerness and you pounced. Yes, you got dirty but you took down someone much dirtier.
But none of those programs worked. Whoever was playing this game had a brain or two in his head.
Neal had tried everything, had madly improvised program improvements, had written enough code to start a new social network, yet SCADA was impenetrable by virtue of the tough defenses built into MEMTAC 6.2 and its resolute steadfastness in avoiding temptations to jump to online status.
“How’s it coming, Jeff?” asked Dr. Benson.
“This guy’s good. He tightened up their protocols so I can’t even get the SCADA meme up, just to get a rope on the culture. I’ve been to the Siemens website and it’s clear what this guy has come up with is even beyond them. Jesus, he could be making a billion a year writing code for Steve or Bill and getting laid by nerd-babes left and right, and he’s doing this shit?”
“Maybe he doesn’t like nerd-babes,” Benson said. “So what are you going to do?”
“Pray.”
“Swell. I’ll tell them that-”
“Pray, as in, ‘talk to God.’ God being the engineer at Siemens who designed it. You better get me a translator fast, Bob, because I don’t speak one word of German.”
Lavelva looked at him. This was it, then. Somali, like so many Somalis in the area, thin, arrogant, reeking of narcissism because he considered himself so beautiful with the thin nose and the thin lips. Presumably the hair was that thick froth so Somali in its wiriness, but she could not tell for he wore a patterned scarf tied tightly to his head, held in place by a band. He wore baggy jeans and a hoodie, like any banger she had seen, and she’d seen a lot of them, Somali and otherwise, and he carried a Kalashnikov and he had a handgun dangling in a holster. He was all warred-up. His eyes seemed slightly crazed, all Nubian-warrior-lion-killing bullshit in his mind, and that was what made the Somali gangs so feared on the East Side and anywhere they left their signs.
He called to her in his jive.
“Fuck you,” she replied. No way she backed down to this sucker, no way she gave him the kids. No way, no way, no way.
He smiled, showing bright teeth. He walked to her, full of bravado and confidence, lion-proud with his big guns and a knife. He spoke again to her in his gibberish. She held her ground.
He approached.
“Babies,” he said. “You give me babies,” in poor English. “Now, give me the babies.”
“Ain’t no way I’m giving you nothing, Jack,” she said.
“Babies. I want babies. Imam want babies. Downstairs, bring babies. Now. ”
He poked her with the muzzle of the Kalash. Then he poked her again, this time hard enough to bruise.
“Want to die, sister? I kill, no problem. Bangbang, shoot dead black sister, then take babies. Maybe I kill a baby. No problem, no problem.”
He poked her again but did not see the thing in her hand that now flew at him and struck him with a sword’s cut across the face and drove a flash of light and pain up through his head, and he stepped back, feeling the tremendous hurt of it, the gun muzzle dropping as he pivoted, and then his pain alchemized into rage and he flew on her, wanting to kill her with his hands and the two grappled awkwardly, spinning this way or that and she cracked him another time in the head with her weapon, another slicing gouge that shot off lights behind his eyes. But he was stronger and he leaned into her and twisted her down and was on her. He would kill the bitch with his own hands, choke the life out of her, and then get the babies.
The press loved him. They always had. They projected their dreams upon him, he knew, and he had no problem internalizing that emotion and building it into his persona. After a brief sum-up by the governor’s public affairs idiot, the governor uttered a few bromides about his confidence in Minnesota’s first responders and announced that he had activated the Minnesota Guard and that units would be arriving within five hours. Then FBI Special Agent Kemp, repping the feds, said aid was on the way from DC and all over America, and back on Pennsylvania Avenue in the Hoover Building, analysts and intelligence experts were applying their full energy to the crisis. And then the gov’s idiot turned things over to Colonel Obobo, and everyone smiled and took reassurance from his collected calmness, his radiant charisma.
He stood at a podium outside the Incident Command van, lit by a thousand TV lights, to say nothing of the mercury vapors on aluminum supports already in place thanks to the site’s origin as a parking lot. Behind them, blank and gigantic and without detail in the gloaming, the mall itself loomed one hundred or so feet tall. It was ringed by emergency vehicles and police units, all lit to hell with their flashers going, so that its darkness was jabbed by the red-blue cop lights. Above, a fleet of choppers held in steady formation at three thousand feet, the roar of their engines undercutting the press conference.
