by Lee Goldberg
Even so, he’d underestimated the emotional and psychological toll that writing the script would have on him. He’d had to revisit a past, and a former self, he’d thought he’d left far behind. To get into the right frame of mind, he’d had to get into character and feel as unhappy and creatively unfulfilled as he had when he was writing and producing the show. That feeling still lingered, like the aftertaste of vomiting, when Margo drove up outside the gate in her Mini Cooper.
He buzzed her in and met her at the door. She was carrying a Costco pizza. “Are you doing pizza delivery now?” he asked.
“It probably pays better than being a superspy,” Margo said as she came in and went past him to the kitchen. “I don’t know how Bond can afford an Aston Martin.”
“What are you doing here?” he asked, following her into the kitchen.
“I came by to see how you’re doing on your Straker story.”
“I’ve been busy working on my Hollywood & the Vine script.”
“You aren’t going to save the world with that.” Margo set the pizza box on top of the Los Angeles Times that was on the kitchen island and then helped herself to a slice of pepperoni and cheese. “How long until you’re done?”
Ian handed out napkins and took a slice. “I just finished it and sent it to Ronnie.”
“Is it awful?”
He nodded as he chewed, then: “It redefines the word.”
“Congratulations,” she said. “Now we can get to work on your new Straker novel.”
“I told you before, I’ve got nothing.” Ian went to the refrigerator, took out two cans of Coke, and brought them to the island.
Margo glanced over each shoulder. “Since you’re dressed, I guess that means Mei isn’t around.”
“She’s at Pinnacle Studios, doing some publicity shots for the movie.”
“Good. She won’t get in our way while we work.”
“I write alone,” Ian said.
Margo took a drink of Coke. “Who said anything about writing? We’re just kicking around ideas. How do you usually come up with a Straker story?”
“By myself.”
“Do you enjoy the self-loathing you feel right now?” Margo picked a piece of burned pepperoni off her pizza and tossed it into the sink. “Isn’t writing soul-sucking shit for Hollywood & the Vine what drove you to write a Straker novel in the first place?”
Yes, it is, he thought, and I can do it again. She’d said exactly what he needed to hear. He could have kissed her, and might have, too, if he wasn’t afraid she’d take it the wrong way and knee him in the groin.
“I need two things to get started,” he said. “The big idea—that’s the bad guy plot—and the small, personal angle into it for Clint Straker.”
“So Straker starts out fighting for the little guy and ends up taking down a vast conspiracy.”
“That’s the formula.” Ian started in on a second slice of pizza. “It’s what invests the reader emotionally in what’s happening.”
Margo followed his lead and took a second slice. “Where do you get your inspirations for the big idea and the personal story?”
“From the TV news and what I read in the paper. I just absorb stuff and, after a while, a story percolates up from my subconscious.” Usually while he was in the car, or in the shower, or on the toilet, or lying in bed late at night, times when he wasn’t particularly trying to come up with a story. Maybe, he thought, he should go to the bathroom right now.
“And what news have you been watching lately?”
“Honestly?” Ian said. “I’ve been obsessed with Dwight Edney ever since we did his show.”
Margo grimaced as if she’d just taken a bite of something sour instead of finishing her pizza slice. “Why?”
“Because he’s insane, rattling off one conspiracy theory after another,” Ian said. “Actually, it’s more than that. He twists the news to fit his own agenda. It’s sort of like what I do with the news in my books.”
“What’s his agenda?”
Ian said the first thing that popped into his mind: “Whip up American fury against illegal immigrants and start a war with Mexico.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Ian said. “Maybe the same reason William Randolph Hearst got us into the Spanish-American War.”
“Hearst did it to sell newspapers,” Margo said.
“So maybe Edney is doing it for ratings. Ever since he broke the Gustavo Reynoso story, his numbers have been way up. He hasn’t stopped milking it. He’s doing his show from here in LA now and ranting that armed, drug-dealing, plague-carrying Mexican rapists and murderers are swarming over our border.”
In fact, every time Ian turned on Fox now, all he saw was news about Gustavo Reynoso, his “Deathscalade” (the Escalade with the two dead women inside), and his “ATF gun” (one of the weapons sold to the Vibora cartel in the Guns & Roses debacle). It was almost as bad on CNN, MSNBC, and the three legacy TV networks, all of them eager to capitalize on the same ratings bounce that Edney was enjoying.
“That’s not much of a bad guy plot,” Margo said.
Ian held up his hands in surrender. “I told you I had nothing.”
“What about the personal story?” she asked. “Where does that come from?”
“That’s easy.” Ian pulled the Los Angeles Times out from underneath the pizza box. “I could take almost anything from here and run with it. Like this one . . .”
He pointed to an article he’d read that morning.
COUPLE KILLED TAKING SELFIE
PORTO, PORTUGAL—A San Diego couple, Stan Rolfe and Briana Clemens, fell to their deaths yesterday while taking a selfie at a scenic overlook popular with tourists.
Authorities believe that Rolfe, 28, and Clemens, 26, were on a morning jog shortly after dawn in this steep, hillside city and stopped at the Miradouro da Vitória to take an impromptu selfie while standing atop a rocky wall with views of the Porto Cathedral, Ponte Luís I bridge, and the Douro River behind them.
