Soft target

5:04 P.M.-5:26 P.M

This is very disturbing,” said Colonel Obobo.

He stood unbelieving in the center of the state police Incident Command van, surrounded by several majors and the FBI executive, Kemp, as they dealt with the news from the snipers that five people had just been executed. Mr. Renfro stood immediately to the left of the colonel, saying nothing.

“Could it be a phony?” someone asked. “Maybe those are actors or something, or his own volunteers previously put in place, and-”

“They’re real,” said Mike Jefferson, the aggressive SWAT commander. “And he is talking to us-in blood.”

“I just-”

“Look at the time, Colonel Obobo. It’s five o’clock. He killed five people at five o’clock. He’ll kill six people at six o’clock, seven at seven o’clock, and on through the night. There aren’t any demands, except that we get a lot of body bags. This is just a straight murder job. We have to get our assault units in position, issue orders, distribute the proper breaching equipment, and get ready to jump.”

“He will talk to us,” said the colonel. “This is just his way of getting our attention.”

“He had our attention, for God’s sake!” shouted Jefferson. “For Christ’s fucking sake, men with AKs shooting everything that moves, he has our fucking attention.”

“No,” said Obobo, ever courteous, ever unflappably astute and collected. “He has to demonstrate that he is capable of ordering executions. That is his baseline. All our negotiations will now have to take that into consideration. He’s laying down the rules, that’s what he’s doing. He will talk to us, before six. Well before six. And he knows that to assault, we have a massive job of logistics, planning, equipping, moving, and coordinating, and he’s putting something before us to slow us down, baffle us, make us inefficient at that very tough job.”

“Ah,” said Jefferson in immense frustration. “Colonel, let me begin to put people in play under the mall. We’ve got to be able to breach that floor, it’s the only way, and we have to have them there now in order to do it anytime in the future. We can’t just blow the doors and charge into the place.”

“Can we chopper people to the roof? Aren’t there doorways, they could come down from above somehow?” someone asked.

“No,” said Kemp, “at least not as a main strike. It would take a dozen choppers to get men in force. He’d know. If they blew the doors, it would take ten minutes for them to work their way down. If they rappelled, they’d be sitting ducks for the riflemen. You’d just get a lot of highly trained men killed for nothing, and maybe fifty or sixty hostages.”

Obobo tuned it all out. He made eye contact with Mr. Renfro and the two exchanged listen-to-these-idiots-talk expressions. The advisor then nodded, communicating his sublime confidence in Colonel Obobo’s abilities. He knew that if the colonel could just talk to these people and make them see the hopelessness of their position, the inevitability of what lay ahead, he could make this thing go away. He had that power. He was a convincer, an inspirer.

“Gentlemen, for now I’d like you to hold your positions,” Obobo finally said. “Commo, continue to monitor the channels to see if he’s trying to talk to us. We have to know his demands. When we learn his demands-”

“His demands are that a lot of people die; those are his demands,” said Jefferson. “This is a straight murder raid, like Mumbai or the World Trade Center. He just wants a lot of people off the earth and his own glory and ascension to heaven guaranteed. He thinks when this is over, he’s going to get himself fucked royally by seventy-two-”

“Major Jefferson,” said Obobo, showing a whisper of irritation, “I think you’ve made your point. In the meantime, I want a written assault plan from you, a list of assets you currently have and those that you will need before I can authorize any kind of a strike. I hope to hell I never have to issue that order. Nichols, get on the phone to the Justice Department and see how our request for Army engineers, Delta, and SEAL people is playing at Defense. Special Agent Kemp, I want an update on your investigative efforts in Minneapolis as well as our requests to BATF for support in the firearms investigation.”

“Sir,” said Jefferson, “this isn’t an investigation, it’s a war.”

“Major Jefferson, you’ve made your point fifty times over. Please follow my orders or be relieved of duty. I can’t fight him and you.”

“Yes sir.”

“Sir,” someone said, “do we release to media?”

“No,” said Mr. Renfro, who rarely addressed tactical or operational issues but this time couldn’t help himself. “If word gets out he’s shooting hostages, it’ll add pressure to an already pressurized decision.”

“Good point,” said the colonel. “Do you concur, Special Agent Kemp?”

Kemp, thanking God he had no dog in this fight, said, “Yes, Colonel.”

