Fun and Games ch-1

by Duane Swierczynski

  THE LANE Madden production was supposed to be the easy one.

  After Mann received the green light, O’Neal observed the actress for a few days. He reported back, which only confirmed that Mann’s original idea was best: a “Sleeping Beauty”—late-night OD after a party. The narrative in Mann’s head went something like:

  After a career slump and well-publicized descent into booze and drugs, and eventually a court-ordered alcohol-monitoring anklet, a B-list starlet is given a second chance with a part in a new indie prestige film. Feeling good, she decides to celebrate. She can’t handle it; she relapses hard. She ODs in her Venice Beach apartment.

  If all went well, Mann thought, the actress wouldn’t even wake up for her own death. She might feel a slight pinch somewhere in her dreams, and then she’d feel wonderful, and then she’d feel nothing at all.

  Mann had a three-man support team (O’Neal, A.D., Malibu) all set to move when SURPRISE—the actress got her ass up and went for a late-night drive up the PCH. They reported it to Mann, who told Malibu to follow her, see if any opportunities presented themselves. Malibu pushed for a Decker Canyon Road crash, but the thought made Mann uneasy. Too many wildcard factors—including the idea that the actress might survive a plunge into the canyon, or live long enough to place a 911 call describing the car that had run her off the road. When it seemed that Lane was headed down the 101 toward Hollywood, Mann put a new plan into play—an old reliable. Drug overdose followed by a crash. Easy, simple.

  Only not so simple. A.D. and O’Neal had tracked her up into the Hollywood Hills while Mann staggered off to have an eye patched and Malibu stayed at the scene to give a report to the police.

  The court-ordered ankle bracelet made it easy to trace Madden’s movements through the Hollywood Hills. They’d hacked into it the day before and had been following her movements on their phones ever since. Toward the end of the chase, however, she got smart and used something—probably a rock—to break the bracelet and tossed it into a clump of eucalyptus bushes down at the bottom of a steep hill. All seemed lost until they picked up some blood splatters near Alta Brea Drive.

  There was only one house on this flat steep slope. A quick phone call revealed the owner’s name, and that settled it. The actress was obviously there, slipping inside like some fucked-up Goldilocks who knew the bears were about to devour her ass.

  They weren’t bears, though.

  They were highly trained professionals, part of something they loosely (and semijokingly) referred to as the Guild.

  The Guild was a small brotherhood that specialized in invisible acts. They considered themselves the unseen architects of modern history. No footprints, no forensic evidence, no hint of the hand behind the act. Mann and her kind didn’t provide something as crude as a “hit”; rather, she strived for an airtight death narrative. You could look, but you would not find anything. You could question, but there would be no answers—other than the obvious.

  Few people knew they existed.

  Those who did called them by their nickname:

  “The Accident People.”

  O’Neal and A.D. were ordered to watch the house until Mann could make it up to Alta Brea. Once Mann arrived, O’Neal and A.D. reported that no one had entered or exited in the past hour. With one good eye—and oh, the cut eye almost made it personal, it truly did—Mann noticed a small white house down the hill below Alta Brea Drive. A quick call to Factboy confirmed that the occupant, an actress, was away on a horror-movie shoot in Atlanta. The house would be a perfect staging area. Mann broke in, secured it, then set up a surveillance post.

  So now Mann watched from below and started to craft a new narrative:

  Drugged-out B-list starlet crashes her car on the 101, staggers away in a haze, thinks she can just leave her mess behind for someone else to clean up. Wanders into some poor bastard’s home (celebrities were known to do that, too) only to die in a guest bathroom… or no, wait, she wanders the hills for a while, which explains the scrapes from tree branches, and the grass stains on the bottoms of her feet.

  Once they had her again and made sure she was dead, they’d dump her in the canyon. Even better: march her body out to the edge of a mini-canyon, then whoops, good-bye, Lane Madden.

