Greenville (III)
The sweep was done, and they had nothing.
“Fuck,” said Nick.
“This guy’s the best,” said Bob.
“I know my people were on plan,” said the colonel who supervised Ohio’s Highway Patrol and stood with them near the garden at the center of the mall under plastic palm fronds and next to gurgling toxic water in a filthy open sewer among the palms’ fake terra-cotta pots. “Nobody got out after we commenced our operation. There was just a few seconds there where the cars hadn’t quite gotten to all the exits.”
“Colonel, your people did fine, I’m sure,” said Nick. “And a nod to Greenville, they helped too. I’m just thinking I should have sent the cover cars in first, without siren and flashing lights. When they were in position, we hit the Impala with SWAT.”
“There was hardly time to consider everything,” the colonel said. “The doors were covered within two minutes, maybe one. I don’t know how anybody could have made it out.”
“Anybody couldn’t have. But this guy, he could have,” said Nick.
The search continued, but now at a slower pace. Closets opened by heavily armed police, civilians cleared and let go, aisles and bins explored and probed, storerooms and break rooms penetrated. It might, it could, maybe it would, yield something—but neither Nick nor Bob held out much hope.
Meanwhile, FBI techs dusted the car for prints and in a fast first pass had come up with two of Juba’s right thumb, and lots of others, which meant that one trophy of the operation—a consolation prize, to be sure—would be a whole set of prints. They also noted a pile of plastic grit in the well of the backseat and half the butt of a shotgun.
“He’s cut it down for practicality,” said Bob. “He can hide it better, pull it out fast.”
Nick nodded, then he had to go back to the phone for the tenth time. This round, he was on it with D.C. for a long time, explaining, taking responsibility, offering his resignation twice, both times turned down, because the people there only were interested in one thing: what does Swagger think?
“They think you’re a god. Don’t worry, I won’t tell them the truth. Anyway, talk to them.” He handed the phone over.
“Swagger.”
“You’re on speakerphone with the Director and four Assistant Directors and the head of the Counterterrorism Division,” said the voice.
“What can I do?” said Swagger.
“Your read, please, Mr. Swagger.”
“We almost got him. We know he was there. In my humble, Director, Memphis put together a brilliant plan on the fly and—”
“Swagger, no, leave that for later. Tell us where you think we are and what you think is next.”
“I would just add that we have consistently underestimated this guy.” Oops, maybe that was selling out Nick. Can’t do that. “I mean, I have continually underestimated this guy. Everything we throw at him is nothing new. He’s done it before. He doesn’t panic, he doesn’t quit, he improvises. He’s a pro’s pro.”
“Your next move would be . . . ?”
“Well, I wouldn’t set up roadblocks. He’ll never give in to that. On top of that, we don’t know who helped him split, and in what vehicle. He may be with another cell—four guys with light machine guns and RPGs, and if some country cops out in the haystacks bounce them, it could go to guns in a bad way, with a lot of people—cops and civilians—going down. The one thing we know is, he’s got a cut-down Remington 1100 on him, and that’s a big, bad toy. You don’t want him going Remington on you, which is what he’ll do if you corner him. You have to ambush him. You have to be there first, and let him walk into it, and take him hard, with overwhelming force. Still dangerous, but maybe one degree less so. So I’d go back to the brainiac stuff.”
“Our analysts?”
“I think some hard thinking by your top people should come up with some possibilities that would narrow the search areas. Given what we think he’s going to do, he’s got to have certain things. We have to anticipate him. Along those lines, Nick wants to set me up with a computer genius. I think that’s a good idea. I have a series of attributes he will need to have at his disposal to move on to the next step, maybe you could use that as some kind of index or filter, or something.”
“All right, taken into consideration. Put Memphis back on.”
So Nick talked to them for a few more minutes, and then a Greenville detective came up, whispered to a sergeant, who whispered to the colonel, who indicated something to Nick.
Nick ended the call.
“We’ve got them on surveillance footage from McDonald’s. You guys want to take a look?”
It was him, no doubt. Not in the center of the frame, not in the cone of focus, but definitely a man of intimidation and danger. He sat in a booth just off the cash register and delivery counter and, by a twist of fate, facing toward the camera, while his companion, sitting across from him, was just the back of the head.
He wolfed down two burgers and a soft drink, seemed to savor the French fries, and looked to be engaging in conversation with the boy. Meanwhile, in a box in the corner of the frame, integers raced by that indicated number of frames and time of day.
“Looks like McDonald’s has a fan,” said Nick.
“Nobody don’t like them fries,” said Bob. “Freeze it, please.”
They were in the mall security office, amid a bank of video screens, all of them recording and feeding from various key spots around the installation. The McDonald’s had three cameras, because ruckuses were most likely to start in spots where teenagers gathered. Thus, all things considered, it was a pretty good show.
“We’ll need to ASAP this to D.C. Our labs can enhance. Maybe we’ll get a clearer picture, something we can put out. That would cut way down on his maneuverability and operational freedom.”
Bob looked at the blurred image.
“Can you bring it up?”
