Soft target

3:20 P.M.-4:00 P.M

The shooting had stopped. Ray lay with Molly and several other women in the rear of a Frederick’s of Hollywood store on the second floor. Generic women’s bodies, truncated at neck and thigh, stood around in bikinis, leather corsets, underpants, pasties, but nobody thought there was anything remotely funny about it. Outside, the pedestrian traffic had disappeared.

“Oh God,” said a girl, “Oh God, oh God, oh God, I can’t believe this is happening.”

“I don’t want to die,” said another woman. “I have children. I can’t die. It’s not right.”

“Please, ladies,” Ray said, “I’m no expert but you’ll be better off if you hold it down and get a grip. You can worry about how unfair it is later.”

“He’s right, Phyllis,” someone said. “Shut up. Just be glad Milt and the kids aren’t here.”

“I’m here to buy something to wear for his goddamn birthday! He should be here.”

“It’s probably some freak with a gun,” said another. “The cops will get him. Don’t you think they’ll get him, mister?”

“I heard more than one gun,” said Ray. “That’s what bothers me.”

“I can’t get through. I have to call my husband. The phones are-”

“It’s all jammed up,” Ray said. “Everyone in this mall who isn’t dead is trying to call home. Please, you’d be much better off not to worry about making contact now. Just try and stay calm and relax. I didn’t hear any firing on the upper floors. I think this is restricted to downstairs, so if you’ll just try and stay calm and still, in the long run that’s the best course.”

“We just lie here and they come kill us.”

“If they were into slaughter, they’d still be shooting. Now I’m going to slip out and see what I can see. Stay here, stay down. Don’t get curious.”

Molly pulled him close.

“My mother and sister are downstairs,” she said.

“Let me see what’s going on,” he said. Then, louder, “Is there a manager or a clerk here?”

A young woman crawled over to him.

“Mrs. Renfels is the manager, but she’s in pretty bad shape. My name is Rose. I work here.”

“Listen, Rose, I need to know about the security cameras here in the mall. Are they everywhere? If I sneak out, will someone watching them in the security headquarters see me? Maybe they’ve taken that over. That would be their logical first step.”

“I don’t think there are any in the corridors, you know, I mean, what I mean is-”

“Settle down, Rose. Take a deep breath. No rush. You’re doing fine.”

“Okay. Mostly they’re at the intersections and they look down the corridors. They don’t have them every twenty-five feet or anything, that’s what I mean. They make you take a tour when you start working here and I was in that room. The views don’t have a lot of details, you know. It’s a long look down the corridor, there’s a lot of shadows. I wouldn’t stand up. If you stand up and someone’s looking at that camera, they’ll know you’re there.”

“Good, very good.” He considered. “Okay,” he said, “I’m going to crawl out and try and get a feel for what’s happening. Ladies, please stay here. Like Rose said, if you try and get out by running, they may see you.”

“What are you going to do, Ray?” Molly asked.

“Well, I guess I ought to scout around. I can’t just sit here.”

“Ray, you can just sit here. Follow your own advice. Just sit here. Wait. Help will come.”

“I heard that one about a thousand times in the suck. It never did. I’m just going to slide out and see what’s what. You ladies, you just stay still.”

Slowly, Ray snaked forward. He eased his head around the threshold of the doorway. The corridor was empty, though signs of rapid abandonment were everywhere, dropped purses and bags of goods, upturned baby carts, some of the windows of the stores broken. He saw no bodies and no shell casings on the floor. But he heard moans, din, the sound of many people shifting in place. That noise came from the space of the atrium, seventy-five feet away, its openness and height guarded by railings. Incomprehensibly, Christmas music still filled the air and the lights from the amusement park still blinked remorselessly on. No, it wasn’t a silent night; it was a loud afternoon.

He looked up and down the hallway for a sign of gunmen, saw nothing. Everything told him get in the back of the store. Block the doors. Wait it out. There can’t be that many, even now law enforcement is responding in a big way, there will be an assault, and you do not want to be running around in the middle of that kind of shitstorm.

