Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

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 walk 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.