The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  Rabbit walked a half block south of the plaza, then stopped for the light on Jeffers. He was almost ready to let himself feel satisfaction, the project finally complete. It was last night’s feeling intensified further, a view of the stars, rooftop moss underfoot, his last unit in place and beginning to charge, ready to activate as early as that evening. Rabbit was smiling.

  The traffic lights changed and he stepped out briskly into the intersection. And his mind was just cycling back to the day at hand, lowered skies and threatening weather. Black smoke and the smell of gasoline, the sense of atmospheric pressure and alert nerves, poised fear. But these thoughts were interrupted almost the moment they started—thoughts of children, gunmen, cordons, consequences—because as Rabbit reached the far curb, a car door sprawled open in his path and someone climbed out and stood in his way.

  Blue uniform, wide stance, a routine grained into every movement. The hand to the gun hip, the other one raised to catch his attention. Now the voice, no rush or alarm in it. A steady insistence: “Just a moment, please.”

  Rabbit raised his eyes and brought them level. He smiled again to indicate calm and an easygoing nature. And he kept that smile in place while the questions started. Where he was going, where he worked, where he lived.

  “Just down in Stofton,” he said. “I’m going there now.”

  “You work nights?”

  “Just getting some air.”

  “You have some identification?”

  Rabbit went under official observation there. He felt the patterns adjust. The partner climbed out of the far side of the car and circled around until he stood directly behind Rabbit. They cordoned him off and contained him with their eyes, their physical frames. The questions veered.

  “No ID. None at all. You forgot your wallet at home?”

  “I don’t carry a wallet. I don’t drive. I don’t use credit cards.”

  They closed off routes back to the ordinary.

  “You illegal? Where’re you from? Please keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Real tension here, Rabbit realized. He heard the police officer behind him shift on his feet, open palm to the top of his nylon holster. They wanted to know why there was grease on his hands. Why was there blood on his face?

  “Put your hands on the car,” the cop said, and when Rabbit did so, the other one began to pat him down. “Any weapons? Any drugs? You high?”

  Rabbit kept the responses coming. Calm and cooperative. The cop behind him had removed Rabbit’s pack and handed it to his partner. He’d begun his frisk, down Rabbit’s arms and back, closing within inches of the map in Rabbit’s waistband. The emergency of the moment was suddenly very clear to Rabbit. The pack held items that would be difficult to explain. The map with lines and numbers and sites would be a different kind of trouble altogether.

  The air crackled. Static. Voices. Rabbit’s pack was open now and here came the contents. Foam and foil. Bolt cutters, wires, batteries.

  The cop behind Rabbit stopped his frisk and stepped clear. Rabbit sensed the moment that a handbook precaution was suddenly deemed necessary. One officer should stand aside and cover. One officer to continue the search.

  The cop with the pack said: “And this?”

  In his hand now: a WaferFone with the outside casing removed. Wires soldered into the works now tremoring in the rigid air.

  The cop’s head went over to the mouthpiece on his shoulder. Words and numbers. Codes and directives. Rabbit felt the city alive with hidden action, forces opposed in complicated arrangement. He flashed on Jabez the protester and Beyer the entrepreneur. The endless disagreement, isolating him in the space between them. He thought of words painted at the heart of a tunnel. Words that inspired and drove him. And as the officer cocked his ear to his lapel and held up a hand for quiet, Rabbit whispered the name: “Alto.”

  To which there was, then, a surprise response. Not from the person in question. And not in words. The answer came with her appearing. It was the only sense he could make of it. Rabbit spoke the hidden word and she emerged into his field of view, coming up over the shoulder of the cop in front of him just as Rabbit raised his eyes.

  Here she came. With such an intense look of interest that he lost other details. Was she near or far? He couldn’t be sure, only that he was observed in a way he couldn’t remember having been observed before. She wasn’t seeing through him but around him somehow, back to his beginnings. And when she spoke finally, the fact that she called him by an unfamiliar name wasn’t strange. Rabbit accepted that it was the right name for the moment.

  The cops turned, seeing her there. If Rabbit had been watching them closely, he would have noticed them both loosen in their stance, open in their expressions, as if her arrival had already relieved some tension in the moment.

