“Someone,” I say, “is shooting at you. Another innocent person could get hit.” I looked up at him. “Maybe you should just disappear.”
Ossley and Emeline exchange looks again. “We thought about it,” he says. “But shit, we’re sitting right here in the middle of this huge police presence. I figure we’re safer here than outside.”
“Tell that to Loni,” I say.
There is a long silence. “Look,” he says finally. “Nobody’s going to shoot with all these cops around. It’s just not going to happen.”
“No?” I point at the drapes drawn over his window. “Then why don’t you open your drapes? Stand out on your patio and drink a beer?”
Ossley licks his lips. He looks desperate. Emeline, who is still standing behind him, gives his shoulders a little push.
“Tell him about the paradigm shift,” she says.
“I—”
She pushes him again. “Tell him,” she insists.
His eyes blink behind the thick glasses. “Well, see, it’s a shift in how everything’s going to be manufactured, right? Little 3D printers in kiosks and garages, making all the tools you need.”
“Including drugs,” I say.
“Right. Most of the stuff now that they need big factories and assembly lines to create.” He licks his lips again. “But see, if you can make—or someone in your village can make—stuff that used to need a factory, then nobody’s going to need that factory, right?”
“So,” I say, “factories go out of business.”
“Drug factories,” says Ossley. “Because once the formula gets out, people can make their medication on their own. Not just the illegal stuff, but everything else—statins for cholesterol, beta-blockers for hypertension, triterpenoids for kidney disease, antibiotics for infection …”
“It’s a paradigm shift,” Emeline says. She’s desperate to be understood.
“So drug companies go crash,” I say. “I get it.”
“Not just drug companies,” Ossley says. “But the whole mechanism by which drugs are distributed, or, um, not distributed. Suppressed.” He gives a desperate little laugh. “See, the DEA’s job becomes impossible if anyone can make the drugs they want.” He grins. “It’s a new world. Prohibition will go away because there will be too many ways around it.”
“That’s why the DEA wants to put Ossley away!” Emeline cries. “He’s not breaking the law, he’s threatening their jobs.”
I try to put my mind around what Emeline is trying to tell me. “You’re saying it was the DEA who tried to shoot you?” I say.
“No,” Ossley says, just as Emeline shouts “Of course!” They glare at each other for a minute, and then Ossley turns back to me.
“See, it’s not just the cops who are out of business,” he says. “It’s the criminals.”
“Ah,” I say. Because right now there are elaborate networks that take coca or opium poppies or whatever, and refine the raw vegetable matter down to powerful alkaloids, and smuggle that stuff across borders, and then cut it and break it into small packages and distribute it around neighborhoods … and of course there are a lot of really hard men with guns whose job it is to make sure that business is successful and protected from competition.
Whole organizations, reaping billions of dollars in profit, for whom violence is a first response, and every member of which will have to go back to shining shoes, planting beans, or working at the convenience store if Ossley perfects his technology.
“You’ll put the cartels out of business,” I say.
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people, yeah?” he says.
“And in the meantime they’re trying to kill you.”
“I still think it’s the damn cops,” Emeline says. “How would the cartels even know you’re here?”
I don’t have an answer for that, or for much of anything else. I stand.
“Better print a new identity and plan your escape,” I say. “You can’t stay here much longer.”
He chews on that while I leave.
I’m sitting in my cabana that afternoon when Hadley, the director, comes to see me. He doesn’t bring me food.
“Jesus Christ, we’re in such fucking trouble,” he says.
I’m almost grateful that he’s not oozing sympathy. He wanders over to one of the baskets of fruit I’ve been given and starts popping grapes into his mouth.
Hadley is bearded and blond and twitchy, with a full range of nervous tics probably acquired during the course of helming a series of huge, complex films, where a single mistake on his part, or on the part of practically anyone else connected with the production, could result in a couple hundred million dollars disappearing just as surely as if it had been doused with gasoline and set on fire. He’s devoted to his films with a formidable single-mindedness that’s just slightly inhuman.
