Stephen Hunter - Soft target

“If I hide in the ladies’ underwear store, what has my life accomplished?” Ray said. “You’ll be all right. As I said, you stay here, you commit psychologically to the long term, you don’t expect help now or in an hour or a day or a week, and you will survive.”

“He thinks he’s John Wayne,” said Molly, bitterly. “John Wayne was a fantasy. He never existed. He’s a dream, a phantom, a ghost.”

“He existed,” said Ray, “and his name was Bob Lee Swagger. He’s my father.”

“You don’t even have a gun,” said Rose.

“Then I will have to get a gun,” said Ray.

“Okay,” said Lavelva quietly. “Now, boys and girls, let’s go back to the bathroom, all right? The name of this game is Let’s hide in the bathroom.”

“Miss Lavelva,” said DAVID 3–4, “I’m scared.”

“David, don’t you be scared now. No one’s going to hurt you, you trust Miss Lavelva on this, sweetie, okay? Now, kids, come on now, let’s put on our quiet shoes and our quiet voices and go back to the bathroom and it will be all right.”

Somehow-she could feel their fear in the drop-off of energy, the quiet that overtook them, the lassitude that seemed to creep through their small bones-she got them back and into the room.

“Larry,” she said to the eldest, “you be in charge here, you hear? You stay till Miss Lavelva comes back. Y’all stay quiet now and listen to Larry.”

“Miss Lavelva, I’m scared too,” said SHERRY 4–6.

“It’s okay, Sherry,” said Miss Lavelva. “And when this is over, Miss Lavelva goin’ take you to get something nice to eat, maybe french fries or frosties, whatever you want, a nice treat, from Miss Lavelva.”

That seemed to quiet them down.

Lavelva slipped out. She was alone in the bigger room. She looked at the translucent glass blocks that marked off the day care center and saw nothing. Maybe he’d missed her. Maybe he was gone.

Asad could not read the English in the mall directory pamphlet, but he got the representation of the map well enough, and the imam had drawn a circle around the location of the day care center. Yes, this was the Colorado corridor, yes, COLORADO 2-145, the numbers were right. It seemed that helpfully each store had an address that indexed it to the map, and even though he had little English, he recognized the address NE C-2-145. He divined practically that it meant Colorado corridor, second floor, 145 retail designation, and since evens were on the left and odds on the right, it had to be on his left. Even though he assumed that he had free range, he was careful. He was aware that many of the stores still hid customers. What if some of them came rushing out and jumped him? Then he laughed. No Americans would do that. They were a soft and decadent people, and here, in this palace of luxury and greed, their reflexes and warrior minds, if they even had them, would be shoved way down by shock and fear. They would lie in the dark weeping, praying to their absurd man on the cross, saying to him pleasepleasepleaseplease.

He missed it. He looked at a store and saw an address that read COLORADO 2-157. He turned back, began to edge his way down the corridor. It was quiet and dark, strewn with abandoned bags, tipped carriages, shoes, hats, jackets, all signs of the intensity of the panic. A few windows had been broken but no looting appeared to have taken place.

Slowly he tracked the stores, stopping every once in a while to check for signs of threat. He saw none. And then he came to it. For about thirty feet, the gaudy glass windows of the storefronts yielded to glass brick, and a double door stood in the center. Above, a sign must have announced the purpose of the location, though he could not read it. He slid to the glass doors and peered in, and soon his eyes made out toys on the floor, children’s furniture tilted sideways, that sort of thing. This had to be where the babies were. But it was quiet. Maybe they had moved the babies, but he didn’t see how. Maybe they were inside, in hiding.

He slipped in, his eyes in full search mode, scanning what lay before him in semidarkness, and everywhere he looked, he swept with the muzzle of the baby Kalashnikov, his finger on the trigger, a full orange magazine clicked solidly in place.

Then he saw her.

She was dark, like him. She stood, facing him, twenty-five feet away. Her face was a stone mask. He read her bones and saw that she was not Somali, thin-nosed and — lipped, high-foreheaded, like him, but still of Africa, with that stoic face of the sub-Saharan peoples, broad of nose. She wore her hair in the African style, in tiny ringlets all over her head.

“Sister,” he said in Somali, and she replied in English, two words he knew.

“Fuck you,” she said.

Nothing worked. When you busted kiddie porn, you pierced. You fought your way through pretty elementary protection schemes, worms, predatory malware, you looked for back doors, baited and phished, you ran decoding or password-finding programs, and eventually, with stamina and creativity and a strong stomach, you got in. Then the deal was trying to put a network together, finding out who was buying the stuff, who was distributing the stuff, who was producing the stuff. Then you penetrated, playing the role of John A. Smith, corporate lawyer, father of five, country club member, Kiwanis, Rotary, bar association vice president with a hunger for watching children violated, and you put all that together, documented the linkages, and you took it to whichever fed or state prosecutor in whichever state had the most juice and eagerness and you pounced. Yes, you got dirty but you took down someone much dirtier.

But none of those programs worked. Whoever was playing this game had a brain or two in his head.

Neal had tried everything, had madly improvised program improvements, had written enough code to start a new social network, yet SCADA was impenetrable by virtue of the tough defenses built into MEMTAC 6.2 and its resolute steadfastness in avoiding temptations to jump to online status.

“How’s it coming, Jeff?” asked Dr. Benson.

“This guy’s good. He tightened up their protocols so I can’t even get the SCADA meme up, just to get a rope on the culture. I’ve been to the Siemens website and it’s clear what this guy has come up with is even beyond them. Jesus, he could be making a billion a year writing code for Steve or Bill and getting laid by nerd-babes left and right, and he’s doing this shit?”

“Maybe he doesn’t like nerd-babes,” Benson said. “So what are you going to do?”

“Pray.”

“Swell. I’ll tell them that-”

“Pray, as in, ‘talk to God.’ God being the engineer at Siemens who designed it. You better get me a translator fast, Bob, because I don’t speak one word of German.”

Lavelva looked at him. This was it, then. Somali, like so many Somalis in the area, thin, arrogant, reeking of narcissism because he considered himself so beautiful with the thin nose and the thin lips. Presumably the hair was that thick froth so Somali in its wiriness, but she could not tell for he wore a patterned scarf tied tightly to his head, held in place by a band. He wore baggy jeans and a hoodie, like any banger she had seen, and she’d seen a lot of them, Somali and otherwise, and he carried a Kalashnikov and he had a handgun dangling in a holster. He was all warred-up. His eyes seemed slightly crazed, all Nubian-warrior-lion-killing bullshit in his mind, and that was what made the Somali gangs so feared on the East Side and anywhere they left their signs.

He called to her in his jive.

“Fuck you,” she replied. No way she backed down to this sucker, no way she gave him the kids. No way, no way, no way.

He smiled, showing bright teeth. He walked to her, full of bravado and confidence, lion-proud with his big guns and a knife. He spoke again to her in his gibberish. She held her ground.