Soft target

4:00 P.M.-5:04 P.M

D on’t have too much fun in there,” someone yelled merrily at Special Agent Jeffrey Neal.

He was one of the bright guys, tech-style, who worked in the Hoover Building, detecting mainly on a computer. He was an unbuttoner, a penetrator, a second-story man, a slippery little shadow in the night of cyberspace. It was said he’d get the department if he didn’t fuck up but that he would fuck up, as guys with his IQ could be counted on to get busted for falling in love with escorts or acquiring a drug habit or coming to believe Ancient Grecians were communicating with him through his Grecian Formula hair coloring brush, something self-destructive that for some reason always draws the hyperintelligent into its flame.

“Ha ha,” he commented from within the shroud.

The shroud was a canopy draped over his second computer, which was connected to the Internet. It was next to his unshrouded non-Internet-connected computer, and the two machines and two monitors crowded his small cubicle in the Computer Services Division of the Pennsylvania Avenue monstrosity. The shroud on the net beast kept inquiring eyes out and political correctness at its highest level, for one had to dip inside it and only in dark secrecy encounter the very special hell known as the universe of child pornography.

It was dues you had to pay, even if nobody wanted to.

But Neal had three months left to go on his six-month tour on the Child Porn Task Force, which meant he went home each night feeling like a used condom. His own sex life, mild as it was, had been destroyed. The things people did to kids, the sick worms in their heads that compelled them to conjure new variations in torment, abuse, piercing, and posture. You wanted to reach through the screen and crush skulls, watch the bastards-not just fat white guys in their forties, but amazingly handsome people of all races, ages, demo groups, normal-looking people, even distinguished-looking people-bleed out in the gutter, whimpering. But he soldiered on, knowing that at the end of “Neal, hey, wake up in there, hot one in from HQ. There’s some kind of mall takedown in Minneapolis and we have to get into the computer system.” It was his supervisor, Dr. Bob Benson, SA and PhD.

“He’s in the system?” Neal asked.

“Is he ever. He’s got a thousand hostages, he’s locked down the mall, no local agencies have been able to penetrate. Guess on whose plate it is now.”

“On it,” said Neal.

“Get upstairs ASAP for the briefing, then get down here and get your action into gear. This baby’s so hot it’s steaming. No more kiddie rape.”

Neal rose quickly, started to dash out. But he turned back, reached out, grabbed the shroud of his enforced disgust, and ripped it down. It was sort of like John Wayne throwing off the rifle scabbard as he saw the burning ranch before him in The Searchers. It meant he was going to war.

On the way over, Kemp had been on the phone with Washington the whole time. Subject: politics. Tone: unpleasant. Reality: discouraging.

“You have to play this very well, Will,” said Assistant Director Nick Memphis. “He will not want to give up command, and if you backstreet him, he will go to the media and they love him, you know that.”

“So how the hell do I play it?” said Kemp.

“I wouldn’t buck him,” said Nick. “Let him come to you. He has to.”

“He better come to me, goddammit,” said Kemp, the SAIC of the Minneapolis Office, a vet of several task forces including a long spell in Texas with ATF and Drug Enforcement that got him shot in the leg. “He doesn’t know a goddamn thing.”

It was true. Colonel Douglas Obobo really hadn’t done anything. His career was primarily a phenomenon of showing up, giving speeches, accepting awards, then moving up to the next level, as assisted by the superb public relations and career advisor David Renfro, who’d spent years working the trade, fronting at various times for the New York chief of police, the San Francisco police commissioner. Renfro had met Obobo when both worked for the Senate committee and had been with him ever since.

“Don’t say that to anybody,” counseled Nick. “Keep it to yourself. Publicly you love and respect him as does everyone in the Bureau. He’s the One, we all know that.”

“What a mess,” said Kemp, and both men knew what he was talking about. Rumors were rife in Washington that Obobo’s next big job would be as director of the FBI, the first black man, the youngest to ever get the job. So both Memphis and Kemp knew that whatever decisions they made today might come back to shadow them if they ended up working for the guy somewhere down the road.

“Assistant Director Memphis, if I think he’s endangering people, I have to act. I have to. That’s the bottom line, you know that.”

