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.