Empire of Lies

by Andrew Klavan

  "My class?"

  "I heard what you said..."

  "It's just talking, lectures..."

  "I saw what you are."

  "It's speech. Free speech. You believe in free speech, don't you?"

  "I saw. I'm telling you..."

  "You believe in rights, don't you? I have rights. I have—"

  I stuffed the sponge back into his mouth. I clutched him by the throat. I saw the blood coming into his cheeks. It's not my fault, I thought again. But it was no good anymore, telling myself that. In the wild energy of the moment, in the surge of adrenaline, my head had cleared. The veil of fever had become a pane of glass. I could see: It was my fault. Of course it was. Maybe not all of it. Maybe not the fact that he was who he was and had chosen to do what he was doing. Maybe not the fact that I was alone and the police wouldn't listen to me and I had somehow wound up the only man in America who could stop him. Even this—this terrible thing I was about to do—maybe even this was not my fault because what else was there, what options did I have?

  But the thrill of it ... Yes, that. The coursing rush of excitement, the old dark, mesmerizing sadistic joy—that belonged to me. Even at that moment, I could feel it flowing into my brain, into my belly and my groin. I could feel the old smoky sickness of lust and pleasure spreading all through me. I had been saved from this once. I had been given the strength to walk away into a new life, a better life. And I knew with cold, bright clarity that if I chose to do this thing, if I brought this hammer down, if I unleashed this flood of feeling in myself again, there would be no second chance. I would be damned to this—damned from within—forever.

  "This is the first time," I told Rashid hoarsely. I swallowed hard. "This is the first time I'm asking you. If you don't answer me, I shatter your left knee. You hear? Where is Serena? Where is the attack gonna be? When is it? Where and when? Tell me."

  I let go of his throat. He worked the sponge out between his lips. I helped him with it, pulled it free. The fierce, rapid whisper streamed out of him again. "Listen, listen. For the love of God, please, listen, please. I'm not a terrorist. I'm a professor. Ask the police, the FBI. They know me. I helped them!"

  "That was a trick, a diversion."

  "No, no, no. Do you think they haven't checked me out? Do you think you know something they don't? Think about it! That doesn't make sense. I'm sorry if you don't like my ideas, but that's all they are, they—"

  "It's not all. It's not all."

  "Just stop. Stop and consider. I'm begging you. You're not thinking clearly. People sit in their rooms, they think things, they watch things on television and come up with all these crazy ideas."

  "The TV lies. It's all lies."

  "That's right, that's what I'm saying!" Rashid whispered up at me urgently. "Look, there's still time. You haven't hurt anyone yet. You can stop this. You can get help. I swear to you: There is no attack. Not from me. I swear—"

  I jammed the sponge back into his mouth. I taped his mouth shut again. He struggled to speak around the gag, but there were only strangled mutterings.

  I grabbed his shirtfront. My heart was banging in my chest so hard I thought it would explode or break through. I couldn't catch my breath. The fear, the moral agony, the thrill—it was nearly enough to make me faint. I felt as if I were spinning into the spout of a funnel, everything closing in, everything sinking, swirling down to a single impossible point.

  I reached for Rashid's throat again, but instead my fingers touched his cheek. My fingers played against his cheek almost tenderly.

  "Please," I said to him. "Please tell me."

  He was shaking his head now frantically. He went on shaking his head: No, no, no! Trying to say the words behind his gag.

  I climbed off him. I grabbed him by the ankle to steady his leg. He kicked and struggled wildly, shaking his head wildly: No, no, no! The shriek was jammed back into his throat by the sponge in his mouth.

  I lifted the hammer in a trembling hand. I stared down at the twisting, struggling man on the floor. My mind flashed back to The Thinker—The Thinker in Paris staring down at the twisting, struggling figures in The Gates of Hell, the twisting, struggling figures of the damned churning in the vortical force of their passion and misery and self-destruction. I knew I would be one of those damned figures if I did this thing.

