Regent Beverly Wilshire
Beverly Hills, California
December 19, 5:37 P.M. EST
Charles Osgood Harrington IV—known as C-Four since he was thrown out of college—was a total pain in the ass. Everyone knew that and agreed on it. The media loved to hate him and ran paparazzi pictures of him almost daily, usually peeing in a sacred fountain in Italy or in a perp walk
after a DUI, or those infamous pictures of him during his first and second stays in county correctional facilities or work-release camps. C-Four’s father’s lawyers hated him because he was so irredeemably arrogant and unrepentant in court that he instantly alienated judges and juries. The members of the various boards on which his father, Charles Osgood Harrington III—Three to his cronies and the press—was the chair. The stockholders hated him because each time his personal life detonated onto the headlines the shares in the family companies—Harrington Aeronautics, Harrington-Cheney Petrochemicals, Harrington and Milhaus Fuel Oil Company, and the fourteen others—tumbled. The administration of Yale hated that they were coerced into pushing him through with a degree even though he rarely attended a class and was never sober, but the Harrington family and their friends wrote checks larger than the outrage of the board of regents. Even C-Four’s friends only stayed with him because they thought he was richer than God and liked to show it off by spreading cash around. On a whim he flew the cast of
Gossip Girl
to a clothing-optional island. Another time he bought a hotel just to throw a party, and once he purchased a Mercedes dealership on a bet and then lost it in a run of poker hands that same night.
When his name came up on programs like
Dr. Phil
and
Ellen,
kindhearted but misinformed guest stars speculated that C-Four suffered from emotional damage that was the result of having been too famous even from birth. They discussed how the rich and privileged bear a terrible burden because they can’t be real and said that C-Four’s escapades were no different from the early excesses of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, both of whom had been romantically linked with him at one time or another, at least according to the tabloids.
Three only had one son. His daughter, Victoria, had married a civil-rights lawyer from Boston and was now only tolerated at Christmas. The keys to the kingdom would be passed to C-Four.
Father and son sat in leather chairs by a penthouse window in the Regent Beverly Wilshire. A tall Christmas tree sparkled and glowed behind them. Neither of them had decorated the tree and neither cared who had. Three had barely registered that there was a ten-foot tree in the room. C-Four had draped unused condoms on it like tinsel.
“I would prefer you not go,” said Three.
His son waggled the engraved and gold-embossed card. “Are you fucking kidding me, Dad?”
“Watch your language.”
C-Four snorted. “Oh, right, ’cause you don’t want me to spoil my image.”
“No, I just don’t appreciate you talking like you’re from the gutter.”
“Fuck that.”
Three fumed into the amber depths of his Scotch.
“This gig is going to be too cool to miss.” He reached for the return envelope, which had fallen to the floor. He fished a pen from his pocket, scrawled a brief note, stuffed the card into the envelope, and licked the glue. When he was done, he held it up between fore and index fingers. “You should be happy they even invited me.”
“If I had known about it in time I would have made sure you weren’t invited. It isn’t appropriate that you should go. No one at Yale remembers any ‘good old times’ with you. At best you were a figure of fun, and I suspect you received that invitation out of pity.”
“Thanks, Pop. Always nice to know that you care.” C-Four shook his head and finished the last of his drink. “Besides, this isn’t one of those über-mysterious Inner Circle things. And it’s not for you and your crew of vultures and thieves. For once it’s my generation instead of the corrupt old farts you hang out with.”
“‘Corrupt’?”
“Sorry, Dad, was that the wrong choice of words? Would ‘insanely manipulative’ be better?”
“Charlie …”
“Don’t even try to call me that. And don’t pretend that I don’t know what you and your Inner Circle Bonesmen are all about. Christ, everyone with Net access knows about the shit you assholes pull.” C-Four held up the sealed return envelope. “Besides … this is going to be the party of the century.”
C-Four got up and walked over to the wet bar, mixed a complicated drink, drank half of it standing there, and then strolled to the Christmas tree.
“In what way?” demanded Three.
C-Four took another pull on the drink. “I doubt you’d …” His voice trailed away and he stood frowning at the tree.
“You doubt I’d what?” snapped his father.
“Hm? What?” C-Four looked at his father with a confused smile on his face. He touched his cheeks. “What?”
“You said you doubted that I’d—what?”
C-Four’s confused smile flickered like a lightbulb whose filament was burning too thin. He shifted uncertainly and Three could see that there was something wrong with his son’s face. It looked weirdly uneven. Knobbed. Almost …
blistered.
