Book 1 of AI Series
Public Secrets
By
Liza O’Connor
All Rights Reserved
Any copying or recording is forbidden without the written permission of the author reproduction of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying, electronic except that allowed by Amazon.
In other words: if you buy this book anywhere other than Amazon, it’s a pirated copy. Please support Authors instead of Pirates.
We are much nicer.
All characters in this book come from the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names, titles or professions. They are not based on or inspired by any known individual and any resemblance to a person living or dead is purely coincidental.
Table of Content
All Rights Reserved
Table of Content
A Note on Punctuation:
Blurb
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
A Note on Punctuation:
Long ago when colonists of the New World got their first printing press, it was evidently a piece of crap. To make the wooden blocks fit better, the operator of the printing press decided all fragile punctuation (periods and commas) would remain within the tall dialogue tags for ease of printing. And thus began the U.S. illogical punctuation rule. Convenience ruled over logic. I understand.
What I don’t understand is why, in the digital world, we cling to this archaic illogical rule instead of returning to the logical British rule that decides the location of dialogue tags by where it logically resides.
I’m happy to say, some U.S. e-publishers are returning to the British rule of logic in this matter, and so shall I. Here forth, logical dialogue punctuation will be willfully and purposefully used in my novels. It’s not a mistake or ignorance on my part. It’s a rebellion against illogical rules of the past. I encourage all authors and publishers to overthrow silly habits of the past.
Blurb
Carla Simon is a bestselling novelist besieged by death threats and lawsuits because her stories keep turning out to be true. She is considered an extraordinary researcher, uncovering facts unknown by field experts.
The truth is far simpler and more disturbing. Carla has a software program that “fixes” her mistakes and rewrites her novels so they are error-proof both in presentation and in content. The result is beautifully written and completely accurate stories about real people and events.
Some of those people want her silenced forever. When a woman, mistaken for Carla, turns up dead in New Zealand, she must face the hard truth about her program. But first she has to survive the assassin who has never failed to deliver on a contract.
Chapter One
“I am sorry, sir, but we’ve only one seat left in first class,” the harried United Airlines woman explained.
The expression on the man’s face went from shock to anger in a millisecond. “That is not acceptable! I booked two side-by-side seats in first, and that’s what I want.”
The woman sighed. “I’m sorry, but we had a canceled flight and we are double-booked on this one. If you had checked in earlier, I might have been able to accommodate your request, but not now.”
“This is absurd! Let me speak to the supervisor.”
“I am the supervisor.”
“Then let me speak to your manager.”
The woman sighed and looked at her screen. “I have one seat in business…”
The man’s voice rose. “So move the person in my seat to business. God! Doesn’t anyone know how to do their job?”
“I can’t do that, sir. All the other passengers have checked in. If you want the business class seat for yourself…”
“I want to speak to your manager.”
“He’s not on site, sir. Would you prefer that I put you and Mr. Tyler on a later flight that isn’t overbooked?”
“Keep your voice down,” he warned. “No one must know he’s here.”
The woman sighed. “Do you want on this flight or not, sir?”
The man didn’t answer for nearly a minute. “Is there no one of higher authority than you that I can talk to?”
“Not on site.”
He took out a pad. “I want your name. I fully intend to register a serious complaint about your refusal to honor my ticket.”
The woman spelled out her name and added her employee number. As long as she didn’t lose her temper, she knew she would receive no reprimand for her actions. She tapped the screen. “The last business class seat was just taken by someone else. We have three left in coach, all of them center seats.”
He slammed his fist on the counter as his face turned a bright crimson. “You gave my seat away?”
“You never said whether you wanted it. Until I book you in, the seat isn’t yours.” Looking at the screen, she added, “There are now only two seats in coach. Do you want one or shall I book you on a later flight?”
“Book it,” he snapped. “And rest assured that tomorrow I will call the CEO of United personally to let him know of your gross incompetence and mishandling of customers.”
“Could you please ask Mr. Tyler to come up here with a picture ID so I can book his seat?”
“You don’t know who he is?”
The woman looked down at the ticket she had just printed off and read the angry man’s name. “Yes, Mr. Davis, I do know who he is, but the rules don’t change. Every passenger is required to personally check in and provide proof of identity. There are no exceptions.”
“This is absurd…” Davis muttered as he stormed away.
Moments later, he returned with the very large and handsome Chad Tyler at his side.
***
Chad approached the counter and smiled warmly at the woman. “Davis says there’s only one first-class seat available. Is there nothing you can do to correct that?”
The woman returned his smile but shook her head regretfully. “I’m sorry, there isn’t. If you had checked in earlier…but not at this late hour.”
