Empire of Lies

  "My God—" I began to whisper.

  Then the New Coliseum exploded.

  I could not take in the vastness of the catastrophe. I could only stand and stare.

  There was a hugely loud yet strangely echoless thump. There was a great heaving movement in the street. There was a punching blast of air and heat that knocked me back on my heels. I felt a jolt of terror and a kind of awe as every one of the big arched windows that spiraled up the front and side of the building flashed with fire then went suddenly black. Glass flew—enormous slanting shards and little confetti fragments of it flew out everywhere—fanned out into the night with what almost seemed an air of frantic gaiety. The glass caught the white of the spotlights. It caught the colored lights of Broadway. It glittered and sparkled gaily, shattering and tinkling and raining down over the ducked heads and raised arms of the crowd in the street. The whole theater seemed to expand for a moment and then, remarkably, settle back into itself as if it were unharmed.

  After that, there was a second of uncanny stillness.

  After that, the theater crumbled.

  Before our eyes, the fabulous structure turned to jagged stones and dust and, with a long, dying roar, spilled down out of itself and over the pavement. Once again, the people began screaming. They ran and stumbled over each other, trying to get away from the white onslaught of debris and the thick spindrift of dust. I saw people caught by the tide of stone and knocked over. Some were buried under it. Some were carried away.

  The rubble that had been the theater rolled clear across the street. It splashed and crashed against the walls of the brick buildings opposite. More windows shattered. Blood splattered against the stone. The debris seemed to rise up high into the night and hurl itself down again, leaving a thick mist of motes choking the air. At some point, the spotlights were knocked over. There was a brittle crash of glass and metal and that beautiful silver light around the red carpets was snuffed out. The kliegs fell, their beams toppling out of the night sky like towers. Where the bright theater stood, there was all at once a black hole, a ruin of girders and cement caught in places by sweeping brightness and then released again into shadow as a single klieg—swept off its truck bed but still somehow standing on the street—swung back and forth, its shaft crossing back and forth beneath the bellies of the roiling clouds above.

  The panicking people poured past me, jostling me where I stood. Covered with dust and glass, catching, like the glass, the Broadway lights, they looked like strange rhinestone ghosts with dark O's where their mouths should have been. I kept my left arm around Serena's shoulders and pulled her to me to hold her upright, to keep her from being swept off as the people knocked into us and flowed past on either side.

  I sought out Patrick Piersall again and found him. He was not far from where he'd been before. It was as if the collapsing theater had simply passed over him, as if the running, panicked crowd had passed over him, and all of it left him untouched. He was dusty—his pullover white, his face gray and white—but otherwise unmoved and unharmed.

  And he was still just standing there, just staring up at the theater—or at the ruin that had been the theater, the emptiness of slanting girder and jagged stone. Then, the next moment, he was laughing—laughing hard, with his debauched wreck of a face thrown back and his shoulders going up and down and his round belly quivering. His laugh broke high once, then settled into a long baritone guffaw. I could hear him clearly over the shouts and screams and honking horns and traffic.

  He began to look around, as if searching for someone he could share the joke with. He found me. Our eyes met.

  Through the floating mist of ruin, as the people ran screaming for their lives, Patrick Piersall sent me a flamboyant salute. Laughing like a madman, he braced the tips of all five fingers of his left hand against his forehead and then flung the hand toward me, opening it in my direction. It was a grandiose, flyaway gesture, a gesture of pure, alcoholic derangement, both exalted and absurd. I returned it in a more restrained fashion, a finger to my eyebrow, then pointed at him. Piersall went on laughing. Even I couldn't help but smile.

  Because the fact was—when the dust and insanity settled—the fact was we had saved them. Oh, there were terrible tragedies that night, terrible injuries that would never be healed. Children lost limbs. Women's faces were slashed and ravaged. A couple of men were paralyzed. A couple had heart attacks. A few were buried under the rubble for hours. There were hundreds hurt, some in ways almost unimaginable, ways too disturbing to describe. Still...

