The Blue Light Project (24 page)

It was a delicious turning point for Pegg. Something he’d never experienced previously. He said: “Have you always wondered that? I mean about the name?”

Loftin’s expression had gone hard and blank as a sidewalk.

“Because it’s quite fascinating really,” Pegg said.

“Really.”

“Yes, well there are those who say the one thing, right? And then those who say something completely different.”

The man’s eyes were dead slits. “Right,” he said.

Pegg plunged onward, gorging himself on a moment. “But really,” he said. “I’ve always tended to think, you know, that
L:MN
stood for
Lick: My Nuts.
”

“Thom, Thom. Come on now.”

This was Haden, finally at his elbow. Haden, whom Pegg had watched coming across the room while he spoke and not recognized until the very last moment. Stepping between chairs and through conversations without raising a single glance. He looked different than he had on the plane. Younger now in a sweater, wool cap and jeans. No frog pin either. He might have been the correspondent for the local campus paper. But more importantly, he was invisible. Seen by only
those who had a need to see. Haden, it seemed obvious, was good at his job. Pegg wondered what that was exactly.

He took Pegg’s elbow and steered him out into the hall. Haden said: “Yes, yes. It’s out there. Some tabloid grunt has been given access. There are ways to handle the publicity that will make it easy and ways to handle it that will make it hard.”

“Tabloid grunt,” Pegg said. “You don’t offend me, if that’s what you’re trying.”

The conference room across the hall was still emptying. But already Pegg found his pleasure in the moment fading. Trumping the Loftins of this world, whatever. Loftin was a prig. Fucking puffed-up Loftin and his famous book. Six national magazine awards and a bunch of money. Wife and kids. Whoopie fact-bearing, bestselling, Episcopalian shit.

Haden guided him down the hall to a door, then through that and into the alley. Here, against the rank brick, he leaned a shoulder. Ten yards away, under the overhang of an entrance to an underground parking garage, a soldier trained his weapon on the pavement, looking back and forth. His eyes drifted over them professionally, lingered for the seconds required, then continued their steady patrol.

Haden shook his head before starting. “Try to keep it together. Things are only going to get more confusing here for a while.”

“You seem rather calm though,” Pegg said.

Haden’s expression went opaque and distant. He glanced down at his own shoes. This next bit, Pegg thought, is full-on bullshit.

Haden said, quite clearly: “Brass is worried that he’s started to kill the kids.”

Pegg hadn’t seen that coming at all. He swiveled sharply away from Haden and put his hands to his face, leaned into the railing. He could barely manage the words. “God,” he said. “I can’t do this.”

Haden didn’t answer right away. Pegg could hear the wind pick up,
knocking a downspout against a wall somewhere nearby. He let his hands fall away from his face. He croaked: “Kill them, like what do you mean?”

Haden shook his head. “Like executions. Like he’s getting impatient.”

“Have released hostages been reporting this?”

“Nobody has been released in four hours and the idea is that this might have started within the past hour.”

“An idea based on what evidence?” Pegg said.

“Well, not much really. I never said I believed the story.”

“Fucking hell,” Pegg said, staring at Haden. “What’re you telling me for?”

“Just giving you the picture, Thom. It’s what people are saying. Best guess at numbers is under a dozen remaining now. And the thinking is that these situations work down to some significant configuration. Then they resolve for lack of material.”

Pegg breathed deeply, several times. “You are fucking with me.”

“I’m not. You’re here because the man asked for you,” Haden said.

“You know what I think?” Pegg said. “I think I was your bright idea.”

Haden nodded like he’d expected Pegg to say this eventually. “I’d like to say yes. I really would. As an idea, you would have been a good one.”

“He asked for the
New York Times,
didn’t he? He asked for the
Washington Post.
For the BBC World Service. And they all said no.”

Haden found a vial in a hip pocket and unscrewed the lid, extracted a tightly hand-rolled cigarette. Darkish paper. He lit up and offered it to Pegg, who shook his head but knew the sweet scent. Beedis. Pegg thought: Please may I one day know what kind of federal operative, what the fuck kind of gray-zone emissary smokes beedis on the job.

