Soft target

5:26 P.M.-5:48 P.M

The Geeks had spoken. That is, the first Behavioral Sciences report had come in, BeSci being the forensic psychology unit of the Bureau tasked with inferring personality of perpetrator from evidence, originally begun in response to various colorful serial killers of depraved sexual impulse, then glorified in novel, film, and TV. However, despite their glory, the boys seldom got out of the office, a bunker in a nondescript building on the FBI campus at Quantico. Since their duty was basically riding the net 24/7, putting together personalities from what they uncovered, and then offering their work product to whomever was interested, and not many were, they were known as the Geeks. They looked mostly like the excitable guys who try and sell you televisions at RealDeal.

“It’s a very interesting set of attributes,” said Kemp to his second in command as they both looked at the document just e-mailed to them. “The Geeks point out that he’s clearly got intimate familiarity with this mall, which, after all, isn’t just any mall. That means he’s worked here, he knows it forwards and backwards, and this thing began as a fantasy that became a temptation so overwhelming he couldn’t resist it. It’s probably been at the core of his secret life for three or four years now.”

“If that’s the core, I think we can assume further,” said number two Jake Webley, “he doesn’t have a real life. So I’m seeing some techno-nerd full of resentments and grudges, working alone in a little corner of the mall, probably convinced that no one gets how special he is.”

“Very good,” said Kemp. “So we have to find that guy. He’s probably been fired or he has a record of near firings, disciplinary problems, and everybody says, ‘Joey, you’re so smart, why on earth can’t you get along?’ and they don’t get that the reason he can’t get along is that Joey’s so smart.”

“Agh,” said Webley, who’d seen that dynamic in play more than a few times. “So our first move is to begin to search the records for that profile. I will get teams in contact with every corporate HQ of all shops who-”

“Wait,” said Kemp. “There’s more.”

“There’s always more,” said Webley.

“Ain’t it the truth? Okay, he’s got computer chops and has been able to take command of the mall security protocols. That means he’s penetrated several layers of obstacles, evaded several firewalls, avoided setting off countermeasures, all in all a world-class job of hacking, perhaps on a WikiLeaks level.”

“I hope our geniuses are smart enough to fight him. I hate the smart ones,” said Webley, “they make all the trouble in the world. They get so teched-up they think they’re supermen and we normal one-thirty-IQ drones have to clean up after them.”

Both men, all geared up in their combat style and decorated with automatic weapons and tear gas grenades, huddled a hundred or so feet from the big state police Incident Command trailer in their own recently arrived HQ, a smallish commo van, which put them in private contact with the Bureau and its assets.

“Okay,” Kemp said, “add to the profile a dense immersion in computer science. There must be twenty computer or computer game shops in the mall. They must employ a hundred bitter grinds. Maybe one of those guys got fired or disciplined or lost his girlfriend or something. And one of his buddies would know that. And that would lead us to him, and when we know who he is, we’ll have leverage of some sort on him.”

“I will inform our teams.”

“And yet, the Geeks also point out that despite his brilliance, he’s got some odd, perhaps revealing gaps in his knowledge. Even, possibly, subtler strategy. I’m talking about the phones.”

“It is strange. He could but he hasn’t cut off the cell phone usage in his little empire.”

“So… did he not do it because he’s stupid and didn’t think of it? Unlikely. Did he not do it because he doesn’t know how to do it? It’s pretty easy, actually. All you have to do is override the frequency with white noise and you could do that with a microwave oven. Or did he not do it because he knew that a major thing like this is going to produce megamultigazillion phone calls and he thought that would impact our communications big-time? And maybe he also wanted all the bad information, the chaff, that would produce?”

“Good question.”

“Then there’s the power,” said Webley, clearly on a riff, leaping through mental gymnastics with super agility, seeing things clearly for the first time. “He must have shut it down in the security office when he iced the place. But he left the main lines on. We haven’t shut ’em down because it’ll terrify the hostages. But we can shut ’em down easily, plus, maybe we’ll want to do that as a prelude to an assault.”