“I …”
“Charlie, what’s wrong?”
His son tore at his collar, exposing his throat. All along his upper chest and neck dozens of red spots were appearing, rising from pinpricks and swelling into boils even as the young man stood swaying.
“Good God!” yelled Three. “What the hell did you do to yourself?” C-Four’s fingers twitched and the glass tumbled from his hands. It hit the thick Persian carpet, bounced, and splashed ice and alcohol over his bare feet. But the young man did not seem to notice. He stood there with a half smile, brows knit, head cocked into an attitude of listening as if he was pondering some great internal mystery. Boils blossomed across his face and on his hands. When he touched the ones on his face, they burst with sprays of red mist.
“Careful, dammit … ,” his father said, starting in his chair. Then he froze in place as C-Four raised dreamy eyes toward him.
“I feel really …”
And blood exploded from his mouth and nose.
“Charlie!”
Charles Osgood Harrington III erupted from his chair as his son’s knees suddenly buckled and he dropped. C-Four landed on his knees and fell sideways against the tree. The whole mass of it—tree, tinsel, ornaments, condoms, and fairy lights—canted sideways with the young man on top of it. Blood geysered from C-Four’s mouth and the boils on his skin burst. His father was thirty feet away and he crossed the room in a shot.
But C-Four was already dead.
Starbucks
Southampton, Pennsylvania
December 19, 5:42 P.M. EST
Hanler saw me and stood as I approached. He offered me his hand and gave me a single-pump shake that was dry and rock hard. Marty Hanler was in his mid-sixties, with receding gray hair and a deepwater tan. He had bright blue eyes that looked merry but were as focused as a sniper’s eyes. He peered past me out the window.
“Is that Circe? Wow … she’s really … filled out.”
When he straightened he caught sight of my face. My expression flipped some kind of switch inside his head, because immediately the caveman receded and the writer stepped forward. He cleared his throat and looked at Ghost. “That’s a good-looking shepherd. Is he friendly?”
“Occasionally.”
“Can I pet him?”
“Can you type without fingers?”
He stuck his hands in his pockets.
We ordered coffee and sat in the back and there was some nice cover noise in the form of a mixed tape of pop stars singing Christmas songs. Ghost lay down between our chairs, within petting reach, but Hanler didn’t rise to the bait.
I’d met Hanler through Mr. Church, but I’ve known about him since college. His espionage thrillers always hit the number one spot on the bestseller lists. So far, four of them had been made into movies. Matt Damon starred in the last one. I owned the DVD, but I didn’t say that to Hanler.
“Mr. Church said that you had something for me.”
“‘Church,’” he said, smiling with teeth so bright I felt like I was getting a tan. “I’m still not used to calling him that. He’ll always be ‘Deacon’ to me.”
“Is that his real name?” I said, pitching it to sound offhand, but Hanler flicked his shooter’s eyes at me.
“Good try.” He laughed. “Ask him.”
I grinned. “Which means that you don’t know, either.”
He shrugged and sipped his coffee. “Okay, I called the Deacon because I think someone took an idea I had and maybe put it into practice in the most terrible possible way.” He cut me an amused look. “Settle down, Dick Tracy … . I’m not here to confess. I said I may have come up with the scenario, but I’m not part of a global criminal conspiracy.”
“Hit me.”
“It’s a plot for a novel. The Hospital thing.”
“When was the novel published?”
“That’s the weird part. I’ve been knocking the idea around for a while. It’s something I thought I’d do if I ever started a new series. My Rick Stenner books are all set in the U.S. except the flashback one,
Black Ops,
which is set during the invasion of Baghdad. But I’ve been wanting to spin off the Xander Murphy character for a while now. He was a supporting character in
White Gold,
and the readers really took to him. Kind of lowrent James Bond type that—”
“I know,” I said. “Jude Law played him in the movie.”
“Right, right … so you know. Okay, well, I figured that if my writing schedule ever opened up a bit, or if the Stenner books got stale, I’d do some Murphy books. It would be a switch to—”
“Slow down … . You’re saying that the Hospital scenario is from a book you
plan
to write but haven’t actually
done
anything with?”
“Right.”
“There are no early drafts?”
“There are no drafts at all. Never got that far.”
“Notes? Plot outlines, anything like that?”
“Nope. The idea’s still up here.” He tapped his skull. “That’s one of the reasons I’m so concerned. I mean, if it was something that I’d already published—”
“Then we’d have six billion suspects.”
“I don’t sell quite that many books.”
“Anyone can read your stuff in a library,” I said.
