Fake Truth (Ian Ludlow Thrillers)

by Lee Goldberg

  “You have to do the opposite,” Healy said. “You’re going to put a spotlight on yourself. You and Ian will go public, telling the world about your daring escape from Chinese oppression, maybe even imply a romance to tug at America’s salacious heartstrings. It’s a win-win for everybody.”

  “How do you figure that?” Ian asked.

  “The Chinese will be shamed, you will sell a bazillion books, and the studio will put Straker back into production to capitalize on the publicity, turning Mei into an international star.”

  “Posthumously,” Mei said. “The Chinese will kill me before the movie comes out.”

  “They wouldn’t dare,” Healy said.

  “They just tried to kill two presidents,” Margo said to Healy. “But you think they draw the line at killing an actress?”

  Healy got up, got himself a mason jar, and casually filled it with ice tea. If he was angered by Margo challenging him, he wasn’t showing it. “It would be a public relations nightmare, right before the party congress. Xiao won’t want that.”

  Mei said, “So he’ll kill me after he becomes ruler for life.”

  “Why would he bother if he already has what he wants?” Healy brought the pitcher over to the couch and refilled Mei’s glass, playing the polite host. “Besides, the fact that we didn’t put you into hiding, and that you’re going public, reinforces Penny’s story that you gave us nothing, so we tossed you on your ass.”

  “Isn’t that what you’re doing?” she asked.

  “You’ll be with Ian and Margo, at least until the movie resumes production. After it wraps, your new life begins. You may not even need our help to get on your feet.” Healy took a sip of his ice tea. “Or we can just forget all that and you can go off to your double-wide in Wyoming.”

  Mei looked past Healy to Ian. “What do you think?”

  Ian thought about Healy’s scenario as if it were a story being pitched to him for one of the TV series that he’d produced before he became a novelist. He considered whether the action naturally developed from the characters, and their established motivations, or if they were being shoehorned into a contrived narrative for the convenience of a lazy writer.

  “I don’t see any holes in the plot,” Ian said. “I could write it.”

  “Okay,” Mei announced. “Then I’ll do it.”

  Ian was flattered that she was willing to bet her life on his story sense yet again. But then it occurred to him that the truth was probably that she’d rather die than work at a Walmart in Wyoming.

  “Excellent,” Healy said and turned to Ian. “I’m going to take you at your word.”

  “What word is that?” Ian asked.

  “That you’ll write it.”

  “I didn’t mean it literally.”

  “This is your scenario now. You run with it.” Healy set down his mason jar and headed for the door. “I’m leaving now and taking Mei’s security detail with me. The CIA can’t be directly involved in what comes next. Good luck.”

  And on that note, Healy walked out.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Top Chef Catering. Khimki, Moscow Oblast. July 11. 9:30 p.m. Moscow Standard Time.

  The headquarters of Top Chef Catering was a ten-story, deep-blue monolith in Khimki, a bedroom community eighteen miles northwest of the Kremlin, and was known in Russian intelligence circles as the Kitchen.

  It wasn’t called that because the first two floors of the tower were devoted to preparing meals for the Russian military, hundreds of grade schools, numerous prisons, and the International Space Station. It got its nickname because floors three through ten were devoted to cooking up covert operations that were too hot for even the feared GRU to touch, even with oven mitts. The Kitchen’s present mission was running an internet troll farm that employed four hundred Russians to spread propaganda on the web.

  The Kitchen belonged to Leonid Morzeny, who began his career running a prostitution ring, expanded into blackmail and loan-sharking, and then took an unexpected turn into catering when he seized Top Chef from a now-deceased borrower who couldn’t settle his debts. Morzeny broadened the catering business into institutional food service, bribing and blackmailing politicians to win lucrative contracts, then shrewdly approached the GRU with the idea of laundering cash through his company to fund their covert operations abroad. The GRU jumped at it. That successful relationship evolved into Top Chef becoming the cover for various off-the-books intelligence operations, secretly funded by outrageously inflated government and institutional food service contracts so there wouldn’t be any direct ties to the Kremlin if things went wrong.

