The Blue Light Project (20 page)

Pegg had imagined himself in a tent somewhere. In a parking lot around the corner from the theater. On a phone. With someone like Haden right there at his elbow, handing him his lines. He’d imagined all this taking place on a set.

Now Pegg slid his coffee mug away, as if he had just tasted a dangerous flavor underlying the breakfast blend. He surveyed the non-faces around him. He spoke again, although now even he could hear that his voice lacked conviction, that it revealed him to be aware of a trap. “And if that’s the case, well then, you’d all be mad, wouldn’t you?”

But they were all leaving the cabin now, gathering up their papers and filing out. Taking their seats up front. Pegg could hear the buckles snapping and the tray tables being stowed. He registered the placeless ding of the overheard light: fasten your seatbelts, we’re about to land. Although nobody came back to remind him or to check. And he didn’t do it either. He just leaned over to the window, let his face slide in close. Bare dawn over the rising city, the shape of it gradually making itself clear in the rosy murk. A shape in lights elbowed in around the black river, the downtown core, the bridges. He watched as they angled down into these lights, flickering in over the warehouses and the dusty residential neighborhoods that clustered near the airport. And noting something just in that last minute. A last thought before the wretched thump. Before the spill of something inside him, organic disputes renewed.

Images scattered, off-grid patterned. Appearing, disappearing.

No. Yes. He looked away, looked back. And there they were again. Ghosted outlines in white, floating, flashing to the retina and disappearing. A hand. An eye. A lizard. Nazca lines on the big-box stores. A retinal malfunction to accompany his many others, surely. Please, not this. Pegg squeezed his eyes shut again, then popped them open to shake off the clinging illusion, as the plane lowered itself towards the blurred ground. A robotic face. A spider. Sparking to life, streaks on the invisible landscape below.

A man with his arms up-stretched as if in surrender. Both hands open, one missing finger.

There and then gone.

A SPASM WAITED IN THE AIR. All the news agencies seemed to agree.

Already by Thursday morning, any report or talk-show feature that didn’t concern the Meme Media Crisis aired with a discernible trace of apology. The story about head lice in local schools. The guest appearance by the author of a book about organizing the clutter in your closets. These conversations continued, but were worried and frayed at the edges. People seemed to doubt the normal life to which these conversations pointed hopefully. And on the hours, news anchors made the mood official, cutting back to the wider tragic moment, clouds leaning low over the plaza.

A throat was cleared. An earpiece adjusted. Here came the update. Thursday first light, the opinion of all newsreaders and analysts sharply converge:

The weather coiled and waited. Bruised cloud in the east, sloping gray strands beneath. In and around the plaza, the streets were frozen
in uncertainty. People stood in groups on corners and outside cafés, talking in low voices or saying not a word. Shifting on their feet, shaking their heads.

“Most of us will remember an incident like this from some other time,” said a security studies expert on one of the international channels. “Moscow, Breslin. Even Entebbe or Munich. This is different because there are no demands or negotiations. Officials still haven’t been able to contact this individual, and that’s a source of concern on this side of the barricade.”

The
KiddieFame
banners fluttered now in a steady wind. The titanium flanks of the building were dull and smeared. The smashed front glass of the lobby doors kept the eye nervously focused there, one’s gaze never flickering far before wandering back to watch and to hope.

Those released continued to emerge, but at a trickle now, in ones and twos. It was all happening against some calculus nobody could figure out. Released hostages were whisked from the front steps and into the backs of waiting minivans. Driven over to the command center where they saw doctors and were questioned, twice, sometimes three times. Made to produce ID. Nobody had the whole picture. They reported what they knew to everyone who asked, sipped tea or juice, wiped their eyes.

Inside the theater, it was reported, people cried or slept or fidgeted. Nobody was planning to fight back. Raised voices lasted fifteen minutes at the beginning. Objections and hostility. Twelve hours in, everyone was stupefied with fatigue. People dozed in their seats, waking only to imagine that they could see the faint outline of a figure onstage, briefcase across his knees. But they couldn’t see this at all, in reality. It was only a retinal memory of those final seconds as the light fell. Some still believed they’d be released. Others didn’t. Others worried only that the story might be long unfolding. Children cried. On and off, everybody cried. Released hostages spoke of having to use plastic garbage
bags at the back of the theater for relieving themselves. The place smelled awful. They said that cookies had been distributed. But bland, like sawdust. One of the adults released early Thursday, whose family made a practice of laying away food in preparation for crisis, recognized the texture and the taste. So the story was out. The perpetrator of the Meme Media Crisis had thought to bring survival rations.

The news seized on the detail and re-ran the numbers.

Not a shot had been fired since the one that came through the front glass just before midnight the day before. Not a word said by the hostage taker for public consumption. Crowds grew dense in the south end of the square. Hundreds of people saw the armored cars of the militia units pull in from the north and south, saw them park on the lawns there near the public gardens, saw troops fan out. Federal politicians were known to be in town, huddled in the government buildings downtown. Black SUVs were seen crossing the bridge at high speed, flashers on. A story was suddenly circulating that SWAT and antiterrorism units were training at a theater in the eastern suburbs. They’d set up a black tarp to block any view from the street. They were practicing the storm in there. Sweeping in from doors and the stage wings. A number of journalists made their way over to the theater that morning, but there was no tarp or anything else unusual to be found.

Among the journalists who didn’t follow that lead was a man named Loftin who wrote for various newspapers and magazines of reputation. Loftin was well known in the press corps for his award-winning political and human interest pieces, and for the fact that he seemed always to find the more illuminating story that lived just off the shoulder of the one everybody else was writing. A journalist’s journalist—enough so to be asked by the
Times
those years ago to weigh in on the Thom Pegg scandal—Loftin was comfortable in front of heads of state but
found his most natural cadence with the second-in-commands, the supporting characters at the fringe of the action. He was an angle jockey, virtuoso of the surprise point of view. His book of collected essays was called
Oblique Angles,
a big seller. Now other journalists listened when Loftin asked questions at press conferences, sussing his take on the material at hand.