  Still in all, not one person died as a result of the terrorist blast in the New Coliseum Theater. Todd, Juliette, Angelica, the secretary of state, all the others in the audience and all the people who'd been standing and watching on the street outside—miraculously, every single one of them—every single one of them survived.

  So Patrick Piersall laughed and I managed a small smile and we saluted each other, standing on the corner of Times Square. Because we saved them, he and I—and Casey Diggs, too. We saved them—that was the truth of it. A paranoid wannabe journalist barred from his profession for telling the truth. A drunken has-been Hollywood actor who once pretended to be the admiral of a spaceship. And me. Not much in the way of heroes, I know, but all the heroes we could muster in a desperate hour.

  And it was enough. Just barely enough.

  Because we saved them all.

  * * *

  EPILOGUE

  On a clear fall afternoon not long after the explosion, I came home to the Hill. As I stepped out of my car into the driveway, my wife and children rushed the door of the house so fast they got jammed up in it together. Then they broke out one at a time and came hurtling toward me. Chad and Nathan were racing in the lead with little Terry running behind. As I stepped out of the driveway onto the front walk, they flung themselves at me. In a moment, I had a boy in each arm and the girl wrapped around my leg, and Cathy, smiling and crying at once, moving in among them with a kiss.

  I wanted to weep when I saw them. I wanted to fall to my knees and press my forehead to the flagstone and sob enormous racking sobs until I heaved up some portion of the thick, strangling mass of my self-revulsion. I wanted to slobber over the goodness of those children's heads and wallow in the sweetness of my wife's bosom and grovel on the earth in front of them. I wanted to rip open my shirt and bare the ugliness of myself to heaven and beg their forgiveness for what I was inside.

  But no. I was Cathy's husband, the children's father, and they were all of them in my care. If I wept, they would weep. If I showed them my misery, they would be miserable, too. I had no business bringing my moral nausea to their happy occasion. I settled instead for many misty-eyed kisses and embraces all around. Then, with what I hoped was insouciant Dad gallantry, I said, "So— what's for dinner?" They all laughed and we headed together into the house.

  It was the beginning of a very hard winter. A black depression soon settled over me. My old joy of life seemed to seep through my fingers as I desperately tried to hold it fast. At last, it bled out of my life entirely. I walked through the days hollow-hearted and soul-dead. Day by day, hour by hour, I used all the strength of will I had to hide my emptiness from the children. I went through the motions of driving them to school and playing with them in the snow and taking them to movies, but that's what it was: just going through the motions. Joking with them, wrestling with them, setting rules for them, hearing them out. None of it seemed real to me. My life did not seem real.

  I told my wife how I felt, but I tried not to show it to her too much. I tried to describe it to her without complaining or moping or carrying on. One night, I confessed to her what I did to Arthur Rashid, forcing myself to remain dry-eyed as I described pulverizing his kneecaps with the hammer. Cathy reached across the table and took my hand.

  "That's awful. What an awful experience," she said.

  But I could see the doubt and horror in her eyes. I could see her hold back the question: "Wasn't there anything else you could have done
?"

  I couldn't bring myself to tell her the rest, to describe the pulsing excitement that went through me as I brought the hammer down, or about how I hid in the theater closet, ready to lay hands on Maryanne.

  I tried to pray about these things, but I couldn't somehow. I tried to ask God to forgive me for what I'd done and what I'd felt, but I couldn't. The truth was: I was too angry at him to pray. I felt he had asked too much of me. It wasn't that he had asked me to sacrifice my decency or my complacency or even my joy of living. Those were his to give and his to take away; I understood that. But before he would allow me to save those thousands and thousands of innocent lives—his damn lives, his creations—God had demanded that I know myself, and for that I could not forgive him. I could not forgive him and so I could not ask him to forgive me.

  So what else was there? I tried going to a psychiatrist. He listened to me talk for fifteen minutes, then wrote me a prescription for pills—some of those anti-depression pills I'd seen advertised on TV. I was so dejected at that point I actually filled the prescription. But I never took them. Listen, to each his own. For all I know, you could pop a couple of those suckers and spend the rest of your days dancing in the sun. But the way I saw it, my problem wasn't chemical, it was spiritual. The spirit has to have its journey, has to go through its stations, you know; that's how it's shaped finally into a soul. I took the pills down to the lake and hurled them in.