Fuck, he thought. I thought I was done with this stuff. He had been shot at a whole lot in his life, and for the most part, he was fine by that. It went with the territory, it was the avenue by which he expressed his odd, powerful, even self-defining gift to put a bullet where he wanted no matter the position, the distance, the angle, the firearm, to be the dark figure known as the Sniper. Someone wanted him to enjoy that talent, and it was the centerpiece of his life that he not blow the mission, whatever the mission was, whoever gave it to him, and now he knew that it tracked back over generations to an odd family of men with similar gifts, some greater, some smaller, but who had always gone beyond the edge with their possibly autistic (how else to explain it?) coordination of front sight and target and sometimes not even front sight.

But… now? Here? He thought he was home free from the suck, but the suck had followed him home and he was not free. Someone had given him another mission, and though his bones ached and his breath came in hard spurts, he had some obligation to… well, he knew the obligation more than he knew the name of the force that had generated it. So he pushed on.

Again, checking the hallway and seeing no signs of movement, he edged out and slithered in the low crawl. He stuck close to the wall, figuring that he was in a zone of shadow, and unless one were looking carefully at the feed from a particular camera, itself mounted a good hundred feet down the corridor at the intersection, he ought to be okay. He got by several stores and became aware that each contained people as well. The smart ones, the lucky ones, the strong ones, the young ones had beat it to the exitways and gotten out to the parking areas.

He could see the balcony ahead and, beyond it, the looming strut-work of various thrill rides, the buttresses of the coaster tracks, the log chute, the top of the whirling two-seat swings. The noise from just beyond had gotten more intense. He had to know what was going on below.

He slid forward just a few feet to the very edge of the balcony, lifted his head, and took a quick scan, then withdrew.

Shit.

First, of course, in the center of the park, dead Santa atop his throne of blood presided, head tilted, inert as the earth itself. He was the king of death. Beneath His Majesty, sitting disconsolately on the pathways that crosscut the amusement park, were at least a thousand people, packed closely, most in a state of shock. He saw what had happened. The gunmen had begun at the outer ring and, shooting wildly, killing enough to compel instant, terrified obedience, had driven shoppers forward to converge in the amusement park in the center. A thousand hostages, under the struts and buttresses of the roller coasters, under the vastness of glass above shaped like Lake Michigan. He hadn’t time to check closely, but he imagined they were now circled by gunmen. That was two gunmen per corridor, eight gunmen at least, a team for each “river,” in the wacky scheme of the mall, the Colorado, the Hudson, the Rio Grande, and the Mississippi.

He scooted low along the balcony railing, out of view from beneath, and popped up again for a look at the shooters. He could see them as if from his own nightmares: the insouciant postures, the raffish shemaghs thrown loosely around the neck in gaudy variations, otherwise in jeans and hoodies and sneaks. All carried some kind of AK, though from the distance and given the time he had, he couldn’t tell if it was a 47 or a 74. They carried the guns with that movie-driven stylishness of the young jihadi, aware how cool and badass they looked, self-consciously modeled on the same figure they had worshipped for years on television. Thin-hipped, sexy, anonymous, deadly: the warrior of the East come to slay in the West.

And he saw what a mess they had crafted. The situation instantly became clear in Ray’s tactical mind. Those on the upper floors will be abandoned there, too terrified to move downward, basically not a part of the equation. The young, the spry, the brave: they had escaped, running crazily past the gunmen, getting out of ground-floor exits, climbing, finding other ways out or secure hides. Who was left? The weakest of the weak, the most defenseless of the defenseless. The old. The very young. Mothers and fathers tethered to children.

At any sign of an assault, the gunmen could open fire. Even with semiautomatics, as his ears told him their weapons were, they could kill hundreds, while at each corridor their brothers held off the assaulters for a few minutes more. Ray looked up, saw the lake-shaped skylights. They appeared deserted, but at any moment snipers would station themselves there. Could they get shots through the heavy glass? Probably not. They’d have to blow the glass to have any effectiveness, and that would give away any surprise element. Military operators, Delta people or SEALs, could blow the glass and rappel down, but they’d be sitting ducks as they descended and they couldn’t fire downward for fear of hitting the innocent. They could, Ray supposed, just keep coming, like the Marines at Iwo, but that kind of dying for an objective was definitely out of fashion. On top of that, operators at that tactical level were mostly deployed overseas; where would the Minnesota authorities, even with FBI assistance, get such men on short notice? And this whole op had the look of something planned for maximum outrage over a short window of time.

