Black Friday

by William W. Johnstone

  At the same time, his right hand reached around and across and caught hold of the man’s jaw on the left side. Tobey’s fingers hooked under the jawbone and he pulled as hard as he could.

  He heard the sharp crack as the terrorist’s neck broke.

  The man went limp and dropped the Steyr he held. Tobey lunged and caught it with one hand before it hit the floor and made a racket. With his other hand, he lowered the dead man to the floor.

  When the first man looked around, he would see that his friend was gone, but he wouldn’t have any idea what had happened. Tobey could wait for him to come back and investigate.

  He didn’t have to wait for very long, either. A minute later, a low-voiced call floated across the store. When there was no response, the first man repeated it, more urgently this time. Still no answer, and Tobey eased away from the body of the man he had killed as he heard footsteps approaching. They grew more rapid as they came closer.

  Then the first terrorist spotted the body and rushed past the place where Tobey was hidden behind a rack of coats. Tobey uncoiled from his crouch and smashed his Steyr against the back of the man’s head.

  The terrorist went down hard, too stunned to allow his muscles to work properly. He tried to roll over but succeeded only in flopping clumsily. Tobey kicked him in the head, and the man became still.

  Tobey used his foot to push the Steyr away from the man’s hand, then searched him. He found a couple of fully loaded magazines and put them in his pocket. Then Tobey slid a knife with a curved blade from a sheath inside the man’s waistband and used it to cut his throat.

  He stood with one foot on either side of the terrorist’s torso, grabbed his hair, and yanked his head back to draw his throat taut, then slashed the keen blade across in a deep cut. Blood shot out away from Tobey, pumping hard for a few seconds before the flow began to ebb.

  Tobey let go. The dead man’s face thudded against the tile floor.

  Two of the bastards dead. It was a start. Not necessarily a good start . . . but Tobey was far from finished.

  * * *

  Bleak lines were etched in Walt Graham’s face as he handed the phone back to Springfield’s chief of police.

  “Bastard hung up on me,” Graham said. “But not before telling me what they want.”

  “Never mind that. Just tell us what the guy said,” Zimmer asked.

  “They want all Muslim prisoners released.”

  “The ones we used to have at Guantanamo, you mean?”

  A couple of years earlier, there had been an abortive effort to move all terror suspects from Guantanamo to a federal prison in Texas. When that had turned into a bloody mess, the prisoners had been dispersed to a number of different black sites, according to the scuttlebutt Graham had heard. The real truth of the matter was probably well above his pay grade.

  “No, I’m not talking about just the guys we had at Gitmo,” he said in answer to Zimmer’s question. “They want every Muslim prisoner released, no matter what the charge, from the CIA’s black sites down to the county jails and small-town lockups.”

  Zimmer, Crimmens, and Shaw all stared at Graham for several seconds before Crimmens said, “But that’s insane! We don’t even know who’s locked up in all the jails in the country, let alone which of them are Muslims.”

  “What about the NSA?” Shaw asked. “That sounds like something they might keep track of.”

  “They keep track of everything else,” Zimmer muttered. He shook his head. “But it doesn’t matter. Coordinating such a thing would be impossible, even if you could get everyone involved to agree to it, which you couldn’t in a million years. Anyway, most of the Muslims who are locked up aren’t political prisoners, by any stretch of the imagination. They’re just criminals, pure and simple.”

  “I’m just telling you what the man said they wanted,” Graham said. “I think it’s impossible, too.”

  “What else?” Crimmens asked. “That couldn’t have been all of it.”

  “They want twenty million dollars put in an offshore account. The guy said he would give me the number once we’d agreed to the terms.”

  “It’s a stall of some sort,” Zimmer said. “We know good and well that at least three-fourths of the Islamic terror groups are bankrolled by Saudi oil money. Some of those families are worth billions. Twenty million would be small change to them.”

  Graham nodded and said, “I agree.”

