“Will do,” Goodwell said and walked out.
Trace tapped a virtual button that activated the speakerphone on his digital desktop and called Garver, his enforcer and bodyguard. Garver answered his phone after one ring.
“Yeah?” Garver replied. He was the only man who worked for Trace who didn’t feel the slightest need to grovel to him.
“Pack your mallet,” Trace said. “We’re going to Macau.”
Thanks to the success of The Lego Movie, there was a mad scramble among Hollywood producers to make films based on children’s toys. So perhaps it was inevitable that Mr. Potato Head would inspire a new animated feature. But few people, besides savvy studio accountants, could have foreseen that it would be an all-potato adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. The novel was in the public domain, meaning that it was free to use, saving the producers the money, time, and creativity required to come up with an original story suitable for talking potatoes. The studio accountants were thrilled.
The movie’s cast recorded their parts individually in a studio located in a small office building on Hollywood Way in Burbank. The studio had originally been a dentist’s office and still smelled like mint mouthwash. Not because the scent had tenaciously lingered through the remodeling, but because the voice actors were constantly sucking on breath mints and throat lozenges.
One of those actors was Boyd Capwell, a fortyish man with great teeth, a strong chin, and perfect hair who behaved as if he was always playing to an audience or a camera, even when they existed only in his mind. Boyd was in a soundproof booth the size of a closet. He was facing the window into the control room, where the director and the sound editor were watching him.
He’d been cast as the voice of Magwitch, the escaped convict that young Pip encounters one fateful, foggy night in a churchyard cemetery at the beginning of Dickens’s tale. Magwitch was described by Dickens as a fearful man in leg irons, wearing wet, filthy clothes and a dirty rag tied around his head, who’d limped and shivered, glared and growled. So Boyd was limping and shivering within the cramped confines of the booth as he recorded his lines into the microphone. He wore tattered clothes and a dirty rag on his head, and addressed a potato in his hand as if it were young Pip. It was a pose intentionally reminiscent of Hamlet.
“You’ll bring me a file to cut these chains and food to fill my stomach, you little devil, and you won’t say a word to anyone.” Boyd spoke with a heavy Irish accent while he glared and growled. “Or else my friend who is hiding in the marshes will cut you into fries and shred you into hash browns for us to eat.”
“Cut,” the director said into his microphone. His name was Milt Freiberger, and he was a twenty-year veteran of Saturday morning cartoons who was making his first feature film. He took off his tortoiseshell glasses, rubbed his eyes, and ran his hands through his thick, curly hair before speaking quietly and patiently. “Boyd, what are you doing?”
“Acting.”
“Yes, I know that. But this isn’t the same performance you gave in the audition.”
“That’s because all I knew then was that I was auditioning for an animated version of Great Expectations,” Boyd said. “I wasn’t aware that the characters would be potatoes.”
“What difference does it make?” Milt asked.
“It goes to the essence of the characters. I have to embody that. I’ve spent the last two weeks eating nothing but potatoes to fill myself with the taste, smell, and texture of the noble tuber.”
“I see,” Milt said. “Why are you using an Irish accent?”
“Because I did my research. Clearly, Magwitch is an Irish lumper, the prevalent variety of potato at the time. But here’s where it gets interesting. Twenty years after this story ends, the Irish lumper crops were decimated by a horrible disease, causing the great potato famine of 1845, so my accent is also dramatic foreshadowing.”
“But in the Charles Dickens novel, Magwitch wasn’t Irish.”
“He wasn’t a potato, either.”
“Go back to the cockney accent you used in the audition. And please, stick to the lines as written, too. You’re supposed to say to Pip that your friend will ‘cut out your heart and your liver, roast them and eat them.’ You changed it to something about French fries and hash browns.”
“Because Pip is a potato,” Boyd said, shaking the potato in his hand for emphasis. “He doesn’t have a heart or a liver.”
“He’s got arms and legs and he talks,” Milt said. “So he has a heart and liver.”
“That makes no biological or botanical sense.”