“Doesn’t this mall have an emergency generator?”

“It does, on the roof,” said Webley. “Now the issue is, what does he know about power? Has he anticipated action in the dark? Do they have night vision? If so, and we think we’re all state-of-the-art with our night goggles, we could be walking into a killer ambush. Or has it just not crossed his mind? Or maybe he’s aware of that vulnerability and the vulnerability of the emergency generator. We can shut down the power and light in thirty seconds, or so we think. But this guy has tech chops, this guy has the profile of a bomber. He likes to express himself through his mastery of tech. I’m surprised he hasn’t planted explosives. The little fucks at Columbine did, maybe it’s the same mentality. When we go to blow the emergency gen, it may be booby-trapped. Maybe we ought to get a team on that now.”

“Good idea. Make it happen.”

“I will. But what I’m seeing doesn’t sound like a terrorist of the turban-wearing, Koran-spouting kind. You know, that guy. Nothing in this whatsoever suggests Islam or international terrorism. Despite the reports of the scarves. Fuck, anybody can buy those scarves mail order. You see ’em on chicks these days. No, I see another guy: some twisted computer freak with a hard-on against authority,” said Webley.

“I agree. And yet-”

“And yet?”

“And yet there’s still another component that doesn’t really fit with this first diagram,” said Kemp, as if it was his turn to be the brilliant one. “What is wrong with the picture? I’ll tell you: how does this guy, bitter techie, the IT man from hell, how does he of all people round up hard-core gunmen and send them down hallways machine-gunning little girls?”

“Good question.”

“He needs manpower, firepower, fire-and-move small-unit training, communications setup, all the sorts of things a Green Beret or some kind of SEAL pro could handle. Not the president of the chess club who’s angry because he got fired from Computers-R-Us.”

“So maybe it’s a partnership. Two of ’em. The bright kid, somehow the seasoned combat operator. Highly unlikely, I know.”

“Those aren’t types that hang together, no way.”

“Okay,” said Kemp, “maybe you ought to put people in DC on professional soldiers, contractors, Graywolf vets, ex-Berets, or SEALs in the greater Minneapolis area. Also, maybe get somebody local digging into very smart but screwed-up kids. Arsonists, bomb threateners, maybe commies or socialists, you know, ‘activists’ they call them. I’m thinking University of Minnesota would be a good place to start looking, plus if there are any ‘gifted and talented’ high schools in the area, and I’m guessing there are.”

“I’ll get right on it,” said Webley. “If we could find a convergence, we might find our guy, or our guys.”

“I’ll bring this to Obobo. Maybe he’s got state police investigators to toss in, plus we ought to be able to get metros from Saint Paul and Minneapolis.”

“That’s a good idea, Will,” said Webley. “But the thing is, even if we figure out who is doing this, how does that help us stop him? I mean if we put his crying mommy on the bullhorn, it could just as easily set him off as break him down.”

“I know,” said Kemp disconsolately. “I have a terrible feeling we’re going to lose a lot more civilians on this one and I don’t think there’s a goddamn thing we can do about it.”

McElroy found something. He found it by tracing with his fingers around the joinery of glass to stucco of the entire loop of lower Lake Michigan, from Milwaukee, past Chicago and Gary, on up into Michigan, halfway to Canada. It was a subtle thing, a sort of give in the surface as though the stucco wasn’t quite set.

He pulled out his SureFire, put a bright beam on it, and decided that what he saw revealed under the harshness of the illumination was a subtly different coloration in the stucco, the concrete, the whatever it was that comprised the window well. Next he took out the wicked long Spyderco he carried clipped into his thigh cargo pocket, flicked it open to reveal a blade bad enough for killing, for getting deep into blood-bearing organs if the need arose. The need was not present now, but the sharpness of point and blade certainly looked promising, and he set at the patch of whatever it was and began to chip and dig away. The surface yielded swiftly, and McElroy realized that this zone here must have been somehow damaged, water damage maybe, a broken pipe or something, maybe a lightning strike, but anyway the mall’s engineering staff had done a quick repair, not with hard-set concrete or whatever but with putty, and had then painted over it. A cheap repair, cost-saving-the recession, remember.

