The Blue Light Project (29 page)

“The Executor.” A girl’s voice.

“Jabba the Hut’s first lieutenant?”

“Fortuna.” Another boy.

“Any cell phones around?” Pegg asked.

“He took them away. I don’t even live here. I don’t even watch TV. I play video games but only an hour a day. Everybody just wants to go home.”

“You’re going home. You’re doing well, though. You’re all doing really well. What’s your sport?”

“Chess and debate,” Gerry said. “I started karate but a kid broke my nose.”

“Have you all eaten?”

“He gave us some kind of cookie. We shared candy bars.”

“And who else is here? Come on, all of you. Tell me who you are.” Pegg was sitting now, looking back into the blackness. But he could feel the small forms here, and feel them as they came close. A hand to his arm now. Another one finding his shoulder.

Ashley, Isaac, Roshawn, Barker.

Pegg touched their shoulders, or put his hands on their heads, communicating in that way possible only by touch. We’re all here. None of us are alone. There were no tears here now. Bravery indeed. Bravery and a strange silence. It didn’t make Pegg proud imagining himself in the same position. He’d have run with the voice coaches, he was sadly certain. Did anything in his life allow him to think otherwise? Would he have gone back for the missing best friend of his little sister, the sister living with the father from whom it sounded like Gerry had grown entirely distant?

Gerry was telling him: “There were five or six men to start. They were actors, part of the show. Then there was a Kill. You know what that is?

“I’ve heard about it, yes,” Pegg said.

“She’s still up there in the other group, that girl. Her name is Hyacinth. I wish I hadn’t given her five stars. I could have given her four and maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Because after the actors, the other guy came in and started shooting. The actors ran off and left him here. He has a briefcase. It’s a bomb, I think. Hyacinth is still here. Still over at the back.”

“It’s going to be okay,” Pegg said. “Tell me where the rest of you live.”

Gerry was breathing through his mouth. Smart kid, holding some five-year-old stranger in his lap. Guilty in a way he had no reason to feel. But they talked about where they lived for a while. Streets and
crescents were described. High-rise developments. Favorite rooms and toys and holidays.

“Let’s do pi,” Gerry said.

“Three point one four . . . one five . . .”

“ . . . nine two six five . . .”

“Roshawn, my man. Roshawn does what?”

“I rock the house,” Roshawn said.

“He’s a comic,” Gerry explained. “Do some, Roshawn.”

“Grandmothers are really nuts though, don’t you find?” Roshawn said to Pegg, who felt himself become an audience, felt attention directed through this granular black towards him alone.

“I like this one.”

“Can I go on here?”

“Go, Roshawn. Quiet, everyone.”

“Like my own grandmother the other day, pushing me down the sidewalk. This other old lady stops. She’s saying, like, aw he’s so cute. He’s so sweet. My grandmother, she’s like: Oh, this is nothing. Wait’ll I show you his picture.”

Gerry there in the darkness, unsmiling. Unable to escape all that he’d seen. When the man was shot in the center aisle and fell to the floor, his head had rolled over towards Gerry and their eyes had met. There was no escaping the gaze. And when the woman came into the theater later, standing in the side door that opened onto the lobby, ranting that they should just get up and leave, run out, don’t listen to this guy, she looked at Gerry too, he was sure of it. She was fourteen rows away, a black smudge of silhouette at the center of a blinding halo of light from the street outside. Gerry’s eyes were pinched shut. And still he felt sure she was talking directly to him. Telling him to move, to do something. And he just sat there until the theater came alight with a ragged burst of flame, the stage and front seats candled into brilliance by a ragged lick of white and orange. They all saw the man
onstage then, with his night-vision goggles. He was blind in that instant he fired. The tables turned. But nobody moved. The long arc of flame bridged the air between the two figures. The ghost trace. Once, twice, three times. MAC-10 or mini-Uzi. She did not fly backwards and hit the wall like in the first-person shooter games Gerry had played. She just crumpled in place in the middle of her ranting and didn’t move again.

 

PEGG CIRCLED AWAY FROM GERRY and around the room. He talked to the others. He counted and remembered names. Laisha, Reebo, Sam, Hyacinth, Metric. That made ten total.

