“I’m Tarantula, remember? I don’t miss.”
Her confident words belied a bad case of nerves. Her palms sweated inside leather gloves. It had been a long time since she had done this kind of thing—and seldom for such a good reason. The inked webbing on her neck itched even though she knew that had to be psychosomatic. Painful memories, that she had tried to trap between the pages of her book, threatened to overwhelm her.
Okata crumpled against the ventilation fan, his life leaking from his chest. He had saved her life on more than one occasion, but now he was dying on a Paris rooftop. A smoking rifle weighed down her hands. He coughed up blood.
“Assassins never forget…”
She shoved the distracting flashback aside.
Save it for the next book, she thought. If there is one.
Seen through the goggles, living targets inside the house showed up as glowing red silhouettes. The window blurred the images, and Parker’s flash-bangs weren’t helping, but Denise could still make out enough to shoot by. She assumed the female figure standing calmly in the middle of the chaos, surrounded by the bad guys, was Sophie, keeping her back to a window as planned. Denise tried to tune out the distracting flashes from Parker’s grenades.
“Any time now,” Nate prompted. It felt strange hearing his voice in her ear. Hardison’s clever little buds were certainly state-of-the-art. It sounded like Nate was right there with them, urging her on. “We’re on the clock.”
“Tick, tock,” she whispered.
She squeezed the trigger, firing in the space between her heartbeats, just like she had been trained to do. A single bullet shattered the distant window, missing Sophie by less than an inch, before slamming harmlessly into the fireplace. Given the clamor and smoke, there was a good chance that nobody would see where the bullet had really hit, what with Eliot’s team staging their mock attack at the same time. Denise watched from afar as Parker dropped a second smoke bomb down the house’s chimney in order to keep the bad guys off balance.
“It done?” Eliot asked.
Denise nodded and put down the rifle. She had done her part, just as Nate had requested.
Now it was all up to Sophie.
The shot blew out the window behind her.
That’s my cue, Sophie realized.
Nate always drew up multiple contingency plans, anticipating every possibility. Plan A had not involved Sophie being captured at all; the idea had been to liberate Brad, get the incriminating sequel (including Chapter Thirteen) into the hands of Beria and his associates, and then slip away under the cover of the zombie mob. In theory, no one would have been taken hostage and they would have planted the seeds of Beria’s downfall. But then Larry had stuck his nose into things and Plan A had gone into the rubbish bin, as it usually did.
Time for Plan B, she thought. Or was it Plan C… ?
Gasping, she acted as though she had just been shot in the back. She clutched the fictitious wound and staggered forward like a woman on the verge of extinction. Trembling fingers groped poignantly for the fading light, a bit of business she borrowed from her classic performance as Cleopatra, post-asp. To truly sell the scene, she bit down hard on the inside of her mouth, drawing blood. It hurt like the dickens, naturally, but she wasn’t the first actress to suffer for her art. The blood dribbled dramatically out of the corner of her mouth.
Beria, who had been lunging at her only a moment before, froze in surprise. His eyes bulged. His jaw dropped. He definitely hadn’t seen this twist coming.
And so perishes Tarantula, she thought. Rest in peace.
Only then did she realize that she had neglected to craft some memorable last words for this death scene. Bugger, she thought. How did I forget that? She couldn’t meet her end without some choice dialogue. That was how a spear-carrier died, not a star. With no time to think of anything new, she did the next best thing.
“The rest is silence,” she moaned, cribbing from the Bard.
You really couldn’t go wrong with the classics.
She collapsed into the convenient red coaster car, figuring it might provide a little extra cover if the bullets started flying for real. The swirling smoke enveloped her and she struggled not to cough or choke on the fumes. Playing dead was always harder than it looked.
“Dear Lord, no!” Larry blurted, sounding suitably horrified. “You got her killed, you fiend! Sophie Devereaux is dead!”
Sophie was touched by his outburst. It was good to know that her tragic demise had affected someone, even if it was only her stalker.
“Good riddance,” Beria snarled.
