CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Vic saw that the auditorium was full…and that was the first problem.
Yes, she knew that there would be one thousand people, but it somehow looked to be much more than that.
Someone could have told her it was ten thousand, and she would have believed it.
Most of the people were seated in the orchestra section, with additional rows in the mezzanine above.
The stage was lit in warm amber and the house was dimmed, and Timothy Laurence was at the center of the stage in a cream-colored shirt with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, speaking in the measured and unhurried cadence of a man who had given this talk many times and knew exactly where he was in it.
The audience was quiet and attentive in the specific way of people who had paid a substantial amount to be there.
The room had the collective stillness of a group in the middle of something they considered significant.
Kowalski was a few paces behind her. She had no idea where Hess had gone to…
maybe cowering in a corner somewhere out of fear of what he knew was about to happen.
They had come in through the main auditorium doors at the rear of the orchestra level, and the sound of the doors opening had drawn a few heads in the back rows.
"We need to do this fast and loud," Vic told Kowalski. “But we also need to try to keep some sort of order.”
Kowalski nodded once and they moved down the center aisle. He looked uncertain about what was about to happen, which made sense. She wondered where the hell those other police cars were. In about ten seconds, they were going to need all the help they could get.
Laurence saw them when they were about halfway to the stage. He didn't stop speaking immediately, but his eyes tracked them with the sharp attention of a man accustomed to monitoring a room. He finished his sentence before he said, into the microphone: "We seem to have some unplanned guests."
That turned one thousand heads in their direction.
Now that they had been called out, Vic hurried to the front of the orchestra section and held her badge up high enough for the people in the nearest rows to see it clearly.
To her right, she could see a member of security coming toward her—whether part of Laurence’s team or the Paramount’s, she did not know.
"FBI," she said, loud enough to carry without the microphone.
"I need everyone to stand up and move calmly to the exits at the rear of the theater.
Please do not touch one another. Move to the exits, leave the building as calmly as possibly in a single file line, and follow the instructions of the officers outside. "
For approximately two seconds, the room held. It seemed that a few of them either had no idea what she had said or were wondering if this was all some strange part of the show.
Then someone in the middle section said the word "murders" at a volume that was clearly not intended for the people beside them, but reached the surrounding rows regardless.
Vic couldn't see who had said it or how they knew, but the word moved through the nearest section in a visible wave, person to person, and the stillness broke.
It happened quickly, and within a breath, the theater went from puzzled stillness to something akin to warlike chaos.
The first group to stand was a cluster near the center aisle, and they moved toward the rear exits in a tight press that immediately collided with the people in the row behind them who were also trying to stand.
The collision produced a sound, a collective grunt, and the scrape of seat backs that fed back into the room as an alarm, and within thirty seconds, the entire orchestra section was on its feet and moving in the same direction at different speeds.
"Please don't push," Vic screamed into the space above them. "Leave in an orderly—"
A surge from the mezzanine stairwells added bodies to the already-compressed rear of the orchestra section, and the compression at the back of the room drove the people in the middle rows forward rather than back.
Vic watched a woman in a blue cardigan go down near the fifth row.
She disappeared from view for a moment before the people immediately around her stopped, creating a small still point in the moving crowd while others pushed past it.
The woman came back up without visible help, one hand on the seatback, her face white and her mouth open.
She was upright, but the crowd was moving past her before she had fully steadied herself.
Vic cursed and dashed forward, pulling bodies apart at the center aisle, putting herself between two men who were chest to chest and neither backing off. "Out," she said to both of them. "Go. Get the hell out of here now!"
On the stage, Laurence had not moved. He was still at the microphone, watching the crowd with the open fury of a man whose house had just been walked into uninvited.
"This is unconscionable," he said into the microphone, and the PA carried it clearly over the noise of the crowd. He sounded angry but a little scared himself. "This is a private event. You have no right to interrupt—"
Kowalski had gone up the side stairs to the stage. He reached Laurence and put a hand on his arm. Laurence pulled back sharply and Vic could hear his response through the mic.
"Do not touch me."
"Sir, I need you to come with me."
"I'm not going anywhere." He stepped back from Kowalski with the absolute confidence of a man who had never been told no in a professional setting and intended to preserve that record. "I want your badge number and your supervisor's name, and I want them right now."
"Sir—"
It was all audible down in the chaotic crowd, and the conversation must have stoked even more rising panic. People began screaming and cursing, pushing even more in an attempt to get out of the theater.
Meanwhile, up on the stage, Vic barely saw it when Laurence shoved Kowalski.
It was not a small contact and not an ambiguous one.
Both of his hands came up, and he pushed Kowalski squarely in the chest with enough force that Kowalski took a full step back and had to catch his balance on the monitor wedge at the edge of the stage.
Kowalski looked at him for a half-second, absorbing what had just happened, and then he had Laurence's right wrist and was turning him, and Laurence was going down to one knee, saying something at high volume that was no longer coherent.
Kowalski had the cuffs out and on before Laurence had finished whatever he was trying to say.
"You're under arrest for assaulting a police officer," Kowalski said. This, too, was just barely heard down in the crowd. Vic heard a few people gasp and one even yelled out “No!” rather dramatically.
Vic had turned back to the crowd. The rear exits were open, and people were moving through them, but the rate was too slow for the pressure building at the back of the room, and the pressure was translating forward again in pulses.
The fifth row had become a knot of bodies that was not moving cleanly in any direction.
Three people near the center aisle were trying to move laterally across the row and colliding with people trying to move toward the aisle from the other end.
A man in the fourth row was telling everyone around him to slow down, and no one was listening to him, and his voice was adding to the noise rather than cutting through it.
Vic moved to the center aisle and positioned herself at the fourth row, her badge in one hand and her arm extended to create a gap. She didn’t want to pull her weapon in a situation like this but God, it was hard to stop herself from doing so.
"One at a time," she said. "Right here, one at a time. Come toward me."
A few people in the immediate area responded to the direction and the flow at that point organized briefly.
Bodies filtered past her arm in a single file that lasted about fifteen seconds before the pressure from the rows behind overwhelmed it.
Someone caught her shoulder going by. Someone else caught her elbow.
She stayed in position and kept her arm out and kept saying it, one at a time, come toward me, because stopping was not an option and moving was the only thing she could control.
On the stage, Kowalski had Laurence on his feet and was walking him toward the side stairs, Laurence still talking, his voice strained and insistent, his wrists behind his back.
He was not struggling anymore, but he had not stopped speaking.
He looked out to the ambling, screaming crowd with a look of pained horror.
None of the crowd paid him any attention.
They were all looking at the exits and the people-shaped obstacles ahead of them.
The woman in the blue cardigan was moving again, making her way toward the side aisle with one hand on the seatbacks.
She was limping slightly, and her cardigan had come partly off one shoulder, but she was moving, and she was upright, and Vic made a note of where she was in the room so she could find her when the auditorium cleared.
The rear doors were fully open now and the flow had improved as the back rows emptied and the pressure at the center eased.
Vic moved toward the sixth row and positioned herself again, arm out, keeping the aisle clear.
The room was still loud and still moving, but it was moving in the right direction now, and the difference between chaos with direction and chaos without it was the only margin she had to work with.
She kept her arm out and kept her voice even and loud and waited for the room to empty…hoping no one would get trampled in the process.