by Lee Goldberg
“The script is a master class in television writing,” Ronnie said. “It works on so many levels—as a police procedural, as a comedy, as a drama, and as an allegory. Emmy material, buddy.”
Ian gave up. What was the point of arguing? Why talk them out of loving it? He just wanted to be punished for writing crap. “You’re right. It’s full of hidden meaning. It’s about so much more than an FBI profiler who is actually a plant that eats men.”
“She’s the government,” Mei said, “devouring humanity and ultimately justice, as represented by Detective Hollywood, who himself is an allegory for popular culture.”
Ronnie added, “And Vine is nature, which is purity, integrity, and innocence, the enduring virtues that will always expose deceit.”
“That’s exactly what I was going for,” Ian said.
“I don’t know why you put so much effort into trying to pretend otherwise,” Ronnie said. “The complexity underlying the banality is why Hollywood & the Vine endures.”
It was amazing to Ian how some people could delude themselves, and Ronnie, being both an actor and someone who was certifiably insane, was better at it than most.
“I wanted you to read it now because I’m going to Portugal tomorrow to research my next novel,” Ian said. “After today, I won’t be able to do any rewrites.”
Ronnie set the script aside on the small table between the two chaise lounges. “This script doesn’t need any revisions. It’s perfect.”
Mei leaned forward and slid her glasses down her nose. “You never mentioned to me that you were going on a trip.”
“I didn’t know I was going until this morning,” he said. “I got a great idea and I wanted to jump on it while it’s still fresh.”
“It feels like you’re running away,” she said.
“From what?” Ian asked.
“Me? The show? Both?”
She was right, because there was certainly no Straker story waiting for him in Portugal. But what he said was: “Don’t be silly. This is just how I work. I’ll be back in a week.”
Ronnie took off his hat and held it out to Ian. “Take this with you.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
Ronnie gestured to the sky. “So nobody knows what you’re thinking.”
“Nobody cares what I’m thinking,” Ian said.
“Are you kidding me?” Ronnie tipped his head toward Mei. “She’s a Chinese defector and you’re the guy who got her out. I guaran-fucking-tee you that sophisticated spy satellites from the US and China are positioned over us right now, watching and listening with microscopic intensity.” Ian and Mei, almost by reflex, both looked up to the sky. “There’s probably someone in Beijing at this moment who can tell you with one hundred percent accuracy the percentage of hydrogen sulfide in my last fart.”
Mei lowered her head, picked up her script, and got to her feet. “I think I’ll read the script again inside.”
“I’ll be right there, honey,” Ronnie said. “We can run lines together.”
Mei smiled. “I’d really like that.”
She walked past the two men and into the house. As soon as she was out of earshot, Ronnie pulled Ian aside, took a device out of his pocket that resembled a digital voice recorder, and held it between the two of them.
“What is that?” Ian asked.
“A sonic scrambler. Totally distorts our voices to the ears in orbit. All they are hearing now is gibberish.”
“They’d be hearing gibberish without that machine.”
“Has it occurred to you, amigo, that Mei only pretended to defect and that she’s actually a double agent?”
Ian laughed. “No, it has not.”
“She could be here to spy on us for Red China.”
“I’m not doing anything they’d care about,” Ian said. “Are you?”
Ronnie shrugged. “I dabble.”
“What does that mean?”
“The assault on our freedom didn’t end when we took down Blackthorn, buddy. The New World Order, funded by the military industrial complex, is still out there watching, listening, preparing . . . waiting for their chance to strike. We both know that.”
Ian narrowed his eyes at him. “What are you up to?”
Ronnie narrowed his eyes, too. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing,” Ian said, breaking the stare. “I’m just a writer trying to put words on the page.”
“And I’m just an actor who plays a crime-solving plant on TV. Who’d want to watch or listen to us?” Ronnie gave Ian a big wink, put his white-noise device back in his pocket, lifted his face to the sky, and yelled: “One percent, motherfuckers!”
Ian resisted the urge to look up, too. “One percent? What’s that?”
“The amount of hydrogen sulfide in my farts.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I like to analyze them in my gas chromatograph.”
Ian searched Ronnie’s face for a hint of humor and saw none. “You have one?”
“Of course.”
“And you fart into it regularly.”
“You say that like it’s unusual,” Ronnie said.
“Why would you do that?”
“Why do dogs sniff butts? Think about that.” Ronnie patted him on the back and went inside to rehearse with Mei.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Guardados de Abajo, Tamaulipas, Mexico. November 10. 8:00 p.m. Central Standard Time.
In a crumbling wooden barn on a weedy ranch just a few miles south of the Rio Grande, two dozen men and women with sad eyes and dark skin sat on fruit and vegetable crates, listening to a pitch from Caesar Orona, a human smuggler in khakis. Four of his men were evenly spread out around the barn.
“We know the best routes and we have paid off the Border Patrol agents, so there’s no danger of capture,” Orona said with a reassuring smile. “Once you cross the river, you’ll be led by experienced guides on a five-mile walk to an air-conditioned bus, which will take you to Houston, where jobs will be waiting. You can pick and choose what you like. The cost is only three thousand dollars per person, which you will earn back in your first month in America.”
