Greenville (II)
Juba wanted to destroy America but for one thing: the French fries.
“I like these,” he said.
“You’ve been all over the world, you’ve never had French fries?”
“I was not on tour. I was on jihad.”
“Yeah, busy, busy—I get it.”
They sat in a booth at a McDonald’s halfway down the mall’s hallway. To the right, the broad opening to the shiny paradise of Walmart beckoned. The hall itself was darker, a corridor of dying retail, with a cheesy plastic garden in the middle. A lot of mom-’n’-pop new-media stuff, DVDs and games and phones from obscure networks, a couple of other fast-food troughs, a shoe chain, an Old Navy, the whole place dying. The brick-and-mortar was losing to the ’Net, as Jared knew, but he thought this was not a topic that would fascinate Juba.
“No,” said Juba. “I’ve seen these places, you know? They’re everywhere.”
“I remember when they were just another snake cult,” said Jared.
“What?”
“Nothing. Bad joke.”
“Jihadis do not joke.”
“But they eat French fries?”
“I make the rules.”
“That is true,” said Jared.
Next to Juba on the seat was a hoodie wrapped tight to obscure fourteen inches or so of semi-automatic shotgun stoked to the gills on 12-gauge double-aughts. But the man carried it with such insouciant naturalism, it would never have occurred to anyone that such a package could conceal such a weapon. Juba was completely calm, at peace. He had prayed in the car, something Jared could not get himself to do even now, explaining to himself his attraction to the cause was more identity politics than faith.
They had made the drive down 127 to Greenville without trouble, skipped the Sears mall, found the Walmart mall with equal ease, and realized there was no time frame set up. Jared found a space, close to one entrance.
“Want me to get another phone?” he said. “Maybe they’re here already. Do you know where they were coming from?”
“Detroit, same as us. It’s where they were to pick me up. But then things went wrong.”
“Who are these guys, may I ask?”
“No. Suppose I get away and you get caught. You will give up all your secrets. So, the less you know, the better.”
“Okay, just asking . . . Do we wait in the car? That’s kind of suspicious.”
“I agree. Go inside, one at time, meet at . . . Where will we meet?”
“Hungry?”
“Yes.”
“I see by the sign, the golden arches, there’s a McDonald’s inside. Meet me there? Easy to find.”
“Fine.”
They left the car, each going a different way, eyes hunting the presence of the tan van, neither seeing it. The mall swallowed each and, in time, reunited them at the McDonald’s.
After the meal, Jared said, “So, now get new throwaway?”
“Yes, little boy.”
Juba sat, drinking coffee, appearing uninterested, as Jared went to run his errand. He was a good boy, it turned out, and his cheer and wit, something long missing from Juba’s life, paid off as a small pleasure. He trusted Jared enough at this point that he felt no anxiety as the boy disappeared—and no relief when he reappeared twenty minutes later.
“You get it?”
“Yes.”
“Powered up?”
“Yes. You want to make a call?”
“Not now. We go to the car, wait there. They drive by and we hop in. Who would notice?”
“Nobody.”
So they ambled out, headed down the mall amid strangers who paid them no attention at all, came to the entrance that yielded the car and headed out.
It was all fine—and then it wasn’t.
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” said Jared, pulling the larger man back just inside the doors.
Juba wheeled on Jared, caught off guard by the physical contact.
“See out there,” Jared said quickly, “a mile out? That helicopter?”
He pointed. Above the trees, a speck moved horizontally through the air, its faintest of buzzes only barely reaching their ears.
“Yes . . .”
“I saw it fly by when we headed in a half hour ago. It’s still there. Farther out, but still. Could they have us?”
“Are you sure?” said Juba.
“Yes.”
“Go out, look about,” said Juba.
The boy sauntered out, pretending nonchalance, headed back.
“Okay,” he said. “I see the white roofs of police cars at major intersections. As if they’re . . . waiting for a signal.”
“How will they come?”
“God, I don’t know. Go to the car first, then sweep the mall.”
From far off, five squad cars punched out in a squeal and roar as they raced into the lot and blazed toward the sector where the Impala was parked, led by what looked like an Abrams tank but was some kind of black SWAT thing, moving too fast for its treads but clearly a war machine. All over the perimeter, gumballs lit up as officers moved to restrict access at intersections. The helicopter roared inbound.
“Okay,” said Juba, slipping his hand into the package he carried. “Little boy, you run away. When this is over, you surrender. You are no longer jihadi, you are kidnap victim.”
Jared was struck by this sudden mercy. The man had human graces after all and didn’t require of Jared his pointless death. But he knew it wouldn’t work.
“Not with my size tens on Oprah’s face. Come on, we can still make it out.”
He pulled the larger man to him, back to the main corridor, where they veered toward the Walmart at the end of the mall, while Jared said, “Call your friends, tell them we’ll be at the south end, down where the shopping carts are. The mall is hot, it’s about to be cop city.”
“No. I stay and fight. I take as many infidels—”
Jared saw his man walking down the corridor, methodically blowing up housewives and baby buggies and old guys with walkers until the State cops hosed him down with full auto. He’d have two hundred bullets in him.
“You don’t have to die today. Call them!”
As they moved, Juba dialed the number and spoke rapidly to the responder.
They reached the maw of the big store and plunged into Walmart, skidded past people loading up for the next seven months, past the Chinese menswear and the Filipino furniture and the Japanese electronics and the Brazilian shoes, turned hard, past many shoppers, skipped sideways and through the lines at the cash registers in front, hit the exit.
But instead of bulling his way directly out, Juba sidled up to a woman pushing a large shopping cart and said, in English, “I help,” and smiling, showed a crown of white teeth. It was there that Jared noticed something for the first time: Juba was a strikingly handsome man, square of face, strong of jaw, and regular of feature, and, with the baseball cap off, his shock of thick dark hair turned him almost debonaire.
The woman—she hadn’t been looked at by a man in decades, Jared guessed—lit up and instantly yielded to his charm. The two of them walked out into chaos, Jared a little behind but clearly a part of the same triad.
Sirens. Rushing, careening squad cars. Jared glanced northward, observed the Impala, surrounded by ninjas in black armor with subguns who’d just poured from a giant black armored truck, while squad cars with flashers and shotgun cops set up at every entrance.
They turned right, unconfronted, because as a self-contained, inward-directed family unit, they were off the cops’ radar. They went to the curb, the feds too forward-oriented to look peripherally, too busy setting up exactly as ordered, too hungry for a genuine terrorist to notice them.
It would be seconds before more cops flooded the area, and now the olive chopper took over the auditory universe as its rotors beat the air on the descent. Risking a peek back, Jared saw it land two hundred feet from the Impala, and two more men hurtled out of it.
They stood there, naked to all eyes yet rendered invisible by the beaming woman, who was having the time of her life.
A van materialized before them.
“My dear, I must leave,” crooned Juba, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She sighed, having had a wonderful date, if a bit of a truncated one.
Men pulled them in and flattened them out.
“Lie in here,” someone said, opening a hatch in the floor like the lid of a coffin, and they rolled in, seeing the light disappear as the hatch was closed behind them.
But Jared had gotten a glimpse of the save team.
They were Mexicans.