  “I suppose they want safe passage to the airport, too, and a jet waiting there to take them to, where, Mecca?”

  “That’s right.”

  Zimmer shook his head.

  “They’re full of hot air, and they’re bound to know that. They’re just stringing us along. What is it they really want?”

  Graham rubbed his chin, frowned in thought, and said, “Maybe just to string us along.”

  “Keep us waiting,” Shaw said. “Keep us hoping. Keep us scared. They know the whole country’s watching by now, sitting around their televisions and computers, praying that the hostages make it out alive.”

  “I think you’re right, Agent Shaw,” Graham said. “There’s another angle to consider, too, and I’m not sure those guys in there have even thought of it. This is going to make a huge dent in Black Friday shopping. In fact, the hangover from it is liable to damage the numbers for the entire holiday season. That’ll hurt the economy. It’s not going to collapse or anything like that because of it, but it’s still not good.”

  Crimmens folded her arms across her chest and asked, “Then what do we do? If we can’t give them what they ask for—and I agree that we can’t—what happens next?”

  “They’re threatening to kill hostages, of course.”

  The chief of police spoke up, saying, “When I talked to the leader of the suspects, he told me they could kill a hundred hostages an hour for the next ten hours.”

  “No way they’re that patient,” Graham said. His voice was firm with conviction as he went on, “This whole thing is a sham. Like Agent Shaw said, they’re going to torture the whole country for a while, and then they’ll jerk the rug out from under all of us by killing the hostages.”

  “You’re talking about a bloodbath unlike anything this country has seen in the past fifteen years,” Crimmens said.

  “Yes, ma’am. I certainly am. That’s what they want. A sea of infidel blood.”

  Zimmer said, “We have to get in there. There’ll be heavy casualties among the hostages and among the personnel who carry out the assault, but if we wait, everybody’s going to die.”

  A uniformed officer hurried up and broke into the tense silence that followed Zimmer’s declaration. He said, “Chief, we’ve got another call from inside the mall.”

  “That terrorist bastard again—”

  “No, sir. This guy says he’s a cop, he’s armed, and he’s on the loose in there.”

  Chapter 32

  As a cop in Chicago, Jake Connelly had attended antiterrorism seminars and other training sessions along those lines, but he’d never been assigned to any of the units that dealt with such matters. Everyday street crime had been his focus. He had paid attention during the seminars, but he’d never expected to have to use any of it.

  That was before that punk kid had gunned down Ray Napoli and tried to kill him, too.

  The explosion a moment later, followed by waves of shooting and screaming, pretty well confirmed all Jake’s suspicions. The two guys he’d been watching were up to something, all right . . . something as bad as it could be.

  After the kid took off, as Jake stood up in the corridor, his hands and clothes sticky with Napoli’s blood, he felt an unusual sensation: indecision. He didn’t know what to do. When he was on the street, he’d never been bothered with that. His instincts had always told him the proper course of action.

  Sometimes he had ignored those instincts out of sheer stubbornness, and mostly that hadn’t worked out too well. So he’d learned to trust his gut.

  Today his gut couldn’t make up it
s mind whether he should charge out there into the mall with his gun blazing, or retreat deeper into the warren of service corridors.

  If he chose to fight, he’d be one guy against who knew how many terrorists. He would almost certainly be killed, probably within minutes, but he could take some of the bastards with him and that might save some lives.

  But if he played it safe—and God, how he hated the idea!—he could survive longer and maybe do more good in the long run.

  What made up his mind in the end, though, was actually simple.

  Adele.

  He couldn’t throw his life away while she still needed him. He might not survive today either way—hell, he knew he probably wouldn’t—but he had to do whatever gave him the best chance of living. If he made it out of here, he could return home and spend with Adele whatever time she had left.

  He knew that if she were here, she would tell him not to worry about her, just to go ahead and do his duty however he saw fit. He knew that. She would say that he needed to help as many of those other people as he could. That was her way, to think about everybody else before herself.

