Soft target

7:21 P.M.-7:35 P.M

It surprised no one that the house was so nice. It was set back from the road by a driveway, possibly one hundred feet in length, and stood shaded by trees, with all kinds of flourishes like porches and gables and a three-car garage. It was in one of those posh million-dollar developments to the north of Minneapolis, among houses of equal or more value, the whole gated neighborhood itself protected from the rigors of actuality by a 24/7 uniformed patrol.

Three cars of agents pulled up, and Bill Simon, acting on behalf of SAIC Kemp, took the lead. He had the warrant number, though no actual paper representation, as the warrant had been arranged on the fly on the drive from downtown headquarters.

He knocked, and a man in his late fifties, with an ample head of gray hair teased attractively about his head and a scotch glass in his hand, answered. Simon noted emblems of upper-boho gentility: running shoes, tight-fitting jeans, a lush Scottish heather turtleneck over a health-club disciplined body, wire-rim glasses. Over the man’s left shoulder lurked his wife, maybe the trophy edition, for she looked a decade younger, a handsome woman with an adorable mess of tawny blond hair, also in jeans-great, tight bod-and an oxford button-down shirt. She held a glass of wine.

“Mr. Nicks? Jason Nicks?”

“Yes sir,” said Nicks, who thought he knew exactly what was going on. “You’re FBI, right? Here about Andrew? You have some news. We haven’t heard from him and I’ve tried the store a hundred times. I’m so worried.”

“Yes sir,” said Simon. “Actually, yes, we are FBI, and yes, this is about your son, and yes, we know he manages one of your stores in the mall, but we’re here to serve a search warrant.”

“What?” said Jason Nicks.

“Sir, there’s some suspicion that your son is involved with the gunmen who’ve taken over the mall. He was definitely involved in procuring the arms and ammunition they’re using. I have a number for a federal warrant that’s been issued by the Fourth Circuit US, Judge Raphael, to search his house. You can check if you want by looking up the warrant number on the Internet.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Jason Nicks, stepping back to admit them.

Simon himself ran the interrogation, while the forensics and evidence collection team went downstairs, where Andrew lived. As Simon addressed the parents, they all could hear the cracks as the agents used tactical entry battering rams to knock down the locked door.

“Does Andrew need a lawyer?” asked Nicks.

“Possibly, sir. Do you want to make a call? We are in a hurry, as you might imagine, but at the same time, I want your son to have the full protection of the law.”

“No, no, go ahead.”

In the background, NBC was reporting that the van had arrived from the penitentiary and that the prisoners would file aboard the airplanes within a few minutes.

“I’m looking at his record now,” said Simon. “Andrew has had some difficulties, I see.”

“He’s been a hard kid to have around, yes,” said the father. “So bright, so angry. I’ve spent a lot of money on lawyers, just trying to keep him out of jail. He’s my only child, what could I do?”

“Yes sir. Just scanning here, I see some drug busts, I see that he has been kicked out of three private schools and just barely managed to graduate from the fourth-”

“He’s got a genius-level IQ.”

“Somehow he got into Harvard.”

“I made a very large donation to the school, and that may have had something to do with it. But he was certainly smart enough. He just wasn’t mature enough.”

“He didn’t stay long?”

“Less than a year. A very unfortunate year, I’m afraid. He let himself get angry, he sent some unwise e-mails to people, he didn’t invent Facebook because someone else had already, he got lost in writing code, hacking, designing games, stopped going to class, ultimately returned to his drugs and his music and his trendy nihilism. You know the profile: love of destruction, heavy metal, a fantasy life full of violence. I don’t know what’s wrong with that kid. We gave him everything, we supported him through it all. He’s been in psychotherapy since he was twelve. He’s been in every program you could imagine, taken every antidepressant, every ADD drug, Ritalin by the long ton. It works, sometimes, for a while. But he always regresses: rock and roll, computers, violent nihilistic fantasies, anger at… I suppose at me. I made a lot of money. Big mistake.”

“You’re an entrepreneur?”

