Kevin Costner’s comeback playing a man having a midlife crisis who, over a period of three and a half hours, lumbers towards the realization that he actually really loves his wife.
The atmosphere in the Kodak Theater moved from brittle nervousness at the start to restlessness as the minor awards went on and on, and too many wives, lawyers and agents were thanked. By the time Scott and Olivia arrived at the theater, the show had been under way for nearly two hours. The stars were returning from the bar, the seat-fillers were being replaced by the real celebrities and tension was mounting for the big ones.
Scott and Olivia slipped quietly into the auditorium, standing in the shadows of a door stage-right, a few feet from the podium. Olivia tried to keep her composure in the face of such a spectacle. The whole of the entertainment industry’s elite was before them: actors, directors, producers, writers, agents, executives were all gathered under one roof in a glittering display of self-congratulation. The front rows were filled with some of the most beautiful, recognizable faces on the planet.
As Olivia scanned the audience, Scott Rich watched her without seeming to watch, as only a secret agent can. Her face was silhouetted in the red light and had that familiar look of earnest determination. The long, shimmering dress that had been hurriedly provided clung to her form in a way which made him ache. She was wearing an insane auburn wig which made even Scott Rich want to smile. Her hands were clenched tightly around a smart leather clutch bag which, he happened to know, contained the following:
CIA ID
chloroform pad
syringe containing nerve relaxant
syringe containing instant sedative
stun gas pellet
mini-spyglass
tiny cellphone
and, of course, a hatpin
What Scott didn’t know, because he was a man, and a man whose skills lay more in his powers of logical deduction and technical brilliance than in his intuition, was that Olivia was almost overwhelmed by fear. She was more scared than she had ever been in Honduras, Cairo or the Sudan. She had the awful feeling that there was about to be a catastrophe over which she had no control. She was here, at the epicenter of where it was going to happen, and she didn’t know what it was, where it would come from or how to stop it.
She checked the faces in the auditorium, row by row. If she saw one face—one actress, one girlfriend, one security guard, one seat-filler, one usher—she recognized from Feramo’s crew, she would know. She would have them arrested and interrogated while there was still time.
Helena Bonham Carter was taking the microphone. “There are those who have argued that the nomination for Best Supporting Actor in Moses should have gone to the burning bush,” she began. There was a roar of laughter. The audience was excited, ready to laugh. Shots of the five supporting-actor nominees appeared on-screen in various poses of ferocious staring, weak smiles or studied nonchalance. The shot cut to one of them dangling from a helicopter above a choppy ocean, swinging to and fro, waving his legs wildly.
“If he carries on wriggling like that, the chopper’ll be in the water,” muttered Scott. Olivia had a flashback to her rescue from the Red Sea: the noise of the Black Hawk above the surface, the lights turning the water green, Scott’s silhouette plunging towards her, kicking Feramo away, grabbing her, hauling her up to the surface and the unexpected warmth of the tropical night, then him knocking Feramo out and winching her to safety.
As the tearful actor ran up the stairs, putting his hands to his heart then out to the audience, Olivia wanted to point at Scott Rich and shout, “It should have been him, not you! He does it for real!” Then she imagined Scott attempting a sobbingly grateful “without whom none of this would have been possible” speech, and Widgett arriving for his lifetime-achievement-in-heroic-deeds-of-espionage award, posing for the camera, arms and scarves flapping everywhere, and she wanted to burst out laughing.
The tearful actor held the Oscar above his head in a triumphant salute, and she saw the bottom of the plinth with the gold shape behind it, and suddenly nothing was funny about the situation any more because she knew exactly where she had seen the same image from the same angle before. It was in the al-Qaeda cave beneath Suakin: the plinth lying on its side, the jagged layers of gold-plated metal behind it, hollowed out like a chocolate Santa or Easter bunny.
“Scott,” she said, grabbing his arm, “it’s the Oscars.”
“Er, I know,” he said, looking bemused.
“No,” she hissed. “The statuettes. They’ve doctored the Oscars. The Oscars are the bombs.”