“Sir,” someone said, “the governor is here.”

“Oh fuck,” said somebody.

It happened that Nikki was watching a particular sniper whom she had nicknamed Chicago with her binoculars from three thousand feet up at a particular moment as the WUSScopter hovered at that height. Though from there he was a tiny, almost blurred figure and the light was quickly diminishing, she saw him suddenly bolt upward, then lean forward, tense radically as if he were willing himself somehow to penetrate the glass of the skylight and fly down into the atrium; instantly, his finger flew to the radio unit at his belt-she knew where to look because she’d covered cops in Bristol-and presumably switched it on. He began jabbering into the throat mike. She zapped around the margins of the lake of Plexiglas until she’d located all five snipers and noted that all five were on their mikes.

“Something just happened,” she said.

“How can you tell?” asked Jim, the cameraman.

“I saw the snipers jerk up, and now all are reporting in.”

She switched to Marty back at the station.

“Is Command saying anything?”

“No, nothing. We’ve had reports the governor is incoming. We might want to put you on the ground and get over there in case he has a presser.”

“Marty, no presser means anything tonight. They’ll use the press to put out reassuring bullshit, knowing that whoever’s doing this is monitoring. Pressers are a waste of time and it pisses me off that His Eminence puts his big fat mug on camera tonight.”

“Settle down, Mary Richards, it was only a suggestion.”

“Well, something’s happened here and-”

She had an idea. Two weeks ago she’d been to the mall and had bought a pocketbook from a shop called Purses, Bags and Whatnot, one of those cutesy places that smelled of potpourri but had very nice leather bags. She pulled out that very same pocketbook now and began to rifle through it, because she remembered that’s where she’d stuffed the bill of sale. Yes, indeed, there it was, amid a scruffy collection of receipts for $100 from Bank of America, $35.47 for gas at Sheetz, and $22.75 from Safeway.

Remembering the very pleasant young woman who had run the transaction for her, she looked at the bottom of the bill of sale and saw a handwritten note, “Thanks so much, Amanda Birkowsky.”

“Marty,” she said, “real quick, run the name Birkowsky through AnyWho. com and see what you come up with.”

“Nikki-”

“Just do it, Marty. I don’t have time to explain. It’s a rare enough name so there probably aren’t too many of them.”

There were, as it turned out, only three in the three Minneapolis-Saint Paul area codes. She dialed the first, got no answer, and then hit on the second.

“Yes,” she said. “This is WUFF-TV. May I speak with Amanda, please.”

A woman said, brokenly, “Amanda is in the mall.”

“I am so sorry, Mrs. Birkowsky,” Nikki said, guessing from the voice that it was a mom, not a sister.

“She’s all right,” said Mrs. Birkowsky. “For now. She’s upstairs in the-who did you say you were?”

Nikki explained the connection.

“What is it you want?”

“I’m trying to reach Amanda. She’s called you? I guess she has a cell, she called you to tell you she’s all right, she’s in no danger, or no immediate danger.”

“I can’t give you her number.”

“I understand. But… can you call her, give her my number, and if she decides, she can call me? I just think people have a right to know what’s going on. It’s my job. There’s next to no information available and that’s never a good thing.”

Amanda called Nikki three minutes later. She and two customers and two other staff were hiding in the rear room of Purses, Bags and Whatnot on the first floor of the mall, in the dark. They felt themselves all right for the time being as no one had begun to search the stores for hiding shoppers.

“Did anything happen at five?” Nikki asked. “We heard five shots. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Not a machine gun, not like that, but five individual shots. Then we heard the crowd-it makes noise, like an animal, all those people-we heard what I would call some kind of uproar, I don’t know, then barking from the voices of the guards, I guess. It was very unclear but something bad must have happened.”

“Five shots?” said Nikki. “Yes, exactly. I could try and sneak out there and-”

“No, no, no, no, you just stay where you are.”

“Are they going to come get us soon? The police.”

“There are police all over the place, but in truth, I don’t see any signs of an attack or an entry or anything.”

“This is so awful.”

“Listen, if something happens and you want to, and it seems safe, can you call me back? And if I think the cops are going to go, I’ll give you a heads-up through your mom, okay, and you can get low to the floor behind cover. I’ll never call you, because I won’t know what situation you’ll be in. Is that fair?”

“Thank you,” said Amanda.