That’s what he wanted. Just what the doctor ordered, he thought, and began to dig aggressively, soon revealing the heavy metal of the window frame itself. Couldn’t get through that with a knife blade, of course, but beneath it, more of the soft stuff, and he was so heated with energy over the enormity of his discovery, he worked with renewed dedication, feeling himself a Superman. The sniper god had answered his prayer.

He lost track of time, but it seemed to be only seconds. In that period he scooped out an actual channel through the material, being sure as he dug to draw the stuff toward him so that debris didn’t fall upon the crowd and the gunmen five stories below. But it was gloppy, somehow, and the moisture provided an adhesive factor; the knife scraped off not particles of dust but gobbets of mucus, clay, something unpleasant.

It wasn’t much, but he had opened an oblong gap alongside a section of the steel frame of the sky light. He peered through it, and no glass obstructed his view. He fished out his binocs and saw what he could see, now jacked up by an optical factor of ten.

He had an angle onto a few feet of major corridor leading to the balcony overlooking the amusement park, about two hundred feet away at roughly 135 degrees. Not a lot of range, not a lot of elevation or windage, but he had the view into one of the corridors-Colorado, it had to be, based on his familiarity with the place-with nothing but air between him and his theoretical target. Could he get a shot? That was the first issue, and it had to be solved before What would the target be? even came up.

He picked the rifle up, eased the suppressor through the hole he’d opened, found a shooting position, his spotweld, and went to the scope and saw… nothing.

Goddamn.

There was clearance for the muzzle, but the scope was mounted higher than the muzzle by about an inch and it looked squarely into the metal frame.

He began to grind downward, trying to torque the suppressor deeper into the putty to lower the muzzle another inch or so, which would afford him the vantage of the Leupold tactical 10? he carried.

Nah. Couldn’t get enough leverage. He withdrew the rifle, went back to the knife. He hoped he didn’t have to cut any throats or cut open any tin cans, because he was blunting the crap out of the murderous sharpness of the blade, but he could afford a new knife.

Ugh. He ground, he scraped, he rubbed, he spit, he thought about pissing, anything to wear down the resistance of what opposed him, for it seemed he was beyond putty now and fighting the higher tensile strength of something hardened. It seemed to take hours, he felt the sweat running down his sides, he felt the ache in his wrists and fingers from the steady pressure he was applying to the structure through the medium of the blade.

He sat back at last, and it seemed he’d opened a loophole in the building material under the frame of the window. Would it be enough? Was he done?

He reacquired the rifle, repeated the shouldering and inserting process, tried to gauge how far he’d come, how far he’d have to go, and finally peeked through the scope and saw lightness, blur, whatever, realized he was focused at two hundred yards and this was much shorter, just seventy-five, and his finger flew to the focus knob, and he found himself staring with surprise into the face of a terrorist edging down the corridor. He looked up, through the window, and confirmed. It was a man, stealing his way toward the balcony, and that was an AK in his grip, his head was blanketed in an Arabic tribal scarf, and a boom microphone came around to cover his lips from earphones inside the headgear.

McElroy went back to scope and saw the face quadrisected by the four pie slices of scope upon which the reticle was centered. He had the kill shot with his suppressor. He had to get the okay to shoot.

Amazingly, the guy looked not Arabic at all but sort of Chinese or something.

It was Webley again, Kemp’s second in command, and this time he’d come up almost secretly to Kemp. He spoke in a whisper.

“One of our guys on the roof has managed to bore through a soft spot under the frame of the window. He has a target.”

“Tango?” asked Kemp.

