The Job

by Janet Evanovich

  The mine was closed and deserted and Buck thought “Just about anything” sounded like exactly what he needed, so they crept up the metal staircase that was across the front of the 797F’s massive two-story grill, and into the operator’s cab. They spent a few hours messing around before falling asleep.

  When dawn broke, Willie slipped into the driver’s seat, fired up the 4,000 hp engine, and pressed the pedal to the floor. Buck was still passed out in the passenger seat, which was probably a blessing, considering the learning curve for driving the truck was steeper than Willie’d anticipated.

  She stomped on the brakes just before rolling over the car, but the beast didn’t exactly stop on a dime. It continued on course and smashed through the office trailer in an explosion of corrugated metal, glass, and thousands of pieces of paper.

  Willie finally brought the truck to a stop, blew a kiss to Buck, who was snoring away, and snatched her high heels off the floor. She made her way down the stairs, holding her high heels in her hands as if she were leaving an apartment after an all-night party and not fleeing the cab of one of the largest vehicles on earth. By the time she got to the bottom step, two private security vehicles had screeched up, and four uniformed officers were waiting for her. They all looked at her in shocked silence, like she was some kind of alien emerging from her flying saucer.

  Willie tossed the dump truck keys to one of the astonished guards. “You park it, honey. But don’t scratch the paint.”

  “You’re under arrest,” another guard said, holding a pair of handcuffs.

  His hands were shaking, which made Willie smile as she sat down on the step and slipped on her high heels. He was in his twenties and filled out his uniform nicely.

  “I bet you’ll enjoy putting those cuffs on me,” she said. “Bet you’d enjoy it even more if you let me put them on you sometime.”

  A dark Chevy Impala slid to a stop in a cloud of dust. A man emerged from the car in a dark suit and wearing dark sunglasses. The crowd parted for the stranger, who quickly flipped open a leather case and flashed a badge of some kind, then slapped it shut and stuck it back in his pocket.

  “John Doggett, FBI,” Nick Fox said. “I’ll take over from here.”

  “You know her?” the guard with the cuffs asked.

  “Sydney Bristow. She’s wanted in seventeen states for vehicular mayhem.”

  “I didn’t know that was a federal offense,” Willie said.

  “It is when you do it in seventeen states,” Nick said, taking her by the arm and leading her to his car. “You’re in big trouble, Sydney.”

  “It was a big truck,” she said.

  “You have the right to remain silent. I suggest you use it.” He put her into the backseat of the car, slammed the door, and turned back to the guards. “Tell your bosses they’ll find her at the federal courthouse in Casper.”

  Nick got into the car, backed up, and sped off before the guards could think any more about it. He glanced in the rearview mirror at Willie, and she winked at him.

  “My hero,” Willie said.

  She didn’t know Nick’s full name, but he was hotter than a stolen Ferrari and just as fast, sleek, and dangerous. Over the last year or so, he’d hired her a few times to drive a variety of cars, boats, and planes in several big cons to bring down bad guys for some shadowy firm called Intertect. It was fishy, and very illegal, but she liked adventure. And she liked him.

  “What would you have done if I hadn’t shown up?” Nick asked.

  “I’d have been arrested. So I would’ve flirted with the cops for a few hours, posted bail, gone back to my hotel with that young security guard and had some fun, and then skedaddled out of the state and skipped the trial.”

  “Is that what you do with all the money we pay you? Use it to jump bail when you take joyrides in stolen cars?”

  “That wasn’t just any car, honey, it’s the biggest one on earth. Now I can tick that off my bucket list.”

  “What else would you like to drive?”

  “A bullet train. An Apache attack helicopter. The Hennessey Venom GT. The stealth bomber.”

  “How about a hundred-and-fifty-foot cargo ship?”

  “That doesn’t sound very sexy.”

  “Did I mention it’s in Portugal, and we’ll pay you a hundred thousand dollars?”

  “Deal,” she said.

  “Don’t you want to know who our target is?”