“Sweetie, don’t thank me. You’re the brave one here.”

One minute later, Nikki was on the air with the news that five shots had been fired within the atrium and that possibly the gunmen had begun to shoot hostages.

“They just shot five people,” Ray said.

“You don’t know that,” Molly said.

“Yes, I do,” said Ray.

It seemed that the sound of the shots still echoed through the weird acoustics of the gigantic space. Everyone in the Frederick’s had stiffened when the sounds reached them, and in the several minutes since, nobody had said a thing until Ray broke the silence.

“Maybe some kid raised his rifle and pulled the trigger five times because he thought it was a cool thing to do,” Molly said.

“No,” said Ray. “That would have been faster shooting, onetwothreefourfive. This was deliberate fire. One shot, move to the next, shoot, move to the next. He just shot five people.”

Nobody said a thing. Ray, Molly, Rose the clerk, the broken-down manager of the store, and the three customers just lay there in the dark, in the storeroom.

“You could go check, like last time,” Rose finally said.

Ray didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “No. No, if I go out there, I’m not coming back. Somebody’s got to do something and I’m probably the only man with training who’s close enough to the situation to act and the police have no idea of how to get in here.”

“Ray-” said Molly, but Rose cut her off.

“If you go, what do we do? Do we just lie here? Six women, and there’s guys out there with machine guns? What do we do? What happens to us?”

“I think you’re okay,” said Ray. “You don’t need help. The people down there do.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” said Rose. “There’s a bunch of them, with army weapons. What can one guy do? You’ll just get yourself killed. You don’t even have a gun, much less a machine gun.”

Molly said, “She’s right. If they see you, they’ll kill you. That’s all. After all you’ve done, some punk kills you in the Payless shoe store or the Best Buy and you haven’t helped a thing and in six hours the hostage takers make a deal with the cops and fly to Cuba with a million dollars and what has your death accomplished?”

“If I hide in the ladies’ underwear store, what has my life accomplished?” Ray said. “You’ll be all right. As I said, you stay here, you commit psychologically to the long term, you don’t expect help now or in an hour or a day or a week, and you will survive.”

“He thinks he’s John Wayne,” said Molly, bitterly. “John Wayne was a fantasy. He never existed. He’s a dream, a phantom, a ghost.”

“He existed,” said Ray, “and his name was Bob Lee Swagger. He’s my father.”

“You don’t even have a gun,” said Rose.

“Then I will have to get a gun,” said Ray.

“Okay,” said Lavelva quietly. “Now, boys and girls, let’s go back to the bathroom, all right? The name of this game is Let’s hide in the bathroom.”

“Miss Lavelva,” said DAVID 3–4, “I’m scared.”

“David, don’t you be scared now. No one’s going to hurt you, you trust Miss Lavelva on this, sweetie, okay? Now, kids, come on now, let’s put on our quiet shoes and our quiet voices and go back to the bathroom and it will be all right.”

Somehow-she could feel their fear in the drop-off of energy, the quiet that overtook them, the lassitude that seemed to creep through their small bones-she got them back and into the room.

“Larry,” she said to the eldest, “you be in charge here, you hear? You stay till Miss Lavelva comes back. Y’all stay quiet now and listen to Larry.”

“Miss Lavelva, I’m scared too,” said SHERRY 4–6.

“It’s okay, Sherry,” said Miss Lavelva. “And when this is over, Miss Lavelva goin’ take you to get something nice to eat, maybe french fries or frosties, whatever you want, a nice treat, from Miss Lavelva.”

That seemed to quiet them down.

Lavelva slipped out. She was alone in the bigger room. She looked at the translucent glass blocks that marked off the day care center and saw nothing. Maybe he’d missed her. Maybe he was gone.

Asad could not read the English in the mall directory pamphlet, but he got the representation of the map well enough, and the imam had drawn a circle around the location of the day care center. Yes, this was the Colorado corridor, yes, COLORADO 2-145, the numbers were right. It seemed that helpfully each store had an address that indexed it to the map, and even though he had little English, he recognized the address NE C-2-145. He divined practically that it meant Colorado corridor, second floor, 145 retail designation, and since evens were on the left and odds on the right, it had to be on his left. Even though he assumed that he had free range, he was careful. He was aware that many of the stores still hid customers. What if some of them came rushing out and jumped him? Then he laughed. No Americans would do that. They were a soft and decadent people, and here, in this palace of luxury and greed, their reflexes and warrior minds, if they even had them, would be shoved way down by shock and fear. They would lie in the dark weeping, praying to their absurd man on the cross, saying to him pleasepleasepleaseplease.