“Mr. Potato Head is a plastic toy potato that you can snap different facial features onto, like noses, eyes, ears, and mouths, to create new characters,” Milt said. “It’s not an actual potato. None of these characters are. Think of them as people who happen to resemble potatoes.”
Perhaps Boyd might have argued the point, or even given in to the director’s wishes, but then he saw Nick walk into the studio. Boyd didn’t know anything, really, about Nick or his partner, Kate, or Intertect, the mysterious private security company they claimed to work for. All that Boyd knew, and all that really mattered to him, was that whenever they showed up, it meant he’d have a chance to earn $100,000 by playing a character in an elaborate con to capture a criminal. The colorful roles they gave him were played on the stage of life, where a bad performance could get him killed. The danger made the roles even more thrilling.
“I quit,” Boyd said.
“You can’t quit,” Milt said.
“Take it up with my agent,” Boyd said, pointing to Nick. “He just walked in.”
Milt turned to Nick. “He has a contract. If he walks, I’ll ruin him in this business.”
“If you had that kind of pull,” Nick said, “you wouldn’t be directing a cartoon version of Great Expectations with talking potatoes.”
“The Lego Movie made half a billion dollars worldwide, and Legos aren’t even characters. They’re plastic bricks. Mr. Potato Head is a beloved global personality, an icon. We could top what Lego did.”
“If you do, then you won’t care that Boyd walked, will you?” Nick said. “You’ll be too busy basking in your success.”
Boyd emerged from the booth. “If you want success to happen, Milt, you can’t pretend the potatoes aren’t potatoes. You have to embrace your inner potato.”
“I don’t have an inner potato,” Milt said.
“Then you are the wrong man to be directing this movie,” Boyd said and dropped his potato in Milt’s lap.
Nick and Boyd walked outside to the parking lot where Nick’s Porsche 911 was parked next to Boyd’s Cadillac CTS.
“So how much were you making as a potato?” Nick asked.
“It’s not about the money, it’s about living. I am an actor. I need to act, the same way that I need to breathe, or eat or sleep. I saw playing a potato as a creative challenge. I’ve played an apple in a Fruit of the Loom commercial, and even a pancake once, but I’ve never had a chance to be a vegetable, and certainly not with classy material like this,” Boyd said. “It’s Great Expectations, a Charles Dickens masterpiece. There will never be a better vegetable part. How could I say no?”
“And, yet, you’re walking away.”
“I can’t work with directors who don’t have passion for what they’re doing. But you certainly do. What role do you have for me?”
“A powerful, vicious, and amoral Canadian mobster who is going to Macau to play high-stakes baccarat,” Nick said. “You like the game, but what you’re really there to do is launder your money through the casino. You’re mixing business with pleasure.”
“I’ll be Tony Soprano meets Snidely Whiplash.”
“The bad guy with the handlebar mustache that Dudley Do-Right, the Canadian Mountie, was always battling in the cartoons?”
“He’s a perfect touchstone for my character,” Boyd said. “I particularly like the mustache.”
“Just don’t wear the top hat and black cape,”
Nick said. “Keep it subtle.”
—
Nick and Kate spent the first part of the week establishing identities for Boyd and Billy Dee.
Kate used her FBI access to create criminal backgrounds for “Shane Blackmore,” Boyd’s nonexistent Canadian mobster, in all of the key law enforcement databases worldwide. She also sensationalized the criminal files that already existed for Lou Ould-Abdallah, Billy Dee Snipes’s real name, so he’d appear to be an active, brutal power player in high-seas piracy. When the con was over, she’d erase all of her creative writing.
Nick got in touch with his tech wizard in Hong Kong. They planted fake articles and references about Shane Blackmore and Lou Ould-Abdallah on the Internet, and forged the necessary passports, credit cards, and driver’s licenses that would be needed.
Once Nick and Kate were done, Boyd flew to Vancouver, British Columbia, on his U.S. passport. In Canada, he switched to Shane Blackmore’s Canadian passport and flew to Hong Kong. This established a trail that led back to Canada in case anyone checked into his identity.
