The Manuscript (4 page)

Michael Derrigan was a sole-proprietor with a few part-time consultants, whose expertise he drew upon when needed, and while the money was pretty good, it was far from great – but work was steady, and for the decade he’d been doing it, relatively uneventful. Compared to his prior stint with the Navy in the elite SEAL division, this was a walk in the park – he’d never had to shoot anyone on the job, and the few times one of his clients had gotten into serious trouble, he’d been able to put it to rest with a briefcase of hundreds and a broken nose.

Lately, he’d been spending more time escorting trophy wives on shopping sprees or cleaning up after some Middle Eastern royalty’s son’s embarrassing behaviour at a nightspot than on any sort of real security work.

Which was fine with Michael as long as the cash kept coming. He billed a grand per eight-hour day and had steady gigs that kept him busy three to four days a week, so while he certainly wasn’t building an empire, he had adequate walking around money to keep himself in a nice lifestyle. Some day, he was going to finish his great American novel, but for now, he was more focused on his daily grind, which this morning involved meeting some visiting businessmen at JFK and playing tour guide/concierge, hopefully keeping them out of jail, the morgue, or the papers for the three days they were in town.

That wasn’t as easy as it sounded. These gentlemen were on a combination business/pleasure junket from Turkey and likely couldn’t wait to begin the boozing and whoring to which many of his international clients were inevitably drawn.

Michael washed down an English muffin with an oversized cup of coffee and watched CNN to keep track of the world’s latest horrors and atrocities. The talking heads always seemed so earnest, and a part of him absently wondered whether they prayed every morning for a war to start, or a plane to crash, or a school bus full of children to be held hostage. Chewing the remains of his breakfast, he pondered what got someone interested in being a newscaster. Were they failed actors? Did they bomb Off-Broadway and this was their big break, or at least a steady pay check? Or was this their dream? Were there really children out there who didn’t want to be firemen or astronauts, but instead wanted to be pseudo-reporters reading earnestly from a teleprompter? He didn’t get it, but then again, there was a whole world of things Michael didn’t get.

A story about a boat explosion at the mouth of the Hudson caught his attention, but after a few moments watching the vapid coverage his eyes drifted away from the screen and to his computer; he had no interest in listening to the perkily earnest reporter try to make an engine fire sound riveting.

Michael checked the time and realized he was dawdling. Forcing himself into action, he assembled his daily inventory of necessities on his small dining room table – Blackberry, permit to carry, Glock with extra magazine, money clip with two grand in hundreds, driver’s license, PI license, business cards held together with a worn rubber band, and black Amex card in his company’s name. He ticked the items off his mental checklist by habit.

All there, present and accounted for.

Satisfied he hadn’t forgotten anything, he switched off the television and grabbed his gear, stuffing it into various and sundry pockets. Now properly equipped, he checked his appearance one last time in the full-length mirror by the front door; a vanity a long-departed aspiring model girlfriend had insisted upon as a requirement for regular feedback of her charms. Michael looked competent, alert, and completely average, which was exactly the effect he strove for. The loose cut of his hand-tailored gray suit hid the bulge from the shoulder holster. He was indistinguishable from the legions of nondescript businessmen thronging the streets of Manhattan.

His pocket vibrated as he received the text message from Aldous, the 300-pound Haitian driver he used for these types of pick-ups, informing Michael that the car was rounding the corner and would be in front of his building within sixty seconds.

Michael shut off the lights, double-locked the front door, and quickly descended the two flights of stairs to the street, humming to himself as he approached the waiting limo.

Life was pretty good, all things considered. At least he wasn’t breaking up bar fights at four a.m. like some of his peers from the service did to make ends meet now they were private citizens again. If wearing a monkey suit and treating some wonk from a refinery in lower Killdickistan like a visiting head of state was what it took to pay the rent, hey, there were worse alternatives: he could be a pimp, or, God forbid, a lawyer.