“Look, all this may be premature. The situation may not be as bad as we think or it may resolve itself peacefully without force, and everybody will walk away unscathed. If the worst comes, he has good people in the Minnesota State Police to advise him.”

“If he listens to them.”

Three Ford Ranger XLT modified trucks, black with black glass, pulled into the area under the on-off rhythm of red-blue and rolled to the state police trailer.

Kemp leaped out, in black Nomex SWAT gear, with an MP5 sub-machine gun on a sling across his chest and a Glock. 40 in a shoulder holster strapped across his body armor. Three of the other seven men were equally equipped, but the four snipers unlimbered large, awkward gun cases from the back of each big SUV.

“Special Agent Kemp, I’m surprised you don’t have more manpower,” said Obobo, in full uniform, with his shadow Renfro close at hand.

“Colonel Obobo, we’ve got all our people coming in. But it’s a tough thing, logistically. More will arrive shortly.”

“Of course,” said Obobo. “Now, let me brief you quickly. I’ve got Jefferson on assault planning, I’ve got Carmody handling logistics, I’ve got Neimeyer trying to coordinate with the medical people. I will be handling negotiations myself. But of course we need to get an investigation going and that’s where I see the Bureau making its contribution. I’ve decided to turn over the investigation-the witness interviews, the collation of evidence, the records and forensic database checks, all that-to the Bureau.”

“Sir, I’m sure you realize by federal statute the Bureau is obligated to take over any incidents involving terrorism.”

“Of course and absolutely,” said Obobo, smiling broadly, putting a big hand on Kemp’s shoulder. He was tall, towering over most, and had an especially beguiling style, even in disagreement, so it was hard to dislike him. “But this situation has not clarified, I think you’ll agree, and we’re not sure with whom we’re dealing. There is no operative intelligence suggesting foreign involvement, other than unsubstantiated reports of some Arabic-styled scarves. I’m sure you agree, that’s not enough to make a determination. This could be any group of nuts. As I’ve already organized my teams, I think it’s more sound for me to retain command. Of course if and when evidence develops that clarifies the situation, and if it’s within parameters, I’d be happy to make another disposition. But you understand, of course, and I know you agree, that turf is less important than teamwork. I know I can count on you to work with our initiatives and within our framework.”

“Yes sir. I’m hoping you’re open to advice from my people. We do have a lot of experience in these matters.”

“Of course, Special Agent. You’ll get your more detailed briefing from Major Carmody, and if you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them. But let me tell you up front, I am not about to launch an assault. Even with your additions, I don’t have the people, the expertise, or the equipment. We’ve asked the governor to get us some National Guard people to take over the perimeter and that will free up our SWAT personnel for possible deployment.”

Kemp suspected the chances of a SWAT deployment order from Obobo were somewhere between ze-fucking-ro and na-fucking-da; he kept his face that administrative blank that long government service teaches.

“You know the drill,” said Obobo. “Perimeter security, establish commo with the hostage takers, and begin to negotiate. Time is on our side. They’ll get tired, hungry, and scared. We’ll play them out over their demands as long as possible. If I might suggest, I’d like you to get on the horn to Defense and see if we could get some advice on chemical agents that might come into play.”

“I will, Colonel Obobo. I also brought in some very good snipers. I’d like to deploy them on the roof.”

“Of course, and we’ll combine forces with some state police marksmen. But I’m advised the roof skylights are heavy Plexiglas sealed in concrete. I don’t know how we get through them. Yes, we’ll send snipers, but no shooting without permission of course, and they have to understand their primary mission is observation.”

“Yes sir,” said Kemp.

Standing nearby was the rogue state police commander Mike Jefferson. His take was different, but he had fewer people to answer to, and if he lost his job, his status as a famous police gunfighter and SWAT warrior would get him rehired anywhere in America on a moment’s notice. He’d been thinking about Idaho, as a matter of fact.