He missed it. He looked at a store and saw an address that read COLORADO 2-157. He turned back, began to edge his way down the corridor. It was quiet and dark, strewn with abandoned bags, tipped carriages, shoes, hats, jackets, all signs of the intensity of the panic. A few windows had been broken but no looting appeared to have taken place.

Slowly he tracked the stores, stopping every once in a while to check for signs of threat. He saw none. And then he came to it. For about thirty feet, the gaudy glass windows of the storefronts yielded to glass brick, and a double door stood in the center. Above, a sign must have announced the purpose of the location, though he could not read it. He slid to the glass doors and peered in, and soon his eyes made out toys on the floor, children’s furniture tilted sideways, that sort of thing. This had to be where the babies were. But it was quiet. Maybe they had moved the babies, but he didn’t see how. Maybe they were inside, in hiding.

He slipped in, his eyes in full search mode, scanning what lay before him in semidarkness, and everywhere he looked, he swept with the muzzle of the baby Kalashnikov, his finger on the trigger, a full orange magazine clicked solidly in place.

Then he saw her.

She was dark, like him. She stood, facing him, twenty-five feet away. Her face was a stone mask. He read her bones and saw that she was not Somali, thin-nosed and — lipped, high-foreheaded, like him, but still of Africa, with that stoic face of the sub-Saharan peoples, broad of nose. She wore her hair in the African style, in tiny ringlets all over her head.

“Sister,” he said in Somali, and she replied in English, two words he knew.

“Fuck you,” she said.

Nothing worked. When you busted kiddie porn, you pierced. You fought your way through pretty elementary protection schemes, worms, predatory malware, you looked for back doors, baited and phished, you ran decoding or password-finding programs, and eventually, with stamina and creativity and a strong stomach, you got in. Then the deal was trying to put a network together, finding out who was buying the stuff, who was distributing the stuff, who was producing the stuff. Then you penetrated, playing the role of John A. Smith, corporate lawyer, father of five, country club member, Kiwanis, Rotary, bar association vice president with a hunger for watching children violated, and you put all that together, documented the linkages, and you took it to whichever fed or state prosecutor in whichever state had the most juice and eagerness and you pounced. Yes, you got dirty but you took down someone much dirtier.

But none of those programs worked. Whoever was playing this game had a brain or two in his head.

Neal had tried everything, had madly improvised program improvements, had written enough code to start a new social network, yet SCADA was impenetrable by virtue of the tough defenses built into MEMTAC 6.2 and its resolute steadfastness in avoiding temptations to jump to online status.

“How’s it coming, Jeff?” asked Dr. Benson.

“This guy’s good. He tightened up their protocols so I can’t even get the SCADA meme up, just to get a rope on the culture. I’ve been to the Siemens website and it’s clear what this guy has come up with is even beyond them. Jesus, he could be making a billion a year writing code for Steve or Bill and getting laid by nerd-babes left and right, and he’s doing this shit?”

“Maybe he doesn’t like nerd-babes,” Benson said. “So what are you going to do?”

“Pray.”

“Swell. I’ll tell them that-”

“Pray, as in, ‘talk to God.’ God being the engineer at Siemens who designed it. You better get me a translator fast, Bob, because I don’t speak one word of German.”

Lavelva looked at him. This was it, then. Somali, like so many Somalis in the area, thin, arrogant, reeking of narcissism because he considered himself so beautiful with the thin nose and the thin lips. Presumably the hair was that thick froth so Somali in its wiriness, but she could not tell for he wore a patterned scarf tied tightly to his head, held in place by a band. He wore baggy jeans and a hoodie, like any banger she had seen, and she’d seen a lot of them, Somali and otherwise, and he carried a Kalashnikov and he had a handgun dangling in a holster. He was all warred-up. His eyes seemed slightly crazed, all Nubian-warrior-lion-killing bullshit in his mind, and that was what made the Somali gangs so feared on the East Side and anywhere they left their signs.

He called to her in his jive.

“Fuck you,” she replied. No way she backed down to this sucker, no way she gave him the kids. No way, no way, no way.

