by Lee Goldberg
Mei turned to Ian and pointed at the screen. “How is he allowed to say that about the president?”
“The first amendment,” Ian said. “It guarantees the right of free speech.”
“But it isn’t true.”
“Probably not.” Ian picked up the TV remote from the coffee table and muted Edney. “Not that it matters anymore. You say things enough on TV and it becomes its own truth.”
“You watch his show?”
Ian shrugged. “I find him inspiring.”
Mei stared at him in furious astonishment. “You admire this man? How can you say that after the way he treated me? This was a bad idea.”
She turned and headed for the front door.
Ian chased after her. “I didn’t say that I admire Edney. I think he’s an ass. But I get ideas for my Straker books by listening to insane conspiracy theories from guys like him and I could use a few ideas right now. Any idea would do, actually.”
She stopped at the front door and faced him, some concern on her face. “The writing isn’t going well?”
He closed his bathrobe, cinched the sash tight, and tied it into a knot. “I’ve never had such a hard time writing a book.”
“What about telling our story and revealing China’s plot to assassinate the president?”
“I tried using it but every time I added Straker into the mix, it became ridiculous.”
“Straker has always been ridiculous,” she said.
“Yes,” Ian said. “But now I know it.”
“That’s a shame.”
“What is? That I can’t finish this book or that I’ve become so self-aware that I might never be able to write a Straker novel again?”
She shook her head. “That those are the reasons you can’t write the book. I thought you were going to say that the reason you couldn’t use our story was because you were afraid it would put me in jeopardy.”
Ian wished he were that noble or, at the very least, had thought to say that, even if it wasn’t true. He was always better at making up dialogue for his characters than he was for himself.
“You’d be in no danger,” he said. “I could tell the truth, word for word, and no one would believe that’s what really happened.”
“But we know it did,” she said. “That’s actually why I’m here.”
“I don’t understand.”
Mei lowered her eyes. “I have nowhere else to go.”
“You’re a billionairess,” he said. “You could afford to stay anywhere you want.”
“Most of my money is stashed in offshore accounts and it’s not going to be easy to access it. All I have right now is my paltry salary from the movie.”
“Which is either a million dollars or four million dollars, depending on which contract we’re talking about.”
“It’s not about money,” she said, ignoring his reference to the yin-yang scandal. “I could continue to stay at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills for years if I wanted.”
“Then what is the problem?”
She met his gaze. “You’re the only one who knows the truth, who I can be myself with.”
“Healy and Margo know the truth.”
“But you’re the only one I trust,” Mei said.
“You can trust Margo.”
“She hates me,” Mei said.
“She’d still die for you.”
Mei smiled. “That sounds like something Straker would say.”
“Because I’m the guy who used to put words in his mouth.”
“It’s more than that. You saved two presidents from assassination. You actually do what he does.”
“That’s probably why I’m having such a hard time writing the books,” Ian said. “Now I know you don’t have to be Clint Straker, and have his experience and special skills, to save America. You can just bumble your way through it like I did.”
“I’m one of the few people who knows that about you.” Mei took a step toward him and held his hands in hers. “Who else could you tell that to? Doesn’t it feel good?”
He pulled his hands away from her loose grip. “What do you want from me?”
“To stay here until I feel safe and I know what to do with my life.”
“You’re going to be a movie star,” he said.
“That hasn’t happened yet. It may after the movie comes out or it may not. Until then, what do I do with myself and where do I go? I need time, in a safe place, to figure out my life.”
Ian had sympathy for her situation but he also felt a nagging sense of déjà vu. The last time he’d let a woman stay with him, because he was supposedly “the only one who understood the truth” about her life, it was Margo. She’d claimed she was homeless, broke, and suffered from PTSD. It had been a lie. She’d turned out to be a CIA agent who was using him as her cover for her first mission.
“Are you a spy?” he asked Mei.
“Of course not!” She laughed. “How would that work anyway? Spies are supposed to move around in secret. I’m famous.”
Ian was famous and technically a spy, but he figured he probably shouldn’t tell her that. “Good point. I have a guesthouse out back. It’s not much, just a bedroom, a kitchenette, and a bathroom.”
“Thank you,” she said and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll have the Peninsula Hotel send over my suitcases.”
“I hope you like it,” he said as he led her across the living room to the french doors that opened to the backyard. “But if you don’t, feel free to redecorate, take out a wall, or add a second floor.”
“I will,” she said.
He was joking but he wasn’t certain that she was.
CHAPTER NINE
San Diego, California. November 2. 10:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.
Gustavo Reynoso awoke in the back seat of a panel van. He was dizzy and dry-mouthed, and all his joints ached. It felt like he’d been folded in half. Someone had changed him out of his La Villa Contenta shirt and shorts into a denim work shirt and jeans.
The woman who’d held a knife to his cojones turned around in the front passenger seat and tossed him a bottle of water. He unscrewed the top off the bottle and took a long drink, noticing now that one of the two men he’d seen in her villa was sitting beside him. The other was driving the van. There were palm trees outside and the signs on the passing storefronts outside were written in English.
