Authors: Stephen Hunter
“Well,” he said, “one can always use cash.”
“No feasts, no Last Suppers with the little lambs. Anything,
anything
you do out of the ordinary might alert the feds. So far, they don’t seem to be onto anything, but we’re so close now, I’d hate to see this thing fall apart and spend the rest of my life getting reamed three times a day in prison for nothing.”
“I understand, I obey, I am thankful.”
“Good, then that’s it.”
“There is one other thing.”
“Okay, what?”
“Death.”
“My favorite thing, in any color. Whose are we talking about?”
“Yours and mine.”
“It will come when it will come. It is nothing in exchange for larger goals. I’m not particularly afraid.”
“Yes, but . . . have you no one you’d like to see again?”
“Only to laugh in their faces.”
“But consider the possibility of escape.”
“There is no possibility.”
“But . . . if there was.”
“Hmm,” said the boy.
“It so happens that I have a follower who has a brother. This brother was a helicopter pilot in the Moroccan Air Force. He got involved in radical politics, he was arrested, tortured, imprisoned. He escaped, he managed to end up in Canada.”
“Interesting.”
“He’s quite a good pilot. He now works for an agricultural dusting firm. He sprays poisons on weeds. He kills things.”
“What a great job.”
“Now, I am thinking, on that day, the air will be full of helicopters, police and military but mostly from the news organizations.”
“It’ll be a chopper hullabaloo, no doubt about it.”
“Suppose it were arranged . . . ,” and he continued with his plan.
I
t surprised no one that the house was so nice. It was set back from the road by a driveway, possibly one hundred feet in length, and stood shaded by trees, with all kinds of flourishes like porches and gables and a three-car garage. It was in one of those posh million-dollar developments to the north of Minneapolis, among houses of equal or more value, the whole gated neighborhood itself protected from the rigors of actuality by a 24/7 uniformed patrol.
Three cars of agents pulled up, and Bill Simon, acting on behalf of SAIC Kemp, took the lead. He had the warrant number, though no actual paper representation, as the warrant had been arranged on the fly on the drive from downtown headquarters.
He knocked, and a man in his late fifties, with an ample head of gray hair teased attractively about his head and a scotch glass in his hand, answered. Simon noted emblems of upper-boho gentility: running shoes, tight-fitting jeans, a lush Scottish heather turtleneck over a health-club disciplined body, wire-rim glasses. Over the man’s left shoulder lurked his wife, maybe the trophy edition, for she looked a decade younger, a handsome woman with an adorable mess of tawny blond hair, also in jeans—great, tight bod—and an oxford button-down shirt. She held a glass of wine.
“Mr. Nicks? Jason Nicks?”
“Yes sir,” said Nicks, who thought he knew exactly what was going on. “You’re FBI, right? Here about Andrew? You have some news. We haven’t heard from him and I’ve tried the store a hundred times. I’m so worried.”
“Yes sir,” said Simon. “Actually, yes, we are FBI, and yes, this is about your son, and yes, we know he manages one of your stores in the mall, but we’re here to serve a search warrant.”
“What?” said Jason Nicks.
“Sir, there’s some suspicion that your son is involved with the gunmen who’ve taken over the mall. He was definitely involved in procuring the arms and ammunition they’re using. I have a number for a federal warrant that’s been issued by the Fourth Circuit US, Judge Raphael, to search his house. You can check if you want by looking up the warrant number on the Internet.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Jason Nicks, stepping back to admit them.
Simon himself ran the interrogation, while the forensics and evidence collection team went downstairs, where Andrew lived. As Simon addressed the parents, they all could hear the cracks as the agents used tactical entry battering rams to knock down the locked door.
“Does Andrew need a lawyer?” asked Nicks.
“Possibly, sir. Do you want to make a call? We are in a hurry, as you might imagine, but at the same time, I want your son to have the full protection of the law.”
“No, no, go ahead.”
In the background, NBC was reporting that the van had arrived from the penitentiary and that the prisoners would file aboard the airplanes within a few minutes.
“I’m looking at his record now,” said Simon. “Andrew has had some difficulties, I see.”
“He’s been a hard kid to have around, yes,” said the father. “So bright, so angry. I’ve spent a lot of money on lawyers, just trying to keep him out of jail. He’s my only child, what could I do?”
“Yes sir. Just scanning here, I see some drug busts, I see that he has been kicked out of three private schools and just barely managed to graduate from the fourth—”
“He’s got a genius-level IQ.”
“Somehow he got into Harvard.”
“I made a very large donation to the school, and that may have had something to do with it. But he was certainly smart enough. He just wasn’t mature enough.”
“He didn’t stay long?”
“Less than a year. A very unfortunate year, I’m afraid. He let himself get angry, he sent some unwise e-mails to people, he didn’t invent Facebook because someone else had already, he got lost in writing code, hacking, designing games, stopped going to class, ultimately returned to his drugs and his music and his trendy nihilism. You know the profile: love of destruction, heavy metal, a fantasy life full of violence. I don’t know what’s wrong with that kid. We gave him everything, we supported him through it all. He’s been in psychotherapy since he was twelve. He’s been in every program you could imagine, taken every antidepressant, every ADD drug, Ritalin by the long ton. It works, sometimes, for a while. But he always regresses: rock and roll, computers, violent nihilistic fantasies, anger at . . . I suppose at me. I made a lot of money. Big mistake.”
“You’re an entrepreneur?”
“I have a gift for retail,” Jason said. “I just surf the zeitgeist looking for opportunities. I’m not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, believe me, just a storefront guy. I had hippie clothing stores in the seventies, running shoes in the eighties, computers in the nineties, now computer games. That’s the cool stuff. There’s some other stuff too, not so cool. I own several fast-food franchises, the better part of three local strip malls, a complete mall in Kansas, a restaurant and three motels in the Wisconsin Dells, three Sheetzes along I-ninety-two. I own the First Person Shooter shops, do you know what they are?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Shooting games in cyberspace. Andrew grew up with them. He’s probably one of the best in the world when it comes to fighting with your thumbs on a PlayStation. My flagship store is at the mall. Two years ago, I asked Andrew to manage it, and for the first time in his life, he applied himself. He’s run it very well.”
“And that’s where he is now?”
“Yes. And every day.”
“Are you aware that for six months he had a job in a sporting goods store in Twin Rivers?”
“What? That’s not Andrew.”
“He used the store’s FFL to acquire sixteen assault rifles, sixteen surplus German pistols, and over ten thousand rounds of ammunition.”
An agent entered the room.
“Bill,” he said, “you ought to come see this.”
“Everybody’s so happy,” said Mr. Girardi.
“They say it’s almost over.”
They stood essentially nowhere. They’d been exiled from the press area, and there seemed to be little point in going back to the Red Cross area, especially as it would be buckling down to receive the seriously wounded. They were more or less in between those two stations, about three hundred yards from the bulk of America, the Mall, which was a hub of activity, still surrounded by cops with their lights flashing. A few minutes ago, buses had begun to assemble not at the mall, per se, but a few hundred yards off to the right, so that when given the signal, they could progress to the entrances and load up on freed hostages, who would then be taken to triage stations and then to other destinations. The whole thing was immensely complicated, and it seemed everywhere they looked, they saw vehicles and scurrying men.
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.