“But I would hood them with empty sandbags and stand them spread-eagled against the wall, hands high over their heads. You pulled their feet right back, made them support their weight against the wall with their fingertips.”
Sometimes he did this to a group of people. A few hours standing with six or eight of their friends arrested at the same time. At first they took a lot of strength from the collective, which was exactly how you wanted it. Four or five hours in, they might have been questioning the return on their investment. They still had sandbags over their heads. They had no idea if the brothers were still there or if they were alone because they weren’t allowed to speak. The hood cut off a great deal of who they were as autonomous people.
“So hour four you ask for a show of hands. Who’s ready to have a conversation? You say something like: whoa, whoa, one at a time. They have no idea who all has raised their hands. But you can see the pennies individually drop. The hands start going up.”
He had compliments from the people in intelligence, spooks and wonks. Good prep, the guys would say, they’re talking. He was flying around more. The inquest was spreading and taking Mov with it across that land with no borders, defined simply by wherever he appeared. He didn’t mind admitting that he loved the feeling of being everywhere at once and virtually invisible. Anti-fame. Well, exactly. He once saw a famous movie producer waiting for a flight, hovered over
by protective flight attendants who kept autograph hounds away and then whisked the man into a corner seat in business class.
“Oscar winner,” Mov told Pegg. “You know the name although it doesn’t matter. The guy’s Gulfstream was probably in the shop.”
Mov said he remembered the sense of satisfaction he felt as he took his own seat in the opposite corner of the cabin. Between him and the movie mogul—hunched over the
Wall Street Journal
in his sunglasses—a grid of businessmen making last calls before liftoff on their cell phone earpieces, pecking out last memos on their BlackBerrys. Tense with aspiration and thwarted desire. Every one of them packing an extra twenty or thirty pounds in their light blue shirts and tassel loafers. Every one of them sipping the complimentary champagne that only Mov and the producer had declined. Me and you, pal, Mov thought. We’re free. And he felt pity for the rest of them. Slaving away on the outside without a clue about how anything actually worked.
“Gaming the system, he and I,” Mov said. “We were inside the machinery looking out.”
“A feeling you enjoyed,” Pegg said.
“You don’t enjoy it?” Mov said. “You don’t like it on the inside of your machine, Thom? You don’t secretly thrill to the work you’re doing now over the work you did before? A lot of serious journalists would have considered an interview with me to be a big opportunity. Tell me honestly: were you dying to come in here and meet me?”
“Honestly, no,” Pegg said. His tongue dry and raspy. “Although I still don’t see where you and I . . .”
“Oh, there’s a lot of me that’s a lot like you, Thom. Just listen,” Mov said. “We prepped a young guy in a back room at a civilian airport once. Nineteen years old.”
And Pegg could hear that one crack in the air. He sat forward, then forced himself to relax. “Civilian airport?” he said. “Where was it?”
Mov considered the question. “Eastern Europe. The United Kingdom. Canada.”
Romania. Manitoba. The point was that no matter where the prisoner was physically, he was in all the places where he might conceivably have been. The other point was that the prisoner was more than a God School grad, more than an indoctrination case. What they had there was a prisoner who was genuinely religious.
Pegg made to speak again. He inhaled to ask the question,
Which God?
But Mov’s hand went up. Don’t. It doesn’t matter. “The point is he had one,” Mov said. “Once you have a God, the only point worth making about it is that you have one.”
Pegg nodded grimly. Point taken.
And a closely held God, too. This was God in the very grain of the person. In the weave of all self-reflection. Nineteen, twenty years old. A bad age to encounter this kind of thing. There hadn’t been enough years lived for contrary evidence to accumulate: life’s ordinary disappointments and irregularities, all the superficial nicks and edges on which faith begins to snag and fray. He didn’t pray aloud or rock in place. Mov looked him over when he arrived and saw a depth there that worried him.