He remembered something similar in Russia, with Chechens. Didn’t they take over a theater? Hundreds of hostages, lots of explosives and gunmen, no way in. The Russian authorities had gassed the place. But the gas was tricky, and although it incapacitated the Chechens, it killed half the hostages. There was no way Americans would be willing to run that risk. And with so many hostages children and the elderly, with undeveloped or overworked, inefficient respiratory systems, the gas would be doubly risky, perhaps doubly lethal. And who said the gunmen didn’t have gas masks? They seemed to have everything else.

Fuck, Ray thought. He suddenly felt him. Him? Yes, the one, the guy, what’shisname, Beelzebub, Lucifer, whoever he was, the fellow who’d thought this thing up. In his mind, he saw some Osama variant, possibly with time in America, who knew American vanities and vulnerabilities, a guy with a special, malevolent cunning and a great deal, damn his damned soul, of creativity. He’d thought it through very carefully, for maximum impact, maximum drama, maximum casualties, at a site comprising entirely the innocent, at the start of the West’s most precious holiday. He knew who his hostages would be; he knew where to place his assets for maximum utility; he had both a strategic and a tactical gift. Already, Ray knew, this was worldwide news, and in every department in the world, pointy-heads were trying to figure out its meaning. Nobody anywhere was talking about anything else.

Would I ever like to get that guy in my crosshairs, he thought.

Molly looked up as Ray slid back in the door.

“Did you see my mother and Sally?” she asked.

“No, I didn’t have time. Ladies, listen up, I’m going to tell you what I think is best.”

Quickly he narrated his discoveries, the situation, his estimation of the difficulties law enforcement would face.

“How soon will they come?” one of the women asked.

“Not soon. They have to get their best people in here; they have to acquire detailed plans for the mall; they have to try and penetrate the security system, which these people may already control and which was designed by geniuses to keep people out. They have to decide their best course. On top of that, these invaders, they may have demands, which will put further complications into the situation. They seem professional and this operation appears well planned. And nobody outside wants to make a hasty decision that could get a thousand civilians killed, believe me. So I’m telling you right now, you have to commit to the long haul. You can’t pin your hopes on this being done quickly.”

“So do we just sit here?”

He turned to the young clerk, Rose.

“Rose, what about a back way out?”

“There’s a loading corridor that runs through each of the sections. That’s how we receive our merchandise.”

“Where would that take us?”

“Well, there’s an elevator to the basement, which leads to the subterranean receiving level.”

“First thing they’d do would be to turn off the elevators. What about a stairwell?”

“Yes, there’s a stairwell.”

“We could escape through the stairwell!” someone said joyously.

“No, not quite. See, I’m thinking that for now they’re not going to pay attention to the upper floors. But as time goes by, they may send teams upstairs to root people out and herd them down to join the hostages. The more hostages they have, the more power to negotiate. So I’d go up one floor to three and find refuge there. Because when they come for us, one team will start at the top and work their way down. And another will come up to the second and work up. So the middle floor is the safest in the long run. Plus, if the cops do assault, they may drive some gunmen up here, to this floor, and have a shootout here, and trust me, you don’t want to be in the middle of it. Does that make sense?”

A surge of good cheer arose and Ray noticed that all the women were buoyed at the prospect of doing something to help their chances. Except for Rose.

“Rose, what’s wrong?”

“When the shooting started, I had the same idea. I ran out the back and tried the stairwell. See, all the locks in the building are part of the software. He’s locked it. We’re stuck here.”

“Are the doors heavy?”

“They’re not as heavy as the outside doors. Those are metal, sunk in metal. But these are tough, heavy wood and you’d have to batter and kick an hour to get them down. Or shoot your way through.”

Ray didn’t say anything, but he knew what that meant. Yes, it confirmed that somehow the attack team had taken over the security program that underlay the mall operations protocols. They had locked the doors remotely. They were in complete control.

He looked carefully at the SCADA representation of MEMTAC 6.2 where its captured images blazed from his own monitors. Quickly he checked off the key points.

LOCKDOWN ENABLEDELEVATORS DISABLEDESCALATORS DISABLED

No surprises there. Once you get in, you learn the culture of the system, the assumptions it’s built on, how the German geniuses at Siemens think, how thorough they were, how they swept up their sandwich crumbs after lunch, and how shiny the bathroom fixtures were.