But his warrior’s instincts were all lit up now. His idea: assault the gunmen, have a gunfight, take the casualties and the press bashing that would occur, and to hell with it. Kill all the bad guys, that was the basic idea. He was Custer, always moving to the sound of the guns. He had no patience for the Obobo school of psychobabble bullshit, for that faction of police psychology that required “negotiators” well-trained in making empathetic connection to the hostage takers, understanding their pain, and cajoling them to a peaceful resolution. He knew that Obobo, by long reputation not afraid of the sound of his own voice, would assume that responsibility for himself. But Jefferson knew how fragile these things could be and had seen it all go down. His idea was to end the bad guys’ pain by shooting them in the head.

But he saw now nobody wanted to listen to him or entertain his speculations. Jefferson thought these gunmen were here simply because they wanted to kill people. That’s what would make the biggest splash. If they killed five hundred people on the day after Thanksgiving to the greater glory of Allah and the Islamic Faith-no, no confirmation that Islamists were involved-in a mall called America that looked like America, then that would be their victory. Hell, they’d already killed Santa Claus! There was no evidence this wasn’t a suicide thing, and suicide-martyrdom, the goatfuckers called it-was a part of their mind-set.

The truth was, Jefferson really shouldn’t have been a cop. He should have been an old-time marshal with a six-gun on his belt, not a Sig Sauer. That was his mentality. He felt fully alive when he faced armed men, and his solution to all problems tended to angle the situation toward man-on-man violence. The team play aspect of law enforcement had never meant much to him, not since he was twenty-one and faced three armed robbers in a Saint Paul bank and shot it out face to face (to face to face) with them, took two. 38s in the left arm and hand but dropped all three, two fatally, with his own. 38, it being the day of the revolver. Nothing since had quite matched that moment of maximum life/maximum risk. He was a gunfighter, that was all, and love him or hate him, he’d never be another thing as long as he lived, which might not, given his personality and lack of fear of anything, be very long.

“Mike,” another major yelled, “we have detailed mall plans, just arrived from the construction firm that built the place. An engineer is here too.”

“Bring him along. Maybe he knows the back way in.”

Meanwhile, Obobo and Renfro conferred briefly in the corner.

“You handled that well,” said Renfro. “Decent, smooth, no macho bullshit.”

“That goddamned Jefferson, though. He has been a pain since the start. I can tell, he doesn’t buy me, never has, never will. The tough guys hate me, think I’m too fine a lady. I’d love to push him up to International Falls, in charge of taking the temperature.”

“You were fine with him, Colonel. Yes, he’s a pain, all the SWAT people are. Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out. But you handled him. Here’s my advice: Keep him busy. Keep him running around, making reports, checking this way and that. You don’t want him here at Command, sowing doubts, collecting allies. Make him your little errand boy and bury him in praise. That’s a weapon he can’t overcome.”

Saalim had his eye on the Somali girl in the crowd. “Fuck you,” she had said in English to him, the two words he knew. Ha ha. She was spirited. She was proud. She had bright eyes and fine, straight white teeth and a rich crop of hair. She would make a good wife. He wondered how many goats her father would charge. Probably many.

Sitting there in the mall, his baby Kalashnikov across his lap, his pistol dangling from his holster, the shemagh tight around his face, he had a brief fantasy that reflected on a childhood he never had. He was the son of the tribal chief in the high desert. He was a fierce warrior, a killer of men and lions. He was favored by Allah, and the mullahs agreed he was destined for greatness. He would have many wives and many concubines and many goats. He would lead his people in many battles and that one, that proud African girl, she would be his.

Actually, he had been born in a slum of Mogadishu; his mother was a whore. He lived the life of an unclean, wild pig for some years, scrapping and fighting for survival. Finally, when he was big enough to hold a Kalashnikov, General Hassan Dahir Aweys’s Hizbul Islam militia took him in. That was his family, boy soldiers and brutal leaders, and enemies to be slain in the name of Allah.

“Fuck you,” she said! What spirit, what “Saalim, I can tell by the glaze in your eyes you are dreaming,” said Asad, next to him. “If the imam catches you with a faraway look on your face, he’ll cane you and make you sleep with the goats.”

“There are no goats here,” said Saalim. “This is America. They keep the goats outside. No goats, no goatshit in a fine American place.”

“That is why we came so far. To destroy it and spread the will of Allah-”

“And to bring the goats inside, where they belong!”