“The evidence suggests that Rolfe, with one arm around Clemens, dropped his phone while trying to take a selfie, reflexively reached to catch it, and they both lost their footing, falling thirty feet to their deaths,” said Tito Sampaio, a spokesman for the Polícia de Segurança Pública.
The bodies of the couple, and their shattered phone, were found several hours later on Rua da Vitória by a local resident driving on the narrow, cobblestone street below the high overlook. The resident thought at first that they were sleeping, but as she got closer, she saw their “horrifically broken bodies” and alerted authorities, Sampaio said. The couple was found with their passports and hotel room card keys still in their pockets. Foul play is not suspected.
Rolfe, an executive with a San Diego wine and spirits importer, was in Porto to visit vineyards in the Douro Valley and brought along Clemens, his longtime girlfriend and a graduate student in geology at the University of California San Diego. Photos on their Facebook and Instagram accounts show they were avid hikers and rock climbers, taking selfies together on peaks in Yosemite, Joshua Tree, the Grand Canyon, and the Alps.
Serious injuries and deaths caused by people taking selfies from precarious locations are on the rise. According to a recent report, nearly 200 people worldwide were injured or killed in the last 24 months attempting to photograph themselves.
The Miradouro da Vitória, high above the city, offers unobstructed views of most of Porto and its most iconic landmarks. There are no security measures in place preventing anyone from standing along the top of the retaining wall that creates the edge of the overlook and is approximately 30 feet tall at its highest point above Rua da Vitória.
Authorities declined to say if other tourists or locals have been injured or killed while taking selfies from the same spot.
“How is that a Straker story?” Margo asked.
“What if Straker knew the guy who was killed?” Ian said. “What if Straker and Rolfe free-climbed mountai
ns together in Switzerland?”
“Free-climbed?”
“No ropes. They only used their bare hands.”
Margo gestured to the newspaper. “Were these two free climbers?”
“I have no idea. But they would be in my story, which is why Straker doesn’t buy Rolfe’s accidental death,” Ian said. He also wondered how an experienced rock climber could make such a stupid mistake, which is why the article had stuck with him. But to make it a Straker story, his hero had to have personal knowledge that gave him strong reasons to question the facts. “A guy who can climb mountains with his bare hands isn’t going to fall off a wall taking a selfie. He’s not that dumb or careless. Straker knows it has to be murder. So Straker investigates . . . and it leads him right into the bad guy plot.”
“Okay.” Margo slapped the counter. “Then that’s what we’ll do.”
Ian was confused. “Do what?”
“We’ll investigate this selfie death and see where it takes us.”
What she was suggesting was ludicrous. Ian pointed to the article. “Did you read the story? This wasn’t murder.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I just made that part up,” he said. “But even if this was murder, it’s a job for Jessica Fletcher, not Jason Bourne.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s a whodunit, not a spy story,” Ian said. “It’s not something the CIA is going to be interested in.”
Margo shrugged. “We won’t know that until we investigate. Think of it as an all-expenses-paid research trip.”
“You just want to go on a trip to Portugal.”
“You picked the article, not me,” she said. “It will be fun.”
“Healy will never clear this,” he said.
“He already has. Getting you to walk through how you create a story was his idea.” She carefully tore the selfie-death article out of the newspaper. “I’ll have the Agency get us the entire life stories on these two, their full travel itineraries, and whatever pictures were on their phones. Be ready to go in the morning.”
Margo got up and headed for the door. Ian hurried after her.
“This is ridiculous, Margo. I’m not going to Portugal tomorrow. It’s a total waste of time.”
She opened the door and turned back to him. “You’re probably right. But look at it this way—if you’re out of the country, you can’t be called to the set of Hollywood & the Vine to do rewrites. It will all be over when you get back.”
“I’ll start packing,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
CIA Headquarters. Langley, Virginia. November 9. 4:04 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Healy entered his office after a long lunch with the vice president, under the pretext of briefing him for his state visit to the tiny nation of Tuvalu, a collection of islands in the Pacific that comprised barely ten square miles of landmass. The president liked to send Penny on pointless and humiliating diplomatic trips as far from Washington, DC, as possible. Penny’s mission was to reaffirm the island’s support for a tuna-fishing treaty.
During the lunch, Penny told Healy that the Chinese wanted him to urge the president to take aggressive action against illegal immigration from Mexico. They also wanted Penny to do his best behind the scenes to whip up anti-Mexico sentiment in Congress.
Why, Healy wondered, would the Chinese want that? He was still puzzling over that question when his personal cell phone rang. The caller ID read FRENCH.
“Margo,” Healy said. “What plot has Ian come up with?”
“He’s in the research stage, sir. We’re going to Portugal tomorrow to investigate the death of an American couple who fell off a wall while taking a selfie.”
“That doesn’t sound like it’s going to lead to anything involving national security.”
“We don’t know that. This is Ian’s process, the same one that led him to create two other Straker plots that came true and would have fucked our country if they weren’t stopped.”