“I have a gift for retail,” Jason said. “I just surf the zeitgeist looking for opportunities. I’m not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, believe me, just a storefront guy. I had hippie clothing stores in the seventies, running shoes in the eighties, computers in the nineties, now computer games. That’s the cool stuff. There’s some other stuff too, not so cool. I own several fast-food franchises, the better part of three local strip malls, a complete mall in Kansas, a restaurant and three motels in the Wisconsin Dells, three Sheetzes along I-ninety-two. I own the First Person Shooter shops, do you know what they are?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Shooting games in cyberspace. Andrew grew up with them. He’s probably one of the best in the world when it comes to fighting with your thumbs on a PlayStation. My flagship store is at the mall. Two years ago, I asked Andrew to manage it, and for the first time in his life, he applied himself. He’s run it very well.”

“And that’s where he is now?”

“Yes. And every day.”

“Are you aware that for six months he had a job in a sporting goods store in Twin Rivers?”

“What? That’s not Andrew.”

“He used the store’s FFL to acquire sixteen assault rifles, sixteen surplus German pistols, and over ten thousand rounds of ammunition.”

An agent entered the room.

“Bill,” he said, “you ought to come see this.”

“Everybody’s so happy,” said Mr. Girardi.

“They say it’s almost over.”

They stood essentially nowhere. They’d been exiled from the press area, and there seemed to be little point in going back to the Red Cross area, especially as it would be buckling down to receive the seriously wounded. They were more or less in between those two stations, about three hundred yards from the bulk of America, the Mall, which was a hub of activity, still surrounded by cops with their lights flashing. A few minutes ago, buses had begun to assemble not at the mall, per se, but a few hundred yards off to the right, so that when given the signal, they could progress to the entrances and load up on freed hostages, who would then be taken to triage stations and then to other destinations. The whole thing was immensely complicated, and it seemed everywhere they looked, they saw vehicles and scurrying men.

It was cold now, near forty degrees, and the woman shivered.

“I don’t think we should get any closer. They’ll try and stop us,” she said.

“We’ll just stay here. It’ll only be a little while longer, I’m sure.”

“You see,” said Colonel Obobo to his friend David Banjax of the New York Times, as they sat on folding chairs outside America, the Mall, with Mr. Renfro hovering over Obobo’s shoulder. Behind them the buses to transport the freed hostages pulled into position. “I’m of the belief that we in law enforcement shouldn’t be bullies or tough guys or sucker punchers. I’ve believed that since I walked a beat in Boston all those years ago.”

Banjax knew the colonel had walked the beat in Boston for less than three weeks before being snatched up to more glamorous duty, as befit his spectacular personage, but he wrote it down anyhow, while his tape recorder purred away, even though Obobo had used the same line when he’d interviewed him before, for the magazine.

“I’ve always thought of force as the least and last part of law enforcement’s job. Rather, guidance, advice, steady presence, absolute fealty to the letter of the law, but also patience and compassion and discipline, all of it driven forward by a commitment to diversity. No one should look at a policeman and feel fear. That’s the law enforcement I hope I embody and I hope I represent.”

“Sir,” said Banjax, “I’m hearing that there were elements in your command who wanted to go in guns blazing. Is that right?”

“We discussed many ideas, David, many possibilities. But sometimes courage comes in doing nothing. Sometimes it comes in not applying pressure and in letting the alleged perpetrators understand the absurdity of the situation they’ve engineered and letting them see that the sensible solution saves lives rather than takes them. Most people aren’t killers. Most people are simply trying to make themselves heard, to have a selfhood, an identity, whatever you want to call it. And once that is permitted, it defuses the situation. I’m sure these folks consider their cause right and just, and who’s to say, really, that it isn’t? There’s room here on earth for different ideas; that’s why we treasure diversity as a value and I’ve tried to increase it wherever I’ve been and wherever I may go.”

“Well said, sir, if I may. But speaking of ‘wherever you may go,’ is it true that you’re in consideration to become director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation? The successful closure of this emergency certainly can’t hurt that.”

