Screenscam

by Michael Bowen

  Which was all very interesting, but left unsolved the problem of attracting the guard’s attention.

  Walking back around the corner, Rep found the surveillance camera he’d smiled at and stood once again in front of its unblinking eye. He jabbed toward the building several times with his index finger in the hope that the guard would see this and interpret it as a plea to come to the door. Three solid minutes of this, interspersed with impatient glances around the corner, accomplished nothing but to make Rep feel silly.

  Frustrated, he reached up in an effort to thread his fingers through the protective cage around the camera and knock crankily on the lens, hoping that a screen-sized knuckle might attract more attention than rapping on the window had. By itself, it didn’t. What it did do, as he irritably jostled the thin metal bars that enclosed the camera, was set off an intermittent, high-pitched alarm at the security desk. The alarm apparently took its job more seriously than the guard took his, for the piercing beeps! it produced were loud enough for Rep to hear outside.

  He scurried back to the front door, waving energetically, just in time to see the guard start to react. The guy at first sat rigidly erect as he seemed to concentrate very, very hard. Then realization apparently burst through and he bolted to a standing position, bent over the beeping monitor, hands on either side of it, focusing on it with willed intensity, as if the slowly penetrating shock of the alarm had brought him a millisecond of stone cold sobriety.

  The interval of lucidity, alas, wasn’t enough for Rep’s frantic gesticulations and renewed window-knocking to attract the guard’s attention. The gent did work his way out from behind the security desk, although he made that modest task look quite challenging, but he didn’t pay the slightest attention to Rep. He began running—or, at least, doing something that in his present condition he apparently took for running—not toward the front door but toward the far side of the building where the service door was.

  Cursing in exasperation, Rep reversed course yet again and ran back around the corner.

  Ran.

  At full speed.

  In the dark.

  This was more concentrated physical exertion than he’d committed with his clothes on in five years. Still ten feet from the picnic table, he saw the service door start to swing open. Gut stitched, muscles burning, and lungs aching, Rep strained to pick up his pace. He managed it, but only for a second or so. Then a searing pain lanced through both shins and he suddenly found himself airborne as a stumble over one of the picnic benches sent him flying.

  The sound of Rep’s own startled yelp reached his ears at the same moment as the strangled “HUHHH!” produced by the guard when Rep’s head and shoulders collided with him and slammed him into the inside of the outward-swinging door. Rep and the guy hit the ground at the same time, both stunned but Rep at least not baked on top of it.

  The guy flailed confusedly with a left fist and a right elbow, which connected respectively with Rep’s ribs and his cheekbone. Rep had devoted great energy and ingenuity through much of his life to assiduous avoidance of fists swung in anger, and this experience confirmed the wisdom of that course. He found the ad-libbed blows excruciating.

  Rep, fortunately, didn’t have time at the moment to reflect further on the situation, which was that the door was now swinging inward on its powerful springs, trying to shut and in the process pressing insistently against his body and the guard’s; and that the guard was writhing, trying to get up. What Rep had to do was get up before the guard did, get through the door, and close it with the guard on the outside. Had Rep taken even a moment to think, a lifetime of bitter experience would have told him that he had just about as much chance of accomplishing this as he did of making the Olympic decathlon team.

  Modest though it was, however, the guard’s low-rent pummeling proved highly motivational. Instead of thinking, Rep acted on pure reflex. He rolled toward the building, away from the guard’s blunt, punishing knuckles and sharp elbow. He scrambled awkwardly to his knees and then to his feet. Then he darted inside the building.

  The guard displayed none of Rep’s clumsiness. He rolled quickly and adroitly away from the building. He bounced nimbly to the balls of his feet in one fluid motion. At that point, however, he spoiled the effect by putting his hands on his knees and retching for awhile as the door closed behind Rep.

  Third floor, Rep thought breathlessly, as thrilled as he was astounded at having actually bested someone else, however fortuitously, in a physical contest. His urban survival skills had been honed by years of work in a downtown office building, so he knew better than to try the elevator at this hour without an access card. He bolted instead up a broad staircase leading from the lobby. It’s true that this staircase took him only to the second floor, which was completely dark, and that he didn’t have the faintest idea of what to do next. But at least it was a start.

  A few moments of reflection, stimulated by the certainty that before too much longer the chap outside would finish throwing up and begin giving consideration to reentry, led Rep to a constructive thought: Ordinances of the City of Chicago and statutes of the State of Illinois undoubtedly required that, somewhere on this floor, there be an illuminated EXIT sign near a fire door leading to a stairway. He went in search of it and presently, after only a few bumps and scrapes and the overturn of a floral display that he told himself probably hadn’t been all that pretty to start with, he found the sign near the back of the building’s far side.

  He paused at the fire door for five deep breaths. Getting past the guard and into the building was like swishing a twenty-foot jump shot: it happens once in awhile and it feels good, but if you’re a guy like Rep you really don’t count on doing it again any time soon. The only argument in favor of going on was that there wasn’t any alternative. He opened the door and hurried up the unadorned concrete stairs before he had a chance to talk himself out of it.

