“Something just happened,” she said.
“How can you tell?” asked Jim, the cameraman.
“I saw the snipers jerk up, and now all are reporting in.”
She switched to Marty back at the station.
“Is Command saying anything?”
“No, nothing. We’ve had reports the governor is incoming. We might want to put you on the ground and get over there in case he has a presser.”
“Marty, no presser means anything tonight. They’ll use the press to put out reassuring bullshit, knowing that whoever’s doing this is monitoring. Pressers are a waste of time and it pisses me off that His Eminence puts his big fat mug on camera tonight.”
“Settle down, Mary Richards, it was only a suggestion.”
“Well, something’s happened here and—”
She had an idea. Two weeks ago she’d been to the mall and had bought a pocketbook from a shop called Purses, Bags and Whatnot, one of those cutesy places that smelled of potpourri but had very nice leather bags. She pulled out that very same pocketbook now and began to rifle through it, because she remembered that’s where she’d stuffed the bill of sale. Yes, indeed, there it was, amid a scruffy collection of receipts for $100 from Bank of America, $35.47 for gas at Sheetz, and $22.75 from Safeway.
Remembering the very pleasant young woman who had run the transaction for her, she looked at the bottom of the bill of sale and saw a handwritten note, “Thanks so much, Amanda Birkowsky.”
“Marty,” she said, “real quick, run the name Birkowsky through AnyWho.com and see what you come up with.”
“Nikki—”
“Just do it, Marty. I don’t have time to explain. It’s a rare enough name so there probably aren’t too many of them.”
There were, as it turned out, only three in the three Minneapolis–Saint Paul area codes. She dialed the first, got no answer, and then hit on the second.
“Yes,” she said. “This is WUFF-TV. May I speak with Amanda, please.”
A woman said, brokenly, “Amanda is in the mall.”
“I am so sorry, Mrs. Birkowsky,” Nikki said, guessing from the voice that it was a mom, not a sister.
“She’s all right,” said Mrs. Birkowsky. “For now. She’s upstairs in the—who did you say you were?”
Nikki explained the connection.
“What is it you want?”
“I’m trying to reach Amanda. She’s called you? I guess she has a cell, she called you to tell you she’s all right, she’s in no danger, or no immediate danger.”
“I can’t give you her number.”
“I understand. But . . . can you call her, give her my number, and if she decides, she can call me? I just think people have a right to know what’s going on. It’s my job. There’s next to no information available and that’s never a good thing.”
Amanda called Nikki three minutes later. She and two customers and two other staff were hiding in the rear room of Purses, Bags and Whatnot on the first floor of the mall, in the dark. They felt themselves all right for the time being as no one had begun to search the stores for hiding shoppers.
“Did anything happen at five?” Nikki asked. “We heard five shots. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Not a machine gun, not like that, but five individual shots. Then we heard the crowd—it makes noise, like an animal, all those people—we heard what I would call some kind of uproar, I don’t know, then barking from the voices of the guards, I guess. It was very unclear but something bad must have happened.”
“Five shots?” said Nikki. “Yes, exactly. I could try and sneak out there and—”
“No, no, no, no, you just stay where you are.”
“Are they going to come get us soon? The police.”
“There are police all over the place, but in truth, I don’t see any signs of an attack or an entry or anything.”
“This is so awful.”
“Listen, if something happens and you want to, and it seems safe, can you call me back? And if I think the cops are going to go, I’ll give you a heads-up through your mom, okay, and you can get low to the floor behind cover. I’ll never call you, because I won’t know what situation you’ll be in. Is that fair?”
“Thank you,” said Amanda.
“Sweetie, don’t thank me. You’re the brave one here.”
One minute later, Nikki was on the air with the news that five shots had been fired within the atrium and that possibly the gunmen had begun to shoot hostages.
“They just shot five people,” Ray said.
“You don’t know that,” Molly said.
“Yes, I do,” said Ray.
It seemed that the sound of the shots still echoed through the weird acoustics of the gigantic space. Everyone in the Frederick’s had stiffened when the sounds reached them, and in the several minutes since, nobody had said a thing until Ray broke the silence.
“Maybe some kid raised his rifle and pulled the trigger five times because he thought it was a cool thing to do,” Molly said.