He smiled, showing bright teeth. He walked to her, full of bravado and confidence, lion-proud with his big guns and a knife. He spoke again to her in his gibberish. She held her ground.

He approached.

“Babies,” he said. “You give me babies,” in poor English. “Now, give me the babies.”

“Ain’t no way I’m giving you nothing, Jack,” she said.

“Babies. I want babies. Imam want babies. Downstairs, bring babies. Now. ”

He poked her with the muzzle of the Kalash. Then he poked her again, this time hard enough to bruise.

“Want to die, sister? I kill, no problem. Bangbang, shoot dead black sister, then take babies. Maybe I kill a baby. No problem, no problem.”

He poked her again but did not see the thing in her hand that now flew at him and struck him with a sword’s cut across the face and drove a flash of light and pain up through his head, and he stepped back, feeling the tremendous hurt of it, the gun muzzle dropping as he pivoted, and then his pain alchemized into rage and he flew on her, wanting to kill her with his hands and the two grappled awkwardly, spinning this way or that and she cracked him another time in the head with her weapon, another slicing gouge that shot off lights behind his eyes. But he was stronger and he leaned into her and twisted her down and was on her. He would kill the bitch with his own hands, choke the life out of her, and then get the babies.

The press loved him. They always had. They projected their dreams upon him, he knew, and he had no problem internalizing that emotion and building it into his persona. After a brief sum-up by the governor’s public affairs idiot, the governor uttered a few bromides about his confidence in Minnesota’s first responders and announced that he had activated the Minnesota Guard and that units would be arriving within five hours. Then FBI Special Agent Kemp, repping the feds, said aid was on the way from DC and all over America, and back on Pennsylvania Avenue in the Hoover Building, analysts and intelligence experts were applying their full energy to the crisis. And then the gov’s idiot turned things over to Colonel Obobo, and everyone smiled and took reassurance from his collected calmness, his radiant charisma.

He stood at a podium outside the Incident Command van, lit by a thousand TV lights, to say nothing of the mercury vapors on aluminum supports already in place thanks to the site’s origin as a parking lot. Behind them, blank and gigantic and without detail in the gloaming, the mall itself loomed one hundred or so feet tall. It was ringed by emergency vehicles and police units, all lit to hell with their flashers going, so that its darkness was jabbed by the red-blue cop lights. Above, a fleet of choppers held in steady formation at three thousand feet, the roar of their engines undercutting the press conference.

“As you all know, we have a terrible situation here. I simply want to echo the words of the governor and our friends in the FBI. The Minnesota State Police have assumed primary responsibility for resolving this situation, under my command, and we are moving quickly to secure the mall. But we are not cowboys and this is not Dodge City. Our enemy isn’t so much these deluded men but violence itself. We have no intentions of getting into a showdown and demonstrating that we are capable of more violence than they are. Violence is death and death is unacceptable. So we will pursue alternative means of de-escalating the situation, all the while hoping that as time passes, tempers cool and justice, rather than vengeance, becomes the order of the day. That I promise you.”

“Are they executing hostages?”

Goddammit! Somehow, some TV reporter had gotten through to someone in the mall, reporting that witnesses were claiming that five shots had been fired. Already, Mr. Renfro was on the line to the station, complaining bitterly about unauthorized news reports, even if accurate, and how they jeopardized operations.

But clearly five shots would not signify a head-on assault; the only conclusion was hostage execution, and this drama held a particularly ugly fascination for the reporters. Americans put on their knees and shot in the head in a mall in middle America on the opening of the Christmas season, the day after Thanksgiving, the most family-some might say, too much family-of family days.

“I cannot confirm or deny reports that hostages have been shot,” was all that Obobo could say. But he was extremely annoyed at the abruptness and the hostility with which the question had been launched at him. It was not the sort of treatment he was used to.

“But there was shooting in the mall?”

It was a thin line, but he stuck to it.

“I cannot confirm or deny there has been shooting in the mall. Obviously, we prefer to keep tactical details to ourselves as we deal with this situation.”

“If they start executing hostages, don’t you have to attack?”

“We don’t have to do anything,” said the colonel. “It’s when we permit ourselves to be locked into ‘have to’ situations that tragedy ensues.”