Staying limp and seemingly lifeless, she listened as Beria’s unhappy minions dragged their boss away. From the sound of things, the framed spymaster had plenty of explaining to do to his disgruntled accomplices.
Good luck with that, she thought.
“It was all faked?” Larry asked.
“All of it,” Nate assured him. The van rolled toward Manhattan, leaving Brooklyn and Coney Island behind. “It’s amazing what you can do with sound effects and fireworks these days.”
“I guess,” the shell-shocked fan said uncertainly. You could practically see him trying to make sense of everything that had happened to him since the ambush in the cemetery. He scratched his head in confusion. “But, wait, how did you find us anyway? How did you know where they were holding us?”
“Oh, that,” Nate said.
EVEN EARLIER:
Parker wasn’t the only team member taking part in the zombie walk. Nate shambled toward the churchyard, blending in with the other make-believe monsters. His disheveled hair was even more unruly than usual. His haggard face was gray and spotted with patches of fresh decomp. False teeth, fitting over his real ones, were jagged and clotted with gore. Like Parker, he had eschewed red or yellow contact lenses in favor of actually being able to see. The trick lenses hadn’t been necessary either; after staying up two days straight to edit Assassins Remember, his eyes were already bloodshot enough.
Playing a zombie was easy; at this point, he felt like the living dead. He staggered down the crowded sidewalk like a drunk on a bender. Bristling whiskers cried out for a razor. His grimy, ill-fitting suit had seen better days. A blood-spotted tie hung askew around his neck. Scuffed shoes, splitting at the seams, dragged across the pavement. If not for the Halloween makeup and the accompanying mob, he could have easily been mistaken for a wino—and not for the first time.
Hardison had been disappointed by how generic Nate’s zombie getup was. He had pressed Nate to go with something with more flair, like maybe a zombie ringmaster or rabbi, but Nate had not wanted to stand out in the crowd. The whole idea was to go unnoticed.
The mob carried him toward the black limousine idling outside the churchyard. Nate’s eyes narrowed as he recognized the vehicle. A slow-burning sense of injustice, never terribly far away, flared up deep inside him. The limo was more than just a pricey means of transportation.
It was a murder weapon.
Moving anonymously within the throng, just another nameless nightwalker, he deftly slapped a magnetic tracking device beneath the limo’s bumper.
“You reading that?” he asked.
“Like it’s one of Oprah’s picks,” Hardison replied. “From now on, that bad boy’s not going anywhere without us knowing.”
Nate planted another bug on the limo just to be safe.
He glanced around. As expected, nobody seemed to have noticed his sleight of hand. He shambled past the limo into the churchyard, where Beria’s inevitable double cross had succumbed to some well-orchestrated zombie bedlam. Nate tried to pinpoint the rest of his crew, but it was a lost cause. It was a mob scene, literally.
“Nate!” Parker said. “I lost Sophie… I think.”
Nate’s mouth went dry. He had been worried about something like that happening. There was no way around it; passing Sophie off as Tarantula was a risky play. For a moment his own complicated feelings for Sophie threatened to cloud his thinking, but he shov
ed that part of himself back into a box. Losing his head wasn’t going to help anybody, let alone Sophie.
“Stick to the plan,” he said brusquely. “No matter what.”
“But…”
“Keep moving, Parker.”
Following his own advice, he focused on his next objective: Anton Beria. The frustrated spymaster was caught up in the middle of the flash mob, trying to cope with the chaos. Nate was pleased to see that Beria had managed to hang on to the briefcase in the confusion. Never underestimate a spook’s grip on his secrets, Nate thought. They don’t surrender them readily.
He was also pleased to observe that Beria was on his own for the moment, having been temporarily deprived of his goon squad.
Thank you, Parker and Eliot, Nate thought.
Moaning hungrily, Nate maneuvered through the mob, charting an intercept course with Beria. The same horde that sheltered Nate also slowed him down, but he eventually managed to get within arm’s reach of the other man. Nate’s questing fingers brushed against the back of Beria’s coat, leaving a bug behind.
