Codename

by F. Paul Wilson

  But for as long as it did, I decided to enjoy it.

  "Do you want me to call you back?" Jacob asked.

  That was the funniest thing I'd ever heard.

  Jacob stayed with us, and eventually we calmed down enough that he could get a word in.

  "To neutralize the toxin, you'll need a water with a salinity of at least thirty parts per thousand. The Hudson River is brackish, fluctuating between 18ppt and 28ppt. Go to the East River. It will be around 35ppt."

  "We can't do that," Jack said.

  "Why?" I asked.

  "I didn't bring my swimsuit."

  That brought fresh tears of laughter, which lasted all the way to street level where I hailed us a cab.

  "East Seventy-Eighth," Jack told the cabbie. Almost to the end."

  We wove through the traffic until Jack said, "Stop right here."

  I paid – Jack had only one hand available – and we stepped out onto Cherokee Place, a street I hadn't known existed. The East River glittered straight ahead, but on the far side of the roaring FDR Drive.

  "We take the ramp," he said.

  The ramp led to a pedestrian overpass above the FDR, and down to a broad walking/jogging path. Only a low fence separated us from the water.

  "What now?" I said.

  His smile had a grim touch. "Ever hear the expression, 'Take a long walk off a short pier'? That's me. Help me get these jeans and boots off."

  Jack

  Cold didn't begin to describe what it was like to stick a foot into the East River in April.

  Putting two feet in was even worse.

  Jack stood on the river side of the fence. More precisely, on a six-inch ledge on the river side of the fence. Since the tide was in, the ledge itself was a few inches underwater. He was stripped below the waist to his plaid boxer shorts, shivering as he clutched the canister. And he was only ankle-deep.

  Chandler stood just behind him on the dry side of the fence, her arms crossed. After those delirious few minutes when they'd laughed themselves silly at the prospect of still being alive, she'd reverted to stoicism.

  "You weren't afraid to stick your finger into a leaking neurotoxin, but you're chicken to jump in the river?"

  "It's gonna be cold. Titanic cold. Leonard DiCaprio would have shoved Kate Winslet off the plank and taken her place if it had been this cold."

  Chandler remained impassive.

  "I forgot," Jack said. "The only movie you've seen is Casablanca."

  "Not true. I've also seen Jaws, and most of Lethal Weapon. But you're stalling."

  "You think this is easy? You get in here. I'm only ankle-deep, and my testicles have already retreated up into my neck."

  Chandler eased herself over the fence and settled on the ledge next to Jack, soaking her sneakers. Her expression didn't change.

  "Are you sure you're not a Terminator?"

  "That's the tenth movie reference you've made since we met. Maybe you should consider other topics for small talk."

  "Maybe you should see some damn movies," Jack grumbled.

  Taking a deep breath, he stepped off the ledge and plunged below the surface.

  GodDAMN! This was cold. His joke about his balls retracting to his neck was no longer a joke; he could practically feel them up there, impairing his ability to swallow.

  Teeth chattering, he broke the surface. Keeping the cylinder just below the surface, he yanked his finger from the nozzle. Took more effort than he'd expected; he had really wedged it in there.

  The gas started bubbling free.

  "We sure this will do it?" he called to Chandler.

  "The canister was pressurized with CO2 for dispersion. That's causing the bubbles. The toxin is binding with the salt in the water and becoming inert."

  "I hope so," he muttered to himself. "I'd hate to think I'm freezing my tuchus off for no reason."

  "Freezing your what?"

  Damn, her hearing was excellent. Maybe she really was a cyborg.

  "Tuchus. I'm hanging out with Abe too much. He's rubbing off."

  Jack put his weight on the container and kept the nozzle pointed down; as it emptied, it became more buoyant. He kept at it until the fizzing stopped. Still he hung onto it.

