“The Road Runners know who I am, that means he has to as well. Besides, it also bolsters our position with Dragan and the Road Runners. He can attest that you and I pulled off the biggest heist in Canadian history.”
“We told Gaëlle Rochon about the con.”
“Because we need her to confuse the Road Runners underground so they won’t figure out they aren’t actually digging underneath the institute,” Nick said. “She wouldn’t have helped if she thought we were real thieves, and Huck won’t help us if he knows that we aren’t.”
“He might have for the money and the thrill.”
“Maybe, but it’s too risky. It goes back to the authenticity we’re trying to create. The Road Runners have to believe that Gaëlle knows her way through the underworld, and that it’s as much of a maze as we say it is,” Nick said. “That will come through naturally. It doesn’t require her to act. Huck can’t act. He could barely stop himself from crying when we offered him the job. If Huck knew he wasn’t really digging into a real lab, he’d show it. By us not telling Huck, his enthusiasm and determination will be real.”
“Okay, but what happens if Huck comes back here after this is over, convinced that he’s ‘the best sewer man in the game’ and starts looking for a museum to rob?”
“He’ll be so terrified by the way this heist ultimately turns out that he’ll never want to commit a crime again,” Nick said. “He’ll thank God that he got out alive and with his hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“I hope you’re right,” Kate said as they reached their car. “Because I don’t want his next heist and his eventual imprisonment on my conscience.”
“Let’s just survive this job first,” Nick said, unlocking the car and walking around to the driver’s side.
“Good point.”
“If I’m wrong about Huck, I promise you that we’ll come up with a way to scare him straight.”
“You also need to talk to Gaëlle and caution her against talking to Huck.”
They got into the car and headed for the airport, where they had a private jet waiting to take them to Los Angeles.
Boyd Capwell ran across an open field in Ojai, California. He was being pursued by half a dozen bug-eyed bald women in halter tops and cutoffs. The women were running with their arms outstretched and their gnarled hands clawing at the air in front of them as if it might bring Boyd closer to their drooling, wide-open, shrieking mouths.
He was racing for the forest and freedom when more of the mutant women poured out from between the trees like a tidal wave, screeching their insane, lusty cry as they charged toward him. There was no place for him to go. He was surrounded.
Boyd dropped to his knees, a beaten man, and looked up to the sky. Tears streamed down his chiseled anchorman’s face, his fists were balled up with rage.
“Why, God, why? What have I done to deserve your pitiless wrath?”
The sky rumbled, as if God were clearing his throat to speak, and out of the blue heavens came the Hellcopter. An airborne gunship that looked like a flying great white shark sheathed in cannons, machine guns, harpoons, and missiles.
The Hellcopter swooped down low, its machine guns spitting hot death, mowing down the mutant women. Boyd stood up to face the Hellcopter as it landed. The pilot’s door opened and out came Willie Owens, boobs first. Her enormous breasts strained against a tight, nearly transparent white T-shirt. Besides the double-D silicone boobs, collagen-plumped lips, and peroxide blond hair, there was nothing mutant about the woman in the Daisy Duke shorts and pumps. She was all woman and proud of it.
Willie strutted up to Boyd, tore open his shirt, buttons flying, and appraised his body, which wasn’t bad for a guy in his forties who didn’t exercise.
“Finally, a real man,” she said.
“Finally, a real woman,” he said.
He reached for her breasts, and she kicked him in the knee.
“Cut!” Boyd yelled, clutching his knee.
Nick Fox turned to Chet Kershaw, a big bear of a man in his early forties with a professional makeup bag slung over his shoulder. Nick and Chet were standing together out in a field, under a tent that covered a bank of monitors. The monitors showed various angles on the action. Kate O’Hare and Tom Underhill, an African American man in his thirties with a tool belt around his waist, were in the tent, too. Tom was holding a remote control joystick to pilot a drone with a tiny GoPro camera attached to it. They were watching the live stream of the GoPro’s video on one of the monitors.