“Well, we’ll let the future take care of itself, David. It will be what it will be. Yes, it would be a great challenge to be in charge of the FBI and to see my ideas applied on a national scale, but-”

Mr. Renfro leaned in. “I hate to break this up, but we’re receiving word the Kaafi brothers have arrived at the airport and been trucked to the plane. Doug, we have to make you available to TV now.”

The colonel and Banjax turned. A monitor had been set up, and indeed the screen showed the three prisoners, still in their orange jumpsuits, all twitchy and excited, climbing up the steps to the giant airliner one by one.

“You should be proud to see that,” said Banjax.

“I am. Off the record, I had people who wanted to explode bombs underneath the floor and go in shooting. Jesus Christ, can you imagine the carnage? For what, to save three measly bank robbers who’d be out in a few years anyway?”

“We’d never be at this moment.”

“No, and we’d have to send out for more body bags. I don’t think there are enough in Minnesota for something like that.”

Simon walked through the shattered door into Andrew Nicks’s large, paneled bedroom on the bottom floor of his father’s mansion. The first thing he saw were posters from a group calling itself Megakill on the walls, jagged images of rockers made up as the angels of Armageddon, with crazed screwball makeup, long black nails, coils of hair to the shoulders, lips red as blood, electric instruments like weapons, faces contorted into the pagan killing mask, like Conan on a good day outside the walls of some doomed Hyborian city-state. Other pix: smiling shots of Dylan and Eric of Columbine fame, a solemn loner named Seung-Hui Cho of Virginia Tech, the great Charles Manson, Charles Whitman, a strange guy with haunted eyes and a bushy ’40s haircut, even two little squirts in period outfits he recognized finally as Bonnie and Clyde. All screwball shooters, little men with big guns, artists of destruction and mayhem. Then the guy in the haircut clarified for him as he realized it was Howard Unruh, who’d taken a Luger for a walk in 1948, murdering thirteen, first of the big-kill maniacs.

Then he saw the elaborate computer setup, and an agent had called up MEMTAC 6.2, which Simon knew to be the software package that controlled America, the Mall’s, security system. An immensely detailed and possibly impenetrable flowchart seemed to be on display. On a table across from the unmade bed were stacks of blueprints, all of them from Oakland Engineering and Architectural, one of the firms that had constructed the mall in 1992. On many of them, red pencil lines tracked pathways, corridors, stairways, choke points, areas in square footage.

The bookshelf held a variety of texts-classic revolutionary strategy by Mao, Debray, Guevara, and Trotsky, to say nothing of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, Dave Cullen’s Columbine, a variety of US Army and Marine Corps insurgency and counterinsurgency manuals, sniper guides, improvised explosive handbooks, psywar op pamphlets, ambush tactics and man-tracking guides from various survivalist or radical publishers.

“Mentally, he was getting ready for war,” said someone.

“Mentally, he was nuts,” someone else said.

“Oh God,” somebody said, “look at this.”

He held up a batch of newspaper clippings on a Reverend Reed Hobart, of a Church of the Redeemer in some outlying community, who had been famously demonstrating at downtown mosques with a group of his followers but then had suddenly vanished without a trace.

“Maybe Andrew made the Reverend Mr. Reed go bye-bye,” said someone.

“Okay,” said Simon, “I think that pretty much tears it. I’ll call Kemp, and meanwhile let’s get this stuff photoed, tagged, and removed. It’ll all have to be looked at.”

“What’s in the closet, I wonder,” another agent said, and opened the door.

The detonation represented itself even before it was a blade of light as a wall of immense energy that stopped time for a split second, and in the next everybody in the room had been blown back until they hit something that stopped them. The noise was stupendous, and shards of wood flying viciously through the air opened a hundred or so wounds in the men and women so blasted.

