What’s this stuff about refilling and loading mailbags? Is the guy a neat-freak on top of everything else? For no reason he could have named at the time, the unanswered question asked by both the Coast Guardsman and Eastman came back to him. What was the connection between Tempus-Caveator staging a hostile takeover of an old-economy dinosaur like Tavistock and the conflict with Eastman that was causing all this trouble?
Rep opened the envelope he was still gripping. It held a single sheet. A title at the top identified it as a NOMINATING BALLOT ONLY. A subhead instructed the reader to, “Identify by title only NO MORE THAN five films first commercially exhibited in the United States during calendar year 1996 to be considered for nomination for the Academy’s BEST PICTURE Award. This nominating category is open to all members of the Academy.” Whoever submitted this one understood the concept of the bullet ballot, for he or she had named only one movie: Red Guard!
Except that apparently no one had submitted this ballot. It was still sitting here in this obscure Midwestern post-production facility with thousands of other unsubmitted ballots, years after Red Guard! had not received a best picture award nomination—or any other major nomination. And this had happened because—
Well, of course, Rep couldn’t know for sure why it had happened. But suppose Galaxy Entertainment had accumulated nominating ballots from everyone in any guild who depended on Galaxy’s good opinion, ostensibly so that they could be submitted in bulk. Send them all to us; we’ll make sure they get in, just like ward-heelers sweeping through nursing homes to collect absentee ballots two weeks before an election. The nominations sent to Galaxy would overwhelmingly favor a Galaxy production—like Red Guard! A good percentage of the voters who liked that movie, in fact, might send their ballots to Galaxy, in an effort to curry favor.
Then suppose that instead of submitting those nominating ballots Galaxy Entertainment had buried them. Ballot-box stuffing in reverse. What did the politicians call it? Vote suppression. Red Guard!’s chances had died in a Chicago post-production facility.
If Rep’s teeth hadn’t been chipped he would have whistled. Who would have thought that a major Hollywood studio and its corporate master had no more integrity than the average politician? Well, anyone who read either Variety or Joan Didion, okay, but even so. Eastman wasn’t only right, he had no idea how right he was. If he replaced fantasy computer hacking with these mailbags full of Oscar nominations in his treatment for Screenscam, he’d be pitching a documentary.
That was why these mailbags were here. And why the mailbags had to be refilled and loaded onto something. Not to mention why Tempus-Caveator wanted to acquire Tavistock for the mega-corporation equivalent of pocket change before Eastman generated too much buzz about Screenscam. These ballots weren’t just a bitter producer’s ranting or speculation or pointed questions about changing release dates and other odd behavior. They were documentary evidence, something tangible, red meat on the bones of Eastman’s theory. They were the smoking gun that could turn Screenscam from a pesky nuisance into the kind of threat they use mushroom clouds to symbolize.
Would Tempus-Caveator actually buy a whole company just to get the suppressed ballots that some idiot had left in one building years before? Couldn’t they just send someone in to steal them? That was probably what the tactical geniuses on the Committee to Re-Elect the President had said in 1972 before they sent James McCord and his buddies into the Watergate: What’s the big deal, we’ll just burgle the place and take the bugs back out. Not a happy precedent, considering the ultimate consequences of that little adventure. And anyway, the ballots weren’t the only things Tempus-Caveator needed here. There might be e-mails stored in the back-up files of computers, hard copies of memos stuck in file cabinets and in-boxes and mail-room pigeon-holes. Sure, most of it had probably been taken out or tossed out. But Tempus-Caveator couldn’t take a chance on a single scrap of paper or a single pixel being left.
A highly publicized congressional investigation had crashed and burned because Tempus-Caveator’s obliging shaft of its own studio’s movie had silenced a critical source of leaks and hard data. Now there’d be congressional committee chairmen drawing straws to jump on this thing with both feet. This week’s scandal of the century! The missing link in the China connection! Who cares if they stole our missile technology—THEY FIDDLED THE OSCAR COUNT! Tempus-Caveator couldn’t take a chance. Once that corporate behemoth realized that it hadn’t completely covered its tracks, it had to go back in and make apodictally certain that it had gotten absolutely everything—and that meant total control, for an unlimited period of time.
