We touch down at LAX three hours later, and it’s on to Hollywood.
An incredibly ugly little town.
A lot of people who don’t live here have a really idealized version of all this in their heads, mostly from watching movies, but even the tinsel and glamour stuff is pretty tarnished, pocketed away among skyscrapers and scummy neighborhoods, all compacted together with about a hundred thousand million billion people coming and going. That’s what makes this one of the biggest cities on the map—the sheer number of people in it. Hollywood Boulevard is full of homeless types in Halloween costumes, off-duty dishwashers spare-changing the tourists, trannies and hookers and pimps who don’t look like pimps. There’s a skinny guy in flannels and a red top hat camped in front of the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre where they have a lot of big premieres—and he’s sitting in a lawn chair, offering a set of headphones to anyone who will listen, waving a cardboard sign on a big stick that says: JESUS IS BACK AND HE NEEDS A RECORD DEAL.
There’s a lot of guys like that on this street.
You have more flashing lights and glittering signs on this one stretch of real estate than most any other city in America—besides Vegas, of course.
It doesn’t look nearly as interesting during the day.
Los Angeles is basically a series of smaller towns all grouped together. Drive far enough, and Hollywood turns into Culver City, which turns into Beverly Hills, which turns into Long Beach. All of it swims in a bleak undertow of greed and deception and dead people screaming their heads off about how life is really unfair.
The good thing is that the whole bloody mess is perched on the edge of an ocean, and the climate is cooler than Texas because the breeze of the sea washes through at night. It blows a lot of the bad stuff away, but not all of it. New Orleans is a backwater knife fight built on a swamp—Hollywood is a lot of lying and ruined dreams wrapped up in a dazzle of lights, hidden in canyons of unforgiving concrete and steel, like stars twinkling deep in piles of shit.
I keep my headphones on the whole way in, reading the five-page nondisclosure agreement they handed me when we left the airport. All pretty standard stuff. Eric Tate sits across from me in the limo, cursing at someone on a cell phone.
I sign my name on the dotted line.
The Lost Angels Plaza is a shining steel mirage against the backdrop of a painted city buried in its own sin. It looks a lot like a Vegas casino.
It takes up twelve city blocks.
The main building is ten stories built at a futuristic slope, towering above the street at the far edge of Hollywood Boulevard.
Roosevelt told me they had to create new zoning laws to get the thing built. Took them a year just to grease the LA politicians, two more years to do the real estate deal. Schwarzenegger was a big advocate back in the day, of course. Another three years and the hotel plaza was open for business, and since the gala opening in 2007, they’ve been constructing the raised platform system for the Jaeger Laser. An ambitious project requiring two billion in labor alone. The rail runs from the heart of the Lost Angels Plaza and snakes through the city on an elevated track. Looks like something out of an old sci-fi magazine.
Yeah, this Sidney Jaeger, he thinks big, all right.
The limo comes to a stop in a huge semicircle full of other limousines right on the massive front steps of the plaza. The mouth of the great city of Oz, welcoming us.
I get out, and a very large man is right there at the bottom of the stone steps. Should have known it would be him. He tells me I look like hell, waddling toward me with a gigantic shiteater set deep into his wrinkled face. I tell him that’s the second time this week I’ve been fashion-policed by a fair-weather friend.
Tom Romilda holds out his hand and I shake it with a silly little grin.
“I said you’d be back,” he tells me.
I reach down and click the tape player off.
Mötley Crüe dies, leaving me at the mercy of Oz.
The lobby could be half the size of a football field at first glance, like a train station gene-spliced with a theme park mutating into a shopping mall, with a thick sheen of chromed metal and plastic over the whole thing, keeping the sci-fi magazine illusion going in a pretty major way. Giant columns reach up ten stories to a domed ceiling filled with old movie-poster reproductions, like some overblown temple of postmodern gods bound to earth. The levels of the hotel are visible through walls of glass, encircling the giant chamber, ringed with catwalks and VIP boxes. It’s all designed to look inwards at the bullet train platform, which is just above us at the fifth floor, like a raised subway car landing that runs through the room overhead, encased within an elaborate construction that you can see through like the skeleton of a crystal robot, held aloft by two of the columns, and great steel supports glittering with chrome and lights, like nothing else in this city or on this earth. Luxurious lifts rising and falling into the lobby on all sides of us. Golden carriages filled with precious humanity.
The place is giant, the way you think of alien worlds as giant.