Got you, Nate thought smugly.
Even if Beria managed to recapture Sophie, and located her earbud, it was unlikely that he would think to search himself. Or the murder car.
They had him tagged, redundantly.
Nate smirked behind his greasy gray makeup. He slipped back into the zombie horde, which was growing larger and more out of control by the second. Wannabe monsters bumped and jostled him. An undead beauty queen, complete with a tiara and a sash, wailed shrilly in his ear.
Forget brains, he thought. I need a drink.
The bugs had led them straight to Coney Island and the “abandoned” amusement park, but, of course, Nate couldn’t tell Larry that. He needed to come up with a different story for Sophie’s stalker, one that left the crew and its operations less exposed.
“Why wouldn’t we know where you were?” Nate said. “It was all part of the movie.”
“Movie?” Larry could not have looked more baffled. Too many twists in too short an interval had his head spinning. “What movie?”
“The movie.” Nate looked over at Sophie, who was brushing her frazzled hair back into something less horrific. “You did tell him you were going to a movie shoot, right?”
“Well, I wasn’t really at liberty to discuss it,” she said, playing along. Her dark eyes gleamed with amusement. She smiled mischievously. “Perhaps it would be better if you explained…”
He accepted the challenge.
“See, it’s your basic Candid Camera/cinema vérité/found footage kind of thing, shot in real time with hidden cameras and spontaneous, unscripted reactions. Like Blair Witch meets Borat.”
“Very cutting edge,” Sophie insisted, “blurring the lines between reality and artifice.” She effortlessly slipped into the role of an enthusiastic leading lady. “I’m quite excited to be a part of it.”
Larry looked at Nate. “And you’re… the director?”
“Always,” Sophie said drily.
“But…” Larry took another swig from the flask to steady his nerves. He struggled visibly to reconcile his memories with Nate’s explanation. He questioned Sophie with his eyes. “But you said it wasn’t a movie.”
“Of course I was going to say that,” she explained, as though it was patently obvious. “I was in character at that point. And the cameras were rolling.”
“What cameras?” Larry blurted. “I didn’t see any cameras!”
“Naturally,” Nate said. “That was the point.” He beckoned to Hardison, who was seated a few feet away at his computer terminal. “Show him.”
Hardison caught on right away. “Come on, man,” he scoffed to Larry. “You don’t think we still use those big cumbersome cameras and lighting setups anymore? That’s so old-school.”
He scooted across the back of the van and plucked the miniature spy cam from Eliot’s cap. “Hey!” the hitter barked. “Keep your hands to yourself!”
“Don’t mind him,” Hardison said. “You know how testy stuntmen can be. Comes from being dropped on their heads so many times.”
Eliot glared at Hardison. “I’ll drop you—”
“See, this here’s what I’m talking about,” Hardison said, ignoring Eliot. He held out his hand, displaying the captured spy cam on his palm. “Full audio and visual pickup, from a state-of-the-art microcamera less than the size of a malted milk ball. Plant a few of these beauties around your locations, to get plenty of coverage, and you could shoot an entire trilogy downtown right under everybody’s noses. Edit the raw footage into shape, add some CGI and whatnot in post, redub any lost dialogue, and… bingo, you got yourself a movie!”
He made it sound convincing, Nate thought. But would Larry buy it?
“So all of that was being filmed?” Larry asked. “Even the part where I fainted?”
“After valiantly confronting the bad guys after my death,” Sophie stressed, “which I was deeply touched by, incidentally. As a matter of fact, I was wearing one of those hidden cameras myself, as were the very talented actors playing the villains.”
She was lying, of course. Beria’s scanner would have detected any hidden scanner on her person. But Larry didn’t need to know it. Just as long as it sounded plausible, and there was actual physical hardware to back it up.
“But I really thought you had died!” Larry protested. His voice quavered as he relived the horror of her shooting. He shook with emotion. “I thought I was going to die!”
