“Occasionally.”
“Can I pet him?”
“Can you type without fingers?”
He stuck his hands in his pockets.
We ordered coffee and sat in the back and there was some nice cover noise in the form of a mixed tape of pop stars singing Christmas songs. Ghost lay down between our chairs, within petting reach, but Hanler didn’t rise to the bait.
I’d met Hanler through Mr. Church, but I’ve known about him since college. His espionage thrillers always hit the number one spot on the bestseller lists. So far, four of them had been made into movies. Matt Damon starred in the last one. I owned the DVD, but I didn’t say that to Hanler.
“Mr. Church said that you had something for me.”
“‘Church,’” he said, smiling with teeth so bright I felt like I was getting a tan. “I’m still not used to calling him that. He’ll always be ‘Deacon’ to me.”
“Is that his real name?” I said, pitching it to sound offhand, but Hanler flicked his shooter’s eyes at me.
“Good try.” He laughed. “Ask him.”
I grinned. “Which means that you don’t know, either.”
He shrugged and sipped his coffee. “Okay, I called the Deacon because I think someone took an idea I had and maybe put it into practice in the most terrible possible way.” He cut me an amused look. “Settle down, Dick Tracy … . I’m not here to confess. I said I may have come up with the scenario, but I’m not part of a global criminal conspiracy.”
“Hit me.”
“It’s a plot for a novel. The Hospital thing.”
“When was the novel published?”
“That’s the weird part. I’ve been knocking the idea around for a while. It’s something I thought I’d do if I ever started a new series. My Rick Stenner books are all set in the U.S. except the flashback one, Black Ops, which is set during the invasion of Baghdad. But I’ve been wanting to spin off the Xander Murphy character for a while now. He was a supporting character in White Gold, and the readers really took to him. Kind of lowrent James Bond type that—”
“I know,” I said. “Jude Law played him in the movie.”
“Right, right … so you know. Okay, well, I figured that if my writing schedule ever opened up a bit, or if the Stenner books got stale, I’d do some Murphy books. It would be a switch to—”
“Slow down … . You’re saying that the Hospital scenario is from a book you plan to write but haven’t actually done anything with?”
“Right.”
“There are no early drafts?”
“There are no drafts at all. Never got that far.”
“Notes? Plot outlines, anything like that?”
“Nope. The idea’s still up here.” He tapped his skull. “That’s one of the reasons I’m so concerned. I mean, if it was something that I’d already published—”
“Then we’d have six billion suspects.”
“I don’t sell quite that many books.”
“Anyone can read your stuff in a library,” I said.
“Good point. On the other hand, if it was something I’d written but which hadn’t yet been released, that would narrow it down to the staff at my agent’s office, my lawyer, my family, and my publisher. Still a lot of people, but a narrower field.”
“So, who have you told about this plot?”
“I belong to a couple of writers’ organizations and we have conventions every year. The pros do a couple of panels for the fans, and then we decamp to the closest bar and spend the rest of the weekend networking or bullshitting. You know, gossip, industry news, that sort of thing. After a couple of rounds we start one-upping each other about what would make the absolute best kick-ass novel and how we’re the guy to write it.”
“And that’s where the Hospital idea came in?”
“Yeah. This was a convention called ThrillerFest. I was at the bar in the Hyatt with a whole bunch of other writers. We were all hammered and we were doing the one-up thing with the perfect thriller plot. I told them about the Hospital bombing.”
I said, “Tell me why you picked that hospital.”
“You probably can’t tell from my accent, but I was born in London. Grew up in Whitechapel, about two blocks from the hospital. We emigrated when I was seventeen and I lost my accent in college theater courses. My first job, though, was as an assistant orderly at the London. Mostly I pushed a laundry cart around, but I was in every part of that hospital every day. I could draw a diagram of it from memory, or at least a diagram of the old building. So, when I needed a landmark for my imaginary terrorists to blow up, I picked that one.”
“Write what you know,” I suggested.
“Exactly.”
“So, who stole your idea?”
He grunted. “I’m pretty sure Osama bin Laden wasn’t doing shots with us that night.”
“When was this?”
“Couple of years ago. July 20 09.”
“Who was there?”
“In the bar? Christ, everyone. Place was packed. People were coming and going. I can’t tell you for sure who was in our conversational circle when I talked about that scenario. We were all pretty well hit in the ass. It was late, though. Midnight at least, which means that the party was in full swing.”
“Give me some names.”
“Well … David Morrell was there for some of it. He asked me later if I ever wrote the book.”
“Morrell?”
“Guy who created Rambo? Who else? Let’s see … . Gayle Lynds was there. Sandra Brown, Doug Clegg, Steve Berry, Vince Flynn, Eric Van Lustbader, Ken Isaacson, John Gilstrap …”
He rattled off a long list of names. I recognized some of them from Hugo Vox’s Terror Town think tank. I wrote down all of the names. By the time Hanler was finished rooting around in the rubble of that drunken memory we’d compiled a list of twenty-eight names. Of those eleven were definites. Four of them were hazy maybes. The rest had all been at the table, but he didn’t know when or for how long.
“Anyone else there?”
“Maybe, but I was seeing pink lobsters by the time I rolled out of there. I should have been arrested for the way I drove the elevator to my floor.”
We sat in silence for a few moments, drinking our coffee, thinking it through.
“Your plot,” I said, “did it involve bringing in oil or rubber in large quantities? Or pallets of tires?”
He gave me a shrewd look and for a moment I could see the brains behind the bestseller bluster. “You’re talking about the black clouds? Yeah, I saw that on TV and thought it was odd.”
“Not part of your story?”
“No.”
“Any religious themes in your plot?”
“Just the usual stuff. Fundamentalist Shiites. Not very original, I’m afraid, and I’d probably have changed it in the writing. The genre’s moving away from using Muslims as the go-to bad guys.”
I said nothing.
Hanler sipped his coffee and stared up at the ceiling. “It would be kind of weird if a writer was involved in this sort of thing,” he said. “We cook up the worst possible catastrophes. Brilliant crimes, terrorist campaigns, mass murders. We get inside the heads of serial killers and extremists. Good thing we’re the good guys.”
“If all of you are,” I said.
“Yeah, there’s that. Sorry this wasn’t more useful. And I hope like hell that I didn’t waste your time.”
Me, too, I almost said aloud.
We stood and shook hands. Hanler eyed me for a moment. “Look, Joe, if it turns out that it was one of the people at ThrillerFest or someone from the T-Town group, someone who used my idea …”