A woman stood up and addressed the crowd. “Don’t listen to this lying bastard. We paid him every penny we had and he left my husband to die in the desert.”
“It is not my fault if your man was fat, weak, and unprepared,” Orona said. “This is a journey for the strong in mind and body.”
“You’re a liar and a vulture,” the widow said. “We never hear from half of the families you send across. Men, women, children, they all just disappear.”
“That’s because they are rich and happy and want to forget the pitiful lives they left behind.”
Two of Orona’s men rushed up and grabbed her.
“Thief! Murderer!” she screamed as the men dragged her away.
“Can you blame her husband for wanting to escape from that drunken shrew?” Orona said.
The two men opened the back door of the barn to find a woman in black standing there holding a gun with a suppressor. It was Beth Wheeler, her hair dyed black, and with a ferocious scar across her throat, as if she’d survived a near beheading. She smiled and promptly shot the two men in their knees. The men collapsed with shrieks of agony, releasing the widow, who backed away in terror.
Orona’s two other men went for their guns, but Beth shot them both in the forehead before their weapons cleared their holsters. They dropped like sacks of fertilizer, which is exactly how they smelled, the sphincters in their bladders and bowels opening wide in death.
She marched up the aisle to Orona and aimed her gun at him. He stood stock-still. Everyone else was still as well.
“I want you to tell these people what’s really going to happen if they pay you to smuggle them over the border,” she said to Orona in perfect Spanish, but her voice was raw, a nice theatrical touch to underscore the scar on her throat. “How far will they actually have to walk?”
“Ten mile
s,” Orona said.
Beth shot him in the left knee. It exploded like a water balloon filled with blood. He screamed and dropped to the floor. She aimed her gun at his crotch. In her experience, threatening a man’s genitalia always got his complete attention. “The truth this time, Caesar, or your balls are next.”
“Fifty miles,” Orona said through gritted teeth, holding his bleeding knee with both of his hands, blood seeping between his fingers.
“Do they have a guide?”
“We give them a map,” he said. There were tears of pain filling his furious eyes.
“And if they survive the walk, what happens then?”
“We give them a ride into Houston,” Orona said.
“On an air-conditioned bus?”
Orona hesitated. She jammed the gun in his crotch. “I asked you a question.”
“In a truck,” he said.
“When the truck shows up, how many people are jammed into the back of the windowless, airless trailer?”
“Thirty.”
Beth turned now to the people in the barn, their faces etched with anger. “More like fifty, locked inside with nothing to eat or drink, shitting and vomiting on each other. And the people who manage to survive, and make it to Houston, are told that you’ll kill them and their families if they ever tell the truth about their ordeal.” She let that sink in with the audience, then looked back at Orona. “Isn’t that right, Caesar?”
He didn’t answer and just glared at her, but that in itself was a confession. She faced the room again.
“Last month, Caesar’s driver got spooked by a cop car and left a truck full of people in a parking lot of an abandoned Kmart. It wasn’t until people in town smelled the stench of a ton of rotting flesh that the bodies were finally discovered.” There were gasps of horror throughout the barn. Beth glanced down at Orona. “How many died?”
He didn’t answer. She tapped his forehead with the muzzle of her compressor.
“Forty-one,” he said.
“I hear confession is good for the soul. You’d better hope so.” Beth shot him in the head and he toppled over.
There was a long moment of silence, which was broken when the widow began to clap. The applause began to spread through the room. Beth held up her hand to quiet everyone down.
“I will get you to America, but you won’t have to pay me to do it,” she said. “I will pay you. One thousand dollars to each of your families today, plus five hundred dollars in your pockets now, another five hundred dollars when you get there. We’ll give you good shoes and plenty of food and water for the journey.”
One of the men in the audience spoke up. “What do we have to do in return?”
“You’ll be delivering heroin and cocaine for the Vibora cartel.”
Her blunt honesty was almost as startling as the murders. There was another moment of silence before another man said: “You want us to be drug mules.”
A third man added, “I’m not sticking drugs up my ass or swallowing a bag of pills to shit out later.”
Beth laughed. “That won’t be necessary. We’ll strap the bags to your bodies. Once you cross the river, you’ll be going across the land of a rancher who works for us. You will deliver the drugs to him, get your five hundred dollars, and then you’ll be taken by van to Houston, where you will be on your own.”
“What happens if we get caught on the way?” another man asked.
“You’ll go to prison and get deported upon your release.”
“What happens if someone tries to take the drugs from us before we get to your people?” someone else asked.
“We’ll give you a gun to protect yourself and our product,” she said. “You can keep it as our gift.”
The first man spoke up again, a cocky grin on his face. “What’s to stop me from running off with your drugs and your money and using your gun to shoot anyone who gets in my way?”
“We’ll kill you, massacre your entire family, slaughter your pets, and desecrate the graves of your ancestors,” Beth said, then smiled. “Who’d like to sign up?”
A dozen men and one widow raised their hands.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Somewhere over the continental United States. November 10.