“Affirmative. Dead center, moving down the hallway. One guy, isolated, AK-74, don’t know what he’s doing up there. My shooter is suppressed, he’s on him now, can take him down quietly, the others won’t know.”

“Interesting,” said Kemp.

“Will, we have to take this guy.”

“We ought to clear it with Obobo.”

“He’ll say no. I guarantee you, you know it, I know it. He’s risk-averse, force-averse, kill-averse. I don’t know what he’s doing in this line of work.”

“Jake, keep it down. You don’t know who’s listening.”

“Will, let us take this guy. It’s one less to deal with. Obobo doesn’t need to know. It’s our sniper, our operation, we have to take this chance.”

Everything in Kemp warned him to say no, which is why he himself was surprised when he said, “Green-light him. Drop the fucker hard.”

“Sniper Five, cleared to engage,” McElroy heard.

“Roger wilco,” said McElroy, trying to fight the spasm of elation that it had finally come, the clearance to make the kill, the order he’d been waiting for his whole life. He almost pulled hard at that second but…

Some sniper wisdom from somewhere halted him, maybe the sniper god reaching down to calm him. He’d been in position too long, his body discipline was breaking down, the whole goddamn thing was pretty shaky because he wasn’t set up on something to take the weight, the rifle wasn’t on its bipod, he didn’t have a bag or a tight left arm under the buttstock to eat up the tremble. This was all fucked up and nobody in sniper school had ever said a thing about an improvised position like this.

He stood half hunching, all weight centered on the small of his back, which was beginning to object. His legs were slightly spread but he couldn’t lock his knees and instead had to keep them precisely folded to stay on target. He supported the rifle entirely on the strength of his arms, which deadened his trigger finger and sent telegrams of pain to wrists and gripping hands. The yips had begun to build, little random tremors that could come from nowhere and blow the shot he’d made ten thousand times. He stepped back, eased the rifle down, took a deep breath of cool air, felt it soothe his lungs and his dried throat, felt the oxygen send a squirt of strength to his much-troubled and overworked limbs, and he willed himself back together again.

He went into his hunch, drawing the rifle up, knowing that he wouldn’t want to spend too much time on target but break the trigger at the first sight picture. He torqued his elbows inward even as his trigger finger snapped the safety forward, making him hot, good to go, ready to rock. He found the spotweld, watched the sight picture clarify, noted that his guy had moved just a bit and was possibly a foot closer to his objective-which had to be the balcony overlooking the hostages-and felt a little oddness.

Why was he so cautious? Why was he not striding about like he owned the place? Why was he kind of Asian?

McElroy had no answers.

But on the other hand: He has an AK. He is dressed in the tribal headdress of Islamic, specifically Arab, persuasion. He has a throat mike, a pistol, a knife, as had all the others McElroy’d seen. He was a terrorist, he had to be, the only explanation that made sense.

Kill him, he thought, kill him quick before the yips break you down again.

He made the slight adjustment to drop the muzzle to account for the slight forward progress of the man, felt the trigger strut against the softest push of his finger just exactly as the four right angles of the reticle settled on the blank of the forehead, and beheld the perfection.

The rifle fired itself.

First person shooter at its ultimate. First person shooter, for real. First person shooter, the logical destination. First person shooter, the end of the road.

He watched on number seven, the big screen. He knew he should be watching the other screens, should be scanning this corridor and that stairwell for all the signs of disturbance, for possible threat, for danger, for sloppiness on the part of the kids, but he could not stop watching.

The rifles, unnoticed by their users, had miniaturized vidcams clamped to the barrel with some fixture from GG amp;G or Bravo Company or LaRue Tactical just behind the muzzle, and each sent a streaming vid feed to him at his headquarters, via the mall’s Wi-Fi network, and came up on the big screens adjacent to the wall that displayed his intercept of the security cam data. Images, images everywhere on the walls of this dark back room, which was filled with screenglow, turning everything a translucent gray white, yet more surrealism for this most surreal of enterprises.

