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It was cold now, near forty degrees, and the woman shivered.

“I don’t think we should get any closer. They’ll try and stop us,” she said.

“We’ll just stay here. It’ll only be a little while longer, I’m sure.”

“You see,” said Colonel Obobo to his friend David Banjax of the New York Times, as they sat on folding chairs outside America, the Mall, with Mr. Renfro hovering over Obobo’s shoulder. Behind them the buses to transport the freed hostages pulled into position. “I’m of the belief that we in law enforcement shouldn’t be bullies or tough guys or sucker punchers. I’ve believed that since I walked a beat in Boston all those years ago.”

Banjax knew the colonel had walked the beat in Boston for less than three weeks before being snatched up to more glamorous duty, as befit his spectacular personage, but he wrote it down anyhow, while his tape recorder purred away, even though Obobo had used the same line when he’d interviewed him before, for the magazine.

“I’ve always thought of force as the least and last part of law enforcement’s job. Rather, guidance, advice, steady presence, absolute fealty to the letter of the law, but also patience and compassion and discipline, all of it driven forward by a commitment to diversity. No one should look at a policeman and feel fear. That’s the law enforcement I hope I embody and I hope I represent.”

“Sir,” said Banjax, “I’m hearing that there were elements in your command who wanted to go in guns blazing. Is that right?”

“We discussed many ideas, David, many possibilities. But sometimes courage comes in doing nothing. Sometimes it comes in not applying pressure and in letting the alleged perpetrators understand the absurdity of the situation they’ve engineered and letting them see that the sensible solution saves lives rather than takes them. Most people aren’t killers. Most people are simply trying to make themselves heard, to have a selfhood, an identity, whatever you want to call it. And once that is permitted, it defuses the situation. I’m sure these folks consider their cause right and just, and who’s to say, really, that it isn’t? There’s room here on earth for different ideas; that’s why we treasure diversity as a value and I’ve tried to increase it wherever I’ve been and wherever I may go.”

“Well said, sir, if I may. But speaking of ‘wherever you may go,’ is it true that you’re in consideration to become director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation? The successful closure of this emergency certainly can’t hurt that.”

“Well, we’ll let the future take care of itself, David. It will be what it will be. Yes, it would be a great challenge to be in charge of the FBI and to see my ideas applied on a national scale, but-”

Mr. Renfro leaned in. “I hate to break this up, but we’re receiving word the Kaafi brothers have arrived at the airport and been trucked to the plane. Doug, we have to make you available to TV now.”

The colonel and Banjax turned. A monitor had been set up, and indeed the screen showed the three prisoners, still in their orange jumpsuits, all twitchy and excited, climbing up the steps to the giant airliner one by one.

“You should be proud to see that,” said Banjax.

“I am. Off the record, I had people who wanted to explode bombs underneath the floor and go in shooting. Jesus Christ, can you imagine the carnage? For what, to save three measly bank robbers who’d be out in a few years anyway?”

“We’d never be at this moment.”

“No, and we’d have to send out for more body bags. I don’t think there are enough in Minnesota for something like that.”

Simon walked through the shattered door into Andrew Nicks’s large, paneled bedroom on the bottom floor of his father’s mansion. The first thing he saw were posters from a group calling itself Megakill on the walls, jagged images of rockers made up as the angels of Armageddon, with crazed screwball makeup, long black nails, coils of hair to the shoulders, lips red as blood, electric instruments like weapons, faces contorted into the pagan killing mask, like Conan on a good day outside the walls of some doomed Hyborian city-state. Other pix: smiling shots of Dylan and Eric of Columbine fame, a solemn loner named Seung-Hui Cho of Virginia Tech, the great Charles Manson, Charles Whitman, a strange guy with haunted eyes and a bushy ’40s haircut, even two little squirts in period outfits he recognized finally as Bonnie and Clyde. All screwball shooters, little men with big guns, artists of destruction and mayhem. Then the guy in the haircut clarified for him as he realized it was Howard Unruh, who’d taken a Luger for a walk in 1948, murdering thirteen, first of the big-kill maniacs.

Then he saw the elaborate computer setup, and an agent had called up MEMTAC 6.2, which Simon knew to be the software package that controlled America, the Mall’s, security system. An immensely detailed and possibly impenetrable flowchart seemed to be on display. On a table across from the unmade bed were stacks of blueprints, all of them from Oakland Engineering and Architectural, one of the firms that had constructed the mall in 1992. On many of them, red pencil lines tracked pathways, corridors, stairways, choke points, areas in square footage.

The bookshelf held a variety of texts-classic revolutionary strategy by Mao, Debray, Guevara, and Trotsky, to say nothing of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, Dave Cullen’s Columbine, a variety of US Army and Marine Corps insurgency and counterinsurgency manuals, sniper guides, improvised explosive handbooks, psywar op pamphlets, ambush tactics and man-tracking guides from various survivalist or radical publishers.

“Mentally, he was getting ready for war,” said someone.

“Mentally, he was nuts,” someone else said.

“Oh God,” somebody said, “look at this.”

He held up a batch of newspaper clippings on a Reverend Reed Hobart, of a Church of the Redeemer in some outlying community, who had been famously demonstrating at downtown mosques with a group of his followers but then had suddenly vanished without a trace.

“Maybe Andrew made the Reverend Mr. Reed go bye-bye,” said someone.

“Okay,” said Simon, “I think that pretty much tears it. I’ll call Kemp, and meanwhile let’s get this stuff photoed, tagged, and removed. It’ll all have to be looked at.”

“What’s in the closet, I wonder,” another agent said, and opened the door.

The detonation represented itself even before it was a blade of light as a wall of immense energy that stopped time for a split second, and in the next everybody in the room had been blown back until they hit something that stopped them. The noise was stupendous, and shards of wood flying viciously through the air opened a hundred or so wounds in the men and women so blasted.

Simon, who had been deeper in the room at the time of the blast and thus missed its killing force, found himself the new owner of three broken ribs. He fought the terrible, suppurating lassitude that leadened his limbs and tried to shut down his brain. He blinked, exhaled a plume of acrid air, looked about, and through the smoke that hung everywhere in the room, noted a young agent against another wall so still he had to be dead, and grew angry at himself that he could not remember the young man’s name just now. He tried to pull himself up, get himself together, take charge, make a report, get medical and ATF bomb people out here, all at once.

Then he saw, through the fog, the boy’s father standing in the doorway.