Chad glanced at Davis. “I told you we needed to check in earlier.” He didn’t push the woman further. He thought it just desserts that Davis would be stuck in coach with a middle seat. He found the man’s habit of throwing his name about very annoying. Hopefully, with time, his new assistant would settle into his job and Chad would like him better. Presently, he was sorely missing his old assistant.
After checking his ID, the woman handed him his boarding ticket. “You should board immediately, sir. The gate will be closing in five minutes.”
As Chad and Davis hurried onto the plane, his assistant continued his non-stop harangue against the airline. Upon realizing that he had an aisle seat—Chad preferred the slight isolation of a window seat—and that his seating companion was a young woman, his annoyance with Davis increased. He now wished his assistant would be stuck between two large people and serenaded by a crying baby.
A young woman was the worst of all possibilities for a twelve-hour
flight. She was sleeping presently, but the moment she woke and recognized him as the very eligible star quarterback of the Cowboys, there would be no further peace. He looked around. Perhaps they should have waited for a later flight on which he could safely place Davis between him and the world. Unfortunately, the door was already closed and latched.
“If you’ll take your seat, sir,” the flight attendant suggested, “we can get on our way.”
Chad could feel everyone’s eyes on him. He was even recognized internationally now, thanks to a couple of movie parts and the worldwide marketing of sport clothes bearing his name. The men gave him dignified nods of approval, the women smiled. Why did their smiles always remind him of shark grins?
He sat down beside the young woman and was careful not to bump and wake her while he buckled up. The longer she slept, the better for him.
She seemed an odd occupant for an international first-class seat. She wore worn old blue jeans, frayed at the pockets and hem, and a thick piled sweatshirt with a picture of two sleeping cats on the front. He noticed a pair of hiking shoes kicked beneath her seat, her feet covered with blue wool socks. A blue baseball cap, pulled low over her face, hid her features. A few strands of blonde hair peeked out from beneath it. She had “third class passenger” written all over her. How had she managed to afford a first-class international ticket?
He shook his head. This made matters even worse. A socialite might spend the entire time trying to seduce or impress him, but at least, she wouldn’t sell her story to a gossip rag. This girl might be tempted—would be tempted—to create a fantasy romance. He could see the tabloid headline now: “My Twelve Hours with Chad Tyler.”
He looked around, hoping he could find someone who would be willing to switch seats. Unfortunately, everyone appeared to be a couple, except for him and Miss Third Class, which meant he was stuck with her for the duration of the flight. He studied her further, trying to assess the damage she would cause him.
His first impression was that she wasn’t a pretty girl, but as he studied her features, or what he could see of them, he wasn’t so certain. He could only see a portion of her face beneath the cap. She wore no makeup, but there was natural shading beneath her high cheekbones, and her lips had a full softness he found pleasing.
As much as he dreaded her waking, he had a great desire to remove the cap so he could study her more closely.
Chad was surprised by his reaction. Was he attracted to this girl, or just mystified by the lack of cosmetics? Honestly, it was the first time he’d ever seen a woman go out in public without makeup. In Texas, women wouldn’t leave their house in such a state, much less get on a plane and travel to New Zealand.
Growing annoyed by his interest in the girl, he flipped up his personal movie screen and selected his movie.
***
Carla was close to falling asleep when the man sat beside her. She peeked beneath her lashes to assess her seatmate and immediately closed her eyes: Handsome, well-dressed, in his early thirties. He also seemed familiar—maybe an actor. With any luck, he would find her plain and unappealing and ignore her throughout the twelve-hour flight. She relaxed and fell asleep.
She woke the moment someone touched her shoulder. Jeez, was the guy groping her? She tried to stand, but the seat belt around her waist wouldn’t let her. As she floundered about, she realized the person who must have touched her was the smiling attendant, not the guy staring at her as if she were nuts.
“Sorry to startle you. Did you want breakfast?”
Breakfast? Carla sat up and rubbed her eyes, wondering how long she’d slept. Her stomach growled loudly as if responding that it had been awhile. She rifled her seat pocket for the menu. “Sorry, yes. Do you have anything healthy? Preferably organically grown?”
Her seatmate handed her his menu and returned to watching a movie.
“Thanks,” she murmured and smiled as she found items she could eat. She gave the attendant her order.
When the guy glanced at her, she worried he was about to abandon his movie, which looked idiotic, and talk to her instead. So she grabbed her e-reader and found a book she’d heard great things about and gave it her full attention.