  I forced the thought away. I forced myself to think about Serena. I thought of her face as she was dragged out of my mother's house, as she shouted for me: "Daddy!" I thought of all the faces in the park and in the city and on TV and I loved them and I loved my country. And I thought: What right have you in the end to hold on to your decency when the life of the nation is at stake? What is your sanity compared to that or even your salvation? You can't let thousands of people die simply to preserve your own righteousness.

  I held the hammer high another moment. Rashid fought wildly in my grip, shaking his head, No, no, no.

  All right, then, I thought, I'll go to Hell.

  And I brought the hammer down on him.

  The New Coliseum

  The lights outside the theater swept the night. I saw them crisscrossing over the towers and billboards of Times Square when I was still several blocks north. It was dark now, but whatever stars there were were dazzled to nothing by the radiance of Broadway. Spotlit images of half-naked women several stories high, soaring electrified soda cans and golden arches, twinkling ads for shoes and video cameras, gigantic heads talking on TV screens the size of houses: They washed the sky black; they washed the faces on the street below to a corpselike pallor. Thousands of faces, mobs of faces, hustling, pushing, flowing under the lights, chalk-skinned and dead-eyed. I shouldered through the crush of them as quickly as I could.

  I had called 911 from the cab. I must've sounded crazy to the operator. I must've sounded almost as crazy as I felt. But I didn't care. I babbled it all out in response to her bored, drawling questions. A massive amount of explosives, I said. The New Coliseum, I said. The End of Civilization as We Know It, I said. There would be over three thousand people there. The secretary of state, the governor, the mayor. Not to mention the crowds in the street turning out to watch the celebrities. My voice was strained with exhaustion as I explained it. The olive-skinned driver in the seat in front of me watched me warily in his rearview mirror. I went on to tell the 911 operator what I had done to Rashid, how I had left him broken and unconscious on the floor of his office. I stared out the window. I thought: I must be completely out of my mind. I thought: My life is over.

  The operator kept trying to pacify me. She kept telling me security on the scene was airtight. No one could get through, she said. No one could get explosives inside. I tried to explain that the explosives were already inside. Maintenance and security had all been compromised, infiltrated. It was a long-term plan. They had blueprints, C4, detonation cord to cut through steel, engineers with the skill to plant the stuff for maximum demolition. The operator kept changing the subject. She kept asking me about Rashid. She didn't seem all that interested in the rest of it. She didn't believe me.

  The traffic grew steadily thicker as the cab neared Columbus Circle. By the time we were centrifuged out of the big rotary and fired off down Broadway, the flow of cars was congealing. A few blocks more and we had become one more irregular shape in a motionless patchwork of multicolored metal and taillights, stalled blue buses, shadowy heads behind panes of thick gray glass. The traffic lights strung above us went from green to red and back to green again, but nothing moved forward.

  "You have to clear out the theater!" I croaked urgently into the phone.

  The cabbie watched me anxiously in his mirror.

  "What is your location right now, sir?" drawled the 911 woman.

  Exasperated, I finally killed the connection. I slipped the phone into my pocket.

  "There is an event up ahead," said the cabbie in what I think was a Turkish accent. "I can't go any farther." He wanted me out of his cab.

  I took out my wallet. "I'll w
alk from here," I said.

  He didn't try to disguise his relief.

  I got out of the car and started jogging south along the sidewalk. There were couples all along the way, men and women arm in arm, dressed up for a night on the town. I dodged this way and that between them. The air was cold and damp on my cheeks, but there was still no mist, no rain. I could no longer see the roiling clouds in that blacked-out sky. Soon I was out of breath. I fell into a quick, striding walk. The crowd on the street grew thicker. I had to use my hands to get through like a man wading through the high reeds in a swamp. All the same, I was still traveling faster than the cars. Most of the cars had stopped dead. Only a few were jerking forward here and there, looking for half a foot's advantage. Horns blared. Exhaust gathered. The air was suffocating, rank.

  Now the Broadway lights grew brighter up ahead. They rose higher and the sky was a deeper black. The crowd on the street swelled. As I twisted and wedged my way though the tide of bodies, I looked up—and it was then I saw Times Square, the boulevards intersecting and dividing, the great billboards lining them, and the towering lights—and I saw the kliegs of the New Coliseum, five of them, spearing the night and sweeping back and forth over the surface of it, crossing and uncrossing. I fought my way toward them through the crowd.