Michael smiled for the first time that day as he climbed into the passenger side of the long, black vehicle’s front cab. Aldous didn’t smile back. The big man obviously had a lot on his mind. Michael tried a cheerful ‘Hello’ but Aldous merely grunted ominously before gunning the car into mid-morning traffic.

Welcome to the Big Apple.

********

Abe shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

His ass hurt.

Lately, that had been a recurring theme in his life, however this morning, especially, his ass felt like a hive of bees had stung his rather ample posterior.

It was an occupational hazard as much as a lack of adequate roughage. He was one of a dying breed of literary agents and spent most of his waking hours sitting. Abraham Sarkins was one of the few who still believed there were talents worth discovering. He actually read everything he got before he sent a rejection letter – or read at least a few dozen pages so he could determine whether he was about to shut down the next Tolstoy or a semi-literate chimp with delusions of grandeur. He realized he was somewhat of an anachronism, but he’d been doing it that way forever and he wasn’t about to change now.

Most of his contemporaries farmed out the scanning of query letters and first chapters to their overworked, meagrely-paid assistants, however Abraham was old-fashioned, and believed a large part of his professional life had been distinguished by recognizing talent others had overlooked.

And so he sat, twelve hours a day and up, with a throbbing sciatica and a conviction that he owed those sending him their work at least a cursory personal review before he crushed their dreams. Which he did ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time. It was nothing personal; just the way the business worked, and it had been getting nothing but tougher for as long as Abe had been doing it.

But every now and then, completely out of left field, Abe would find something that captivated his interest and made him want to read more. That happened about as often as a lunar landing, but the universe worked in an inexplicable manner, and for some reason, as was the case with the remarkable document he’d begun reading last night, Abe was occasionally chosen as the vessel through which genius would flow – or at least as the agent to whom something worth reading was sent.

He shifted in his seat, trying to mitigate the discomfort.

Today, not only did his ass hurt, but he was also genuinely mystified.

Last evening, as he was preparing to leave the office after a long day of fighting with publishers, ass-kissing prima donna authors and shmoozing film producers, he’d been floored by an e-mail sent to his private, unpublished address. The sender was unfamiliar, yet it was worded in such a way that a personality like Abe’s had to at least glance at the attached pages.

He didn’t want to – normally he’d have summarily deleted it unread – and in hindsight, part of him wished he’d done so and gone home to his two Yorkies. But for whatever reason, likely the mention in the opening sentence of a little-known factoid from Abe’s college days, he’d violated his own rule and taken a peek at the contents.

That peek had developed into three hours of increasingly engrossed reading, and then the printing of the manuscript for consumption at home. Abe hated reading on his computer screen and routinely printed out any longer documents, to be read in what he felt was a proper manner. Pages flowed differently on paper than on a screen, no matter what new miracle materials it was made with, and he was too set in his ways to start being romanced by technological advents now. He’d waited twenty years before he bought his first answering machine, convinced the innovation was a fly-by-night fad. Even with all the hubbub about
eReaders
and
Eye-Pads,
or whatever the hell the kids were so fired up about, Abe wasn’t even close to convinced that paper was dead in the water.

His thinking returned to the remarkable manuscript he’d been sent.

Either the author was a wildly-inventive fiction writer blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, or he’d authored an incredible non-fiction account that could alter the course of modern history, as well as the standing of many of society’s most venerated figures and institutions. Abe had been immediately sucked in by the account, and even though he suspected the whole thing was a work of elaborate fiction, he was open to the idea that it was possible – just possible – it was actually what it purported to be.

If that was the case, and if, when he finished the manuscript, the events described were verifiable as true and correct, he’d just received the most important book of his career.

The e-mail message had indicated Abe was the only person it had been sent to because of the author’s knowledge of his literary tastes and track record. The latter wasn’t tough to figure out, because Abe had been fortunate enough to amass a roster of respectable non-fiction talents along with a few commercially-successful fiction scribes. But that hadn’t really helped Abe figure out which of the two camps this author fell into.

