Chapter 70: Turning the Tables
Chuck was waiting at the entrance when Simon arrived at the Buy More just before noon.
"Simon. What's the plan? Did you reach Beckman? When do we move?"
"One thing at a time." Simon looked past Chuck at the unusually empty sales floor. "Where is everyone?"
Chuck exhaled. "Lester tried to fire Morgan. Everyone else walked out in solidarity. Now Lester's in the break room attempting to negotiate his way back to a functional staff." He paused. "I'm using the word negotiate loosely."
Simon briefly imagined the scene, decided it would resolve itself without his involvement, and set it aside.
"Beckman is unreachable through my channels," he said. "This one's on us."
Chuck stared at him. "Just us. You and me. Against a former KGB operative and her people."
"And the element of surprise," Simon said. "Which is actually significant."
"Walk me through it."
"Tonight," Simon said. "Right now you need to work and not think about it too hard. Thinking too hard is going to make you tense, and tense is the wrong state for what we're doing."
Chuck didn't look convinced, but he nodded.
Simon went to work.
By closing time the floor was empty. Simon changed in the back — not his regular clothes, but a FedEx uniform he'd sourced that afternoon from a secondhand shop, close enough to pass a quick look.
He stood in the center of the empty store and looked at what they'd prepared.
"Everything placed?" he said.
Chuck nodded. He looked pale but present. "Per the plan."
"Good." Simon picked up a sealed package — cardboard box, standard shipping label, contents that would not appear on any customs declaration. "The most dangerous part is next. Everything after this is controlled."
"What's in the box?" Chuck asked.
"A phone." Simon tucked the package under his arm. "One that's already ringing."
He took a car he'd borrowed from a long-term parking structure two miles away — anonymous, forgettable, not the Mustang — and drove to the exchange location.
Sixth and Alameda.
An industrial block, mostly warehouses. The kind of street that saw no foot traffic after dark and had been chosen for exactly that reason.
He was out of the car ten seconds before two men in dark suits materialized from the shadows and grabbed him by the collar.
"Easy," Simon said, letting his voice go slightly shaky. "I'm just making a delivery. FedEx. The name on the label is Sasha Banachek — I just need a signature."
One of them manhandled him toward the center of the space where Sasha was waiting — composed, watching, reading the situation with the flat professional attention of someone who had spent decades learning not to be surprised.
She took the package from his hands and opened it without ceremony.
Inside: a phone. Screen lit. Ringing.
"You need to sign for that," Simon said pleasantly.
She answered the phone. He couldn't hear his own voice from where he was standing, but he knew what it said — a brief recorded message establishing that the exchange location had changed and that she should proceed to the Buy More if she wanted the chip.
Sasha's expression didn't change. She handed the phone to one of her people and nodded at Simon.
He was pressed against the hood of a nearby car and searched. He'd been careful — nothing on him except his wallet, his regular phone, and the FedEx paperwork. The searching was thorough and found nothing.
During the process, Simon angled himself until he had a sightline to where Casey and Sarah were being held — a step van parked twenty feet back, both of them visible through the side window, restrained but functional.
He let his eyes meet Casey's for a fraction of a second. His lips formed a single word.
Shelving.
Whether Casey caught it or not, he couldn't tell. He filed it and moved on.
"Can I go now?" Simon said, with the energy of a man who wanted to be very far from this street very soon.
Sasha looked at him for a moment. Then nodded to her man.
Simon was escorted back to his car and pointed toward the exit with considerable emphasis.
He drove away without looking back.
He returned the borrowed car to its parking structure, walked to the Mustang, and called Chuck.
"They coming?"
"Already on their way," Chuck said. "Fifteen minutes, maybe less."
"Lock the back. All secondary exits. Then get into position."
"Done."
Simon opened his trunk.
The rifle case came out first — he'd pre-assembled everything, scope zeroed that afternoon on a quiet stretch of highway where nobody would ask questions about a young man with a precision rifle and a sandbag rest. He carried it across the street to the low commercial building opposite the Buy More, found the maintenance access to the roof he'd identified that morning, and climbed.
He set up on the northeast corner, which gave him clear sightlines through the Buy More's front windows and a partial angle on the interior through the glass of the home theater display wall.
He opened the laptop — connected to the Buy More's security camera system through a login Chuck had provided — and watched the feed.
The black town car arrived nine minutes later.
Sasha stepped out. Four men with her. Two of them holding Casey and Sarah's arms in the specific way of people who were managing prisoners rather than escorting guests.
They went through the front entrance.
"Go," Simon said into the earpiece.
Inside, Chuck moved through the employee corridor, running chains through the push bars of every secondary exit. Back door. Loading dock. Employee entrance. Each one locked from the inside with enough chain and padlock to require tools to break.
Simon positioned himself behind the rifle and settled his breathing.
He called the Buy More's Nerd Herd line from a burner phone, put it on speaker, and set it beside the laptop.
When the call connected to the desk phone inside, he spoke.
"Welcome to the Buy More," he said. "You're the guests of honor."
On the camera feed, he watched Sasha's head come up. She was scanning the room, looking for the source.
"Who is this?" she said.
"I was the delivery driver," Simon said. "You still owe me a signature, by the way."
"Who are you?"
"That's not the interesting question," Simon said. He watched one of her men move through the store, checking aisles. "The interesting question is what happens in the next thirty seconds. You have two choices — and I want you to think about them carefully before you decide."
He watched her on the camera feed. She was calm. Professionals were always calm until they weren't.
"Before you answer," Simon said, "have someone check the Nerd Herd service desk. There's something there I put together for you."
He watched her gesture. One of her men moved to the desk and opened the small package sitting on its surface.
"Bomb." The man's voice, flat and reporting.
On the camera feed, Sasha's expression didn't change. But her posture shifted — not fear, but recalibration. The math had just changed and she was doing it again.
"Twenty kilos of C4," Simon said into the phone. "Remotely triggered. The detonator responds to a phone call from a number only I have." He let that land. "The exits are locked. Your car is outside and you can't get to it." He paused. "So here are your options. You release Casey and Sarah, you leave the chip on the desk, and you walk out the front door. Or we find out what twenty kilos does to a retail environment."
The Buy More was completely quiet.
Sasha looked at the package on the Nerd Herd desk.
She looked at the front windows — dark, reflective, revealing nothing about the street outside.
She was trying to find him. Trying to determine whether the threat was real or theater. That was the calculation she was running, and Simon had built the situation specifically so that the cost of guessing wrong was too high to risk.
He settled the rifle's bipod on the roof ledge, put his eye to the scope, and waited.
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