  It seemed I would never reach the place. The square was packed with people, a heaving sludge of them making its slow way north and south. I edged into the southbound flow, but I couldn't break through it or get ahead of its inching, muddy pace. I felt trapped and smothered and small at the bottom of a canyon of lights, a canyon of enormous billboard bodies and enormous talking heads on their house-sized TVs. The nearness and solidity of all those other humans and the nearness and the stares and the corpselike pallor of so many faces pressing in around me and the crushing radiance of all the soaring, flashing, overhanging signs and screens made me claustrophobic and nauseous—or maybe it was the flashbacks that came into my mind now—now that I couldn't distract myself, couldn't run or shove or shout into a phone: images of Rashid rigid in agony, the sound his knee made when the hammer struck it, the sound of his frantic shrieks behind the gag—and me hanging over him with the hammer raised, and with the small, dark, secret hope hunkered in my consciousness like some bright-eyed gnome—the hope that the terrorist son of a bitch would refuse to answer me again...

  Sick, I made my way in the human sludge, beneath the oppressive, towering Broadway lights.

  The theater was off the center of the square, just west of the intersecting boulevards. I pushed into the side street and saw it. It rose spotlit above a dark mass of people crushed against the police barricades. It was elegant and vast, a swirl of pilasters and arched windows rising like a great stone wedding cake five stories high. The windows were bathed in golden light from the chandeliers above the lobby. You could see the guests rising on the spiraling marble stairways within: women of gliding elegance in sequined dresses and twinkling jewels, men of substance, confidence and wealth in suits as straight and black against the white steps as the sharp keys on a grand piano. And children—I was surprised to see so many children—the boys in ties and jackets, flumping about and clowning self-consciously, the girls in dresses, staring goggle-eyed and openmouthed, as if trying to remember everything forever. All in all, watching the glittering people on the spiral stairs through the window was like viewing a scene in a diorama or a snow globe, some faraway vision of yearning charm.

  Out in front of the theater, off to one side between the theater and the crowd, the five big klieg lights swiveled on a couple of flatbed trailers, sending their beams into the night. Next to the trailers, there was an area all aglow with spectacular silver radiance. I couldn't see it over the massed people, but I guessed that that was where the red carpet was, where the movie stars and dignitaries were arriving in their limousines and sweeping their glorious way past the cameras and microphones of the gawkers and reporters to join those already on the spiral stairs inside.

  I approached the edges of the crowd. Jammed and throbbing with humanity as it was, the scene was more-or-less orderly. The police had closed the street to all traffic except the limousines coming from the west, and were allowing pedestrians to enter only from the east. As a result, the onlookers swarmed steadily in from Broadway while police calmly directed the limos swinging in off Eighth Avenue. I caught glimpses of the big cars approaching one after another, vanishing behind the throng to where, judging by the shouts and camera flashes, the celebrities disembarked. It was all very well organized. The sabotaged theater was filling up quickly.

  I wedged my way into the crowd and started pushing toward the front. "Excuse me. Excuse me," I grunted again and again. There were so many people. Thousands inside, thousands more out here. They were packed together so densely, they formed a nearly solid mass. I had to shoulder and elbow and shove my way through—"Excuse me. Excuse me."—nauseated by the smothering flesh all around me, squeezing past body after body toward the barricades.

  At last, clammy with sweat, I broke through to the front of the crowd and emerged into the magnificent silver light around the red carpet. It was a wonderful light, like none I'd ever seen. It turned the world the color of the moon. Emanating from a series of standing lamps arrayed around the edges of the mob, it poured down on the carpet and splashed up over the New Coliseum's pristine white facade. The black limos pulling up into the glow seemed to take on a startling added dimension. You know those books for kids, those pop-up books where 3-D objects leap up off the page at you? That's how the cars seemed suddenly to leap out of reality as they entered the light. One was arriving even as I reached the barricade. I staggered, blinking, out of the darkness of the multitude, and there it was. A doorman in a blinding livery of scarlet and gold opened the back door. Out, then, into that extra fullness of existence stepped a man I recognized from movie posters, one of the popular comedians of the last few years, and with him, his starlet wife.

