“Oh God, Andrew,” he was screaming, “what have you done!”
Tick tock, tick tock, Jeff Neal thought. He looked around, saw the eyes of all the leaners-in boring in at him. But he was trying to put pieces together. Somehow “perverts” and “mall” and… and what? He thought he had an idea, an inspiration, a possibility, a “Sorry. I thought I had something. I didn’t.”
“Well,” said Dr. Benson, “I guess you ought to just run penetration programs on it again, and just maybe-”
“Okay, okay, okay,” said Neal suddenly, again very fast. “Stay with me on this. We track pervs, right?”
“That seems to be the consensus,” someone said.
“Now, I do have a California guy in my crosshairs. His name is Bruce Wyatt, thirty-four. I’ve been all over his hard drive. Kids dressed as cowboys, you don’t want to know more. Okay. Okay, he works, I think, at a RealDeal in Sacramento. So I’m going to get on his drive, search for links. He’s computer-savvy, sort of, so he’s got a link to RealDeal Corporate. So from him I can get into RealDeal Corporate. I get into that, their main setup, not the bullshit public website, I get into their guts, where all their maintenance and security and financial programs are, and maybe there’s a link to each branch, even if it’s only e-mail. So maybe I somehow figure out which of the fifty or so branches-”
“Jeff, there’s probably over five hundred of them.”
“So I get into their operating system and from there I get to the system here at this mall, at their big fourth-floor store and maybe, depending on who built it and how much money they spent, maybe, maybe maybe there’s some kind of undocumented portal from it into the bigger SCADA thing and I can get in through that. And I can take it down that way.”
“Go for it,” said Dr. Benson.
“So we wait till it’s all clear,” asked Lavelva Oates, “then we come out, is that what they’re saying?”
“That’s what they’re saying. It’s over, the bad guys won. Hostages for prisoners. The prisoners go, then the hostages go.”
“What happens then?”
“I don’t know,” Ray said. “We’ll let the geniuses figure it out.”
“It ain’t right,” said Lavelva. “It ain’t right all those people dead and messed up, and they git what they want.”
“But do you kill a thousand innocent to punish fifteen or so bad? I don’t know the answer but I thought the point of all these special police units was to set it up so you could kill the fifteen without the thousand. But it didn’t seem to work out here today, did it?”
“No, it didn’t.”
“The one that was choking on me, you punished him but good. So there’s a little justice here today, and you’re the one who brought it, and you should be proud of yourself for the rest of your life for that one.”
“It still ain’t right,” she said, disturbed.
They sat behind the rear counter of a store called Perfumaria, amid odors so sweet they had a gaggy quality to them. Cruz felt like throwing up. But he had his orders, and he would sit tight and make explanations later. There was no percentage in any other line of action.
The vibrator on his phone buzzed.
He fished it out of his pocket, slid the bar to answer.
It was all of them: McElroy but also Webley and, from far away, Nick Memphis.
Memphis did the talking.
“Where are you, Cruz?”
“In a perfume store still on the second floor. We killed one more bad guy, but I don’t think anybody’s caught on to that.”
“Okay, we have an ID on the big man, a kid actually, twenty-two. He manages a store in the mall called First Person Shooter. He ordered the weapons through a dodge, he’s got the computer chops, and maybe he’s trying to do Columbine on steroids.”
“So it’s just some little fuck?”
“He would have access to the mall, he’d know all security arrangements, all the corridors and tunnels, and he has a record of disturbing behavior, from drug arrests to Internet harassment to arson, always quashed by Dad’s money. He’s been under a psychiatrist’s care for years and it was thought he was ‘getting better.’”
“Guess not,” said Ray.
“You’re the only asset we have in the mall. What we need you to do, Ray, is find a way to the fourth floor and to the Rio Grande corridor. This First Person Shooter is there, Rio Grande 4-312. It’s where his headquarters would have to be, we think, where he’s got this thing wired. When you get there, you set up outside. If everything goes well, we may not need you. If it goes bad, you may have to bust in there and cap him and whoever else is there fast. Sorry I can’t get you body armor or anything. I suppose you don’t even have to go if you don’t want, but on the other hand, if any man in America would go on this one, it would be you.”
Yeah me, he thought. I, warrior. I, hero. I, marine. I, sniper.
“Cruz, are you okay?” asked Memphis.
“I’m on my way,” said Ray.
“Look,” said Memphis, “I get it. You thought you were out of it, and it followed you home and it’s still trying to kill you. You have a beautiful fiancee and a thousand job opportunities and it’s all looking swell, and then these guys come along with their little thing. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”
Stay away from the W-word, Cruz told himself. There is no why in this world. There is only is, that is, what has to be done next, and this has to be done next. His father would do it without a second thought, and if he got killed in the very last seconds, he would not die tainted by bitterness. There is no why, there is only is.
“Cruz, are you okay on this one?”
“It’s past my nap time,” he said, “but I think I have one more day without a nap in me.”
“Cruz, when this is over, I’ll buy you a mattress store and you can nap all day long.”
“I’ll take you up on that,” Cruz said.
Wearily, he rose.
“Don’t know where you’re going,” said Lavelva, “but I’m going too.”
Some things hadn’t worked out. For one, the gun cameras. Now and then, as in the execution footage, they yielded something very interesting. But mostly they just tracked the random imagery that the muzzles covered as the gunmen haphazardly wielded them, at a speed that increased the abstraction to near totality and the information to almost nothing. Rather quickly, Andrew had ceased paying attention to them. They were like lava lamps mounted on the wall, nice if you’re high and feeling kinda groovy, otherwise useless.
He sat in his command chair in the back room of First Person Shooter before a wall of such imagery. On the other wall, more important to monitor, were all the image feeds from the security cameras. They at least communicated security responses to his event. He could see in the exterior exit cameras, for example, that the murky black-clad ninjas known as SWAT teams had pulled back, or at least out of the picture, and that at each entrance a line of buses had pulled up. According to Andrew’s instructions, each bus driver had opened his doors and left his bus and now stood in front of it, arms held upward and without jacket to display his unarmed status.
Ho-hum, another day at the office. It was all going swell.
The big board, which had the hacked SCADA pictorial of the MEMTAC 6.2 security program, showed nothing. Everything that was supposed to be locked down was still locked down; everything that wasn’t, wasn’t.
“What is going on with number six?” asked the imam.
“I don’t-”
“He is still. He is on the ground. What is wrong with him?” Andrew looked back to number six on the gun camera wall. It took him a while to make any sense of it, but then he realized it was an inverted image, and twisting his head to find the proper orientation, he saw that it was a floor-level observation of nothing, that is to say, not ceiling, not hallway, nothing containing data, but rather what, upon concentration, appeared to be the lower foot or so of wall beneath the window of a retail outlet, on a level with the floor.
“The gun is on the floor,” Andrew said. “Like the kid just dumped it and went and got himself some ice cream. Or maybe the camera fell off in some roughhouse and it landed on the floor sideways. He wouldn’t notice it. He didn’t even know it was there.”