Pegg said: “I’m having a hard time placing you, to be frank. In the scheme of things.”

Haden inhaled the clovey smoke and held it, nodding. He released the lung-load while talking, his words sculpted in gray eddies and whorls. “My line is more creative than it used to be.”

“And what line is that?”

“Think like human resources.”

“You mean I could hand in my letter of resignation?”

“You could but you won’t,” Haden said. “You’ve been in that pressroom. You’ve seen the envious looks. The
Washington Post
said no? What are you, out of your mind? There isn’t a paper on the planet that wouldn’t kill for what you have right now. Right in front of you.”

Pegg glanced away again. The soldier near the entrance to the parking garage was gone.

“You’ve got the whole thing read,” Pegg said. “Simple, simple.”

“I didn’t say simple. I see a situation here that is many sided.”

“Do you really? I sort of see it having only two sides myself. Some lunatic threatening some other people who are probably not lunatics even if they are
KiddieFame
contestants.”

Haden pressed out the cigarette on the sole of his shoe. “I’d be the last person to try and dissuade you in a moment of moral clarity. But you’re really a spectacularly arrogant prick, aren’t you?”

Morality between the garbage bins. Talking to a guy who got trained up at some private farm in rural Virginia or in the lake country outside of Regina. Knows fifteen ways to kill a man with a safety pin or a gelato spoon. Running down this line of reasoning, Pegg had a thought. The guys in the pressroom, the ripple of awareness when he’d entered. The galvanizing flash of his own resolve on sensing that he was the center of an envy field, his situation profoundly desired by all those arrayed around, arms hung over the backs of chairs, phones flipped open, screens flickering a thousand news feeds from other parts of the world, an endless loop on Meme Media. Whose eyes in that moment had just swiveled onto him, onto Pegg. Who never questioned why they all
wanted it so much, the rare chance to go verbal with the real thing, the man with death on his mind, yours and his. They all wanted that. It was the thing coveted above all.

He asked: “Why tell anyone that I’d been given access?”

Haden looked at his watch and then the lowered sky. He said: “We set the information free. I mean, either that’s the answer or: does it matter anyway?”

The drops of rain began to strike the alley garbage and the sheet lids of the dumpsters and Pegg himself. He does his job well indeed, Pegg thought. Haden calls the rain down. Haden darkens the mood. Haden pulls something small from his inside pocket that he wants carried inside.

“You must be joking,” Pegg said.

“It’s not a weapon,” Haden said. “It’s a voice recorder.”

“I know what it is. I have my own, thanks.”

“Of course you do. This is your own.”

Pegg took the tape recorder and rolled it in his hands. Japanese minidisc, ten years dated although it still worked well. Omnidirectional mike and a dozen hours’ recording time on long play. Pointless to ask how Haden had gotten it. The fact was he had gotten it. Although nothing looked jigged or souped or tricked-up about it. Pegg paged through the storage folders, all empty as he had left them, except for Folder D. And there it was. The single recording that had survived all purging. A snip of audio that had traveled with him and lived on this machine while it recorded other voices in Bel Air haciendas and Park Avenue triplex palaces, in warehouse lofts on Queen West. And before that, in places where the real victims had been. In poisoned lives and toxic landscapes. This thirty-second clip had comforted him before sleep in an uncountable number of hotel rooms before his fall and since.

“Record your conversation with the man,” Haden was saying. “He’ll expect that.”

Pegg’s thumb brushed the buttons.

“Then at some point, when the moment seems right,” Haden said, “play your little clip there.”

Pegg looked up at him. “Like a signal.”

“The man is wearing night-vision, we believe,” Haden said. “We’d like you to confirm that, perhaps at a moment when you and the man are separated from the others by some distance. Night-vision, Pegg. If yes, hit Play.”

“And you’ll hear me.”

“As long as you’re carrying that device, we’ll hear you loud and clear.”

“And what will happen?”

“Something sudden, Thom. But you mustn’t be frightened. Wait for that critical moment. Then hit Play.”

