Hidden Charges

by Ridley Pearson

  Laura caught the grin on Sam’s face. Looking him in the eye, she said, “I know.”

  8

  “Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the grand opening of Stage Three of the Yankee Green Shopping Center.” The strident voice was that of pudgy Lloyd Beggs, a public relations director for Haverill’s High Star Redevelopment Partners. “This is the first time New England has seen a shopping environment of this magnitude. We hope everyone here will take note of the large variety of rides, the new stores which cater to your every need, and the fine food….”

  Jacobs focused on the crowd, his eyes searching for Les Civichek, his ears ignoring Beggs’s dribble. Now that Mrs. Popolov had called in a complaint, Civichek could be thrown out, neckerchief or not. Jacobs had arranged for a number of his guards, both plainclothes and uniformed, to head off Civichek. Concerned over the fact that Civichek enjoyed publicity, Jacobs hoped he could get the young tough out of the mall without an incident.

  He eased his way through the crowd and reached the northeast escalator that connected to the pavilion’s upper concourse. As he was lifted up above the crowd, he checked again with Dispatch, making sure an accurate head count was being kept. Fire laws restricted attendance in this wing to five thousand five hundred and forty-one people. It was estimated that seven hundred and fifty-five worked as employees of the various stores. Another thirty ran the rides. Six of his guards—two at every entrance—were attempting to keep track of the influx of patrons, using small hand-held counters.

  Looking down into the thick crowds, Jacobs wondered if they wouldn’t be smart to mag-lock the doors temporarily until they could take a better head count.

  The overweight woman in front of him smelled like a gymnasium and spoke with a voice that could shatter glass. Her husband had not wanted to come here, she explained to an equally unattractive woman at her side, that is, she continued, until he found out about the Hobby Shop, located in Toys of the World. A fan of model planes and rockets, he had gone off and she had lost him. Now, amid the swarming crowds, she was attempting to find her way to the Hobby Shop herself. Jacobs leaned forward and informed her that the shop was below, on the ground floor, behind the roller coaster. She told him it was none of his business, but as they reached the second level she stepped off, turned abruptly like a trained circus bear, and stepped onto the escalator headed back down.

  “If I have my figures right,” explained Dicky Brock’s voice over the walkie-talkie earpiece, “we’ve peaked at a total attendance of four nine eight six, including all employees, so we’re within the limit.” The crowd had settled in to the festivities and rides on the ground floor, which made the building look dangerously overcrowded. Levels 2 and 3 had yet to see their share of the large crowds, which were just now finding their way up the escalators.

  Jacobs caught up to Civichek and a few of his Flock, motioning his own guards back at the same time. “Mr. Civichek,” Jacobs said formally, “I have been asked to expel you from the Yankee Green.”

  “I’m not here in any official capacity.”

  “Nonetheless, we received a complaint.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “We have several options open, you and I. You can leave peacefully, which will better influence our decision to readmit you. You can put up a struggle, and my people will subdue you. Or you can put up a struggle and the police will subdue you.”

  “That won’t make you look too good on TV, will it?”

  “Fortunately, Mr. Civichek, my job doesn’t involve ‘looks,’ only safety and security. Whichever way you decide it should go is just fine with me and my people. However, I should warn you that we will press charges. And if media people are involved, I will explain that we detained a member of the Flock yesterday who had in his possession a concealed and unregistered firearm.” He added slowly, “These are the same charges, if I’m not mistaken, that were nearly brought against you in Maine. The choice is yours.”

  Color drained from Civichek’s normally unwavering face. “Okay. Okay. I’m gone.” He turned. “But this is bullshit, and I’ll be back.”

  9

  In the telephone utility room of Sub-level 2, Pavilion C, John Steuhl connected the three pairs of wires that ran from the phones in Dispatch to the three matrix switches on the crossbar exchange. At the same time he disconnected the one incoming pair at the top of the second line. Now, only the phone in Dispatch could call up the detonator and override the timer he had set. This eliminated the chance of a misdialed number causing the charges to explode.

  He carefully taped the thin wires to the trunk line of pairs, so that even if on the off chance someone inspected this area today, nothing would appear out of the ordinary.