“They needed him ready to talk inside three days. Ticking bomb scenario. He knows something event-specific. It involves a truck full of explosives or a bomb wired to a cell phone in a locker somewhere. Everyone involved in this case has a degree of urgency and the guy’s just sitting in the regular cell on a bench. We haven’t started to strip things away yet. I haven’t. First thing I do is tell him I’m Israeli. Of course I’m not, but I’d claim to be whatever worked. And for a lot of prisoners, at this point in history, Israeli is the one they don’t want to hear. It sets the stage. It says: between you and me it’s personal. And nobody cares that you’re here because of exactly that, because between you and me it’s personal.”
Mov talks to him in his own language. He talks to him in a dialect from his region. He uses slang you’d know only if you were raised there, if you were thick with the locals. The guy listens, humming noteless rhythms under his breath.
“Not too much early physical pressure. You can drive these types into an inner chamber. They have a consciousness with trapdoors. Something happens and the catch springs, they slide down a chute into the panic room of their soul. Then they’re well and truly gone. You might as well let them go.”
Mov worked at subtracting things in layers. He corrects the guy’s pronunciation of a word in his own language. He tells him his father and brother have been arrested and are down the hall. He moves him to a cell with no furniture, no windows. On with the hood. On with the death-metal soundtrack. The cell is soundproof so Mov doesn’t have to listen to it, a scything avalanche of machine noises and guttural German screaming. The volume is randomly varied. They bring him military rations in the middle of the night. After twenty-four hours they make him stand on a box. The music hasn’t stopped. The guy moans. He falls and wakes himself up. He falls and wakes himself up again. Mov hasn’t even raised his voice. The guy is going through all this like he’s had practice. He asks to use a toilet and Mov leaves him to soil himself. He hasn’t seen the light or felt a trace of life’s regular heartbeat in twenty-four hours, thirty-six hours. He has been unmoored from sanity’s anchors, pattern and repeat, stable rhythm.
“Then I turn the music off. Give the cell some heat. It was about five degrees centigrade in there. I take off his hood and sit him down. He’s swollen around the eyes from where he’s been banging his head against the wall, lacerations. But he’s still with me. I haven’t lost him yet.”
Mov tells him some men want to talk to him. Just questions. The guy spits on the floor. “So it’s going to get a bit more physical now. You ready to hear this?”
Pegg listened in the urgent gloom. His mind racing. He was thinking of Gerry, Hyacinth and the others just then, having heard a movement in the theater, in the cluster of shapes up there. A sniffle, a whimper. Pegg felt a surge inside him, not his guts, which were strangely silent. Something from the heart. He said: “I really, really need to suggest something.”
HEROISM. TICKER-TAPE PARADE STUFF. Pegg had no business doing this kind of thing and he blamed the fact that both pocket bottles were now tragically empty. All that courage was inside him now and bleeding out. Better use it while it lasted.
“I’d like to suggest we let them go. Finish up this conversation on our own. It’s brilliant, I mean. The story will be told.”
“You think?”
“Yes, I do. Just let them go.”
“Why not choose a couple?” Mov suggested. “That’s what I’ve been doing. Keeps things moving along. Gives the whole event directionality without bringing us to our conclusion all at once, too suddenly.”
“I can’t choose.”
“Sure you can. Pick two.”
“No, no. I refuse.”
“Make it three.”
Pegg in a dream. Pegg in a terrible nightmare. He stumbled up to the end of the row where Gerry and the others were sitting.
“Are we going?” Gerry asked. “I have a sick one here.”
“Who’s sick?”
“Isaac needs his inhaler. He dropped it somewhere.”
“Take Isaac and another one,” Pegg said. “You’re going.”
Gerry stood and then sat. Then stood again and said quite loudly, “By age. We do it by age. That’s Barker and Sam.”
Pegg took the boy Barker and the little girl Sam, holding both their hands in one of his. Then Isaac. Then the next youngest one, Ashley.
“I have four, Mov. There’s a sick one here.”
Then he moved across the sloping floor towards the side doors opening onto the lobby, pausing there. Wondering at the logistics of it for the first time.
“Take off the vision,” Mov called.
Right, right. Pegg stripped away the mask and blinked into darkness again. Then he pushed open the door, slowly, slowly. “Eyes shut,” he said to them. “It’s bright.” And then into the glass-walled lobby, which was lit from all the lights in the square outside. Into the whitest light he could remember having endured. It was painful. He took a step and waited, hoping he was seen. Another step, another long wait. They were on the marble now, broken glass underfoot. Pegg was humming to himself. He heard it suddenly, an intensely alien sound. A tune he didn’t know. An impulse he didn’t remember.