58
Scott Rich neither changed his expression nor took his eyes off the audience. He simply drew Olivia into the shadows of the doorway and whispered, “How do you know? Tell me quietly.”
“It was in the cave. They had an Oscar cut in half, hollow in the middle.”
“You’re sure?”
“Well, it was kind of hard to see, but . . . I’m pretty sure. And in Catalina he showed me an Oscar he’d bought off eBay.”
“Oh Jesus,” said Scott, scanning the audience, where the gold statuettes were scattered, cradled lovingly in the arms of the winners. “How many are out there already? Fifteen? Twenty?”
He pushed Olivia through the door ahead of him and started walking fast along the corridor, taking his cellphone out, thinking aloud as Olivia tried to keep up.
“It has to be C4. It’s the only explosive that’s stable enough. A pound of C4 in each one and a timer sealed inside some sort of metal alloy. They must have switched the load at some point. They probably wouldn’t even run the dogs over the statuettes. Even if they did, depending on when they put the stuff in there, they might not have picked it up. Hello? Is that central control? Scott Rich, CIA. Give me the head of law enforcement. This is very urgent.”
With Olivia following, he headed out of the building, walking fast, the wrong way down the red carpet, flashing his ID. “Hello?” he said. “Tom. Scott Rich here. We have a tip-off. This is a secure line, right? Okay, get this: the Oscars have been doctored. They’re devices. IEDs. They’re bombs.” There was a second’s pause on the other end. Then Olivia heard the voice begin again. “I know. We have the agent here,” Scott said. “She remembers seeing a doctored statuette in the al-Qaeda hideout in Sudan. What? Yes, I know, I know. But what do we do?”
As they hurried along, Olivia’s mind was working very fast. She suddenly interrupted him. “Who’re you talking to?” she whispered. “Ask him the name of the company that transports the Oscars.”
A few seconds later the reply came back.
“Carrysure.”
“Carrysure! That was the company Travis Brancato worked for! You remember? The flaky actor slash writer slash lifestyle manager with the wolf eyes? The one who wrote the script? He was a driver for them when he wasn’t writing.”
Scott blinked at her for a moment, holding the phone away from his ear. “Okay, Olivia, call the office,” he said. “Tell them what you know and get them onto him in the interrogations unit.” Then back into the phone, “Tom, okay, this lead is firming up. We need to move. Yeah, we’re heading out towards you now. I can see the van, we’ll be with you in two minutes.”
“Shouldn’t they just stop the show and get everyone out?” Olivia said, glancing at her watch as she waited to be connected: twenty-eight minutes to go until the end of the scheduled broadcast.
Scott shook his head and scowled, still talking. Olivia’s connection came through, and she filled them in and told them to get onto the interrogation center and grill Travis Brancato, adding a few helpful hints on how to get him to talk.
They were approaching the big white van of the Command Post. Scott clicked off his cell and looked at Olivia. “Okay, baby,” he said tenderly. “You’ve done your bit ten times over. You want to get out of here and go home?”
“No.”
“Good,” he grinned. “So let’s get back in there,” he said, nodding at the auditorium. “If the statuettes
are on timers, you can bet there’ll be a very nervous al-Qaeda operative in the auditorium with a device which can override the timers and detonate the bombs. It’s probably a cellphone or a very, very big watch. If he sees any attempt to stop the show, get the Oscars out or evacuate the theater, his orders will probably be to blow the lot there and then, including himself. Just carry on looking for anyone you recognize from Feramo’s entourage or anyone behaving suspiciously. They’re going to be sweating, probably high on something, certainly very scared, like ‘Shit-I’m-about-to-die’ very scared. Should stand out among a bunch of actors playing gracious in defeat.”
He looked at his watch. “If they’re thinking big, they’ll blow it in Best Picture, just before the end. We have maybe twenty-five minutes.”