“Was that kick in the script?” Nick asked.
“Nope,” Chet said.
Chet was the last in a family dynasty of Hollywood makeup artists and special effects masters adept at all the live, “on set” magic in front of the cameras that was now primarily done digitally in postproduction.
“That was my favorite part,” Kate said.
“Mine, too,” Tom said, landing the drone beside the tent.
Tom’s day job was making inventive playhouses, tree houses, and other fanciful structures. He’d retrofitted the old helicopter, which Nick had acquired for a past scam, into a fake Hellcopter combat vehicle for this film.
Willie marched over to them, Boyd trailing after her, limping. She was a fifty-something single Texan with a natural affinity and dangerous zeal for driving or piloting just about anything on land, sea, or air with a motor.
Joe Morey was right behind them, a Steadicam rig strapped to his upper body to hold a digital camera. He was an electronic security and alarm systems expert who excelled in hidden video and audio surveillance.
“Why did you kick me?” Boyd yelled at her. “You killed the emotion of the scene.”
“Because you tried to cop a feel,” Willie said. “That’s not going to happen.”
“I wasn’t ‘copping a feel,’ ” Boyd said. “My character was reaching out to touch the humanity that he thought he’d lost.”
“It was you using this movie as an excuse to feel me up,” Willie said. “Something you’ve wanted to do for years.”
“It’s acting,” Boyd said. “Didn’t you read the script?”
“Which you wrote so you could touch my tits.”
“Which I wrote to showcase your talent as a pilot, Chet’s talent as a makeup and visual effects artist, Tom’s talent as an imagineer, Joe’s talent with cameras and sound, and my skills as triple-threat multi-hyphenate writer, actor, and director.” Boyd looked back at Joe, who seemed startled to be seen. “Why are you still shooting? Didn’t you hear me say ‘cut’?”
“This is for the behind-the-scenes documentary,” Joe said.
“Turn it off,” Boyd said, then called back to the two dozen barely dressed, bloodied mutant women in the field. “Take five, but stay where you are. We’re going to do a pickup on that last bit of dialogue, and we don’t want to screw up the background continuity.”
“What are you guys shooting here?” Nick asked.
“A short film we can use as an industry calling card,” Chet said. “We’ll post it on YouTube, Vimeo, IMDb, places like that. It’s what you’ve got to do to get jobs in Hollywood these days.”
“We’ve all done our best work with you two,” Boyd said. “But we can’t exactly use you as a reference or show our reel, can we?”
“I see your point,” Nick said and turned to Joe. “I didn’t know that you had Hollywood aspirations.”
“I don’t,” Joe said. “I’m a single, hot-blooded man and I know my way around cameras and mikes. When Boyd told me he needed a camera and sound guy, and that there’d be a dozen strippers running around half-naked in front of me, how could I say no?”
“I see what you mean,” Nick said.
Kate looked out at the women lounging in the field, smoking cigarettes, checking their emails, and snapping selfies. “They’re strippers?”
“Who else would play these parts?” Willie said.
“This production must have cost a fortune,” Nick said.
“You’ve paid us a fortune,” B
oyd said. “Unfortunately, we can’t count on you for future employment. Work with you is unpredictable at best, and we’ve got our muses to serve. So we’ve reinvested some of our earnings in our own potential.”
“I’m surprised you’re doing another zombie flick,” Nick said to Chet. “I thought you were tired of the genre.”
“Those aren’t zombies,” Chet said.
“They sure look like hungry zombies to me,” Kate said.
“It’s lust,” Chet said. “They don’t want to eat Boyd. They want to screw him.”
“Good grief,” Kate said. “Why would they all want to do that?”
“My character is the last man on earth,” Boyd said. “Germ warfare has turned people into sex-crazed mutants. The mutant men are sterile but the women are not. They need me, the last real man, to repopulate our planet and keep our race from going extinct.”
“Of course they do,” Kate said. “So what’s stopping you from giving all those women what they want?”