  Cars and drugs were popular methods of celebrity death, but accidental falls were surprisingly popular, too. Maybe Lane would enjoy a lucky trifecta? People wouldn’t focus so much on the wrecked car or the speedball as on her stupid plunge off the edge of a cliff in Hollywoodland. That was it. Right there. Lane Madden’s final narrative.

  But they had to get her out of the house first.

  And they had to do that just right.

  Celebrity deaths were always scrutinized. By reporters, by cops, by fans. Even your average American idiot, having put in years of forensic study watching CSI, knew that the evidence told the story.

  So if you needed everyone to believe your narrative, you had to get the details perfect.

  Mann could not kick down the doors, guns in hand, screaming, looking for their target. That was not being invisible. They had to use their brains and pinpoint her location by other means. Mann was smart, and was regarded in extremely small circles as the best. Lane Madden was a vain little bitch, probably still out of her mind from the injection. This shouldn’t be too difficult…

  They needed to operate within the parameters of the narrative. Narrative was everything.

  But first, they needed to get rid of the intruder.

  He had shown up unexpectedly. Parked right in front of the garage, then went to the mailbox and flipped the top like he owned the place. Which was not the case. The owner was a man named Andrew Lowenbruck, who was currently landing at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow. Who was this guy? Did the actress figure out a way to call for help? Had she left him a note in the mailbox somehow?

  This intruder was fucking with Mann’s narrative. She needed him identified, then eliminated from the scene.

  “Okay, go ahead,” she told O’Neal. “Take it.”

  Number of vehicles stolen in Los Angeles every year: 75,000.

  Hot-wiring cars? For punks and crackheads. O’Neal preferred to go high tech: hacking the onboard navigation system, popping the locks, and firing up the engine courtesy of a hunk of metal flying twelve thousand miles above the surface of the earth. It took maybe fifteen, sixteen seconds from the first keystroke. He was getting better at it all the time. New skills, new ways to pay the bills.

  Then again, O’Neal shouldn’t go breaking his arm to pat himself on the back. Rental cars were notoriously easy picking. Nobody thought twice about override commands and remote starts—if anybody was looking. Which they weren’t.

  The only disappointing thing was that the vehicle was… well, a Honda. Perfectly okay car, don’t get him wrong, if you were a suburban dad who worked in a cube and equated kinky with jacking off to photos of a New Jersey Housewife. The instant he slid himself behind the wheel, O’Neal felt that much lamer. Good thing he’d be driving it for only a couple of minutes—off the road and into a safe haven. In this case, a storage facility on Vine, right under the 101.

  O’Neal made an efficient search of the interior, reporting details to Mann over a hands-free unit as he worked.

  “Okay, nearly full tank, one twelve on the odometer. Small black duffel bag in the passenger seat.”

  Then O’Neal popped the glove box and found the rental papers—the driver had simply stuffed them in there, like every other human being on the planet.

  “Vehicle rented to a Charles Hardie, eighty-seven Colony Drive, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania one nine one five two.”

  “Good,” Mann said, then thumbed the vitals into the phone, sent it off to the researcher. Within minutes, a short but complete summary of Charles Hardie’s life would be winging its way back.

  Soon the man who called himself “Factboy” had the basics nailed down. Factboy knew better than to bore Mann with the minutiae of Charles Hardie’s life—high sch
ool attended, last book checked out of the library, blood type. What mattered now was what Hardie did for a living. Why he was here, at this address on Alta Brea Drive, right now, in the middle of their business.

  “He’s a former consultant with the Philadelphia Police Department,” Factboy said. “Now he’s a freelance home security specialist, working with an agency out of Dallas.”

  “Home security?” Mann asked. “We didn’t trip any alarms.”

  “No, he’s not a guard. Hardie’s just a house sitter. The owner of the house, one Andrew Lowenbruck, is away for a month. Hardie’s here to watch the place.”

  “And he shows up now, of all times?”

  “Seems legit to me. Lowenbruck left just last night according to the agency’s records. Hardie caught a red-eye, made it here this morning.”

  “So he wasn’t called in because of the target,” Mann said.