* * *
Inside the theater, Olivia was silently repeating her mantra: Don’t panic, stop, breathe, think; don’t panic, stop, breathe, think, in a breathless, panicky fashion. She walked down the side of the auditorium, scanning the rows one by one, praying to whatever divine force was up there: Please, please, whatever you are . . . just help me out one more time, then I won’t ask you again, I promise. She was conscious of a subtle increase in the security presence, people slipping through side doors, taking positions against the walls. Here and there among the audience, she could see the glint of the golden awards, each a ticking time bomb, cradled against a sequined bosom or passed admiringly from one celebrity to another.
Anthony Minghella was opening the envelope for Best Director.
“And the winner is, Tim Burton for Jack Tar Bush Land.”
Olivia spotted Burton as he rose to his feet, fringe flopping over his thick blue-tinted glasses as he made his way along the row. She headed swiftly down the aisle towards him, ignoring the odd glances, threw her arms round him as if she’d been his agent for fifteen years, flashed her ID and whispered: “CIA. Major problem. Please keep talking as long as you can.”
He caught her eye, saw how scared she was and nodded. “Thanks,” she whispered. “Make it a long list.”
* * *
A shudder went through the crowds on Hollywood Boulevard as the white SUVs of the LAPD bomb squad raced the two blocks between the Command Post and the theater. The Oscars still remaining backstage were being replaced. Guest lists, staff lists and plus-one lists were being scrutinized for clues. Officers were poised to remove the Oscars from the winners in the audience as discreetly as possible, as soon as the word came. But inside the Command Post there was silent pandemonium as the heads of the LAPD, the Fire Service, the FBI, the security firms and Scott Rich debated an impossible series of incalculable risks and decisions.
An attempt, however low-key, to extricate the Oscars from the clutches of their recipients might trigger an operative to detonate them. Stopping the ceremony might do the same. And, in any case, evacuating an audience of three and a half thousand could take the best part of an hour. To send the full might of the emergency services hurtling to the scene would generate equal panic, a panic which would surely, inevitably, seep into the auditorium, into the consciousness of whoever it was who had his finger on that override button. Someone suggested gas.
“Yeah, that went great in Moscow,” murmured Scott.
“We’d have three dozen of the world’s most famous celebrities choking on their tongues,” said the man from the FBI.
And so the ceremony was proceeding. With twenty minutes to go, there were eighteen metal bombs spread around the auditorium, which could blow the Academy Awards sky-high with the whole world watching. But as far as anyone knew, it could all just be a figment of Olivia Joules’s overactive imagination.
* * *
Onstage, Tim Burton was giving the performance of a lifetime. “What can you say about an assistant cinematographer who also makes a great pot of chamomile tea, and I don’t mean with tea bags . . .”
* * *
At the CIA special interrogations unit, Travis Brancato’s formerly stunning ice-blue, wolflike eyes were more like those of a drunk who has been on a four-day bender. His hair was wild, his chin against his chest. The interrogator’s hand was poised to strike again, but he was getting nowhere. A woman appeared in the room and handed him a note—it was Olivia’s suggestion for getting Travis to talk. The interrogator paused to read it, then leaned over to Brancato’s ear.
“The head of every Hollywood studio is at that ceremony. You come up with the goods, you’ve saved the day. You don’t, you’ll never work in this town again.”
Brancato’s head jerked up, alert. “I didn’t do anything,” he gabbled. “All I did was leave the van unlocked for twenty minutes at a rest stop. That’s all I did, man. I thought Feramo just wanted an Oscar for himself.”
* * *
Back onstage, an increasingly desperate-looking Burton was doing his best. “Well, look at the time!” The audience was becoming restless, but he plowed gamely on.
“But seriously,” he said, “how many of us do stop to really look at the time? I hope my accountant Marty Reiss does, because I gather he works by the hour . . .”
* * *
As Scott Rich strode through the backstage area, a man hurtled past him with four Oscars in his arms. He was wearing a T-shirt which said IFYOUSEEMERUNNING,TRYTOKEEPUP. Scott did as it said and was joined by a man carrying more Oscars, this one in full protection gear: a dark green, eighty-pound suit lined with bulky, ceramic, blastproof plates and an air-cooled mask. They hurried out of the back of the building, where the area around the white bomb squad SUVs was cordoned off.