“They’re hideous,” Boyd said. “I can’t mate with them.”
“Because of their appearance?” Kate said.
“Would you want the next evolution of the human race to look like that?” Boyd said. “My character is a reluctant Adam searching for a still human, still hot, postapocalyptic Eve.”
Willie raised her hand. “That’s me.”
“So if you understand that,” Boyd said, “why did you ruin the dramatic and emotional payoff to the whole story?”
“You mean the money shot?” Willie said.
“I mean the passionate salvation of the human race.”
“Funny you should bring that up,” Nick said. “That’s kind of why we’re here.”
“I didn’t think this was just a friendly visit,” Tom said. “But aren’t you being a bit melodramatic?”
“Unfortunately, he’s not,” Kate said. They were out of earshot of the strippers, but she lowered her voice to a near whisper as an extra precaution. “We need your help to prevent a biological attack on an American city by overseas terrorists.”
“Wait a sec,” Joe said. “Isn’t that a job for Homeland Security, the CIA, or the U.S. military, and not some high-end private security firm?”
Chet laughed at Joe. “You honestly believe that’s who they work for? These two go around the world taking down supercriminals. Have you ever thought about the money that they spend on the cons and thefts we’ve done together? It’s millions of dollars. Who could their clients possibly be to pay that bill? That’s why I’ve always figured that they’re really working off the books for some U.S. acronym.”
“I’ve never cared,” Willie said. “I like the fast cars and the money.”
“It doesn’t matter to me who they are working for,” Tom said. “What matters is that I can trust them, that they’re doing the right thing, and that we’ve put a stop to some very bad people doing very bad things.” He turned to Kate. “You can count me in on this.”
“I appreciate that,” Kate said. “But you don’t even know what the assignment is yet, what the risks are, or what we are paying. You have a family to think about.”
“That’s right, I do,” Tom said. “That’s why if there’s anything I can do to stop that biological attack from happening, I will do it and I won’t take a dime for it, either.”
“You’ll do it for God and country,” Boyd said. “That’s powerful motivation for a character. I know, because that’s my character’s motivation today.”
“Your motivation today is vanity and booty,” Willie said. “You’ve cast yourself as the last man on earth that every woman wants to screw.”
“Who is saving his precious seed for your character out of his profound love for God and country,” Boyd said to her, then looked back at Kate. “The point I’m trying to make is that I’m in for whatever part you want me to play in this life-or-death drama. I am an American and this country ’tis of thee.”
“I’m in, too,” Willie said. “Because I like kicking ass and this sounds like some ass that needs kicking.”
Chet raised his hand. “Count me in.”
“Me, too,” Joe said.
An hour later, after the movie was wrapped with Boyd’s Adam and Willie’s Eve locked in an embrace, they all reconvened in the barn. Boyd, Willie, Chet, Tom, and Joe sat on picnic table benches while Nick and Kate stood in front of them and briefed them on the broad strokes of the new project.
“You and Nick are such complex, conflict-ridden characters,” Boyd said. “I’ve definitely got to play Nick in the movie.”
“Wouldn’t you rather play yourself?” Nick asked.
“Leonardo DiCaprio will want that part,” Boyd said. “So will George Clooney, but I think he’s too old to do me justice.”
“Sofía Vergara without the accent would do a decent job as me,” Willie said. “But she’d need to get a boob job.”
“Her boobs are enormous,” Chet said.
“Not enough,” Willie said.
“I’ll settle for any of the Hemsworths,” Joe said. “I’m a dead ringer for all three of them.”
“Hopefully, there will never be a movie, because if this story ever comes out, we’ll all end up in jail,” Kate said.
“But the FBI would get us out, right?” Tom said.
Joe gave his head a small shake. “I’m sure it’s CIA.”
“You’re all wrong,” Boyd said. “It’s the Men in Black.”
“No one is going to get us out of jail,” Kate said.
She hoped that wasn’t true, but there was no guarantee anyone could help them if things went wrong.
“Tell us about this biological attack,” Boyd said. “And how my character is going to save a city.”