Simon, who had been deeper in the room at the time of the blast and thus missed its killing force, found himself the new owner of three broken ribs. He fought the terrible, suppurating lassitude that leadened his limbs and tried to shut down his brain. He blinked, exhaled a plume of acrid air, looked about, and through the smoke that hung everywhere in the room, noted a young agent against another wall so still he had to be dead, and grew angry at himself that he could not remember the young man’s name just now. He tried to pull himself up, get himself together, take charge, make a report, get medical and ATF bomb people out here, all at once.

Then he saw, through the fog, the boy’s father standing in the doorway.

“Oh God, Andrew,” he was screaming, “what have you done!”

Tick tock, tick tock, Jeff Neal thought. He looked around, saw the eyes of all the leaners-in boring in at him. But he was trying to put pieces together. Somehow “perverts” and “mall” and… and what? He thought he had an idea, an inspiration, a possibility, a “Sorry. I thought I had something. I didn’t.”

“Well,” said Dr. Benson, “I guess you ought to just run penetration programs on it again, and just maybe-”

“Okay, okay, okay,” said Neal suddenly, again very fast. “Stay with me on this. We track pervs, right?”

“That seems to be the consensus,” someone said.

“Now, I do have a California guy in my crosshairs. His name is Bruce Wyatt, thirty-four. I’ve been all over his hard drive. Kids dressed as cowboys, you don’t want to know more. Okay. Okay, he works, I think, at a RealDeal in Sacramento. So I’m going to get on his drive, search for links. He’s computer-savvy, sort of, so he’s got a link to RealDeal Corporate. So from him I can get into RealDeal Corporate. I get into that, their main setup, not the bullshit public website, I get into their guts, where all their maintenance and security and financial programs are, and maybe there’s a link to each branch, even if it’s only e-mail. So maybe I somehow figure out which of the fifty or so branches-”

“Jeff, there’s probably over five hundred of them.”

“So I get into their operating system and from there I get to the system here at this mall, at their big fourth-floor store and maybe, depending on who built it and how much money they spent, maybe, maybe maybe there’s some kind of undocumented portal from it into the bigger SCADA thing and I can get in through that. And I can take it down that way.”

“Go for it,” said Dr. Benson.

“So we wait till it’s all clear,” asked Lavelva Oates, “then we come out, is that what they’re saying?”

“That’s what they’re saying. It’s over, the bad guys won. Hostages for prisoners. The prisoners go, then the hostages go.”

“What happens then?”

“I don’t know,” Ray said. “We’ll let the geniuses figure it out.”

“It ain’t right,” said Lavelva. “It ain’t right all those people dead and messed up, and they git what they want.”

“But do you kill a thousand innocent to punish fifteen or so bad? I don’t know the answer but I thought the point of all these special police units was to set it up so you could kill the fifteen without the thousand. But it didn’t seem to work out here today, did it?”

“No, it didn’t.”

“The one that was choking on me, you punished him but good. So there’s a little justice here today, and you’re the one who brought it, and you should be proud of yourself for the rest of your life for that one.”

“It still ain’t right,” she said, disturbed.

They sat behind the rear counter of a store called Perfumaria, amid odors so sweet they had a gaggy quality to them. Cruz felt like throwing up. But he had his orders, and he would sit tight and make explanations later. There was no percentage in any other line of action.

The vibrator on his phone buzzed.

He fished it out of his pocket, slid the bar to answer.

It was all of them: McElroy but also Webley and, from far away, Nick Memphis.

Memphis did the talking.

“Where are you, Cruz?”

“In a perfume store still on the second floor. We killed one more bad guy, but I don’t think anybody’s caught on to that.”

“Okay, we have an ID on the big man, a kid actually, twenty-two. He manages a store in the mall called First Person Shooter. He ordered the weapons through a dodge, he’s got the computer chops, and maybe he’s trying to do Columbine on steroids.”

“So it’s just some little fuck?”

“He would have access to the mall, he’d know all security arrangements, all the corridors and tunnels, and he has a record of disturbing behavior, from drug arrests to Internet harassment to arson, always quashed by Dad’s money. He’s been under a psychiatrist’s care for years and it was thought he was ‘getting better.’”

“Guess not,” said Ray.