  Now I guess you may say to me: Well, that's all very well and good, but what if you can't make it through the stations of the spirit, what if the journey's too much for you? What if you get so depressed you go out and buy a rope and hang yourself? And I guess I would answer you: Them's the breaks, pal. There's no freedom without the possibility of failure. And I'm not afraid to die.

  I thought about it a lot, in fact: killing myself, I mean. I took long drives to deserted country lanes, parked in the grass by the roadside, and thought about ways to do it. After months of considering various methods, I settled on a gun as the surest and quickest. I even began shopping around for a gun and had my eye on an elegant little Beretta 9mm. With that, I figured, if I decided to live, I would still have something for home protection.

  So it went, through Christmas, into January, February, March. And all in spite of the fact that most of my worst fears of what would happen in the aftermath of The End of Civilization never actually materialized. For instance, I had worried quite a lot early on that I might have to go to jail for what I did to Rashid or at least stand trial for it. I had worried that I might even still be a suspect in Anne Smith's death. For weeks I had bouts of paranoia during which I imagined that all the details of my sordid earlier life would somehow become news and so become known to my children and my neighbors on the Hill. Even the idea that my children and neighbors would hear about Rashid—how I had taped him up and gagged him and shattered his knees with a hammer to make him talk—haunted and sickened me and kept me awake at night.

  But none of the things I worried about happened. What happened instead was this:

  I was questioned for nearly a week after the explosion. Police officers, FBI agents, spies, lawyers, people who for all I know were just dropping by to deliver Chinese food—everyone seemed to want to hear my story. As I had with Detective Curtis, I stuck to the truth with all of them no matter how awful or embarrassing it was. I told the tale day after day, again and again and again.

  Then, after I don't know how long, Detective Curtis himself showed up. I was relaxing between interrogations in a pleasant room on one of the upper floors of One Police Plaza. It was a conference room, with a long table and a wall of windows looking out at the big white clouds over the Brooklyn Bridge. I was sitting at the head of the table, swiveling in a chair, reading about the explosion in the Times. There were the usual angry and fretful stories asking the usual angry and fretful questions that arise after such an incident: How had the terrorists infiltrated security? Where had they gotten the C4? Which conservative politician was to blame? Which American policy had driven the murderers to act? And how could anyone call Christianity a tolerant religion after the Crusades? And so on. There was even a piece demanding to know how Patrick Piersall had gotten into the building with a gun. I knew the answer to that one: celebrity. He'd wangled a ticket to the show from his manager, then found a die-hard Universal fan among the guards, one of those guys who attends Universal conventions dressed up as a Borgon in his spare time. He'd convinced the guard to let him in early so he could tour the theater, and made sure the idiot neglected to put him through the metal detector. Piersall was clever, I'll say that for him. It was a good thing he was on our side.

  I was still paging my way through the stories when the door opened and in came Curtis.

  His tough brown face went wide with a shockingly friendly smile. It didn't suit him. It looked foreign to his features. Even as I stood up to meet him, even as he swung his hand to me for a friendly shake, I could see in his eyes that he was the same, that he discounted any illusion of decency in me or in anyone. I was just another squirrelly felon who hadn't been caught out yet, that's all. He knew a lot about people, Curtis did, but all of it was bad.

  He gestured me back into my chair and sat in a chair beside me. He laid a manila folder on the table between us, but he never opened it. He just liked them, I guess, those folders. He always seemed to have one around.

  He pointed casually to the Times open on the table in front of me. "So? What do you think of the coverage?"

  I shrugged. "Seems like you haven't told them much yet."

  "Not too much. They just get it wrong anyway."

  "I notice, for instance, you haven't told them about Rashid." That was foremost in my mind. I figured once the press found out he was involved, the whole incident would become public start to finish.

  "Well, we will," Curtis said. "We're going to tell them today."