There were no direct flights to Portugal from Los Angeles, so Ian and Margo took an 8:00 p.m. flight to Paris. They would arrive at Charles de Gaulle airport in midafternoon the next day and catch a two-hour flight to Porto, getting there in time for dinner.
Margo had convinced Healy to buy them first-class tickets because, she argued, that was how New York Times bestselling authors traveled when they were researching their books. The truth was that Ian only flew first class when someone else, like a publisher, a movie studio, or an intelligence agency, was paying the bill.
Once they were in flight in their side-by-side, first-class pods, Margo settled in by ordering champagne, putting on her airline-supplied slippers, and listening to music on the airline’s complimentary noise-canceling Bose headphones.
Ian ordered a Diet Coke and got to work. He opened up his laptop and reviewed the astonishing amount of data that the CIA had given them on Rolfe’s and Clemens’ activities in Porto. He could precisely follow the couple’s footsteps, in easy-to-read spreadsheets, from their arrival in Porto to the moment they’d died. Or if he really wanted to be nosy, he could trace their movements, minute by minute, going back years.
That was possible because whenever Rolfe and Clemens had their phones powered on, their carriers, operating system, and dozens of apps were secretly watching them and saving the information. Even when the couple disabled “location history” or “location services” in an app, their wishes were ignored. The couple was more closely monitored than a paroled child molester with a tamperproof GPS tracker around his ankle. And so are all of us, Ian thought.
He also had all the photos that Rolfe and Clemens had taken over the last four weeks. But if he really wanted to pry into their private lives, he could access their pictures going back years, since they’d been automatically backed up to the cloud, which was less secure than an actual cloud and wide open to the CIA and now, by extension, to him.
He browsed through some of their pictures, most of them selfies. Stan Rolfe and Briana Clemens were both young, slim, and tan, often wearing tank tops or short-sleeve shirts to show off their strong shoulders and arms. Rolfe had a carefully manicured shadow of a beard that took the edges off his angular face and somehow softened his sharp nose. Clemens had an endearingly goofy smile and a slightly chubby face that, combined with all the pictures she took of food, suggested to Ian that their hiking and climbing was the only thing that kept her from blimping out.
He closed the photo app, went back to the spreadsheet of the couple’s timeline, then reached into his bag for a pen and a Porto guidebook by Rick Steves. He opened the book to the city map and spent the next hour or so marking all the places the couple went and the exact times they visited, so that he and Margo could follow the same path. When he was done, he reached across the partition separating his pod from Margo’s and nudged her. She lifted off her headphones.
“What?” she asked.
“Doesn’t it bother you that it was so easy for the CIA to get all of this information on Rolfe and Clemens?”
“Why should it?”
“Because it proves we have absolutely no privacy anymore.”
“Privacy is so last century,” she said. “Even my mother has a Twitter account now.”
“What does she tweet about?”
“Everything and anything. What she eats, the pills she takes, what she’s watching on television, and whether my dad has left the toilet seat up or down,” she said. “News flash, it’s always up. Nobody wants privacy, Ian. TMI is the new normal.”
“TMI?”
“Too much information,” she said. “Do you live in a cave?”
“Sometimes I wish I did. I don’t like the government watching me.”
“You’re beginning to
sound like Ronnie.”
“Maybe he isn’t the one who is crazy,” Ian said. “Maybe it’s the rest of us.”
“Does he still wear aluminum foil on his head?”
“Yes,” Ian said.
“Have you ever met a sane person who does that?”
“No,” Ian said.
“I rest my case.” Margo put her headphones back on and raised the partition between the pods.
There was no more work he could do until they got to Porto. So he closed his laptop, stowed it away with the guidebook, then put on his headphones and browsed through the airplane’s entertainment options.
The satellite feeds from CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC were available, so he chose Dwight Edney’s show to see if it might provide any inspiration. Edney was on location in San Diego, standing on the shoulder of Interstate 5 with the twenty-five-lane border checkpoint with Mexico as his backdrop.
“This is the border crossing between California and Mexico, where each day tens of thousands of immigrants from Mexico, South America, and scores of other impoverished countries try to enter the United States legally. But this is a trickle compared to the hordes of sex-crazed, bloodthirsty rapists and killers who rampage into our country from Mexico over our unprotected borders in Arizona and Texas. I’m talking about animals like convicted rapist and five-time deportee Gustavo Reynoso, who prowled the streets of San Diego in his stolen Escalade of Death, looking for women to defile and kill—”
At this point, Edney cut briefly to an old ICE booking photo of Reynoso, presumably taken during one of his deportations from the United States, and Fox News footage of the Escalade he was driving with two dead women in the back.
“I applaud Attorney General Douglas’ announcement today that he intends to prosecute the ATF agents behind the Guns & Roses sting who sold weapons to Arturo Giron, the Vibora cartel leader who recently ‘escaped’”—Edney used his fingers to put air quotes around the word—“from a maximum-security Mexican prison. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? What if Arturo Giron owned those ATF agents just like he owned the guards at that prison? What if the Guns & Roses sting was just a ruse to get United States taxpayers to give the Viboras the firepower to massacre their rival cartels and take complete control of the corrupt Mexican government? Think about that.”