He continued to monitor, examining the ecosystem of the empire.

AIR-CONDITIONING ONTEMPERATURE CONTROL 72FIRE SPRINKLERS ENABLEDFLUORESCENT LIGHTING SYSTEM ENABLEDAREA Z FUSES FUNCTION 100 PERCENTPOWER GRID STABLESANTA CLAUS DEAD

No, no, it didn’t say that, but he had a morbid sense of humor and he saw it in his imagination, as he also thought about what he could do with his power. Since the owners of this mall owned dozens of other malls in the US and Canada, all using the MEMTAC-driven SCADA, all linked, he could really raise hell if he wanted by refusing credit cards, turning cash registers insane, locking out and in, freezing elevators, directing the Coke machines to urge customers to buy Pepsi all across the land. But really. That wasn’t the point. The point was

… the game.

And then as an afterthought, his piece de resistance.

INTERNET CONNECTION DISABLED

Ha. I hear you knocking but you can’t come in.

Well actually, there was one way in. It would be interesting to see if there was anybody out there smart enough to figure it out.

“I can’t get in,” said a computer technician from the Minnesota State Police. “Whoever he is, he’s taken the thing off line. It’s internally sealed. I’ve run all my conventional link search programs and I’m not getting a thing. It’s a vault.”

“Keep trying,” said Douglas Obobo, who was the newly appointed commandant of the state cops. “I know you won’t let me down.”

A special warmth came into Colonel Obobo’s voice on the last sentence. I know you won’t let me down. That was the Obobo touch, known in its limited way and possibly about to become more famous. He had the gift of inspiration, of making people believe, first in him, second in the mission, third in the larger program that sustained the mission, and finally in the administrative entity that embraced all. It was why he was the youngest man in history, at forty-four, to become a superintendent of state police, and the first African American. It had been national news.

“Sir, we need more sophisticated programs and more sophisticated IT guys. The federal people will have that; maybe they can get in.”

Obobo said, “I understand and that’s why I have federal people on the way. I know if we all work together, we can get this done with a minimum of loss.” He spoke with the confidence of the man who knew the truth.

And why shouldn’t he? His success had been pretty much a certainty. The son of a Kenyan graduate student at Harvard and a Radcliffe anthropology major, he’d graduated from both Harvard and Harvard Law. But instead of taking the conventional path to whatever the American Dream was, he’d joined the Boston Police Department as a beat cop. He was quickly absorbed into the Homicide Bureau and had been the front man on a series of highly publicized cases, where he revealed himself to be a mellifluous speaker and a quick wit and to exude a kind of enlightened law enforcement attitude that could console the races, even in a tough town like Boston.

Despite the fact that he never broke a case, arrested a suspect, won a gunfight, led a raid, or testified in court, in five years he left the department to become the lead investigator for the Senate Subcommittee on Government Fraud, where again his charisma made him a star and got him noticed on the national level. Run for office, many said. You have the gift.

But he was a cop, he said, and committed to the healing of America by progressive law enforcement policy. The old days of kick-ass and coerced confession were gone; the new day of respect for all had arrived.

He became, quickly, the assistant commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, then the chief of the Omaha Police Department, though he cared little for the snowy plains far from the national media. But they kept dropping by anyway, and he made the national news more than any other police executive in the country, in 2008, 2009, and 2010. Finally, his big move, to head the Minnesota State Police with the idea of bringing it into the twenty-first century, making it the premier investigative agency in the state while aiming to cut traffic fatalities to a new low. That hadn’t happened yet and in fact no stated goal had been accomplished, but it was hard to hold that against a man struggling against the old culture and the old ways. The media loved him for his effort. Somehow, he’d ended up on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, subject of a gushing profile by David Banjax.

Now, his first real crisis. He understood that America, the Mall, was a mess. First responders had had a nightmare approaching, as shoppers fled in the thousands, most in cars, gridlocking the place so that incoming LE simply added to the confusion. Meanwhile, the reports were sketchy. Mall security was not answering and had not communicated since the first 10–32 alert went out. Thousands of 911 calls crowded the circuits, all some variety on the theme “Machine gunners are in the mall,” or “I lost my grandma in the mess, help me find my grandma.”

Grandma was going to have to wait, unless she was already dead.