“As you all know, we have a terrible situation here. I simply want to echo the words of the governor and our friends in the FBI. The Minnesota State Police have assumed primary responsibility for resolving this situation, under my command, and we are moving quickly to secure the mall. But we are not cowboys and this is not Dodge City. Our enemy isn’t so much these deluded men but violence itself. We have no intentions of getting into a showdown and demonstrating that we are capable of more violence than they are. Violence is death and death is unacceptable. So we will pursue alternative means of de-escalating the situation, all the while hoping that as time passes, tempers cool and justice, rather than vengeance, becomes the order of the day. That I promise you.”
“Are they executing hostages?”
Goddammit! Somehow, some TV reporter had gotten through to someone in the mall, reporting that witnesses were claiming that five shots had been fired. Already, Mr. Renfro was on the line to the station, complaining bitterly about unauthorized news reports, even if accurate, and how they jeopardized operations.
But clearly five shots would not signify a head-
on assault; the only conclusion was hostage execution, and this drama held a particularly ugly fascination for the reporters. Americans put on their knees and shot in the head in a mall in middle America on the opening of the Christmas season, the day after Thanksgiving, the most family-some might say, too much family-of family days.
“I cannot confirm or deny reports that hostages have been shot,” was all that Obobo could say. But he was extremely annoyed at the abruptness and the hostility with which the question had been launched at him. It was not the sort of treatment he was used to.
“But there was shooting in the mall?”
It was a thin line, but he stuck to it.
“I cannot confirm or deny there has been shooting in the mall. Obviously, we prefer to keep tactical details to ourselves as we deal with this situation.”
“If they start executing hostages, don’t you have to attack?”
“We don’t have to do anything,” said the colonel. “It’s when we permit ourselves to be locked into ‘have to’ situations that tragedy ensues.”
Hmm. No, he didn’t like this tone of hostility. In fact, all of a sudden, he decided he was sick of them. He looked out on a hundred faces. Where was the love? Where had it gone? It began to needle him. He would have to discuss this with Renfro.
“I did not say they were killing hostages. I will not be announcing any tactical plans here. Presumably, these folks are monitoring our public announcements.”
“Who are they?”
“We do not know yet. As I said, they have yet to make contact or issue demands. I can say we have secured the mall and nobody is going anywhere. At this time we are studying various options. As you might suspect, this is a tremendously complex undertaking, and we don’t want to do anything hasty and stupid.”
“At Columbine, didn’t they decide they should have moved immediately on the shooters? All they did was set up guard posts outside while people bled to death. Is that what you’re doing?”
Another ridiculous question! Who did these assholes think they were? Where was Renfro?
“This is not Columbine. This is an entity that is far more than a high school, the number of gunmen is as yet unknown, thought to be ten or more, extremely well informed, working with a well-thought-out plan, heavily armed with professional-quality weapons. As Special Agent Kemp said, we do have Army and Navy commando types inbound, and they are far better suited to this kind of tactical work than we are. I have at least twenty teams ready to go in, but I have to get them coordinated, I have to get them inside, I have to get them moving in step with each other, and they have to have clear targets guided by intelligence. None of those conditions exist at this time, so we are in a wait-and-see mode.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” interrupted the governor, “although it’s true that shots were fired, we have no evidence that people were executed. It could have been just some kid shooting his gun.”
Great! The stupid bastard had just put the shots on the table.
“Colonel Obobo, Tom Kiefaver, NBC News.” Handsome national haircut, sometimes anchored the big show. “Are you comfortable in established positions while people may be a few dozen feet away dying?”
“I think we all need to get back to work, folks. You’ll forgive us,” and he turned manfully and walked back toward the trailer. As he went back to the van, Obobo saw the governor giving one-on-ones to the national news and the big Minneapolis channels, each team waiting patiently. The governor seemed to be enjoying himself.
It went all fuzzy on Lavelva. The Somali pressed his thumbs into her larynx, grinning wildly, his gashed face bleeding, the blood falling into her face. She bucked and fought and twice again swacked him hard with the steel spine of the notebook, but each time he saw it coming and turned, flinching down, and the blade bit into his hairline and across his ear, cutting shallowly but not hurting him bad enough. He had her now. It was over. She felt herself in the whirlpool as the oxygen debt turned her lungs into broken balloons.
Then he relented. His fingers came slightly out of her throat, and he let a desperately sought gush of air into her throat. But his fingers did not come off her neck. He spoke in Somali, not that she understood anything but the emotional gist.
“Hah, girl, see what Asad does to you! Hah, now I send you to the fiery noplace of infidel hell you who stand against Allah must go. I am your killer, your ruler. You defy me and die as do all peoples everywhere soon to know the power of Islam.”
What bullshit! He was all lit up, so proud of his mighty victory, unwilling to let the moment go, savoring the kill. She whacked him again, but he blinked only a bit, shook his head, and said, “Now, die, bitch.”
