Chapter 51: Black Friday
"You know what day it is?" Big Mike was standing at the front of the store looking through the glass doors at the parking lot with the expression of a man who had made a terrible mistake by agreeing to manage a retail establishment. "It's Black Friday. You know what those people out there are? They're animals. Every single one of them."
The crowd beyond the glass was already pressing against the doors — a dense, organized mass of people with carts and lists and the particular focused energy of shoppers who had been awake since four AM and had been planning this since last Tuesday.
"I'll be in my office," Big Mike said. "Do not knock. Do not call. Do not slide anything under the door. I am not here."
He left.
Chuck watched him go with the expression of a man who had recently been promoted to Assistant Manager and was now experiencing the full weight of what that meant.
"Alright," Chuck said, straightening up. "Let's do this. Open the doors."
The doors opened.
By nine AM, the Buy More floor had absorbed what felt like the entire population of Burbank and several surrounding communities. Every aisle had traffic. Every display had hands on it. The Nerd Herd desk had a line that had been approximately twelve people long since the moment the doors opened and showed no signs of shrinking.
Simon helped a woman choose between two laptops for forty-five minutes, turned around, and helped a man understand why his warranty was not, in fact, going to cover something his son had done with a screwdriver.
He found Chuck during a thirty-second window between customers.
"I didn't realize it would be like this," Simon said.
"Every year," Chuck said. "Every single year. Same every time."
"Sarah's been standing near the Nerd Herd desk since we opened," Simon said. "And you had that face when you looked toward the entrance about twenty minutes ago. Are you running something today?"
Chuck's expression did the thing it did when he was about to tell a lie and had decided at the last second to tell an adjacent truth instead. "Today is—"
"It's fine," Simon said. "I already noticed. Just tell me if you need anything and make sure it costs me something."
Chuck almost smiled. "It's probably nothing."
"It's never nothing with you," Simon said pleasantly, and went back to work.
The customer who caught Simon's attention appeared around ten fifteen.
He was browsing the laptop display with the particular patience of someone who wasn't actually interested in laptops — looking at the products, but looking at the room. A man in his late twenties, clean-cut, moving through the floor with a physical ease that Simon had learned to recognize.
Something about him triggered a connection Simon couldn't immediately place.
He moved toward the display. "Can I help you find something?"
The man looked at him. "Just browsing."
"No problem." Simon kept his voice easy. "You remind me of someone I know. Friend of a friend, went to Stanford. Sorry — occupational hazard."
The man studied him briefly. "I went to Penn, actually."
"My mistake." Simon extended his hand. "Simon."
The man shook it. "No worries."
The handshake told Simon something. Not the grip — the positioning. The way someone who'd been trained to shake hands for cover rather than greeting did it. A fraction too practiced.
He looked at the man's face again.
The Intersect gave him nothing — which meant either this person wasn't in the system or the loading percentage hadn't reached the right file yet. But Chuck had been watching this corner of the floor since the man arrived, with the particular quality of attention Chuck used when he was trying not to be seen watching something.
"Enjoy your shopping," Simon said. "Black Friday deals on the laptops are pretty good today."
"Thanks," the man said.
Simon walked away, took a route that brought him past Chuck, and said quietly without stopping: "Your friend from Penn. Does he have a name?"
Chuck's jaw tightened by a fraction. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Sure you don't," Simon said, and kept walking.
He filed it. Bryce Larkin — the name surfaced from somewhere below the conscious level, the way things surfaced when the Intersect was working indirectly. Chuck's former Stanford roommate. The one who had gotten Chuck expelled. Supposedly dead. Not, apparently, dead.
He said nothing to Casey about this yet. He needed more information before he knew what to do with the information he had.
At eleven thirty, two people walked in through the main entrance who were not there to shop.
Simon clocked them before they were ten feet inside: one tall, one shorter, both wearing the kind of nondescript dark clothing that was trying to be invisible and achieving the opposite. They moved through the floor with their eyes on the room rather than the products — the specific surveillance pattern of trained people doing a preliminary sweep.
