Chapter 52: The Buy More Siege
Simon couldn't get to his weapons.
Big Mike had locked the employee corridor from the inside with the thoroughness of a man who intended to stay locked inside it, which meant the Beretta and the tranq pistol were in Simon's locker and his locker was behind a door he couldn't open without making enough noise to announce himself to eight trained operatives.
New plan.
He moved toward the Nerd Herd desk.
Tommy was still leaning across it, making his case to Chuck in the specific way that people made cases when the alternative they were implying was significantly worse than the thing they were offering. Chuck was doing the customer service face — bright, cooperative, entirely opaque about what was actually happening internally.
Simon came up from the angle that let him approach Tommy without walking through Tommy's peripheral vision.
"Hey, Chuck — this your customer?" He pulled the Buy More tone on like a jacket. "Sir, are you finding everything okay today? We've got some incredible deals on the extended warranties—"
Tommy's attention snapped to him. "Leave."
"Hey, man." Simon raised both hands slightly — the universal easy, I'm just here to help posture. "I'm just doing my job. If you're not looking for the extended warranty, that's completely fine, but I do want to make sure you're aware of our Black Friday—"
"Leave." The word came with significantly more weight this time.
"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to be a little more—"
"Western." Chuck's voice, cutting across the exchange with an intensity Simon didn't miss. "It's fine. This gentleman and I are handling something. Can you go check on the television display? And—" His eyes were very steady. "Tell Morgan the pineapple is ready."
Simon looked at him.
"The pineapple," Chuck said again, with the same careful emphasis.
"Sure," Simon said. He gave Tommy one more polite-retail look and walked away.
He found Morgan near the gaming section, reorganizing a display with more focus than the task required.
"Chuck says pineapple," Simon said.
Morgan went very still.
Then he turned around with the expression of a man receiving a message he'd hoped he'd never actually receive. "You're sure."
"He said it twice."
"Okay." Morgan swallowed. "Okay. That's — that's the emergency code. If someone says pineapple, we clear the store."
Simon looked at the floor — still full of Black Friday shoppers, oblivious, moving through aisles with carts and lists. "How?"
"Fire alarm," Morgan said. "We pull it and people leave."
"Can you get to the alarm without being seen by the guys in the black suits?"
Morgan looked around the store with the focused attention of someone who had just discovered that his detailed knowledge of the Buy More's floor plan might actually be useful. "The one near the garden section. Yeah. I can get there."
"Go," Simon said. "Wait for my call."
Morgan went.
Simon found Casey near the large appliances, still managed by his two shadows. He came up alongside Casey with the natural ease of a coworker passing by.
"Couldn't get to the locker," Simon said quietly. "Mike locked the corridor."
Casey's expression communicated something between exasperation and professional acceptance.
"I can get the alarm pulled," Simon said. "Once the floor clears, we have a cleaner situation. Morgan's positioned."
Casey absorbed this in the half-second he allowed himself. Then gave a minimal nod — barely movement, the kind of nod that only read as a nod if you were looking for it.
"Get ready," Simon said, and walked away.
He pulled out his phone and called Morgan.
"Now," he said.
The alarm went off.
The Buy More's fire alarm was a serious piece of equipment — loud, authoritative, the kind of sound that bypassed conscious decision-making and went directly to the leave response that evolution had optimized over several million years.
The shoppers responded the way shoppers responded to fire alarms: with the instinctive urgency of people who had somewhere better to be and had just received official permission to go there. The floor cleared in under ninety seconds — a small stampede, orderly in the way that small stampedes were orderly when the exits were wide enough.
Simon moved through the departing crowd in the opposite direction, using the flow to cover his approach to one of Tommy's men positioned near the laptop display.
"Sir — sir, the alarm means you need to exit the building. I need you to—"
The man looked at him.
Simon drove the edge of his hand into the man's throat — the specific strike he'd learned from Sifu Yao's intermediate curriculum, the one that didn't require significant force to be decisive because the target was a convergence point for everything that needed to keep working. The man's hands went to his throat reflexively. His knees went next.
Simon caught him on the way down, guided him against the shelving unit behind him so he looked like a person sitting rather than a person not working, and lifted the compact automatic from his shoulder holster. Took the spare magazine from his belt.
He moved.
Two men were moving together toward the garden section — they'd separated from their previous positions, converging on something or someone. Simon came up on their blind side from between two display aisles.
"Your friend's down," he said. They both turned. He pointed toward where he'd left the first man. "He needs help."
Both of them moved toward the indicated location — the instinct to verify overriding the question of how Simon knew. One of them stopped, processed the inconsistency, started to turn back.
Simon's arm closed around his neck from behind — not a choke, a blood choke, the kind that works in seconds on the vascular compression rather than the airway. The man's hands came up, found Simon's arm, tried to pry, achieved nothing in the time available.
He went down.
Simon lowered him to the floor, took his weapon and magazine, and swept his attention to the remaining man who was still processing what had just happened. By the time that processing completed, Simon had covered the distance between them and taken him to the floor with an ankle sweep and a controlled fall that was less elegant than ideal but entirely sufficient.
He secured the man with a display cable tie from a nearby rack.
Three down.
He pulled back and took stock.
The floor was empty of shoppers. Tommy was still near the home theater area with three people. His two remaining mobile operatives were somewhere in the building — Simon hadn't accounted for them, which meant they were a variable.
He didn't have his locker weapons. He had one handgun taken from the first operative and the spare magazines from two others.
He found a gap between the kitchen appliances display and the back wall, crouched down, and used the mirrored surface of a display toaster to see what was behind him.
Nothing.
He moved to a better position — behind the refrigerator display, which gave him a sightline to the home theater area and the main entrance simultaneously.
The home theater showroom's glass wall was between Casey's position and Tommy's people. Casey was in there with Chuck. Possibly Sarah as well — Simon still hadn't located her, which meant she was either already positioned or dealing with something he didn't know about.
His phone vibrated. Earpiece.
"Lewis." Casey's voice. "Two incoming from the north aisle. Don't engage — let them pass."
Simon pressed flat against the refrigerator and stayed still.
Two figures in dark suits moved through his peripheral vision eight feet away — the remaining mobile operatives, completing a sweep of the floor. They moved past without registering his position.
Casey's voice again: "Now."
Simon came out of cover.
He moved toward Tommy's group from the south angle while simultaneously the home theater room's glass wall became suddenly very busy — Casey and Chuck using the interior as cover, the glass providing some ballistic mitigation, the angle giving Casey a position over Tommy's people.
Tommy's group responded the way trained people responded to a threat engagement — they split, sought cover, brought their weapons up.
Simon dropped behind the end of the appliance display as the first shots went wide.
He came up, fired twice in the direction of the nearest operative — suppressive, not aimed, creating space — then moved left while they were tracking the muzzle flash position.
The store erupted.
Not full firefight — all sides were managing their fields of fire because civilians might still be in the building — but the controlled, purposeful exchange of people who knew what they were doing and were trying to accomplish specific outcomes rather than simply win a volume contest.
Simon went low. Used the retail shelving as cover and movement paths. Kept moving — the static target was always the worse option.
He was three aisles over from where he'd started when he heard Sarah's voice from his right: clear, controlled, giving cover commands to Chuck.
She was positioned.
Which meant the geometry had changed.
Simon had a decision: stay mobile and keep them disrupted, or find a fixed position and add consistent fire to Casey's line.
He went mobile.
He was, at this moment, the most unpredictable element in the space. That had value as long as he used it.
He kept moving.
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