The Blue Light Project (40 page)

People sang nearby. Loftin heard old church hymns and John Lennon blended. A choral weave behind the action, advancing riot police, special squads now deploying to the rear. Loftin recognized the snub-nosed rifles used to fire rubber bullets. While in the crowd all around him, he felt the shift. The factions fusing, a larger organism being born. And that organism now seethed and rocked, it washed from one side of the plaza to the other, it let its head fall into its hands. It wept for all it didn’t know.

The police lines met the crowd right at the seam where the Black Bloc and the Call intersected. The Black Bloc launched their missiles. The police swung their clubs. The Call went to their knees. Hands to heaven. But that, in the end, did not save them.

Crack. Loftin heard it. A brutal sound. A cop stepped forward and did what he’d been taught to do. Slam the shield into the man’s face. Knock him down. Apply baton to side of head. It sounded like a big stick of celery being snapped in two.

Crack. Blood pooling. The crowd surging. Loftin was again calling
out words. He was feeling real anger now. There was simply no call for that kind of violence. And he noted a momentary lapse in police resolve too, as people rushed in to surround the fallen man. As the hail of stones began again.

The tear gas arrived. Loftin watched the arcs of smoke overhead, the cans hitting the pavement, spitting and spinning. Then his nose and eyes locked and streamed mucus. He doubled over and held his breath. Shapes danced in, faces swathed in towels or gas masks. Ski goggles. Foam padding wrapped to the shoulders and the arms, cinched in place with duct tape. The gas canisters were picked up and sent sailing back over the heads of the cops. Angels, Loftin thought. Guardian Black Bloc angels. Then someone threw a bottle corked with a burning rag and the pavement burned, Plexiglas shields winking orange and black.

Loftin’s legs were cramping. He went onto his knees. He watched a man standing in the front ranks of the Black Bloc, gesturing at the police. Black leather jacket, black mask. And then a cop stepped forward, shouldering a snub-nosed rifle, and dropped the man with a rubber bullet to the side of his head from only twenty feet away. Whomp. The man spasmed grotesquely, then crashed straight down to the pavement. Leg quiver. Then nothing.

Loftin was gasping, his brain unspooling.
What the devil. That was. He didn’t. He is dead. That man is dead. Heaven help us.

And then the strangest thing. Loftin couldn’t believe what he was seeing. A second man stepped out of the Black Bloc lines and approached the police directly. He was also dressed in black, with a black mask over a dark beard. But he was now waving his arms and gesturing that the police should stop. It was either incredible bravado or incredible stupidity. And Loftin winced involuntarily, waiting for what would happen to the man. But nothing did. The police actually stopped. The batons dropped. The rank of men took several shuffling steps back.

It was a miracle, Loftin thought. The bearded man was Mahatma Gandhi. He was Nelson Mandela. The crowd cheered as he crouched beside the man who’d been hit by the rubber bullet, taking his pulse and talking into a cell phone. Loftin squinted, processing these details. Then it came to him in a rush as the man clicked shut the phone and his hand went into the side pocket of his jacket, shaping around something there. Loftin guessed 9 mm. Personalized grip. Oh dear, he thought. The man was some kind of professional.

And that thought came to Loftin the instant before a helicopter thundered up over the building opposite and came rotoring in on the plaza. Pasting back the trees. Cycloning garbage. Sending people running all over. The man who’d been shot was lifted aboard. The bearded man followed and the chopper vaulted skywards and wheeled away.

Loftin was still on his knees behind the planter, but the miracle was now sour.

The riot police withdrew to a side street. And all the old rumors were now replaced by a single new one. The men evacuated in the chopper were police, or Special Forces, or intelligence. Something bad had been loose in the plaza, seeded through the crowd. And the crowd’s mood now dangerously darkened. Loftin’s own mood darkened. And in the hours following midnight, he listened to the sound of breaking glass and watched fires being started in the planters and the dead fountains. At three in the morning, he called his wife, very unusual for him. Mid-morning London time. “Just to say I love you,” he told her. “Everything is fine, sure.” He said it again, “I love you.” And she said the words back to him: “I love you too.”

He was off the phone less than a minute when he witnessed the beating. Firelight flickering on all of their faces. Three men with black masks grabbed another and ripped off his woolen hat. He fought back, make no mistake. But when they slammed him down to the concrete stairs he curled into a ball and tried only to survive the kicking. Dismal
business, the street fight. It lasted thirty seconds, but Loftin didn’t make a move. Special Forces tattoo, the men who had done the beating said afterwards. Dude’s a spy. A fucking rat. There were fucking rats everywhere.

“This is terrible,” Loftin said, to nobody in particular. “Did anyone even see the tattoo?”

The beaten man staggered away, disappearing into a side street, leaving a treacly spatter of blood on the pavement behind him.

The man next to Loftin turned to look him over. He didn’t say a word.

“I’m a journalist,” Loftin told him. “I have a press card.”

There were more men around him now. There were hands feeling in his pockets, hands holding him. Notebooks out. They were leafing through the pages.
#35 Man, 26 yrs. of age. Left of center politics . . . #43 Female, 53 yrs. . . .

Helicopters in the lower air. Someone was yelling at the top of the plaza. Loftin could hear the words very distinctly:
It’s happening. It’s happening.

So fast. So quickly. Loftin might have missed it even if the beating hadn’t begun at that same moment. Fists and elbows, knees and boots. Something crushed and cracked in his central regions. His bowels released. He was falling down through plate-glass windows of pain. While up top of the plaza, the business had begun. One helicopter. One armored personnel carrier. The simplest of maneuvers. The helicopter landed on top of the complex. The armored personnel carrier backed up at high speed and smashed into the lobby of the theater.

