Stephen Hunter: Soft target

“No, not quite. See, I’m thinking that for now they’re not going to pay attention to the upper floors. But as time goes by, they may send teams upstairs to root people out and herd them down to join the hostages. The more hostages they have, the more power to negotiate. So I’d go up one floor to three and find refuge there. Because when they come for us, one team will start at the top and work their way down. And another will come up to the second and work up. So the middle floor is the safest in the long run. Plus, if the cops do assault, they may drive some gunmen up here, to this floor, and have a shootout here, and trust me, you don’t want to be in the middle of it. Does that make sense?”

A surge of good cheer arose and Ray noticed that all the women were buoyed at the prospect of doing something to help their chances. Except for Rose.

“Rose, what’s wrong?”

“When the shooting started, I had the same idea. I ran out the back and tried the stairwell. See, all the locks in the building are part of the software. He’s locked it. We’re stuck here.”

“Are the doors heavy?”

“They’re not as heavy as the outside doors. Those are metal, sunk in metal. But these are tough, heavy wood and you’d have to batter and kick an hour to get them down. Or shoot your way through.”

Ray didn’t say anything, but he knew what that meant. Yes, it confirmed that somehow the attack team had taken over the security program that underlay the mall operations protocols. They had locked the doors remotely. They were in complete control.

He looked carefully at the SCADA representation of MEMTAC 6.2 where its captured images blazed from his own monitors. Quickly he checked off the key points.

LOCKDOWN ENABLEDELEVATORS DISABLEDESCALATORS DISABLED

No surprises there. Once you get in, you learn the culture of the system, the assumptions it’s built on, how the German geniuses at Siemens think, how thorough they were, how they swept up their sandwich crumbs after lunch, and how shiny the bathroom fixtures were.

He continued to monitor, examining the ecosystem of the empire.

AIR-CONDITIONING ONTEMPERATURE CONTROL 72FIRE SPRINKLERS ENABLEDFLUORESCENT LIGHTING SYSTEM ENABLEDAREA Z FUSES FUNCTION 100 PERCENTPOWER GRID STABLESANTA CLAUS DEAD

No, no, it didn’t say that, but he had a morbid sense of humor and he saw it in his imagination, as he also thought about what he could do with his power. Since the owners of this mall owned dozens of other malls in the US and Canada, all using the MEMTAC-driven SCADA, all linked, he could really raise hell if he wanted by refusing credit cards, turning cash registers insane, locking out and in, freezing elevators, directing the Coke machines to urge customers to buy Pepsi all across the land. But really. That wasn’t the point. The point was

… the game.

And then as an afterthought, his piece de resistance.

INTERNET CONNECTION DISABLED

Ha. I hear you knocking but you can’t come in.

Well actually, there was one way in. It would be interesting to see if there was anybody out there smart enough to figure it out.

“I can’t get in,” said a computer technician from the Minnesota State Police. “Whoever he is, he’s taken the thing off line. It’s internally sealed. I’ve run all my conventional link search programs and I’m not getting a thing. It’s a vault.”

“Keep trying,” said Douglas Obobo, who was the newly appointed commandant of the state cops. “I know you won’t let me down.”

A special warmth came into Colonel Obobo’s voice on the last sentence. I know you won’t let me down. That was the Obobo touch, known in its limited way and possibly about to become more famous. He had the gift of inspiration, of making people believe, first in him, second in the mission, third in the larger program that sustained the mission, and finally in the administrative entity that embraced all. It was why he was the youngest man in history, at forty-four, to become a superintendent of state police, and the first African American. It had been national news.

“Sir, we need more sophisticated programs and more sophisticated IT guys. The federal people will have that; maybe they can get in.”

Obobo said, “I understand and that’s why I have federal people on the way. I know if we all work together, we can get this done with a minimum of loss.” He spoke with the confidence of the man who knew the truth.

And why shouldn’t he? His success had been pretty much a certainty. The son of a Kenyan graduate student at Harvard and a Radcliffe anthropology major, he’d graduated from both Harvard and Harvard Law. But instead of taking the conventional path to whatever the American Dream was, he’d joined the Boston Police Department as a beat cop. He was quickly absorbed into the Homicide Bureau and had been the front man on a series of highly publicized cases, where he revealed himself to be a mellifluous speaker and a quick wit and to exude a kind of enlightened law enforcement attitude that could console the races, even in a tough town like Boston.

Despite the fact that he never broke a case, arrested a suspect, won a gunfight, led a raid, or testified in court, in five years he left the department to become the lead investigator for the Senate Subcommittee on Government Fraud, where again his charisma made him a star and got him noticed on the national level. Run for office, many said. You have the gift.

But he was a cop, he said, and committed to the healing of America by progressive law enforcement policy. The old days of kick-ass and coerced confession were gone; the new day of respect for all had arrived.

He became, quickly, the assistant commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, then the chief of the Omaha Police Department, though he cared little for the snowy plains far from the national media. But they kept dropping by anyway, and he made the national news more than any other police executive in the country, in 2008, 2009, and 2010. Finally, his big move, to head the Minnesota State Police with the idea of bringing it into the twenty-first century, making it the premier investigative agency in the state while aiming to cut traffic fatalities to a new low. That hadn’t happened yet and in fact no stated goal had been accomplished, but it was hard to hold that against a man struggling against the old culture and the old ways. The media loved him for his effort. Somehow, he’d ended up on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, subject of a gushing profile by David Banjax.

Now, his first real crisis. He understood that America, the Mall, was a mess. First responders had had a nightmare approaching, as shoppers fled in the thousands, most in cars, gridlocking the place so that incoming LE simply added to the confusion. Meanwhile, the reports were sketchy. Mall security was not answering and had not communicated since the first 10–32 alert went out. Thousands of 911 calls crowded the circuits, all some variety on the theme “Machine gunners are in the mall,” or “I lost my grandma in the mess, help me find my grandma.”

Grandma was going to have to wait, unless she was already dead.

But he also understood that this was an opportunity beyond measure, in some way a gift. The national spotlight would again shine on him and the decisions he made, the leadership he showed-the resolution coupled with fairness, the fortitude coupled with compassion, the eloquence coupled with wisdom-would be on fine display. It wasn’t about ambition, he always said; it was about gifts. He had been given many; it was mandated, therefore, that he give back.

“You know,” his longtime civilian advisor and public affairs guru David Renfro had whispered in his ear on the thunderous ride over, “few men get a chance like this. This is an opportunity we have to seize by the throat.”