  "How do we know there's not a little left in here that—"

  The BANG! was instantly accompanied by the canister ringing in Jack's hands. Chandler had taken his Glock, resting neatly on his pile of clothes on shore, and shot a hole in the side, a few inches below Jack's wrist.

  The hole, and its exit point on the other side of the container, immediately began to fill with salt water.

  Jack shook his head. "Seriously? You couldn't have warned me you were going to shoot it?"

  "You would have objected."

  "Damn right I would have. There's C4 in here."

  "You can't set off C4 with a bullet. It needs a detonator."

  "What if you hit the detonator?"

  "That wouldn't have blown either," Chandler said.

  "You're sure?"

  "Forty percent sure."

  "Forty percent sure? Are you fucking kidding—?"

  And then Jack noticed her smiling.

  Great. She finally develops a sense of humor while I'm dying of hypo-freaking-thermia.

  "The tank… is full… of water," Jack said between cold spasms.

  "Let it sink. We're done here."

  Jack released it and felt it sink past his legs. He kicked to the bulkhead and tried to lever himself back onto the ledge but his muscles wouldn't cooperate.

  "A little help?"

  But she already had her hands out. "That's what hypothermia does to your muscles. Turns them to taffy."

  She helped him to his feet and over the fence, then helped him back into his dry jeans.

  "I've… never… been this cold…"

  Chandler fit herself into his arms, and it was a decent fit. "Let's see if I can do anything to warm you up."

  # # #

  She did manage to warm Jack up, back at his place.

  Then they watched the end of Lethal Weapon, and afterward she warmed him up again.

  Getting close to dinnertime, Jack suggested a Mongolian barbecue up the block, but Chandler demurred.

  "My flight leaves in two hours."

  "You're going?"

  She nodded.

  Jack couldn't think of an appropriate movie quip.

  "Well, it's been fun saving New York with you, Chandler."

  "You, too."

  "If you're ever in the city again, look me up."

  "Count on it."

  "So if I'm ever in your neck of the woods…"

  "I have no neck of the woods."

  "No way to reach you at all?"

  He watched her eyes, saw them glint.

  "I have a mail drop in Chicago. You could get a message to me there."

  "Chicago, huh? You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way."

  "Not a bad rule to live by. What's it from?" Chandler asked.

  Jack smiled. "Maybe I'll tell you sometime."

  The kiss goodbye was bittersweet.

  CHICAGO

  One Week Later

  Chandler

  Home sweet home.

  Except it wasn't home. Just a place where I lived between jobs. To eat. To sleep. To exercise. Nothing personal about it.

  Almost the exact opposite of Jack's apartment.

  I'd thought about him, a lot, since leaving NYC. Some of it was in a romantic way. But a lot of my thoughts were about the way he lived. So different from me. Or from anyone I'd ever met.

  I'd kept an eye on the New York Times and read all about the body discovered in the subway tunnel. Seems it belonged to one of the mayor's aides, and in his possession, they found a priceless necklace he'd stolen from the mayor. Seemed as if the media had gotten the story right for a change, even if they hadn't uncovered all of it. There was no wo
rd about cause of death.

  I needed a new pair of boots to replace the ones I'd dropped off the Met, so I went to Gucci on the Magnificent Mile. Afterwards I stopped at Water Tower Place and came across a movie memorabilia store in the mall. In the window was a poster.

  Bogart. Bacall. Cheek to cheek.

  Casablanca.

  I went in.

  "Is that an original in the storefront?" I asked a clerk. He was young, had horn rimmed glasses, and wore a T-shirt that read Han Shot First.

  "You mean the Casablanca poster? Ha! I wish. Those things go for thousands. It's a repro. But if you want something original, I have a lobby card."

  "What's that?"

  "Smaller. Cardboard. The studios used to send them to theaters to hang in the lobby. Same image as the poster. Want to see it?"

  "Please."

  He walked deeper into the store, and took a small, framed picture off the wall. The lobby card was faded, a corner of it stained, the edges frayed. It was nicely framed, but the $900 price tag was pretty hefty.