“You’re the only asset we have in the mall. What we need you to do, Ray, is find a way to the fourth floor and to the Rio Grande corridor. This First Person Shooter is there, Rio Grande 4-312. It’s where his headquarters would have to be, we think, where he’s got this thing wired. When you get there, you set up outside. If everything goes well, we may not need you. If it goes bad, you may have to bust in there and cap him and whoever else is there fast. Sorry I can’t get you body armor or anything. I suppose you don’t even have to go if you don’t want, but on the other hand, if any man in America would go on this one, it would be you.”

Yeah me, he thought. I, warrior. I, hero. I, marine. I, sniper.

“Cruz, are you okay?” asked Memphis.

“I’m on my way,” said Ray.

“Look,” said Memphis, “I get it. You thought you were out of it, and it followed you home and it’s still trying to kill you. You have a beautiful fiancee and a thousand job opportunities and it’s all looking swell, and then these guys come along with their little thing. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

Stay away from the W-word, Cruz told himself. There is no why in this world. There is only is, that is, what has to be done next, and this has to be done next. His father would do it without a second thought, and if he got killed in the very last seconds, he would not die tainted by bitterness. There is no why, there is only is.

“Cruz, are you okay on this one?”

“It’s past my nap time,” he said, “but I think I have one more day without a nap in me.”

“Cruz, when this is over, I’ll buy you a mattress store and you can nap all day long.”

“I’ll take you up on that,” Cruz said.

Wearily, he rose.

“Don’t know where you’re going,” said Lavelva, “but I’m going too.”

Some things hadn’t worked out. For one, the gun cameras. Now and then, as in the execution footage, they yielded something very interesting. But mostly they just tracked the random imagery that the muzzles covered as the gunmen haphazardly wielded them, at a speed that increased the abstraction to near totality and the information to almost nothing. Rather quickly, Andrew had ceased paying attention to them. They were like lava lamps mounted on the wall, nice if you’re high and feeling kinda groovy, otherwise useless.

He sat in his command chair in the back room of First Person Shooter before a wall of such imagery. On the other wall, more important to monitor, were all the image feeds from the security cameras. They at least communicated security responses to his event. He could see in the exterior exit cameras, for example, that the murky black-clad ninjas known as SWAT teams had pulled back, or at least out of the picture, and that at each entrance a line of buses had pulled up. According to Andrew’s instructions, each bus driver had opened his doors and left his bus and now stood in front of it, arms held upward and without jacket to display his unarmed status.

Ho-hum, another day at the office. It was all going swell.

The big board, which had the hacked SCADA pictorial of the MEMTAC 6.2 security program, showed nothing. Everything that was supposed to be locked down was still locked down; everything that wasn’t, wasn’t.

“What is going on with number six?” asked the imam.

“I don’t-”

“He is still. He is on the ground. What is wrong with him?” Andrew looked back to number six on the gun camera wall. It took him a while to make any sense of it, but then he realized it was an inverted image, and twisting his head to find the proper orientation, he saw that it was a floor-level observation of nothing, that is to say, not ceiling, not hallway, nothing containing data, but rather what, upon concentration, appeared to be the lower foot or so of wall beneath the window of a retail outlet, on a level with the floor.

“The gun is on the floor,” Andrew said. “Like the kid just dumped it and went and got himself some ice cream. Or maybe the camera fell off in some roughhouse and it landed on the floor sideways. He wouldn’t notice it. He didn’t even know it was there.”

“Or someone killed him, left the gun on the floor, and it’s just lying there, showing nothing.”

“Call him,” said Andrew.

The imam spoke in Somali. “Number six, Hanad, are you there? Hanad? Has anybody seen Hanad?”

The imam listened to the return messages and then reported, “Hanad went up on the second floor with Feysal.”

“Which one was he?”

“Number eight.”

He looked at number eight. Hmm, it seemed okay, just more blur and dazzle as the muzzle bounced about, pulling the camera with it.

“Asad? Where is Asad?” asked the imam. “I sent him to get the babies an hour or so ago. Where is Asad?”

