The Blue Light Project (30 page)

“Ah, Thom Pegg,” Mov said. “Now I know why I asked for you. Because you’re really very good.”

“How am I good? Help me understand.”

“Where would we start with such demands?” Mov said. “These men to whom you refer. These helicopters. You ask where in the world they might be. I ask you where in the world they aren’t. Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan. Yes, those are the obvious places. But Libya, Morocco, Romania, Georgia, Thailand, the Philippines, Canada. These lists go on forever.”

Pegg was experiencing some kind of auditory delusion while Mov was speaking. He wondered if it were being induced by sensory deprivation. Only this voice and the pressure of a small chair against the
small of his back, a small chair that seemed to be slanted forward. He kept sliding down to the front of it before pushing himself back, his calves cramping with the subtle strain of it. And then these sounds, doors opening and closing in the distance, an echo, a metallic sound, footsteps on concrete.

Oh no, Pegg thought. Not this. “Languages. You were a translator.”

Sounds coming from inside his own body. These clanks and clangs. His own interior alive with movement, with footsteps, with knowledge.

“Sort of. I worked for a private company that put interrogation contractors into the field.”

Pancreatic winks. Gastroenterological innuendo.

“You know what that’s all about, don’t you, Thom Pegg? Producing information out of reluctance. Rules and techniques for making them talk.”

Duodenal reckoning.

“Private company,” Mov continued. “That’s how it is with security these days. Public need, private profit. I didn’t wear a uniform. I never saluted anyone.”

Pegg took out his whiskey and slowly unscrewed the cap. “Drink?”

“Don’t take the stuff. Used to, of course. I’m sure you’ll quit too, eventually.”

Pegg drank some and pocketed the bottle. Then he felt something pressed into his hands, tubular, with straps and mounts. He pulled the thing over his head and nestled his eyes into the goggles. For a second or two, he kept his eyes closed, as if to look all at once might blind him. But that was not the case. Teasing new information from the nether reaches of the wave spectrum, these emanations didn’t sting the retina like sunlight might after an hour in a closet. They merely hummed to life. The information that all along had been flowing, seaming through the theater and out past them through the walls and on into the endless universe, those waves were now accessible to him.

Pegg opened his eyes and re-entered the world. Silver and green tones, crisp, oddly charged with depth and length. Barely a trace of shadow.

Mov sat opposite, a figure completely unexpected for how familiar he was. Overweight, shortish, balding. He wasn’t dressed in combat fatigues at all, as the reports had had it. He wore a rumpled suit, shirt open, no tie. No weapon evident that Pegg could tell, no pistol bulge at the armpit either. He sat, this man, like a reflection of Pegg himself. Only holding that briefcase, hand clenched down on the handle. All that his guts had known, Pegg now felt surge to consciousness. The ordinary horror. The quiet certainty of it. The way in which Haden came to mind.

Mov looked at him across the distance. Goggles swiveling. Pegg could suddenly hear his own breathing and swallowing. His own preparation for speech.

“You worked the black sites, the secret prisons,” Pegg said. It wasn’t an accusation. Pegg was only repeating back to Mov the insight that he’d been offered. He was opening the way, without pressure, for the full confession. “Camp X-Ray, Abu Ghraib, Kohat, Diego Garcia,” he continued, although his heart was now torquing within. “You did terrible things, Mov. I know. You hurt people behind closed doors. You broke them down with water and electricity and light.”

Mov was leaning forward in the shimmery haze, his goggles reaching towards Pegg, who could appreciate with sudden intensity how they would have appeared to anyone who could see them. Like insects, like crawling things. Mandible action just now beginning under the busy apparatus of the eyes as the one opposite opened up. As he began to speak.

FRIDAY

OCTOBER 25

EARLY MORNING, UNREADABLE LIGHT. There were police and militia units all through the plaza, SWAT teams and Special Forces. Members of an anti-terrorist unit were seen in the streets nearby moving from a van into a building. Police were stop-checking people, watching the entrances to the restaurants and cafés, which people might not have ultimately minded so much if the cameras hadn’t also appeared. These were unsettling, mounted high on telescoping tripods. They looked like deep-space probes touched down to the pavement, with their thin aluminum members spindling, the tiny glint of a lens at the tip of each. They were aimed in all directions, at Meme and around the plaza, down the side streets. Now here came a good and sticky rumor, seemingly too detailed to be dismissed. These cameras (the rumor went) were networked via satellite to the same face-recognition system run by the big Vegas casinos to scan and catalog the millions who came through their doors every year. Sharp lenses, smart algorithms, massive banks of processors and the deep global sea of personal data.

Loftin got Pam on the line when he heard about that one. She knew the rumor was out there but couldn’t say where it started.
Probably bullshit, she said. Although it was a fact that one of the sons of the Jordanian family who owned Meme Media was married to the daughter of the head of IT systems for the Bellagio Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.

Loftin had to chuckle. It was incredible how these rumors worked. Random facts beaten and hammered into patterns. “Well that’s a lock then,” he said.

She asked Loftin how his own story was shaping up.

It wasn’t, really. He didn’t tell Pam as much, but the truth was that the narrative thread was eluding him. Nobody would talk, although he could read the signs of fear, the signs that official people felt the impending weight of unknown events. No press conference since the day before, public information bleeding dry. True to form, Loftin worked his oblique angles. He shifted around. He talked to a couple of young soldiers at the barricade. They’d been schooled. They were friendly but told him nothing.