  Jake couldn’t help it. He was going to be selfish for a change. He wanted to see her again, to hold her and stroke her hair and kiss her forehead and tell her how much he loved her. Sure, she knew that, but he wanted to say it again.

  Clutching the .357, he faded back away from the opening into the mall, away from Napoli’s body, until he reached the open door of the storage room where the kid in the security guard’s uniform had come out.

  Curious what the guy had been doing there, and figuring that he wouldn’t be coming back any time soon with all that chaos going on out in the mall, Jake ducked into the room.

  The light was still on, revealing stacks of crates and boxes, buckets and mops, big push brooms, and a floor-buffing machine. This room was used by the mall’s custodial crew, Jake realized.

  Some open, empty crates were scattered around. On a hunch, Jake reached into one, picked up a handful of packing material, and sniffed it.

  Gun oil. Somebody had hidden the automatic weapons the terrorists were using in here. That told Jake this attack had been planned for a while, and that the bastards had an inside man.

  That could be sorted out later, if anybody survived. Right now Jake was more interested in firepower. Maybe one or two of the machine pistols had been left unused. He started opening the other crates.

  While he was doing that, he spotted a man’s shoe sticking out from behind one of the stacks. With a bad feeling in his gut, he pushed that stack aside and saw the body of a security guard lying there. This guy was the real thing, Jake thought. The front of his uniform shirt had a small bloodstain on it, probably from a stab wound to the heart. Jake had seen corpses like that before.

  The guard had found out what was going on, and the terrorists had killed him. Quite possibly, he had been the first one to die in the mall today.

  Unfortunately, not the last, by far.

  “Sorry, buddy,” Jake muttered. “I’ll see what I can do about getting even with the sons of bitches.”

  A moment later, he found two of the machine pistols like the one the kid had used to kill Napoli. Jake recognized them as Steyrs. He had never fired one before, but operating them wouldn’t be difficult for him. He found a number of loaded magazines as well and stuffed as many of them into his pockets as he could.

  Then, feeling a little better because he knew he could put up a hell of a fight, anyway, he ventured out again.

  Around a corner, he found a door with no knob, just a place for a key. Acting on a hunch again, he returned quickly to the room where he had come across the dead guard and searched the man’s pockets. He found a ring of keys, took them with him, and tried them until he came to one that opened the lock. Holding tight to the key, he pulled the door open and blocked it with his foot while he removed the key.

  The door opened into a narrow corridor with cinder-block walls. Jake nodded. That was what he’d been hoping to find.

  He stepped into the dimly lit passage and pulled the door closed behind him.

  * * *

  Jake spent the next hour wandering the network of tunnel-like corridors without encountering anyone. The American Way Mall was so big it would take all day to explore these shadowy, twisting passages.

  No more explosions rocked the mall, but from time to time Jake heard shooting. The gunfire sounded distant, but he knew that was because the thick walls muffled it.

  The shots meant more people were dying out there, and although the knowledge gnawed at Jake’s guts, he resisted the temptation to go out and die in a blaze of glory. Throwing his life away wouldn’t be glorious, he told himself. In fact, it would be damned stupid.

  Finally, tucked away in a little alcove, he found what he’d been looking for: a ladder of sorts, iron rungs set into the wall that led up a shaft to the mall’s upper level. When he tilted his head back to look up, he saw light at the top of the shaft. There was some sort of ventilation opening up there.

  He didn’t know if he could use that opening to get out of the mall, but he didn’t really want to get out. He had been checking his phone every so often, but he couldn’t get a signal in here. There was too much concrete and steel all around him. Up there, though, it might be a different story.

  He tucked the machine pistols behind his belt and started to climb.

  He hadn’t gone very far before he realized that he was too old and fat for this crap. The workmen who clambered around in here were all younger and slimmer than he was. He stopped and hung on the ladder while he puffed and caught his breath.

