It wasn’t hard to spot McAdams coming toward me. Everywhere he went, he strode with purpose, and the world parted around him. Struggling to keep up with him was a young woman—couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—in cargo shorts, T-shirt, and headset.
Her name was Amy Garfunkel. She was the dictionary definition of “cute” and “eager”—bustling, unadorned, and wide-eyed—with a palpable brio that made it clear to all that she had come to work as hard as humanly possible in the hopes of making it in the circus. Unlike the sleek and tall actors running in packs around the makeup and wardrobe trailers, Amy had a beauty that came from a compact and practical place. It wasn’t looks that made her sparkle, but rather an enthusiastic work ethic that time wouldn’t mar nearly as easily.
As I watched them, I wondered when the last time was I had been that young. I also made note of Amy’s beaming smile as she listened to Cole McAdams.
She’d been given the gift to stare at the sun without injury.
As Cole McAdams ended his conversation with Amy, I felt the approach of the Blond Mountain behind me. I chose not to acknowledge it. Just as I chose not to snap his wrist when he put his hand on my shoulder.
“Cell phone, please,” he demanded.
“Excuse me?”
“Cole McAdams can’t speak to you unless you surrender your cell phone. People like to record what he says and sell it.”
“Lemme guess, TMZ?”
Blond Mountain let out a rumbling grunt.
I handed over my cell phone. He then exchanged a subtle nod with Cole McAdams, who gave Amy a warm and sincere hug and seamlessly made his way to me. Blond Mountain turned his back on us as Cole McAdams closed the distance, taking off his leather jacket, a pristine duplicate of the one he wore in the crash, to reveal a clean arm.
You got that right. Clean. No protruding bone. No trace of blood.
Not even a spot of road rash.
Eighty minutes ago, I saw an injury on this guy that should have taken a team of orthopedic and vascular surgeons eight hours in scrubs to sort out just enough for a lifetime of rehabilitation and phantom pain. That injury should have shut down production on Department Zero for weeks and made the studio’s insurance company call the fire department.
Now Cole McAdams was stopping on a dime in front of me in his brand-new leathers, and though his viridescent eyes made it clear he wanted me to feel like the center of the universe, what he clearly wanted even more was for me to walk away from this meeting knowing in no uncertain terms that he was fine.
The charm offensive continued with a warm, firm handshake. It then proceeded with Cole McAdams inviting me into his circle of masculinity by looking back at the receding Amy Garfunkel and letting his gaze rest subtly but discernibly on her ass.
“She’s a sweetheart,” volunteered Cole McAdams. “Works as a painter in the props department.”
“Didn’t think they’d be your favorite people right around now,” I said, taking the bait. I figured the next step in his charm offensive, being as I did not accept the invitation into Cole McAdams’s circle of masculinity (I like women my own damn age and wasn’t about to validate his ogling a girl who could have been his granddaughter), was to let me know that he was a nice fellow and had forgiven all her trespasses.
“Oh, everyone makes mistakes,” he said with a what the hell grin I can only describe as “weaponized.” Cole McAdams then turned to Blond Mountain. “Hey, Lemmy, get her on the guest list for that thing tonight.”
Now I knew four things about Cole McAdams.
1. If I wanted to be aggressively heterosexual around him, he was fine with that as an exercise in male bonding.
2. He had a “thing” tonight and—while it was clearly something very exclusive—an invitation was on the table if I was willing to discern, and then perform, the necessary forms of fellatio.
3. His arm was fine.
Number four?
That one I figured out for myself. Everything about this encounter had been engineered to make sure I understood the first three things.
Yes. Technically, I also knew that Blond Mountain’s name was “Lemmy,” but fuck that shit.
Anyway, I introduced myself to Cole McAdams, but I couldn’t get more than fifteen seconds into the carefully crafted layers of my manufactured identity as “former CIA agent turned movie set consultant Hank McClaine.” Cole McAdams grabbed on to the first conversational handle I threw at him and launched into a monologue about his many skills and accomplishments.
