The Vanagon was parked in section green-19 of the Shop-All parking lot. From the middle row of the van's cabin, Quaid just could make out the mammoth Shop-All logo atop the superstore, the S overlapping A inside a spinning red circle. The building underneath housed ten stories of high-count, low-unit-cost products, arranged optimally for ease of loading onto shopping carts.
"I never could get into box stores," Quaid said. "I go food shopping, I want to be traipsing through the aisles and find something new. Something in season."
Durwood, back near the tailgate, worked a steel needle through a suit of fine mesh. His hat sat cockeyed on his head.
Quaid continued, "I don't want to worry some crate of Hamburger Helpers is gonna fall on me. I don't need fifteen spreadable butter options. I want to be delighted."
Durwood firmed his brow at a knot in the mesh suit, which he worked on while stretched taut across the knees of his bluejeans. In a nearby cup holder sat pliers and micro-components.
"Tell me," Quaid said. "When were you last delighted?"
The question was met with a low growl, which Quaid might've mistaken for Sue-Ann's had she not been forward, keeping watch from the driver seat.
"Need to get those headaches checked out, Wood. How long have you had them? Months, right?"
From the corner of Durwood's mouth: "I'm healthy as a horse."
He probably was. Most days, his diet consisted of eggs, either raw or hard-boiled, and unadorned green peppers. He drank water exclusively, and must have been walking ten miles a night on those crime patrols of his.
"Headache can be a symptom of tumors," Quaid said. "They obstruct your cerebral fluid, creating pressure on—"
"How 'bout we get square on this mission?" Durwood eyeballed his partner over the mesh. "You do your diagnosis later."
Quaid ignored the rebuke. "Fine by me. What can I do to be useful?"
Durwood checked his watch. "It's three-fifteen." Molly had told them the attack was to begin at three o'clock. "You get visual on the Mice yet?"
Quaid glanced outside. Seeing nothing by naked eye, he assumed the joystick control and cycled through feeds on the van's bank of monitors. He zoomed in too quickly, then changed to IR mode by accident—Durwood's gadgets always befuddled him.
When he finally did tame the streams from the hidden cameras they'd planted two nights earlier, Quaid scanned for the Mice, homing in on large groups of shoppers. He had no success, and found himself instead surveillance-stalking a woman in her early twenties wearing a spaghetti strap top and cutoffs, buying ten-for-a-dollar organizing bins.
Durwood prompted, "Visual?"
"Oh, uh...no. None yet."
Durwood saw what was on the monitor and huffed.
To cover himself, Quaid said, "What if they're flaking? Or somebody talked sense into Josiah and he canceled?"
"Moll would've called us."
"Unless they sniffed her out and she can't. What if the Jackson girl gave her up?"
Molly had assured the guys Piper Jackson was "on board," but Quaid hadn't liked the way she'd said it. Her eyes had been over-bright, and she'd been quick to change the subject.
Durwood shrugged. "Only fifteen minutes late. Not out of character, this nut."
Quaid wondered how things would go once they had the nut himself, Josiah, in hand. The hope was that after snatching him today, they could debrief him and Piper Jackson and gain a clearer picture of the Anarchy—the exact role of Rivard, how or whether one could reverse damage caused by the mysterious kernel.
But would Josiah talk?
Durwood thought so. "We'll loosen up his lips," the ex-marine had said during prep. "Couple ways to go about it."
Quaid had refrained from asking more.
Now he said, "What if Rivard beat us to the punch? What if Leathersby already took him out?"
Durwood finished a last repair of his mesh suit, sewing in one micro-component and tossing the one it had replaced—a flat, splayed-wire doodad—in the trash.
The question gave him pause.
"Leathersby's in Europe," he finally said.
"He was last week."
Quaid glanced from the monitors to Durwood. Durwood, avoiding the look, stripped and began pulling on his mesh suit. Sue-Ann loped back from her post in the Vanagon driver seat to sniff her master's bluejeans.
Quaid futzed around looking for the Mice on hidden camera. When Durwood had finished outfitting himself, mesh gloves and hood secured and pinched flush to the suit, he took over the joystick.
Together they watched ten floors of retail bacchanalia. Shoppers pulled boxes of chocolate bars off shelves, considered sleeves of paper cups as big as their own arms. Inter-aisle kiosks tempted passersby with cherry bratwurst, loaded eggnog, while-you-wait silkscreening.
After five minutes, Durwood switched to the exterior cams. On the third view, a fifteen-passenger Ford cargo van—black—idled near the entrance. Durwood lingered on the vehicle, narrowing focus on opaque windows, trying for a view of the driver.
Quaid said, "Leathersby wouldn't be caught dead driving a Ford."
Durwood made a noise between snarl and chuckle. The enmity between him and Blake Leathersby ran deep. It wasn't just that they'd shot at each other across the Vltava River, or fought with crampons on a Greenlandic glacier. The rift had deeper roots—cultural, ideological.
Though the two men had ostensibly fought on the same side in Desert Storm, Britain being the U.S.'s primary coalition partner, they had come to their service differently. Where Durwood had risen up the enlisted ranks, Leathersby had been special forces. "Big SAS boy," Durwood had once said. "Missions with code names, politicians watching on closed circuit."
Durwood was strong—Quaid had seen him hurl a cinder block ten yards to alter the course of a runaway pickup—but Leathersby bulged out of his shirts. "Gym muscles," Durwood called them.
Now, as the commercial van cruised off, Durwood panned to watch its progress until the camera ran out of range. He then switched back to a view inside the fifth floor, which contained the Shop-All management offices. The guys figured Josiah would end his spree there, finding some unlucky executive to harangue and lay blame upon—as he had with Blackstone, as he had with Steed.
Using a feather touch on the stick, Durwood hunted the fringes of the fifth floor, the fourth, the third. He peeked behind racks of cut-rate dresses and past car batteries stacked like children's blocks. His steel-blue eyes tracked the monitor, rising to a corner, flitting to the bottom.
Then stopping.
"There."
Quaid scooted forward on his vinyl captain's chair.
How does he see this crap?
At the lowest reaches of the screen, near an emergency-exit staircase, a dozen figures were huddled around a wiry figure with upswept blue hair. It was a wide angle—the camera shooting from the other end of the floor—and Durwood dragged his thumb along a wheel control to focus the view.
There was Molly, with the jet-black bob and wearing that huggy blue sweater. A big guy that must've been Hatch, his facial tattoos covered over by makeup. And the wiry figure, Josiah, easily identifiable even in the wig from his erratic gestures.
They were in the pickle and olive section.
Quaid said, "Where's the Jackson girl?"
Durwood edged the camera view along a wall of condiments, over foodcourt-style seating, into the kitchen of a burger counter peddling sixty-nine cent steakburgers.
There, wearing a boat-shaped paper hat, was Piper Jackson. She was twisting dials on deep fryers and reaching around back of soda fountain dispensers, slinking from one machine to the next, out of sight of a checker at the register.
"Mm," Durwood said.
Quaid wondered, "Does that look like somebody getting ready to betray her friends?"
Durwood gave no answer, reaching down to activate a switch on the heel of his suit, slipping quietly from the Vanagon.