“No,” said Ray. “That would have been faster shooting, onetwothreefourfive. This was deliberate fire. One shot, move to the next, shoot, move to the next. He just shot five people.”
Nobody said a thing. Ray, Molly, Rose the clerk, the broken-down manager of the store, and the three customers just lay there in the dark, in the storeroom.
“You could go check, like last time,” Rose finally said.
Ray didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “No. No, if I go out there, I’m not coming back. Somebody’s got to do something and I’m probably the only man with training who’s close enough to the situation to act and the police have no idea of how to get in here.”
“Ray—” said Molly, but Rose cut her off.
“If you go, what do we do? Do we just lie here? Six women, and there’s guys out there with machine guns? What do we do? What happens to us?”
“I think you’re okay,” said Ray. “You don’t need help. The people down there do.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” said Rose. “There’s a bunch of them, with army weapons. What can one guy do? You’ll just get yourself killed. You don’t even have a gun, much less a machine gun.”
Molly said, “She’s right. If they see you, they’ll kill you. That’s all. After all you’ve done, some punk kills you in the Payless shoe store or the Best Buy and you haven’t helped a thing and in six hours the hostage takers make a deal with the cops and fly to Cuba with a million dollars and what has your death accomplished?”
“If I hide in the ladies’ underwear store, what has my life accomplished?” Ray said. “You’ll be all right. As I said, you stay here, you commit psychologically to the long term, you don’t expect help now or in an hour or a day or a week, and you will survive.”
“He thinks he’s John Wayne,” said Molly, bitterly. “John Wayne was a fantasy. He never existed. He’s a dream, a phantom, a ghost.”
“He existed,” said Ray, “and his name was Bob Lee Swagger. He’s my father.”
“You don’t even have a gun,” said Rose.
“Then I will have to get a gun,” said Ray.
“Okay,” said Lavelva quietly. “Now, boys and girls, let’s go back to the bathroom, all right? The name of this game is Let’s hide in the bathroom.”
“Miss Lavelva,” said DAVID 3-4, “I’m scared.”
“David, don’t you be scared now. No one’s going to hurt you, you trust Miss Lavelva on this, sweetie, okay? Now, kids, come on now, let’s put on our quiet shoes and our quiet voices and go back to the bathroom and it will be all right.”
Somehow—she could feel their fear in the drop-off of energy, the quiet that overtook them, the lassitude that seemed to creep through their small bones—she got them back and into the room.
“Larry,” she said to the eldest, “you be in charge here, you hear? You stay till Miss Lavelva comes back. Y’all stay quiet now and listen to Larry.”
“Miss Lavelva, I’m scared too,” said SHERRY 4-6
.
“It’s okay, Sherry,” said Miss Lavelva. “And when this is over, Miss Lavelva goin’ take you to get something nice to eat, maybe french fries or frosties, whatever you want, a nice treat, from Miss Lavelva.”
That seemed to quiet them down.
Lavelva slipped out. She was alone in the bigger room. She looked at the translucent glass blocks that marked off the day care center and saw nothing. Maybe he’d missed her. Maybe he was gone.
Asad could not read the English in the mall directory pamphlet, but he got the representation of the map well enough, and the imam had drawn a circle around the location of the day care center. Yes, this was the Colorado corridor, yes, COLORADO 2-145, the numbers were right. It seemed that helpfully each store had an address that indexed it to the map, and even though he had little English, he recognized the address NE C-2-145. He divined practically that it meant Colorado corridor, second floor, 145 retail designation, and since evens were on the left and odds on the right, it had to be on his left. Even though he assumed that he had free range, he was careful. He was aware that many of the stores still hid customers. What if some of them came rushing out and jumped him? Then he laughed. No Americans would do that. They were a soft and decadent people, and here, in this palace of luxury and greed, their reflexes and warrior minds, if they even had them, would be shoved way down by shock and fear. They would lie in the dark weeping, praying to their absurd man on the cross, saying to him pleasepleasepleaseplease.
He missed it. He looked at a store and saw an address that read COLORADO 2-157. He turned back, began to edge his way down the corridor. It was quiet and dark, strewn with abandoned bags, tipped carriages, shoes, hats, jackets, all signs of the intensity of the panic. A few windows had been broken but no looting appeared to have taken place.
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 turne
d 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.