  There followed several swift, disorienting moments of machinelike efficiency, a human clockwork engineered to allow the glamorous couple an assigned interval of the crowd's admiration before they were ushered toward a fifteen-second interview under the theater awning, and finally swept inside as the next limousine pulled up behind them. Through all this they were accompanied by a chittering, insectile swarm of paparazzi nibbling at the edges of their silver space and by graceful television cameras that swooped around them, dancing attendance in the outer shadows. It was a strange thing to see. It had a strange effect on me. I found myself frozen there, staring, fascinated, my desperation almost forgotten, as if I'd suddenly been rendered nothing more here than an observer, as if I were at home, in fact, watching the whole thing on TV. The passage of the arriving stars from limo to interviewer to theater became everything, a sequence distinct from its surroundings. The chaos around me, the terror inside me, seemed to become dim and peripheral. The police working to keep the crowd at bay, the sound equipment on its trucks, the klieg lights, the photographers, and the chaotic depths of the mob itself, became a blurred frame to the central progression, a border of living irrelevance to the fullness of the comedian's celebrated life. All the force of reality seemed to me to be not with myself but with the couple on the red carpet, with the white teeth in the comic's tanned face, the sparkling sequins on his wife's black dress. The truth of their being, the being of their being, the dimness of my own somehow-lesser presence on the border of the great glow, seemed to grow more intense with every precisely organized second until the sheer force of their actuality climaxed as they stepped up to the interviewer at the theater entrance and I recognized her—her blonde curls, her avid eyes, her bee-stung lips—it was Sally Sterling—and the shock of her familiar appearance rendered the scene on the red carpet so entirely there somehow that I felt, in contrast, I had all but vanished.

  It was, as I say, strange; disorienting: the quickness of it, and the brightness of it and my own unimportance on the edges of it practically paralyzed me at first,
paralyzed my mind. I just stood there—just stood there, staring. And even when I started to think again, I couldn't think clearly, I couldn't think of anything to do. How could I get closer to the theater? How could I get inside? How could I warn the people—so many people—that they were all about to die?

  There were uniformed police patrolling the barricades at every point. There were many more plainclothes security people standing guard watchfully within the protected circle. I thought of grabbing one of them, screaming at him, warning them all of the danger. But they would've arrested me on the spot. I knew they would have. They would have called headquarters and found out who I was: a murder suspect trying to distract an investigation with unfounded terrorist scares. They would have carted me away and it all would've gone on without me. I could already see it in my mind's eye—the chaos—the rubble—the death.

  So I stood there—that's all—stood there and stared, watching the scene with a swiftly growing sense of panic and helplessness and confusion. Another limousine pulled up and—great God—there was the secretary of state, tall and sleek in a shiny tuxedo. He stepped smoothly from the car. Took his moment in the moony glow, smiling, waving. And I stood there, watching him, fairly panting in my powerlessness, and thinking, Him, too. They will kill him, too. And looking at the crowds, the thousands all around, and thinking: They will kill everyone for their unforgiving god.

  The thought brought me back to myself, back to my senses. As the secretary of state was swept along to his moment before Sally's microphone, I began to take stock. My eyes started moving, searching the scene here and there, looking for anything, any weakness in the defenses, any possible point of entry.

  I found one.

  The theater stretched over much of the block. On this side of it, near the corner, there was a kind of narrow courtyard, formed by the theater's wall and the rear of a massive hotel on Times Square. A short way into the courtyard, I could make out a door—a stage door or maybe an entrance for technicians—I couldn't tell which from where I was. The entrance to the courtyard was roped off. There were two patrolmen guarding the rope. Two more patrolmen stood on the other side of the courtyard, facing away toward the next street over. I thought: If I could create a diversion, if I could draw the attention of these two cops at the rope, maybe I could rush past them, down the courtyard to the door. Of course the door might be locked. And the two cops at the far end might spot me. And if I did get in, there'd be sure to be more cops inside. But it was the only thing I could think of, the only chance I had.