As I said, those were the longest six minutes of my life.
I nodded and smiled, denying him the pleasure of seeing me impressed, and definitely not trying to match his list of accomplishments with some of my own. You know parkour? That’s nice: I killed an army of transgenic cockroach men in the Poconos. You own a jet? That’s nice: I stopped zombie terrorists from blowing up the Liberty Bell. You have a big gun collection? That’s nice: I helped space aliens stop a nuclear holocaust.
No. Sometimes, you just gotta shut up and take the hit.
Finishing up, Cole McAdams flashed me his best good talk expression. He then clapped me on the shoulder, let me know he’d be consulting me when he found some piece of operational jargon in the script that he didn’t understand, and was halfway down the midway with an iris closing over him like the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon before I realized my audience with the king was over.
The thought How do people fall for this horseshit? had barely coalesced in my brain before Blond Mountain put the phone back in my hand and fucked off to wherever it is that people with necks that big fuck off to.
Apparently, everyone was now duly convinced that I was duly convinced that I had not seen what I knew I had seen.
Of course, I knew what I had seen. And I was about to start some shit.
* * *
I found a relatively quiet spot near the “honey wagons” (that’s a fancy Hollywood term for “chemical toilets”). I lifted the phone and dialed.
A familiar voice said hello on the other end and I launched into it:
“Hey. Dr. Hwang. It’s Hank McClaine. I know it’s been a long time since the farm, but I got a lead on something I think you might find interesting. Could be our ticket back in.”
“Hang on a minute, I gotta put my earbuds in…,” acknowledged the voice on the other end of the line.
“I’m made of time,” I replied.
“Okay, do tell.”
“You remember that advanced Lin28a research we caught the Chinks doing back in ’08?”
“Oh yeah, crazy-ass shit.”
“They ever deploy that? Black market, maybe, party favors for the superrich?”
“Never cracked it far as I know. You want me to look into it?”
“Nah, I’ll get back to you.” I clicked off.
Here’s what actually happened in that call:
I found a relatively quiet spot near the “honey wagons” (that’s a fancy Hollywood term for “chemical toilets”). I lifted the phone and dialed.
A familiar voice said hello on the other end and I launched into it:
“Hey, Bug”—yeah, “Dr. Hwang” was our little joke—“I’m using my cover because I suspect my phone is being monitored. If it is, I want to make sure they think I am sort of on to what they are doing and I need for you to play along and maybe improvise a bit.”
“Please clarify whether you’re under duress,” acknowledged the voice on the other end of the line.
“I’m not under duress,” I replied.
“Your phone is bugged, confirmed. Run your sting.”
“I am making up a bullshit case and throwing in a technical term which anyone monitoring could easily figure out has to do with regeneration of limbs and other living tissue.”
“Oh yeah, crazy-ass shit.” (Okay, that wasn’t code—it was in fact some crazy-ass shit.)
“I’m gonna throw out some more vague suspicions as bait.”
“I’m helping you make that bait tan
talizingly tasty, but letting you perpetuate the idea that you’re acting alone.”
“I definitely want them to think I’m acting alone.” I clicked off.
For a man with such massive hands, Blond Mountain had slipped the paper-thin DxO 9 monitoring chip in my phone with great ease. The thing was a masterpiece: something I would have been surprised to see in the hands of a fellow operator. I left it in there, knowing that whoever was working with Cole McAdams (if this was indeed something more than a very rich wannabe getting his hands on some top gear) was tracking my movements along with my calls, and that red flags would go up if I dropped the surveillance.
Also, I didn’t want to risk tampering with my phone. Why? Because I knew damn well—unless something was way off with my operational radar—that Cole McAdams’s “people” would be calling any minute.
The call came less than an hour later, as I waited patiently, sipping cold coffee from a white foam cup in the folding plastic chair ghetto. It was Cole McAdams’s “appointment desk assistant,” and she wanted to know if I would join Mr. McAdams and a few of his friends at the after-hours VIP set he was hosting with DJ Takakura at the Garbo on Selma.