I feel like I’m on Mars.
Eric Tate walks in front of Tom and me, his bodyguards flanking us at a respectable distance, his expensive Italian shoes clocking on thick marble, motioning in wide circles like a tour guide. “How do you like it, Mr. Carlsbad?”
“It smells like money in here,” I tell him.
“There’s four hundred million dollars in this room alone. The platform is a marvel of modern engineering and rail technology. The track extends through the nerve center of old Hollywood and provides a dazzling view of the entire city during departure from Los Angeles.”
Sounds like a press release, this guy.
He doesn’t miss a beat, aiming at the walls of glass all around us with his sunglasses. “The hotel was built with the lobby and the platform in its center so that guests in their rooms and on the walkways surrounding us can view the train as it enters and leaves the station. It’s quite the spectacle. People will come from far and wide just to watch the train pull out.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“There’s already a six-month waiting list, Mr. Carlsbad. Pre-sales of our VIP packages have paid nearly a third of our construction costs.”
Jesus.
What the hell does a room go for in this place?
I rub my chin, thinking about that kid on the street with the record-deal sign, and I choose my next words very carefully. “What about the average Joe? Don’t those guys wanna see the paradise too?”
“Of course. Sidney wants everyone to share in his dream. There are several five-star restaurants located in this lobby and on level three. A shopping center with a fast-food court, movie theater with stadium seating. Vendors, video games, you name it. We even have a tattoo and body-piercing shop.”
“How hip of you.”
“This place is a happening, Mr. Carlsbad. We expect people from all walks of life to participate.”
“But they mostly just get to watch the train, right?”
“Money does have its privileges.”
“Guess you can say that again.”
“As the years go on, we hope to make some of the accommodations more affordable to the working class.”
“Hooray for us.”
“Do I sense sarcasm, Mr. Carlsbad?”
“No. I just don’t have any money.”
He laughs. “Our sales department projects that within the first year of the train’s operation, more than half a billion dollars in revenue will be generated from the hotel alone. This brings something far more valuable to the working class than E tickets on the Jaeger Laser or seats in one of those fancy opera boxes up there—it brings wealth to the community. Jobs. A change for the future.”
“All paid for by the rich.”
“Exactly, Mr. Carlsbad. Exactly.”
Tom pats me on the shoulder. “These guys got their act together, Buck. Believe you me.”
Yeah.
Kinda makes you wonder what they want with scumbags like us.
I feel the bottom fall away from my stomach as the golden lift floats us in space above the gigantic lobby. He was right, the view from up here is spectacular. It looks like a small, compact city built on multiple levels, teeming with ants, all centered around the train in its elaborate dock. The floors that streak by on all sides of us are like crystal walkways leading to luxury suites and shopping levels. Eric Tate tells us it’s all open to the public and I have a hard time believing him. You could get away with charging twenty bucks just for the elevator ride.
We step out on a glass walkway near the giant temple ceiling with all the movie posters. Tate leads us down a hallway with high column arches and fancy carpeting. I can’t get any kind of reading here.
It’s dead, no life at all.
Executive penthouse level.
The hall terminates in a wide marble staircase, and there’s a really big door at the top of the stairs, set into a small section of marble with more columns.
A guy in a suit on the door, who nods at our bodyguards.
He says something into a handheld device, and it glimmers, talking back.
One of them gives my satchel a weird glance, but nobody searches me.
Good thing.
I have a gun in there.
Never mind that it’s thirty years old and rusted beyond use—I’m sure the threat is just the same to grunts like this. I’m not even sure why I brought the damn thing. Just feeling the nexus, man.
Going with it.
The guy at the door steps away, and it opens wide, like the arms of a rich Greek god welcoming us.
Eric Tate’s expensive shoes clock through the door, the sound leading point into the chamber beyond, which flows in a circle all around us, layers of black glass shafting in prisms, creating frames for artwork and movie posters—probably the originals, if anything about this place is as real as it seems to be. The windows of the suite are slotted in twenty-foot slices, surrounding the whole room in a 360-degree panorama of the whole city, which winks at us with a billion all-knowing eyes. From up here, you’d almost think it was something beautiful, civilized. A great glimmering mural immortalizing some epic dream you once had.
There’s a man in the room.
He’s wearing a dull gray suit.
His stark form stands out in sharp relief against a center window he’s looking through, an ivory cane held at his side, no bodyguards next to him.
He’s much taller than I expected.
Looks about six and a half foot.