“We’ve infiltrated a gang of international diamond thieves called the Road Runners,” Kate said. “The group is made up almost entirely of ex-Serbian soldiers and led by a lunatic named Dragan Kovic.”
“A very smart and cautious lunatic,” Nick said. “They’ve made over four hundred million dollars from their robberies as of this week and have never been caught.”
“Now we know what they were doing with all of that money,” Kate said. “They’ve been developing a biological weapon that they will use to attack an American city. They plan to weaponize smallpox.”
“My God,” Tom said. “That’s inhuman.”
“They already have a smallpox sample, but it’s not quite good enough for their purposes,” Nick said. “So they want Kate and me to steal a smallpox sample for them from a research institute in Paris.”
“We need to find Dragan’s lab, retrieve the smallpox sample they already have, and stop them from pulling off their attack,” Kate said.
“Stealing the smallpox in Paris is how we’re going to do it,” Nick said. “We’re going to use a tracking device to follow the stolen virus back to Dragan’s lab and shut them down for good.”
“Aren’t you taking an enormous risk?” Joe said. “What if you lose track of the smallpox and they get away with it?”
“Eliminating the risk is where the con comes in,” Nick said. He looked at Chet and Tom. “You two are going to build a fake biolab in the basement of an empty storefront on the same street as the real lab.”
“The Road Runners will break into a fake lab and steal fake smallpox,” Kate said. “The vial itself will be the tracking device that leads us to Dragan’s lab. Nick and I will be part of the Road Runners crew tunneling into the institute to steal the virus.”
“We’ve also recruited two other people,” Nick said. “Gaëlle Rochon, an expert on the Paris underground, who will be aware that it’s a con, and Huck Moseby, an experienced sewer worker and tunnel digger, who won’t be.”
“Gaëlle’s job is to lead the Road Runners around in circles so they don’t know they are digging into the wrong building,” Kate said. “Huck’s job is to supervise the dig into the lab to steal the virus.”
“I can get photos and blueprints of a real biolab,” Tom said. ??
?Building the fake lab should be easy. The critical issue is how real it has to be, and that depends on whether the Road Runners will be in the room or only seeing it on-screen.”
“Same goes for dressing the lab with scientific equipment and props,” Chet said. “How much of it has to actually work?”
“I will be the only one entering the lab where the smallpox is supposedly kept,” Nick said. “The others won’t go any further than the room that leads to it. That’s the room we are going to dig into from below. So everything just has to look and sound good.”
“Getting the necessary props and equipment, and making them all look like they are working, is not a problem, either,” Chet said.
“In that case, if everybody kicks in to help on the construction, I can have the lab set built in a week,” Tom said.
“I can dress it up as we go,” Chet said.
Joe jerked a thumb at himself. “Where do I fit in?”
Nick turned to him. “We’re going to recruit you as part of the Road Runner team to compromise and control the institute’s security systems.”
“Your cover will be easy to remember,” Kate said. “You’re going to be you. Not your real name, or your real past, but you’ll be demonstrating your real skills.”
“I can handle that, but I still don’t get what I’ll be doing,” Joe said. “There is no security system for me to disable because we aren’t really breaking into the institute.”
“Your job is to create the illusion that we are,” Nick said. “Early on in the job, you will tap into the institute’s actual video surveillance system and integrate our fake lab’s video feed into it for our robbers to see on a monitor that we’ll set up underground for them. That will convince them of our make-believe world. On the day we break into the fake lab, you’ll put on a convincing show of disabling the nonexistent alarm systems.”
“No problemo,” Joe said.
“I’m not sure you understand the danger you’re going to be in,” Kate said, concerned by his enthusiasm. “You’re going to be undercover with us among the thieves. You won’t be on the dig, you’ll be in a van or someplace else nearby. But you will be living and working with the Road Runners while straddling both sides of the operation, the break-in and the con. That’s a dangerous balance to maintain. If they catch you, they will kill you.”