“No more cattle car traveling for you for at least a little while, tiger,” Eastman told him while they were waiting at the luggage carousel for his Travelpro. “You’ve earned a few perks. We’ve got a limo to the Paper Valley Hotel, which admittedly ain’t the Century Plaza but it’s the best place for a hundred miles in any direction. Plus, the hookers are a lot cheaper and instead of AIDS they’ll give you stuff they treat with penicillin. There’ll be room service waiting for you when we check you in. They don’t do free range chicken out here, but that’s okay because you’ve lived around here and you can probably still handle the local cuisine.”
“You don’t know how good that sounds,” Selding said.
“Also, that chick from Entertainment Tonight! who thought she’d have a permanent bad hair day after our helicopter went blooey is still hanging around. She’s looking for inside stuff, and if she thinks you’ll give her some you might get lucky. If that’s your speed.”
“What can I tell her?”
“We’ll talk about it in the limo. You might squeeze her a little bit, too. See if she’s gotten cozy with the local law and found out anything about the explosion we don’t know. That’s on top of getting a line on another Sikorsky helicopter, which just became another entry on your to-do list.”
“Right.”
The limo ride was heaven. The martini was heaven. The prospect of trying his luck with the chick from Entertainment Tonight! was intriguing. The thought that, sometime around noon tomorrow, Aaron Eastman would be in that B-24 heading for Moneyland, leaving Selding for at least three unsupervised days with a luxury hotel room and a decent expense account—that thought was almost enough to compensate for the brutal hardships of a coach seat from the coast and a commuter flight connection. When Eastman showed him into Room 622 at the Paper Valley Hotel just before six o’clock, Selding decided that, on the whole, the world had once again become quite satisfactory.
As soon as Selding’s door closed, Eastman quick-stepped to his own suite, 649. His laptop sat, open and glowing, on the work table in the suite’s front room. The e-mail window open on the screen displayed a provocative message:
Saturday, 4:12 P.M. CDT
From: Jerry Selding[[email protected]]
To: Aaron Eastman
Re: You’ve Got Mail
Dear Mr. Eastman:
Rep was right. If I could do this to Selding, Mixler could have done it to Charlotte. And did.
Melissa Pennyworth
Rep and Melissa Pennyworth sat on a couch about eight feet from Eastman’s computer, looking rather like teenagers babysitting for a child whose parents had returned a tad earlier than expected. He grinned at them in gracious concession.
“Where did you pull the switch?” he asked.
“At the security checkpoint,” Melissa said. “I went through ahead of him, with a general issue Tavistock laptop and case that were identical to his. I left something I said he’d dropped with the attendant to divert him for a second, and that was enough for me to take his case and leave mine after they’d both been through the x-ray machine.”
“So now he’s sitting in his room with your laptop?”
“No, I switched back on the plane. As soon as he stowed the one he had in the overhead compartment, I opened the compartment right behind his, pulled the laptop he had stowed over to my area and put the one I had—which was his—in its place.”
“Which gave you time before you boarded the plane,” Eastman mused, “to find a data port and send me this e-mail.”
“Right.”
“But you were able to do that only because I gave your husband Selding’s log-on password. How did Mixler know Charlotte Buchanan’s password?”
“Selding told him,” Melissa explained. “They both worked at Tavistock, they both had the Dell computers Tavistock gave to its employees, both computers used Tavistock-tailored software and operating systems that the company had licensed, and they both at least started out with company-issued passwords generated according to the same formula. Selding knew that if his password was ‘jselding’ then Charlotte’s was ‘cbuchanan.’ She could have changed it, of course, but in most places only the techies bother with that. And even if she had, he probably still had friends back at Tavistock and could have found out the new one if he really wanted to.”
“I see,” Eastman said. “Of course if he’d turned the computer on he would have instantly spotted the switch. How did you know he wouldn’t do that?”
“I deliberately ran the battery down on the one I switched with his.”
“And you were lucky that he didn’t find a working outlet.”