  “Not really. But I am curious what that piece of tin was that you flashed to those security guards back there.”

  He reached into his pocket and tossed the leather case into the backseat. She caught it and opened it up. It was a Geek Squad badge from Best Buy.

  “Remind me never to play poker with you,” she said. “You’re too good at bluffing.”

  The talk show set in the Simi Valley, California, soundstage looked like every other one on late-night television. There was a desk, a chair, and a couch lined up against a backdrop of the Hollywood Hills. But this was no Jimmy Fallon, Conan, or David Letterman show. This studio audience was paid to attend and the host wasn’t a comedian but, rather, an actor, Boyd Capwell, hired to play the part. Boyd was perfectly cast for the role. He was good-looking in an aging anchorman sort of way, had a full head of hair, great teeth, and wore a suit well.

  “Welcome back to Straight Talk. My guest tonight is Delmer Pratt of Beaumont, Texas,” Boyd said, staring into the camera. “His life was spiraling into madness and despair until he discovered Uberboner, the incredible herbal remedy for impotence.”

  The audience applauded. Delmer sat stiffly in his chair and nodded his thanks. He wore a John Deere cap, flannel shirt, jeans, and work boots. He was a real Uberboner user, but he’d been given the clothes to wear, a script to learn, and a check to make his humiliation worthwhile.

  “For years, I carried a secret shame. I wasn’t able to satisfy my wife’s womanly needs the way a husband should.” Delmer repeated his lines in the unnatural tone of someone not used to reciting memorized dialogue. “I was slow, soft, and listless, unable to stand at attention in the bedroom. I needed to man up before my marriage and my self-respect completely crumbled. Fortunately for me, one of my friends recommended Uberboner, the affordable herbal remedy available only on TV. Now I am ten times the man I ever was, and my marriage has been saved.”

  “That’s truly amazing, Delmer, and I’m happy for you and your wife,” Boyd said. “But now that you’re manly again, have you ever wondered what caused the problem in the first place?”

  “Excuse me?” Delmer asked.

  It was the first thing he’d said that wasn’t scripted and memorized.

  Boyd leaned toward him earnestly. “What was your relationship with your mother like?”

  “My mother?” Delmer looked to someone offstage. “What the hell does my mother have to do with this?”

  “Impotence is often more psychological than physical,” Boyd said. “You’ve solved the blood-flow problem, but what about what’s happening in your head?”

  “Who gives a crap about that?”

  “You will when the pill stops working and you become a limp noodle again, because your inner demons come roaring back to life.”

  “CUT!”

  A gray-haired man in a doctor’s lab coat marched onto the set and up to Boyd’s desk. He was Dr. Landry, the inventor of Uberboner. He was also the writer, director, financier of the infomercial, and the next scheduled guest.

  “What kind of question was that?” Landry asked Boyd.

  “The obvious one,” Boyd said. “I’m trying to get the whole story.”

  “The only story is what’s in the script,” Landry said.

  “I have journalistic integrity.”

  “You’re an actor.”

  “My character has journalistic integrity,” Boyd said.

  “No, he doesn’t. He has no integrity of any kind. He exists to sell my pills.”

  “You know nothing about him.”

  “I wrote the script
,” Landry said.

  “But you didn’t develop the character at all. I had to fill in all the blanks. Did you know his father was a war correspondent who died in Vietnam? That’s where he got his passion for journalism and pursuing the truth in every story.”

  “This is an infomercial,” Landry said. “A long commercial, understand? It’s not a drama.”

  “You want this to look like a real talk show, right? You want people to believe they are getting actual news,” Boyd said. “To do that, my character has to be authentic.”

  “Your character has to repeat the lines in the script exactly as written,” Landry said. “Or your character will be an unemployed actor.”

  Boyd’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He took it out and answered it.

  “It’s me,” Kate said. “Did I call at a bad time?”

  Boyd recognized her voice instantly. It was the mysterious agent for an even more mysterious security firm that used cons to bring down big-time criminals. She and her partner, Nick, had given him the best, and most lucrative, roles of his career, even if it was always for an audience of one, who usually ended up in prison.