Loftin talked to paramedics and firefighters. A couple off-duty cops in baggy jeans and ball caps. These guys were in vice-narcotics but they were staying close. There was that kind of feeling in the air. People found the groups with which they identified and readied themselves to help. One of these cops followed Loftin as he strolled away around the corner of a parked ambulance.

He thought there was one other thing Loftin might want to know.

Loftin stopped and turned. He tried not to look too curious.

The woman who went inside, the cop said. The rumor going around hard at the moment was that she wasn’t shot at all. Not with a bullet, that is. The guy used a ballistic knife.

Loftin raised his eyebrows. Now here was a rumor based on an arcane detail. Ballistic knife, hadn’t heard about those in a while. Nasty bit of work. Banned back in the late eighties. Your thug who picked up one of these could choose between stabbing people or
pulling a side-mounted trigger and launching the blade like a crossbow bolt out of the handle.

“Pretty exotic,” Loftin said.

“Russian-made,” the cop said. Manufactured by the company Ostblock for the Russian Special Forces. And here, while the off-duty narcotics officer nodded slowly for emphasis, he didn’t immediately close the logic loop for Loftin. He didn’t assert that the hostage taker was Russian or Special Forces or anything else particularly. But something remained hanging, dangling in the unsaid.

“So what are we supposed to conclude from all that?” Loftin asked.

“Well,” the man said, looking away, then looking back. His hair was greasy and long in the Hollywood style of the moment. Loftin thought how easy it must be to go undercover when all you had to do was cut your hair the way you saw in the entertainment pages. Or perhaps that made it more difficult.

“Go ahead,” Loftin told the man. “I can take it.”

“It’s October twenty-fifth today,” the man said. “Friday.”

“Right,” Loftin said.

“Last time October twenty-fifth fell on a Friday was 2002, eleven years ago.”

Loftin nodded. “Right.”

“October twenty-fifth, 2002, was what?” The man waited for him, with a satisfied half smile. Loftin might have been a serious journo but he obviously wasn’t so smart.

“Moscow Theater Crisis,” the man said. “The day before the end.”

 

LOFTIN RETURNED TO HIS HOTEL and stood looking down at the narrow slice of the plaza he could see through the buildings nearby. People seething there, another fire truck creeping through. Loftin thought about the paranoid detail the cop had shared. Who would have even seen a ballistic knife in absolute darkness? Nobody, of
course. The cop had seen it in his own imagination, or whoever had told him, or whoever had told the person that had told him. There had probably been many people involved in turning the fantasy of a ballistic knife into a serious point of discussion.

Forget the rumors, Loftin told himself, inventorying the facts as he knew them. A guy targeting a television show for aspiring kid celebrities. A man with the entire world to choose from who decides to tell his story to a soft-porn tabloid magazine. Thom Pegg. Pegg was a disgrace. He was a drunk who had squandered his obvious talents as a writer and a journalist. And he was a proven liar who apparently didn’t even lie very well. Where these facts led Loftin in his reasoning was that they had some kind of tawdry, fame-game freak show shaping up in there, and that the real story, the story with a shot at the truth, wouldn’t be inside at all.

Yes. Loftin turned to the window, looking intently down towards the plaza again. The television behind him just now returning from commercials to an interview in progress, right down there somewhere, just out of sight.

“You see these things?” one of the Black Bloc protesters was saying to a news camera. He was waving behind himself at a set of tripodmounted cameras, rumored to be linked to spinning discs of silicon buried in armored vaults somewhere in the Mojave Desert. “You see how they do this? The corporate eye, filming us. Harassing us. But why us? Who is the enemy here, I ask you.”

A black handkerchief covered his mouth and nose. He was talking about private money. Billionaires in the shadows. Just look at the people guarding the camera towers, pistols in snug nylon belt holsters but otherwise dressed in khakis and blue shirts. They looked like Microsoft employees, Google or some such.

Loftin was still standing at the glass, his idea shaping. Of course. The story wasn’t inside the theater at all. To think he had briefly considered
Thom Pegg to have been in on the angle. Thom Pegg might have been someone to reckon with once, but he was on the empty story here. The common story. The sensation. The razzle-dazzle. Good for him. Let Pegg have it. What mattered was down there. Out there with the cops and the military, the Black Bloc and the Call, the pro-lifers and the law-and-order buffs. Out there among the infected and the suspicious. On the barricades. Among the spectators. Woven into the grain of that agitated and fractious mob. That’s what would always distinguish Loftin from other journalists, and from Pegg too now in his degraded state: an understanding that the story was told through unexpected voices.

And while he had these thoughts, up top of the plaza—outside Loftin’s field of view, beyond the adjacent buildings—the spotlights were shimmering in the angular facades of water and warping off the front of the Meme complex. The facade glared in the chaos of halogen, an angry sun, licks of hot light and harsh shadows. Everything that morning rested under a roving, searching gaze, suspicious and powerful. And in front of hundreds of people in the crowd at the south end of the square, right at that moment, Jabez and the Poets came in as if from nowhere and bombed out a statement in front of the world.