Screen Savers

Chapter 50

‘This much is certain,’ Miles Grayson growled. He seemed to have taken my advice; he was doing a damn fine job of focusing his anger. ‘I will never use that agency again, and I’ll do my best to see that no one else in this business does either.’

I had to agree with him. Zoltan Szabo had been knocked down and almost killed by a hit-and-run driver, and next day a new and previously unknown electrician had shown up out of the blue, ready and willing to take his place on the project.

No one had asked a thing about him, and no one had known a thing about him — other than that he was there and the agency was no longer in a hole.

‘Should we go to them tomorrow and ask to see the file they hold on Stu Queen?’ I asked.

It was Prim who answered. ‘No. They’d be bound to ask why we were so interested in him. We’d have to give them a hell of a strong cover story; they might get nervous and call their lawyers. They might get silly and call the press. The whole thing could blow wide open.’

She was right too.

I looked at Miles across the top of my glass, where an ice cube big enough to have been the centrepiece of another movie was fighting to submerge a slice of lemon. ‘So we don’t really know any more than we did before we spoke to Pep,’ I muttered. ‘That Stephen Donn posed as a film sparks to get on set and among us, that he’s a real bad bastard and that he has Dawn.’

‘We do,’ said Prim. ‘We know that he’s worked in other places as an electrician. Maybe he was Stu Queen there too.’

‘Maybe he has a criminal record as Stu Queen,’ Miles suggested.

‘If he has, Mike will find it,’ I countered. ‘But if he has so what? We know already that he’s a fucking criminal. No, we’re back where we were, sat on our hands.’

‘And the Goddamned phone hasn’t rung all day, other than once when Kiki Eldon called to tell me that the press have bought our story, without question.’

‘So maybe tomorrow, we’ll have mail,’ Prim mused.

I blinked. ‘Hold the phone,’ I exclaimed. ‘Maybe we’ve got it now. Dawn’s got an e-mail address. You and she talk that way all the time.’ Miles, who had been slumped, sat upright in his chair. ‘Could she access it from here?’ I asked him.

‘Sure, she has a lap-top.’ He was out of that chair in a second, running out of the room and up the big staircase. Less than a minute later he was back, clutching an Apple Mac Powerbook, with a modem cable flying behind it.

He crouched beside the telephone jack point and changed cables; Mr Mac was powering up already.

‘You do know her password?’ I asked.

‘Fuck!’

‘No, it’s unlikely to be that. But why don’t you try P-R-I-M, ’ Prim suggested. ‘They’re usually four letters, and my password is D-A-W-N, so you never know.’ Miles nodded, moved the cursor to the apple symbol in the top left-hand corner of the colour screen and opened the Internet software. A box, with a cursor flashing on an empty line, appeared on screen. We watched as he keyed in P-R-I-M.

An on-screen dialogue told us what was happening step by step as the modem dialled the Internet provider. After a few seconds, the connection was made, and a soft — and very well-known — voice told us that Dawn had mail.

‘What do I do now?’ asked Miles. ‘I don’t use this stuff.’

‘Gimme.’ He obeyed at once, and passed the lap-top across to Prim. She pulled down the e-mail section of the menu, gave two quick commands to retrieve the waiting messages, then, when the process was complete, broke the Internet connection.

There were three new messages in the off-line mailbox when Prim opened it. One was from ‘DPhil’ — SuperDave, I guessed — the second was from someone with an all-numeral Compuserve address, and the third was from ‘stuer@hotmail.com’.

‘That’s him,’ said Prim. ‘Funny guy. Stu Queen: S-T-U and then E-R, the Queen.’

‘You sure?’ asked Miles.

‘There’s a quick way to find out.’ She clicked on the small envelope symbol to open the document. The screen cleared then filled with a new window, containing a page of text. ‘It’s him,’ she cried out. ‘Look there. He sent it this afternoon.’

She fell silent as Miles and I perched on the couch on either side of her, leaning close so that we could clearly see the message on the flat LCD screen. We read it together.

It began politely:

Hello Mr Grayson,

I hope that you haven’t taken too long to work out how

I would contact you. That could be bad for Dawn’s health. I assure you that she’s safe and sound for the moment. Whether she remains that way depends on your co-operation.

I know enough about the film business to be sure that Snatch will make you another fortune at the box office, especially when the news of this incident breaks — I have no doubt you will ensure that it does. What I propose is that to secure your wife’s safe release, you anticipate those profits and send some of them in my direction. Ten million sterling, seems reasonable and achievable in the circumstances.

I appreciate that arrangements like these can’t be made on the instant, so I will allow you twenty-four hours from the receipt of this message to transfer the funds to a new account in the Bank Neder, in Lugano, Switzerland. The money should be cleared for immediate transfer by simple coded instruction, to another account of my choosing.

Please send me a one-word reply, ‘Yes’, immediately, to confirm that you have received this message and that you will comply. Then, within the twenty-four hours specified, I will expect to receive a second message containing the code word which will allow me to make the next transfer.

Forty-eight hours after that, when the money and I are no longer traceable, I will send you a further e-mail telling you where Dawn can be found. Be assured, she will be unharmed and will be fed and watered during that two-day period.

I do not want you to feel, Mr Grayson, that you are simply a random victim. Equally, I hope you will not waste your life in futile pursuit of me when this is over. Think of me as a working man who is taking an opportunity to secure his future. The only person you should blame for what has happened is Oz Blackstone.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Stephen Donn.

