The South Florida Offshore Tourism Redevelopment Zone #3
But Roger was interested in her. He liked to sit next to her, always bought her a pint when they met at pubs.
He offered to accompany her home on more than one occasion, or call her a cab when she refused.
One of the other Reapers teased her, thinking Roger was clearly crushing on Lilly.
But Lilly knew better. A fifty-something-year-old man like Roger does not crush on a fifty-something-year-old woman.
Guys like him lean younger. No, he was after something else.
After two months of Roger’s flirtations, he changed tactics.
One Saturday night, a few hours after she’d returned from trivia night with the Reapers at a pub, there was a knock at Lilly’s door.
Hard, loud, with a gruff voice shouting behind it.
Not the kind of knocking one could ignore.
Peering through the peephole, Lilly saw Roger, wearing a suit.
He had been wearing a polo shirt earlier. She opened the door.
“Hi, Roger,” she said.
“Lilly, hello,” he replied. “I was worried about you. I didn’t have your number. I couldn’t call.”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“What if there’s an emergency?”
“Who would call me in an emergency?”
Roger smiled, not in the flirty way she had seen him smile before, but with a malicious delight.
“Can we talk?” he asked.
She let him in. Lilly sat on the couch, pushing aside the old, crusted plates of food. Roger stood over her, uncomfortably close.
“How did you know where I live?” Lilly asked.
“It’s not very difficult to find people,” Roger said. “Also I followed you home tonight.”
“Christ, Roger.”
“Don’t worry. You know the British Secret Service? That’s MI6. You know, MI6? I’m with them.”
“Well, of course,” said Lilly, almost relieved to be caught. “I haven’t done anything else, you know. I haven’t hurt anyone. It’s been years, I’ve stayed quiet, I—”
“I know,” Roger said. He spoke with the confidence of a man who had never believed himself to be wrong. “I’m not here on behalf of the studio. I’m here because I need your help.”
“With what?”
“Tell me everything you know about neuroscanner technology.”
Roger and Lilly filed into the large, hot convention hall.
They sat in small, wobbly folding chairs set up in the very back of the room.
Roger had worked out down to the minute the timeline, but if they weren’t in the hall then they couldn’t be precise.
All Roger had to do was confirm the start time, but he screwed that up.
“Lilly, calm down,” he whispered as they sat down. “They changed it, it happens. You know how many times I’ve done this?”
“Are you trying to sabotage us?” she hissed at him. The crowd erupted in applause as the lights dimmed. “This is your idea anyway.”
“Yeah, you keep saying that.”
“Hellloooo, Miami!” The voice boomed out over the loudspeakers.
Hall B was set up for speakers and guests, and it was the largest room at the convention.
Hundreds of people crammed into it. At the front, on a raised stage, were two large chairs, facing one another.
Behind the chairs were projected images from the Malicarn films.
“Now if you direct your attention to the main stage…” The voice introduced some studio official, a diminutive man who spoke softly. He droned on about the importance of The Malicarn and how excited he was about upcoming projects. Nobody listened to him.
“The schedule for the meet and greet is still the same, though,” Roger whispered to Lilly. “So we actually have more time than we thought.”
“You sure? Don’t you think you should double-check that too?”
The official introduced a celebrity journalist with a popular video blog, then left the stage.
The journalist, a man named Bob Pickering, worked the room with jokes and hype.
Then he pointed at the crowd and began to shout.
“Now, are you ready to learn ‘the Secrets of the Malicarn’? Well, put your hands together for the most famous wizard of all time!”
The crowd roared.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Great Gregorian himself: Glenn Mackey!”
From stage left emerged a tall, thin, balding man, with a short, messy beard, dressed in a blue suit. He waved and smiled at the crowd, then sat in a chair opposite Pickering. Lilly was shocked at how old he had become.
2.
The woman in the row behind Glenn took three selfies before she got one that didn’t crop out his face.
The furtive scurrying of fans toward the first-class cabin started up again now that the plane was in the air, but after the woman’s photo Glenn placed his headphones on and squinted at his laptop, hoping to ignore them by playing the part of a man in deep concentration.