But he also understood that this was an opportunity beyond measure, in some way a gift. The national spotlight would again shine on him and the decisions he made, the leadership he showed-the resolution coupled with fairness, the fortitude coupled with compassion, the eloquence coupled with wisdom-would be on fine display. It wasn’t about ambition, he always said; it was about gifts. He had been given many; it was mandated, therefore, that he give back.

“You know,” his longtime civilian advisor and public affairs guru David Renfro had whispered in his ear on the thunderous ride over, “few men get a chance like this. This is an opportunity we have to seize by the throat.”

Obobo and his senior command team-including Mr. Renfro-were in a state police communication van parked across the highway from the huge structure of the mall. They were roughly in the position of Bermuda, about 250 yards out from the Middle Atlantic states, directly to the east.

He had made some early organizational decisions: one major was liaising with incoming SWAT teams from the local area, assigning the men positions on the perimeter. But the colonel had authorized no entry or engagement. The situation was too unclear; he had no idea what he was up against, who these people were, what they wanted. The last thing he needed was an out-of-control gunfight between his heavily armed operators and equally heavily armed terrorists or whatever in the middle of a crowd of civilians. Hundreds would die. But he also knew that people inside were bleeding out with wounds, suffering heart attacks, anxiety overloads, had been separated from children or other siblings or relatives, were hiding in stores, panicking, maybe plotting a rebellion of their own.

Then he had a major running communications, trying to get everybody on the same met and organizing the inflow of information.

“Any news on the feds?”

“A skeleton team is inbound from Minneapolis fast under siren. They’re still collecting their SWAT people. They’ve got their HRT team gearing up at Quantico, but they’re still three hours out, and then when they land, they’ve got to get here. It’s going to take a while. Colonel, are we going in? I’ve got people in body armor at every exit now. Maybe we shouldn’t wait. Reports are that there’s a lot of wounded inside. Those folks need medical attention.”

“Ah,” he said. An issue of jurisdiction was looming. By federal law, the FBI took charge in any situation that was defined as “terrorism” and ran the show. But things at America, the Mall, were still unclear: despite reports of terrorist-like gunmen and terrorist-like tactics and ruthlessness, he thought it could still be some crazed white militia, some NRA offshoot, some screwball Tea Party gone berserk. In his mind, one never could tell about the right in this country, particularly deep in the glowering Midwest, where men clung to guns and religion, cursed bitterly as America changed, and still believed, fundamentally, in the old ways.

Renfro said, “Colonel, you cannot let the FBI people run this show. It can’t be a Washington thing. There are sound policy reasons for it-harder for them to coordinate with the locals, unfamiliarity with the territory, lack of intelligence on the local scene-but the politics count here too. Washington will want in, but you’ve got to hold Washington at bay.”

“I know, I know,” said the colonel. “I’ve got a plan.”

Obobo’s idea was to use the FBI as the primary investigative tool of this operation. They would interview witnesses, run the databases, check the photo IDs and the fingerprint files; they would liaise with ATF on ballistics. That would be plenty for them. But in no way was he prepared to relinquish command. This one was his.

“Negative, negative on any kind of assault,” he announced to his gathered majors. “I am not going to tell the governor that he has presided over the largest bloodbath in American history. Establish the perimeter, hold the medical people and the ambulance in a zone, keep the media in the loop because we do have a responsibility to inform a panicked public, and try and set up some kind of contact with these people. They must want something, and I know I can influence them positively, given the chance.”

“Maybe they just want to kill a lot of folks,” someone said. “Maybe the longer we wait…”

This was Mike Jefferson, another major, head of SWAT and by nature aggressive; he’d won three gunfights and could be a pain in the ass. Obobo mistrusted him, as he mistrusted that kind of man, bodacious, body-proud, thick-armed, tattooed, and a little too hungry to go to guns. If you went to guns, he knew, all kinds of craziness was loosed upon the earth and nobody knew which way the bullets would ricochet. He would never go to guns. On the other hand, it was not his way to crush underlings.

“Major Jefferson, that’s a great point. Therefore I want you to begin to assemble an assault plan and be ready to deploy and implement. At present, I feel we must hold until federal reinforcement arrives, and then we will see where we are and consider our options. But we have to have other options and that’s your job.”

Jefferson understood he’d just gotten a no that sounded like a yes; he muttered something and backed off.