  “There’s no indication. No phone calls have been made from the residence, or from the target’s phone.”

  Factboy waited for the smallest indication that Mann was impressed by how much he’d cobbled together in such a short span of time, but Factboy knew better. Mann wasn’t impressed by miracles; they were expected.

  Factboy had a large array of digital tools at his disposal, but lately his weapon of choice was the National Security Letter, something the FBI invented over thirty years ago but really came into its own after the Patriot Act. NSLs were lethal little mothers. If presented with one, you had to open up your files, no questions asked. Didn’t matter if you were a used-car dealer or a US Customs official—all your base belong to them.

  And the NSL came with a nifty feature: a built-in gag order, lasting until your death. Say one word about the NSL, and you can be thrown into prison. Before 9/11, the FBI used NSLs sparingly. But in the hazy, crazy days that followed, the FBI handed them out like candy corn on Halloween—something like a quarter of a million in three years alone.

  Factboy had quickly learned how to fake them. He could even send one digitally. No voice, face, no human contact whatsoever.

  This was just like his relationship with Mann—which, like “Factboy,” was a code name. They had never met. They probably never would. But hey, as long as the checks cleared.

  “You said he was a consultant,” Mann said. “What kind?”

  “I’m still working on that.”

  “Work harder.”

  Mann disconnected. Factboy stood up, slid the phone into the pocket of his cargo shorts, stepped on the metal handle to flush the toilet, then opened the stall. The men’s room was crowded. He walked over to the one open sink, splashed some lukewarm water on his hands and face, then went outside to rejoin his family.

  They were on vacation.

  Factboy had a real name, but he made it a point never to reveal it. His real identity wasn’t even known to Mann, who accounted for roughly seventy percent of his income. Factboy presented himself as a ghost in the system, a man (or maybe a woman!) living off the grid somewhere in a country where extradition laws do not apply, with servers spread throughout the globe with a nominal headquarters in Sweden. Trying to catch Factboy would be like trying to grab a fistful of smoke—physically impossible. But if you needed information quickly, Factboy could find it for you quickly, cleanly, untraceably.

  In reality, Factboy was a suburban dad, thirty-four, with two laptops, a smartphone, and really, really good encryption software.

  And right now, he was on vacation with his wife and two kids at the Grand Canyon, ready to have a nervous breakdown.

  This was unusual for Factboy, who spent most of his waking hours in his attic office “programming.” A total lie. He was busy retrieving information, then selling it to people who would pay him a lot of money for that information. This took anywhere from ten seconds to a couple of minutes, depending on the type of information. Nothing—nothing—took more than a few minutes. The rest of the time Factboy watched 1980s-era horror movies, prowled message boards, and jacked off. Which was pretty much his life twenty years ago, too, come to think of it, down to the same movies. A wife and kids hadn’t changed things all that much.

  The problem was, Factboy had to be available to Mann more or less all the time. While the info retrieval might take ten seconds, the request might come in at 3:13 a.m., and Factboy was expected to respond within seconds.

  Factboy excused himself to go to the bathroom quite often.

  So much so that Factboy’s wife thought he had irritable bowel syndrome. Instead, he was usually sitting on top of the toilet, thumbs flying over the tiny keypad on his phone, fielding a request, hoping he wasn’t too late.

  Then he’d flush.

  Lately, though, the wife had started in on him about spending more time with his family. Usually this was something that politicians or executives said after being caught with a dead ladyboy in their secret apartments, but the wife meant it for real. More time. Quality time. She thought they should travel. They should go see the Grand Canyon, she said.

  Factboy and his family lived in a modest three-bedroom in Flagstaff, AZ—just an hour away from the Canyon. They’d never seen it.

  Sensing that refusal might lead to separation, possibly divorce, and a smart enough lawyer might start taking a close look at Factboy’s revenue streams, jeopardizing pretty much everything, Factboy caved.

  They went to the Grand Canyon. Stayed at the El Tovar, the oldest resort hotel, which looked like a huge pile of smoky timber perched within yards of a big gaping hole in the earth.