  He cracked the door at the top a sliver, and then a bit wider as he saw nothing but slightly varying shades of dark. He slipped out of the stairwell, crept across perhaps eight feet of hallway, and began feeling his way down a long wall that turned out to be unbroken all the way to the end, where he met the intersecting wall at the front of the building.

  Hm. Not the most obvious choice for office building interior design. But then, of course, this wasn’t primarily an office building. What had Eastman called it? A post-production facility.

  Rep felt his way back along the wall toward the opposite end. His gropings in this direction eventually brought him to a corner, which he rounded. He was now moving parallel to the back of the building, going toward the side he’d first seen when he got out of the cab—the side where he’d noticed light glowing from the inside.

  Rep’s plan was simple. He had no thought of a chivalric rescue, like Lancelot slicing Guinevere away from the stake just as the faggots began to crackle, or Han Solo snatching Princess Leia from under the noses of Darth Vader’s stormtroopers. What he wanted was to see something—say, Charlotte Buchanan in gag and handcuffs—that would provoke a useful reaction from whoever handled 911 calls in Chicago. Therefore, he had to get to the light. He proceeded.

  He hadn’t gone more than ten feet before he heard something. He couldn’t identify the sound exactly, although it vaguely suggested machinery laboring. He crept toward the sound and, because he was moving slowly, hurt his knee only a little when he banged it against something dark and hard protruding at an angle from the inside wall. Five seconds of tactile investigation sufficed to tell Rep that it was a door, left miraculously (or suspiciously, depending on how you looked at it) ajar. He slipped through the doorway.

  As soon as he was through he ducked—understandably, because an F4F Wildcat was coming at him, its whirling propeller bracketed by flame that spat from its machine guns. Or, rather, he realized, the mirror image of a World War II fighter was coming at him, for he was looking at the back of a flat, rear projection screen. (Technically, what he was looking
at was a very old-fashioned version of something called a traveling mat, but he didn’t know that.) Mounted at the rear of a large stage, the screen/mat undulated slightly as red, blue, and white lights beamed at it from the panting projector in an otherwise inky room.

  Rep skirted around the stage and moved about thirty feet deeper into what he now thought must be a very large, internal room taking up most of the building’s third floor. On the screen, the fighter planes gave way to crashing surf. What commanded Rep’s attention, though, was a rectangle of light in the middle of the wall now opposite him. Dropping to his hands and knees so as to keep his shadow off the screen—though if anyone else were in the room, they must certainly have some idea by now that they had company—he scuttled with efficiency if not dignity toward the rectangle. During his transit the Manhattan skyline replaced crashing surf on the screen.

  The light was coming through frosted glass in the upper half of a door. Rep managed to reach the door with only one more minor glitch, stubbing his knee—that’s right, his knee—on a pile of bulging mailbags that cluttered the floor on the stage side of the portal. Without pausing to wonder what mailbags were doing in a screening room, he pulled himself up to the window, where he found only an inch or so of clear glass at the margin. Sneaking an eye over the lower right-hand corner of this border and bracing himself for something gruesome, he looked into the building’s only lighted room.

  It was fifteen feet wide with three outside windows and a closed door at the end to his left. Six non-descript Masonite work tables sat perpendicular to the outside wall, paired on either side of each window. Two held what Rep might have recognized as Movieola film editors if he’d been thirty years older. Another held binders, writing pads, cheap pens, and similar miscellaneous office supplies. The other three supported word processors and printers.

  At the nearest of these, surrounded on floor and table by layers of discarded Evian bottles, Diet Coca-Cola cans, cardboard coffee cups, empty pizza and Chinese food boxes, and a vast quantity of paper defaced with the printed word, sat Charlotte Buchanan. Bernie Mixler paced in her vicinity, reading from a sheaf of pages that he clutched.

  Golly, Rep thought, the pizza delivery guy scam might actually have worked.

  During the thirty seconds or so that Rep spent examining the scene, Buchanan alternately frowned in the apparent throes of creative agony and typed in furious bursts. Nothing in the scene suggested much in the way of criminal activity. After Selding’s confession and Rep’s adventures in just getting into the building, in fact, the whole thing struck him as a tad anticlimactic.

  A key on a ring rested in a lock immediately below the doorknob. Rep stood up, took a pass at brushing himself off, turned the key decisively and opened the door. Buchanan looked up with distracted interest as he strode in. Mixler glared at him in unalloyed and unpleasant surprise.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Buchanan said, smiling the way well brought-up people do when they’re trying to be polite and having to work at it. “Hi, Rep. You look a little scuffed up and shopworn, like you’re maybe a month past your sell-by date.”

  “What are you doing here?” Mixler demanded—which, to be honest, was a pretty fair question. If Rep wasn’t here to call the cops, what was he going to do?

  “I’m here to take Charlotte somewhere else,” Rep said.

  “Where?” Buchanan asked. “And more important, why?”