I pretended to know what the hell she meant, and was told that a Town Car would pick me up at my hotel (the production had arranged for lodging during my consultancy).
My gambit had worked.
I figured their next step would be to put a gun in my face right after I got in the Town Car … take me somewhere remote, rough me up a little bit, ask how much I knew, and then, realizing I knew nothing, release me and have me discreetly fired from the production … perhaps after giving up some useful clue about the real reason why Cole McAdams had the healing ability of an axolotl on meth.
What I did not expect was that Cole McAdams would call me in to consult on the scene being shot, and that he would listen intently to my advice on handling a supersonic fléchette gun with honeycomb rounds, and then keep me on the set and ask me spycraft questions between takes for the next ten hours. What I also didn’t see coming was that while this was going on, Blond Mountain not only ran the dossiers on my manufactured identity but also ascertained my threat level, and then left the set, snuck into my hotel room, and injected every one of the bottles in my minibar.
So basically, the party invitation and Town Car had been an elaborate ruse to keep me from being suspicious when I opened the bottle of Starbucks Iced Coffee in the back of my minibar (the production was paying my expenses, so I figured why not live a little?) and guzzled down enough gamma hydroxybutyrate to drop a water buffalo.
There’s a lot of shit that pissed me off about this mission, but fucking with a man’s minibar? That’s just mean-spirited.
* * *
I don’t always get drugged and abducted, but when I do, I tend to wake up duct-taped to a chair and naked. So tonight was a definite improvement.
I came to on a chair, no duct tape, in a midcentury modern office in a large house in the Hollywood Hills. The view alone—on a clear day it must have gone all the way to Long Beach—must have set Cole McAdams back well into the eight figures. Cole McAdams looked fabulous, etched against the setting sun in gray trousers and a tight, long-sleeved black oxford with the top three buttons undone.
Behind me, I noticed three things. First, Blond Mountain, in his bodyguard-black suit with a black T-shirt underneath. Second, another man, shorter, with close-cropped steel-gray hair, wearing a navy three-piece suit that would not have looked out of place in a board meeting in a London bank in the early 1960s. The third thing I noticed was a wall festooned with trophies on shelves.
Even I, with my meager knowledge of popular culture, could discern the conspicuous absence of an Oscar. That made me chuckle.
“We don’t want to hurt you, Hank,” declared Cole McAdams with a probing smile, “and we don’t want there to be any trouble, but we got trade secrets of our own around here, and we just need to know that you’re cool.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Silence…,” Cole said, letting it hang there with a charming shrug, then adding, “And no more phone calls to your cronies who went freelance in the biotech world after the Gulf War pork barrel emptied out.”
That reply told me everything I needed to know.
Cole McAdams’s security personnel had dug deep into the layers of my cover and learned that “Hank McClaine” had been discreetly released from his duties in the CIA because of a substance abuse problem, and that while no malfeasances had been allowed into his public record, he had not been allowed his complete pension.
This meant that “Hank McClaine” had just enough red on his column to keep him from a lucrative job commenting about state affairs on conservative radio and television. This meant that “Hank McClaine” was very lucky to be sent out to consult on movie sets every once in a while.
Bug did his work beautifully on this one. And that work was directly responsible for my not being tied up, stripped down, and hot-prodded in some orifice not designed for that sort of action. The life of “Hank McClaine” had been carefully designed to broadcast the message that “Hank McClaine” was eminently vulnerable to a handsome bribe.
“Okay…,” I said, acting like a man trying to keep his cool when he has been completely and totally made. “What’s that worth to you?”
“We’ll wire a hundred thousand dollars to the offshore account of your choice.”
“What makes you think I’m such a cheap date?” I grumbled.
Cole McAdams looked back at the man in the three-piece suit. Nods were exchanged. Three-Piece lifted a Bang & Olufsen remote control from a bookcase as Blond Mountain roughly swiveled my chair to face a screen the size of a Buick.