  "All right."

  "We're going to tell them Rashid is gone."

  My reaction must have looked comical, a comical imitation of surprise. I bolted straight up in my chair, opened my mouth wide, blinked my eyes. "Gone? What do you mean?"

  "I mean gone," said Curtis, smiling again beneath those suspicious eyes. "We've searched his office, his apartment, his weekend place: no sign of him."

  "But he was in his office. That's impossible. How could he get away? He couldn't walk."

  Curtis seemed to consider it. "I don't know. Maybe he had some help. Maybe you didn't hurt him as badly as you thought you did."

  I added a few moments of comical sputtering to my ridiculous facial expression. "I ... I..."

  "Anyway..." Curtis slid the folder off the tabletop into his hand and rose from his chair. I was too flummoxed to stand up myself. I just sat there, staring up at him. "We're gonna tell the media we suspect he may have been smuggled out of the country by his masters and possibly executed for betraying the Wall Street operation. That's it. Anything else you want to tell them is up to you. It's a free country."

  He was at the door before I managed to say, "Is that really what you think happened? You think someone smuggled him out of the country?"

  Curtis snorted. It was quite a sound. It was hard and mirthless, and yet it registered a deep, genuine amusement of a kind I don't really like to think about. It made my balls tighten and go cold. For a moment, after the door shut behind him, I just sat where I was, swiveling slightly, trying to think. I thought: I'm free then. They're not going to prosecute me. I'm free. But I didn't feel free or, if I did, I didn't feel much joy about it. I just kept thinking about that sound, Curtis's short, snorting laugh. A deep feeling of pity welled up in me—pity for Rashid—and maybe a sense of awe and terror, too. I did not think he had left the country. And I did not think his life was going to be very pleasant from now on, or that it would be pleasant ever again until its end.

  So the rest of the story—the story of how I tortured a university professor on what was essentially a hunch—never came out—not until now, at least
; not until I told it here. In fact, after that week or so of questioning, the law was more-or-less done with me.

  The media, on the other hand—they were a different story altogether.

  At first, they treated me as a hero—a second-string hero maybe, next to the celebrity, next to Patrick Piersall, but a hero still. The newspaper writers and TV and radio commentators compared me to characters in movies, guys who hunt down the truth when the authorities suspect them or won't believe them, who stop the killers in the nick of time, and so on. Some of the praise started to sound pretty overheated, even to me.

  Then one day, Piersall and I were interviewed on a television show together. It was one of those morning news programs with a sort of domestic feeling—you know, some perky female and some housebroken male acting almost like husband and wife as they chat with newsmakers and celebrities.

  Anyway, it was the perky female interviewing Piersall and me. And she was basically asking the same sorts of questions all the other journalists I'd spoken to had asked. "Were you scared?" and "How did you feel?" and "What was the first moment you realized this was really happening?" Even with the bright lights and with the cameras swirling around me and with the perky female's face uncannily sharp and distinct in front of me because of her makeup and celebrity, I grew bored with the whole thing and my mind began to wander. I began to think about the television room in my mother's house. About the fact that I'd programmed the TiVo there to record every show that had Patrick Piersall in it. I wondered if my old friend the enormous TV was recording me right now.

  Then, unexpectedly, the perky female interviewer put on her Serious and Thoughtful Face. She leaned toward me over her crossed knees and asked, "When you look at a situation like this, do you have any thoughts about what the root causes of our current troubles in the world might be? Do you think America might share some of the responsibility?"

  She was giving me a chance, you see. A chance to show I was deep and nuanced like herself and could understand that sometimes the victim of an attack is really the perpetrator and vice versa. Unfortunately, the question caught me off guard. I had no prepared response. I just began speaking and I said, "You know, Perky (or whatever her name was), I saw one of these fundamentalist imams on TV recently. And he said that when the Soviet Union fell, the forces of faith had triumphed over the forces of atheism. And he said that now, we had to fight a holy war to decide which faith would rule. The more I think about that, the more I think maybe he got it exactly right. Maybe in some sense, this is a holy war..."