  Then he climbed again, past the landing on the mall’s upper level and higher still until he reached a square opening on the side of the shaft covered with a heavy iron grate.

  Jake got a good grip on the ladder with his left hand and used his right to take his phone out of his shirt pocket. When he held it up this time, a good strong five bars appeared on the display.

  He used his thumb to press 911.

  * * *

  “You take it, Walt,” Zimmer said as the cop held out the phone. “You’ve got more experience at this sort of thing than any of us do.”

  Graham took the phone and said, “This is Walt Graham. I’m an agent with the FBI.”

  “Jake Connelly, Agent Graham. Formerly of the Chicago PD.”

  “Jake,” Graham said. “I hear that you’re inside the mall. Are you injured?”

  “No, I’ve got a bunch of dried blood on me, but it’s not mine.”

  “It belonged to one of those terrorists, I hope.”

  “I wish it did. I was with a guy named Ray Napoli, the head of security for the mall, when he was shot and killed by one of the bastards. That’s what started the ball rolling in here.”

  “I see. What’s your location now?”

  “I’m in a combination ventilation and service shaft near the top of the mall. Getting up here higher seemed the best way to get a phone signal.”

  “What can you tell us about what’s going on in there?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid. I heard an explosion and a lot of shooting. There are bound to be quite a few casualties by now.”

  “Yes, too many. You don’t know where all the terrorists are located?”

  “No, but I think I may have gotten a look at the guy who’s in charge.” Quickly, Jake Connelly explained to Graham about the two men he had seen exchanging a signal just before the killing started. “The kid I saw came out of the storage room where they had their weapons hidden,” he went on. “He must have been passing them out to the others so they could scatter around the mall and wait for his go.”

  “You didn’t happen to get his name, did you?” Graham asked.

  “No, all I can give you is a description. He’s young, early twenties, dark hair, brown skin, Middle Eastern in appearance. He doesn’t really look like a killer. He looks more like a college kid.”

  “They don’t all look like movie terrorists,�
� Graham said. “What else can you tell us, Mr. Connelly?”

  “Not much. But I was thinking . . . They’ve got the entrances to the mall covered, don’t they?”

  “We’re not getting in without a firefight,” Graham replied, his voice grim. “We’ve determined that already.”

  “Maybe you need to come in from a different direction. I haven’t found it yet, but there has to be some sort of access from the mall to the roof, otherwise they couldn’t get to the heating and air-conditioning equipment up there to work on it. If you could land guys on top and have them work their way down, you might take those terrorist sons of bitches by surprise.”

  Graham frowned. He was proud enough to think that they didn’t need some retired cop coming up with their tactics, but on the other hand, he wasn’t too proud to let that keep him from putting people’s lives first.

  Anyway, he was certain that he and Zimmer and Crimmens would have come up with the same idea. They just hadn’t had time to get around to it yet, that was all.

  “We’ll discuss it out here, Mr. Connelly, but you may be onto something. In the meantime, can you get out and make it to safety?”

  “Maybe, but I’m not going to. I’m staying here so I can lend a hand when it all hits the fan.”

  “I could order you to escape if possible, you know.”

  “And I could ignore that order, Agent Graham. What’re you gonna do, arrest me?”

  Graham had to chuckle at that. He said, “All right, Jake. I think under the circumstances we can call each other by our first names. I’m Walt.”

  “Sounds good, Walt. I may not be able to stay in touch, but tell your guys that when they come busting in, they should keep their eyes open for a fat, gray-haired guy who looks like a flatfoot. That’ll be me, so don’t shoot.”

  “I’ll pass the word along,” Graham promised. “It’s going to take a while to discuss all this, settle on a course of action, and then implement it.”

  “Just don’t take too long,” Jake Connelly said. “I don’t know how much time the folks in here have left.”

  Chapter 33

  The other men in Tobey’s squad—he couldn’t help but think of them that way—were waiting with anxious expressions on their faces when he got back to them.