Both boys laughed. They were lounging on a park bench on the southeast side of the Silli-Land Park, near the ticket office for the Ride-a-Log flume shoot, a twisty tube of water that enabled Americans the thrill of a downward thunder of a splashing ride, now vacant and unattended. From where they were, they were spared the disagreeable sight of Dead Man in Red upon His Throne. But they did see, everywhere, desultory Americans sitting crunched together, supposedly with their hands on their heads, though this imposed discipline had soon disappeared.

They were teenaged boys: their own discipline was not superb. They were supposed to keep iron eyes on their captives, to make certain little cliques didn’t form and plot some kind of revolution. But the Americans seemed to have no spirit for that kind of work and mostly just sat there, in a kind of stupor that both Saalim and Asad had seen among the struggling citizens of Wabra. Thus, Saalim and Asad found themselves occupied with chitchat, petty teasing, attraction to various girls, shows of adolescent bravado, and hunger for fast food, which was abundant in the now largely empty mall. That sometime soon soldiers or police officers would surely crash the place, guns firing, and probably kill them was of utterly no concern. Given the toughness of their lives, death held little sting.

But suddenly a crackle came over the earphones they wore under their shemaghs. It was the imam.

“You, Asad, that is your name, correct?”

“Yes, Imam,” said Asad, jumping alert.

“You remember what we discussed, you and I?”

It was true. He had a special mission.

“I do, Imam,” he said into the throat mike.

“Well, it’s time. You can find this place?”

He remembered. Second floor, NW Colorado, C-2-145. That was the destination. The imam had shown him on the bright-colored brochures with maps that guided them through the mall.

“I can, Imam,” he said.

“Good,” said the imam. “It’s time to go and get the babies.”

Humbly, Mr. and Mrs. Girardi approached the police officer at the farthest extreme from the mall. In fact, they could see it almost a mile away in the twilight, looking like a big tub upside down, surrounded by police cars and fire engines.

“Folks,” said the cop, “sorry, I can’t let you in any closer.”

“Sir,” said Mr. Girardi, “we’re looking for our son. He’s fourteen.”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever let him go to the mall alone,” said Mrs. Girardi. “I usually take him or he goes with friends. But he wanted to do his Christmas shopping.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“We haven’t heard from him. Should we call him?”

“He hasn’t called you?”

“We haven’t heard anything. We just know what’s on the TV.”

“No I wouldn’t advise that,” said the officer. “He may be hiding or something, or hurt or-well, you just don’t know what his circumstance is and it’s probably better to wait until he reaches out to you.”

“Is there any information available?”

“No, sir. We’re trying to get a command structure set up and get organized. It’s a terrible problem and nobody is clear on what to do. To be honest, it’ll be several hours before we really get what’s going on, and even longer before we have information. I’m sure your son is okay. He’s young, he’s strong, he’s quick.”

“He’s not really. He has asthma. He’s very thin and frail.”

“Well,” said the cop, stuck for an answer. “Maybe the best thing for you to do is find the Red Cross tent. I think they’re set up on the western side. You can rest there and you’ll get information there sooner.”

“I never should have let him come to the mall by himself,” said Mrs. Girardi, as her husband led her away.

Lavelva Oates shushed the redheaded one. He was a handful. Maybe it was because he was a redhead, he seemed to want a lot of attention and had tendencies toward disruption. He kept picking on a little Asian girl who would do nothing but sit and weep when he addressed her. Smack him hard on his burry little pipsqueak head? That’s what Lavelva wanted to do, but she knew it was a mistake. Jobs were hard enough to come by these days and no one went around hitting damn babies.

“Okay, boys and girls, now let’s play a new game,” she said brightly. “In this game, I want you all to be playing Hide from the monster. When I say go, you go hide. We’ll pretend the bad monsters are here. But they won’t see you, and you’ll be all right. We can hide from the monsters together.”

“That’s a scary game,” said Robert. She knew he was named Robert because he had a big name tag pinned on: ROBERT 3–4. But it was past four o’clock and Robert’s mom hadn’t shown up. Maybe she was dead.

“I want to go home. Where’s my mom?” asked Robert.

“I’m sure she’s on her way,” Lavelva said.

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

“Peepee or the other?” asked Lavelva.