It was only when the message finished that I realised I had been reading aloud.

‘Cool son-of-a-bitch,’ Miles hissed. And then he looked at me. ‘Why, Oz?’ he asked, with pain in his voice. ‘Why is all this happening, and what does it have to do with you?’

I shook my head. ‘I have no idea. I promise you, I have never met Stephen Donn in my life, and I have never done anything to upset him.’

‘What about his Uncle? You told me about him getting kicked out of Susie’s company. Could he be blaming you? Could he have sent his nephew on some sort of crazy revenge mission?’

‘Not a chance,’ said Prim, evenly. ‘Especially since Susie was one of the targets.’ Something in her tone made me tense as I looked at her. ‘Joseph Donn is Susie’s real father,’ she continued. ‘He told me that when I went to see him. But she doesn’t know, and she never will because I promised not to tell her. When Susie’s mother left Joe for Jack Gantry, she didn’t know at the time, but she was already pregnant.

‘Jack told him when he asked him to come into the business. He confessed to him that he was sterile — that fits, for Susie’s an only child. Old Joe would kill Stephen himself, for that stunt with the car.’

In my mind, two pennies dropped simultaneously; I couldn’t handle both so I let one roll on the floor for a while.

‘He’s read the script,’ I said. Miles stared at me. ‘Think about it,’ I told him. ‘He’s asked for ten million sterling. He wants it deposited in a secure bank account for onward transfer. Straight out of the Snatch script.’

‘Surely he couldn’t be that arrogant?’ Prim asked.

‘What’s arrogant about it? He didn’t expect to be identified as Stu Queen; not after removing all those happy family snapshots. He didn’t reckon on Uncle Joe putting one over on him.’

‘Okay, Oz,’ said Miles. ‘Maybe you’re right; maybe this guy is using our own plot against him. But he’s got Dawn for real.

‘Can you send the first reply message like he says, Prim?’ he asked.

‘Sure.’

‘Then do it. Give him his “Yes”. I’ll call my accountant and tell him to make the transfer to the Lugano Bank, code word “Elanore”.’ He took out a cellphone, punched in a short-code number, and barked those instructions to the person who answered.

When he was finished he nodded to Prim. There was a small box beside the message labelled ‘reply’. She clicked it, typed the single word into the new window which appeared, then re-established the connection with the service provider and pressed the ‘send’ symbol. ‘Message sent successfully’ appeared on screen a second or two later.

‘Done,’ she pronounced. ‘Now. We’ve got twenty-four hours to find him.’

‘Why?’ Miles asked, grimly. ‘Because you think he’s going to kill Dawn anyway?’

I could tell from the sudden flicker of fright which crossed her face that that possibility hadn’t occurred to her. I answered for her. ‘No. Why should he do that? Stephen’s planning his early retirement on your money. If he kills Dawn, then he will never have a moment’s peace anywhere in the world, for he will know for sure that the three of us will hunt him down, literally to the ends of the earth.’

‘Oh yeah. How would we do that? Where would we even start?’

‘Well for openers, he’s got a mother. In those circumstances I’d put the thumbscrews on her myself for any clue to where he might have gone. No, this is his big play. Killing Dawn would be stupid, and stupid this boy ain’t.’

‘Okay, so where’s the clever bastard hiding my wife.’

‘Go into the script again,’ said Prim. ‘What happens in the movie, when Dawn’s kidnapped?’

Miles frowned. ‘Nelson Reed takes her to an abandoned offshore oil platform. Donn’s not going to follow the plot that closely; that really would be stupid.’

‘I agree with you that he wouldn’t take her to that place. Think of this, though; when you send him the code word, Dawn will be out of his hands for forty-eight hours while he makes his getaway. “Fed and watered”, he said. But not able to contact anyone, surely, not able to raise the alarm and set us on his trail before he’s got where he’s going. He won’t leave an accomplice to guard her; that wouldn’t make sense. So he must be holding her where he believes she can be left safely alone for that length of time.

‘Somewhere the buses don’t run. Somewhere the postman doesn’t call. An uninhabited island?’

A third penny dropped; this time I picked it up. ‘No. A rig after all; but not that one. Prim, Pep Newton hardly told us anything about Donn that we didn’t know before, but there was one fact, wasn’t there?’

She nodded. ‘He worked offshore, the Middle East, out of Singapore, out of Rotterdam.’

I didn’t wait for a reply; instead I took out my mobile phone and called Dylan, on Susie’s number. He answered the phone, sleepily. ‘Mike, it’s me.’

‘’cking Hell, Oz. Do you know what time it is?’

‘It’s countdown time,’ I snapped at him, excited. ‘The money’s in place, code word Dawn’s mum’s name, and now we’ve got twenty-four hours before we give it to him and he scoots. I need you to check something now. I want a list of abandoned gas or oil production platforms in the southern part of the North Sea, including, in particular, the Dutch sector. I need it now.’

‘Okay. Keep your phone switched on.’ The drowsiness had gone from his voice.

Miles was frowning at me. ‘You think. .?’

‘It’s not just our best shot, man. It’s our only shot.’

‘But how the hell would he get her on to a rig? He’d need a chopper, assuming he could fly one, and they don’t leave those lying around, do they?’

It was one of those rare moments when two people realise the same truth at exactly the same time. We stood there staring at each other, open-mouthed. Prim must have thought we were idiots, but then she hadn’t seen the open-air studio set, or the real Jet Ranger parked on the mock helipad.