A book was an excellent tool to limit unwanted conversation. If that didn’t work, she could always resort to a movie. Fortunately, such actions didn’t seem necessary. The man had returned to his movie and posed no threat to her peace of mind.
Even when her breakfast arrived, he didn’t bother her. The guy truly understood that just because you were sitting by a person didn’t mean you had to tell them your life story. In fact, he ignored her entirely.
After breakfast, Carla pulled out her computer and downloaded her emails. Within seconds, her program had scanned and filtered them, sorting out fan mail from death threats.
She still found it odd that her writing would elicit such angry passion from so many factions. However, she had discovered that her novels and real life were not so different. Evil and goodness were ubiquitous and profound. In the midst of horror, a kind deed could occur, and likewise in the midst of the best of intentions, evil could take seed. She considered the Temple an example of both. The religion had been created by the lies and manipulations of a con-artist, yet had become in itself a positive faith that promoted family unity. However, within this positive faith, there remained men who were willing to resort to murder to keep the truth of its origin a secret.
She was acutely aware of this since several of her death threats had come from those who were angered by her writings of the Temple. Her books were fiction, her characters always figments of her imagination, but their similarity to actual people—people she wasn’t even aware of when she wrote her stories—continually caused her headaches. Despite the disclaimers, she kept the publisher’s law firm rich and wealthy fending off lawsuits.
One of her novels was about a young girl who was taken from the man she loved and forced to become the second wife to a religious con-man. A second book of the series followed the girl’s daughter, who attempted to escape the group and was treated like a prisoner for most of her life until she fell in love with her captor and returned willingly to the fold. The third book was about their son, who rose from the ranks of the Temple and became one of its most important leaders. It traced his trials and love affairs along the way and truly made the reader wonder whether his position of wealth and power was worth the price he had paid to obtain it. It was the story that had changed Carla from a moderately successful novelist to a hunted bestseller. Suddenly, lawsuits filled the courts, claiming she had slandered their plaintiffs’ in her stories. Her publisher’s lawyers had managed to settle or get the cases dismissed, but the similarity between her novels and people’s lives began to worry her.
She remembered her last meeting with Dan Anderson, the chief editor at her publishing house, right before she’d decided it was time to take a long-needed respite.
The moment she’d stepped into his office, he began his rant. “How can you be so stupid? If you’re going to use real people to base your characters on, you have to change some of the facts. Change their name, their profession. For God’s sake! It’s a simple enough thing to do!”
“But I’m not writing about real people. They come from my imagination.”
“Really? Then how do you explain this one? Harry Jacobson. Lives in a city called White Hall, Arkansas. Two children, ages twelve and fourteen. He’s in love with a librarian named Jessie Smith.”
“I know the story. I wrote it.”
“I’m not talking about the story. I’m talking about the lawsuit we’ve just been hit with by his wife, Myra Jacobson, for injury to their two children.”
“A real Myra Jacobson is suing me?”
“Yes, and she doesn’t want to settle. Whitehall is a small town, and she’s very angry about having her life laid out for all the world to see. She wants five million in damages.”
Carla collapsed onto the couch and buried her face in her hands. “I should just
quit writing and disappear.”
Dan grew nervous at the word “quit” and got control of his temper. He sat beside her on the couch. “None of that. We’ll take care of it. Who actually told you about Harry Jacobson? Was it him or some third party?”
Carla sighed. No one told her these stories. They came from her imagination and the software program she’d written. Just as the Temple stories had been written without research. She hadn’t even realized the stories were true until after they’d been published and scores of historians began to dig about and then attested to the accuracy of her details. She frequently received requests from renowned historians asking her to share her extensive research notes on the Temple—something she could not do, since she had no such notes. She hadn’t even realized the religious group was the Temple when she’d written her stories.
Dan stood up in agitation. “Fine. Don’t reveal your source. But tell me this. Can they prove you were ever in Whitehall?”
“No. I’ve never been there.”
“Are you sure? My sources say you did an accurate job describing the town. Right down to the blue hydrangeas that border the town hall.”
“I’ve never been in Arkansas,” she assured him.
He would have pushed further, except every other time she had made such declarations, the other side had failed to find any evidence that she had visited the location in her book. It was the main reason they had managed to settle so many cases for relatively small amounts.
He returned to his desk and sat down. “In the future, before we publish, I want final say on all your characters’ names. It’s such a simple thing, changing the name, but you don’t seem to grasp the importance.”
Carla nodded her consent. Her characters always came with their own name, but if he wanted to change them before publication, she would let him try. At least then, when the lawsuits popped up out of nowhere, he would have to blame himself and not her.
Public Secrets (Artificial Intelligence Book 1) Page 1