Behind them, spread across the entrance area, four more. Then another two near the side entrance.
Eight people total, minimum.
Simon kept working. Helped a teenager find a gaming headset. Made a recommendation on a wireless router. Kept the floor staff energy around him normal so that whatever was happening in the operational layer of the store didn't produce visible disruption in the retail layer.
At noon, the man who pulled the eight together into focus walked through the front door.
Asian, late thirties, a scar that ran from his left ear to the corner of his jaw. He moved with the authority of someone who had given orders for a long time and expected them to be followed. He was dressed well but not expensively, in the way of someone whose priority was function rather than appearance.
The Intersect gave Simon something this time — fragmented, but usable. A name. An organization. Fulcrum. The file was incomplete but the classification was clear: hostile. Not law enforcement. Not a rival intelligence service in any conventional sense. Something in the space between those categories that was its own category.
The scarred man — Tommy, the Intersect supplied — moved directly toward the Nerd Herd desk.
Toward Chuck.
Simon set down the display item he'd been holding and found Casey.
Two of the dark-suited people were already flanking Casey from a distance — not blocking him, just establishing position. Casey had noticed. His posture had the specific quality it had when he was managing a contained problem while appearing to do nothing.
Simon came up beside him with the easy pace of a coworker.
"Lunch break," Simon said. "There's a hot dog cart across the street. You coming?"
Casey looked at him with the measured communication of someone sending a message through a very narrow channel. "I brought a sandwich. It's in my locker." He held Simon's eye for exactly one additional second.
Get to the break room. I need you positioned.
"Your loss," Simon said. "Hot dogs are great today."
He walked away from Casey and the two flanking operatives at a natural pace, turned toward the employee corridor, and arrived at the break room door.
Which was locked.
He tried the handle twice.
Locked from the inside.
He knocked.
Nothing.
"Big Mike," he said, at normal conversational volume. "I know you're in there."
Silence.
"Mike. Something is happening on the floor and I need to get to the equipment in the back."
Still nothing.
Simon looked at the door. Looked at the hallway. Looked at the lock — a standard commercial interior lock, the kind with a privacy button on the inside that could be defeated with a flat implement in the gap.
He had a credit card in his wallet.
He had it out in three seconds, the door open in five.
Big Mike was sitting behind the break room table with a pillow over his face.
"Oh thank God," Big Mike said, not moving the pillow. "I thought they were customers."
"Some of them are," Simon said. He crossed to the storage area at the back, opened his locker, and retrieved the Beretta and the tranq pistol. He pocketed both. "Stay here. Keep the pillow."
"Not a problem," Big Mike said.
Simon went back out through the corridor toward the floor.
The situation had developed while he was gone.
Tommy was at the Nerd Herd desk. Chuck was behind it, doing the thing he did when he was frightened and covering it with customer-service professionalism. Three of Tommy's people were positioned around the desk perimeter in a configuration that was clearly coordinated.
Two more had moved to cover the main exit.
Casey was still in his position near the large appliances, with his two shadows maintaining distance. His hands were relaxed at his sides — which meant he'd decided to wait for an opening rather than force one, which was the right call given the number of civilians on the floor.
Sarah wasn't visible. Which meant she was positioned somewhere Simon couldn't immediately place, which was also the right call.
Simon moved to the edge of the camera display wall, which gave him sightlines to the Nerd Herd desk, both exits, and Casey's position without putting him in the direct line of sight of anyone he was watching.
He put in his earpiece.
"Casey," he said quietly. "I'm at the camera wall. East side. What do you need?"
A pause.
"Right flank," Casey said, barely audible. "When it moves, it moves fast."
"Understood," Simon said.
He watched Tommy lean across the Nerd Herd desk and say something to Chuck. Chuck's expression went through several things — recognition, calculation, the specific conflict of someone for whom the person in front of them represents a problem with no clean solution.
Tommy was making an offer. Or a demand. The body language read somewhere between the two.
Simon checked his sight lines, confirmed his exits, and waited.
Whatever was about to happen was going to happen in the next few minutes.
He was where he needed to be.
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