Screenscam

by Michael Bowen

  “I intend to. I’m going straight back to my room.”

  “No. At least not any longer than it takes you to get your suitcase. Check out. Right now. Find another hotel, then go back home tomorrow after you’ve gotten a good night’s sleep.”

  “Why?” Melissa asked.

  Payne sighed as she continued to urge Melissa ungently along.

  “This will take some explaining if you’re really going to buy it,” she said, “so I guess I’ll have to give you the long version.”

  “Okay.”

  “What you just saw isn’t my standard routine. My specialty is more the strict but loving older sister, more in sorrow than in anger, ‘I’m terribly sorry, honey, but rules are rules and I’m afraid you’re just going to have to have a spanking,’ hugs before and after, that kind of thing.”

  “I see. I guess.”

  “A lot of clients, though, don’t necessarily want your specialty. They have particular scenes they like to act out, almost scripted routines that they want to follow. It’s my job to draw that out of them and accommodate them.”

  “Well, sure,” Melissa said. “I mean, being a professional and everything.”

  “Exactly. Now, it so happens that none of the lines you heard just now were terribly original. Including Packbrat’s lines. In fact, I’ve been through that whole routine before—with Fessephile.”

  “You’re saying Packbrat is Fessephile?” Melissa demanded.

  “Yes. There were minor variations, of course, but parts of the scenario were word for word. It refreshed my recollection. The memories came flooding back. I’ll have Maggie check the registration data, and by the time you’re home tomorrow I will have e-mailed you Packbrat/Fessephile’s real name.”

  “So that, by some incredible coincidence the guy who tracked Rep down was the same guy who started hitting on me tonight after you and I talked about him?” Melissa commented, raising her voice to make it a question.

  “Nothing coincidental about it. Your husband went public with his query, and someone who wanted to badly enough could have found out that you had signed up for this event at the last minute. Fessephile was here to find out if someone was on his trail, and it was natural for him to suspect you—especially after he saw you talking to me. He accosted you so that he could check out his suspicions.”

  Melissa nodded while she took a deep breath. Payne’s theory made sense—and it made Melissa’s skin crawl. What if Payne hadn’t happened to be watching over Melissa like a discreet bodyguard when Packbrat had checked out his suspicions?

  “You’ve been enormously helpful and very kind,” Melissa said, “and I don’t want to seem skeptical. But can you really be sure about his identity? You said yourself you’ve done this for thousands of men and couldn’t remember a particular face.”

  “I can’t remember clients’ faces,” Payne conceded. “But I never forget a bright red, well spanked bottom.”

  Chapter 13

  As soon as he made it onto I-635 South out of Traverse City, Rep verified that the last milliwatt of juice in his digital phone battery was gone. He glared in dismay at the useless hunk of plastic and silicon in his hand. He was desperately anxious to reach Melissa, not only to update her but even more just to hear her voice. Now he couldn’t, unless he pulled off the highway and used a payphone. Which he wouldn’t let himself do, because if he did—if he stopped relying on sheer momentum, gave himself a few minutes to reflect on how insane his enterprise was—there was no way he’d talk himself into continuing this mad, Quixotic trek through four states to thwart the nefarious plans of professionals coldly proficient enough to blow up helicopters and plant cocaine in locked cars.

  He was wondering if things could possibly get worse when he saw the cop car in his rear-view mirror. It was about two hundred yards behind him. No red and blue lights flashing, just a looming, distinctive profile in Rep’s wake. His eyes flicked automatically to the speedometer, where he was relieved to see the needle hovering closer to sixty than sixty-five. He cut it to fifty-eight anyway, just for luck. Half a minute later the cop apparently lost interest. The squad car pulled into the left lane and blew past Rep, presumably in search of less vigilant prey.

  Air exploded from Rep’s lungs as he realized that he’d been holding his breath. White-knuckled fingers on each hand had been gripping the steering wheel to a point just short of molecular fusion. I’m not cut out for this, Rep thought in near despair. He hadn’t done anything wrong (lately), but a nothing—a squad car randomly patrolling the interstate—had had him shaking like a novice crack mule approaching Customs.