  Morzeny was forty-five, regularly shaved his head to keep it Jeff Bezos bald, and always wore the Steve Jobs black-sweater-and-blue-jeans ensemble. He believed that emulating the style cues of successful men subliminally prompted others to see their qualities in him.

  Today he was consciously trying not to trip on his Air Jordans, which he wore with the laces untied, Jay-Z style, as he strode into his tenth-floor conference room. Falling on his face would seriously undermine the oligarch’s authority with his “generals.” That was what he called the six computer geeks—unshaven, pale-skinned, and largely unbathed twentysomethings—who sat around the conference table. They were awaiting their orders from him on how to deploy their soldiers, the hundreds of internet trolls toiling in the floors below, in their war on Russia’s enemies. His generals looked up at him with their bloodshot eyes, strained from countless hours staring at bright computer screens, as he stood at the head of the table.

  “Good evening, gentlemen. We’ve enjoyed great success weaponizing free speech on social media platforms to disrupt the democratic political systems and institutions abroad. That fake news operation will continue. But now we’ve been ordered to take that operation to the next level.”

  His six generals traded looks. They had no idea what “the next level” was. Frankly, Morzeny hadn’t known what it was, either, until he was told by the president himself over breakfast at the Kremlin. But he rolled his eyes, as if the answer was obvious and his generals were morons for not knowing it.

  “We’re going to manipulate the American people and their leaders with real fake news to achieve a specific outcome.”

  Petrov, a programmer adept at hijacking websites, raised one of his freakish arms, which was almost as long as his legs, and then spoke up without waiting to be called on. “Real fake news? What is that?”

  “Reality that isn’t real,” Morzeny said. “I suppose you could call it fake truth.”

  “Like a movie,” said Viktor, a shifty little man who excelled at creating doctored photos and videos for social media and, on his own time, liked to direct amateur skin flicks for Pornhub.

  “Yes, but one that’s played out in the real world,” Morzeny said. “The way the Ukrainians faked the death of an anti-Russia reporter as a means of exposing the assassins who’d been hired to kill him.”

  “By the GRU,” said Evgeny, who created fake social media accounts for nonexistent people and oversaw the posting of thousands of fake tweets each day. He had the nervous habit of chewing his fingers until they bled. His keyboard looked like a crime scene. “It was a major fuckup.”

  “The GRU prefers to look at it as a teachable moment,” Morzeny said.

  “So we’re going to stage events,” Petrov said, not raising one of his tentacles this time, “and then amplify them through social media manipulation.”

  “They won’t be staged,” Morzeny said. “They will be real.”

  Evgeny chewed on a scab on his left thumb. “I don’t understand.”

  “We are going to take several real events and wildly amplify them until they come together to form one compelling narrative that leads inevitably to our desired result. It’s not a new idea. In the 1890s, a revolution was raging in Cuba. American newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst had his reporters exaggerate what was going on in their stories to whip the public into a frenzy and spark the Spanish-American War. Why did h
e want a war? To sell more newspapers. And it worked.”

  Viktor asked: “What is the specific outcome we want to achieve?”

  “The first steps in the rebirth and reunification of the Soviet Union.”

  “Is that all?” Petrov said, his sarcastic comment generating some anxious laughter among the generals. “Where do we start?”

  “As with any story, it begins with the plot.” Morzeny went to the door and opened it, ushering in a guest with a wave of his arm. “For that, we’re fortunate to have an expert to lead us.”

  And, to the astonishment of the generals, in strode Kirk Cannon, the American action movie star, writer, and director who’d fled from the United States to Russia a decade ago rather than face eighty years in prison for drugging and raping women. He’d become the president’s personal martial arts instructor and continued to pursue his passion for filmmaking and sex with unconscious women.

