Chapter 35

OH MY GOD, Mom shot Rainbow Dave. Gavin peeks between the fingers of the hand he’s holding over his eyes. Dave is down on his knees on the stage and Gavin’s mother is pointing her gun at him. A croaking sound rises to a wail in his ears before he realizes he’s making it with his own throat. He’s screaming. Other kids are, too, and the adults are rushing them up the aisles and over the tops of chairs, dragging and carrying them away from the stage in a tide of bodies flooding toward the clogged exits.

Dave, on his knees under his desk, is groping at something: a shattered plastic box. But he’s not bleeding. Did she miss? Will she try again and kill him and go to jail forever?

Gavin feels like someone shoved a hand down his throat, ripped his beating heart out, and plunged it into ice water.

“No! Mama, stop! STOP IT!”

Are those sirens he hears now above the screaming? Are they here to arrest her and take her away? Someone said her name loud in the speakers before she did it. Someone said there was a bomb.

The lizards are bombs.

Gavin looks in horror at the figurine clenched in his clammy hand.

He should throw it, but where? There are people everywhere. And now his mother is looking at him, wild-eyed, chest heaving. She’s staring at the lizard with the hot gun in her hand hanging at her side, and she looks like a little girl. And it’s the scariest thing Gavin has ever seen—because she doesn’t know what to do, either.

A fresh commotion rises at the exits, and she looks past him, blinks, and then sets her gun on the carpet before raising her hands slowly. The crowd is parting to let men in black helmets and body armor through. They run down the aisles, closing on the stage with assault rifles braced in their shoulders. A man in the same gear appears from backstage, aiming his gun at Dave cowering on the floor, shouting at him to put his hands behind his head.

In seconds, they have Dave surrounded, and a bald man with FBI in big yellow letters on his vest is picking up Jessica’s gun. He approaches Gavin like he’s greeting a dog that might bite, holding out a hand that says, easy. “Set the lizard down on the floor, son, and come with me. Come with me and your mom.”

* * *

Jessica kneels and hugs Gavin fiercely. She lifts him up and carries him away from the lizard. The SWAT team isn’t evacuating the crowd; they’re struggling to establish some kind of order. From what she can see down here at the edge of the stage, they’re funneling the crowd through a hastily established search checkpoint in the lobby. The kind of screening that should have happened before they were allowed into the theater in the first place. But then, nobody knew the lizards were explosives. No one but Dave. And somehow, Andy.

Gavin struggles in her arms and she sets him down. He’s staring at Dave, now handcuffed on his knees on the stage, flanked by officers, eyes downcast, neon green mohawk drooping, while another FBI agent—a small frizzy-haired woman in a tweed coat—questions him.

The agent who took Jessica’s gun tells her she can’t leave until they question her. He escorts her and Gavin through the stage door and up a small flight of steps to where she sees Andy seated on a stool. He’s talking fast to a group of FBI agents while SWAT guys open metal cases containing the armored pieces of a bomb squad suit. A robot that resembles the Mars Rover Gavin was briefly enamored with is being carried in through the back door by two burly men in black tactical gear.

Jessica catches one phrase that Andy keeps repeating, “Shielded bags. You have shielded bags? Even a foil potato chip bag. They’re inert if they can’t receive a Wi-Fi signal,” he says. “I don’t know if the trigger command was on a timer, or he never got a chance to send it, but you can’t take that chance.”

“We have bags for shielding cell phones,” one of the men in black says, “and a containment tank on the truck out back that can withstand a blast.”

“Separate the lizards from the docks and bag them,” the female agent in the tweed jacket says. “Bagged lizards go in the tank.”

“How many lizards are there?” asks the agent that escorted Jessica and Gavin backstage.

Andy looks at him, sees Jessica, and almost collapses with relief. “I don’t know. Len might. I’d keep him on the line. Did you shut down Dave’s laptop?”

The agent looks to one of the SWAT guys who couldn’t be more than twenty-one. “Yes,” he says. “We’re disassembling it to remove the battery.”

Andy rises and steps through the uniformed men and women, who disperse around him with new purpose. “Jessica. Thank God you’re all right.”

Gavin watches bemused as his mother squeezes Andy’s hand. “I think you get some credit for that,” she says.

A bullhorn echoes from the auditorium, a man with a Boston accent instructing any adult whose child has a lizard to place the figurine in one of the bags held by agents in the lobby. There’s a surreal emotional atmosphere in the theater; a dreamlike sensation that the violence has passed, but the potential for tragedy still clings to the air, a vapor that only needs an errant spark to set it off.

She turns back to Andy. “How did you know?”

He tells her about Len, explaining that it all came out of the email he sent a couple of weeks ago. She can tell he’s being careful with his words because Gavin is listening.

Scarcely ten minutes have passed before one of the SWAT guys runs a pair of silver bags out the back door to the bomb squad truck carrying the containment vessel. There’s a palpable look of relief on Andy’s face. Neither the robot nor the blast suit was needed in the end. The crowd is funneled out onto Mass Ave. Through the backstage door, Jessica can see agents and officers engaged with reporters running cameras, lights, and microphones out of news vans.

Dave is being ushered into the backseat of a police car by a pair when the agents breaking down his equipment and packing it into evidence bags find his phone. Jessica notices Andy turning toward the conversation of the agents huddled around the device.

Gavin tugs at her sleeve. “Mom?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Where’s Jacob? Did they come back?”

Her stomach lurches. She forgot all about Lucy and Jacob in the chaos and commotion. And they’re still carrying a lizard.

“Andy!” She reaches for his arm, but he’s drifting away from her, as if in a trance, toward Rainbow Dave’s phone.

“Wait a sec,” he tells her over his shoulder.

“No, Andy. My friend and her son. They left the theater to go to my car right before it happened. They have a dock and maybe a lizard.”