A giant, really.
Figures.
“Hello, Mr. Carlsbad,” he says, not turning around, though I can see his face reflected in the glass in front of him. “I’m Sidney.”
His voice is not what I expected either.
It was different on television.
The tone is smooth and practiced, even theatrical. All these rich fellas tend to be like that. It comes from a lifetime of pretending to be humble in rooms made of gold. But there’s something human about the way he speaks too. Something that betrays secret parts of him. I’m reminded of a doctor I once knew—whose daughter fell from the earth and came back to him as a monster in the dark.
And I’m reminded of something else too.
His face and his eyes, younger than they should be, a deep passion running beneath the surgically reworked contours of his decades-old skin.
Something cold in his eyes.
Something I can’t figure right off.
It’ll come to me.
He starts off by welcoming me to the hotel, and we go through the introductions. He tells me I have a suite just below the penthouse. Anything I want, it’s mine. He says he likes my jacket, and I tell him I have ten just like it. He finds my Walkman quaint and turns his mouth into an odd shape that almost looks like a smile, motioning to several glasses of champagne bubbling on a table made of polished volcanic rock. Everything in this room is black. The couches, the chairs, the giant flat-screen television. There’s a glossy-gothy elegance to it.
“Shall we have a drink, Mr. Carlsbad? To celebrate our new alliance.”
“We haven’t talked about an alliance yet.”
“You spoke with Eric?”
“He saved the big pitch for you.”
“Of course he did.” His smile widens and he forgets about the bubbly, standing there with both hands in front of him, resting on his cane. I’m reminded of a Marvel Comics supervillain. “Mr. Carlsbad, let’s discuss the future. After all, that’s where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives, isn’t it?”
Sheesh.
Fortune-cookie philosophy from the Fortune 500.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I tell him, trying not to laugh.
“Of course I am. We are privileged to inhabit a very exciting period of history. The discoveries of fractal equations in relation to microtechnology and computer components, for example—these are miracles that our forefathers could never have imagined in their wildest dreams. But it all comes at a heavy price, and one must pay that price to those who are still wary of things to come. You’ve no doubt been made aware of the controversy surrounding my rail project?”
“A little bit.”
This time the lie is easy.
He’s performing, not reading me the way Tate was.
“That’s where it all falls down a lot of the time,” Sidney says. “Controversy can work both ways. With patience, however, everything moves ahead. At a slow pace, perhaps, but ahead, Mr. Carlsbad. Part of the process involves the participation of certain…shall we say, necessary persons?”
The way he says that, it kind of sounds like he means necessary evils.
“You’re talking about Senator Bob?”
“Him and men like him, yes. This entire country is built on a delicate latticework of political systemetry, and it’s all fueled by cold cash.”
“Surprise, surprise.”
“But we’ve been given a hostage to fortune in the senator. He’s corrupt, like most politicians, but he possesses a sort of public charisma not seen in politics before. It’s unprecedented, really. Money makes that happen too. When you have a big enough machine working for you, the opinion makers can be easily manipulated. My analysts project that by the year 2030, youth will control society as we know it.”
“Good for them.”
“They will also be directed in their opinions and philosophies by men such as Bob Maxton, and his campaign platforms are radical, particularly for a so-called conservative. His bill to legalize gambling in this city, for example. It will be passed next year, without a doubt.”
“That’s the plan, I hear.”
“It’s a plan backed by a lot more than public opinion, I assure you.”
Welcome to the next generation, where everything’s for sale.
I almost say that out loud but decide it’s not a good idea.
The gravity in this room is almost crushing me now.
The nexus, tighter than ever.
“So,” I say, then take a few steps toward him. “You’re launching your bullet into the future in a few weeks and you think you’ve got a…problem?”
“It is a distinct possibility, Mr. Carlsbad. And the launch is not in a few weeks. It’s happening in just four days.”
What?
They haven’t even made a public announcement about it yet.
He sees my face screw up in confusion and laughs.
“Tomorrow, you’ll hear about it on every channel. Another seemingly impromptu press conference with Senator Maxton. It’s all been carefully orchestrated. Our moles inside the Internet blogosphere and certain controlled leaks have already set the media on fire. This will guarantee a turnout of epic proportions. It’s the kind of press you can’t buy.”
Brilliant, Sidney.
I’m almost amazed the kid didn’t predict this.
So I take a deep breath, sit down next to Tom, and jump right in.
“Tell me about your problem.”