  “You have impeccable timing, as usual,” Boyd said. “I’m in.”

  “You don’t even know what the job is, what the risks are, or what we’re paying.”

  “What’s my role?”

  “You’ll be the captain of a research vessel on the high seas.”

  “Captain Phillips meets Horatio Hornblower,” he said.

  “If you say so.”

  “You know I’d do anything for you, Woody.”

  “Woody?” Kate asked.

  “I’m on my way,” Boyd said, ending the call.

  “What do you mean, you’re ‘on your way’?” Dr. Landry said. “We’re still shooting. We aren’t finished yet.”

  “Sorry, but Woody Allen needs me in New York for a part. You of all people should appreciate that I can’t ignore a Woody emergency.” Boyd smiled at his own wit, took a bow, and walked off the set.

  A flying saucer from an alien world had crashed into a tree in the backyard of a tract home in Newport Beach, California. The silver spacecraft, scorched from its fiery descent through the earth’s atmosphere, was lodged precariously in the tree’s branches. An escape ladder ran down along the tree trunk to a perfectly manicured lawn where a dozen excited six-year-olds were lined up to get inside the saucer. At the head of the line, scrambling up the ladder, was deliriously happy Bobby Nickerson, Jr., who still had birthday cake all over his face and couldn’t wait to get into his Best Birthday Present Ever.

  “Freaking amazing,” said Bobby, Sr., admiring his son’s flying saucer. “It’s the treehouse to end all treehouses.”

  “I hope not, or I’m out of business,” said Tom Underhill, who’d spent the past six weeks building it.

  It was thanks to innovative treehouses like the flying saucer that Tom was written up as one of Southern California’s visionary entrepreneurs. Problem was, not many people could afford a $50,000 indulgence for their kids. He certainly couldn’t for his two kids. The treehouse he’d built for them was pretty basic. The only special feature was a fireman’s pole for a quick escape.

  Bobby, Sr., shook Tom’s hand, thanked him again, and then cut to the front of the line to climb up into the treehouse himself.

  Tom stayed for a while and watched everyone enjoy his creation. He had cake and ice cream. He took a couple balloons for his kids, waved goodbye to the Nickersons, and showed himself out of the backyard. He reached the street where he’d parked his pickup and was surprised to see Nick.

  “Now you’re going to have to come back next year and build Hogwarts for that kid,” Nick said to Tom.

  “That’s my fiendish plot,” Tom said with a grin, thinking if anybody knew about fiendish plotting, it was Nick. A year or so ago, Nick had come along out of nowhere and saved Tom’s house from foreclosure. In return, Tom had helped Nick transform a derelict Palm Springs McMansion into a Mexican drug lord’s fortified compound. It was part of an outrageous con to trick a sleazy Beverly Hills lawyer into revealing where his fugitive client was hiding. It was the most fun Tom had ever had.

  “I could use your help on a new job,” Nick said.

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  “How would you like to go to Portugal, transform a cargo boat into a research vessel, and build me a remotely operated deep-sea submersible rover with cameras, lights, and claws, and the high-tech command center that runs it?”

  “I would,” Tom said. “But I don’t know anything about building a robotic sub.”

  “It doesn’t have to work,” Nick said. “It only has to look amazing.”

  “That I can do,” Tom said, already feeling a shot of adrenaline hitting his bloodstream. He could tell his wife he’d been hired to build a treehouse in Portugal for some rich guy. He’d learned from Nick that the best lies were the ones that were substantially truthful. She wouldn’t argue if the money was right and he wasn’t away too long, because the money wasn’t exactly flowing in from the treehouse business.

  “I take it we’re tricking another very bad man,” Tom said.

  “The worst,” Nick said. “We’re taking down a sadistic monster.”

  “Is what we’re doing illegal?”

  “As far as I know, I don’t think there are any laws against tricking a killer into being captured by law enforcement. But I wouldn’t put it on your résumé.”