There was nothing to see after that. No movement. No shapes visible. No formation. No plan unfurling. There was only an instant of pause, and then something like a pulse. It was barely visible. People experienced it as a sense on the skin, or at the inner ear. The building pulsed and then the plaza did too.

Loftin felt it. He couldn’t be sure exactly what it was. His eyes were pinched shut and they were beating him methodically, paying much more attention to him than they had to the first man. Face and knees. Groin. Face again, this time with kicks. But something came in through his eyelids and rippled through him.

Voices all around them:
It’s happening. It’s happening. It’s happening.

The last one to kick Loftin had no idea that as his boot went home, there was in fact no Loftin left to kick. That was because the one who had kicked him just prior had done so artfully to the side of his head and killed him. That man was nineteen years old and was never charged. And he might have continued kicking Loftin, in his turn, were it not for that strange pulse. It seemed to come from within the theater and spread outwards invisibly. Everybody turned to look. Some people would say later that they saw the walls of the building physically move, puff outwards a fraction. That’s not how Loftin would have described it, however. Had he survived to describe the last experience of his senses, he would have said that a seam of white seemed to blink out of every crack and crevice in the Meme complex at once, a glow of spotless white, the structure humming suddenly with a new and total energy. And that energy, which all those present in the plaza had collectively brought to life, then burst outwards, back through the crowd, penetrating and transforming them all, dissolving whatever order he’d observed there previously, making chaos into larger chaos. Had he lived, those are the things that Loftin would have said.

Twenty seconds, no more. And then everybody was poised, everybody waiting, everybody holding their collective breath.

IT WAS LIGHT.

They did it with light. In the end, that was the trick they saved for timely use. They would have had other options. There were ways they could make your bones vibrate or blenderize your inner ear, fiddle with the knobs on your stability and balance systems, make you fall over, wet your pants, liquefy your entire intestinal tract. They could project a voice into your head and make you insane. They could do that kind of thing.

Only, key point, they weren’t going to use any of those techniques on someone with his fist clamped around the trigger of what might be a radiological dispersion device, a so-called dirty bomb. True, these weapons were not considered potent enough to kill a lot of people. But a nuke was a nuke, in the public eye. And the authorities would be evacuating a city if that word got out, which would surely be the black outcome, the major domo downside.

Pegg was in an ambulance, fading slowly from consciousness by the time he got around to thinking this through. They were heading somewhere, although not quickly. In fact, they were stopping and starting
now through crowds that plugged every street around the plaza. Honking and wailing and welping their way through. Even strapped to a gurney, though, Pegg was able to appreciate the genius of what had been unleashed. The genius of that otherworldly light. And he, Thom Pegg, had called it forth.

“Bring me a beer,” said his boy. His own lost boy. “And a mop.”

And there was Pegg laughing somewhere in the deep and forgotten recesses of history.

They didn’t come immediately. Pegg waited after the tape played with his eyes pinched shut, unable to imagine what Haden had in store. He listened for sounds in the ceiling, in the sewers below. He listened for explosions, soldiers breaching the walls, storming through. None of it came. And as Pegg counted off seconds, then what he assumed to be minutes, it occurred to him that he could leave the theater. Everybody was through with Thom Pegg now. He’d listened to Mov’s madness from beginning to end. He’d pressed the button on his tape recorder at the moment that seemed right, just as Haden had requested. Haden hadn’t sent men in to kill him immediately, so he was free to go. Free to be free. Free to live unless they were planning to sniper him down on the lobby steps in front of five hundred television cameras.

But he didn’t leave. He went back to sit with the kids instead. Gerry and Hyacinth still next to one another. Roshawn. Laisha, Reebo, Metric. Pegg flashed on an image of what lay outside the theater doors, the agitated crowds there, the press and lights. And it seemed quite clear that he and these kids had more important things to discuss. The first thing on that list, naturally, was what they were going to eat when they got out. Pegg had them all hold hands sitting there in row 14. Hyacinth suggested fries. Everyone agreed. So it was unanimous. They were all going to eat french fries when they were freed. Not a long time afterwards. Immediately afterwards. And tears were streaming down Pegg’s cheeks.

Gerry said: “You okay?”

I’m good. I’m good.

And then the kid said this. He actually did. “Would you like a hug?”

Pegg embraced the boy and wept onto the top of his head. Gerry gave him a squeeze. He said, “I know we’re not going to die.”

Pegg wasn’t an adult. That’s the thought he had. He couldn’t possibly be an adult, because he was unable to suppress the following question: “How do you know?”

“Because I choose to believe in life,” Gerry said. “I believe in all of our lives.”

The boy said that too. He actually said that.

Mov had disappeared, although Pegg could still feel him in the darkness, somewhere close. Sitting on the edge of the stage, head lowered. Leaning against a nearby wall, exhausted from the effort of bringing everything to these last moments. Pegg found that even fear was hard to shape in the darkness.

As it was, they all sat tightly together in the sweating blackness. Everything suspended. Everything in that darkness having now taken on a temporary tone. They heard Mov move towards the front. Pegg thought it had been fifteen minutes since his tape played, since he’d held his breath and depressed that key. He wondered if there were any traces yet of morning light outside. Predawn. Then he heard Mov in sudden motion.

Pegg said: “On the floor, now. Everybody.”

And they all wriggled their way to the sticky, stinking carpet. They all tucked their heads in under the seats. Except Pegg, who stood uselessly, stupidly.

“Is it over?” Gerry asked him from the floor.

“Right now,” Pegg said.

That was the moment.
Is it over? Right now.
But Pegg could not have known the way in which it would arrive. Nobody could have seen that coming, because there was, literally, nothing to see.