Sam did beatbox and Reebo rapped. Laisha had memorized every dish in the most recent season of
Iron Chef America
and traveled with her own copper cookware from Villedieu-les-Poêles. Metric danced pop-lock. Hyacinth, who seemed to be sitting a couple seats away to one side, said she was a singer. Her voice kept low, as if wishing not to be heard. As if she were keeping her head down.

“Come here, Hyacinth,” Pegg said to her, crouching low. And he heard the little girl get up from her seat and come towards the rest of them at the end of the row. “Tell us about where you live,” he asked her, reaching a hand out and finding her shoulder. He felt her hesitation. But now the others joined in, as if they too had been trying to make her speak, and failing so far. They said:
Tell us, Hyacinth. Tell us, please. We want to hear.
So she started, slowly, then went on to describe where she lived and how it had inspired her. That and Celine Dion, but mostly her home. The sound of birds in the distance. There was always a ripple of light in the trees, even at night. And if you were very still, around sunrise and dusk, the animals moved in the forests near you without fear. Elk, wolves, bears. Hyacinth was glad to have
seen them, because she could think of them now. And the memories helped her.

In the darkness, Pegg’s face was performing a dance of expressions, helpless to the cross-wired emotions below. KiddieFamers. Here in the darkness, they were held together by their ambitions, no matter where they learned them. The desire for fame may be long-term toxic, but was it toxic for young Hyacinth here, right at that moment? Didn’t it serve her well sitting in the darkness next to a ticking bomb? If a person didn’t crave living as the exception at such a moment, one might too easily accept death. And who the hell was Thom Pegg anyway to criticize?

Pegg traced the side wall forward to the front of the theater. Halfway there he decided he needed a drink to settle the acid squelching of his middle regions, relieve the pinion there, the clamp at his lower right side. He pulled out one of the half-pints and hefted it. Then he put it away without taking a sip.

 

“TELL ME ABOUT THE NAME,” Pegg said to the man. “Mov. Is it short for something?”

They sat on the stage together, chairs just a few feet apart on either side of a low table, like actors doing improv. Pegg fumbled his tape recorder out and held it up in the darkness.

“It’s fine,” Mov said.

Pegg groped it down to the low table, feeling with his other hand. “The name Mov. It’s not yours. It’s a nom de guerre.”

“Just mine for the moment,” the man said. “I’ve taken it to honor a fallen hero. Movsar.”

Pegg thought this rang a bell, but couldn’t pull in the reference.

“Barayev,” the man said. “Movsar Barayev.”

Ah, here we go. “The incident in Moscow. I believe he was Chechen,” Pegg said, starting the tape recorder. “So is this a kind of tribute, then?”

“Not exactly,” Mov said. “But there are parallels.”

Pegg thought about his angles here. What flattered a hostage taker? He tried the topic of those outside. How were they handling things? Did Mov think they knew what they were dealing with, really?

Mov didn’t bite. He answered in monosyllables.

Pegg circled and returned. “Barayev was a drug addict,” he tried. “Probably the front for some other leader, calling the shots from behind.”

“Yes, well think of me as both the drug addict and the figure calling the shots.”

“So what would you like me to report back? As in Moscow, so too here?”

“Not quite. I have no ethnic beef, so that’s different. No subjugated homeland. No sacred codex, no articles of faith. I also have much better technology.”

“How so?”

“I can see in the dark, for one. Infrared filter. These are military units.”

Night-vision. Haden would probably want to hear about that as soon as possible. But he wouldn’t tell him just yet, Pegg thought. Surely he’d earned the right to hear a little more of this man’s story.

“Are you military?” Pegg asked.

“Not a chance. I bought two of these on eBay. And then there’s the payload. The central question.”

“And what is that, Mov?”

“It’s a bomb. A really big one. You techie or just asking me questions on a topic designed to flatter me? Get him talking about his gear. He’ll like that.”

“I’m genuinely interested. Briefcase bomb?”

“Call it that. Special tweaks, though. Hand trigger.”

