True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(8)

Bob sat on the couch on the opposite corner from Kurt. There was something grandfatherly and comforting about Bob, unlike the stony-faced man who stood at the wall near the front door, his arms crossed under his chest, wearing an earpiece that kept him in contact with the other stony-faced men who were somewhere outside in the snow.

“Or do you have a way to do it?” Bob added.

“I think I do,” Ian said. “You’ll have to find out if it’s actually possible. But isn’t that why the CIA invited us out here?”

Bob smiled. “Tell us your evil plan.”





CHAPTER SEVEN

Sheraton Hotel, Seattle, Washington. July 18. 3:48 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.

Ian reached for the iPhone on his nightstand and called Clayton Roper, who lived on Cape Cod, where he’d churned out a book a month in his Deathfist series for decades. The books were about Michel Sang, an ex-priest turned assassin and restaurateur who was an expert in all of the martial, erotic, and culinary arts. It was one of the last surviving series in the men’s action-adventure genre that once included heroes like the Executioner, the Penetrator, the Destroyer, the S.O.B.s, Black Samurai, and Mr. Jury.

The phone was answered by a young woman on the second ring. “Hello. This is Emily.”

Ian sat up straighter in bed and tried to quash his anxiety from creeping into his voice. “Good morning, Emily. My name is Ian Ludlow. I’m sorry to be calling so early but I have to speak to Clayton.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“It’s urgent. I’m sure that he won’t mind if you wake him up for this.”

“I wish I could,” Emily said. “But I don’t have the power to raise the dead.”

Her last word hit Ian like a bucket of ice water poured over his head. He was stunned and yet completely alert. “Did you say . . . dead?”

“My father died six weeks ago,” she said, a weariness creeping into her voice, “so you can forget about whatever he owes you.”

“I’m not after any money. I was a friend of his. I’m a writer, too. I write the Clint Straker novels.”

“Forgive me, I don’t read much and I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m his only child, and ever since he died, I’ve been getting calls from bill collectors. I had no idea he was having any financial trouble so that’s been a shock, too. Dad never talked to me about that kind of thing.”

“It’s okay, I totally understand. I can only imagine how overwhelming it must be for you to have to deal with all of this,” Ian said. “If you don’t mind, may I ask how he died?”

“He was out fishing and his boat capsized. He drowned.”

For a moment, Ian couldn’t summon the air to breathe, much less speak. The implications of what she said were too horrifying to consider and they put recent events in his own life in a whole new light.

“Were you two close?” Emily asked.

“No, not really,” Ian replied, almost in a whisper. He cleared his throat and regained his voice. “We met at a writers’ conference a few years ago. He had a vivid imagination.”

“It sustained him, financially and in just about every other way, but I guess that’s true of most writers. He was always emotionally distant. Sometimes it felt like he was saving his emotional investments for the characters in his books. He definitely cared more about Michel Sang, the Deathfist, than he did any of his wives,” Emily said. “Forgive me again, I’m rambling. What was the urgent matter you needed to discuss with him?”

“It’s irrelevant now,” Ian said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Ian ended the call, tossed the phone on the bed, then reached down with his good arm to pick up his MacBook from the floor. He set the computer on his lap, raised the screen to wake it from its snooze, and typed “Kurt Delmore” with his left hand into the search window of his browser. In an instant, the Google search results came up on his screen, arranged by date. The most recent mention was an article from Deadline Hollywood, the entertainment industry news site.

It was Kurt Delmore’s obituary.





CHAPTER EIGHT

Blackthorn Global Security Headquarters, Bethesda, Maryland. July 18. 7:10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Victoria Takahara was at her touch screen, scrolling through the petty criminal record of a TransAmerican 976 passenger, when she heard an alert beep from her computer. A telephone icon blinked on her screen. She tapped it. A graphic of an audio recording that resembled an EKG readout popped up with two phone numbers listed underneath it. One number was Ian Ludlow’s iPhone. The other was Clayton Roper’s home phone in Cape Cod. Both devices were constantly monitored by Blackthorn and all calls, sent or received, were automatically recorded, flagged, and archived. The time stamp showed that the call had occurred only moments ago. She touched the app’s play button and listened.

EMILY: Hello. This is Emily.

IAN: Good morning, Emily. My name is Ian Ludlow. I’m sorry to be calling so early but I have to speak to Clayton.

EMILY: That’s not going to happen.

IAN: It’s urgent—

Victoria swore to herself, tapped the screen to pause the recording, and then typed a command on her keyboard.

An instant later Ian Ludlow’s worried face appeared in a window on her screen as if they were having a live FaceTime video chat. In a sense they were, only it was one-way. He didn’t know that his camera was on. The green light on the top edge of his screen that would ordinarily have lit up when his camera was on had been deactivated by Victoria’s hacking program the instant she’d hijacked his MacBook to spy on him. His microphone was live, too, recording the sound of his anxious breathing. The hacking program was also recording his keystrokes, capturing his passwords and anything else he wrote.