“Well,” Melissa conceded, “you need a little luck. But Mixler wouldn’t necessarily have had to count on that. If our theory is right, he met Charlotte at O’Hare, and he could simply have kept her busy himself while an accomplice sent the e-mail.”
“Not too bad,” Eastman said. “It’d be kinda fun to figure out a way to show that on the screen.”
“And one more thing,” Melissa said. “You might want to have someone look into whether Morrie Bristol has anything going at the moment with Galaxy Entertainment.”
“The Morrie Bristol who was the worst of the three screenwriters for In Contemplation of Death?” Eastman asked. “Why?”
“Because he’s the only one of those three who’s also a published novelist,” Rep said. “I’ve left voice-mails with a couple of my buddies in the New York copyright bar to confirm it, but it won’t shock me to the soles of my shoes to learn that Julia Deltrediche is his agent.”
“That might be worth looking into at that,” Eastman conceded.
“Which brings us to the most interesting question,” Rep said. “What are we going to do now?”
“I don’t know what you’re going to do,” Eastman said, “but I need sixty million dollars to make a movie with. I’m flying to northern California—except a little earlier than planned.”
“Excellent,” Rep said.
Chapter 15
“So how did it go?” Eastman asked Selding. “Did you make the earth move for her?”
Hemingway again, thought Selding, who wasn’t entirely uneducated.
Eastman’s question came at a bad time—specifically, at 11:20 Saturday night, as Selding was stumbling irritably out of a limousine that had delivered him to the EAA airfield. He nevertheless managed to answer it without overt insolence.
“Uh, no,” he mumbled. Longing still for the air-conditioned atmosphere richly textured with tobacco smoke and redolent of alcohol that he had just left at the Paper Valley Hotel’s bar, he pressed fingertips against temples in an effort to force the loathsome fresh air out of his head. “She said she doesn’t sleep with sources.”
“Hadn’t she ever seen All the President’s Men?” Eastman asked.
“Guess not. I was scoping out the local talent when I got your beep.”
This anodyne comment was a triumph of discretion, for Selding had to concentrate fiercely to keep impolitic thoughts from tumbling out of his mouth. Eastman’s message from forty minutes ago still echoed obscenely in his head: “Bad news, buckaroo. Attitude alert in Silicon Valley. Change in plans. Early command performance in Pomona. Car on the way.” Just please don’t call me ‘buckaroo’ again, Selding thought now.
“Well, don’t take it too hard, buckaroo,” Eastman said. “After the opening weekend for Every Sixteen Minutes the local talent will be taking numbers outside your apartment—and I’m talking about the local talent in Beverly Hills. Let’s climb on board so we can get our seat backs and tray tables in their original upright and locked positions.”
That startled Selding, as it suddenly dawned on him that they weren’t at the EAA Airfield to wait for a hastily arranged chopper to buzz them down to O’Hare where they could catch a real plane for the coast. Instead, they were going to make this improvised journey in Eastman’s current toy, that bloody B-24. Duh, he thought disgustedl
y, just before he found himself being ungently hoisted into the thing.
When his eyes had adjusted enough to the dim red light inside to see Rep Pennyworth already ensconced snugly in the navigator’s seat, he said something a lot stronger than duh. Thirty seconds later he noticed Eastman slipping into the cockpit and he realized that the certifiably wacko egomaniac he worked for was actually planning to fly this crate himself all the way to northern California. The string of epithets he let loose with mentally at that point would have guaranteed an instant R rating for any film that dared to include them.
“Where’s the real pilot?” Selding demanded, as rage and frustration finally overtaxed his normally inexhaustible capacity for toadyism.
“Probably bopping that ET! skirt you struck out with,” Eastman said genially as he flipped switches and set propellers spinning. “I couldn’t raise him on short notice.”
“What’s the big emergency, then? Why couldn’t you just fly out tomorrow around noon, like you’d planned?” And why do I suddenly have to be in on it?