Mov explained this detail. If his hand were to let go of the case here, the one he was holding tightly as they spoke, a pressurized capsule in
the handle would expand by a millimeter, closing a circuit between electrical contacts and delivering power to an ignition chip that would then send the whole thing up, and magnificently too.

“Like someone tries to take the thing away from you and boom,” Pegg said.

“Exactly that. Same thing if it gets removed from the theater.”

“And how does that part work?”

“Boring stuff, technology,” Mov said. “Technology is just a tool.”

“I’m a journalist. I’m all about the telling detail.”

“Is your tape recorder on?”

“It is, yes,” Pegg said.

“In addition to the pressure trigger in the handle, the case has a GPS trip switch,” Mov told him. “That switch is activated if the case is moved out of a certain zone.”

Pegg coughed and then, for a moment, couldn’t stop coughing. When he recovered, he asked: “How big a zone?”

Bigger than a Buick, smaller than the theater. “Beats strapping bombs to your women.”

“I don’t know about beats, Mov. You have children in here. This is a fairly bad scene as far as they go.”

“Well yes, children. I said there were parallels. And the children are a key part of that, certainly. But an appreciation for the theater too. We want this to be remembered, don’t we?”

Pegg winced in the darkness. Belly alight. Rumbles at the navel now, a blossoming within. He leaned a little backwards in his chair, which occasionally provided relief. Buzzing the internet constantly for information on his symptoms, he’d once come across the advice about leaning back. It worked for a while, temporarily convincing him that the problem was in the pancreas, the groans and complaints of which were apparently alleviated by going straight, unfurling. But then the symptoms had ripped the other way the following week, and Pegg was
driven on to other ideas, other fears. Spinal tumor. Cancer of the connective tissue.

“You all right?” Mov asked him.

“Splendid,” Pegg said, willing himself past the pain. “But if I remember correctly from Moscow, Barayev got the BBC World Service.”

“Don’t put yourself down. You were my idea.”

“You read
L:MN?
”

“I do. But more importantly, I read you. I happen to like a good fall from grace. Did you lose your house? End up living in your car for a while before a rental place came through? Lose the kid? That’s the one that turns people. Losing the kid.”

Pegg shuffled in his chair a little. He forced his eyes to the spot in the darkness from which the voice had been emanating. From where he could hear the squeak of the wooden chair. He detected a tighter grain here and resolved to track it, staring. Pegg said: “Have we met before?”

“Never had the pleasure. Call me a fan.”

Mov was making fun of him, of course. But he was doing so in a particular way. He was mocking Pegg the way Pegg himself had liked to mock people in print since his infamous fall from grace. He’d made a business of fucking with celebrities, yes. Just as Haden had said on the plane, those endless hours before. But he’d mocked the readers too. Not for their stupidity exactly. But for their self-identification as fans. Fanatics. Possessed by enthusiasm beyond reason, by a mindless enslavement not to the person being profiled—whatever actor or comedian or rising rap star—but to the precise machinery at the heart of which he and Mov presently sat, knee to knee onstage in the
KiddieFame
studio theater, bracketed around a briefcase bomb that might just vaporize them all. The machinery of yearning and dissatisfaction that delivered to people fame on the one hand and ruination on the other.

“And what was your line of work?” Pegg asked, finally.

“Languages,” Mov answered. “I speak four well. Four or five others less well. I have a fantastic memory.”

Pegg felt the waking alertness opposite, as if they were now both getting somewhere. He sat a little straighter himself. “Which languages, Mov?”

“Think along the lines of Arabic dialects. Although make no mistake. I’m from here. I’m one of you.”

Pegg leaned back in the chair, felt the wood of it bite his back, his knees. He felt a slow wave of intestinal pressure, a steady sickness not quite rising to complete itself. He’d had many occasions to wonder what the organics of his abdomen knew that had not yet reached his brain. All that fateful knowing of hidden cysts and swelling lymph nodes. Here was such a time. The sense of knowledge there in the savvy guts.

“Why no demands, no statements, Mov? In Moscow they had demands. Troops out of Chechnya, et cetera. So tell me. Where in the world would you like them to start ordering the men back into the helicopters?”