  It seemed so strange to Steuhl to finally be doing this.

  But the dry run had been yesterday. Today was today. He adjusted his thick glasses, squinting to read the face on his watch. Only minutes to go. He had to hurry now. Timing was everything.

  He climbed up the pipes toward the darkened utility tunnel overhead, following the phone trunk and electrical conduits as he went.

  He reached the mouth of the tunnel, tucked low, and went scuffling inside.

  Twenty yards into this tunnel he arrived at an intersection with a utility shaft, running vertically, that serviced the east side of Pavilion C.

  He knew from his cassette tapes that several guards awaited him at his hidden storage area below the pavilion. But he had set up the switches on the wall as a diversion. They ran nowhere. He had no intention of being anywhere near the storage area. His destination was directly overhead.

  At the top of this shaft, he went down another utility tunnel to the backside of the wall to the Security Dispatch Control Center and the all-important Chubb computer. He could hear their voices on the other side of the wall. The trick was keeping the bolt absolutely still as he unscrewed the nut. The back of the large electronic map of the mall was woven with tiny wires, each leading to a different LCD.

  He knew from his nearly fifteen months of study at the penitentiary that one of the RAM disks in the Chubb computer ran the map. The dispatcher could call up any one of the floor plans to any level of any pavilion with a single keystroke. The map measured four feet by four feet and was mounted on the wall, to the right of the monitors, out of the way of the Chubb.

  Of the thirty-eight bolts that mounted the map to the frame, only two remained to be unfastened, the one on top, dead center, and its match on the bottom. This was where Steuhl had to be extremely careful. Too much pressure on the map at this point and it might move, alerting the two men inside to his intentions. As it was, he had just overheard one of them complain about the scratching of rats in the walls. Steuhl smiled at the assumption, squinting through his thick glasses and working on the next-to-last bolt and nut.

  One hour and forty-eight minutes until the explosives would be detonated by the timer. Right on schedule.

  He took hold of the back of the map as he removed the last nut on the top. His headlamp followed the motions of his head and lit the area in front of him. He rechecked his work, making certain that each of the thirty-eight hexagonal nuts had been removed. He couldn’t afford to have the map stick. Timing was everything.

  He removed the handgun and took a deep breath. After all the planning, his moment had arrived.

  He pushed forward on the map, sending it careening to the floor. He pointed the gun at the two men and said, “Don’t speak a word, and don’t move a muscle.” He’d been practicing for a week. He waved them a few feet away from the console. “No heroics. Hands visible. That’s good.”

  Brock glanced at Perkins and back to Steuhl. At Steuhl’s insistence, Perkins removed his headset and moved slowly across the room. He lay face down with his hands pulled behind him.

  “You stay there,” Steuhl told Brock, waving the weapon. “I want you to page Miss Susan Lyme. When she answers, tell her she is wanted here in Dispatch. Keep it very simple. Now go ahead.”

  Brock did as he wa
s asked. To his disappointment Susan answered the page and after a second asked, “Is Toby up there?”

  “Come up here as soon as possible,” said Brock, replacing the receiver, feeling like a Judas.

  Steuhl used the men’s handcuffs to secure them to a leg strut of the counter on the far wall. He told them to stay still and kept the gun trained on them as he searched their pockets. He came up with three sets of keys, which he placed out of their reach. He took Perkins’s ID card. A dispatcher’s security card had high security clearance on the Chubb and could admit him to about any room in the complex. He moved over to the Chubb and sat down, placing the gun next to him and pulling the telephone over. “If you move at all,” Steuhl told them, “I’m going to shoot you.”

  He withdrew the Radio Shack Memory Dialer from his pocket. The device was three inches square, ivory-colored, and held five push buttons. Within a matter of seconds he plugged the autodialer into the phone line between the receiver and the wall. With the touch of a button a number could be speed-dialed. He had arranged this because in the event of a raid on Dispatch he knew he wouldn’t have time to dial seven digits of a phone number. The small box would do it for him with the single push of a button. The top three buttons had been colored with Magic Marker: red, green, and black.