“Joe,” Scott shouted, seeing a seasoned, wise-looking man with graying hair and glasses. “You run one through yet?” It was Joe Perros, a bomb-squad veteran of twenty-two years, now its head.
“Yup,” said Joe grimly. “There’s a pound of C4 in there with a Casio timer. We’re just gearing up to open it by remote.”
“You going to take the rest away or blow ’em here?” said Scott. “If they hear that lot go up inside the auditorium . . .”
“Yeah, that’s the pucker factor,” said Joe. “But as luck would have it, we brought a TCV.”
He pointed to a five-foot steel ball, which the techs were draping in bomb blankets in the back of one of the vans. “We blow half a dozen in there, the audience won’t know a thing.”
“You got a team inside to work on the overrider?” Scott said, nodding back towards the auditorium.
“What do you think?”
“Great. I’m going inside,” said Scott. “Call me with the bad news when you get to the timer.”
* * *
Tim Burton had moved on to influences from his past. “None of this would have been possible without my cousin Neil, who let me play with his painting-by-numbers in the school holidays. Thanks, Neil, this is for you. And, finally, my first art teacher, a white-haired lady with the soul of Picasso. What the hell was her name? Mrs. Something . . . Lankoda? Swaboda? Hang on, I’ll get it in a minute . . . Olim! Ms. Olim!”
Olivia, lurking in the shadows of a doorway and sporting her newly borrowed seat-filler pass, was using the miniature spyglass to scan the upper levels of the balcony. There was no one she recognized. No one was behaving more oddly than was normal for an Oscar ceremony. The music started up. She saw the relief on Burton’s face as he stumbled desperately towards the wings and, at his glance, flashed him a huge thumbs-up.
Stars were pouring back into their seats during the applause. Olivia watched the woman in charge of the seat-fillers shepherding her charges into the key gaps. They had less than fifteen minutes left now. As Adrian Brody made his entrance to present the Best Actress award, all eyes turned to the stage, and she saw a security guard bend towards an Oscar winner in the stage-left aisle. The order must have been given to get them out. Olivia did one last despairing sweep of the center stalls—and there! There was a face she recognized, a blond girl with big hair, heavy lip liner and pneumatic breasts bursting out of a skimpy silver dress. It was Demi, Kimberley’s ex–best fr
iend from the party in Miami. She was taking her seat in the middle of the stalls, a seat-filler’s ID pass hanging round her neck, sitting down next to a dark-haired boy. Olivia recognized the boy—he had stumbled out of the cloakroom with Demi, all disheveled, as she was leaving Feramo’s penthouse in Miami. He was sweating. His eyes were darting wildly round the room. He had seen the security guard disappear with an Oscar, and his right hand was hovering nervously over his left wrist. Olivia dialed quickly and whispered into her cellphone, “Scott, I think I’ve got him. Stage-right stalls, ten rows back, on the right of Raquel Welch.” She started moving up the aisle towards the boy and Demi, blood pounding in her ears.
Just then Brad Pitt appeared through the side door ahead and leaned against the wall, cool as fuck. Brad Pitt! Great. Olivia clocked his look of mild surprise as she approached. She flashed her new CIA ID and drew him back into the shadows of the doorway.
“We need you to do what I say,” she whispered. “Just do whatever I say.”
He met her eye reassuringly. “The girl in the silver dress,” she whispered, standing on tiptoes to reach his ear. “Blond hair in a bun thing, two to the right of Raquel Welch. You got her? Get her to leave her seat and go outside with you.”
“You got it.” He gave a delicious, sexy smirk and set off towards Demi. Olivia watched him play the moment like the pro he was. She watched Demi’s head turn, as if drawn by Brad Pitt–vibes, saw him giving her a look and a nod. Demi’s hand fluttered to her throat, disbelieving, then she got up, making her way along the row towards him. Olivia saw the dark-haired boy look round in a panic, and then back to the stage, where Adrian Brody was giving the longest preamble to the Best Actress nominations in the history of the Academy Awards.