“Good point. On the other hand, if it was something I’d written but which hadn’t yet been released, that would narrow it down to the staff at my agent’s office, my lawyer, my family, and my publisher. Still a lot of people, but a narrower field.”
“So, who have you told about this plot?”
“I belong to a couple of writers’ organizations and we have conventions every year. The pros do a couple of panels for the fans, and then we decamp to the closest bar and spend the rest of the weekend networking or bullshitting. You know, gossip, industry news, that sort of thing. After a couple of rounds we start one-upping each other about what would make the absolute best kick-ass novel and how we’re the guy to write it.”
“And that’s where the Hospital idea came in?”
“Yeah. This was a convention called ThrillerFest. I was at the bar in the Hyatt with a whole bunch of other writers. We were all hammered and we were doing the one-up thing with the perfect thriller plot. I told them about the Hospital bombing.”
I said, “Tell me why you picked that hospital.”
“You probably can’t tell from my accent, but I was born in London. Grew up in Whitechapel, about two blocks from the hospital. We emigrated when I was seventeen and I lost my accent in college theater courses. My first job, though, was as an assistant orderly at the London. Mostly I pushed a laundry cart around, but I was in every part of that hospital every day. I could draw a diagram of it from memory, or at least a diagram of the old building. So, when I needed a landmark for my imaginary terrorists to blow up, I picked that one.”
“Write what you know,” I suggested.
“Exactly.”
“So, who stole your idea?”
He grunted. “I’m pretty sure Osama bin Laden wasn’t doing shots with us that night.”
“When was this?”
“Couple of years ago. July 20 09.”
“Who was there?”
“In the bar? Christ,
everyone
. Place was packed. People were coming and going. I can’t tell you for sure who was in our conversational circle when I talked about that scenario. We were all pretty well hit in the ass. It was late, though. Midnight at least, which means that the party was in full swing.”
“Give me some names.”
“Well … David Morrell was there for some of it. He asked me later if I ever wrote the book.”
“Morrell?”
“Guy who created Rambo? Who else? Let’s see … . Gayle Lynds was there. Sandra Brown, Doug Clegg, Steve Berry, Vince Flynn, Eric Van Lustbader, Ken Isaacson, John Gilstrap …”
He rattled off a long list of names. I recognized some of them from Hugo Vox’s Terror Town think tank. I wrote down all of the names. By the time Hanler was finished rooting around in the rubble of that drunken memory we’d compiled a list of twenty-eight names. Of those eleven were definites. Four of them were hazy maybes. The rest had all been at the table, but he didn’t know when or for how long.
“Anyone else there?”
“Maybe, but I was seeing pink lobsters by the time I rolled out of there. I should have been arrested for the way I drove the elevator to my floor.”
We sat in silence for a few moments, drinking our coffee, thinking it through.
“Your plot,” I said, “did it involve bringing in oil or rubber in large quantities? Or pallets of tires?”
He gave me a shrewd look and for a moment I could see the brains behind the bestseller bluster. “You’re talking about the black clouds? Yeah, I saw that on TV and thought it was odd.”
“Not part of your story?”
“No.”
“Any religious themes in your plot?”
“Just the usual stuff. Fundamentalist Shiites. Not very original, I’m afraid, and I’d probably have changed it in the writing. The genre’s moving away from using Muslims as the go-to bad guys.”
I said nothing.
Hanler sipped his coffee and stared up at the ceiling. “It would be kind of weird if a writer was involved in this sort of thing,” he said. “We cook up the worst possible catastrophes. Brilliant crimes, terrorist campaigns, mass murders. We get inside the heads of serial killers and extremists. Good thing we’re the good guys.”
“If all of you are,” I said.
“Yeah, there’s that. Sorry this wasn’t more useful. And I hope like hell that I didn’t waste your time.”
Me, too,
I almost said aloud.
We stood and shook hands. Hanler eyed me for a moment. “Look, Joe, if it turns out that it was one of the people at ThrillerFest or someone from the T-Town group, someone who used my idea …”
“Yeah?”
“Put the son of a bitch down like a rabid dog.”
“Why? For stealing your idea?”
“No,” he said without humor. “Because it means that I’m partly responsible, however far removed, for the deaths of four thousand people. I have trouble sleeping at night as it is. I think knowing that for sure … Christ, I think that might kill me.” He sighed and smiled a weary smile. “Come on; let me buy you one for the road. And something for Circe and your pal.”
And that fast everything went all to hell.
There was a series of firecracker pops somewhere outside and the whole front set of windows of the Starbucks exploded inward.