The display came to life with multiple high-def and full-color security camera views of a research sciences facility that would have made DARPA drool—stainless steel and glass, all standard-issue Bond villain shit. With something absolutely god-awful as the main event.
Strapped upside-down on a shiny scaffold at the center of the lab was the once vibrant form of Amy Garfunkel.
Her body had been stripped down to two black cloth bands to preserve what these animals must have believed was her dignity. The rest of her was crisscrossed by a network of wiring, monitoring devices, and tubing, some of them carrying fluid into her body, most draining it out.
Her skin was the color of brittle newsprint and about as thin and wrinkled. Her eyes were black. All life had been leeched from her features. The monitors buzzed with flatlines.
I was looking at a corpse.
“We won’t bother you with the technical details,” said Three-Piece, his voice sheer with the sinister silk of an impending threat.
And you don’t have to, asshole, I kept thinking—because even with a murderous rage for justice occluding my every instinct for self-preservation, what I saw before me also clarified this entire situation:
I know the technical details. Just like I now recognize your Ukrainian accent. I’m looking at a rapid-fire p21 gene therapy combined with a pluripotent stem cell harvest designed to create a transplantable suite of biocompounds that can target and heal any injury in minutes with complete regenerative efficacy.
How did I know all this?
The same way I knew fourteen hours ago at the sight of an arm with no road rash that this was a day I was gonna start some shit:
I popped a cap in your former boss’s spine five years ago when he tried selling this shit to a couple of undercover North Korean MSS agents and found out that even they weren’t batshit crazy enough to invest in a life-extension and tissue-regeneration treatment that required an investment in the billions … and the agonizing death of multiple donors per treatment.
Three-Piece finally got to his point:
“We used up our entire supply of our proprietary serum fixing Mr. McAdams’s compound fracture this morning … and we have several local clients waiting for treatments in the next two weeks.…”
I guess I sh
ould have known, I thought while he threatened to do to me what they did to Amy, that Hollywood would have an even more sociopathic narcissist than Kim Jong Un: one willing to bankroll this operation and provide a list of ultrawealthy clients motivated to pay billions to stay young and spry.
“So you can either take the money…,” concluded Three-Piece while Cole McAdams nodded in agreement, “or … maybe … you will go on a bender after being seen at tonight’s party with my business partner…”
Which one of that commie Mengele’s acolytes are you, Three-Piece? Lupinsky? Vartamian? I know there’s at least three more of your colleagues on the DMS’s most wanted list.
Three-Piece concluded his threat with an ain’t I clever grin:
“… and be found a few days later, dead of an unfortunate overdose.”
That’s when my own thought process came to its own inevitable conclusion.
Fuck it. Dr. Hu and his pencil-necks’ll figure out your identity. I’m just gonna go ahead and kill the shit out of you and every other motherfucker in this room.
* * *
When you have sent as many men to meet their Maker as I have, you develop an attuned situational appreciation for any new methods, or weapons, that come your way.
Take, for example, the People’s Choice Award for Best Actor (which Cole McAdams won for his 2003 tour-de-force performance as an autistic mathematical genius in Fermat’s Last Dance).
I bolted from my chair, picking it up in one seamless motion and heaving it into Cole McAdams’s chest to stop him from reaching for the gun in the polished steel box on his desktop. As I did that, the thought crossed my mind that the People’s Choice Award might just be the perfect cutlass with which to skewer Blond Mountain’s head. From looks alone, you could have come to the same conclusion. The thing’s basically a massive, bulbous arrowhead with a very sharp point.
So I used the momentum from the chair-throw to whip around to the trophy case and snatch the People’s Choice Award from the shelf. When I jammed it mercilessly into the skin under Blond Mountain’s neck, however, I quickly realized that his gouting blood was messing up my grip on the crystal surface of the trophy.
Patient Zero Page 22