He/she claimed the work was non-fiction, but then again so did all religions, along with thousands of dubious biographies and memoirs, so a non-fiction assurance meant less than nothing to Abe.

As to his tastes, the author had nailed Abe, he’d grant him that. After forty-odd years in the business, it was almost impossible to write something Abe would find interesting, and even less likely he’d read more than a few pages before deciding it wasn’t marketable. This manuscript had stopped Abe cold, riveting him, had resonated with a part of him he’d considered, if not dead, at least in some kind of protracted coma.

This morning when he’d gotten into the office, he’d spent the first few hours of his day making calls in an attempt to verify or refute some of the more incredible claims the manuscript had made in the couple of hundred pages he’d skimmed before hitting the sack late last night.

Over his forty years in the business, Abe had accumulated a lot of favors, so his inquiries to his contact base received serious attention. Nobody he reached could immediately offer any definitives, but all promised to investigate and get back to him with whatever they learned. This included two professors at Columbia University, the vice-chairman of one of the largest investment banks on Wall Street, and the head of an elite think-tank in D.C..

Abe had pondered the claims in the manuscript long and hard, and understood that if they could be corroborated, they represented an incredible exposé of a hidden reality not even the most jaded conspiracy theorists had dreamt of in their most paranoid moments. But in order to know whether he had a book, Abe needed to get some feeling of how much, if any of it, was true or could be verified. If he just got blank stares from his network, many of whom were as plugged-in as it was possible to be, he could safely assume it was all a waste of time and simply flush the document and get on with his life.

So he’d made the calls, reeling in favors and cajoling – and then he’d glanced at his watch and realized that he needed to attend to more mundane matters. He’d set the wheels in motion on doing his due diligence, and now he needed to give it some time and see what the tom toms came back with.

His brief stab at initial research concluded, he’d grabbed his coat and satchel and rushed out to meet one of his authors at a brunch launching the writer’s latest non-fiction tome on how to make millions from one’s home computer by working only three hours a day. That chore concluded, he’d next detoured and stopped downtown to chat with a publisher he’d been having a hard time getting on the phone. Many of the real deals were done on a face-to-face basis, and Abe understood you needed to pound the pavement sometimes if you wanted to get mindshare.

The day almost half gone by the time he returned to the office, his thoughts had returned to the manuscript, so he’d logged onto his private account to see what he could glean from the sender’s e-mail address.

Which was why Abe was now mystified.

There was no e-mail.

No attachment.

********

Abe wasn’t a complete Luddite, so he’d done a cursory diagnostic to figure out what had gone wrong with his system, but his grasp of the intricacies of the technology were limited, and thus doomed to failure. After half an hour, he’d exhausted his rudimentary repertoire of technical know-how, and with nothing to show for it but frustration, finally acceded that he was out of his depth.

His personal assistant and secretary, Mona, was somewhat better than he when it came to computers, so he’d had her come in to try to recover the missing message. After fifteen more minutes of effort, they still had nothing to show for their trouble, and the clock was ticking.

Abe stared vacantly through the window at the building across the street as he considered his situation. He needed to find out who’d written the manuscript so he could establish contact and begin the dance. There were about three hundred questions he wanted to ask, and he needed to understand whether the author was a prodigy, a loon or a charlatan – but the attachment had no phone or address on it, and no author name.

So the e-mail was the only contact mechanism.

And it was gone.

Hence his current predicament.

What Abe needed was someone who really understood computers and was internet savvy. The kid who’d hooked up their network was okay, but certainly no genius – a friend’s nephew, just out of college and doing PC consulting until he found a real job – so that option was unlikely to yield any results. Which meant that unless there was a follow-up e-mail from the mystery scribe, he was shit out of luck, and potentially sitting on the mother lode with no way to mine it. That was just great. He gets what could very well be solid gold dropped in his lap and he might as well put a message in a bottle and throw it into the sea to communicate with the author.