'We've found a way out, Lieutenant.'
'Like hell you have.'
'If you don't believe me,' the stranger said, 'you will when you come inside fifteen minutes from now.'
'We have everything covered!'
'You missed one thing.'
'I did not!' Kluger said. His face was a furious shade of red, the blood pounding visibly in his temples and in his neck. He was straining his jaw muscles so hard that they ached.
'Sorry, but you did.'
'Look, you-'
'Remember,' the stranger went on, 'fifteen minutes. If you come inside one minute sooner, we'll have to kill the hostages.'
'I don't know what you're up to-'
'We're up to escape,' the stranger said, laughing. Then he put down his receiver and cut Kluger short just as he had before.
The lieutenant slammed open the booth door, nearly breaking it, and went outside.
'Sir?' Hawbaker asked, turning toward him.
'Shut up!' the lieutenant ordered. 'Let me think.'
Kluger stood by the automated post office, his hands fisted on his hips, and he gave the mall building a thorough going-over. He let his eyes travel along at ground level around the two faces-north and east-that he could see from this vantage point. Two public entrances. Both locked. Two men on the east doors. Three on the north entrance. There were no windows. The only other potential trouble spots were the two big bay doors on the east wall, the truck entrances to the warehouse. But they were also locked; his men had checked them out at the start of this. To leave the mall that way, the men inside would have to make a lot of noise. And Kluger's men would see the doors going up long before anyone could come through them. Kluger had six men covering the bay doors, and he knew there was not going to be trouble there.
But where else?
He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to recall the way the south and west faces looked. One double-door public entrance on each of those walls. No windows. No loading docks. He had enough men on both places to deal with any attempted breakout.
The roof?
He looked at the garish, peaked, imitation thatch roof and immediately ruled that out. Even if they could get onto the roof-and Kluger doubted that-where could they go? Nowhere.
The storm drains?
Kluger had not been among the first men sent out to investigate the cause of the alarm at Oceanview Plaza, and therefore he had not been plunged into this thing unprepared. He had been at the station house on a rest break, using his thirty minutes of free time to catch up on a backlog of paperwork. He was there when Sergeant Brice received the first telephone call from that man in the Plaza building, and he was fairly well aware of the nature of the case before he was put in charge of it. When he was assigned to it minutes after the call to Brice, he had sent a man over to the courthouse to dig up the blueprints to the shopping mall, and then he had come straight out here as fast as he could drive. Even before the blueprints had arrived, he had sent three men into the scrub land next to the mall with orders to search for and guard over any large drain openings. That had been good, sound, far-sighted police work. When the prints had come and he had unrolled them on the macadam behind a squad car, he had learned that there was indeed a way out of the mall through the drains: the same one his men were already guarding. That was the only outlet big enough to pass a man. He was certain that he had read the blueprints correctly.
Therefore, the drains did not figure in this
What else?
Nothing else.
What was this threat of escape, then? A ruse of some sort, a trick? A bluff?
A fat mosquito buzzed persistently around the lieutenant's head and tried to alight on his left ear. This time he did not kill it. He brushed it away without thinking, without really being aware that he was expending the effort.
All over the parking lot the harsh and eerily garbled voices of radio dispatchers were crackling out of ten police-band radios, rising on the night air like ghostly messages from another world. They came to Lieutenant Kluger, but he did not, at the moment, hear them. His thoughts were elsewhere, turning over facts, looking for worms underneath them.
A bluff, was it?
But what could he hope to gain by bluffing?
Nothing. Kluger was sure of it.
If, in fifteen minutes, the lieutenant did lead a force into the mall, and if those hoodlums were waiting in there, then they would start shooting at one another. A number of policemen would die. That was inevitable. Every battle had its casualties. But in the end, what could the thieves gain? They would be cut to ribbons. Unless they just wanted to go out with a bang? And he was sure that the man he had talked to on the phone was not the type to make a grandstand play only to see a few fireworks. That man intended to live.
A trick?
There was no trick, under the circumstances, that amounted to more than a bluff.
He was almost tempted to dismiss it and to go on as he would have done if the stranger had not called with this fairy tale of escape. Yet? Something about that man's voice, something about his style and his undeniable self- confidence led Kluger to believe that he had meant precisely what he had said, regardless of the seeming impossibility of it. He had said he and his men were leaving. And if he were telling the truth
Kluger looked at his watch.
1:34.
He had wasted almost five minutes, and he suddenly realized that they might have been the most precious five minutes of the night. That fifteen-minute waiting period which the man in the mall had demanded was a completely artificial time limit. Kluger was angry with himself for having fallen for it. If they had found a way out, then they would have used it by now. They would have left the five hostages behind and would be unable to reach and harm them. Each minute that Kluger delayed, each minute he stood here on his big flat feet, they might be getting farther and farther away. They might be getting off scot-free.
'Hawbaker!'
The rookie whirled. 'Yes, sir?'
'When I came out here, I brought one of the department's acetylene torches to cut through those inner gates if we had to.'
Hawbaker blinked at him.
'It's in the trunk of my car. Get it and bring it to me-on the double!'
'Yes, sir.'
'Don't forget the tank, Hawbaker.'
'No, sir.' Hawbaker was off, running clumsily.
Kluger looked at the mall building again, thought of the man on the telephone, thought of the promotions he needed, thought of the chief's chair
'Damn!' he said. He ran down toward the east entrance of the mall shouting at his men as he went. 'Look sharp! We're going in!'
Kluger grabbed the torch and the feeding hose in one hand, lifted the small tank of compressed gas in the other, and walked across the carpet of broken glass from the outer mall doors that two of his men had smashed with hammers. He was the only one up front now. The others had fallen back on his orders, had gladly taken up safer positions behind the squad cars.
In the nine years and six months that he had been a policeman, Norman Kluger had never hesitated to risk his life if the occasion seemed to call for that. He had something of a reputation as a daredevil, but he wasn't like that at all. Naturally, there was a slight bit of grandstanding in it because he often took chances in order to be
