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  But then Simultaneously two or three of the gun boys began to leap with what looked like joy and clap each other on the back. Then one pointed his rifle upward and jerked off a batch of shots while others pounded him raucously. A whisper ran through the crowd and it came to and blew over Mom and Sally.

  “There must be an agreement! We’ll be getting out of here soon! We just have to hold on a little longer!”

  Mom didn’t buy it, not for a second. She’d seen boys like these before: they loved their guns, their power, their uniforms too much. They had too little wisdom or imagination; they’d never felt responsibility. They were just children, really, and even if someone was directing them-no evidence, except in the earphones that suggested a leader somewhere addressing them and giving orders and instructions-they would behave like children, pointlessly, foolishly violent and cruel.

  Then a confirmation came. Someone with an iPhone had managed to call up CNN, which was reporting an agreement in the Minnesota standoff! This news flew through the crowd and was confirmed by other iPhoners faster than the first news. Now the optimism was palpable, the sense of relief. Oh, it was so good. Mom allowed herself to half believe, but her hard experience in the world still left her worried.

  Sally peeked up.

  “Mom, what is it?” she asked in Hmong.

  “Good news. They say we’ll be out of here in a bit, some kind of deal has been made.”

  “Thank God,” said Sally.

  “Sally, do not let yourself believe until it is true. Guard against feelings of gratitude and relief. It may still be a long, tragic day and you might still have to use all your skills to survive it.”

  Suddenly a shadow crossed them. Both looked up.

  The black man who’d shot the hostages and who’d bought Sally as his bride stood there, all insolence, pride, glee, his weapon resting casually on his shoulder. He smiled, white teeth showing brightly. Then he knelt down.

  “I will have my wedding night,” he said, “when the time is right. You will come to love me, and possibly when you give yourself to Maahir, Maahir will save you. The martyrs are cheering because they know that the killing is near.”

  The young man turned to the imam.

  “So can you watch the shop for a while?”

  “I’m sorry, what do you-”

  “Oh, nothing’s going to happen for a while. They’ll be driving the Kaafi boys to the airport, you’ll see, and then there’ll be the TV drama of the boarding and takeoff and all the talking heads will check in, and then we’ll move up to another game level on them. But meanwhile, I’ve got a little something to check. You can hang here. I’ll be back in a second.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He reached under his console and took out a plastic bag that could only contain a gas mask. Or another head. But it was a gas mask. He pulled it on carefully, making adjustments. Then he went to the console, armed himself with the mouse, dragged the cursor to SECURITY OFFICE, and clicked. The icon told him it was still remotely locked. He ordered UNLOCK.

  Then he rose, snatched up an AK, and left through the front door. It was only a quarter rotation around and there was no pedestrian traffic. A few windows had been broken, a few carriages abandoned, a few shoes lost. It had an after-the-zombie-apocalypse feeling he kind of liked, thank you, George Romero and all your clones. He passed the big, bright, deserted RealDeal that sold more TV sets than any other retail outlet in America, saw more zombie ruin inside but still utter stillness as all the trapped shoppers would presume him a killer and quake in their hiding places, and beyond that he came to the unmarked door that was the security office.

  Unlocked by computer fiat, it yielded to his push, admitting him to a tunnel that led to more heavy doors, and they too opened cheerfully.

  Inside: not pleasant.

  Six dead guys. Wrong place, wrong time, fellows, the way of the universe. He felt not a morsel of pity for them and-this was his gift or something-could not imagine them as men of families, with lives, relatives, kids, histories, contributions. They were just sort of repulsive in their twisted grotesqueness.

  He walked to a device of some mystery mounted on a wall. A small green bulb gleamed brightly. Oh, they think they’re so smart. Oh, they think they’ve got it figured. Some boy genius of the FBI or the NSA or the CIA, working away, he’d managed to connect with the system, thinking that Satan had forgotten something. Too bad for him. So it goes with the weak and virtuous.

  He smashed the green-lit modem two times with his rifle butt, the second driving the shattered plastic mechanism, its guts of circuits and wires and smashed plastic hanging out, to the floor.