Someone else said, “Mike, the doors are locked from the inside. To even get in for an assault, you’d have to blow fifty doors simultaneously and we don’t have the technology or the explosives to do that. Only the feds have stuff like that.”

“The feds don’t even have it, not in their shop in Minneapolis,” said Jefferson. “Get the governor to authorize the National Guard to the site. Isn’t there a Special Forces unit part of the Minnesota National Guard? Maybe they have the expertise. Also, DOJ, maybe DOD. We may need some Army commandos.”

“Major, it’ll take hours, maybe days, to get commandos in here.”

“I got Minnetonka SWAT incoming. Where should I put them?” asked one of the radio operators.

“I think we’re weak at California,” said the major in charge of logistics. His job was to decide where to place the various units, determine their areas of responsibility, keep them from stumbling into each other or being assigned redundant tasks, and also managing food, coffee, blankets, and other support for the men on the line.

“Dispatch them to holding positions at the California entrance,” said Obobo, once again reiterating his major theme, on the management theory that you tell them, then you tell them again, and when you’re finished, then you tell them again. “No contact, no initiatives, stay off the air unless there’s an emergency. Their job is to help late stragglers get to medical aid, not to be heroes. The last thing we need is a hero. Now let’s have a quick press conference. We have to start putting information out. Mr. Renfro, you’re on top of this?”

“I am, sir,” said Renfro.

It was difficult to determine who died first, Mrs. Goldbine, from her heart attack, or Mr. Graffick, from his lower-back wound. The sixty-seven-year-old woman certainly died the loudest. She gripped her chest and began to breath harshly, coughing now and then. The woman sitting next to her, a Somali waitress who worked in a restaurant in the mall, tried to comfort her and held her hand. The woman turned gray. The waitress stood, raising her hand desperately to attract the attention of one of the gunmen, who pushed his way through the crowd with the familiar arrogance of the armed among the unarmed.

“This lady is very sick,” said the waitress in Somali.

“Too bad for her,” said the boy.

“She will die,” said the girl.

“Then that is what Allah has decreed, sister. Do not take up with these white devils. All are going to die sooner or later. If you are nice to me, maybe I can spare you.”

“Go fuck yourself,” said the young woman in English.

The boy laughed and turned away.

“What did he say, what did he say?” a dozen nearby hostages had to know. She decided not to tell them what he had told her.

“He says he doesn’t care. He thinks he is God. He will find out different.”

She bent over Mrs. Goldbine and saw that it was too late. She had passed.

In another sector of the crowd, Graffick lay in the arms of his wife. He had taken a bullet meant for and aimed at her. It had hit him in the lower back and initially didn’t produce much blood or even pain. He’d stumbled but continued to push her ahead in the mad scramble toward the middle of the mall, not that there was safety there. There was safety nowhere. But the law of least resistance produced the inward rush.

He lay, looking up at the lake-shaped spread of skylights four stories up. He was not a religious man, for driving eight hundred miles a day in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler for forty years does not incline one toward the more spiritual things in life, nor was he ever in any one place long enough for church to present itself as an option. If he worshipped anything, it was a goddess: his wife.

“You must fight,” he told her. He knew about fighting: 1st Marine Division, An Loc, RVN, ’65-’66, Purple Heart, Silver Star.

“Jerry,” she said, “just be still.”

“Sweetie, listen. These bastards, don’t let ’em see you crying. Don’t give ’em nothing. Don’t give ’em no satisfaction at all. When I go, just put on your steel face and don’t show a thing. Remember that time I got busted in that vice sting in Ohio? You didn’t talk to me for a year. Honey, that’s the face. I know you got it. You give it to them and make them fear you.”

“Please, please, Jerry.”

She was sitting in a lake of blood. He was bleeding out, and the warm fluid ran from his wound into her dress and puddled around them on the floor.

“God, I love you so much,” he said, and then went still.

Not far from him a man named Charles Dougan was concerned about a bowel movement he could not prevent from occurring. He was ashamed. It was one thing to die, it was another to die with your pants full of shit. He didn’t realize that incontinence of one sort or another was a crucial feature of hostage situations, because no media ever dealt with it honestly. But the significant commonality among a large number of people held against their will was lack of sanitation for bodily fluids and that was simply an unfortunate biological reality.

He raised his hand.