Asad was number three. They both looked at that image and for a second it seemed to show nothing much, just the same blur and dazzle. But then it stabilized. It seemed to show a door. Then it went up to the ceiling and a man’s hand reached around from the left and both the imam and Andrew watched as something large and irregularly shaped was crushed over the muzzle until it was held secure.

Andrew almost laughed. It looked like a potato.

Then the muzzle was lowered and it reacquired the door, settling just over the computer-controlled lock. The muzzle leaped, the irregular object-it was a potato! — dissolved in a blast of mist, and the doorjamb was blown out of the door frame, freeing the lock bolt. Hmm, interesting. The shooter had known not to fire into the lock itself-unbudgeable-but into the door frame, which was wooden and vulnerable to high-velocity energy. This fellow-was he a professional? It was like the moment when Dirty Harry leaps onto the school bus roof from the rail trestle, driving Scorpio nuts!

On the monitor, the muzzle dropped to the floor, displaying a pair of New Balance cross-trainers, and Andrew was aware that the owner had just moved through the door he had shot open and begun to climb some steps.

It suddenly made sense. Somebody in the mall was hunting his people. Some vigilante had killed Asad silently, gotten the rifle, and then improvised a suppressor from the potato-that was straight out of Marine Field Manual MC-118-341, “field-expedient suppression techniques.” Now that person had shot his way into one of the locked stairwells and was headed upstairs, that is, upstairs toward him, Andrew. Was it Bronson, the young Eastwood, Bruce Willis? Or was it some clumping cheese eater who had disobeyed the mall’s privately imposed law and brought a carry piece inside and now waged war?

No. He knew how to blow the lock; he was a professional. Maybe Delta, maybe SEAL, maybe some real good FBI HRT guy.

He hadn’t counted on that, but at the same time, instead of being scared, he was exhilarated. This is really interesting. Oh, this will be so cool in the final document. Every story needs a tragic hero; this guy would be it. This would also give the story another narrative strand to twist in and out. It revved him way up.

He realized he must have, in his voluminous recording stick, the actual moment when the mystery man took out Asad and Feysal and Hanad and whoever else he’d taken out. He also realized that the hunter was now carrying the rifle, not having yet figured out that it was camera-equipped.

He went to his software screen, found the elevator on switch on the menu, and turned the elevators back on.

“Tell Maahir to send two guys up to the fourth floor by elevator and set up in a storefront across from us. They’ll be getting visitors soon. Oh,” he continued, “this is going to look so cool in the game!”

“There it is,” said Renfro. “That’s it, that’s the ball game.”

He and the colonel stood in the Command trailer, watching the network feed from NBC. It showed the three Kaafi boys bounding up the stairs into the Air Saudi plane. Joy pulsed through their limbs and loins, three young men who two hours ago faced ten years of incarceration in an antiseptic, dreary Western prison, now able to dream and plan and feel freedom and anticipate the softness of a woman’s flesh, the awareness of Allah’s approval, the congratulations of imams and mullahs, and, eventually, another chance to strike and bring death to the infidel beast and vengeance for the murder of the Holy Warrior.

“You did it,” said Mr. Renfro.

“You did it,” said the colonel.

“We both did it,” said Mr. Renfro. “And now, look out, world, here we come.”

“It’ll only be another half hour before they clear airspace and they’re home free. Our people would never shoot them down and the Saudi pilots would never obey orders to turn back. The hostages will be freed, the Kaafi brothers will be in Yemen and shortly Mogadishu, and I think I’ll let the mopping up devolve to my good friend Mike Jefferson, who likes the bang-bang stuff so much, he can go in and have his little gun battle with the bad guys. They’ll all be punished that way, my hands are clean, and as you say, look out, world, here we come.”

“Colonel, you have a one-on-one now with ABC. It’s the only major you haven’t hit yet. Oh, and Fox-”

“My good friends at Fox,” said the colonel.

“Even they will kowtow to the colonel on this day.”