  "I know it's not perfect. In fact, it's pretty beat up. But you won't find another one anywhere. It's practically one of a kind."

  Which was a lot like a guy I knew.

  "I'll take it."

  I took it to my local UPS store, asked them to wrap it.

  "Did you want to include a card?"

  "No. Wait. Yes."

  I wrote, We'll always have New York.

  "How would you like to send it?"

  "Overnight."

  On my way back to the apartment, I thought about Jack a bit more. Wondered if he was thinking of me. Long term romantic relationships, in my line of work, were impossible. Friends were almost as rare.

  But I wondered, maybe, if I'd made a friend.

  Without being fully aware of it, I walked past the post office, and popped in to check the mailbox I rented. Inside was a slip saying I had a package.

  After waiting in line, I was presented with a cardboard box. No name on the return address, but the address was one I recognized. I opened it in the lobby.

  There was a card on top.

  We'll always have NY… - Jack

  Beneath it, DVDs. Jaws. Titanic. Midnight Cowboy. Scarface. All four Lethal Weapon movies. Terminator 1 & 2. Silence of the Lambs. Dr. Strangelove. Untouchables. And, of course, Casablanca.

  I smiled.

  It was the first time I'd smiled since getting back to Chicago.

  And it felt pretty good.

  Then I went off to buy a DVD player.

  Interview with Ann Voss Peterson, F. Paul Wilson, & Joe Konrath

  Joe: When Ann and I launched the Codename: Chandler Kindle World, Amazon asked us if there were any authors we wanted to approach to do a story. F. Paul Wilson was our first choice. I've been a fan of Paul's since my younger days, before I'd ever written anything, and in the last decade we'd worked on two projects together; a short story called A Sound of Blunder, and the horror novel Draculas (with Jeff Strand and Blake Crouch.) Do you remember our process on Draculas, Paul?

  Paul: Sure. We each took a protagonist and a villain and wrote the sections fairly independently in accordance with a setup from you and Blake. These were stitched together, and then we all gathered for the finale. It's probably among the top five most fun writing gigs of my career. (I'll have to go a long way to beat the fun of scripting Faster Than Light Newsfeed for the Sci-Fi Channel.) But this was even more fun than Draculas.

  Ann: Joe and I have collaborated on the Chandler stories, and our process was a bit different. For the most part, we would each follow characters. For example, in Flee, we both wrote different sections of Chandler's point of view, but Joe might concentrate on one secondary character while I wrote another. We'd communicate using the text chat in Skype, to let each other know who was doing what.

  Joe: Skype made the process faster. With Draculas, we had hundreds of emails back and forth, trading scenes and making suggestions.

  Paul: As I remember, we had a whole book's worth of emails.

  Joe: Yeah. About 80,000 words of back and forth.

  In the few years since then, technology has come a long way, and collaborating is much easier. For Fix, we used DropBox to share files when we were working on separate scenes, Skype to chat about what we were all doing, and Google Docs when we all worked on the same scene at the same time.

  The end result was written ridiculously quickly--just a few days total, for a short novel. The process was like going on a car trip, and then letting someone else drive while you took a nap. Then you wake up a few hours later, and three hundred miles have passed. I remember taking a day off writing Fix, and I came back and there were three more scenes finished. Great scenes, that didn't require any work from me.

  Can't get easier than that.

  Paul: The Skype chatting during the writing was new for me and I'm astounded with how well it worked when we hit plot or motivation glitches. We'd hammer them out in chat and then move back to the ms.

  Ann: I remember the first time Joe and I used Google docs. My background is in writing romantic suspense, so I challenged Joe to write a romance. He said he would if the hero could be his character from his Jack Daniels series, Harry McGlade. Well, all of you who know Harry realize how ridiculous this idea was. He's no romantic hero. And the book didn't end up being a romance at all.

  Joe: But it did end up pretty funny. And it was a joy to write.