  This won’t cut it, he thought then. I’ve got to do something constructive.

  He decided to stop thinking.

  It worked. Like a machine—well, like an unshaven, cranky machine that had been up since five o’clock Friday morning and tended to jump whenever a car with lights on its roof happened into view—he cruised without incident through northwest Indiana, threaded his way through Chicago on the Skyway, paid the sniveling little penny-ante tolls on I-94 north of the city, managed the transition in Wisconsin from I-94 to I-43 and then to State Highway 41. He pulled into Red and Flora’s Lake Winnebago Motor Court in Oshkosh, Wisconsin a little after seven A.M. Saturday. (Though lacking some of the ambience of, say, a Holiday Inn, Red and Flora’s had the inestimable commercial advantage of promising a vacancy on a sign big enough for Rep to see from the highway as he approached the first Oshkosh exit.)

  While Rep was busy not thinking during the odyssey, his mind had worked steadily, just below the conscious level. Fatigue, fear, and aggravation had stripped away the preconceptions, suppositions, and conventional wisdom that typically impair logical processes. Rep would reflect later that it was like working on a crossword puzzle with wrong answers for two or three critical clues across. You flounder until you finally realize the answers are wrong and erase them. Then, with a string of blank squares unbroken by vagrant mistaken letters, clues down that had been baffling you for half an hour suddenly become limpid and five minutes later the puzzle is done. By the time he got to his room, Rep had figured two things out:

  (1) He’d been played for a chump from pretty much the beginning of this case, and he thought he knew how it had been done and who had done it; and

  (2) Something very bad was going to happen unless he did something about it in the next twenty-four hours.

  This meant that he couldn’t afford more than six hours of sleep, even though he felt like twelve would’ve been more like it. And those six hours were going to have to start pretty fast.

  He plugged his digital phone in to recharge. He called Melissa on the room phone and told the answering machine that he was in Oshkosh and would have to explain more later because he was just about to crash. Then he called what looked from the Yellow Pages like the three most luxurious hotels in the Oshkosh area and asked for Aaron Eastman. After going 0 for 3 he gave up and called the number he had for Eastman’s production company. He reached a security guard who politely explained that it wasn’t yet 5:30 A.M. on the West Coast. Expressing unqualified agreement with this temporal observation, Rep talked the guard into connecting him with Eastman’s voice-mail.

  “This is Rep Pennyworth,” he said after the beep. “We have to talk in a big hurry. Call my digital phone number and leave a message about where and when.”

  Then he recited his digital phone number. And climbed into bed. And fell instantly and gratefully into an untroubled sleep.

  ***

  By nine o’clock that Saturday morning, the meeting in Conference Room I at Rep’s firm was ninety minutes old and Tyler Buchanan still wasn’t there. Steve Finneman and Chip Arundel led a generous sampling of the firm’s senior litigators and transactional lawyers. Mary Jane Masterson joined an even more generous selection of the firm’s grunts. The chief financial officer and sundry top executives from Tavistock, Ltd. took up most of the rest of the space around the massive walnut table fi
lling the cavernous room. But Buchanan himself, Tavistock’s board chairman, chief executive officer and largest single shareholder, The Man, whose immediate and undivided attention to Tempus-Caveator’s hostile takeover bid was indispensable, remained unaccounted for.

  This absence was by far the morning’s most portentous event, and it had Arundel’s belly tied in knots. There was nothing he could do about it at the moment, though, so with superficially unruffled calm he had spent over an hour dealing with other things.

  “All right, we’re working on poison pill and we have white knight on hold for the moment,” he said. “There will be an emergency meeting of the board at five o’clock this afternoon to consider issuing up to one hundred million additional shares of stock, with priority buy options for shareholders of record as of December 31st of last year. That takes care of the corporate side. Now we need something for the litigators to get their teeth into. Something really juicy on Tempus-Caveator. Something a court will enjoin a tender offer for if they don’t put it in the proxy statement. What have we got?”