“Which only made your unscripted reactions all the more intense and dramatic,” Nate said. “You really sold the senseless tragedy of Sophie’s death. It was a lucky break having you there. Better than anything we could have planned.”
“It gave me chills, brother,” Hardison said. “Sincerely.”
“I understand that it was hard on you at times,” Sophie said, taking his hand. “But what were we to do when you unexpectedly inserted yourself into the zombie scene? It was vital that we stayed in the moment; the very conception of the project demanded that we keep on filming. And in the end, I think we captured something very real and powerful.” She gazed at him fondly. “Thank you so much for bringing the truth of your own personal experience to our artistic endeavor.”
“Of course, you’re going to need to sign a release,” Nate said. He snapped his fingers and looked around. “Who’s got the releases?”
Hardison and Sophie exchanged embarrassed looks. Eliot and Denise shrewdly kept out of the conversation. “Don’t look at me,” Parker called out from the driver’s seat. She still had a few leftover grenades clipped to her belt. “Talk to legal.”
“Er, I think we forgot the releases,” Hardison confessed.
Nate feigned exasperation. “Christ on a crutch, people! Do I have to do everything around here?” He gave Larry an apologetic look. “Guess we’ll just have to e-mail it to you later. And a comprehensive nondisclosure agreement, you understand.”
“Nondisclosure?”
“Just the usual boilerplate, nothing to worry about,” Nate said. “After all, we can’t have you giving away the plot of our movie before it’s ready to be released. We just need you to swear that you won’t tell anybody what you saw—until the film opens, that is.”
Not that there was ever going to be a film.
“Spoilers suck, man.” Hardison grimaced in disgust. “Gotta hate the spoilers.”
“Larry understands about all that,” Sophie said, batting her lashes. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want to do anything to ruin my big break. Would you, Larry?”
“No, of course not,” Larry said quickly. “But I’m still not sure how—”
“Great!” Nate slapped Larry on the back. “We’ll just send those forms along, then. Make sure we’ve dotted all our i’s and crossed our t’s.”
“Don’t forget the restraining order,” Eliot muttered.
Sophie shut him up with a look. “He’s just joking. I don’t need to worry about you, do I? After all, you’re m
y biggest fan.”
“Er, about that,” Larry said sheepishly. He slid his sweaty hand out of hers. “I’m glad, really truly, that you’re not actually dead and all, and that you’ve got this big new movie in the works, but I’m thinking, now that I’ve finally got your autograph, that maybe I should branch out a little. Broaden my horizons, you know?”
Sophie was taken aback. Her hand went to her heart.
“You don’t want to stal—I mean, follow my career anymore?”
He tried to break it to her gently. “No offense, but this new direction of yours, it’s a bit… too intense… for my tastes. Maybe it’s time I move on and give another actress a chance?”
“Such as?”
“I’m thinking maybe Lindsay Lohan,” he said.
“Oh.”
Nate winced in sympathy. It was never easy getting dumped by your own stalker.
“In fact, if you could drop me off somewhere, anywhere, that would be great.” He stared longingly at the door, as though he couldn’t wait to put the van—and this whole nightmarish experience—behind him. “Like now, maybe?”
“But we’re crossing the Brooklyn Bridge,” Nate pointed out.
Larry didn’t care. “I’m good.”
Five minutes later, they had left Larry on a high pedestrian walkway, clutching his scrapbook and Nate’s flask. Sophie had needed to remind him to take the former, which he had almost left behind in his haste to get away.
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” she murmured as they drove away.
“Don’t let it get to you,” Nate consoled her. “The public is fickle, you know that. You’ll have other stalkers.”
“You really think so?”
“I know it,” he assured her. “Comes with being the world’s greatest actress.”
She sighed. “It is my cross to bear…”
He wasn’t lying when he told her that she was the greatest actress he knew. It was just that her finest performances were seen only by their targets.
“Besides, Larry was never your number one fan, not really.” Nate smiled warmly at her, unlocking that box just a crack. “That position is taken.”