The guncam imagery, of course, was sent to and recorded on the 6 TB memory card, but he was still able to hit replay at the local level and watch a designated sequence over and over again.

So now he watched number seven, for about the fourteenth time. The gunman was Maahir, the oldest and most reliable, the killer of Santa Claus. It took a while for the video to settle down, but even as the muzzle prodded the arbitrarily selected five and pried them out of the crowd in a dazzle of near-abstract shapes and black-white-gray imagery, certain lucid visions still arrived: the look in the eyes of the woman, the sullen downcast of the face of the old man, the simple dullness of the uncomprehending teenager. Then it all went to blur again as the gunman walked them to the cleared space, got them on their knees. They hadn’t yet figured what was going to happen because of course it was so outside their imagination. This kind of thing, this wantonness, this jihadi contempt for life, it hadn’t yet come to America. Oh, sure, 2,900 at the Trade Center, but those were meaningless numbers. The deaths of these five would be far more terrible and would live forever in the Western imagination when the data got into the world blogosphere. But that was still a few days off.

Okay, now. Five kneelers, hands at their sides. Maahir has settled down, the gun muzzle isn’t flappity-flapping all over the joint, reducing the imagery to a smear of gaudy electrons, and the tiny camera peers down from its forearm mount, seeing the muzzle as a black prong in the upper right hand of the screen, eternally fixed in the image.

The woman is first. The camera closes on the back of her head as he presses the muzzle almost to her skull. She has no idea she’s about to enter history and sits placidly awaiting a deliverance that isn’t to be. Flash, jump, blur, a haze of smoke, and the image is still again and fills with light as she topples forward, twisted slightly, instantly extinct. With animal death comes the end of body discipline, as all the muscles let go at once and she lunges forward like a felled building, straight into the floor, not much damage visible because the bullet passed through hair, burning it, pushing it aside, but still hiding the fragility of the skull.

As the muzzle sweeps to the next in line, his eyes shoot back to the gunman, laced with bulgy fear. Flash, jump, blur, haze, stability. He topples sideways, out of the frame. The next is the younger woman, who appears to be knit up in desperate prayer, all bunched up, her jaw vibrating as she uncorks the various afterlife mantras and deity ass kissing that constitute formal address to the supreme, then flash, jump, blur, haze, stability. An eccentricity. She does not fall immediately but for some reason remains intact and upward for another second or so, then seems to melt from within, as if her core has turned liquid and imploded downward.

The fourth is the older man, who struggles in his anger to rise and fight, so we get a double jolt, the first from Maahir tomahawking him with the gun barrel to drive him back to his knees in pain, and then the flash, jump, blur, and haze of the shot itself, a disappointment because it hits him above the ear, disappearing again in hair.

The last is better, the teen, actually closer to a child. Small, frail skull. Thirteen-, fourteen-year-old boy, he thinks. Flash, jump, blur, haze, but the head detonates, becoming in an instant too swift to even record something called not-head, or unhead, a kind of broken, empty vessel, departed entirely from assumptions of human anatomy. It’s deflated, emptied, eviscerated, but the boy’s bones are so light and his musculature so unimposing that he falls to earth almost insignificantly.

Maahir steps back from his work and casually sweeps the carnage he has unleashed. Five bodies shorn of dignity on the floor in the cruel black/white videography of the guncam. Maahir walks around them, muzzle on them in case he needs to fire another shot, but all are quite dead in their loose-knit positions, and beyond them, on the pavement, a kind of communal blood pool has formed, fed by five tributaries.

In the screen room, Andrew toggles a button on his keyboard and restores the live-feed guncam data, which has, he has to admit, turned out to be rather useless except in special conditions, such as the one he’s just witnessed. It’s mostly blurs of floors, as the boys sweep this way and that, and occasionally you get a view of the cowed hostages sitting in misery and terror or a look down some deserted corridor as the boys are sent out on various errands.

He looks at his watch. It’s almost time.