  For several seconds only foot shuffling answered this comment, and Allen Edmonds wingtips rubbing against deep pile Herculon don’t make much noise. Then, after the polite interval her seniors were entitled to had run, Masterson spoke up.

  “Tempus-Caveator was on the witness list for the Thompson Committee hearings in the United States Senate a few years ago.”

  “You mean the campaign finance scandal thing that didn’t go anywhere?” Arundel asked. “Hype-city for months, then it closed on Saturday night?”

  “That one,” Masterson confirmed. “Foreigner out of nowhere with a sudden security clearance at the Commerce Department; mysterious calls made from a payphone across the street from his office; dirty money back-tracked from a bagman at a presidential reception through shady characters in Indonesia all the way to some woman colonel in the Red Chinese Army.”

  Behind the fleshy lids that hooded them, Finneman’s eyes flicked with interest at the pertinence of Masterson’s comment and the self-confidence in her tone. Not cringing in the background, waiting to see what more senior people would say so that she could agree with them, but actually speaking up on her own. He began to wonder if she might not have the raw material to be molded into a partner in a few years after all.

  “I thought the whole point of that thing was that the dirty money was foreign,” Arundel said. “Tempus-Caveator is a vicious, bottom-feeding, low-life corporate predator, but it’s a vicious, bottom-feeding, low-life American corporate predator. Where did it fit in?”

  “Not clear. They resisted the subpoena, the committee didn’t insist and they ended up not being called.”

  “So what, then?” Arundel snapped.

  “So not long before the scandal broke,” Masterson said calmly, “Tempus-Caveator wasn’t Tempus-Caveator yet. It was Tempus, Inc. and Caveator Corporation, two separately owned companies. A lot of people expected the Justice Department to jump on their merger with both feet, but they got a pass. If you start putting two and two together—”

  “I love it!” Arundel said triumphantly, his lips parting half an inch in a rare show of human emotion. He turned to the litigator sitting to Finneman’s right. “Hit it. Pedal to the metal. Get on that baby and drive it right into the ground.”

  “What proof do we have at this point?” the litigator asked.

  “Proof is your department,” Arundel said. “I’m in charge of allegations. Come back here at one P.M. and you tell me what proof we have. Don’t disappoint me.”

  “Restroom break,” Finneman said then, displaying yet once more his genius for sensing latent consensus. He unobtrusively accosted Tavistock’s CFO during the general shuffle out of the conference room.

  “Where’s Tyler?” he asked.

  “Can’t raise him,” the CFO said uncomfortably. “He’s gotten the messages and he knows where to come.”

  “Let me ask the question more clearly,” Finneman said with a jovial Midwestern twang right out of summer stock. “Where the hell is Tyler? This is the most important issue Tavistock has faced in twenty years. If we don’t play this right, you and he and everyone he’s worked with at that company could be out on your collective rears in three months. Now where is he?”

  The CFO stopped and pulled Finneman ungently into a recess off the corridor, between two secretaries’ desks.

  “Charlotte has disappeared,” he whispered. “Before this takeover attempt came up she was scheduled to be in the office all weekend working on a huge presentation. She played hooky at home yesterday morning, and no one has been able to find her since mid-afternoon on Friday.”

  “Charlotte Buchanan, Tyler’s daughter who has a copyright infringement claim being investigated by this firm?” Finneman asked with a thoughtful gaze.

  “Charlotte Buchanan, the one thing in the world that is more important to Tyler than Tavistock, Limited,” the CFO said.