Hmm. No, he didn’t like this tone of hostility. In fact, all of a sudden, he decided he was sick of them. He looked out on a hundred faces. Where was the love? Where had it gone? It began to needle him. He would have to discuss this with Renfro.

“I did not say they were killing hostages. I will not be announcing any tactical plans here. Presumably, these folks are monitoring our public announcements.”

“Who are they?”

“We do not know yet. As I said, they have yet to make contact or issue demands. I can say we have secured the mall and nobody is going anywhere. At this time we are studying various options. As you might suspect, this is a tremendously complex undertaking, and we don’t want to do anything hasty and stupid.”

“At Columbine, didn’t they decide they should have moved immediately on the shooters? All they did was set up guard posts outside while people bled to death. Is that what you’re doing?”

Another ridiculous question! Who did these assholes think they were? Where was Renfro?

“This is not Columbine. This is an entity that is far more than a high school, the number of gunmen is as yet unknown, thought to be ten or more, extremely well informed, working with a well-thought-out plan, heavily armed with professional-quality weapons. As Special Agent Kemp said, we do have Army and Navy commando types inbound, and they are far better suited to this kind of tactical work than we are. I have at least twenty teams ready to go in, but I have to get them coordinated, I have to get them inside, I have to get them moving in step with each other, and they have to have clear targets guided by intelligence. None of those conditions exist at this time, so we are in a wait-and-see mode.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” interrupted the governor, “although it’s true that shots were fired, we have no evidence that people were executed. It could have been just some kid shooting his gun.”

Great! The stupid bastard had just put the shots on the table.

“Colonel Obobo, Tom Kiefaver, NBC News.” Handsome national haircut, sometimes anchored the big show. “Are you comfortable in established positions while people may be a few dozen feet away dying?”

“I think we all need to get back to work, folks. You’ll forgive us,” and he turned manfully and walked back toward the trailer. As he went back to the van, Obobo saw the governor giving one-on-ones to the national news and the big Minneapolis channels, each team waiting patiently. The governor seemed to be enjoying himself.

It went all fuzzy on Lavelva. The Somali pressed his thumbs into her larynx, grinning wildly, his gashed face bleeding, the blood falling into her face. She bucked and fought and twice again swacked him hard with the steel spine of the notebook, but each time he saw it coming and turned, flinching down, and the blade bit into his hairline and across his ear, cutting shallowly but not hurting him bad enough. He had her now. It was over. She felt herself in the whirlpool as the oxygen debt turned her lungs into broken balloons.

Then he relented. His fingers came slightly out of her throat, and he let a desperately sought gush of air into her throat. But his fingers did not come off her neck. He spoke in Somali, not that she understood anything but the emotional gist.

“Hah, girl, see what Asad does to you! Hah, now I send you to the fiery noplace of infidel hell you who stand against Allah must go. I am your killer, your ruler. You defy me and die as do all peoples everywhere soon to know the power of Islam.”

What bullshit! He was all lit up, so proud of his mighty victory, unwilling to let the moment go, savoring the kill. She whacked him again, but he blinked only a bit, shook his head, and said, “Now, die, bitch.”

The thumbs went hard into her, and her air supply drained quickly and she sucked at dry nothingness, bucking against him but feeling her will vanish and wishing she’d been able to save the babies, she tried so hard to save the babies and And someone broke his neck.

Broke it clean and hard, and she heard the snap as the vertebrae cracked into two pieces, and his tongue came into his skinny-ass lips and his eyes went all cue ball on him and his head hung at a broken-spring angle and his thumbs lost their power and he was lifted from her like a sack of potatoes and laid on a floor from which he would never again rise.

Some Asian-like dude looked down at her.

“You okay?” he said.

“Man, he like to choke the fuck out of me.”

“Just relax, rest. He’s not going to choke anybody ever again, okay?”

The guy, she now saw, was some kind of thin, hardball type, had warrior written all over him in the leanness under his sweatshirt and the veins thick with blood on his wrists. He turned and quickly began to loot the fallen Somali, separating first the AK from the boy, then quickly unbuckling the bandolier of ammunition-the clips were all weird orange, you know, like popsicles-then slipped the kid’s belt with knife and pistol off. He checked the pistol expertly, pinching back the slide to see if it held a chambered round, and then he began to reassemble himself in the image of the man he’d just killed. Finally, finished, he turned back to her.

