“Freeze it,” said Nick. “He saw us. The kid, I mean. Mr. Supervisor, as far as I can make out, that entrance looks directly east?”

“Yes, sir,” said the security chief.

“That’s exactly where we were laying off, goddammit. So the kid sees the chopper, and the plan is shot. Little fucker. Look at the time.”

According to the data window, it was 16:13:34 p.m., thirty-seven seconds before the moment the SWAT truck and its five wingmen began to rush the Impala.

“Okay,” said Nick.

The images started moving again. Juba was speaking urgently to the boy and seemed to reach into his package as if to unlimber the Remington and get ready to go to war. But the kid grabbed him and began to pull him. They advanced toward the camera—another freeze, unfortunately, didn’t provide a better facial of either—and disappeared, clearly to exit, one way or the other, off camera.

“So the kid talked him out of going jihad on Greenville, Ohio,” said Bob. “Saved a lot of folks from getting whacked.”

“I’ll be sure to mention it to his parole officer . . . Mr. Supervisor, that’s it? You don’t have any exteriors of these guys pulling away in the seconds before the squad cars arrived?”

“Nothing my people could see,” said the supervisor.

Nick gestured to Chandler, who’d made it down by car and joined the party a few minutes earlier.

“Jean, I want people to go to every retail outlet on every street surrounding the mall and check the security cameras. Maybe somewhere there’s coverage on who picked them up and in what kind of vehicle. Meanwhile, arrange for our tech people to get the stuff Supervisor Gray’s cameras covered back to D.C. for analysis.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nick’s phone rang. It was D.C.

“Fuck, not again,” he said. “How many times can I resign?”

He slid it on, ID’d himself, said, “Yes,” and listened, nodding. It was a detailed conversation, perhaps three minutes long. “Yeah,” he finally said, “good. Late but good. But it points the way.”

He hung up and turned to Bob and Chandler.

“It was Cyber Division. The kid emailed his buddy. Fifteen fifty-nine. Off a disposable. Juba sends him to buy a disposable, he does, but he sneaks in a quick update to Johnny Jones, to give his mom a heads-up. They just accessed the GPS to give us the location, which, unfortunately, is where we’re standing right now.”

“The jihadi who missed his mom,” Swagger said.