“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.
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.”