A boy shoved his way over, roughly.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

“Shit in pants,” the boy said and turned away.

And so to his shame and horror, that’s what Charles Dougan did.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the young woman next to him.

“That’s okay,” said Sally Chan. “It doesn’t matter.”

There were at least a thousand, sitting cross-legged and head-down on the brick pathways of the Silli-Land amusement park. The rides, now still, towered over them. Absurd contrivances, they seemed yet more insane given the circumstances, but no one in the crowd much cared about the irony of being surrounded by thrill rides while being held at gunpoint under threat of death. And there was dead Santa on his throne, his body twisted, his hat on his ear, his head so askew only a corpse could sustain it, and that red spatter of blood V-shaped by the exit of the bullet on the satin plush of his chair. A loudspeaker issued the words “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way,” but nobody paid much attention.

The armed boys wandered the perimeter, sometimes kicking their way into crowds to deal with issues. Their faces were impassive, but the guns, sinister black with ventilated barrels and wicked curved magazines, were terrifying. Nearly everyone had seen such weapons on the TV news and knew them to be the tool of the subhuman category of merciless terrorists, of which their owners were surely members.

The boys occasionally came together and laughed. Or one would vanish into the mall and return with, say, taffy apples or french fries, and all would eat. They drank a lot of Cokes and pretty much looted the Silli-Land refreshment center for shakes and hot dogs. One of them put a cowboy hat on, squishing it down over his shemagh headdress, and all helped themselves to new jeans and high-end New Balance or Nike sneakers.

Who was in charge? There didn’t seem to be a leader, but the boys weren’t quite random in their movement and more or less obeyed the rules of sound security, each knot of two hanging in that quadrant of the perimeter, keeping their guns oriented toward the seated hostages. At any time there were a great many guns bearing on the hostages, and all fingers on all triggers. Most of the hostages also believed the guns were “machine guns” and that a single pull would send a squirt of bullets out to take them down in batches. That concept alone was enough to keep them seated and quiet.

There was no chance at heroism. Any kind of mass rush toward a gunman was precluded by the impossibility of coordinating it and the immediacy of mass death it would ensure. The smell of burned powder still hung in the air. It was like an anti-aphrodisiac to dreams of action. To rise against the guns would be to die pointlessly in a mall, even while outside the rescuers accumulated.

From above it looked somewhat like the Bristol Speedway, Nikki Swagger thought. A huge, absurd structure decreed into the middle of nowhere, its odd shape touching automatically on chords of patriotism and sacrifice in all who saw it from the sky, serviced by a mesh of highways that came to it from the vague hinterlands. Now it seemed like race day: activity, activity, activity. Trucks kept pulling up, all of them spurting illumination that lit the twilight in incoherent splash patterns. From them spilled urgent men in black, with strange devices, who ran to cover and took up positions. The whole portrait pulsed with energy, purpose, dedication, high training, sophisticated deployment, yet nothing was happening. A fleet of red-white ambulances and other emergency service vehicles had gathered in one of the parking lots. Outside the ring, the highways were jammed with cars and trucks, even as more public safety teams tried to fight the rush and get through them to get close enough to assist.

Over her earphones she heard Marty back at the station.

“Nikki, the great Obobo is giving a briefing.”

“The first of many, I’m sure.”

“He didn’t say much, only that this appears to be some kind of violent takeover, shots have been fired, some people have been wounded, and the mall has been evacuated.”

“Duh,” said Nikki, “who didn’t know that? Does he have a time frame?”

“He just said law enforcement from all over the state is gathering on site, the feds are pitching in, but the situation is still hazy. He has no casualty numbers, no time frame, no declarations of policy, nothing but your usual tight-lipped five-oh bullshit.”

Nikki knew 5–0 bullshit-she’d covered cops in Bristol, Virginia, for five years-but this guy Obobo was a bullshitter beyond any she’d encountered. He was handsome, smooth, learned the reporters’ names, knew which cameras and what lights were used, and how to apply his own makeup. Her joke: “For a cop, he knows more about makeup than Lady Gaga.”

But this was her big op too, she knew, just as it was the ambitious Obobo’s. She’d worked as a news producer in Cape Coral, Florida, for a bit, and now she was a producer for WUFF-TV, Saint Paul. Scoops here, on this day, could get her to a network, to Washington or New York.

