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AS THE THREE GOOD friends inside Charlie Breen’s Deckhouse clicked glasses and toasted the future capture of Supervising Agent William Forrester, Forrester himself sat outside in his 1992 Porsche Carrera. In his hand was his new Nikon camera, which he trained at the Deckhouse door.

He had been clicking away for the past two hours, pictures of Jack and Oscar heading into Charlie Breen’s Deckhouse. And he would get more photos as they left the place. Maybe they’d even come out together. Maybe Charlie would do his man-hug thing with them all, which would be exactly what he needed to build his case.

Of course, what would be even better would be recordings, wiretaps of their conversation. The thought of that made him smile. No doubt the three of them were figuring out some way to bring him down, make him take the fall for the missing money in the First City Bank robbery. Oh, yeah, he could almost hear smug Harper’s voice, probably going on about what a phony and what a jerk Supervising Agent William “Showbiz” Forrester was. How Forrester was the perfect person to take the fall, since everybody hated his ass anyway.

Well, maybe it was true. Maybe he wasn’t Mr. Popularity in the Bureau, because maybe some of the other agents were freaking jealous of his connections, how he had been able to turn his FBI gig into serious-money consulting-producer gigs with Spielberg on his new cop/alien movie The Green Home . . . Yeah, they were all jealous of him, and why? Because they had this ancient FBI mentality . . . the Bureau against the world . . . yeah, we few, we incorruptible few, versus the sordid, compromised, and downright filthy outer world . . . an idea started back when Miss Blue Panties J. Edgar Hoover was in command. Well, Hoover had a reason to be paranoid, the dick-sucking, ass-eating, pillow- biting, ball-gown–wearing fag!

But this was a new era. Hoover was long gone, and now the whole world (outside of the monks at the Bureau) was in the multitasking, schmooze-or-lose-universe! The idea that a man was guilty of a crime just because he had more ambition than another guy was sooooo over. The idea of being good at Just One Thing was so ’50s, so G-man, so black-and-white Anthony Mann movie world, when the rest of the world was running on computers and BlackBerrys.

The thing now was to be good — no, great — at a lot of things. A man could be an agent, which was still way cool, but he could also translate that position into a new top position as a consultant to only the biggest director in the world, and this same agent could expand that position ever outward, commanding more and more respect, garnering more and more power. Agent, consultant, yes, beautiful, and then who knew, like other great cop entrepreneurs before him, maybe series creator (he already had the title: The Hard Guys!, which would be the continuing adventures of two FBI agents who were not only hard-asses against scum like the Neanderthal Muslims, but also guys who got it up with Hollywood-royalty actresses as well. Thus the subconscious hard guy hard-on reference, which would get every red-blooded kid up and ready to fight (but mainly to watch every week) and fuck like the loyal and obedient Americans they were. Yessir, there was no reason he couldn’t be a producer, none at all, but to get there you had to have contacts, and to have contacts you had to pay for lunch occasionally, and when you were taking Steve Spielberg or Bill Friedkin or David Milch (though he always paid) out there to lunchville, you had to have money. Yess! That was like soooo right. And if you were going to play the rich-and-cool producer guy, you had to have a decent car. Just imagine showing up to lunch with Steve S., and he’s driving his freaking Lexus or supercool Jag and you’re driving a Honda Accord! No, sorry, nada, won’t work, don’t play, homie!

No, you had to have your own bread, baby.

You had to show up in a car, not a piece of fucking tin.

You also had to show up in a suit — not some FBI Shop at Syms, a freaking knockoff — but a real suit, custom made, from Savile Row, buddyroo.

You had to spend the cash and get the real stitching. The button holes had to look right, or they would spot you as a Pretend Player and you were through.

Thus, you needed a cash outlay to move forward, to reach your own human potential, and so, well, maybe you had to break a few eggs to make an omelet, after all.

So he had taken the money and he had used it to finance his own little Liberation movement (as so many of the jerk-off movements the Left had out there in Sunni Land were called) . . .

Yep, the Liberation of William Lindsay Forrester, and now the thing was he had to protect himself from scum like Jack Harper and his Tex-Mex partner, the burrito-eating slob, Oscar Hidalgo.

Jesus, it wasn’t even fair that he had to protect himself against such scuzzballs. In the old days, the Bureau wouldn’t even have let in a Mexican bean-eating greaseball like Oscar.

But that was how things had fallen apart.

Nowadays, anyone could get in.

Nowadays, if you could speak the language of the freaking Iraqis or knew two facts about Islam, you were in, you were golden.

The good old boys, the guys who went back, the real American guys, were being pushed out by freaking greaseballs from the Mideast!

Which was another reason he had to play hardball with Jack and Oscar, the evil bastards.

And which was why he was watching them night and day now.

And coming up with a plan.

A plan that would get him free of their corrupt influence and let him move on up in the Bureau hierarchy and then . . . zap, right beyond it to showbiz riches.

TV and movie Producerhood, major bucks, lunch every day at The Grill, and endless A-list actress pussy . . .

But first things first.

There were things to do, and let us not get the left foot tangled up with the right, lest we fall and break our face!

Soon his enemies would be out of the way. ’Bye, ’bye, ’bye . . . And he would be soaring above the other fucking agents and

their minuscule problems, high above them, and he’d come down, so soft and perfect a landing, right in Beverly Fucking Hills!