“We’ve still got Loni’s two big scenes,” he says. “Completion-bond company thinks we can just cut them and nobody will notice.”
A completion bond is the film’s insurance, who guarantee that in the event of some catastrophe that threatens the production, either the film will be completed or the backers will be repaid their investment. On a big production like this, specialists from the completion-bond company are on the set a lot, mostly auditing the various departments. But though they’d obviously prefer that the film be made and they don’t have to pay anyone back, they don’t guarantee that the film will be any good—and they might well be within their rights to insist that the film do without an important subplot and two important scenes. All they care about is whether the movie’s in the can, preferably on time and under budget.
You can imagine my delight in the prospect of my first big feature being a hacked-up, incoherent mess.
“I’ve got to argue them out of it,” Hadley says. He’s pulled a pineapple out of the fruit basket and is absently tugging on the leaves at the top. But he’s too weak to actually yank any of them out, so he loses his patience and slams the pineapple back into the basket.
“Somebody made me a casserole,” I said. “It’s in the fridge. Why don’t you beat that up instead?”
Hadley looks at me. “You’ve got to help, mate.”
“Damn right I will.” I lead with my ace. “I’ll call Bruce Kravitz.”
He puts a finger to his nose. “Brilliant.”
Hadley isn’t a Kravitz client—all PanCosmos directors capable of handling such a big, complicated production were off on other projects—so he doesn’t have access to the biggest cannon in the industry. But I do.
I call Bruce right then, and he understands the equation right away: crappy film => declining careers for PanCosmos clients.
“I’ll start calling around,” he says.
I’m telling the good news to Hadley when Tom King, the line producer, strides in.
“Thought you’d better know,” he tells Hadley. “The cops have been running background checks on everyone connected with the production, and they’ve come across a problem.”
I feel my shoulders tense as I anticipate the news that Ossley is about to be arrested, but that isn’t what Tom is telling us.
“It’s the trucking company we’ve hired to move our gear around on location. It’s a cartel front.”
Hadley and I both stare.
“It really is the fucking narcos?” Hadley says.
“The trucking company’s owned by one Antonio Germán Contreras. His brother Juan Germán Contreras is one of the leaders of the Tricolor Cartel, which controls narcotics trafficking in the Gulf Coast.”
“Fuck me all standing!” Hadley says.
Tom’s blue eyes are relentless. “The Tricolors are badasses,” he says, “even as cartels go. They’ve killed thousands of people to get where they are.”
Hadley clutches his head and looks at me. “What the fuck do we do? If we fire them, they’ll kill us. If we don’t fire them, they’ll kill us anyway.”
Tom turns to me. “Sean,” he says, “do you have any
idea why the cartel and Loni are connected?”
“I don’t think they are,” I say, truthfully enough. I give the subject some desperate consideration. “Does the cartel have rivals?” I say. “Maybe it was a warning to the Tricolors from some other cartel.”
Tom sees the implications of this immediately. He turns to Hadley. “That’s our excuse to fire them. We’ll say that their presence is making the production more likely to be attacked.”
“And then they’ll kill us!” Hadley says. He paces around in a frantic little circle. He is literally gnashing his teeth.
Tom gives this some more thought. “Maybe we’ll have to pay them anyway.”
“Completion-bond company isn’t going to go for that!” Hadley says.
“We’ll talk about it.” Tom turns to me. His blue eyes grow concerned. “Sean,” he says, “how are you doing?”
“Okay, I guess.” An honest self-evaluation would be something like, “I’m really tired of having to pretend to be this grieving lover,” but I don’t think that’s in the cards.
“Because we’re all going to be under pressure to finish the film,” Tom says. “I want you to know that you can take as long as you think necessary to return to the set.” There is a groan from Hadley at this idea. Tom’s eyes flick to the director, then back to me. “But it would be a good thing to know—”
“I’m ready to work,” I say.
