True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(9)

She tapped on Ian’s face with her cursor and a new window opened in front of her, showing her exactly what he was looking at on his MacBook screen. He’d pulled up the month-old Deadline Hollywood obituary for Kurt Delmore, a screenwriter of low-budget action movies who’d died of a heart attack in his sleep.

She looked at Ian. His face betrayed his shock and increasing horror at what he was learning from the information on-screen. This wasn’t good for either of them.

Victoria picked up her phone and called Cross at his office. He answered immediately, awake and alert.

“Cross.”

“Sir, we have a problem developing.”

“What is it?”

“Ian Ludlow called Clayton Roper. Now he’s checking out the others.”

He hung up without a word. She set the phone down in its cradle and a moment later Cross marched into the situation room.

“Show me,” he said.

Victoria swiped both of the windows up on her touch screen and they disappeared from her monitor and appeared in the center of the media wall as if they’d flown there from her desk. Now everyone in the situation room could see that Ian Ludlow was googling another name: Jose Contreras.

“He’s connecting the dots,” Cross said.

Several search results came up on Ian’s MacBook. The top one was a Los Angeles Times article from a few weeks ago reporting on the graphic artist’s tragic death from a drug overdose.

Ian Ludlow is the luckiest man on earth, Cross thought. They’d made two attempts to kill him already, both designed to look like accidents, but he’d survived. Cross decided at the time that making a third within weeks of the other two might appear suspicious to local authorities and might prompt an investigation. Now he wished he’d taken the gamble.

Everyone in the situation room watched as Ian pulled up the Los Angeles Times article and scrolled through it, stopping at the paragraph that described Jose as a recovering drug addict and expressed his family’s shock that he’d fallen prey to demons that they thought he’d conquered years ago.

Ian looked at the cast on his right arm. Cross saw the dawning realization, and the accompanying horror, in the naked, completely unguarded expression on Ian’s face. The writer knew he was a dead man. He slammed the laptop closed and both of the surveillance windows on the media wall went dark.

Cross turned to Seth. “Where is Ludlow now?”

“He’s in Seattle at the Sheraton Hotel on Sixth and Pike. Room 3016. He’s on a book tour for his new novel.” Seth swiped up onto the media wall a screen grab of Ian’s book tour itinerary from his publisher’s website. “He’s signing at the Crime of Your Life bookstore at ten thirty this morning and then he goes to Denver this afternoon.”

Cross turned to Victoria. “Where’s our nearest asset?”

“Waiting for him in Denver,” Victoria said. “She can be in Seattle in three hours.”

“That’s not soon enough,” Cross said, then raised his voice so everyone in the situation room could hear him. “Listen up. This is a priority-one alert. I want eyes and ears on Ludlow at all times. Full Big Brother. Starting now. We need to take this player off the board.”



Ian sat on his hotel room toilet, his pants bunched up around his feet, crapping his guts out in sheer terror. He’d felt his sphincters opening up the instant he’d closed his laptop and had barely made it to the bathroom in time.

He’d dreamed up a terrorist plot to kill hundreds of people as a hypothetical scenario for the CIA so they could prevent it from ever happening. Instead the CIA used his idea to attack their own country for some twisted reason he couldn’t imagine. Or maybe he could, given enough time. He was a writer and imagining was his job. But time was something he didn’t have . . . because the CIA was out to kill him.

Hell, maybe he deserved to die. Hundreds of people were dead in Hawaii. He didn’t crash that plane himself but it was his fucking idea. He was the author of all that destruction.

He felt his bowels blow again but he was empty inside. Instead his purged intestines tangled themselves up in knots of fear that made him curl up with pain. He hugged himself and rocked on the toilet. It was little comfort.

How was he going to survive? And how would he live with himself if he did?





CHAPTER NINE

Sheraton Hotel, Seattle, Washington. July 18. 10:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.

Ian peeked out from behind a pillar outside the Sheraton’s lobby and saw Margo walking from the street toward the automatic doors. She wore a black tank top, pre-torn jeans, and ankle boots. He stepped out of hiding just as she passed.

“Margo. Over here.”

She jerked, startled, her hand reflexively going to her chest. He wondered why people, particularly women, touched their chests when they were surprised. He made a mental note to ask an expert in human nature to explain it to him. It would make a cool fact for his next book, assuming he lived long enough to write another one.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Margo cocked her head and studied him. He had his leather messenger bag over his right shoulder and his Samsonite rolling carry-on suitcase at his left side. He was wearing the same wrinkled clothes from the previous day, his cast was spattered with melted chocolate, and he was looking around furtively with bloodshot eyes.