  “When do you need me?”

  “Right away. You’ll have three weeks to build everything and we’ll pay you a hundred thousand dollars. Tax free.”

  “Now, that is illegal.”

  “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t,” Nick said.

  The $150 million 3-D movie version of the 1970s TV series The Man from Atlantis starred an unknown Australian actor as a water-breathing man who washes up on Santa Monica beach after an earthquake in the Pacific. He becomes a secret agent for the United States government, and in his quest to find the lost city of Atlantis, the fish with a license to kill stops a super-villain from destroying the world with his earthquake-making machine.

  Critics loathed the movie, but it grossed nearly $400 million at the box office, and it won an Academy Award for its incredible computer-generated underwater effects, designed by Rodney Smoot and his team at Magical Realism VFX.

  Unfortunately, the Oscar wasn’t enough to keep Magical Realism afloat. Rodney had sunk every penny he had into the company, but it became a casualty of outsourcing, and Rodney was bankrupted. He’d pink-slipped all his employees, and the bank was about to foreclose on his vast Santa Monica warehouse. Rodney was in the warehouse in the process of removing a poster from his office wall when he was startled to see a man and a woman standing outside his door.

  “The bankruptcy auction isn’t until next Saturday,” Rodney said.

  “How much would it take to call off the auction, get the bank off your back, and allow you to keep all of this?” Nick asked with a sweep of his arm.

  “Five million dollars,” Rodney said.

  Nick looked at Kate. “I think we can swing that, don’t you?”

  “It’s pricey,” she said. “But yes, we can.”

  Nick smiled and turned back to Rodney. “There you go. You’re back in business.”

  Rodney stared at them, bewildered. “I don’t understand.”

  “We want you to create some visual effects for us,” Nick said. “Specifically, an underwater debris field from a Spanish treasure galleon that sank five hundred years ago. Our underwater footage needs to be interactive, allowing the viewer to go wherever he wants.”

  “So you want me to do the effects for a game,” Rodney said.

  “A con game,” Kate said. “By creating these effects, you’ll be helping us capture a fugitive drug lord who has killed a lot of people.”

  “Are you with the government?” Rodney asked.

  “We’re with a private security firm,” Kate said. “It’s impo
rtant that you understand that we aren’t authorized by any government or law enforcement agency to do what we have in mind.”

  “But it’s for the greater good,” Nick said. “And you could also put a lot of the people that you fired back to work.”

  “What exactly do you need me to do?” Rodney asked.

  “Create what the camera on a remotely operated underwater vehicle would see on the ocean floor,” Nick said. “We’ll be watching the feed on monitors in the control room of a salvage vessel and controlling the rover’s camera, and robotic arms, with a joystick. We’ll be picking up some treasure and bringing it back up, so we’ve got to see that, too.”

  “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” Rodney said. “We’ll be free-roaming through a photo-realistic CGI environment, but all you need to see on your monitor is whatever is within the view of the camera on this rover, nothing else.”

  “That’s right,” Nick said.

  “So you’ll only be able to see what the rover’s lights illuminate in the murk, and the image only has to be good enough for crappy video resolution,” Rodney said, clearly warming to the challenge. “That makes things a lot easier. It’ll take at least six weeks to create the effects.”

  “You have three,” Nick said.

  “Geez, you’re no better than a movie studio. Paying off the bank for the equipment and debt will only be the beginning of the costs,” Rodney said. “We’ll need to hire about forty people. Code writers. Modelers. Texture artists. Lighting specialists. What’ll we tell them that they are working on?”

  “A demo for a big investor who’s interested in a new role-playing game,” Nick said. “We’ll have them sign intimidating nondisclosure agreements, so they can’t say anything about their work without forfeiting their salaries and facing a terrifying lawsuit.”

  “Will that NDA protect them from getting arrested with me if this all goes to hell?” Rodney asked.

  “Yep,” Kate said. “It will prove they are innocent dupes who didn’t have any idea what they were actually working on.”