Billy Dee flew from Las Vegas to Mogadishu, by way of London, Istanbul, and Djibouti. He spent a night in Mogadishu, and then used his Somali passport to take a flight to Kenya, a two-hour flight to Ethiopia, and finally a ten-hour flight to Hong Kong. It was a belabored way to get from Las Vegas to Hong Kong but, as with Boyd, it was necessary to establish his cover.
Nick and Kate didn’t have to worry about leaving a trail. They focused instead on making the right impression. So Nick chartered a private jet for their trip. He met Kate at the Van Nuys Airport early in the morning on their departure day.
“The last time we went to China together, it was in the trunk of a ’69 Dodge Charger in the cargo hold of a passenger jet,” Nick said. “This time, I thought we should go in style.”
Kate climbed the stairs to the G650, said hello to the flight attendant and the pilots, and settled into one of the eight cushy leather club chairs. The crew compartment and galley were in front of her. A credenza with a wine cooler and flat-screen TV were behind her. A couch and the restroom were also behind her.
“This is really extravagant,” Kate said. “Couldn’t you have chartered something smaller and cheaper?”
“Sure, but we would have had to stop somewhere on the way for refueling,” he said. “This baby will take us straight to Hong Kong without stopping and makes a bold statement.”
“What does a bold statement cost?”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
Kate squelched a grimace. “Jessup is going to pop a hemorrhoid.”
—
They were an hour into the flight, Kate was halfway through her third bowl of heated nuts, and Nick reached for his messenger bag. “I’m going to teach you how to play baccarat,” he said. “I packed three decks of cards and a big bag of M&M’s for the trip.”
“What are the M&M’s for?”
“Gambling chips. I wanted them to have some value to you.” He handed Kate the bag of candy. “Separate these by color. Yellow M&M’s will be a hundred thousand, red will be fifty thousand, blue will be twenty-five thousand, and brown will be five thousand.”
“What about the orange and green M&M’s?”
“Those are for you to snack on so you won’t be tempted to devour your chips.”
“My kind of game. I’m liking it already.”
“Baccarat is a lot like betting on a sporting event,” Nick said, shuffling the cards. “There are two teams, the dealer and the player. You’re going to place a bet on who you think will be dealt the cards that come closest to adding up to nine.”
“What’s the strategy?”
“There is none,” Nick said. “It’s pure luck. Unlike blackjack or poker, you don’t get to make any choices. You’re dealt your cards and that’s that.”
“You mean you just sit there and do nothing?”
“Yep,” he said.
“There’s no bluffing?”
“Nope,” he said.
“So why is baccarat the game that James Bond always plays against the bad guys to prove how clever he is?”
“Because that’s not what he’s doing. He’s showing them that he’s willing to take huge risks and that he has unwavering confidence in his own good luck.”
“And that he looks great in a tuxedo,” Kate added.
“That’s the part that takes true finesse. Here’s how the game works. To start, you and the dealer are each dealt two cards, facedown.” He dealt out the cards to Kate and himself. “An ace counts as one, the ten and face cards count as zero. You subtract ten from any combination of cards that adds up to more than nine. For example, an eight and a three would add up to one. Two tens would equal zero. The player looks at her cards first.”
Kate turned over her cards. She had a nine and a three. “So am I stuck with this lousy two?”
“Nope. If the player draws two cards that total zero to five, she automatically gets a third card. You never get more than three cards.”
He dealt her a four, giving her a total of six.
“That’s better,” she said. “How does it work for the dealer?”
“That’s more complicated.” Nick turned over his cards, revealing a queen and a three. “The dealer isn’t allowed another card unless the player has drawn three cards, and it depends on what that third card was. The rules vary from casino to casino, but usually the dealer must stand if he has a seven, eight, or nine and must draw a card if he has a zero, one, or two. If the dealer has a three, like I do, he’ll draw if the player’s third card is any number but eight.”
“Why eight?”
“I have absolutely no idea. But none of it really matters since you’re already finished with your part of the game. You just have to go along with it, knowing that the rules are designed to give the house a statistical advantage.” Nick drew a card, a five, giving him a total of eight to win the game.