  He was doing what he had always dreamed of. He was smashing the machine. In its tangled, ripped wiring, in its shattered plastic, in its broken solenoids, he saw the future.

  Ain’t it cool?

  TWO MONTHS EARLIER

  Mr. Reilly was baffled. The owner-actually, the FFL was still in his wife’s name, though she’d died three months earlier-of Reilly’s Sporting Goods and Surplus, in far suburban, nearly rural Twin Falls, Minnesota, he stared at the two crates, one quite large, one quite small, that rested on the UPS man’s freight dolly. He bent, saw the return address on the shipping label as WTI, Laredo, Texas, which he knew to be West Texas Imports, his supplier for low-end Eastbloc surplus military weapons, which he sold to working-class hunters and gun folks who couldn’t afford a big-ticket American deer rifle.

  About a hundred mounted animals witnessed the somewhat confused transaction between the old fellow and the man in brown, and most of them had horns, though of course a few were badgers, ducks, even, whimsically, a groundhog noted for its sagacity and insight. Also on the cozy, wood-paneled walls: rifles, rifles, rifles, most bolt guns, a few ARs, a few shotguns. In the fluorescent-lit cabinets lay the handguns, gleaming, laid out neatly by someone who took the responsibility for display of merchandise and price, the bedrock of retail, seriously.

  “I just don’t see why it’s such a big crate,” he said to Wally, the UPS man.

  “Mr. Reilly, do you want to refuse it? No big deal, I’ll just dolly it back to the truck and we’ll return it.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Reilly, still a little foggy, “let’s ask Andrew.” He turned and called, “Andrew. Andrew! ”

  Andrew stepped from the stockroom. He was a tall, thin young man in his early twenties, and he was the best thing that had come into Mr. Reilly’s life since Flora died. He was punctual, hardworking, entirely trustworthy, good with customers, reliable, and honest. He had a shock of blond hair and a fair complexion. He could have been any neighbor’s son, and it was his compulsion toward tidiness that had turned the store into such a masterpiece of organization.

  “He doesn’t understand why the WTI crate is so big,” said Wally.

  “Mr. Reilly, I’ll check it. Maybe it’s two or three orders in one.”

  “You don’t want to refuse it?” said Wally.

  “No, I guess not,” said Mr. Reilly. “Okay, Andrew?”

  “Yes sir. I’ll run it down through the computer records. They do make mistakes, but I think we did have an outstanding order on Chinese SKSes, and maybe this is them. Or maybe it’s them plus a duplicate order. Wouldn’t be the first time. I’ll straighten it out, and if it’s wrong, you can pick it up tomorrow, Wally.”

  “Sure.”

  Carefully, Wally ran his digital reader over the bar codes on each package label, thus recording accurately and in perpetuity the fact that both packages had been delivered to their destination.

  Andrew hefted the handles of the dolly, got it unmoored from the floor upon which it rested, and wheeled it back into the stockroom. He returned with the empty dolly and slid it over to Wally, who took control of it from him, turned as Mr. Reilly unlocked the door, as it was well after closing time, and returned to his brown van. Reilly waved good-bye, then looked around his store, part of a decaying strip mall that had been on the downhill since big boys like Cabela’s and Midway
USA put everything one click away.

  “You’ll get it straightened out, Andrew?” he asked.

  “Absolutely. It may take a while, I’ve got to go through the records. I may have to call them. And I haven’t even begun to put the handguns in the safe.”

  “Oh, I’ll do that.”

  “No, no,” said Andrew. “I know you’re tired. I’ll take care of everything.”

  That pleased the old man. There were over seventy handguns on display in the store and, though it had never been robbed, the old man wanted it never to be robbed, which committed him or Andrew to a half hour’s hard labor every night, picking up the guns and carefully stowing them in the two big safes behind the counter, then locking them tight. The rifles he could leave on display; the thieves were mostly black people from the city and they only wanted handguns.