The thug was still hunting the key Rep had thrown, but Rep couldn’t forget his warning about staying where he was. Still, at least theoretically, the game wasn’t over yet. If, without being noticed by the guy, Rep could somehow get out the rear door of the screening room; and then get to the other door of the editing room and break through it; and do all of those things before the guy found the key and opened the door between the screening room and the editing room—then Rep could, in concept, get Buchanan out of the editing room and escape.
This possibility would be more viable if Rep could stand up, but he didn’t think he could manage it. He wasn’t sure he could even move. And he was quite sure that, if he did somehow move, the bad guy would spot him long before he reached the rear door, and would do some more unpleasant things to him.
Rep did not want this to happen. He wanted it not to happen more than he had ever wanted anything not to happen in his life.
And yet Rep did move. He pulled himself minutely along the floor, toward the back hallway door by which he had first entered the room a couple of thousand years or so ago. As Melissa had said, Rep drew lines—and somewhere between the gut punch and the uppercut he had drawn one. He was useless in a fight. Without mentally articulating it in so many words, however, he felt that as long as he could find inside himself whatever it took to do something, however hopeless and Quixotic, that could somehow redeem the uselessness. Not compensate for it or make it okay. Just keep it from being the thing that defined who he was.
He had actually managed to crawl ten feet or so when the still keyless thug noticed him. With a disgusted expletive, he hustled toward Rep.
Rep had thought he couldn’t stand up, but that was before the thug started coming at him again. Finding himself highly motivated, Rep struggled to his feet and commenced a shambling dash for the door to the back hallway. Within four strides he saw that he wasn’t going to make it. The thug had an angle to the far corner of the stage, which he used to cut off Rep’s line to the door while he closed in on Rep.
Rep already knew how Rep versus Thug would come out, so he thought it best to avoid the intersection that the thug had in mind. Close enough to smell the anchovies on the thug’s breath, Rep half vaulted and half fell up to and onto the stage. The thug followed suit. Rep’s memory bank apparently included a malicious synapse with a particularly mordant sense of humor, for it now reminded him of a classic cartoon line from his very early youth: “Exit, stage left.” Rep retreated from the thug across the breadth of the stage, scampering past the image of an elegantly appointed English country house library from the stock footage loop that the projector was still throwing onto the traveling mat. All too soon, he ran out of room.
Rep spun around and feinted with his head and shoulders toward the screen. That was the shortest route to the hallway door, so the thug checked his own onslaught and darted in the direction of Rep’s feint.
Rep essayed a panicky leap back off the stage onto the floor. He staggered, then fell, and sheet lightning bolts of white-hot pain shot through his torso from right shoulder to left hip. He felt as if he didn’t have a breath left in him as he tried to rise. Moving as much on his hands as his feet, he stumbled a few yards in front of the stage, back toward the hallway door. He knew that this time it really was over.
He was right. The stock footage now featured an office building interior
at night, so the thug was racing past a long row of desks next to black windows as he got a running start and then launched himself into a headlong dive off the stage at Rep. Rep instantly collapsed under the force of the flying tackle that climaxed the dive. The thug pulled Rep to his feet, whipped him around so that the thug was at Rep’s back, and elbowed him twice in the kidneys. Rep braced himself for further blows, but they didn’t come.
“Would you mind telling me something?” the thug asked instead of hitting him again. Rep correctly took this as a rhetorical question. “Why am I whaling on you after you went to all the trouble to hand me the answer to this little head-scratcher we have on our hands here? You’ve been trying your level best to get it through my head that I oughta be thinking about that other door like you were, and instead of being grateful I crease you up some more. Boy, there’s just no pleasing some people, is there?”
Dispensing with further commentary, the thug spun Rep around to face him, grabbed him under the arms, and with one quick squat and heave unceremoniously slung Rep over his left shoulder. When the guy stood up, Rep found his legs pinned firmly under the chap’s left arm while his torso hung over the thug’s back. The guy had reached behind him with his right hand to grab Rep’s right wrist, in the process holding Rep’s left arm against the guy’s back.