“Okay, let’s-”

But like a bad dream, someone stood between him and the doorway, beyond which lay the ABC team, with its lights and camera and love.

It was the FBI hotshot, Will Kemp. “I thought he was off running the investigation,” the colonel muttered to Mr. Renfro, but as Kemp drew within hearing distance, he blossomed into his wise, cool public personality and said, “Will, your people were unbelievably fast and proficient on the Andrew Nicks ID, really, and that’s such a help once we get those citizens out of there and go in and take the little bastard down.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Kemp.

“I’ll be sure to tell the director how well you and your team operated and under what great pressure. I’m sure he’ll be pleased, and I’m sure you’ll be pleased.”

“Yes sir,” said Kemp, “but if you’ll forgive, I want to discuss something else.”

“Will, I’m on my way to a media thing, unpleasant but, unfortunately, it goes with the territory.”

“Yes sir, but just let me express myself quickly, if I may.”

“Sure, Will, shoot. But please make it snappy.”

“Sir, I’m wondering if it was wise to pull the SWAT people so far back. Equally, I’m worried that it was unwise to give these people in the mall so much operational freedom. I mean they start shooting hostages, we’re a good five to six minutes away from confronting them with force, and they could do a great deal of killing in that time. Our intelligence says they have at least ten thousand rounds of ammunition in there and sixteen fast-firing assault weapons.”

“Will, you know, that troubles me too. Troubles me immensely, in fact. But the truth is, you have to take some risks in operations. I decided to take this one. I think the Muslims will be content with their propaganda victory, hollow though it is. I mean, these are basically thirteenth-century minds we’re dealing with, and they’re easily distracted. The glory that awaits them in this life, the chance to be heroes to their coreligionists, that’s too much for them to give up on.”

“Sir, it’s not them I’m worried about. It’s this goddamned white kid, with his crazy nihilism and bloodlust, his love for Eric Harris and Seung-Hui Cho, he could do anything, anything. I’d feel so much better if we had a sniper put a bullet in his head.”

“Will, your concern is well placed and admirable. But by now, if we move SWAT back into place and authorize the rooftop snipers to get through the glass, I’m worried that we’ll set him off. So my judgment is to stay passive, just a little longer. Then we’ll let the SWAT boys off the leash and teach this kid a thing or two.”

He turned, smiling, and went out to face the ABC cameras.

Up they climbed, up the steel steps in the unlit shaft of the stairwell, slowly, Cruz in the lead, tough little Lavelva behind, from the second floor to the third.

“Sir?” she said.

“Call me Ray. Not sir.”

“Is this a machine gun? I haven’t fired no machine gun before.”

She was gripping the AK-74 that Ray had snatched up from the jihadi Lavelva had conked with her eight iron and he had finished with a bayonet. It made him realize: she knows nothing about that gun except what she’s seen in the movies, but she’s going on anyhow.

“It’s not a machine gun, no. Here, I better show you how to use it.”

They knelt, and he talked to her in whispers.

“Okay, this one fires as fast as you pull the trigger. No machine gun. Thirty times. But it’s got to be loaded, the safety has to be off, it has to be cocked, and it’s much better if you’re aiming it.”

He pushed the magazine release and snapped out the magazine.

“This orange banana-shaped thing is full of the cartridges. You know what a cartridge is?”

“The bullets.”

“Yeah, close enough. You can see them held by the lips of the magazine, showing.”

“Little things.”

“They are small. But they move fast, they hit hard, they do real bad damage. So to load it, you have to lock in the magazine, the bullet part up, the bullets facing down the barrel. Look how I do it. Think of it as a kind of hinge. You sort of wedge the front part of the magazine into the front part of the magazine well, until it catches. See?”

He showed it to her two or three times. Then she took the mag and the small-framed, tinny, even toylike weapon, and mimicked him, ending up with the mag forward lip lodged into the mag well until it lightly clicked.

“Good. Now that it’s set, you pivot the magazine back, or up, all the way into the well. There, that’s right, pivot it in, see how it fits? And sort of force it or shove until-”

It locked.