  Within minutes of arriving at the South Rim, Factboy started having panic attacks. He wasn’t particularly afraid of heights, though the mile plunge to the bottom of the canyon was kind of terrifying. Instead, he found that he was completely freaked out by the lack of a fence. Not even a halfhearted little mesh-wire number. Not so much as a guardrail. Nothing. And there were kids everywhere—Factboy’s kids included—dancing, posing, goofing around, completely oblivious of the fact that certain death was just one fucking ooopsie away. Factboy couldn’t bring himself to look. He couldn’t bring himself to not look.

  And then he received his urgent request from Mann.

  One look at the screen and he told his wife—

  “I’ve got to use the facilities.”

  The “facilities”: marriage code for number two.

  “Now?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  “Everything in place?” Mann asked.

  “Yep,” A.D. said. “All he has to do is step outside.”

  7

  Who’s they? I want you to tell me who they is.

  —John Aquino, Blow Out

  HARDIE COULDN’T believe what his eyes were transmitting to his brain.

  “Where the fuck is my car?”

  “Get away from the window,” the girl scream-whispered behind him. “Please, I’m begging you. You looked, you’re upset, now move the fuck away before something really bad happens.”

  “It was just there.”

  “Are you really this dense? Or haven’t you heard a word I’ve said?”

  But Hardie was too focused on the stretch of asphalt in front of the garage. The sight absolutely boggled his mind. It didn’t make sense. When he finally glanced down at the psycho chick crouched next to him, mic stand in her hand, he decided he’d had enough. He darted for the door. He thought he was moving pretty fast, but she was a lot faster, even limping. The girl easily closed the distance, slid herself into the space between him and the wall, and again pointed the edge of the mic stand at the hollow of his throat.

  “No,” she said.

  Hardie tried to push her out of the way. “Move.”

  “They took your car, don’t you realize that?”

  “Well, I’ll just force Them to give it back. Move.”

  “You can’t go outside. You go outside, you’re dead.”

  “I can still catch them.”

  Hardie was half-serious about that. The roads up here were twisty. Winding. They—whoever—just s
tole it a few seconds ago. He heard them do it. Maybe he had a chance—slim, he knew, but it was still a chance—at catching them on foot. But then what? Leave this girl here, by herself, in the house he was supposed to be guarding?

  She hissed at him:

  “Get down! It’s bad enough they saw you!”

  Hardie sometimes marveled at how quickly things could spin out of control. He’d been in L.A. only, what?… ninety minutes total?… and he’d already lost all his possessions except for the wallet in his back pocket, the useless set of car keys in his front pocket, the cell phone with no service, and the clothes on his back. He’d jumped off a roof and landed in unidentified animal crap. Hardie half expected this crazy bird to force him to strip, then make him jump off the back deck into the wilds, just to show him—that’s how Hollywood does ya.

  Then Hardie remembered that his carry-on bag had still been in the passenger seat of the Honda Whatever, and a tiny knot of grief formed in his stomach.

  Hardie believed there were two kinds of things in the world. Things that could be replaced, and things that could not. He’d spent the past three years giving away or tossing everything in his life that could be replaced. This turned out to be most things in his life. Clothes, CDs, kitchen utensils, old books. All of it junk. You could soak it in lighter fluid and it wouldn’t matter. Because somewhere, out there, was another copy. But his duffel bag, the one he never checked at airlines, the one that never left his side, was full of things that could not be replaced.

  And now it was gone.

  Hardie pulled the cell out of his pocket. Fuck this. At the very least, his rental car was stolen. He needed to report it.

  The girl touched his arm. “They won’t let you call.”

  Hardie eyeballed her. “What do you mean?”

  “I tried to use my phone, too. They’ve stopped the signals.”

  Hardie checked the screen. No bars. Just like earlier, when he tried to call Virgil. At the time, he thought it was just because he was up in the Hollywood Hills, where service was shitty. Maybe he’d get lucky.