  She wasn’t looking at either cop, though. Only at Rabbit. And no mistake on her part when she spoke, either. She hadn’t taken him for someone else. She was telling Rabbit instead about a person he brought forcefully to mind. A person who, in response to the complicated joint needs of the moment, his and hers, Rabbit would now briefly become.

  She said: “Ali.”

  PEGG

  THEY CHECKED PEGG INTO A HOTEL. A nice place. Crisp white lobby, staff liveried in chalk stripe.

  His handler checked him in, that placeless man with his frog lapel pin. He walked him to the elevators. Then Haden said to Pegg: “Make yourself comfortable. Things have gotten a bit hairy and I’m not sure when we can get you in. Will call, yes?”

  Pegg went to his room and lay on his back, hands folded behind his head. Tremendous bed, he thought. Then immediately he sat up, phoned Haden and asked to be picked up. He didn’t like the sense of being a payload in a silo, nice and cool and tuned up, ready to launch. Up there in the pressroom he’d feel more autonomously engaged with this thing, like he really was a journalist with a story to cover. Like he really was choosing to help.

  One of Haden’s people picked him up and drove him over. They left him with the others in the press pool area, a conference room in another hotel just off the plaza, long since booked to the rafters with media. All the typical event squalor, Pegg noted. Stubbed-out smokes in coffee cups. Trampled paper underfoot. Cable and phones and open computers. The bank of newsreaders working their lines, twenty of them all looking exactly the same with their big blond hair and coral nail polish. Orthodontic perfection. Pegg had hit on one of them once, drunk in D.C. He thought she was the one sitting second from the left but couldn’t be sure because her mike with the network insignia was hidden from view. He rated the energy alive in the air as he passed people in the pit. Something registered, then reregistered. But nobody spoke to him. Nobody said: My God but they really burned you down to the ground, didn’t they? How’d that feel, the flames licking up around your ass?

  Pegg walked and they moved their chairs. Faces he recognized, by name and by type. The writer from a news magazine he’d played cards with once in Saskatchewan. He wondered why they’d both been there, couldn’t pull it back. Then these two jokers: a couple of guys who must still have been in school when the personal shit hit for Pegg. They were checking him out.

  Yes it’s me, Pegg thought. Yeah you heard correctly. I fabricated a source. But in service of the truth. Black sites, did I make that shit up? No I did not. Like none of them had ever published white lies before. That was why it was never a good idea to get any of them drunk. Or at least, never let them get drunker than you were at any given moment. Pure misery, listening to the disappointments and disillusions of the copywriting classes. God, give me an actor any day, Pegg thought. It was naked truth from actors, including the aspiration to celebrity, whatever he thought of that. They never denied wanting fame, prestige, status. It was all in the collective gaze for actors and they knew it.

  Pegg was heading towards the far wall, towards a door where he was going to stand and wait for Haden to show up. Stand under the frame like there had been an earth tremor, with aftershocks to com
e. But Haden was nowhere.

  Pegg made his way through the mess of chairs and tables. Body odor. Boredom. Give me a perfumed PR flack, he thought. Give me a junket interview and an L:MN name card, for Christ’s sake. Maybe he’d tell all this to Haden in the way of a confession. He’d tell Haden something like that and crack him open a bit, get him to talk. Get Haden to explain for real how the world had wobbled in its frigid arc such that Pegg was now involved in this business. Kids in a theater, crying. Was he supposed to feel grateful for this opportunity? He did not.

  Because the hostage taker seems to be quite interested in you. He wondered if Spratley were somehow involved. There would be obscure reasons for these kinds of things. Haden trafficked in obscure understandings. All the myriad connections between things, commodity prices and rotten mortgage securities, central bank scheming and a storm brewing among the gang lords in the slums of Rio. A micro-burst over the Persian Gulf and soldiers were exploding out the backs of a hundred Bradley fighting vehicles in Bakhtaran. The rational brain demanded that these events all be related.

  “Doing all right, Peggy? Just look at you here.”

  Thin purse of a face, high shoulders bent against invisible wind. Pegg had to think who this was, which meant he was from some very serious zone of print. One of the intellectual magazines with articles thousands of words long. Writers with war zone routines and jackets to match, all the patches and pockets. Gore-Tex boots. The name was coming to Pegg. The man was local originally, now a big name in London. Oh yes. Here it was. The man who’d put the last knife in when Pegg was going down. Right there on the Times editorial page. Pegg had every word etched in his memory, something no amount of drinking could erase . . . how even that pales in comparison to the damage Thom Pegg has done to the very victims his own column had ostensibly been written to aid and reinstate.