“Okay, turn the gun over.”

She did so.

“See that lever, that piece of rotating metal on the right side of the receiver, see how it goes up and hooks over this open slot in the gun?”

“I do.”

“That’s the safety. In that condition, up, the gun can’t be fired or cocked. It blocks the bolt. See that?” and he pulled the bolt back about an inch until it hit the safety obstruction and would go no farther. “Bet you can figure out what to do.”

“You push it down.”

“You got it.”

With her thumb, she rotated the long safety lever downward, so that it no longer blocked the bolt raceway.

“Now you have to cock it, set the bolt back, allow a cartridge to come up into the chamber.”

“Okay,” she said. She rearranged the gun so that she controlled it more efficiently, its stock against her hip, secured by her tightened elbow.

“Now see that latch or prong thing?” he asked, pointing to the bolt handle.

“Yes.”

“Pull that back and let it go.”

She pulled it back without trouble and then let the bolt fly forward and seat itself after having moved a 5.45mm cartridge into the chamber.

“Okay, now you’re ready to rock. It’ll fire each time you pull the trigger. You know how to shoot it, like the movies. Just don’t hold it sideways. Look over the top, line up the rear sight with the front sight, put it on target, watch the front sight, and press, don’t yank, the trigger.”

It reminded him of a time he’d taken Molly to a civilian rifle range. Molly tried gamely. She pretended she cared. She pretended the gun was interesting.

“Will it hurt?” Molly had asked him.

“No, not if you do it right. I’ll show you how to do it.”

He’d seated her behind a bench, fiddled with wrist and arm and upper body, aligning the barrel, her head, focusing the scope for her, tidying the sandbags.

“Okay, what are you thinking of?”

“What we’re going to have for dinner.”

He laughed. “You’re hopeless.”

“I’m not hopeless at all. I’m full of hope. I’m hoping this will be over soon.”

And it was. And they went out and had a nice dinner and laughed their way through it, and now he wondered if he’d ever get back to that simple peacetime ritual of just hanging out with a woman you loved. Was it that big a deal? It seemed the whole world had managed it.

They made it to the top of the stairs.

“Okay,” he said, “beyond there is enemy territory. I’m going to shoot open the door just like I did before and jump into the hallway. I’ll be low. We’ll check left, we’ll check right. Then I’ll dash across the hallway and cover for you. Then we’ll move into the store, it’s just seventy-five or so feet down to the left on that side.”

Lavelva suddenly said, “No. Don’t do it.”

“What?”

“You’ll be killed.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“They waiting for you.”

“They don’t even know I’m here.”

“Yes, he do. That boy, he knows.”

“Lavelva, what’re you talking about?”

“Don’t you see? It’s in the game.”

“I don’t-”

“It’s a game. This boy, he turned this whole place into his own giant-size game. You said he run First Person Shooter? I been there. All these geeky little E.T.-lookin’ motherfuckers, black, white, yellow, it don’t matter, they all be trippin’ on killing and blowing shit up. It’s so real to them, they don’t remember they sittin’ in a mall surrounded by gal underpants stores. And he’s the king of all that. And what do a king do? He spread his empire, right?”

“Yeah, he’s nuts, but why do you-”

“I play the game too,” she said.

“We’re wasting time.”

“You get killed, you won’t waste no time anymore. You listen to me. I play the games a lot. I like to leave my thing too. I don’t want to be no girl in the projects with a brother dead and another nailing carpet and no prospects for nothing. I want to be Alex in Wizards of Waverly Place, and I’m all the time trying to get through the maze, you know. I like that story. I don’t like the boy shit, which is all blowing up, but I like the girl shit, the Wizard Alex shit. And so I know the rule of the game. It’s you never go in the first way.”

“What?”

“That’s the way the game work. Some people get it, some never do. But there is always another way into it. Always. That’s the way you win. You look and look and look and find that other way in, ’cause if you go in the first way you find, you get whacked.”

He looked hard at her.

“Ray, please,” she said. “I’m telling you straight: through that door, death, sure enough.”