“See, way I see it,” the guy said affably, “the other door to the editing room isn’t soundproofed, so it shouldn’t be any big trick to bang through it. You bleed on my spandex, by the way, and I might use you as a battering ram.”
Without any strain that Rep could detect, the guy carried him out of the screening room and into a rear hallway that now seemed pitch dark. Forty more strides, maybe, and they’d turn the corner. Then some loud noises and other unpleasantness. Then, or sometime not too long after that, Rep and Charlotte Buchanan would die. And, slung over this ectomorph’s shoulder like a rag doll, there wasn’t a thing in the world Rep could do about it.
At about this time on a TV show they’d be due for a cleverly contrived deus ex machina, but Rep didn’t see much prospect of one here. Big screen and small screen heroes would have done something elegantly smart ahead of time, set some trap, left a subtle signal for some cop so they could hope for a miracle—a last-second cavalry charge, the opportune arrival of the 82nd Airborne Division, something along those lines. But Rep hadn’t done anything like that, and so he couldn’t.
He was still wallowing in the sheer self-pity of this reflection when he smelled something. The odor was rich, metallic, a little sweet, like thick oil.
It was cosmolene.
People put cosmolene on guns.
Then Rep heard something that went with the smell. A voice, threatening and no-nonsense, but not growling. On the contrary, almost purring with confidence.
“Stop right there!” the voice said. “FBI! What you’re feeling behind your right ear is a nine millimeter pistol, so just chill. Dead guys don’t get their convictions reversed on appeal.”
The thug didn’t chill. He spun sharply to his right while letting go of Rep’s arm, thereby slinging Rep’s torso like a black-and-blue sandbag against the FBI agent. Rep’s head hit some part of the agent. Rep wasn’t sure which part, but it was quite hard.
Then Rep hit the floor. He heard about eight seconds’ worth of grunts and punches, without any snappy patter from the thug in biker’s shorts. Rep surmised that the thug was now somewhat more evenly matched than he had been in his fight against Rep.
Rep rolled a couple of turns away from the fight and started to crawl across the rear hallway. He didn’t know where the hall lights were but he figured that turning on lights in a couple of rooms off the corridor couldn’t hurt. That looked like about the most constructive contribution he was in a position to make at the moment.
He had almost reached the other side of the hall when he heard a loud, splintering crash from around the corner, followed very soon by labored breathing and floor scraping. He knew instantly what it meant and he crawled as fast as he could, but he wasn’t fast enough. Before he could finish his journey across the corridor, something pounded bruisingly against his left hip and then—accompanied by a surprised yelp—against his spine. He concluded that someone running away from the editing room had rounded the corner and tripped over him. As if to remove any doubt, the same thing happened again a second or two later, with a yelp both higher pitched and angrier. Mixler followed by Buchanan, Rep surmised.
He scarcely even winced at the pain. After what he’d been through in the screening room, a couple of kicks in the hip and a knee or two to the spine were nothing. At the same time, he hadn’t exactly acquired a taste for this kind of thing, so he scrambled with a bit more energy into one of the work stations on the far side of the corridor and began fumbling for light switches. It only took an eternity or so to get three lights on, bathing the corridor in a feeble, indirect glow.
Rep took some satisfaction in the scene the light disclosed. The thug in biker’s shorts was prone with his hands cuffed behind him and the FBI agent’s heel in the small of his back. Buchanan was towering over Mixler, who cringed on his fanny, cornered against the corridor wall. As Rep watched, Buchanan petulantly kicked Mixler’s right shin.
“Knock it off,” the agent ordered sharply.
“He used me,” Buchanan said indignantly, as if no punishment short of the garrote could be too severe for such an offense.
“I don’t care what he did,” the agent said. “Once a guy’s in custody you don’t go kicking him in the shin.”
“All right,” Buchanan said grudgingly, and kicked Mixler in the testicles. She was winding up for a repeat performance when Rep hastily pulled her away.
“Do I need to call for backup or anything?” Rep asked.
“Already on the way,” the agent said, tilting his head toward a microphone clipped to his jacket sleeve.
“Just out of curiosity,” Rep asked then, hoping that anodyne conversation might deter Buchanan from further mayhem, “how did you happen to be here so miraculously at the precise moment you were needed, when all seemed lost?”