“Both,” said the child.

“All right,” said Lavelva. “Anybody else?”

A few hands came up.

“I’m going to take you back there”-the lavatory was in the rear of the room-“but we have to go on tippy-toes.”

“I don’t like tippy-toes,” said Larry. “It’s for babies.”

Lavelva was the day care service coordinator, afternoon shift, second floor. She had seventeen unruly kids, three through eight, under her charge. This was her first day! Goddamn!

She wasn’t sure what was going on. She was trapped in the day care center, a large room full of beat-up toys and pissed-on dolls, on the second floor. About an hour ago, she’d heard the shooting-loud sharp cracks, echoing eerily along the walls, the nooks and crannies of the mall, very frightening-and herded her kids to the back of the room and told them to them lie down. She went to the doorway and watched as the crowded corridor outside seemed to drain itself in a couple of minutes. People ran crazily, screaming, “They’re shooting, they’re shooting, they have machine guns.” She knew there was no way she could get seventeen kids through that mob and that the kids would be knocked down, separated, even hurt. Where was her supervisor? Mrs. Watney, head of mall day care, didn’t answer her calls or her texts. Maybe she’d raced out the door too. She tried her mom; couldn’t get through. She tried her brother Ralphie installing carpets, even though he’d told her never to call while he was on the job. It didn’t matter; couldn’t get through. She tried 911. No response. She was alone.

Lavelva knew two things immediately: the first was that she’d be much better holding the children here until someone in authority-a cop, a fireman, someone-came with instructions, and second that if there were men with guns around, she had to have a weapon. In her universe, inner-city Minneapolis, Twenty-Eighth and Washington, it was a tough life and all the young men carried. She’d seen them lying on the streets, bled out, eyes blank. That was the world. There was no other. All the newspapers were always jabbering about the tragedy of it, blah blah and blah, but words like tragedy held little meaning for Lavelva; hers was a more practical turn of mind, and it had to do with dealing with what was instead of dreaming about what could be.

She herded the kids back to the rear of the room and sent Linda in to do peepee and the other one. Suzanne, Mindy, Jessica, and Marsha went too. In fact all the girls went.

“Everybody gets a turn. No shoving. Stand in line. Make Miss Lavelva proud,” she instructed, knowing these passive little white girls would do exactly that. She couldn’t go with them, of course; policy was that no childcare coordinator could be alone in a bathroom with a child of either sex. But perhaps, on a day such as today, the rules had gone out the window. Still, it was better to obey policy, no matter what was happening outside. Here in the second-floor Mall Service Childcare Center, policies would be obeyed.

Well, all but one.

She said to the boys, “You all line up against the wall. We’re still going to play Hide from the monster. You lie down, you be quiet. You don’t let no monster spot you. This is going to be a long game, so best get used to it. I don’t want crying or whining. Y’all have to be brave little boys today, you hear?”

They nodded. The redheaded one, CHARLES 3–5, said, “What’s brave?”

“Like a big old football player. Ain’t scared of nothing.”

“I am scared,” said Charles. “It’s different now.”

“Yes it is,” said Lavelva. “It is very different. But Charles, you are so feisty I want you to be the leader, okay? You be the bravest.”

“Yes, Miss Lavelva,” said Charles.

Lavelva turned, went to her desk, or rather the desk, as it was generic to the center, owned by none of the coordinators. She saw nothing that could be altered to be dangerous, no letter openers, no files, no spikes for spearing paper notices, nothing. Not even a ruler. Obviously, with nimble-fingered little brutes around, thought had been exercised on keeping the space free of dangerous implements.

Then she saw the daily schedule notebook, a three-ring binder volume. She opened it, realized that a steel or at least metal slat ran up its spine. She pulled apart the three rings, and dumped the papers out, then used her strength to rip the slat from the spine of the book. It tore messily, taking some cardboard binding with it, but it was eleven inches of sharp steel, albeit flawed by three rings, which she snapped shut. She slipped it into her jeans, in the small of her back. Then she turned back to the boys.

CHARLES 3–5 was standing and pointing.

“I see a monster,” he said.

She turned, and through the glass block wall that divided the center from the pedestrian corridor, she saw the shadow of a gunman.