The thumbs went hard into her, and her air supply drained quickly and she sucked at dry nothingness, bucking against him but feeling her will vanish and wishing she’d been able to save the babies, she tried so hard to save the babies and And someone broke his neck.
Broke it clean and hard, and she heard the snap as the vertebrae cracked into two pieces, and his tongue came into his skinny-ass lips and his eyes went all cue ball on him and his head hung at a broken-spring angle and his thumbs lost their power and he was lifted from her like a sack of potatoes and laid on a floor from which he would never again rise.
Some Asian-like dude looked down at her.
“You okay?” he said.
“Man, he like to choke the fuck out of me.”
“Just relax, rest. He’s not going to choke anybody ever again, okay?”
The guy, she now saw, was some kind of thin, hardball type, had warrior written all over him in the leanness under his sweatshirt and the veins thick with blood on his wrists. He turned and quickly began to loot the fallen Somali, separating first the AK from the boy, then quickly unbuckling the bandolier of ammunition-the clips were all weird orange, you know, like popsicles-then slipped the kid’s belt with knife and pistol off. He checked the pistol expertly, pinching back the slide to see if it held a chambered round, and then he began to reassemble himself in the image of the man he’d just killed. Finally, finished, he turned back to her.
“Feeling better? You’ll be bruised for a month, but I think you’ll be all right. Sweetie, I can’t believe you cracked him with that shiv. You can play ball on my team anytime, the guts you must have.”
“Who you?” she asked.
“The name’s Ray. Spent some time in the Marines, that’s why I’m all going-to-war now. Nobody else is. Anyhow, I saw this joker slide in here as I was stalking him. Sorry I didn’t get here sooner.”
She looked at the dead boy. She’d seen the gaze before, on the streets. That I’m-asleep look, the eyes blank, seeing nothing, the I-ain’t-nothing-no-more look of extinction. Someone run into a bullet or a blade with his name on it, down he go, his face come all moony nothingness, like this sucker. She could still gut him, cut his slimy insides out and hang ’em up to dry. But no. He dead.
She turned back to see the Chinese marine studying a mall pamphlet, which must have come from Mr. Dead Ass.
“You have kids here?”
“Seventeen of them. In back. That boy said he’d come to get the babies.”
“Yeah, the place is marked. So they want children, they need ’em as hostages, and they sent this joker. Okay, we’re going to move the kids a little ways down the hall into the ladies’ underwear place. There are some women in there and they can help you take care of them. Does that seem like a good idea?”
“It does.”
“You want them in a single file, hugging the walls, make it a game. See, that way those TV cameras can’t pick them out of the shadow. You get that?”
“I do.”
“Let’s get this done fast. I don’t know how long it’ll be before they notice war hero here didn’t come back with the babies.”
It made as much sense as anything. It was the first positive thing that had happened since the shooting started.
“I also want to hide this guy,” he said. “If they find him, it may pis
s them off and they may take it out on the hostages. They have about a thousand people down in the amusement park.”
“Yes sir,” she said.
“Hey, what is your name?”
“I am Lavelva Oates.”
“Well, Miss Lavelva. I say again, you did real good. If I had it, I’d give you a medal. Stand up to the killer with the gun. Not many have the sand.”
“Yes sir,” she said, secretly so very pleased.
Next she went back, got the kids out of the bathroom on the pretext of a new game: Creep down the hall. Be a kitty cat or a doggy. All fours.
By the time she got them organized, the body was gone, and so was the Chinese marine. And so was the AK rifle.
Bet he know how to run that, she thought.
It took a while before anyone at the Red Cross tent paid attention to Mr. and Mrs. Girardi, and it was not their personality type, either as individuals or as a couple, to demand notice. They simply stood there and watched while nurses bandaged the odd escapees from the mall who’d fallen and cut themselves, bruised, torn, twisted something, and handed out glasses of juice and cookies. Meanwhile, uniformed policemen moved among those on the cots or waiting to see a physician or a nurse to interview the escapees, hoping to pick up that one new piece of information that might matter. But it was a sloppy process, the cops were under great pressure to produce, and when witnesses turned out to have nothing, they were quickly abandoned, raising hard feelings and complaints. All this frenzy took place under the open-walled canvas structure lit by fluorescents, and enough insects remained to buzz and hum around the lights, which themselves were so harsh they showed everything in vivid clarity, the red of the many Red Cross insignias, the blue and gray of the police uniforms, the white smocks of the doctors.
Finally, a woman came to them.
“Have you been helped?”
“No, ma’am,” said Mr. Girardi. He was fifty-two, stooped, balding. He was an unimpressive man by any standards and in no crowd would he stand out.
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