  “Okay, Andrew. I think we’re due for an ATF walk-through anytime now and I don’t want any trouble. There was never any trouble with Flora, she kept the records so neatly. It’s not my skill, you know. Not my kind of mind. I’d rather talk hunting with customers. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “It’s not a problem. I’ll get to the bottom of this and by the time you get in tomorrow, we’ll be shipshape.”

  “Make sure to-”

  “I know, I know,” said Andrew, “log the shipment into the ATF bound book, no worries.”

  Andrew knew the ATF regs forward and backward, maybe better than Flora. If any gun spent twenty-four hours in a retail outlet, it had to be accounted for in the big log book ATF required, which would show its arrival and ultimately its dispersal, either via retail sale or, rarely, shipment back to wholesaler.

  “Mr. Reilly, you go on home. I’ll run this through, and if it’s a mistake, I’ll relabel and ready for shipment back and Wally can pick them up tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Andrew. Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  It took the old man more than a few minutes to get himself together enough to leave. Since Flora’s death, he’d become a ditherer. He’d start one thing, get halfway through, then move on to another. In the end, he had accomplished nothing except to half start a bunch of things that poor Andrew would have to follow through on. Mr. Reilly knew he had this tendency and he was too reliant on Andrew, but he’d never really come out of the fog that his wife’s death had caused. Anyway, in time, he was set to leave, and he yelled good night to Andrew, unlocked then relocked the door, and got into his car and drove away, wondering if he could still make the early bird rate at the Walloon Lake Sizzler.

  As soon as the old man left, Andrew used an X-acto knife to slice the shipping pouch on the big crate and slid out the bill of lading. He knew that it contained sixteen Bulgarian AK-74s from WTI. They’d arrived in the United States as surplus kit purchased by Century Arms, of Vermont. Century’s not particularly subtle armorers had replaced the full auto parts with American-made semiauto parts, which by regulation qualified them for US retail sale, and somewhat haphazardly reassembled them. Usually they worked; sometimes they didn’t. Those guns were wholesaled to WTI, who overstamped them with their own emblem, then repackaged them for entry in the great American gun ocean, 300 million and growing. The smaller package contained two hundred of the orange Chinese magazines held to be the best on the market. Nobody cared much about them and they went uncovered in ATF regs.

  Andrew recorded each gun by serial number off the bill of lading as well as all other pertinent data. Then, using the blade again, he sliced the box end open skillfully, careful not to make any jagged cuts or rip anything in haste. He slid out the guns, each of which arrived packed in a Styrofoam box, then sliced the tape on the boxes. The guns lay inside, along with a moldy leather strap, a ten-round aftermarket magazine, a bayonet, a brass oiler, and a poorly translated manual. The 74s were real cool. He’d seen them initially in the first edition of Modern Combat, where Merc Force Blue used them to take down a Soviet missile silo in Uzbek that had been commandeered by Muslim terrorists. In that game, they’d worked well, though of course the 74s fired a smaller round than the 47s, an Eastbloc variant on our own 5.56 NATO. The cool thing about the Modern Combat series, as opposed to Medal of Honor or Black Merx or Commando Ops, was that the game took into account the muzzle energy of its weapons, so when you smoked a muji on the 74, it took more center of mass hits to put him down. You had to make that adjustment, just like in real life, or he was the one that got the kill.

  In any event the guns bore no surprises: standard Red design, utilitarian, untroubled by aesthetics, uninterested in making a statement other than “This machine exists to kill people,” with rough triggers and painted or baked enamel finishes. It was a gun for small, brown people, with a smallish pistol grip and a shortish buttstock, just the thing for little men trying to upset a big, US-supported government, the rifle’s purpose the world over. The metal was pressed-that is, stamped out crudely-or industrially bent to form by some huge, clanky device in a hellish, dismal, steam-punk factory next to a river of sludge in some perpetually smog-shrouded Eastbloc or ChiCom city. Its makers were all government workers, paid in pennies by the national defense industry; they went home to nothingness and squalor, while the guns, in the millions, were shipped to hot spots, under license to their original artisans in the then Soviet Union. That’s why the pieces were so crappy; no gunmakers’ craft here, as was evident in the older Winchesters and Remingtons in the old man’s rifle racks.