“Blame the shyster here,” Eastman replied. “His client found out about the money meeting, and seems to have gotten her Ivy League-educated rear end out there with mischief in mind. So we have to improvise a quick and happy solution to her little controversy before she makes a nuisance of herself.”
“Found out how?” Selding bleated.
“That’s one thing you’re going to help me get to the bottom of. I need some extra eyes and ears working on that full time, because I’m going to have my hands full getting the shyster and his client straightened out before the software princes start strolling into my hotel room Monday morning. Plus one more thing. There’s buzz that our boy Morrie Bristol had one of his lame post-modern angst novels optioned at Galaxy and they’re actually going ahead with it. I need you to check that out, too.”
“I don’t follow,” Selding said, as a distant warning bell tinkled faintly in his head.
“Then just settle back and enjoy the ride while I run through this twenty-six point preflight checklist and then chat with the gents in the control tower.”
Less than five minutes later they were in the air. Looking over at Rep as he thought Eastman’s comments over, Selding bucked up a bit. It did make sense when you thought about it, he reflected. He wasn’t a mere gofer, or even just a techie who could scan pretty pictures onto computer screens. When you got right down to it, he was actually a pretty impressive guy. He could really see Eastman thinking that the glittering little flicker of danger in the depths of Selding’s dark brown eyes would help a schlepper like Buchanan’s lawyer here see where the dictates of prudence might lie. Not to mention that other matter. Eastman wouldn’t believe how clever Selding could sound about that one if he decided to. This had possibilities.
“Mask time, boys and girls,” Eastman said. “Ten thousand feet in thirty seconds.”
Selding had by now learned to handle the oxygen mask and throat mike adroitly, but he still hated the things. Grudgingly he slipped his on and fingered the mike into position. He waited until he’d filled his lungs twice before he risked bellyaching.
“Couldn’t you just cruise around eight thousand feet all the way to the coast?” he asked. “It’s not like this is a seven-twenty-seven or anything.”
“Maybe not, but we’re way too big for that altitude. I’ll be surprised if they let us stay below twenty thousand feet once we’re cruising.”
The plane throbbed through the night. Selding did not wonder what it would have been like to be riding in one of these things on a night bombing run over Germany, waiting for cannons to belch flak from below and Messerschmidts to come screaming out of the sky above. Nor did he think about the emotions that must have run through men preparing to rain anonymous death on unknown thousands beneath them. Selding’s idea of history was the Reagan administration. What Selding thought about was being co-producer of a movie with world class distribution before he was twenty-nine.
He was pulled from his reveries, such as they were, by the lawyer (Pennyworth, he remembered). Quite suddenly, it seemed, Rep stretched his body, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, and yawned so deeply that Selding could tell he was doing it even though the oxygen mask covered his nose and mouth.
“Sorry,” Rep said after the performance. “I have no idea why I’m so tired all of a sudden. I got plenty of sleep, and I’ve only been out of bed since two this afternoon.”
Selding shrugged more or less sympathetically as he stifled a yawn of his own. A hideous thought—not a thought, really, just the suggestion of the beginning of an idea—fluttered briefly across his consciousness. He repressed it.
“I’m feeling it a little bit myself,” Eastman said. “Shouldn’t be, though. We’re getting pure oxygen. We ought to be feeling peppy and wide awake.”
Selding tried and failed to suppress another yawn. He’d done two lines of pure Columbian nose candy less than ninety minutes ago. No way he should be sleepy.
“Maybe we should bag this flight,” he suggested, a nervous edge coloring his voice despite himself. “Turn back and try it again after everyone has had a good night’s sleep.”
“No can do,” Eastman said. “Don’t worry. I’ll get us there.”
The lawyer yawned again, then lowered his head and shook it with impatience. Selding felt drowsiness begin to overtake him. The hideous thought—and by now it was a full-blown thought, all right—didn’t flutter across his consciousness this time. It vibrated through his whole body with a terrible clarity.
“Maybe there’s something wrong with the oxygen tanks,” he said—a bit faster than he usually spoke. What colored his voice this time wasn’t nervousness but panic. “Maybe that’s why we’re all nodding off.”