His head snaps toward her like he’s been slapped. “I saw them leave,” he says.

“Jacob might have dropped his lizard in my car. They could be on the street with it right now.”

Andy holds up a finger, signaling her to wait, and approaches the huddle around the phone.

“What fresh hell is this?” the female FBI agent asks, nodding at the screen, and Jessica notices she’s wearing Superman logo earrings. Just one more thing that makes this all feel like a weird dream from which she can’t wake up.

“It’s counting up to something,” the agent holding the phone says.

“Shit. Can you unlock it? Is there a passcode screen?”

“No options. Just the counter.”

“McGuire, get the perp back in here.”

Jessica looks over Andy’s shoulder. The phone screen shows a four-digit number, white-on-black surrounded by three gray triangles tilted at odd angles. The counter reads: 27:56, the seconds ticking up through 57… 58… 59, turning over to 28:00… 28:01…

The agent with the geek earrings looks at Andy. “It’s a failsafe, isn’t it? A back-up timer.”

“I think so,” Andy says, his face blanched of color.

“Why is it counting up? Why not down to zero?”

“What time is it?” Andy asks.

The agent checks her watch. “4:04.”

“Dave was obsessed with the number 333. It had some mystical significance for him. I think he timed the event to set the lizards off at 3:33. If this is a backup and it hasn’t timed out yet, it’s probably counting out a related interval.”

“What does that mean? Related.”

Andy shakes his head. “Best guess, he’s sticking with his magic number. Maybe thirty-three minutes, three seconds? That’s 4:06. I don’t know, but assume we have two minutes.”

The SWAT officer holding the phone sets it on the floor and takes a step back. For a second, Jessica thinks he’s treating the phone as if it might explode in his hand, but then he draws his sidearm.

“Whoa!” Andy says. “What are you doing?”

“What she did to the Wi-Fi box,” he says, nodding at Jessica. “Unless you prefer I smash it with the handle. Can’t transmit if it’s in pieces, right? Anyway, the lizards are all bagged. Call it a precaution.”

Andy holds both hands up, shaking his head as if the gun is pointed at him. “Not all of them,” he says. He looks at Jessica and all eyes turn to her for the first time.

“My friend and her son left the theater early. They’re on the street somewhere. Probably got stopped by the police trying to get back in.” Jessica remembers her own cell phone and takes it from her purse. There’s a string of texts from Lucy on the screen.

LG: Are you okay?

LG: Call me.

LG: They won’t let us back in.

LG: Call me as soon as you get this.

“She’s outside the theater.”

“Ask her if they found the lizard,” Andy says.

Jessica types the question. The SWAT guy has ejected the magazine from his gun, which he holds like a hammer over Dave’s phone. Gavin pushes past Jessica and leans over the screen on the floor. Holding her phone with one hand, she puts the other on his shoulder to hold him back.

Andy is arguing with the SWAT guy, something about how they don’t know if the phone is pinging off a cloud to keep the failsafe signal from being sent over the internet until the timer is up. Jessica can’t give his words her full attention and suspects they wouldn’t make sense to her even if she could. The female FBI agent is ordering someone to get another shielded bag for the lizard on the street.

Jessica’s phone buzzes.

LG: Found it in your car. Who cares? Was there really a bomb?

Two SWAT officers frog march Dave onto the stage. He looks sweaty and defiant but doesn’t resist. His jaw is set in a way that suggests it’s wired shut and the only thing that might open it is a lawyer.

Jessica’s phone buzzes again and Lucy’s name and thumbnail appear on the screen as an incoming voice call. Jessica takes it. “Where are you?”

“We’re in the lobby. A cop is asking for the lizard, but Jacob won’t let go of it. Jessica, what the hell is happening?”

Jessica locks eyes with Andy. “She’s in the lobby with the lizard.”

The SWAT officer hovering over the phone holsters his gun and runs up the aisle toward the lobby.

Into her phone, Jessica says, “Lucy, listen to me: it’s a plastic explosive. A SWAT officer is coming to take it.”

“Oh my God. Jacob, Jacob…”

The female agent in the tweed jacket is practically spitting at Dave, talking fast and fierce about how no one’s been hurt yet, but there’s a federal death penalty for terrorism if that changes in the next sixty seconds. “How do you turn it off?” she shouts, inches from his face. “How the fuck do you turn it off?”

Dave flinches, but keeps his mouth shut.

Gavin goes down on his hands and knees over the phone. Jessica lunges for him, but he says, “I know how. I know how to solve it.”

The agent stares at him. A SWAT officer moves in to scoop Gavin up and remove him from the device, but she says, “Wait. Let him.”

The timer reads 32:40.

Gavin touches one of the three triangles and rotates it with his fingertip, then does the same to the other two, placing them all with points up. He slides them toward the center of the screen below the counter, aligning them into a pyramid formation so that the tips of the bottom two touch the bottom corners of the one on top. When they do, a fourth inverted triangle flashes white in the space between them, and the conjoined shape flashes as a fifth all-encompassing triangle, enclosing them all. The timer freezes at 33:01 and then vanishes.

The SWAT officer who went to find Jacob bursts through the theater doors with the lizard in his hand, scanning for the officer who went to fetch a silver bag for it and checking the room to see how far he can get from other people before the thing detonates, his face a strange mask of terror and determination.

The officer with the bag emerges from the backstage door. The two men stare at each other across the theater, at the people between them on the stage.

“It’s over,” the female agent says, and everyone breathes again.

Jessica pulls Gavin into her, away from the phone lying dormant on the scuffed stage. Away from Dave.

“How did you know?” she whispers into her son’s hair. “How did you know to do that?”

Gavin swallows, his hot face pressed against her. “Daddy told me.”