  Ann: Yes, it was my first foray into writing comedy. And writing it in Google docs was a lot like a writer's version of improv. One joke building on the next. In fact, that's what I love about Google docs. Writing thrillers works the same way. Each author throws in details and twists that change the direction of the story. It's like reading a thriller and writing it at the same time.

  What's your opinion of Google Docs, Paul?

  Paul: I used it with Sarah Pinborough for a few scenes in A Necessary End -- worked out well when we had the two characters arguing. But with Fix, we had times when all three of us were typing away on the same scene at once. Mind boggling but very effective for character interplay.

  Joe: It's tough to beat writing in real time with authors who know what they're doing. There were moments when we'd finish each other's sentences, or correct them before they were done. Like jazz. Everything all fit together in a crazy mix of structure and improvisation.

  Paul: To carry on the music analogy, that works only with writers who are playing in the same key -- and we are.

  Ann: Must be all the drunken singing we've done at conferences. :)

  Joe: Ann, Paul, and I have known each other for years. We used to go to writing conferences, drink too much, then get kicked out of hotel lobbies for singing Paperback Writer at 3am.

  Ann: Which was ridiculous, because we sound pretty good. At times...

  Joe: Having been a longtime fan of Repairman Jack, it's been a fantasy of mine to write a story with him in it. But I didn't expect to be actually writing his scenes, and I didn't expect Paul to write Chandler scenes on his own. However, that's what happened…

  Paul: You had a good feel for Jack's voice, but yours was a kinder, gentler Jack than he was at that time in his life. I had to add a rough edge here and there, but otherwise you nailed him.

  Joe: Yeah, he was harsher back in 2006, before Gia and Vicky came into his life.

  You picked up on Chandler's voice immediately.

  Paul: Although sometimes I forgot she's in first person and you or Ann had to change it.

  Joe: Chandler fans are going to wonder why the love scene is tamer than in the other books, and no doubt they'll blame Ann.

  Ann: That's the way it works. I get the blame for love scenes; Joe gets the credit. Sigh.

  Joe: Those readers who know your Val Ryker series, Ann, know you're as good (or even better) writing thrillers as you are writing romance. Which is one of the reasons it's so easy to work with you; you can do everything.

  Paul: Full disclosure: I've read Chandler. I asked
that Joe and Ann keep it tame. I'm a close-the-door type when it comes to writing sex scenes. You know what they say: Write what you know.

  Joe: Having read all your stuff, I think you'd freak out your fans if it got too steamy.

  Paul: Sibs is the only novel of mine with overt sex. It needed that to work.

  Joe: Chandler is pretty sexy, and Ann and I also write erotica under the name Melinda DuChamp, so when Chandler and RJ adjourned to the bedroom, we'd forgotten how to do the fade out before the explicit stuff. I kept having to cut stuff.

  Ann: And for an explicit sex scene to work, the characters need to change during the actual act. In Fix, Chandler and Repairman Jack affect one another, but it doesn't hinge on the sex. So it wasn't necessary to show that scene.

  Joe: That's in contrast to the fight scenes. They have two big fight scenes in the book, in Central Park, and at the Met, and while beating the hell out of each other, they reveal character and motivation. They discuss violence and their different approaches to it at various times, and these scenes illustrate their own personal moralities.

  Paul: They're different in so many ways: gender, upbringing, social status, political philosophy, and yet they find common ground.

  Joe: And mutual respect. Though neither could ever operate in the other's world.

  Also, boy it was fun having them beat the hell out of each other.

  Paul: And the number of movies referenced… that was such a blast.

  Joe: That was a bit meta. As a writer, I'm also a fan of other writers. Including my co-writers. This whole project was a wink wink to fans and to peers.

  Paul: The whole idea was to have fun -- for us to have fun and for the reader to have fun. We're not gonna change the world with Fix, but if we can keep you turning pages and maybe grinning now and then, we've done our job.