I pretended to know what the hell she meant, and was told that a Town Car would pick me up at my hotel (the production had arranged for lodging during my consultancy).
My gambit had worked.
I figured their next step would be to put a gun in my face right after I got in the Town Car… take me somewhere remote, rough me up a little bit, ask how much I knew, and then, realizing I knew nothing, release me and have me discreetly fired from the production… perhaps after giving up some useful clue about the real reason why Cole McAdams had the healing ability of an axolotl on meth.
What I did not expect was that Cole McAdams would call me in to consult on the scene being shot, and that he would listen intently to my advice on handling a supersonic fléchette gun with honeycomb rounds, and then keep me on the set and ask me spycraft questions between takes for the next ten hours. What I also didn’t see coming was that while this was going on, Blond Mountain not only ran the dossiers on my manufactured identity but also ascertained my threat level, and then left the set, snuck into my hotel room, and injected every one of the bottles in my minibar.
So basically, the party invitation and Town Car had been an elaborate ruse to keep me from being suspicious when I opened the bottle of Starbucks Iced Coffee in the back of my minibar (the production was paying my expenses, so I figured why not live a little?) and guzzled down enough gamma hydroxybutyrate to drop a water buffalo.
There’s a lot of shit that pissed me off about this mission, but fucking with a man’s minibar? That’s just mean-spirited.
I don’t always get drugged and abducted, but when I do, I tend to wake up duct-taped to a chair and naked. So tonight was a definite improvement.
I came to on a chair, no duct tape, in a midcentury modern office in a large house in the Hollywood Hills. The view alone — on a clear day it must have gone all the way to Long Beach — must have set Cole McAdams back well into the eight figures. Cole McAdams looked fabulous, etched against the setting sun in gray trousers and a tight, long-sleeved black oxford with the top three buttons undone.
Behind me, I noticed three things. First, Blond Mountain, in his bodyguard-black suit with a black T-shirt underneath. Second, another man, shorter, with close-cropped steel-gray hair, wearing a navy three-piece suit that would not have looked out of place in a board meeting in a London bank in the early 1960s. The third thing I noticed was a wall festooned with trophies on shelves.
Even I, with my meager knowledge of popular culture, could discern the conspicuous absence of an Oscar. That made me chuckle.
“We don’t want to hurt you, Hank,” declared Cole McAdams with a probing smile, “and we don’t want there to be any trouble, but we got trade secrets of our own around here, and we just need to know that you’re cool.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Silence…,” Cole said, letting it hang there with a charming shrug, then adding, “And no more phone calls to your cronies who went freelance in the biotech world after the Gulf War pork barrel emptied out.”
That reply told me everything I needed to know.
Cole McAdams’s security personnel had dug deep into the layers of my cover and learned that “Hank McClaine” had been discreetly released from his duties in the CIA because of a substance abuse problem, and that while no malfeasances had been allowed into his public record, he had not been allowed his complete pension.
This meant that “Hank McClaine” had just enough red on his column to keep him from a lucrative job commenting about state affairs on conservative radio and television. This meant that “Hank McClaine” was very lucky to be sent out to consult on movie sets every once in a while.
Bug did his work beautifully on this one. And that work was directly responsible for my not being tied up, stripped down, and hot-prodded in some orifice not designed for that sort of action. The life of “Hank McClaine” had been carefully designed to broadcast the message that “Hank McClaine” was eminently vulnerable to a handsome bribe.
“Okay…,” I said, acting like a man trying to keep his cool when he has been completely and totally made. “What’s that worth to you?”
“We’ll wire a hundred thousand dollars to the offshore account of your choice.”
“What makes you think I’m such a cheap date?” I grumbled.
Cole McAdams looked back at the man in the three-piece suit. Nods were exchanged. Three-Piece lifted a Bang & Olufsen remote control from a bookcase as Blond Mountain roughly swiveled my chair to face a screen the size of a Buick.
The display came to life with multiple high-def and full-color security camera views of a research sciences facility that would have made DARPA drool — stainless steel and glass, all standard-issue Bond villain shit. With something absolutely god-awful as the main event.
Strapped upside-down on a shiny scaffold at the center of the lab was the once vibrant form of Amy Garfunkel.
Her body had been stripped down to two black cloth bands to preserve what these animals must have believed was her dignity. The rest of her was crisscrossed by a network of wiring, monitoring devices, and tubing, some of them carrying fluid into her body, most draining it out.
Her skin was the color of brittle newsprint and about as thin and wrinkled. Her eyes were black. All life had been leeched from her features. The monitors buzzed with flatlines.
I was looking at a corpse.
“We won’t bother you with the technical details,” said Three-Piece, his voice sheer with the sinister silk of an impending threat.
And you don’t have to, asshole, I kept thinking — because even with a murderous rage for justice occluding my every instinct for self-preservation, what I saw before me also clarified this entire situation:
I know the technical details. Just like I now recognize your Ukrainian accent. I’m looking at a rapid-fire p21 gene therapy combined with a pluripotent stem cell harvest designed to create a transplantable suite of biocompounds that can target and heal any injury in minutes with complete regenerative efficacy.
How did I know all this?
The same way I knew fourteen hours ago at the sight of an arm with no road rash that this was a day I was gonna start some shit:
I popped a cap in your former boss’s spine five years ago when he tried selling this shit to a couple of undercover North Korean MSS agents and found out that even they weren’t batshit crazy enough to invest in a life-extension and tissue-regeneration treatment that required an investment in the billions… and the agonizing death of multiple donors per treatment.
Three-Piece finally got to his point:
“We used up our entire supply of our proprietary serum fixing Mr. McAdams’s compound fracture this morning… and we have several local clients waiting for treatments in the next two weeks.…”
I guess I should have known, I thought while he threatened to do to me what they did to Amy, that Hollywood would have an even more sociopathic narcissist than Kim Jong Un: one willing to bankroll this operation and provide a list of ultrawealthy clients motivated to pay billions to stay young and spry.
“So you can either take the money…,” concluded Three-Piece while Cole McAdams nodded in agreement, “or… maybe… you will go on a bender after being seen at tonight’s party with my business partner…”
Which one of that commie Mengele’s acolytes are you, Three-Piece? Lupinsky? Vartamian? I know there’s at least three more of your colleagues on the DMS’s most wanted list.