Black Friday Read online

  When he finally made it out of the store, he paused in the mall and drew a deep breath as he tried to think of anything else Adele might like. A little surprise of some sort might brighten her day.

  He hadn’t come up with anything yet when he noticed the security guard.

  The guy was standing over by the main escalators in the center of the mall, looking up at the second level. The intensity on the guard’s face made Jake think something might be wrong, so he lifted his gaze as well. If there was some sort of trouble, he might be able to help out, although those rent-a-cops often resented the real thing, even retired ones.

  Jake didn’t see any trouble, though, just another guy leaning on the railing up there and looking down at the guard. Or maybe they weren’t looking at each other, but only in each other’s general direction.

  Jake didn’t think so, though, and then when the guard nodded a little—such a faint movement of his head that most of the busy shoppers hurrying around him never would have noticed it—Jake was sure there was a connection between the men.

  Those two were up to something, he told himself.

  And to a guy like him, such a thought was like waving the proverbial red flag in front of the proverbial bull. Jake wanted to know what was going on here.

  There was one way to find out. When the guy on the second level walked off and then the guard turned and sauntered away, Jake followed him, staying back in the crowd so he wouldn’t be spotted, but close enough that he wouldn’t lose his quarry.

  The thought that he needed to get home to Adele prodded the back of his brain, but Jake put it aside for the moment.

  This wouldn’t take long, and hell, it probably wouldn’t amount to anything, anyway.

  Chapter 16

  Tobey wasn’t the sort of man who second-guessed himself. He knew there was a possibility Ashley wouldn’t like the ring he picked out. If that happened, they would just bring it back and return it, and she could select her own ring.

  She ought to give him credit for trying, though, he thought as he stood in the jewelry store, looking down through glass at glittering diamonds and bands of shining silver and gold.

  A sleekly attractive, well-dressed young woman stood on the other side of the counter, smiling at him. Her expertly manicured hands rested on the glass on her side. She wasn’t wearing an engagement ring or a wedding band, and Tobey had seen the way she eyed him appreciatively.

  Didn’t matter, he told himself. He was taken. And once he had told her he was looking for an engagement ring, she hadn’t bothered trying to flirt with him. Instead she had settled for being friendly and professional.

  “If you told me how much you want to spend, I can show you the rings in that price range,” she suggested. “Just a ballpark figure is fine.”

  Tobey hesitated, then said, “I’ve got three thousand dollars.”

  Actually, he could go as high as four thousand, but he didn’t see any reason to tell her that.

  “You can get a very nice ring for three thousand,” she said. “Let’s look at these right along here . . .”

  Tobey glanced toward the throngs passing by in the mall. The store was open all the way across the front, like most of the businesses here, with heavy gates that would be drawn across to close it off after hours. He figured that they probably had a safe somewhere in back, too, where they locked up the most valuable items.

  The important thing was that Ashley could walk by, glance in here, and see him. He mentally muttered curses at himself for lingering so long in the sporting goods store, looking at guns. He should have gotten this done as quickly as possible, before she finished what she was doing and came searching for him. She might do that even though they had agreed to meet at the food court.

  Then he told himself to relax. She’d said she was going to look at purses and accessories, and he knew from experience how long that could take. He just didn’t need to waste any more time than he already had.

  He couldn’t afford to rush this decision, though. Ash might be wearing this ring for the rest of her life—he certainly hoped she would be—so he had to find just the right one . . .

  “Do you see any you like?” the woman asked.

  “I dunno, they’re all really pretty,” Tobey replied without looking up. His eyes went from one ring to the next in this section as he tried to imagine how each of them would look on Ashley’s finger.

  His scrutinizing gaze paused on a ring with a simple but classically beautiful stone in a setting that was fancy but not gaudy, with three smaller stones in a line on each side of it. The main stone wasn’t huge, but it was a nice size, he thought. The band was a deep gold color.

  “I can afford this?” he asked.

  “You can,” the woman said. “Although the tax might make it go a little over your budget.”

  “That’s all right,” Tobey said.

  “You think your girlfriend—I mean, your soon-to-be fiancée—will like it?”

  “I believe she will,” Tobey said. “She’s beautiful, and so is this ring.”

  “I’ve never even met her, and I know you’re right about her. Do you want a closer look?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

  She unlocked the case and took the ring out, then lifted it from its velvet nest in the box and extended it toward him. Tobey took it gingerly. The thing felt tiny and delicate in his big, blunt fingers, even though he knew that diamonds were among the hardest substances on earth.

  “Think about slipping that onto your girl’s finger.”

  “That’s just what I’m doin’,” Tobey said. Everything about it felt right. “I’ll take it.”

  “That’s wonderful. I’m sure you’re both going to be very happy.” She gave him a dazzling smile, but not as dazzling as the ring. “Now, what about the size?”

  “Oh, crap,” Tobey said before he could stop himself.

  The young woman laughed, a genuine sound that made him like her.

  “You don’t know her ring size, do you?” she asked.

  “Well . . . no.”