There were six of them, but the manager, Mrs. Renfels, had broken down: all women, all terrified, except for Molly, who was more concerned for her mother and her sister Sally than she was for herself. Even tough little Rose, the assistant manager, had quieted down as apprehension gripped her.

“You won’t find out soon,” Ray told Molly. “You have to worry about Molly first. You have to commit yourself to staying put, locking down, waiting them out. That is how you win.” There was no privacy, as all of them were jammed in the rear storeroom, under racks of bustiers and negligees and all the scanties of the male imagination that now seemed quite alien to their world.

“I have to know,” she said, trying to quell the anxiety. Sally was impossibly cute at fifteen, with smart, vivid eyes, a thin girl’s body, and grace just easing into a woman’s radiance, and Mom was still feisty even if she had never quite adjusted to American ways. It sickened Molly that the two most vulnerable members of her family were in the greatest danger. The last she’d spoken to them on her cell, they had in fact been on the first floor where the roundup had taken place. But if they’d been luckily in the outer ring, they might have made it to an exit. She wanted to call, but she was terrified that if they were in the mob of hostages Ray had described, the ringing cell might have attracted attention.

“I wish they’d turn that goddamn music off,” Milt’s wife said. “If I hear ‘Jingle Bells’ one more time I will puke.”

“Not on me, please,” said the blonde, the one who clearly considered herself a hot number.

“Why is this happening?” Mrs. Renfels asked, her first words since the crisis had begun.

“It’s because we should have used the atom bomb on them after nine-eleven,” said the hot blonde, obviously the sort used to issuing opinions and by her beauty banishing responses. “If we’d have burned them all, this wouldn’t be going on.”

“You can’t kill a billion people because, what, thirteen men are crazy assholes,” responded Milt’s wife.

“Oh yes you can. You push a button and they are in flames.”

“That is the craziest-”

“All right, all right,” said Ray. “I am not trying to be a boss or take over or anything, but it’s better if you don’t get in squabbles until this thing is over. You may have to work together and you have to see the person beside you as a family member. You can fight all you want when you’re advising on the set of the TV movie or something.”

“He’s right,” said Rose. “Just keep a cork in it, it’s better for all of us.”

“It’s easy for you to say,” said Mrs. Renfels. “You’re young, you’re in this for yourself. I have three kids. If something happens to me-oh, why is this happening?”

“Ma’am,” said Ray, “I don’t mean to tell you how to think, but I am a former marine and I have been in some fights. If you’ll allow me, I would advise you never to use the W-word today. The W-word is why. Sometimes there is no why, and if you get hung up on why, you lose your effectiveness. I’ve seen it happen. The men who die are the men who can’t believe they’re in a fight and can’t believe that someone is trying to kill them. It seems so unfair to them and they’re so busy feeling sorry for themselves, they don’t seek cover, they don’t return fire, they don’t scan the horizon, they forget how to use their expensive equipment. The men who live get it right away; they understand they’re in a different world and they have to deal with exactly what is before them with maximum concentration.”

“That’s very good advice,” said Rose.

“Maybe we should surrender,” said the blonde.

“No ma’am,” said Ray. “You should instead consider how lucky you are. Some people are dead, some people, maybe a thousand, are under the gun. You are, for the time being, safe. No one knows you’re here and no one, that I can tell, is looking for you. Just stay put and trust in God and the public safety people who are, I guarantee you, working very hard right this second to set us free.”

“Great job,” said Obobo. “Major Jefferson, this is a fabulous plan. I’m very impressed.”

Jefferson amplified: “We don’t blow all doors simultaneously and move down the corridors into the crowd, unable to engage until we reach the amusement park. That’s a no go, because it gives them however long it takes our people to advance down the corridors to open fire on hostages. One guy at each corridor shooting at SWAT could hold up the advance for six or eight minutes. Way too much time.”

“Go on, Major.”