Glenn’s inbox was all notes of fury and despair. He read the ones from Jules first.
We need to do something about the lack of progress with Maximus. Search for lost dwarf kingdom???
More info coming soon on logistics with the planned pestilence. Will make major appearance.
The sons of Ravela continue to be the center of the next arc, so we ought to introduce them to the queen soon. ASAP if possible. For their benefit, not Hannah’s.
Jules’s emails were always short messages, written down in haste and sent without much thought. Notes for future discussion.
The other emails, from Larry or an executive or a journalist fishing for sources, were even more direct.
The entire set had been on high alert since that morning, when some intern flagged a shot of a man running through the woods, and a producer noticed that the man was the missing Chinese pilot.
So he wasn’t floating dead somewhere in the Atlantic.
He was alive in the Malicarn. Glenn had just arrived at his layover when the news broke, and he decided to put off reading those emails as long as possible.
It didn’t have anything to do with him, he reminded himself. If Jules knew, that’s on Jules. They’ll find the pilot soon enough. It’s a good thing, isn’t it? He’s not dead. The Chinese will be happy. Everything’s fine.
An email from Larry’s boss’s boss, a former White House press secretary: “I’m told the president is fielding calls from the Chinese general secretary. This could blow up real fast, why isn’t anyone briefing senior execs?”
Nothing to do with me, Glenn thought.
He looked out the plane’s window. The view below was cloaked by a thick blanket of cloud cover.
It was the third time this year he left the set, but the first time he was going to the United States.
He hadn’t been back since attending the Emmys three years earlier, another compulsory publicity event.
His first flight that morning, an early charter from Funchal to Atlanta, was choppier, so even with the fans bothering him he preferred this commercial flight.
Flying commercial took longer, however, and once they landed he would not have much time to rest.
Two days of my life for this, Glenn thought.
He refreshed his emails and looked over them again.
Jules hadn’t responded about the pilot. Instead, he was complaining about the Madeiran teenagers who lately had been vandalizing the set.
“Need to liaise with local police ASAP.” But Jules had long ago alienated the locals.
Meanwhile, there were several additional panicked emails from the studio.
Glenn tried not to worry about it, it really wasn’t his problem, though he wasn’t sure how the Malicarn population would act if they discovered that the “dragon rider” was real and alive.
Ideally Jules would institute some measures to tamp down on the rising tide of anger in the commons.
Some extra food would go a long way. At least Hannah was smart enough to leave for the Mountain Keep.
She was clever. It would serve her well, once her character came of age.
The plane landed on a large floating tarmac and disembarked into a busy terminal, where Glenn spent several minutes taking pictures and signing autographs for the excited crowds that formed around him.
Eventually he made it to the helicopter gate, where he was the only passenger for a brief ride from the airport to the large red hotel hovering over the water in the east. The other passengers would have to travel by ferry.
A concierge met him on the hotel’s roof helipad, where Glenn’s bags were taken and he was led to his room, a few floors below the convention hall.
His room was a large, comfortable suite.
Sterile, yes, but quiet. But before Glenn could fall asleep there was a knock at the door.
He opened it to find one of the convention producers.
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Mackey, but it appears there’s been a change in the schedule and now your interview is moved up to eleven.”
Glenn sighed. “That’s fine. I’ll be ready in a minute.”
Fifteen minutes and a quick shower later, Glenn was back out in the hallway, some intern leading him to a service elevator and up to the convention hall.
He fiddled with his tie. His suit was tight and uncomfortable.
Glenn rubbed his eyes and tried to remember who he was speaking to, and about what. It didn’t really matter.
In the wings of the main stage, someone applied stage makeup to Glenn as Bob Pickering walked up and shook his hand, made a ribald joke, and then bounded out to the stage to introduce the session. Another intern clipped a mic to Glenn’s shirt as he watched Bob pace under the bright stage lights.
Showtime, thought Glenn.
“Now, are you ready to meet the most famous wizard in the history of the Malicarn?” Bob shouted to the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Great Gregorian himself: Glenn Mackey!”
Glenn walked out, waving at the large, cheering crowd, then shook hands again with Bob before sitting in one of the chairs in the center of the stage.