“Where are we?” Gustavo asked, though he knew they were in the US. He would have known it even without seeing the street outside. The air was different in the States.
“San Diego,” she said.
“How did I get here?”
“I packed you in my suitcase and took a private jet.”
Her eyes were hard, not a trace of humor in them. Based on that, and the way every bendable part of his body felt, he believed her. He was thankful he’d been unconscious for the journey. The van pulled to a stop in the parking lot of a shopping center.
“This is your stop.” She opened her door and got out.
He glanced at the man beside him, who nodded his permission, and Gustavo opened the sliding door and got out, too, a bit unsteady on his feet. The man in the van tossed Gustavo a gym bag. Catching the bag nearly knocked Gustavo down. She grabbed his forearm to keep him from falling.
“Take a deep breath and relax, Gustavo. We put a hundred dollars in your wallet and you’ll find some clothes, toiletries, and another pair of shoes in the bag.” She pointed down the street. “There’s a homeless shelter around the corner with plenty of beds. Good luck.”
None of this made any sense to Gustavo. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because you aren’t welcome in Mexico anymore.” Her hand was still on his forearm and she forcefully turned him toward the storefronts down the other side of the street, where he could see a Pilates studio with dozens of blonde women on mats doing pelvic curls in front of the picture window. “This is your home now.”
The women in the studio were beautiful, fit, and limber. “I can live wit
h that.”
She smiled. “I’m glad to hear it, Gustavo, because if you ever return to Mexico, I’ll kill you.”
He could see in her eyes that she meant it. She let go of him and climbed into the van. The man in the back seat slid the side door closed and the van drove away.
Gustavo watched them go, then shifted his gaze back to the women in the Pilates studio doing one-armed side bends and he felt blessed. He decided that the woman who’d held a knife to his scrotum was an angel. For the first time in his life, the world seemed full of possibilities.
Top Chef Catering. Khimki, Moscow Oblast. November 3. 9:30 a.m. Moscow Standard Time.
Kirk Cannon was in the tenth-floor office the Kitchen had provided for him, looking down at the Moscow Canal, a toxic torrent of Russian chemicals and raw sewage, and then beyond it to the Moscow skyline on the opposite bank. It got him thinking about the wild Mississippi, about his hometown of Memphis, about the soul music coming out of the bars on Beale Street, and about how he’d probably never see the Mississippi, or Memphis, or Beale Street, or even the abomination that was the Bass Pro Pyramid on the riverbank ever again, when Leonid Morzeny sauntered in like he owned the place, which he did.
Morzeny was in his usual Steve Jobs outfit but he’d swapped his untied Air Jordans for a pair of white, red, and blue Pharrell Williams’ Adidas Human Race N.E.R.D. sneakers with neon-yellow soles and laces and a drawing of a human brain on the heel. The man hated America, worked all day to undermine its institutions and society, and yet gleefully rolled his body in its culture like a pig in shit. It made no sense to Cannon.
“Gustavo Reynoso is in San Diego,” Morzeny said. “Now all we have to do is wait.”
The words broke Cannon out of his funk and reminded him why he was here. His country had betrayed him, driving him away for daring to follow his creative vision and refusing to compromise it by adhering to insipid rules of personal conduct meant for people without his gifts.
“If nature doesn’t take its course in a week or two, you’ll have to frame him.” Cannon picked up a few script pages off his desk and handed them to Morzeny. “I’ve written up a scenario for you just in case.”
Morzeny skimmed the pages and grimaced. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to this. It would be better if things played out organically without our heavy hand.”
“Which is why you dropped him off outside a studio filled with women in skintight leotards.”
“We don’t have much time and he is who he is,” Morzeny said. “There’s no downside in offering him the opportunity to be himself.”
They might as well have dropped him off in a nudist colony, Cannon thought. These government bureaucrats were no different than the movie studio executives who’d given him “creative notes” on his scripts. The executives always insisted on hammering every emotional beat, underscoring every plot point, and foreshadowing each coming event with the subtlety of a runaway freight train loaded with dynamite heading toward an oil refinery. But this was real life he was writing and directing, not a movie, and the present situation did raise an interesting question.
“It makes you wonder about the concept of free will, though, doesn’t it?” Cannon said. “Do we ever have a choice? Or are all of us simply playing a part someone else has written?”
“It’s called fate.”
Cannon smiled. “Is that who I am?”
Morzeny held up Cannon’s script pages. “You are for Gustavo Reynoso.”
And perhaps, Cannon thought, for everyone in the United States, too.
CHAPTER TEN
Ian Ludlow’s House. Malibu, California. November 2. 11:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.
In Moscow, it was already tomorrow, but it was still yesterday in Malibu, where Ian was sitting on his living room couch and watching the nightly repeat of Dwight Edney’s show.
For this episode, Edney was on location in Dunn, Texas, and instead of his trademark suit, he wore a Stetson cowboy hat, a red bandana around his neck, and a western shirt with rhinestone snaps. He was doing a walk-and-talk with Eli Tanner, a bow-legged Texan with skin like an old boot who’d obviously spent most of his fifty-some years outside on a horse. They spoke as they walked across the sunbaked dirt of Tanner’s ranch toward a faded red barn.