I can sense deep relief behind the concerned blue eyes. “Are you sure? Because—”
“Yes,” I say. “I really want to get out of here and get back on location. It’s the best thing for me.”
This makes them very happy. They leave together to put together a revised shooting schedule, leaving me alone in my cabana amid the smell of fruit baskets and flower arrangements.
Two seconds after they roll the sliding door shut, my phone rings. I look at it and see that it’s Dagmar.
Oh damn. More trouble.
“I’m on vacation,” Dagmar says. “I’m in the Virgin Islands with my husband and my daughter. My first vacation in years that wasn’t marked by riots, murder, and the collapse of society. And you couldn’t stay out of trouble for two lousy weeks, could you?”
“I’m not in trouble,” I point out. “I had nothing to do with this one.”
“You’ve lied to me before,” she says, “when people were trying to kill you.”
Well, I admit to myself, that’s fair.
It has to be conceded that my relationship with Dagmar Shaw is imperfect. She’s the woman who rescued me from obscurity and made me a star by casting me in Escape to Earth and its sequel, and for that I’m grateful—but on the other hand she’s controlling and devious and driven and far too smart, and she’s got an agenda that’s far beyond mine.
I want to be a big star and have millions of people love me. This strikes me as a modest and understandable ambition.
Dagmar, by contrast, is basically a genius supervillain who wants to take over the world.
“I’m sending you bodyguards,” she tells me. “You need looking after.”
I have a hard time summoning up the moral courage to resist Dagmar. The fact is that she knows a lot more about me than I’d like. She knows where the bodies are buried—or actually body, singular, not that this makes it any better from my perspective.
“Yeah, okay,” I say. I’ve lived in a circle of bodyguards before—at times it was annoying, but most of the time it was like having servants with guns. They have to do what you tell them, and there’s the extra bonus in that they keep the bad people away.
“One more thing,” she says. “It’s your job to make sure the guards are charged to your production. Not to my company.”
I consider this.
“I can probably manage that.” Hiring bodyguards for me would probably count as due diligence, considering both the shooting and my own past.
“And by the way,” she says, “I’m very sorry about Loni Rowe.”
“Most people would have led with that,” I point out.
“Most people,” she says, “don’t know she wasn’t your real girlfriend.”
It never occurs to me to ask Dagmar how she knows this. She has her sources, some of them uncanny.
“Keep out of trouble, now,” she says. “Don’t interrupt my vacation again.”
“I’ll do my best,” I say, and she hangs up.
It’s at that point that my nerves give a snarling leap as big, booming gunshots ring out over the compound. I dive behind the sofa.
Bodyguards, I think, might not be such a bad idea.
It turns out to be the Mexican police who are shooting. They’ve warned the tabloid reporters that the airspace above the hotel is to be treated as a crime scene, and that the drones should be recalled, but the reporters as usual ignored the warnings. Except this is Quintana Roo, not Beverly Hills, and the PFM okayed the use of shotguns to knock the drones from the skies. In addition, any stranger caught with a radio controller was dragged from his vehicle, beaten silly, and tossed in jail.
I stay indoors while the skeet shooting goes on, and falling birdshot rattles down the palm-leaf roof and rains onto the patio. In no time at all, the airspace over the hotel is free of clutter, which makes it easier for Tracee, the sound tech, to slip into my cabana after nightfall. She thinks she’s comforting me after Loni’s death, but in fact she’s easing my anxieties about a lot of things that I couldn’t explain to her if I tried.
Next day, new call sheets appear, and we find out that production will resume the following day. My bodyguards, four of them, arrive in Cancun on the same flight as Mrs. Trevanian, the agent from the completion-bond company. The bodyguards are the gents carrying weapons, but Trevanian is the one who can kill the movie by cutting all of Loni’s scenes and turning the story into nonsense. She’s a sinister figure in a navy blue suit, with a determined way of walking that sends a cold warning shuddering up my back. She looks as if she already knows what she’s willing to pay for and what she’s not.