  Next, Andrew filled each of the Styrofoam boxes with scrap metal from decommissioned shopping carts he’d bought with cash and smuggled into Mr. Reilly’s store. About six pounds in each box, just an array of coaster wheels, tubes, gratings, screws, washers, and bolts. When the lids were retaped over the trays to form a whole, the whole reinserted in the crate, the crate carefully sealed by packing tape, the result was a package equally the size and weight of the one that had arrived, with the same shifty, noisy density. Short of an X-ray exam, no one could tell the difference between the first package and this one.

  Now he went to the store computer and printed out a West Texas Imports address label to patch over the Reilly’s Sporting Goods label. Except that it contained carefully engineered errors: the return zip code for Reilly’s Sporting Goods and for West Texas Imports were both a number off, the 4 from West Texas being where the 3 from Reilly’s should be, and vice versa. Computer error, obviously.

  Then, the piece de resistance. It was a UPS Next Day Air bar code, self-adhesive, and the key to the UPS system. It was fake, carefully hand-manufactured by the clever Andrew in his lair in a Minneapolis suburb. No human eyes could read it, but the computers would send the package to New Mexico, to a store that didn’t exist on a street that didn’t exist. At that point, the confused driver would use his optical reader on the bar code for the return address and send it on its way. But its way was not back to Mr. Reilly; it went instead to another store that didn’t exist on a street that didn’t exist. Then it would go to the UPS undeliverable warehouse in Schenectady, New York, with thousands of other items, a facility bound to become overloaded with misaddressed packages during the upcoming Christmas shipping season as clerks struggled to keep up with and track each package either to its proper destination or back to its point of origin.

  Tomorrow he would log them out and record the transaction in the bound book for ATF and in the notebook of shipping records that UPS issued to all commercial customers. The missing guns, thought delivered to their destination by the sender and thought returned to their sender by Mr. Reilly, would go unnoticed for months. No money was missing to alert any bean counters either, as Andrew stole about five thousand dollars a month from his wealthy father by equally intricate computer strategies and had financed the transaction out of that fund.

  No need for ceremony or delicacy, not with guns like this. Grabbing them five or six at a time like pieces of firewood, Andrew hauled them to the truck bed of his vehicle and dumped them in. The magazines got the same rough treatment. These ba
bies were all designed for rough treatment, that’s what made them so perfect for what he had half-facetiously named Operation Mumbai after the Pakistani murder mission in that Hindu city that killed 160 people.

  Andrew had a momentary lapse in his otherwise tightly focused attention. He had nostalgia for Mumbai, almost as if he had been there with the kill team, had stridden boldly down the great hotel’s corridors, down the city’s backstreets, through its bazaars, with his own AK-74 and a satchelful of grenades. Everything that moved or breathed was a target. It was a night of pure anarchy slouching to Mumbai to be born in the hot spill of the empty brass from the hyperactive bolt of the gun in full auto mode, from the pop of pressure when the Sov grenades detonated, from the scurrying figures in the darkness, stilled forever when lanced by a fleet of 5.45 hurtling into them. Andrew was a collector of apocalypses; he loved those final moments of the fall, when Troy went up in flames, when the Red T-34s rolled through Berlin at the head of an army of rapists and looters, when the sepoys went crazed and put all the British women and children, screaming, helpless, down the well at Cawnpore.

  Why was this? Andrew could not tell you, nor could his many expensive medical and psychological advisors. Perhaps it was some excess brain chemical, perhaps he’d walked in on his mother giving his father a blow job, perhaps one of the bigger boys at school had smacked him in the mouth, turning him forever into a hater, or perhaps he was simply evil in the Old Testament sense. After all, as he had noted many times, evil is fun. It truly is.

  He came back into the world as we know it and reacquired the self that he showed the world most of the time-steady, handsome, thorough, creative, obsequious. He went back into Reilly’s, carefully put the seventy handguns into the safe, swept the place out for the tenth time-some habits die hard-made sure everything was secure, then armed the alarm, stepped out the back door, and pulled it shut and locked behind him.