That day, the reason Loftin didn’t bother heading over to the theater in the eastern suburbs was that he knew already the SWAT team wasn’t there. And he knew that already because Loftin always had the right source.

Pam Pavich. That local police force spokesperson since replaced by the colonel. Pavich, who also happened to be someone Loftin had known since college. Yes, Loftin was a local too, although now based in London, married to an American woman with three kids from a previous marriage he’d met through
EpiscopalianSingles.com
. Loftin was pretty much over the thwarted first-year college crush he’d had on Pam back in the day. But he still talked to her once every few months, catching up on doings in the center of the country because Pam heard every rumor and seemed to know personal stories about every senior law enforcement official in the region.

When this particular crisis broke, Loftin was especially attuned. This was hometown news. When he called Pam, he found that she’d been up all night, following developments with mounting concern. She asked Loftin if he was coming in, her voice distinctly on edge. Loftin told her he was already at his hotel, having been on the last flight in the night before.

The information Loftin then received couldn’t have been more timely. Don’t bother with the SWAT team story, Pam told him. They’ve moved to another practice site already and I can assure you they’ll never let local SWAT guys take that theater anyway. Listen up now. There’s a lot more going on.

Which is how Loftin came to be striding into his first press conference less than an hour later, loaded up with a dark and vibrating energy. There was indeed something going on. And it was something not quite right.

The colonel sat at the front of the pressroom, the largest room in the hotel’s convention area. He was flanked by two other military men, who were in charge of overhead maps and diagrams. Yes, they were examining all options. No, they wouldn’t say what all those options were at this point. And now, the colonel said, he’d like to pass the floor to Army Reserve Captain Massri, who’d be giving a summary of Command and Control functions and would sketch for people the perimeter that had been established.

What about non-lethal techniques? Would they consider those?

Loftin waited until about the ten-minute mark, when the tide of frustration had washed through the room. When he stood, the colonel saw him and shifted in his chair, cleared his throat. Mr. Loftin? The room grew still.

“Colonel,” Loftin said, speaking with the old-fashioned courtesy that was his trademark. “Sources indicate that the hostage taker contacted national law enforcement officials in the very earliest hours of the crisis last night. I wonder if you could throw some light on what was discussed or demanded. Also, would you comment on why that conversation has been kept secret?”

The collective intake of breath was sharp. The room swiveled to look at Loftin. Then everyone swiveled back to the dais. The colonel’s mouth opened, then closed. Then the silence evaporated in a cloud of questions and toppled chairs. The sense of something withheld caught and burned in every imagination, suspicion spreading through the room. Why had that conversation not been mentioned previously? Who was the hostage taker? Where was he from? What did he say?

It wasn’t satisfaction Loftin felt as he sat back down and the room unraveled. He hadn’t received any answers himself, after all. But the colonel had confirmed that he wasn’t authorized to answer Loftin’s particular question, and that was actually worth a great deal. In Loftin’s mind, it endorsed some of the other frightening bits of information Pam Pavich had passed along.

Were they sending people in? It seemed certain, Pam thought. Nobody from the local police supported the idea, but there was a lot of gung-ho talk from the out-of-towners. Pam slowed right down when she got to this part. “I think they know who the guy is,” she said. “As in, they know he’s dangerous.”

Up front, Captain Massri was now announcing that the press conference was not canceled, just postponed, and that details of a followup would be circulated shortly. Questions kept coming, but these were now left to dangle in the confused air.

Loftin made his way towards the door, feeling some crucial phase change, the crisis having morphed dangerously. And he was right too, even if he didn’t realize it. Because just that moment, across the plaza, an off-duty paramedic rose from her coffee and sandwich, left a twenty-dollar bill on the table, exited the diner where she’d been eating, crossed the plaza, breezed through the troops, climbed the barricade and walked calmly up the steps of the Meme complex.

Nobody later remembered anything agitated about her manner. And no official could explain how she did it with all that security except to note that the woman was just off-shift and still wearing her uniform, so she might have slipped through unnoticed, unchallenged. In any case, she was at those glass doors before anybody noticed, and then everybody noticed her at once, earphones suddenly hissing and crackling around the plaza. But she didn’t pause there, didn’t call out to announce herself to those inside. She just put her hand on the tall glass door and pulled hard to open it, shaking free pebbles of safety
glass that skipped and glittered across the pavement and around her heavy-soled boots. And in she went, vanishing instantly.

Silence stretched out tight over greater silence. And then a phenomenon that didn’t make the news because, while the cameras were all recording, it happened so quickly it was hard to interpret, even in the memories of those who produced and witnessed it. The crowd across the square, seeing the woman top the steps and stand for a moment outside, lost itself in a mournful murmur. The sound of pain swirled. And when she moved forward, swinging the door and entering the building, the crowd noise vaulted upwards in anger and agitation at the sight, at the sudden speculation about what this must surely mean. Every placard on display now went up again at once, jagging towards the lowered sky. Every sign reading
War=More War
and
God Hates Islam.
Every one with
Give Peace a Chance
or
Children Are Our Sacred Duty.
The anguished voices rose until they seemed to blend all peak emotions: fury, vengeance, excitement, even trace elements of something like joy. It was a sound so loud, so penetrating and strange as it crested, that people spilled to their windows in the buildings around the plaza, people came to the doorways of stores and restaurants. With light in their faces. A wide hope briefly flickering that a breakthrough of some kind, of some profoundly unlikely kind, must surely be at hand.