Pegg’s eyes returned to the silver surface of the voice recorder, the places worn gray where his thumb had so many times carried out its fractional movement. He pressed Play, right there, like a practice run, releasing the warbled voice into wet air. Three years old when the recording was made and an impressive grasp of fundamental things for a kid that age. He knew how to sell a punch line, that kid.

“What did the skeleton say when he walked into a bar?” asked the boy. One beat. “Give me a beer. And a mop.”

And there it was. The sound of his boy laughing. Micah Swenson Pegg. A delight, a joy. There was nothing else. And you could hear it in Pegg’s laughter too. Booming in the background. Pegg a hundred years younger than he was now. A hundred shades lighter. Pegg laughing with his boy. Jennifer looking in through the door from her office, a half smile on her face.

Had they been happy? They had been ecstatic.

 

PEGG HAD AN ERRAND. Twenty minutes, Haden told him. No longer.

The Pig and Python. Typical turnkey bar that belonged to the international Celtosphere. Pegg knew it was there. He had no idea how he
knew. He was sure he’d never been there before. But as he forded the rivers of rainwater and floating garbage, found the alley mouth and surveyed the street, he sensed it just to the corner and left. Fake gold leaf. Fake red velvet booths. Fake fiddle music. Fake cheer. The place was perfect. They outdid the Irish in every respect and that’s what the Celtosphere demanded.

Irish whiskey, he thought, as a matter of gratitude and respect. One slender half-pint pocket bottle for each side of his long overcoat, which was too hot for his situation but which he found himself unwilling to remove. Sweating in place at the bar, leaned in over a triple for the road. Neat. No ice. He was perspiring and palpitating, struggling to keep his breathing non-critical. He was gulping at the whiskey, waiting for its cauterizing magic in his middle regions, a certain slow calming of the troubles there, the shifting allegiances and betrayals of his inner works and yards. All the while his eyes were locked on the three white swallows that adorned the label of the bottle that had been poured. Their shapes lithe and perfect, flitting around one another in a rosette of purity, making sense of the universe with play, with a circular arrangement of their spotlessly iconic selves.

Pegg struggled with emotion, sipping. Then sipping again. Unfamiliar feelings and his movements to deal with them were not grooved by practice either. Swarmed by . . . what was this? Some kind of sorrow or grief, as if he had already done something for which an avalanche of guilt had been released. He swallowed and coughed, choked, then fumbled out a handkerchief to cover his face. After a few seconds, face buried in this scrap of once-white cotton that hadn’t seen the laundry in many months, he made to blow, but had an epiglottal misfiring doing so, a loud and messy effect. He produced a throaty blatt and left a rivulet of snot across his lip and chin. Agh. Damn. Wiped away. Glances now from the college-aged bartender, who had questioned the triple with an eyebrow spasm and an
involuntary look at the clock over Pegg’s head. Whose glance now had no resting place, bouncing around the room and checking his brunch crowd for reaction. English tourists. Little jars of jam with toast and porcelain pots of tea.

Pegg gulped down the last of his drink, then exited to the street and found his corner, his fetid alley mouth. He entered and passed a dumpster he had somehow not noticed when heading out. A typical metal bin, reeking and sordid, but which someone had artfully postered over to make it look like a piece of Louis Vuitton luggage. Must have taken hours getting all those sheets of paper lined up, getting the seams just right. Hours certainly to get that perfect-hued effect. Magnificently in place while being out of place, luxurious pebblegrained leather against the muck.

Onward. No time to linger on the seething streets in this most seething town. He was past and moving on towards the back door of the hotel. Steeling himself, by the step. Unused to the procedure, but wondering if his display of emotion back at the bar might have been useful, in its way. He was done with the self-pity now, Pegg thought, his mind flickering forward to what nobler spirit must now be stockpiled in preparation for the events ahead. Which was a line of self-talk that might well have continued—Pegg was nothing if not susceptible to his own reasoning—if half a dozen steps farther down he hadn’t been stopped by what the alley wall next threw up for his consideration. A large poster had been mounted on the brick. Eight feet high by five feet wide. Styled as if after a thirties-era election poster, all face and slogan, black and white. The double jab of a political rhetoric aimed at those with guards held low.