“No, sir,” said the mall security boss. “It’s mainly meant for figuring out what kid hit what other kid.”
“Got it,” said Bob.
He stared at the image, but the more he bored into it, the more incoherent it became, until it was just a fuzzy mess of pixels, losing all form and content. What he saw was what he expected, but nothing actionable. His head was big; it went with his big frame and big hands, which were seen dwarfing the individual French fries as he ate them. He was clearly in command, but, in actual point of fact, he didn’t look particularly fierce: a big guy, but no different than a million other men in other malls. Not bad-looking. Baseball cap—black, no insignia—a hoodie, jeans, the shoes not visible. Clean-shaven, not that fake tough look movie stars and podiatrists affected these days. Everybody wanted to look tough, while this guy, and all true tough guys, just wanted to blend in.
At one point, he sent the boy on an errand, got himself a cup of coffee, returned to the table, and just sat. He didn’t appear to be unusually wary or agitated. It was clear he trusted the kid, who, after all, could have sold him out as a way of walking away from flattening Theola Peppers’s face. But the kid was back, and the sack revealed—another freeze, thank you—that he’d bought a phone.
“Disposable,” said Nick. “One call, then into the river. If we track the phone, the GPS signal just takes us to the river. Standard operating procedure.”
The two rose to leave. Upright, Juba was large for his ethnic grouping, with that linebacker’s body and the sparkle, the large and powerful muscles evident with each step, even though he was slightly pigeon-toed. He and the boy ambled out of Mickey D’s, back into the world, all proteined-up for fresh outrage.
“Is that it?” Nick asked.
“One more segment we think is them. Another camera, looking down the hall toward the west parking lot exit, number 2B.”
“Please,” said Nick.
This one, at least, explained something. The two were shuffling nonchalantly to the doors, Juba with fourteen inches of sawed-off shotgun wrapped in what appeared to be a hoodie. They opened the doors, stepped out, the doors closed behind them, and—
A second later, they were back, their postures changed radically. Now their faces were clenched, in fear or anger, clearly alarmed, bursting with a palpable need to move or flee or pull guns on something.
“Freeze it,” said Nick. “He saw us. The kid, I mean. Mr. Supervisor, as far as I can make out, that entrance looks directly east?”
“Yes, sir,” said the security chief.
“That’s exactly where we were laying off, goddammit. So the kid sees the chopper, and the plan is shot. Little fucker. Look at the time.”
According to the data window, it was 16:13:34 p.m., thirty-seven seconds before the moment the SWAT truck and its five wingmen began to rush the Impala.
“Okay,” said Nick.
The images started moving again. Juba was speaking urgently to the boy and seemed to reach into his package as if to unlimber the Remington and get ready to go to war. But the kid grabbed him and began to pull him. They advanced toward the camera—another freeze, unfortunately, didn’t provide a better facial of either—and disappeared, clearly to exit, one way or the other, off camera.
“So the kid talked him out of going jihad on Greenville, Ohio,” said Bob. “Saved a lot of folks from getting whacked.”
“I’ll be sure to mention it to his parole officer . . . Mr. Supervisor, that’s it? You don’t have any exteriors of these guys pulling away in the seconds before the squad cars arrived?”
“Nothing my people could see,” said the supervisor.
Nick gestured to Chandler, who’d made it down by car and joined the party a few minutes earlier.
“Jean, I want people to go to every retail outlet on every street surrounding the mall and check the security cameras. Maybe somewhere there’s coverage on who picked them up and in what kind of vehicle. Meanwhile, arrange for our tech people to get the stuff Supervisor Gray’s cameras covered back to D.C. for analysis.”
“Yes, sir.”
Nick’s phone rang. It was D.C.
“Fuck, not again,” he said. “How many times can I resign?”
He slid it on, ID’d himself, said, “Yes,” and listened, nodding. It was a detailed conversation, perhaps three minutes long. “Yeah,” he finally said, “good. Late but good. But it points the way.”
He hung up and turned to Bob and Chandler.
“It was Cyber Division. The kid emailed his buddy. Fifteen fifty-nine. Off a disposable. Juba sends him to buy a disposable, he does, but he sneaks in a quick update to Johnny Jones, to give his mom a heads-up. They just accessed the GPS to give us the location, which, unfortunately, is where we’re standing right now.”
“The jihadi who missed his mom,” Swagger said.
“Yeah, but it’s the pattern. Whenever Juba needs to make contact with whoever, he sends Jared out to buy a disposable. One call, then into the river. But Jared sneaks in an email or a call to his pal, to reach his mom, and we’re on that. See, if we can nail the area, get our reaction team in place, ready to chopper to the site, we can nail him. That’s how we’ve got to do it.”
“So we’ve got to anticipate where he’ll be,” said Bob. “We get the area tight enough, everything falls into place.”
“He’ll do it again. He misses Mom. He’ll always miss Mom. So you’ll work with the computers to come up with a filter to pinpoint the area, we’ll scour the wires for reports, and also look at it from the weapons acquisition point of view, all of which will point us to an area. The kid is the key to the whole thing.”