“Feeling better? You’ll be bruised for a month, but I think you’ll be all right. Sweetie, I can’t believe you cracked him with that shiv. You can play ball on my team anytime, the guts you must have.”

“Who you?” she asked.

“The name’s Ray. Spent some time in the Marines, that’s why I’m all going-to-war now. Nobody else is. Anyhow, I saw this joker slide in here as I was stalking him. Sorry I didn’t get here sooner.”

She looked at the dead boy. She’d seen the gaze before, on the streets. That I’m-asleep look, the eyes blank, seeing nothing, the I-ain’t-nothing-no-more look of extinction. Someone run into a bullet or a blade with his name on it, down he go, his face come all moony nothingness, like this sucker. She could still gut him, cut his slimy insides out and hang ’em up to dry. But no. He dead.

She turned back to see the Chinese marine studying a mall pamphlet, which must have come from Mr. Dead Ass.

“You have kids here?”

“Seventeen of them. In back. That boy said he’d come to get the babies.”

“Yeah, the place is marked. So they want children, they need ’em as hostages, and they sent this joker. Okay, we’re going to move the kids a little ways down the hall into the ladies’ underwear place. There are some women in there and they can help you take care of them. Does that seem like a good idea?”

“It does.”

“You want them in a single file, hugging the walls, make it a game. See, that way those TV cameras can’t pick them out of the shadow. You get that?”

“I do.”

“Let’s get this done fast. I don’t know how long it’ll be before they notice war hero here didn’t come back with the babies.”

It made as much sense as anything. It was the first positive thing that had happened since the shooting started.

“I also want to hide this guy,” he said. “If they find him, it may piss them off and they may take it out on the hostages. They have about a thousand people down in the amusement park.”

“Yes sir,” she said.

“Hey, what is your name?”

“I am Lavelva Oates.”

“Well, Miss Lavelva. I say again, you did real good. If I had it, I’d give you a medal. Stand up to the killer with the gun. Not many have the sand.”

“Yes sir,” she said, secretly so very pleased.

Next she went back, got the kids out of the bathroom on the pretext of a new game: Creep down the hall. Be a kitty cat or a doggy. All fours.

By the time she got them organized, the body was gone, and so was the Chinese marine. And so was the AK rifle.

Bet he know how to run that, she thought.

It took a while before anyone at the Red Cross tent paid attention to Mr. and Mrs. Girardi, and it was not their personality type, either as individuals or as a couple, to demand notice. They simply stood there and watched while nurses bandaged the odd escapees from the mall who’d fallen and cut themselves, bruised, torn, twisted something, and handed out glasses of juice and cookies. Meanwhile, uniformed policemen moved among those on the cots or waiting to see a physician or a nurse to interview the escapees, hoping to pick up that one new piece of information that might matter. But it was a sloppy process, the cops were under great pressure to produce, and when witnesses turned out to have nothing, they were quickly abandoned, raising hard feelings and complaints. All this frenzy took place under the open-walled canvas structure lit by fluorescents, and enough insects remained to buzz and hum around the lights, which themselves were so harsh they showed everything in vivid clarity, the red of the many Red Cross insignias, the blue and gray of the police uniforms, the white smocks of the doctors.

Finally, a woman came to them.

“Have you been helped?”

“No, ma’am,” said Mr. Girardi. He was fifty-two, stooped, balding. He was an unimpressive man by any standards and in no crowd would he stand out.

“What’s the problem?”

“The policeman over there suggested you might have some information. Our son Jimmy, he’s fourteen, he went to the mall today by himself for the first time. We haven’t heard from him.”

“Ah,” said the woman.

“We wondered if there was any information. We thought they might have released a list or something. They might know who had escaped and where they were.”

“He’s small for his age,” said Mrs. Girardi. “I never let him go alone, but he was so insistent that he wanted to get his shopping done early.”

“Gosh,” the woman, a volunteer from an upscale suburb, said, “that’s a tough one. But no, I’m sorry, they haven’t released any information or names. We just really got set up a little while ago, and we’re really here to deal with seriously hurt people if and when there’s a battle and people need fast medical help. I can’t help you. I can get you a cookie and a juice. Does that interest you?”

“No, ma’am. Thank you very much.”

“You might try the media tent. It’s where all the reporters and TV people are. That’s probably where they’d release information.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Girardi. “You’ve been very kind.”