That afternoon there’s a memorial for Loni. We all get together in one of the producer’s cabanas and take turns talking about how wonderful she was, and all the while I know Mrs. Trevanian is deciding my future in another room. I have a hard time finding anything to say at the memorial. Other people are effusive, chattering on about their happy memories of Loni; but I’m just depressed, struck dumb with grief at the knowledge that Mrs. Trevanian is going to destroy my chances of being a movie star.
I drag myself away from the memorial as soon as I decently can, and I try to learn my next day’s lines while in a frenzy of anxiety.
Tom comes to tell me after dinner that the meeting didn’t go well. Mrs. Trevanian insisted that it was not necessary to replace Loni but only to cut all her scenes. When Hadley shrieked, tore at his facial hair, and cried that without those scenes the film would be incoherent, Mrs. Trevanian said that Desperation Reef was an action blockbuster and that action blockbusters didn’t have to make sense. “Haven’t you seen the Transformers films?” she asked.
I sink deep into my sofa and restrain a whimper of despair. My visions of superstardom are being shot down, just like the spy drones, and I know they’re not coming back. This movie is going to crash, and afterwards, nobody’s going to spend another couple hundred million dollars on someone as certifiably freaky-looking as I am.
My only choice will be to go on working for Dagmar until she gets tired of me, and then I’ll be back on the beach, a nobody, like I was three years ago.
“This whole thing will have been for nothing,” I moan. “Loni will have died for nothing.”
“Yeah well,” Tom says, “what can we do?”
“Raise more money?” I say.
He gives me a skeptical look. “It’s a little late for that,” he says.
“Seriously,” I say. “How much would it cost to shoot all Loni’s scenes with another actress? We don’t have to hire a big star or anything—just some competent, reliable …”
Tom is trying to be kind. “Who else has Loni’s sex appeal? Who else looks as good in a bikini? The character’s a femme fatale.”
“California is full of girls who look good in bikinis,” I point out, truthfully enough.
Tom goes into his tablet computer and scrolls through figures. “Not counting Loni’s paycheck,” he says, “reshooting all Loni’s scenes will cost ten million dollars.”
I stare at him. Loni’s only in a few scenes. “Ten million dollars for—”
“Most of it’s for the cigarette-boat chase,” he says.
Oh Christ, I’d forgotten about the cigarette-boat chase, mainly because I hadn’t shot my part of it yet. Loni had already shot her half, and after I shot my bit, the two parts would be edited together, along with many, many expensive shots, already in the can, involving stunt doubles, explosions, and gunfire, to make it seem as if I had barely managed to evade murder by Loni and a group of cartel gunmen, all of whom get blown up in a flaming crash that cost a fortune in special effects.
“Look,” I point out, “if we don’t shoot the rest of the boat chase, we’ll save millions of dollars. Just put those millions of dollars into hiring a new actress, find some cheap substitute for the boat chase, and reshooting Loni’s scenes.”
Tom looks at me blankly. “I made that suggestion. Trevanian turned it down flat. It’s absolutely not approved.”
“But the money’s already in the budget!”
“Not any more, it isn’t!”
The cords on Tom’s neck are standing out. There’s despair in his tone. He’s already been through this argument.
For a desperate moment I consider putting up the money myself. With my savings and investments, and of course the cash sitting in the Caymans, I might just pull it off.
But no, that’s insane. Motion pictures are the worst investments in the world. Worse than investing in brand-new factories for buggy whips and antimacassars and snoods. Hollywood has a way of making people’s money disappear.
And even if no one tried to steal my money outright, even if everyone on the picture did their best, all it would take was a screwup in one department to make the movie a flop. The studio could demand a catastrophically bad reedit or bungle a last-second transfer into 3D, the composer doing the score could have a tin ear, the trailers could suck, the publicity department could be at war with the producers and sabotage the promotion, and all my money would disappear.
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