“We’re thirty miles north of the Mexico border but I’ve still got illegals running across my land every night,” Tanner said. “They used to break into my house, looking for water and cash. I had to put bars on my windows to keep ’em out and install motion-activated lights to scare ’em away at night. Come daylight, I’ve found all kinds of trash out there—water bottles, tin cans, syringes, and even some corpses, illegals who died on their journey from sunstroke. Or they had their throats slit by one of their own.”
“Have you called the Border Patrol?” Edney asked.
“I’ve called everybody with a badge and they don’t do anything about it except haul away the dead ones.”
“It’s a national disgrace,” Edney said.
“To be fair, the sheriff and the Border Patrol are decent folk who just don’t have the manpower or the resources to handle the surge. Each deputy is responsible for covering a hundred square miles. It ain’t humanly possible to do that. So I’ve had to protect myself.”
“What does that mean?” Edney asked, but Ian was sure the pundit already knew the answer. That was why he’d dressed up like Roy Rogers and flew out to Texas with a film crew.
“Me and some of my ranch hands have started nightly patrols. We catch ’em and hold ’em here.” Tanner led Edney and the camera crew into the barn, where he’d built a huge cage out of chain-link fencing on a concrete pad. The cage held a dozen weary Mexican men, who milled around or sat on metal benches that were bolted to the floor. The camera panned across their sunburned faces.
“We give ’em water and some food, because that’s the humane thing to do,” Tanner said, “then we turn ’em over to the Border Patrol, who send ’em back to where they came from. The thing is, I see some of the same faces again and again.”
Edney put on his best solemn expression. “How does that make you feel?”
“Like I’m the one poor son of a bitch trying to plug all the holes in a leaking dam but more holes keep popping open. Pretty soon the dam is gonna give and everybody is gonna drown in the floodwaters.”
“I hear you,” Edney said. “What you’re saying is that in this sunbaked corner of Southwest Texas, you’re all that’s protecting America from the immigrant hordes that want to rape our women, hook our kids on drugs, and take our jobs.”
To Ian’s surprise, Tanner didn’t take the bait. “Naw, I’m just an ordinary man trying to protect his family and his land.”
That was all Ian could take of Edney’s show. Ian changed the channel to Buzzr and caught the middle of a vintage Match Game ’73 episode, hosted by Gene Rayburn. The game show was comfort food for Ian. He liked seeing the cheesy 1970s fashions and the celebrities of the era. The panelists this time were actors Bert Convy, Loretta Swit, Charles Nelson Reilly, Mary Ann Mobley, Richard Dawson, and Kaye Ballard. There were two contestants, a housewife and a dentist.
“Lester believes in blank even though he has never seen one,” Gene asked the housewife.
“Fairies,” she said.
The crowd roared with laughter. Gene fanned the question card in front of his face as if somebody had just cranked up the heat in the studio and said: “Well, Lester has never been on Third Avenue, I’ll tell you that.”
That was a joke that would never get on the air today, Ian thought.
Gene approached the panel for their answers. Bert Convy said “ghosts.” Loretta Swit said “Martians,” and then Gene got to Charles Nelson Reilly, a toupee-wearing character actor everybody knew was gay but who wouldn’t publicly acknowledge his sexual orientation for a few more decades.
“Lester did see two at the church picnic but he didn’t know that they were . . .” Charles whipped out his card: “Fairies.”
&nbs
p; Charles smiled wickedly into the camera. Take that, America.
That was when Mei came in wearing a silk bathrobe. She was beautiful. Ian tried to focus his attention on the TV.
“What are you watching?” she asked.
“An old game show called Match Game.”
“How is the game played?”
“The host reads a sentence that is missing a word. Two contestants try to guess what word the six celebrities will pick. The contestant who guesses correctly the most times wins some prize money.”
On TV, Gene had moved on to the next question. “George Washington didn’t brush his wooden teeth, he blanked them.”
Mei sat down next to Ian on the couch and watched the show for a few minutes while four of the six celebrities wrote down their answers. “Americans find this challenging and entertaining?”
“It was a huge hit in its day.”
“Who are the celebrities?”
“Mostly washed-up TV stars,” Ian said as Gene turned to the contestant for his answer to the question. The contestant answered “soaked.” The celebrities answered “sharpened,” “waxed,” “polished,” and “filed.”
Mei was confused. “What is the correct answer?”
“There isn’t one,” Ian said.
“This is a stupid game.”
“That’s what makes it fun.”
Wang Mei climbed onto Ian’s lap and straddled him, blocking most of his view of the TV. Her bathrobe fell open and he saw that she was naked underneath.
“If I become a celebrity in America,” she said, “will I have to play this game?”
“No,” he said, his voice catching in his throat.
“That’s a relief.” She kissed him. He was hard instantly. It had been a long time since he’d been with a woman.
Gene Rayburn asked the celebrities another question. “Because Lola was a spy, she kept a microphone hidden in her blank.”
“You can answer this one,” Mei said and shrugged off her bathrobe.
He’d seen her nearly naked before, in a shipping container on the way to Singapore, but it was much more erotic this time. He tried to stay cool.