  “Where doesn’t matter much,” Rep said. “Why is that you’re in danger here. Some bad people have unpleasant plans for you. You’re not supposed to leave this building alive.”

  This was the most dramatic thing Rep had ever said in his life. Buchanan reacted with the kind of half-exasperated, half-tolerant moue that had gotten Claudette Colbert sharply smacked when she tried it on Clark Gable in It Happened One Night.

  “No, no, Rep,” she said with exaggerated patience. “You’re the logical, rational one. I’m the melodramatic fantasist.”

  “Did you send me an e-mail on Friday about meeting Aaron Eastman in Pomona, California this weekend?”

  “Of course not. Bernie has set up a meeting with him Monday in L.A. And I wouldn’t necessarily be e-mailing you about it anyway, would I? It’s business, not legal.” Buchanan noted this distinction with fastidious satisfaction, the way someone who had seen her first baseball game two days before might differentiate savvily between fastballs and sliders.

  “Well, I got an e-mail from you Friday evening saying exactly that,” Rep said. “If you didn’t send it, somebody else did, and they used your laptop to do it.”

  “I don’t see how that could be. I’ve had my laptop under my control since I left home Friday afternoon.” Buchanan tapped a cased computer at her feet with her toe to emphasize the point. Mixler snorted derisively.

  “It was out of your control for at least thirty seconds when you went through security at O’Hare,” Rep said. “That’s when your computer was switched for another one that looks just like it.”

  “You say that like you saw it happen,” Buchanan commented. “Did you?”

  “No. But I know it did happen, the same way I know your battery was out of power the first time you tried to boot up after getting through security Friday afternoon, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, and I’ll give you credit for a very lucky guess.”

  “Well, okay then,” Rep said, not sure how to handle the concession—after all, he wasn’t a litigator. “Let’s see, maybe I can make some more lucky guesses. How about this? When Mixler called you and said he’d arranged this Eastman meeting, he told you to meet him at a particular gate in Chicago so you could fly out together Friday night and he could explain the project. But once you got through security, he met you, told you the meeting was postponed until Monday, and said he’d spend the weekend here in Chicago with you putting something serious on paper for Eastman.”

  Rep paused, hopefully checking Buchanan’s face to see if any of this was penetrating. The evidence wasn’t encouraging.

  “Well, sure,” Buchanan said. “I mean, right on, yes, absolutely. But you should know most of that, Rep. I mean, not the details, maybe, but the overall concept. It all started with your idea about a face-to-face meeting between me and Eastman.”

  “That’s right,” Mixler said. “No big mystery. He’s telling you stuff that I told him.”

  “That’s not true,” Rep said, stamping his foot in impatience at the blatancy of the lie.

  “No need to overplay your hand, counselor,” Mixler said with complete composure. “Just take the credit.”

  “Really, Rep, it’s going to work, I can feel it,” Buchanan added, excitement swelling in her voice. “Bernie has been incredible. He came up with the premise for a story, an updated modus operandi that’s tailor-made for a hip, self-knowing, ironic comedy-suspense flick. He’s already got Eastman hooked on the basic idea, and he’s convinced that I can produce a really powerful treatment that will close the deal. He had me do some research on it and track down an old movie that used a variation of it, and it was just dead on.”

  “The movie was Green for Danger, right?” Rep said.

  “Exactly! And it’s perfect. I’ve been writing for something like sixteen hours straight, and we’ve really got something. No penny-ante book publisher without publicists, offering some bush-league twenty-five hundred copy first printing. We’ll go straight to the movies, and then use the movie deal to sell the book instead of the other way around. Bernie figured everything out and explained it all to me.”

  “And she has to get back to work,” Mixler said. “We’ve made plenty of progress, but we’re a long way from home.”

  Rep opened his mouth to start picking logical holes in the world according to Buchanan, but he checked himself. Mixler knew Buchanan’s dream, and that was all the leverage he’d needed. That dream was more powerful than any logical argument Rep Pennyworth was likely to produce. Logic in this situation was about as useful as a slings
hot in a tank battle.

  He couldn’t even mention Selding’s confession, not that it would have made much difference. The plan Selding had confirmed required Buchanan to be alive at least until the first news reports about Eastman’s plane being missing on its way to northern California Sunday afternoon, because in the script Mixler was writing for the cops that dramatic event would be what caused Buchanan’s final meltdown. If Rep started spouting off about how he and Eastman had cleverly thwarted that whole scenario, the obvious decision for Mixler and company would be to kill her right away.

  Me too, come to think of it, Rep reflected uncomfortably.

  “Let me ask you one other thing,” Rep said, his voice racing with desperation. “In this neat little story Bernie is helping you with, does someone by any wild chance write a suicide note?”

  “Yessss,” Buchanan admitted in a get-on-with-it tone.

  “Not exactly unprecedented in dramatic suspense films,” Mixler interjected. Rep ignored him.

  “And this suicide note has gone through several drafts, all of which are lying on the floor here somewhere?”

  “Yes,” Buchanan said.

  “Which I couldn’t possibly have seen and Mixler couldn’t possibly have told me about, right?”