Healy couldn’t deny Ian’s past foresight, but this felt like a stretch. “What else has he got?”
“Dwight Edney is trying to start a war with Mexico.”
That was the second time Mexico had come up today, but Healy didn’t see how Edney and China could be involved in a plot together or that it would present much of a threat if they were.
“Ian really does have nothing,” Healy said.
“He’s as creative as he’s always been, but reality is getting in the way of his fiction. The solution is to get him to live more in his imagination and less on cable news.”
“And you think going off to Portugal on the CIA’s dime will do that.”
“It couldn’t hurt,” she said.
“Why do I get the feeling that I’m being conned?”
“Creative people are emotional and psychological basket cases, sir. That’s where their stories come from. If you want to use Ian’s imagination, you’re going to have to spark it.”
She made a good argument. “Fine. Go to Portugal. What do you need?”
Margo told him she needed to know everything about a San Diego couple and their itinerary in Portugal, including access to their credit card statements and all the photos they took on their trip.
“That’s no problem,” he said. “You’ll have access to all that information and much more in an hour.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said. “I’ll keep you informed.”
After she hung up, his secretary informed him that Glen Talbot, his liaison with the Pentagon, was there to see him. Healy invited him in. Glen had been recruited a decade ago prior to his graduation from Harvard and he still dressed like a tweedy academic heading to a lecture class.
“What’s up, Glen?” Healy asked.
Glen passed a file folder to him that contained satellite photos. “We got this from the Pentagon. Russia is moving troops and equipment to their borders with Belarus and Georgia.”
This didn’t surprise Healy. Ever since the Russians took Crimea and went to war with Ukraine, Belarus had cozied up even more toward the West, hoping for the protective and economic embrace of the NATO countries that lined its western border. This jacked up the trade and political tensions with Russia and provoked the Russian military to regularly increase the number of troops by the thousands that they sent to their western border for their annual “military drills.”
As for Georgia, the country was fiercely independent, Western leaning, and desperately courting NATO membership and protection, which was something Russia couldn’t allow. The Russians invaded Georgia in 2008 but after a few devastating days agreed to a French-brokered cease-fire and pulled out. However, Russia essentially held on to the northern Georgia regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, by recognizing the separatists there as “independent republics,” to use as future bases of operation. It wouldn’t take much to finish the job of taking Georgia. All the Russians needed was the right provocation and the perfect global political climate.
“It’s just the usual intimidation,” Healy said, “reminding their former republics of what will happen if they get too far out of line.”
Glen adjusted his tortoiseshell trifocals. “How do we know that it’s not what’s happening now?”
“Because launching an unprovoked invasion of Belarus or Georgia now would instigate an immediate military response from the United States and our allies and probably spark a third world war.”
“We let them take Crimea,” Glen said.
“That was different. They’ve got no political cover or provocation for this.”
“Yet.”
Glen was beginning to irritate him. “Do we have any intelligence that suggests the Russians are destabilizing Belarus or Georgia by covertly inciting devastating social, political, and economic unrest as an excuse to march in and establish order for the sake of protecting the Russians who live there?”
“Nothing beyond their usual meddling and their ongoing fake news campaigns.”
Hea
ly handed the file back to Glen. “Then I’m not going to worry about their training exercises any more than North Korea should worry about our annual military exercises with the South Koreans.”
Glen gave him a look and Healy gestured for him to give him back the file. “Okay, perhaps that was a bad example. Is the Pentagon brass worried?”
“Irritated is more like it,” Glen said. “They never like it when they see major enemy troop movements near NATO’s borders.”
“Have our assets in Russia reported anything unusual?”
Glen smiled with amusement. “Kirk Cannon was seen in the halls at GDR headquarters. Maybe he’s advising them on intelligence matters now. Imagine being that desperate for ideas that you’d turn to a burned-out action movie star.”
They shared a laugh, though Healy wondered what his counterparts at the GDR would think if they knew he’d recruited author Ian Ludlow as a consultant. Hell, what would his own agents think?
“Keep your eye on those troops and have our assets look into it, too,” Healy said. “Just in case.”
“Yes, sir,” Glen said and walked out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ian Ludlow’s House. Malibu, California. November 9. 3:45 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
While Ian packed his suitcase in his bedroom, he stole glances out the window to the backyard, where Ronnie and Mei were stretched out on chaise lounges by the pool, reading his Hollywood & the Vine script. Mei was in a bikini and wearing a huge sun hat and sunglasses. Ronnie wore Ray-Bans, a floral Aloha shirt, cargo shorts, and a baseball cap covered with aluminum foil.
He finished packing and went out to the backyard just as Ronnie finished the script.
“How bad is it?” Ian asked.
“It’s like you never left the show,” Ronnie said.
“That bad?”
Mei laid the script on her lap. “The script is terrific. There is so much provocative subtext.”
“I have to be honest with you,” Ian said. “There isn’t any subtext. The stupid stuff is just stupid.”
Mei wagged a finger at him. “You’re not fooling anybody, Ian.”
“Apparently I’m fooling you,” Ian said. He had to put a hand over his eyes to shield himself from the light reflecting in his face from Ronnie’s aluminum foil hat.