“I was following you,” the agent said. “Or trying to.”
“Really? Why?”
“You serious?” the agent snorted. “Residue of an explosive is found on your computer bag at an airport security check the same day a helicopter is blown up on the ground with that explosive one state and one Great Lake to the west. You refuse to cooperate with the investigating officers, who have to let you go. You ostentatiously book a flight for the following morning and check into an airport hotel for the night. Then, before you’ve been in the hotel room an hour, you sneak out of it, rent a car, and drive off—and it turns out you’re driving to the very place where the helicopter blew up. Now what do you suppose someone who’s been to detective school would do in a situation like that?”
“I suppose he’d be very suspicious and have me followed. And now that you mention it, I do recall seeing cop cars more than once in my rear-view mirror while I was driving to Oshkosh. But how did you know about my leaving the hotel and everything?”
“You may remember it was the local police who suggested the hotel. They didn’t just pick one at random. The people at that hotel know the police and they do what they’re told. You were tabbed for a tail from the moment you clammed up at the airport. The desk clerk tipped them when you hustled out. State police kept an eye on you until I could pick you up. I didn’t have any trouble until you got on that antique airplane in Oshkosh that filed a flight plan about someplace in California and ended up landing in Illinois. I was a good two hours behind you by the time I pieced together enough radio messages to get to where you’d flown, but the Coast Guard officer who took your statement had a pretty good idea where you’d gone.”
“Then you broke in here because you thought I might need help?” Rep asked, deeply grateful.
“No, I thought whoever was already in here might need help. You’ve been acting lik
e a stone cold professional terrorist for at least thirty-six hours. I got here just in time to hear the tail-end of a nasty fight and then see someone coming out of that big room. In the dark I thought I was sticking my gun in your ear instead of this surfer-punk’s. Now let’s cut the chat and give me a chance to think. I know I’m going to be arresting people, but I haven’t figured out what for yet.”
“Gee,” Rep said, “maybe I can help. How about conspiracy to interfere with interstate commerce, to-wit, the production of a motion picture and its distribution across state lines for purposes of commercial exhibition, by impairing the safe functioning of an aircraft, in violation of section twelve-thirty-eight of title eighteen of the United States Code?”
“Might do for a start,” the agent said. “At least for the guys on the floor. But what am I going to arrest you for?”
“Arrest Rep?” Buchanan squeaked indignantly, stamping her foot. “He saved my life!”
“Yeah,” the agent sighed, “but that’s probably just a misdemeanor.”
Chapter 18
As he rose euphorically from mellow dreams toward consciousness through a gauzy cocoon of pure feeling, Rep was pretty sure he wasn’t in jail. He couldn’t remember the dreams he’d just had, but they’d been a lot more fun than the jail dream. Odors finally tipped him off, just before he opened his eyes: a cloying fragrance of abundant cut flowers, and the sweet, distinctive smell of rubbing alcohol.
Hospital, he remembered. That’s right, I’m in the hospital.
It was late Tuesday morning. He had been in the hospital since sometime on Sunday, first in Chicago and then—after the United States government decided that at the moment it couldn’t think of anything to charge him with after all—in Indianapolis.
He vaguely remembered now, in fact, that he was supposed to leave the hospital today. The doctors had cleaned his wounds, doused them with antiseptic, stitched his lacerations, and bandaged him abundantly. They had rigged something to his right shoulder that was supposed to help the muscle reattach itself completely to the bone. They had swabbed out his mouth and mentioned that he might want to see a dentist soon. They had x-rayed him and scanned him and taped his ribs. They had checked his blood and his urine, verifying that the former was red and the latter wasn’t. They had dosed him with painkillers. And they had explained that they couldn’t come up with anything else to do even if the insurance company would have paid for it, which it wouldn’t. When Melissa protested that someone as traumatized as Rep obviously had been should at least be kept under observation for a few more days, the chief of clinical staff had explained that a dozen beatings as bad as the one Rep had endured were meted out every weekend in Indianapolis bars, with the typical victim being shoved out of the emergency room after twenty minutes with an intern.
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