True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(7)
TAPPER: Are you saying that the crash was deliberate?
DANIELSON: There is no other explanation.
Ian was lying fully dressed on top of the bed, his back propped up with pillows, staring at the TV. Empty mini-bottles from the minibar were scattered on the bed, along with candy bar wrappers and crinkled empty bags of chips. He chewed on the last bite of his last Toblerone and wondered for perhaps the hundredth time if he was having a waking nightmare or if this was really happening.
Maybe it was all just a horrible coincidence.
Maybe he had nothing to do with it.
Then again, maybe he did.
Maybe it all began three years ago with a group of writers gathered in a mountain cabin, making up stories. He hadn’t seen the harm in it. It was all make-believe. A story never killed anyone.
Until now.
CHAPTER SIX
Somewhere in Maine. Three Years Ago. Winter.
“What about a plane crash?” Ian said.
The six men were gathered in a remote log cabin in the middle of a snowy forest. The interior was almost entirely decorated in animal hides and wood. The sofa and armchairs were upholstered in leather, the rugs were cowhide, and the tables were rough-hewn antique walnut. A roaring fire crackled in a big fieldstone hearth and a pair of moose antlers was mounted over the log mantel. Ian half expected Daniel Boone to bound in, shake the snow off his bearskin jacket, and toss his coonskin cap on one of those antlers.
Ian sat in an armchair that was as close to the fire as he could get without setting his cable-knit wool sweater aflame. He was from Southern California so his idea of a freezing temperature was anything below sixty degrees and it was a good thirty degrees below that outside. Just looking at the frosty windows made him shiver.
“A plane crash has been done,” said Clayton Roper, a heavyset man in his sixties who sat in the armchair beside Ian and sucked on his pipe like it was his only source of oxygen. “Nine/eleven, the shoe bomber, that suicidal pilot who flew into a mountain. It’s become a cliché. I thought we’re supposed to be using our imaginations. How about smallpox?”
“What about it?” asked Kurt Delmore, a screenwriter who sat on one end of the sofa, absently stroking his graying hipster goatee. He was a forty-year-old man with the beginnings of a beer belly under his vintage bowling shirt.
“It’s a virus that has killed millions over the centuries. Nobody is vaccinated against smallpox anymore because everybody thinks it has been eradicated. But in reality, it hasn’t been,” Clayton said. “There are vials of the stuff out there, weaponized and jacked up with Ebola and other nightmarish shit. What if terrorists get hold of a vial? What if they get vaccinated, then go to the Super Bowl and use pocket atomizers, disguised as breath fresheners or inhalers for people with asthma, and spritz the virus into the crowd? Thousands of people would be infected in seconds without even knowing it. In ten days, an epidemic could spread across the nation, if not the world, creating a global pandemic that could wipe out three-quarters of humanity.”
“That sounds like one of your Deathfist novels to me,” Kurt said.
“It is,” Clayton said. “That’s how I know the plot works.”
“We aren’t here to reuse our old plots but to think up new ones,” Kurt said. “Here’s a fun fact: Los Angeles uses an underground cavern to store enough natural gas to heat the city for a year. The cavern is located behind thousands of homes. What if terrorists ignited the gas? The massive explosion would make the Big One seem like a fart.”
“I’m not sure your science is right,” said Jose Contreras from where he sat at the kitchen table, hunched over a sketch pad, smoking a joint, and drawing a picture of a runaway train going off the rails in a fiery blast. He was the youngest man in the room by at least a decade, and was a renowned author and illustrator of graphic novels. “Maybe the gas wouldn’t explode and instead you’d create a geyser of fire that couldn’t be put out.”
“That’s cool,” Kurt said.
“Yeah, but it wouldn’t be a catastrophe,” Jose said. “It might become a tourist attraction instead. But I know for a fact that a runaway train full of crude oil derailed in Canada and the inferno decimated an entire town. We could work with that.”
He held up his sketch for everyone to see. It looked to Ian like a freeze-frame from an action-movie sequence, as if all it would take was someone hitting play on a remote for the catastrophe to unfold on the page. Jose had talent, but Ian wasn’t wild about the derailed train idea.
“Getting back to the plane crash,” Ian said. “I understand your objections, Clayton, but I’m not talking about a hijacking or a bomb. I’m talking about using planes as guided missiles.”
“Forgetting for a moment how boring and familiar that is,” Clayton said, “there’s intense levels of security now at airports and in planes strictly to prevent that scenario from happening. You know why? Because what you’re talking about has already been done. Move on.”
But Ian wasn’t giving up yet. “What if I could crash a plane into downtown San Francisco, or the Las Vegas Strip, or anyplace I want, anytime I want, without setting foot in the airport or on the aircraft?”
“Are you just throwing the notion out there for discussion?” That question came from Bob, the man who’d brought them all here. It was the first time he’d spoken in two hours.