  “What about my finger? How does it compare to hers?” She took the ring from him and slipped it on the third finger of her left hand.

  For a second he wanted to say, Hey, don’t do that! That’s Ashley’s ring!

  But it wasn’t yet, and anyway, he figured other women had tried it on in the past, so this was nothing to get upset about. The woman was just trying to help him.

  Her fingers were a little skinnier than Ashley’s, he thought, and the ring was a little loose on her. He said, “I think it might fit her okay.”

  “You want this to be a surprise, don’t you? So you can’t very well bring her in and have her try it on.”

  “That’s right. I plan to ask her to marry me on Christmas Eve.”

  “Aww. That’s sweet. Well, if it doesn’t quite fit, you can have it resized later. From what you’re saying, though, it should be pretty close.”

  “I hope so.” He hated to bring up the next subject, but he had to. “Uh . . . what if she hates it?” Quickly, he added, “I don’t think she will, but just in case . . .”

  “I know, this is a substantial investment. As long as the ring is in the same condition it is now, you can return it for full credit within thirty days and she can pick out something else.”

  “That’s fair enough, I guess. Cutting it a little close on the thirty-day business, but Christmas Eve falls inside that window.”

  The woman smiled again, shook her head, and said, “I don’t think you have a thing to worry about. She’s going to love it.”

  “You really think so?”

  “She loves you, doesn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” Tobey said. “I believe she does.”

  A few minutes later, he left the jewelry store three grand poorer but with the little black box in his pocket, a light step, and a grin on his face.

  Mission, as they say, accomplished.

  * * *

  Despite the sunshine, the temperature was
cool enough today that most of the shoppers were wearing jackets. Habib had studied the weather forecast and was counting on that, but he had a backup plan as well.

  Now, on the spur of the moment, he decided to combine the two.

  The mall had displays of shopping bags set up in various places. They were simple, cheap bags with the mall’s name and logo printed on both sides. Their handles were looped into a coin-operated machine. Shoppers fed in a certain amount of quarters and could then pull one of the bags loose.

  Habib wandered through the mall until he found one of the shopping bag displays in an isolated area. He had a pad of paper, a marker, and some tape in his pocket, items he had brought along in case the weather was too warm and people were in shirtsleeves. He brought them out and quickly printed a makeshift sign that read OUT OF ORDER.

  After taping the sign to the display, he picked up the whole thing. Tending to a problem like this was probably something the janitorial staff would more likely do, but that didn’t matter. The shoppers who saw a guard carrying a bag machine like that wouldn’t think anything of it.

  Habib started back toward the storage room where the guns and Dave Dixon’s body were hidden.

  He got there just in time. One of the men who had joined in this holy effort with him was approaching the entrance to the service corridor. Habib caught his eye, and the man slowed down, loitering in front of a toy store for a moment while Habib carried the bag display into the corridor and along it to the storage room.

  The area was deserted, he saw. Relief went through him. Dixon’s body and the arsenal hadn’t been discovered.

  He opened the door and confirmed that everything was in place. The Americans hadn’t found out what was going on and set a trap for him.

  They would have been surprised if they had. Enough explosives were strapped to his body under his shirt to make a nice big blast. He had known right from the start that this was a necessary precaution. If anything went wrong, he was not going to be taken alive, and he would take as many of the infidels with him as he could.

  He set the shopping bags down, moved a crate, and opened one of the special ones. He took out a small but deadly, fully automatic Steyr TMP, one of a shipment that had been bought on the black market in Europe, shipped on a freighter to South America, smuggled northward and finally across the border from Mexico into Texas, and then transported up here to Illinois.

  The door eased open. Habib turned and handed the gun to the man he had seen out in the mall a few moments earlier. The man took it, smiled as he hefted it, and said, “Allahu akbar.”

  “Allahu akbar,” Habib replied.

  The man reached behind him and stuck the Steyr into the waistband of his trousers, under the jacket he wore. The weapon was small enough that it wasn’t very noticeable. The man already had a dozen fully loaded thirty-round magazines hidden around his body. When the time came to strike, he and his fellow warriors would have plenty of firepower.

  No sooner had he gone, after wishing Habib good luck and saying that they would meet again in paradise, than another man was there to pick up his weapon. Habib broke open the shopping bag display and slipped the machine pistol into the bag.

  “If you carry it by both handles, the bag will be closed enough that no one will look in and see the weapon,” Habib told the man, who nodded in understanding.

  That was how it began, and for the next hour Habib continued distributing the weapons that Saudi oil money had paid for. Another example of how the stupid Americans had sown the seeds of their own destruction, he thought, by doing business with men who wanted them all dead.

  Habib felt excitement growing inside him. Everything was going so well. He began to get the sense that a great victory was inevitable here today, that Allah had touched him and bestowed a special destiny on him with which nothing could interfere.

  His name would be known from now on.

  When the clerics spoke of the martyrs who had done the most to further the holy cause of Islam, the name of Habib Jabara would be first among them.

  Nothing could stop him now.