“So we take the six best shooters with gunfight experience, all armed with red dot MP5s on semiauto. And we’ve got these guys. Some of our people are good, some of the FBI guys are really good, and Phil Mason of Edina SWAT is the Area Seven three-gun champion. I’ve shot against him and he is damned good and damned cool. So we six, we go underground through a shaft that runs from parking lot seven to the mall central. That puts us right underneath Area Z. I have a guy from Bloomington SWAT who was an army engineer in the sandbox. We rig six detonations to blow through the floor. At a given moment, we turn off the power, the place goes dark. It’ll be a few seconds before the emergency gen kicks in. But the gunmen immediately see the holes and assume men will come from them. No, uh-uh, that’s the diversion. We’ve quietly come up through the ducts under the Area Z concessionaire stand here”-he pointed to it on the chart-“and have only floor boarding and linoleum at a certain locality that the engineer has specified. Once the gunmen commit to the assault from the ground, we hit ’em. They will have moved to cover the openings we’ve just blown. Head shots, targets marked, we can take ’em down fast, before the crowd has a chance to panic. But Colonel, we have to move now. It’ll take time to get men through the ducts into the space under Area Z, it’ll take time to locate and plant the explosives, and it’ll take time to-”

“Again, I can’t tell you how impressed I am,” Colonel Obobo said, explaining his reasons. “It’s thorough, it’s creative, it takes all the variables into consideration. I’m very pleased to take it under advisement.” He touched the intense major on the shoulder as if to confer a blessing. Then he turned away, leaving an incredulous look on the major’s face and the awareness that he’d just gotten another no that sounded even more like a yes.

“They’re shooting inside the mall,” one of the radio techs announced. “FBI snipers say they’re shooting inside the mall.”

McElroy was first off the chopper, first into position. From the air, the lake shape of the glass was apparent and he had raced to what must have been the tip of Lake Michigan, right at Chicago, but now that he was here, it was simply Lake Glass, or Lake Plastic, an immensity of transparent, thick plastic that would somehow have to be penetrated. But first he had to equip.

He unzipped the rifle bag and laid out a Remington 700 with a Leupold 10? tactical scope, the whole thing anodized forest green. Carefully he removed a long green tube, which a Velcro strap had secured inside the bag, and brought it close to his eyes for an examination. It was a Gemtech suppressor, about eight inches long and an inch and a half in diameter, and under the tubing it consisted mainly of baffles and chambers and holes, the point of which was to elongate the time of escape for the rapidly expanding gases of a shot so that when they reached the atmosphere, they were slowed down and exited with a kind of snap instead of a terrible, earsplitting crack. With the suppressor screwed carefully on the threaded muzzle, he inserted the bolt into the receiver, reached into an ammo compartment to remove a box of Federal 175-grain match cartridges in. 308, and slid five into the rifle’s magazine, closing the bolt on and chambering the fifth. He flicked the safety on, not that he believed in safeties, looped the sling around his shoulder, and stood to examine the scene.

What lay before him was a wall about five feet tall that formed the well of the vast skylight that was Lake Michigan. It was of course not a single sheet of Plexiglas but divided into cells about 20 by 20 feet. Peering over the edge of this southernmost cell, he was rewarded with a vision from five stories up of a crowd of disconsolate Christmas shoppers jammed into the walkways and open areas of a Technicolor amusement park and seen from ninety degrees at an altitude of about 125 feet through heavy plastic; details were hard to pick out. In time he recognized what had to be a gunman, mainly by the black object carried under one arm and the black-green rag on his head. Details emerged: pistol, knife, throat mike. With access, it would have been an easy shot, and he prayed to the sniper god that he would get a chance to take it.

He radio-checked.

“Sniper Five, set up, in position,” speaking to a state police sergeant in the headquarters van.

“I have you, Five. Sitrep, please.”

“I have a good angle on the scene, almost straight down. I’m at site Chicago at the bottom of Michigan and therefore have a good view of the balconies on the opposite, that is, the eastward side. No activity there. I do not have a shot, repeat, do not have a shot. The glass or plastic or whatever it is is very thick, I don’t think I could get through it if I had a fucking hammer.”

“Be advised, no shooting, that is our call. You stay on position and call in periodically with intelligence and we will take that under advisement.”

“May I talk with FBI supervisor?”

“Negative, Five, he is in conference with incident commander and others. The governor is expected momentarily.”

“Request conference with him when available, over.”

“Noted, will try and make that happen, Five, but no promises, out.”

