The officer turned his back on Carl and said something low into the phone. After a brief exchange, the officer hung up the phone and handed it back to Carl. “That was your father.”
“I know.”
“So you said you saw a blue car?”
Back to business. “Yeah. I pulled up to the front of the mall to pick up my mother when I heard a car gunning toward the mall. I backed out of the way as the blue car crashed right into the entrance and exploded.”
“And your mother was by the entrance?”
Carl nodded, choking back a sob, and he began to shake.
The officer knew when enough was enough. “Thank you, sir. If we find anything out about your mother, we’ll let you know.” The officer walked off into the mayhem.
Carl sat there in the back of the ambulance trying to process what had just happened, because none of it seemed real at the moment. Maybe it was his mind defending itself against the horror of the reality of what had just occurred.
It was a terrorist attack.
The news had been warning of communications intercepted by government agencies about possible attacks. The targets were supposedly “soft” targets—malls, restaurants, and movie theaters. Apparently, the terrorists were no longer going for the large symbolic targets and the grand spectacles.
He looked the bastard right in the eye.
Suddenly waves of guilt began to pound the shores of his rational mind. What if he hadn’t glanced at the army recruitment station? What if he hadn’t gotten into that argument with his mom? What if he didn’t use the damned restroom? They would have left sooner and missed the explosion, that’s what.
It was his fault. Now here he sat in the back of an ambulance while his poor mother…
Why a freaking mall? Of all the places. In Texas no less. It was as if they were attacking the last semblance of capitalism. Americans were agoraphobic as is. Now they really wouldn’t leave the house.
The terrorists had tried to attack the internet, as it had become the last bastion of the free market. However, what prevented the government from regulating it had also prevented the terrorists from attacking it.
The internet was not just some collection of servers. It was something much bigger than that. The total had become much greater than the sum of its parts. The internet was arguably one of the great wonders of the world. It was intangible. It was a construct, an idea. It was the Wild West in digital form. One could knock out servers and nodes, but others would spring up.
It couldn’t be destroyed. It had become too damned big, too complex. It took on a life of its own, and its life consisted of millions of users around the globe. It was the free world.
So all that was left was to attack malls. They were some of the last public gathering places left in American society. The fact that they attacked one in a Texas suburb meant that no place was safe.
Homeland Security now couldn’t just focus on New York, Chicago, and the big cities, the obvious targets. There was no way they could protect every city and every little town across America.
Those bastards had learned to do what they did in their own back yards. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, it was not unusual for some suicide bomber to wander into a public place and blow himself up.
However, Carl never thought that one of them would come all the way to the United States to blow his poor mother up.
***
First Lieutenant Peter Birdsall stood at the ready with a platoon in reverse Vee formation, awaiting the release of the ID into the hangar. After a few rudimentary exercises, they had progressed to funneling the ID towards and into the Labyrinth, which was supposed to simulate a cave system.
The targets were three pigs at the end. Peter was glad that he did not actually have to enter the Labyrinth with them. No, this time he would remain outside.
They were using live rounds, and two field techs would sweep the building with the MR.UD’s to confirm that the targets had been neutralized. Peter had his finger on the Amygdala Inhibitor master switch, and they would lure the ID back out with more pigs and the retrieval frequency to funnel them back into their container.
Peter nodded to Sergeant Lorenzo, who in turn ordered the release of the ID. Electric nodes from the back of the