  Cannon, whose given name was Floyd Gruber, wore an elaborately embroidered Japanese silk kimono over his three-hundred-pound girth, and his crude oil black hair was tied into a tight man bun. The sixty-year-old actor had injected so much Botox into his face that Morzeny thought he looked like a wax museum version of himself.

  Cannon dropped a four-hundred-page screenplay on the table with a heavy thud that got everyone’s attention.

  “This is our script,” he said in English, having never bothered to learn Russian, and in a near whisper, because it forced people to concentrate when he spoke. Everyone in the room was fluent in English, of course, which was how they were able to write and produce social media posts that seemed authentically American. “We will need a Mexican sociopath, a patriotic Texas rancher, a barbaric drug lord, and a blowhard TV pundit with a huge, devoted audience of ideological sycophants.”

  “We already have one of them,” Morzeny said in English. “The others might take a little time to find.”

  “The president has given us six months,” Cannon said. “We have an unlimited budget and a crack team of GRU special forces agents under our direct command. If Paramount Pictures had given me that kind of support, I’d have ten Oscars by now.”

  “The hell with Oscar,” Viktor said. “I think you’re the greatest filmmaker who has ever lived.”

  “Thank you. But what I did before were just movies. This is going to be my enduring masterpiece,” Cannon said. “And my revenge.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Syria, Virginia. July 11. 3:40 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

  After Healy left, Ian spent thirty minutes pacing outside the cabin, thinking about his next move, and then used Margo’s burner phone to call Larry Novak, his literary agent in New York.

  “Where are you?” Novak yelled into his ear. “I’ve been trying to reach you for days.”

  “Sorry, my life has been wild and this is the first chance I’ve had to catch my breath.”

  “I’ve left you six thousand messages. Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “No, I don’t. I’ve been off the grid.” That was true. Ian had been held incommunicado in a safe house since his return to the United States and had been so caught up with saving the country from being overthrown by the Chinese that he hadn’t thought about the blowback on his writing career. “Fill me in.”

  “Is Wang Mei with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit! Then it’s true.”

  “What’s true?”

  “That you ran off with the female star of your damn movie. Pinnacle Pictures has shut down production on Straker, not that they had any choice. The Chinese government kicked the cast and crew out of Hong Kong and banned the release of Pinnacle’s movies in their country. Thinking with your dick could cost Pinnacle hundreds of millions of dollars.”

  Ian could visualize Novak, a native New Yorker, wearing his ever-present Bluetooth earbuds, angrily pacing his Sixth Avenue corner office and underscoring his words with broad hand gestures in his own personal sign language. “Is that all?”

  “This isn’t funny. There are probably a dozen process servers sleeping on your front porch right now. The studio wants your balls and your money. Your publisher is shredding your book contract, and oh, by the way, we don’t represent you anymore.”

  “It wasn’t an affair, Larry. It was a defection.”

  “Bullshit,” Novak said.

  “I’m calling you from a CIA safe house in Virginia.” Ian told him about Mei’s political troubles in China and a heavily redacted version of their escape from Hong Kong. He left out the part about saving the president of the United States from assassination.

  “That’s incredible,” Novak said. “When will the CIA go public with this?”

  “Never,” Ian said. “They’re a spy agency.”

  “Is Mei willing to go to the media with her story?”

  “I don’t know.” Ian pretended to hesitate for a second. “I might be able to talk her into it.”

  “Do it, because otherwise nobody will believe you and going public with this is the only thing that can save your ass,” Novak said. “Will the CIA contradict you when this comes out?”

  “They’ll say that they can neither confirm nor deny the story.”

  “Perfect, because that’s just another way of saying yes, it’s all true,” Novak said. “How soon can you two get to New York?”

  “We can be there tonight . . . if she agrees to come with me.”

  “Guilt her into it,” Novak said. “Tell her if she doesn’t do this, you’ll end up destitute, living under an overpass, and begging for change outside of Trader Joe’s. I’ll start lining up national television interviews for you to do tomorrow.”