  “Well hello, Loftin,” Pegg said. “Still going after the truth, I see.”

  “Read about you. Your what is it, notoriety?”

  “Yes, well, I gathered you did,” Pegg said. “I read your ruminations in the Times.”

  Loftin smiled falsely. “Of course that all had to be said, Peggy. Even though it wasn’t a bad story except for the . . . you know.”

  “The central character not actually existing,” Pegg said.

  “Yes, that pretty much killed it,” Loftin said. “Shame, though, since it had within it . . . how to say this . . . DNA trace evidence of truth.”

  Pegg looked away and smiled at someone he didn’t recognize. He knew Loftin wouldn’t haven’t crossed the room for the sole purpose of heaping scorn, so there would be more to come.

  Loftin, finally: “But all that’s history now, hey? On your feet again, I see. L:MN magazine, is that the one?”

  “Yes, indeed it is,” Pegg said, trying for a tone of bright satisfaction. “Spratley and I were at Oxford.”

  “Right, right. Spratley still . . . ?”

  Loftin meant: is Spratley still rumored to be sleeping with Filipino boys? But Pegg only laughed through his nose and put a hand into his side pocket. There were no miniature vodka bottles there, he knew. He said: “So what’s the business here? All kinds of nonsense in the air. No money demands. No get the troops out of Iran. No organ-harvesting screeds. No Islamophobia. No Jew baiting, flights to Jordan, unmarked bills. It isn’t a side of architecture grads from Saudi Arabia or there’d have been a bloody big bang by now. And I thought of white supremacy wingnuts but only for about a second because they’re much too self-apocalyptic to take hostages. Wouldn’t you say?”

  Loftin’s expression had been hardening over during each of the seconds that Pegg spoke. “Well, you make various good points. General confusion and speculation. Although I suppose you could say this is where we’ve been heading for some time. School shootings. People storming their own workplaces, labs, trading floors.”

  Pegg nodded. “It’s in the breeze, so to speak.”

  “If you’re mad enough to do it off the cuff, no reason not to wait for a few hours before starting.”

  “Sure, sure. Wait for you and me to pull in.”

  “Exactly. The international coverage.”

  “Makes you wonder though, doesn’t it,” Pegg said. “Motives. The construction of the thing.”

  “It does, Peggy,” Loftin said, muscles in his jaw working free each word. “Especially those of us milling around out here. Those of us dealing with the colonel. Those of us without the gilt-edged invitation.”

  Pegg heard “guilt-edged” and thought for a moment that Loftin was being impossibly clever. Then he refit the word to the circumstances and something important came to him the same instant. The fact of his access was a story that had just broken. The inexplicable reality that it was he, Thom Pegg, who was going in. That explained the way people had been looking at him, moving their chairs to let him pass, averting their glances. They couldn’t believe what they’d heard: that it was Thom Pegg who’d gotten access. This dawning sense was like a private spring, only for Pegg. They were incredulous. And they were envious.

  Envious. Sweet Jesus. The same people, like this jackass Loftin here, who’d so happily put the boots to him those few short years before. Here was something Pegg could savor about the moment. Not redemption. Payback. Quite different.

  “What’d they say about the person inside, then? Who is he? What does he want?” Loftin was pressing quite urgently. He had canted in towards Pegg while Pegg had been skipping through the alpine field of his own delight. Loftin now looked distinctly, agitatedly curious to know if Pegg was going to share anything he’d learned about perpetrators, motives, modus operandi. And Loftin was anxious too, asking his questions. Because for all his skill with sources, for all his vaunted reputation, for all his money, it was pretty clear that Thom Pegg wasn’t going to tell him anything.

  Pegg pretended to cast his mind back as if making sure no detail had escaped him. Then he shook his head firmly and smiled. “I just assumed it was a fan in there, you know. Someone who reads L:MN.”

  “Right, right,” Loftin said, flushed, hands into his pockets, wanting the conversation over. But unable to resist a comment. He tried. He paused for a second. Then he let it go, a poison dart in every word. “Always wanted to ask you one thing, though. What it stood for, L:MN. Like, Little Men, you know. Teenagers whacking off in their mother’s john over one of your famous spreads.”

  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.”

  T
he 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?”