  He watched the monitors for several minutes until he spotted a woman he assumed to be Susan Lyme walking down the hallway that led to Dispatch. He ducked down below the console and waited for her to push the doorbell, which she did within a matter of seconds. He admitted her by depressing a button and freeing the lock on the door. She stepped inside.

  Steuhl poked his head up and she screamed. He held the gun on her. “Welcome, Miss Lyme. Over here, please.” He forced the two men to lie down again and handcuffed Susan to the same post. “All the players in place,” he said.

  Susan’s face was without color. She sat in total silence, trembling.

  Steuhl took one of the two dispatch seats, depressed two keys on the Chubb’s keyboard, and then entered Jacobs’s master password.

  He quickly cued the memory addresses for all the exits to the new pavilion and enabled all the mag locks, locking every exit. He then disabled the panic bars to the ALL HOURS doors.

  Steuhl watched the numbers of the ALL HOURS exits scroll down the Chubb’s screen. Everything was going perfectly. He studied the two topmost right-hand monitors, both of which rhythmically pulsed through various shots from various cameras in the new pavilion. As one reached a shot of a doorway, Steuhl threw a switch and held this picture on one of the small monitors below. When the other top monitor switched to a shot of the new pavilion’s northeast escalator, he moved this to a lower monitor as well, his knowledge of the system operations total.

  In the headset, Jacob’s voice asked, “Dicky?”

  Steuhl pushed the black button on the small autodialer. In the telephone utility room a single spark connected the matrix switch, joining two tiny pieces of metal. Down the line, this switch tripped yet another, sending 120 volts racing down the 12-gauge wire Steuhl had so carefully laid. This current reached the blasting caps. Inside the cement, at the top of each escalator, the dynamite detonated violently.

  The entire complex shook.

  On the monitors they watched as the escalators in the new pavilion exploded silently and then fell away toward the crowded concourse below.

  “God, no!” Susan looked away.

  John Steuhl looked over at her and quoted, “‘Then Joshua rose early in the morning, and the priests took up the ark of the Lord.’”

  Susan Lyme began to weep.

  10

  For Jacobs, it all happened too quickly. He heard Susan paged and curiosity gripped him. Who even knew her name? As he crossed the pavilion’s main concourse, through the thick crowd, he spotted Shleit and caught up with him. The two of them, both wearing hats, stood in an eddy of foot traffic and talked quickly but softly.

  “He’s here,” said Shleit, looking around.

  “I got your message.”

  “We found enough to hang him: the magazines used for his notes, pieces of a chemistry kit. And another note. More Bible stuff. One of my boys says it’s from Joshua, when they bring down the walls of Jericho.”

  “Not too reassuring,” quipped Jacobs.

  “I was thinking—”

  “Why would he have left the note there?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Unless he knew you intended to raid the apartment.”

  “Which means he either has a friend on the force—”

  “Or he bugged my office. You mentioned you would raid his apartment when we talked in my office.”

  “Did I? I’d forgotten that.”

  “Yesterday. We also talked about searching the tunnels. What if he’s been on top of it the whole time? That would explain how he’s managed to stay one step ahead.”

  “You better have your office searched. If he knows what we’re up to—”

  “Then he’ll never show up at his storage area. It was meant to lull us into thinking we had it solved. He played us against ourselves.” Jacobs began to walk swiftly, and Shleit tagged along, though he found the pace too demanding.

  “Where the hell are you going?”

  Jacobs said over his shoulder, “I don’t like the feel of it. A friend of mine was just paged. It doesn’t add up. No one’s answering my walkie-talkie calls. Something’s wrong in Dispatch. I’m heading up there.”

  “I’m coming with you. You don’t even carry a gun, do you?”

  “No, but I’ll be fine. You find Haverill, explain the situation. Tell him we need to evacuate immediately.”

  “But do we?”

  “Do we?” Jacobs repeated.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Until we find him, everyone here is at risk.”

  “I agree. We evacuate. I’ll tell Haverill.”

  “Yes. He’ll listen to you. Give me a minute, and then call Dispatch.”

  “Right.”

  Jacobs dodged through the crowd, more frantic with each step. He remembered Brock’s complaints of hearing rats in walls. How could he have been so stupid? Dispatch offered complete control over the mall; he had told Susan as much only the other day. He broke into a run as he saw people struggling to open the doors to Pavilion C. “Dicky, come in,” he said into his walkie-talkie. The doors were mag-locked.