  “You can make it happen that fast?”

  “This is breaking news and it’s got it all: international intrigue, celebrity, and sex. I could get you on the air tonight if you’re up for it.”

  “Tomorrow is soon enough,” Ian said. “Does this mean you’re still my agent?”

  “Of course I am. What a stupid thing to ask. But I do have a very important question for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Does Mei have a literary agent?”

  LaGuardia Airport. New York City. July 11. 8:07 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

  Ian, Margo, and Mei had taken an Uber to the Charlottesville Airport, where they caught a flight to LaGuardia that arrived shortly after 8:00 p.m. The only baggage they brought with them was psychological. A car was waiting for them outside the terminal, courtesy of Larry Novak, and took them straight to Macy’s in Herald Square so they could buy some clothes. They got to Macy’s less than an hour before closing time. Ian and Margo found what they needed in five minutes but Mei shopped until the manager pushed them out.

  Their driver took them up to the Grand Hyatt on East Forty-Second Street, where Novak had reserved three rooms and left an envelope for Ian with the desk clerk that contained their itinerary for the next day. Their first interview was set for CBS This Morning at 7:30 a.m., and half a dozen more TV interviews were scheduled throughout the day, spread across Manhattan and among networks that covered the full political spectrum, from MSNBC to Fox.

  Ian and Mei spent the next two hours in his room, rehearsing their stories with Margo, who played their interviewer, until they were sure they were telling just enough truth to make their lies and omissions credible. They didn’t get into their beds until after two, giving Ian and Margo about three hours of sleep and Mei, who needed to get up early to do her own hair and makeup, only enough time for an hour-long catnap.

  At 6:45 a.m., another driver was waiting outside the hotel to take them around Manhattan for their whirlwind day of interviews.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CNN Studios, Time Warner Center. New York City. July 12. 9:07 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

  Most news show sets looked like the bridge of a starship. But the set of Cuomo Primetime resembled a converted loft with brick walls, exposed iron girders, and window-framed flat-screen monitors that displayed a generic urban
skyline. Ian assumed the point of pretending to broadcast from a renovated factory was to make the news, and the people delivering it, more relatable to the common working man, few of whom had ever been on a starship, and in those cases only for colonoscopies conducted by extraterrestrial proctologists.

  Ian and Mei sat across a plexiglass table from Chris Cuomo, the host of the show, who faced the camera and said: “Ian Ludlow is the author of the New York Times bestselling adventures of freelance spy Clint Straker. But a few weeks ago in Hong Kong, Ian became the unlikely hero of a real-life espionage thriller, helping Chinese movie star Wang Mei defect to the United States.”

  While Cuomo spoke, the screens behind him swapped the urban skyline for covers of Ian’s books and glamour shots of Mei from her various Chinese movies. Ian stole a glance at Margo, who stood off camera beside the show’s female producer and a monitor that played a live feed of the broadcast. Margo seemed amused by it all.

  “It’s an event that went largely unnoticed by the media because it happened quietly, only a day or two before the attempted assassination of the president in Paris. But now their incredible story has emerged and the two key players are here to tell us about it. Let’s get after it.” Cuomo shifted his gaze from the camera to Ian. “Set the scene for us, Ian.”

  “It’s simple, really, Chris. I went to Hong Kong to see the movie version of my book being filmed and to be in some publicity photos with the stars, Damon Matthews and Wang Mei. That’s all that I was expecting.”

  Various movie clips of Matthews, the biggest box-office star on earth and also one of the shortest, dangling from helicopters, shooting guns, and wrestling with dinosaurs appeared on-screen behind them.

  Mei said, “And I was preparing for the role of a lifetime, costarring in a Damon Matthews movie.”

  Cuomo glanced at Mei now. “But that’s not the whole story, is it, Mei? The real drama for you was happening off camera. Your father, Wang Kang, is the Chinese billionaire who owns the studio that’s making the movie and who vanished months ago.”