So that was it. All dressed up and no one to shoot. Or rather, no way to shoot, although, given the angle, the bad boys would literally represent the idealized fish in a barrel.

Dear Sniper God, your humble servant Dave here, please let me take one of these motherfuckers before the day is done. But he also knew the ways of the sniper god, and the sniper god would only help those who help themselves.

McElroy, thirty-two and a Bureau lifer who loved the SWAT life and had been on a hundred raids and on the periphery of two or three gunfights but had yet to fire a shot in anger, looked around him. Beyond, of course, was Minnesota, turning dark and pierced with an ever-increasing array of lights as the sun was setting. Far off he could see highways streaming with cars, the illumination of suburbs and strip malls, just regular American stuff. Then there was the roof itself, the flat, black-asphalt stage upon which this drama was playing out. The flatness was vast, way out of human scale, easily bigger than an aircraft carrier’s deck or a football stadium’s parking area, reaching to infinity. About a mile away, or so it seemed, was a rack of industrial-looking apparatuses, presumably part of the cooling and heating system. There were at least six little sheds-they looked comically like the ice-fishing hutches these Minnesotans built on their frozen lakes in winter-that presumably held doors that opened onto stairways into the interior. He guessed they were all locked, but it occurred to him that a good B-and-E man could probably get through, and operators could be fed into play that way. But surely they would know that at Command.

Then, more immediately, these goddamned lake-shaped skylights, here at the center of the vastness. Regularly spaced around the perimeter of Michigan, he saw a fellow such as himself, all Tommy-Tacticaled up in Nomex jumpsuit with Glock. 40 in shoulder holster, with a big bad rifle, a black watch cap or Kevlar helmet, and a posture of utter helplessness with reference to the thick wall of impenetrable glass between himself and his potential targets.

He thought, I will get through this fucking glass. I will, I will, I will.

But how? This wasn’t one of those absurd movies where the guy reaches into his kit and just happens to have exactly the right tool, a computer-driven microdiamond buzz saw that was also miniaturized and could cut through the stuff like butter and makes a hell of an old-fashioned. No, darn, he’d left that at home. Nor did he have Gatorade and cough medicine that could be instantly combined into sulfuric acid and melt the glass. He didn’t have a goddamned thing.

He walked the edge of the skylight, finding it uniform in its precision. Why had the developers built it so sturdily? Couldn’t they have cut corners, couldn’t a worker have faked the effort, couldn’t there be some way the thing wasn’t up to spec and a hole could be bored through the joinery of glass and building, giving him a shooting lane? No, no such luck, it was all solid and tight to the finger. Okay, so His eye caught movement below.

What was Looking down from God’s-eye view, he could tell that two of the gunmen had kicked their way into the center of the crowd, covered by other gunmen. They cleared a space. Then they grabbed five people, apparently two women, two men, and a teenager, and dragged them to the center of the opening and made them kneel.

It looked like an execution.

Please, Sniper God, give me a shot!

But he had no shot. He was sealed off by thick glass.

One of the gunmen walked behind the kneeling five and with his rifle shot each in the back of the head. McElroy felt the vibration of the gunshot meeting the glass, giving it a little buzz. He wished he could look away but he could not.

Executed, each victim fell forward without grace and hit the floor face-first and hard. They lay sprawled, loose as ragdolls. In a bit of time one, then another, and finally all began to spew a blackish puddle from the head, and these multiple lakes of plasma reached out, found and followed fissures on the floor, and joined in a large wet-land of blood, though leaving the odd island of high spot.

“Control, this is Five, directly below me the gunmen just executed five hostages, shot ’em dead through the head.”

“I have that,” said the radio.

“Jesus Christ, let us blow this goddamn glass and take these pricks down. They don’t know we’re here; if we get through the glass we can do them all in under thirty seconds.”

“Negative, negative, Five, you are advised to do nothing but stand and observe. If we go tactical, you will be notified and assigned targets.”

“Goddammit, they are killing people and-”

“Five, this is Command, commo space is at a premium and we don’t want you using it up on a rant. Tactical discipline.”

“Sir, please put Special Agent Kemp on-”

“Any information must be channeled through Command,” said the frosted voice.