Jon McGoran is the author of the Doyle Carrick thrillers Drift, Deadout, Down to Zero, and most recently Dust Up, from Tor/Forge Books. His YA science fiction thriller Spliced will be published November 2017 by Holiday House Books. Writing as D. H. Dublin, he is the author of the forensic thrillers Body Trace, Blood Poison, and Freezer Burn. His short fiction includes the novella After Effects, from Amazon StoryFront; the short story “Bad Debt,” which received an honorable mention in The Best American Mystery Stories 2014; and stories in a variety of anthologies and publications in multiple genres, including the X-Files anthology The Truth Is Out There and the Zombies vs Robots anthology No Man’s Land, from IDW. When not writing fiction, he works as a freelance writer, editor, and story consultant. He is a member of the International Thriller Writers and the Mystery Writers of America and a founding member of the Philadelphia Liars Club. Find him on Twitter @JonMcGoran, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jonmcgoran, or at www.jonmcgoran.com.
NO BUSINESS AT ALL
BY JAVIER GRILLO-MARXUACH
The fuckwits had the temerity to call it Department Zero.
Mr. Church didn’t like to put me out there solo. Said it was for my protection. I often wondered whose protection he really had in mind. Truth is, without the blessed stabilizing influence of a Top, Bunny, Ghost — or Rudy — it was a fifty/fifty that I’d corkscrew the head off of any maroon who tried my patience.
And the guy in front of me was doing the merengue on the wrong side of that border.
His name was J. D. Goldfarb, and, to my very great credit, I cowboyed the fuck up the first twenty minutes of his thrilling description of the hidden meanings, and the expense, of his yakuza sleeve tattoos before my homicidal Lorelei started singing her song.
Because God is Love, that was as much time as J. D. needed to figure out I didn’t instinctively recognize him as the writer of the Big Time Studios production of Department Zero, and that I was most likely “below the line.” That’s a fancy Hollywood term for “the folks who do all the real work on a movie set.”
Unaware that he was saving his own life, J. D. Goldfarb quickly pushed up his chunky Prada glasses and shuffled his John Varvatos leather boots and black Thomas Pink shirt away from the craft services table, and the hell out of my sight. “Craft services,” for those keeping score at home, is another fancy Hollywood term. This time for “snack bar.” It’s where actors go to “eat their feelings.”
The craft services table is also the unofficial center of “base camp.” That’s where all the trucks, tents, trailers, and cars supporting the $150 million production of Department Zero parked while on location.
Even I can’t deny that there was an exciting zip to the place, what I imagine people must have meant when they fantasized about running away to join the circus, and there I was: watching a clown scamper back to his car while I waited for my mark to arrive.
The mission should have been simple. When MindReader intercepted an email from a Big Time Studios server with a “log line” for their upcoming production Department Zero, Mr. Church did something he seldom deigned to do. He paid attention to the movies.
On the surface, the screenplay for Department Zero did bear some resemblance to our august organization: telling as it did the story of the eponymous top-secret government unit. Headed by one mysterious “Mr. Chapel.” Department Zero also counted among its operatives a former Special Forces man named “Jack Counter.” A tough-as-nails-and-take-no-shit leader of the heavily armed and state-of-the-art “Mirror Team,” Counter stood at the bleeding edge of the fight against criminal abuses of science-fictional technology.
Of course, Jack Counter kept his personal demons — which were legion, by the way — at bay with the help of his long-suffering Mexican-American psychotherapist, named “Ryan Vazquez.” That she was Jack Counter’s love interest, in a breathtaking abdication of professional ethics, didn’t seem to set off Mr. Church’s bullshit meter in the least.
As you might imagine, it took all of one day undercover as “Special Covert Ops Technical Adviser” to the star of Department Zero to figure out that this was a case of “parallel development.” That’s a fancy Hollywood term for “someone had the same idea we did around the same time we did.”
Hell, I could have told Mr. Church that without leaving the cold one I was nursing on the lanai when I got the call.…
But being as my boss’s paranoia is a self-sustaining ecosystem with its own predatory megafauna, and that he was probably spending nights awake wondering if some sinister power was using the billion-dollar machinery of the entertainment-industrial complex to get the word out about our operation to their allies, I took pity on the guy. I figured a few days in La-La Land investigating this bunch of posers to make sure none of them had unauthorized access to government secrets would be cake.
Now, I don’t want to give away any “spoilers,” but here’s the entirety of the written report I turned in to Mr. Chapel — er, Church — on that score:
The producers of Department Zero know about as much about our operation as their screenwriter knows the yakuza from his own asshole.
But that didn’t mean everything was hunky-dory on the set of Department Zero.
First of all, Department Zero? Excuse me, I work for a living. Contrary to popular belief — and popular culture — government agents don’t sit around coming up with snappy, eye-catching names for their black-bag outfits.
Think it through: some dime-store Snowden downloads the wrong d-base, the first thing they are going to do is click on the sleek and sexy code names. On the other hand, “Department of Military Sciences”? Now there’s a designation guaranteed to cure the insomnia of even the most obsessive-compulsive spreadsheet sniffer.
Second, even though the movie’s leading man (and, according to Dr. Hu, it was shocking I’d never heard of the guy before), international superstar Cole McAdams, was pushing sixty, he played the role of Jack Counter with all the brio of a man a third that age. I’m talking Navy SEAL endurance.
Cole McAdams legendarily did his own stunts, threw his own punches, piloted his own helicopter to remote locations, never forgot his lines, and always hit his marks with spit-polish and devil dog precision.
Normally, that wouldn’t have given me any pause. A star like that? His entire life centers on his “instrument”—a fancy Hollywood term for “his body.” And what’s a guy like that got to do with his day other than keep his abs up?
With every aspect of his existence taken care of by assistants, secretaries, housekeepers, stylists, and personal trainers, Cole McAdams’s racehorselike reality consisted of two activities: staying chiseled and handsome at all costs, and collecting a portfolio of skills every bit as ridiculous as those of the characters he played.
Having earned between $5 million and $20 million, with gross-profit participation, in every one of his projects almost all the way back to his breakthrough starring role as “John Hawk” in the early eighties action extravaganza Relentless and its seven sequels, prequels, and equals, Cole McAdams had amassed not just enough wealth to own his own lavishly restored 747–100 (one of the first off the Boeing assembly line in ’67, he informed anyone who would listen) but also the free time to earn his pilot’s certification. He also designed a small private airport in the style of Eero Saarinen behind his third and largest home, located in the Arizona desert.