  The doors were mag-locked!

  11

  The explosion erupted behind him. As the escalators fell the earth seemed to shake. Hundreds of people dove to the floor. A young girl released her balloon and it raced toward the skylight. A momentary beat of absolute silence followed the explosions, and then it seemed that everyone screamed at once. People surged toward the exits, finding no escape. Mass hysteria swept through the crowd.

  “Dicky!”

  Why had Susan been paged?

  Jacobs pressed the button on the handset again and yelled above the roar of the crowd, “Dicky? Dicky?” He shielded his eyes and ran straight toward the origin of the blast: the escalators. All four had been blown clear of the second level. The injured were scattered about in droves. Children cried and screamed. He looked up: on Level 2 hundreds of people raced frantically toward Spanner’s Drugs at the north end and found escape through the open entrance.

  Seeing this, Jacobs immediately understood why the escalators had been blown. Steuhl had just taken the pavilion—and everyone on Level 1—hostage.

  ***

  Seconds before the explosion, Sam Shole stepped away from the bird cages to watch the Giant’s Tail take a banked curve high overhead. The ride plunged down its steepest descent, and all the passengers screamed in unison. He didn’t like the screaming.

  As the explosions occurred he instinctively tucked into a crouch, spinning away from the blast.

  In that same instant, he saw Shelly standing beneath the escalator talking to one of the birds. He moved in what felt like slow motion, reminding him of traffic accidents and bad dream
s. Before him, Shelly stood frozen, looking straight up at the underside of the falling escalator; Sam heard Laura’s scream behind him.

  He took three long strides toward Shelly, scooped her up into his arms, and dove straight ahead. The escalator slammed down on top of his legs. Shelly cleared the falling machinery, as did Shole’s arms, head, and waist.

  Huge chunks of concrete fell away from Level 2. The falling debris enveloped Sam and Shelly in a thick, dark, gray cloud.

  Laura Haff, surprisingly cool and collected despite her tears, rushed around the fallen escalator, Keze clutching at her neck. “Oh, thank God,” she said, reaching Shelly and drawing her close. They embraced. Then she frantically dug through the debris. “Sam?” She dug even faster. “Oh, my God, no. Sam?” The dust was chalky and made her cough. The air smelled bitter, like the fourth of July. The screaming grew in volume. Everyone in the pavilion seemed to have gone mad. “Sam… oh, Sam.” She spun around, dirty tears streaking her cheeks. “Shelly, dig! Yes, that’s it. Help me. Dig. Dig. Dig! Come on.” She touched his arm, jerked back and screamed, then leaned forward and worked even faster. “Here, Shelly. Over here.” Shelly was crying too. Hearing her daughter’s fragile voice, Laura paused briefly, looked at her daughter, and cried even harder. “Oh, God,” she moaned, “no, please, no.” She reached his head and threw herself forward, dropping her ear to his mouth and nose. Her shoulders buckled in what sounded like a laugh. She turned to Shelly and Keze, her face covered in gray dust and mixed with black mascara tear lines. “He’s alive,” she coughed.

  Keze saw her mother’s face and shrieked at the top of her lungs.

  Laura continued her digging. Shelly reached down and took Sam’s hand. “He saved me,” she whimpered.

  ***

  The walkie-talkie beeped once in his ear. The calm high tenor of John Steuhl said, “Jacobs, listen good. It is now two fifteen. The rest of the charges are on a timer that is set for exactly four o’clock this afternoon. If those charges are detonated, the entire building will fold in on itself. That should be clear enough. I have control of the Chubb computer. I have mag-locked all the exits and prevented escape via the second story by blowing the escalators. I want the two hundred thousand dollars delivered to me by Marvin Haverill. He will place the money in a briefcase”—Steuhl giggled—“and when he shows up at the doors to Pavilion C, I’ll let him through. If anyone tries to come through with him, I’ll detonate the charges. He’ll need a walkie-talkie so I can communicate with him.” He giggled again. “Jacobs?” He paused. “Understand?”