She gazed down on the scene from about two thousand feet in the WUFFcopter, as it was called on the air, the WUSScopter by station personnel, because everybody was scared to fly in it. Usually it covered traffic, but today, with Cap’n Tom at the controls, it orbited over the mall, while in the rear, Larry Soames and Jim Diehl worked cameras to send the images back to the station and thence to the greater Minneapolis area. She hoped Cap’n Tom wasn’t drinking today and cursed the United States Marine Corps, for whom he had once flown, because it was that connection that got him the job with the station manager, another ex-marine, and she chose not to acknowledge the fact that it was her connection to the Corps, via her father, that had probably gotten her the job too. In fact, the station was a kind of Marine outpost in the chilly upper Midwest.

“Nikki, I’d like to go up a couple thousand. It’s tricky this low,” said Cap’n Tom. Her paranoia tried to convince her that there was a slur to his words, but she couldn’t be positive.

“Tom, let’s hold it a little longer. We need good pictures for the feed and up higher it’s just blurs and lights. People need to see the damned place.”

“Nik, I agree with Tom. If we crash into KPOP we’ll be the lead on someone else’s live feed. You’d hate that.” That was Larry, older of the two camera jocks. He knew how fragile and precious life was, even if the concept hadn’t yet dawned on Nikki.

But she would hate to lead anybody else’s feed: she was ferociously competitive, so much so that it scared many people. In the station, she was called “Mary Tyler Moore from Hell.”

She looked out the window and saw a fleet, a mob, a density of news choppers hovering about her same altitude over America, the country, and America, the Mall. It was a tricky thing; the birds had to avoid updrafts and couldn’t predict blasts of prairie wind, so they tried to keep a good three hundred feet apart, but nearly everyone wanted the money shot, which was the state police communications trailer a few hundred yards east of the mall, itself surrounded by police and other official vehicles, in the same shot with the south entrance of the mall, with its famous AtM sign, plastered four stories tall, that was based on a cartoony simplification of the mall’s Americanized shape.

“Just a few seconds more, guys,” she commanded. “Marty. Are you getting good pix?”

“The best, Nik, but don’t get yourself killed yet. If we need you to die for ratings, we’ll let you know.”

“Ha ha,” she said humorlessly. “Okay, let’s get out of here-”

“Something’s coming through,” said Cap’n Tom, and he plugged the emergency general aviation channel into the radio system.

“This is State Police HQ, I am asking all news helicopters to rise to and not wander below three thousand feet. We have incoming to the mall and I need you people out of the way so you don’t get hurt.”

“Hey, maybe something’s finally going to happen,” Jim, the younger, the more eager cameraman, said.

“We won’t be able to see jack from three,” said Nikki. “Larry, what lens are you using? Can you go to something zoomier?”

“You really lose a lot of resolution,” Larry said. “It’ll look like plastic toys in split-pea soup. But no one else will have much anyway.”

“Damn,” she said. “Okay, let’s do it.”

She felt the bottomless-pit sensation as Cap’n Tom elevated the craft against the pull of gravity and the structure beneath got smaller. From altitude, the mall stood in gigantic isolation, a wounded America whose sundered arteries spurted illuminated blood into the purple haze of the lowering sun.

It felt so strange, this proximity thing of the media. There they were, safe and toasty at 3,000 feet above the place, and inside, terrible dramas of life and death were being played out. Nikki and her cohort were there to witness and report, yet it was real life and real death at stake, nothing neat or melodramatic about it. And of course they knew that if they did well-what was the line from some old movie? “I think it’s safe to say you men are in for some promotions, medals, and positive recommendations in your personnel files!”

Then she saw it.

The cavalry? Not quite.

“Is that all?” Jim asked.

“Clearly, that’s not an assault,” said Nikki.

It was just the state police Bell JetRanger, rising from a parking lot and veering on the tilt toward the mall, all lights running hot and red and blinking.

“What are they going to do, scare the bad guys with the noise?” Larry said.

The bird, painted in the maroon-brown scheme of the Minnesota State Police, took a direct line to the mall and hovered six feet off its roof. Six young men in dark suits jumped out and began to deploy at the edges of the lake-shaped glass skylights that topped the atrium over the center of the mall.

“Six guys?” said Jim.

“Those aren’t guys,” said Nikki. “They’re snipers.”