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someone said joyously.
    “No, not quite. See, I’m thinking that for now they’re not going to pay attention to the upper floors. But as time goes by, they may send teams upstairs to root people out and herd them down to join the hostages. The more hostages they have, the more power to negotiate. So I’d go up one floor to three and find refuge there. Because when they come for us, one team will start at the top and work their way down. And another will come up to the second and work up. So the middle floor is the safest in the long run. Plus, if the cops do assault, they may drive some gunmen up here, to this floor, and have a shootout here, and trust me, you don’t want to be in the middle of it. Does that make sense?”
    A surge of good cheer arose and Ray noticed that all the women were buoyed at the prospect of doing something to help their chances. Except for Rose.
    “Rose, what’s wrong?”
    “When the shooting started, I had the same idea. I ran out the back and tried the stairwell. See, all the locks in the building are part of the software. He’s locked it. We’re stuck here.”
    “Are the doors heavy?”
    “They’re not as heavy as the outside doors. Those are metal, sunk in metal. But these are tough, heavy wood and you’d have to batter and kick an hour to get them down. Or shoot your way through.”
    Ray didn’t say anything, but he knew what that meant. Yes, it confirmed that somehow the attack team had taken over the security program that underlay the mall operations protocols. They had locked the doors remotely. They were in complete control.
    He looked carefully at the SCADA representation of MEMTAC 6.2 where its captured images blazed from his own monitors. Quickly he checked off the key points.
    LOCKDOWN ENABLED
ELEVATORS DISABLED
ESCALATORS DISABLED
    No surprises there. Once you get in, you learn the culture of the system, the assumptions it’s built on, how the German geniuses at Siemens think, how thorough they were, how they swept up their sandwich crumbs after lunch, and how shiny the bathroom fixtures were.
    He continued to monitor, examining the ecosystem of the empire.
    AIR-CONDITIONING ON
TEMPERATURE CONTROL 72
FIRE SPRINKLERS ENABLED
FLUORESCENT LIGHTING SYSTEM ENABLED
AREA Z FUSES FUNCTION 100 PERCENT
POWER GRID STABLE
SANTA CLAUS DEAD
    No, no, it didn’t say that, but he had a morbid sense of humor and he saw it in his imagination, as he also thought about what he could do with his power. Since the owners of this mall owned dozens of other malls in the US and Canada, all using the MEMTAC-driven SCADA, all linked, he could really raise hell if he wanted by refusing credit cards, turning cash registers insane, locking out and in, freezing elevators, directing the Coke machines to urge customers to buy Pepsi all across the land. But really. That wasn’t the point. The point was . . . the game.
    And then as an afterthought, his pièce de résistance.
    INTERNET CONNECTION DISABLED
    Ha. I hear you knocking but you can’t come in.
    Well actually, there was one way in. It would be interesting to see if there was anybody out there smart enough to figure it out.
    “I can’t get in,” said a computer technician from the Minnesota State Police. “Whoever he is, he’s taken the thing off line. It’s internally sealed. I’ve run all my conventional link search programs and I’m not getting a thing. It’s a vault.”
    “Keep trying,” said Douglas Obobo, who was the newly appointed commandant of the state cops. “I know you won’t let me down.”
    A special warmth came into Colonel Obobo’s voice on the last sentence.
I know you won’t let me down.
That was the Obobo touch, known in its limited way and possibly about to become more famous. He had the gift of inspiration, of making people believe, first in him, second in the mission, third in the larger program that sustained the mission, and finally in the administrative entity that embraced all. It was why he was the youngest