  * * *

  Jake was more torn than he had been in a long time. He should have headed for home an hour ago, he told himself as he sat on one of the benches the mall had put out so shoppers could rest for a few minutes before going off to spend more money.

  Jake had been on the bench for more than a few minutes, though. It was located diagonally across from the entrance to a service corridor with an AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY sign on it. He was pretending to look at stuff on his phone, but in reality he was watching the steady stream of Middle Eastern–looking guys going in and out of that corridor.

  That security guard he had noticed earlier had made his radar go off, and nothing that had happened since then had done anything to silence those alarm bells. Jake had followed the guy and seen him put an OUT OF ORDER sign on that thing that dispensed shopping bags. That didn’t really seem like something a guard would have done, but Jake supposed it was possible.

  He had been twenty yards back in the crowd as the guy carried the bags back to the service corridor near where Jake had first seen him. Jake had spotted the bench and gone over to sit down on it.

  And then the parade had started.

  Jake’s last fifteen years on the job, he’d heard more than he ever wanted to about racial profiling and how bad it was and how the police and other authorities could never be allowed to carry out such evil, disgusting, racist behavior.

  Which was all bullcrap, of course. There was nothing racist about being able to look at the plain and simple facts right in front of your eyes and recognize them for what they were.

  One of those facts was that nearly all Islamic terrorism was carried out by young, Middle Eastern males. It was crazy to think that anything else might be true. Worse than that, it was a waste of time and resources.

  There were plenty of Muslims in the country now, more than ever before, in fact. Jake supposed that most of them were law-abiding folks who just wanted to be left alone to go about their lives, like anybody else. Maybe it wasn’t fair to look at somebody like that and wonder if he was a terrorist.

  But when a bunch of them suddenly started acting in odd ways . . . Hell, forget about fair. It wasn’t prudent not to wonder about them. Jake was willing to bet that none of the guys he had seen going in and out of that service corridor in the past hour were Authorized Personnel.

  So what were they doing? What was their connection to the security guard Jake had first noticed? To be honest, that guy could be Middle Eastern, too, although Jake had taken him for Hispanic or Indian at first.

  Jake didn’t have any answers, but the hunch was growing strong in him that somebody needed to start looking for some.

  That wasn’t his job. He was just an old, retired cop with a sick wife at home. He put his phone away, rested his hands on his knees, and heaved his body to his feet. He knew where the mall offices were. The head of security would be there, too.

  A few minutes later, Jake found who he was looking for. The burly, white-haired man was standing behind a counter in one of the offices, wearing the same sort of uniform Jake had seen on all the guards. He had some papers in front of him, but he glanced up from them and asked, “Help you, sir?”

  “Jake Connelly,” Jake introduced himself as he stuck his hand out. “I used to be on the job in Chicago.”

  Jake saw the flash of wariness in the man’s eyes. Some ex-cop who’s got his nose out of joint about something, he was probably thinking.

  But the man kept his voice level and noncommittal as he shook Jake’s hand and said, “I’m Ray Napoli, head of security for the mall. Is there a problem, Mr. Connelly? Did you witness some shoplifting or an incident like that? We’re always happy to take reports from our shoppers—”

  “That’s not it,” Jake interrupted. “I think maybe you’ve got yourself a situation here . . . and it’s not a good one.”

  Chapter 17

  Calvin started to get tir
ed as the morning wore on. He had played football, run track, and done plenty of athletic stuff, but he’d never had to just stand for long periods of time. He was surprised by how tiring doing that turned out to be.

  Not only that, but it was boring as well. He wouldn’t have thought that watching thousands of people—all varieties of people—walk past him could get monotonous, especially when many of them were attractive young women, but that was exactly what had happened.

  He found himself wondering where that girl Irina was and what she was doing. She probably wasn’t even here at the mall anymore, he thought. She might work the night shift and could have come in right after midnight to get the place ready for the onslaught of shoppers on Black Friday. Chances were, she was home asleep by now.

  He kept an eye out for her anyway. He wasn’t sure why, other than the fact that she’d seemed nice and he wouldn’t have minded talking to her again. That was reason enough, he supposed.

  But he didn’t see her, and that was a little disappointing. He could have missed her in the crowd, he reasoned. He had thought the mall might get less busy after that first opening rush, but that hadn’t turned out to be the case. If anything, the place was even more crowded now.

  Calvin smiled and nodded to everyone who made eye contact with him. That wasn’t many people. The shoppers who had come to the mall today were too intent on getting what they were looking for to care too much about what was going on around them.

  To them, Calvin thought, he was just another mall fixture, like a bench or a potted plant.

  He knew where he could find at least one friendly face, though. He had a break coming up soon, and when he had the chance, he intended to walk down to the end of the mall where Dave Dixon was posted. Even though he and Dave had talked for only a few minutes early that morning, Calvin had sensed that the other guard would be glad to see him.

  They had been taught in their training to remain at their posts until someone came to relieve them, so that was what Calvin did. The time for his break came and went, but it was only five minutes past the time when another guard walked up to him and said, “You’re Marshall, right?”