“It’s me!” he called out. “It’s Thom Pegg!”
Outside it was Friday afternoon. Indian summer with hovering storm. And in the air a thousand shivering notes at once, slips and cricks and jostles. The attention of the waiting square swiveling and locking in place. He heard the oiled movement of rifle parts and felt the crosshairs tickle his scalp. His sight was returning. People were screaming in the distance. Yells and catcalls, yelps and hollers. It sounded like sports crowd noises.
“It’s me!” he called out again. “Thom Pegg.”
On the steps there was now a flurry of movement, a terse economy of shapes low to the ground. Several people coming forward, scuttling up the stairs. Silent. When they were close Pegg could see that they were soldiers of the midnight black variety, everything about them oiled over and invisibilized, face paint, gloves. He released the children, who were now wailing, crying. They were scooped up and carried away. Gone instantly and over the barricades.
“I need to speak to Bruce Haden,” he said to the one soldier remaining.
“Don’t know him,” the man said. “Tell me how many.”
“He’s federal, I think.”
“Psychos and hostages, sir,” the soldier said, taking Pegg’s arm and persuading him with a single tug down to one knee. They knelt that way face to face, the man’s rifle sited past Pegg, through the broken glass and into the lobby. “Please tell me now, sir. I need the how manys.”
Pegg told him. One hostage taker. Pegg himself plus six kids: Gerry, Roshawn, Laisha, Reebo, Hyacinth, Metric. And the man repeated what he said into a throat mike, his words clipping in behind Pegg’s. Seven total, roger that. The six kids were all together, rear placement.
“The guy is calling himself Movsar Barayev,” Pegg said.
“We know that. And what does he have, sir? Bomb, guns, what else?”
Bomb, Pegg told him. Briefcase. Handle. Can’t be moved. The soldier nodded and held up a gloved hand. Stop there. He was listening intently now to someone talking at the other end. “Yes sir. GPS trigger.”
He listened some more. “Roger that,” he said, then to Pegg: “Don’t ask for any more to be released. We’re going to let it flow from here.”
“All right,” Pegg said. “But Haden. Get to Haden and tell him the man is wearing night-vision.”
“Just keep him talking. Near the stage if possible. Try to keep some distance between you two and the hostages, yes?”
Pegg nodded, bewildered. And the soldier leaned to his shoulder again, listening. He said: “Out.” Then clapped Pegg on the arm, spun on his knee and scuttled off down the steps and over the barricade. Entirely non-human in his movement and speed. Like a turbocharged crab.
ON HIS WAY BACK INSIDE, after strapping back on the vision, Pegg was crushed with guilt. It just dropped on him, this emotion of which
he was keenly aware, but only in the air around him. Not so well personally acquainted. Black guilt. He’d never even thought about the producer and the paramedic woman actually lying there. He’d sort of had them in a wing of the special effects trailer. Flash, bang, they’re dead and then they disappear. All very tidy.
He looked for them and found them. She lay collapsed near the front wall, just inside the door. Pegg got to his knees next to the body and touched her throat. He had never touched a corpse before and was surprised that it seemed so familiar a feeling, as if the fingers come preloaded with the knowledge of what death is, its tactile emptiness, the flatness of it, the grain of the skin as the oils lose their temperature. His fingers touched where the pulse would have been and bounced away. She was rolled to one side, not much blood or mess. Dark stains only across the chest. Body twisted and rigid. The producer wasn’t far away, just up the aisle. But Pegg didn’t touch him.
“And how’d that go?” Mov asked him when he approached the stage. “Out there.”
Mov was sitting on the edge of the stage, legs swinging.
“What do you want to have happen here?” Pegg asked.
Mov patted the stage next to him but Pegg remained where he stood. He saw Mov’s shoulders round in resignation. “In the end, they come inside. Of course.”
“In a big fireball, is that it? You want that.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“What do you want from me?” Pegg asked, voice cracking.