Kate tossed her cards back to Nick. “I’ll bet with the house every time.”
“If you do that, the house takes a five percent commission on each bet you win.”
They played for a couple hours, and Kate eventually started to lose more often than she won. She was down to her last $200,000 in blue and brown M&M’s, when she scooped them up and ate them.
“I guess this means we’re done,” Nick said.
“I’d rather watch grass grow.”
“It was kind of sexy the way you ate all those M&M’s. I like an aggressive, take-charge woman.”
“You should see me in combat gear.”
In the late 1990s, the few farmers that occupied the small, hilly islands of Chek Lap Kok and Lam Chau, twenty-one miles southwest of Hong Kong, were told to pack up and move. Their tiny villages were razed, the hillsides were shaved off, and everything was dumped into the water between the two islands to create one completely flat piece of land for a new international airport. From the sky, the unnaturally level and squared-off island that was Hong Kong International Airport looked to Kate like a gray rug floating on the sea.
Nick and Kate landed in the late afternoon. They were fast-tracked through customs and walked a short distance to the heliport, where a white Peninsula Hotel helicopter was waiting for them. A young Chinese valet in an all-white mandarin-collared uniform, pillbox hat, and gloves cheerfully relieved them of their suitcases and escorted them to the chopper. They climbed in, the valet stowed their bags and secured their door, and they were off, soaring over the hills, the ports, and the bridges toward the city center.
Within moments, Hong Kong Island loomed up in front of them with its spectacular skyline of densely packed skyscrapers. The island consisted of a narrow strip of land between Victoria Peak and a harbor that was a freeway filled with ferries, jetfoils, yachts, ocean liners, and Chinese junks. The Kowloon Peninsula was just across the harbor. Here the skyscrapers had more shoulder room, but still rose up from a closely packed warren of buildings on overcrowded streets.
The
Peninsula Hotel, built in 1928, was on the Kowloon waterfront, facing the harbor. The helicopter landed on top of the hotel’s thirty-story tower, a relatively recent addition to the original building, which was an elegant and fiercely beloved relic of Hong Kong’s British colonial era. The flight from the airport had taken only seven minutes.
Nick and Kate exited the helicopter and walked into the China Clipper lounge on the thirtieth floor. A crisply dressed female clerk greeted them and presented Nick and Kate with their key cards. She assured them that their bags would be delivered to their rooms while they dined. Nick thanked her, and he and Kate took the elevator two floors down to Felix, the hotel’s renowned restaurant and bar.
They emerged from the elevator into a wildly overdesigned restaurant that looked like a SPECTRE villain’s secret lair from a 1960s-era Bond movie. It was a big, bold, two-story-tall space, gleaming with bronze, zinc, and undulating aluminum sheathing. There were dramatically lit walls, pillars, and two oval structures that, if this were SPECTRE headquarters, would have been stylized silos for nuclear missiles instead of fancy bars. The real grabber in the room was the commanding view of the Hong Kong skyline from the wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling windows that would have pleased any supervillain bent on world domination. But instead of finding Dr. Evil sitting in the center of it all, stroking his hairless cat, Kate spotted Boyd Capwell at a table, twirling his handlebar mustache.
Boyd’s hair was colored jet black to match his well-oiled mustache. He’d mimicked Tony Soprano’s fashion sense, wearing a navy blue short-sleeved bowling shirt, with cream panels and two embroidered martini glasses on the left chest, a pair of khaki slacks, and leather loafers with no socks.
“Welcome to Hong Kong,” Boyd said, gesturing to three empty chairs with seatbacks decorated with black-and-white drawings of longtime, and mostly deceased, Peninsula employees. “Have a seat.”
“You look like you’re on Snidely Whiplash’s bowling team,” Kate said.
“Thank you,” Boyd said. “Now Snidely is flesh and blood and embodied in Shane Blackmore, a man to be feared. But because I’m dressed in a relaxed, lighthearted manner, I’ll catch people completely off guard with my seething menace.” Boyd sat back, smiled, and twirled one end of his mustache.
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