“If there were something wrong with the tanks you’d have known about it long before now,” Eastman scoffed reassuringly. “When you breathe you’re getting something through your nose and into your lungs, right? Therefore, there’s nothing wrong with the tanks.”
“Maybe they made a mistake when they recharged them,” Selding said, his voice rising. “Maybe they didn’t put oxygen in them. Maybe they charged them with something else instead.”
“Why would they charge them with anything but oxygen?” Eastman demanded.
“That’s interesting,” Rep volunteered. “My wife was just telling me yesterday about a movie called Green for Danger based on that. It takes place in a hospital, and the murderer kills someone by painting a tank of nitrogen green so that the anesthetist would think it was an oxygen tank. The patient gets nitrogen instead of oxygen, and dies of asphyxiation.”
“I think we could tell if we were getting nitrogen instead of oxygen,” Eastman said sarcastically.
“We couldn’t, actually,” Rep said. “There was an incident at NASA during the early days of the space program, back in the sixties. Some workers went into a sealed chamber filled with pure nitrogen. They couldn’t tell the difference. To them, it was just like breathing air. But they weren’t getting any oxygen so they passed out and died, just like the patient in the movie.”
“I really think we should get down below ten thousand feet,” Selding said, his urgent tones contrasting sharply with Rep’s matter-of-fact commentary.
“Can’t do it,” Eastman said flatly.
“I understand your concern,” Rep said soothingly to Selding. “Long before we lost consciousness we’d start having brain cells die from oxygen deprivation. We could be losing major IQ points somewhere over the Mississippi.”
“WE’VE GOTTA GO BACK!” Selding suddenly yelled, displaying an energy level scarcely suggestive of oxygen deprivation. “SOMETHING’S WRONG!”
He settled back amid a pregnant silence. He looked at Rep, who returned the gaze with polite curiosity. He looked at Eastman, whose head swiveled to stare directly back.
“Buckaroo,” Eastman said evenly, “is there something you’d like to tell me?”
Sel
ding twitched. The spasm didn’t limit itself to any particular part of his body, but shook him from great toe to forelock.
“Let’s just go back and get down,” he begged. “Then we can talk all you want to.”
“We can talk all I want to up here,” Eastman said. “And I’m going to Pomona, California unless you tell me why I shouldn’t.” He paused for four long beats. “Tell me now. Tell me why you think there’s something wrong with the oxygen tanks.”
“I WANT ON THE GROUND!” Selding yelled. “I WANT ON THE GROUND NOW! I SO WANT ON THE GROUND!” He gasped on the last syllable, short of breath. His face turned bridal veil white.
“Talk,” Eastman said calmly. He waited again, through what were now shallow, ragged breaths magnified by Selding’s throat-mike. Then he continued. “You know, it could be that there isn’t something wrong with all three tanks. Did you think about that? It could be that what was supposed to be wrong was discovered, and fixed for two of the tanks. That would be a kind of poetic justice, wouldn’t it? One of those noir things, kind of a Double Indemnity/Postman Always Rings Twice biter-bit kind of number, wouldn’t it?”
“I DIDN’T DO IT!” Selding yelled.
“Who did do it?” Eastman asked.
“I don’t know who did it,” Selding wept desperately.
“Then we’ll settle for what ‘it’ is,” Eastman said. “Talk fast—while you can still talk at all.”
“Okayokayokay,” Selding said, very rapidly. “Understand, I had nothing to do with it. I only heard about it third-hand. The only guy I know was involved was Mixler.”
“I’m waiting for ‘it,’” Eastman said calmly.
“All right, you’re right. The plan—what I heard was the plan, but I couldn’t believe it, I thought it was just a sick joke—was that they’d substitute nitrogen for oxygen on the tanks in this plane. It was supposed to happen at the last minute, just before you took off tomorrow. So that on the way to the coast, you’d, uh, you’d all, um—”
Screenscam Page 15