  ***

  “So that’s the basic story from Chicago,” Melissa said around eleven-fifteen Saturday morning, as she concluded the twelfth minute of her series of voice-mail messages for Rep. She had already covered everything from the plot of Green for Danger to the scene party run-up. “Except, oh, God, how could I do this, I forgot one of the most important things. By the time I was ready to leave Chicago this morning, Margaret Keane had called and told me that the real name of the guy who came on to me was Bernie Mixler. Okay, that’s the basic story. And there are a couple of things that really don’t add up for me. I mean, more than a couple, but a couple really baffle me. Like, why was Jennifer Payne so nice to me? Why did she take such an active interest in this problem in the first place, for that matter? I mean, she said it was because interfering with internet privacy was bad for her business, and I guess it is, but that doesn’t seem good enough to explain her becoming my guardian angel while I was at this, this, uh, scene event, I guess you’d call it.”

  A beep told her that she was nearing the end of recording time on this call, so she said that she’d hang up and call back with some more.

  Which she did, but only after several minutes of reflection. There was one more facet of the problem that was gnawing at her, but she didn’t trust herself right away to put it into words. Finally she felt she had enough of a handle on it to dial Rep’s number again.

  “My last comment is a little hard to articulate,” she said when she knew she was recording again. “It’s kind of oblique, because what made me think about it is all the literary theory I’ve been wading through for my entire adult life. I know this isn’t news to you, but the all-time insight of the last fifty years is supposedly that nothing has any intrinsic meaning. We read Moby Dick and anything we think it means is a construct that we impose on it, based on our sex and class and race and background and so forth. And supposedly that’s the way it is with everything, not just novels. So we’re not even supposed to say ‘reality,’ we have to say “‘reality,’” with quotes around it, because there is no independent reality, everything we think of as ‘reality’ is our own construct and so forth.”

  She paused and exhaled a long breath, as if she were getting rid of exhausted smoke from a joint. This was actually coming out very well, but she wondered if it would make the slightest sense to Rep—or anyone else who hadn’t been buried for term after term in the rarefied arcana of literary deconstructionism. There was nothing to do but go on, though, so that’s what she did.

  “Anyway, what struck me as I was coming back from Chicago this morning was that this is basically a crock. What I mean is, it may be that everything I know about what’s going on, and everything you know, and everything any other particular person knows is a construct that we each put together, influenced by all these factors I mentioned. But somewhere in this mess there’s a reality that none of us has constructed out of our own prejudices and perceptions and that’s completely independent of what we choose to understand about it. There’s a reality that actually e
xists and that doesn’t really care very much what any of us happens to think it might be. And that reality is that someone is trying to kill someone else. And they’re going to bring it off unless someone else does something about it.” She started to choke and willed herself back under control. “Well, Rep, you’re trying to. I don’t know if you can do it, but it’s about the bravest thing I can imagine, the way you’re doing it, and I don’t care what happens or what anyone else thinks, I am so proud to be married to you.”

  ***

  Why would anyone deed a collar? Rep thought as he fought his way up through cottony layers of sleep at (as he later learned) one in the afternoon. And what college is Doan U?

  The big, hostile guy merely repeated the question, more threateningly and with hunks of Rep’s bedclothes in his fists.

  “Doan U know ’bout collar I deed?”

  Oh I get it, Rep thought, another jail dream. I’ve been to this movie before. Time to wake up.

  He woke up. Someone very angry was in his face.

  “Don’t you know about caller i.d.?” the very angry someone reiterated.

  Uh-oh, Rep thought, it isn’t a dream. This is very bad.

  “Here,” a voice behind the angry guy said. The next thing Rep knew a glassful of cold water had splashed in his face. He sat up quickly in bed, sputtering and suddenly awake enough to recognize Aaron Eastman.

  “You’re way out of your league, junior,” Eastman said. “My company switchboard has state-of-the-art caller identification—not that we needed anything more than star-sixty-nine. The security guard who answered your call got the number for this place, so I was able to track you down instead of giving you a roadmap so you could find me. The maid is very trusting with her pass-key, so we didn’t even have to ’loid your lock.”

  “If I hadn’t been too tired to see straight when I called I would have left the motel number myself,” Rep said. “We have to talk.”