7.
As movie star Josh Penner and CIA case officer Charles Mulberry interacted inside Room 8 of the Vagabond Inn in Oxnard, sitting behind the wheel of a Toyota Camry parked nearby was Natalie Ruvo, a reporter with TMZ, watching Penner chase several teenagers away from his bright red Ferrari. Her boyish, pimply colleague captured the encounter on a video recorder. The intrepid pair of showbiz reporters had followed Penner from his house in the Hollywood Hills.
“What do you suppose he’s doing in a dump like this?” asked Ruvo of her lensman, relishing the potential for a gotcha moment—the thrill of which she thrived upon since joining the internet gossip site two years earlier. “It’s gotta be a drug deal.”
Her companion shrugged. “What else?”
“Are you prepared for a confrontation? Penner is known to get violent.”
“Bring him on.” Bradley Bish wanted to stake his reputation as a fearless ambusher. The worse Penner’s behavior, the bigger the story.
Forty minutes later they were still waiting for the celebrity to emerge.
“Maybe he’s in there with a girl?” said Ruvo.
“Maybe a boy?” said Bish.
“Maybe both!” they laughed in unison.
8.
Inside Room 8, CIA case officer Charles Mulberry scribbled like mad, trying to keep up as Josh Penner concluded his thorough debrief about visiting his buddy Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in Caracas.
Of particular interest to Mulberry were answers to a few questions he had provided Penner in advance of the actor’s trip.
Penner shook his head. “Didn’t have a chance.” In truth, the movie star had misplaced CIA’s shopping list even before touching down in Venezuela.
“Where do you stand with a return visit?”
Penner shrugged. “Hugo loves me. He said come back any time.”
“But nothing scheduled?”
Penner shook his head. “I got a call from someone who wants to give me a message from Chavez.”
“Who?”
“Says his name is Alex, something to do with culture at Venezuela’s embassy in Washington. I’m supposed to meet him tomorrow.”
“What? Meet him where?”
“Some place,” Penner snorted, “a helluva lot nicer than this dump.”
“Jesus, you should have checked with me first.”
“Huh?” Penner sneered like a man who believed he never had to check nothing with no one.
“It creates complications. These things need to be planned.”
“What complications?”
“I work in a very bureaucratic world,” said Mulberry. “Approvals need to be sought.”
“Well I don’t work in a bureaucratic world, and I don’t need approval for anything I do.”
“Is the meeting in this country?”
“Yup. West Hollywood.”
Mulberry frowned as he considered the cross-bureaucracy implications. For the eleventh time that day, he had the obsessive thought that he was merely minutes away from being fired. He so wished to count his teeth again. “Where and when exactly?”
“Lunch. One o’clock, The Ivy.”
Mulberry shook his head. “We’re going to have to inform the Bureau.”
“Who?”
“The FBI.”
“What? This is supposed to be just between us—me and the CIA.”
“Nothing I can do about that,” said Mulberry. “We have an obligation to inform the Bureau if any of our operations become a counterintelligence issue. And by agreeing to meet this Venezuelan diplomat, who is probably an intelligence officer, on U.S. soil, you just crossed that line.”
Penner looked dumbfounded. “What’s with you guys and all your rules?”
“New subject,” said Mulberry, ignoring the question. “Are you open to another assignment?”
“I don’t friggin’ believe this,” said Penner, checking on his car through the window blinds. “You come to me and ask if I’d mind asking my friend Hugo a few questions, and now you think I’m one of your full-fledged spies?” As he said this aloud, Penner realized he quite liked the idea.
“I was instructed to ask you. So if you say no, that’s fine. I’m just ticking boxes.”
“What’s it about?”
“We have a rogue spy we want to disrupt.”
“What does that mean?”
“We had to fire an intelligence officer. He has what we call a James Bond Complex.”
“Isn’t that what you want in the spy biz?”
“No.” Penner shook his head “He was not a team player. Good intelligence is about teamwork.”
“So what am I supposed to do about it?” Penner lit another cigarette.
“He’s written a book in retaliation for being fired. And we think he’s including classified information and naming names of CIA people, at headquarters and in the field, and also the names of assets. He’s already shopping it around to various publishers.”
“How do you know that?”
“That I cannot tell you,” said Mulberry, shaking his head. “We just know, trust me." He paused. “We’d like you to contact him and express interest in making a movie of his book. Hopefully, he will give you the manuscript. And you will give it to us. It would help us with damage control.”
Penner nodded. “Won’t he be suspicious if I call him out of the blue?”
“You can say you heard about it on your grapevine, on the basis that publishers test the water with movie production companies to see if they can sell film rights before they commit to a publication deal.” Mulberry paused. “Our personality profile of him suggests he’ll be flattered to hear from you.”
“And then what?” said Penner.
“Distract and disrupt. We need one year of keeping this book tied up in order to move officers and assets out of harm’s way.”
“A year, that’s all? Movies take years to get off the ground.”
“We need only one year. Is that something you could do?”
“Where is this guy?”
“Good question. He moved overseas so that the FBI couldn’t raid his home and confiscate his computer and manuscript.”
“Where overseas?”
“Paris, France.” Mulberry paused. “There’s more. We have indications that several foreign intelligence services are trying to co-opt him and gain access to his secrets.”
“Which ones?”
“Secrets?”
“No, which services?”
“That’s what we want to know—from you, on the basis that you can get him to confide in you.”
Penner grinned. I can do this. This is what I do. I’m an actor. The best. “So what’s the starting point?”
“If you are willing to proceed, I’ve been authorized to give you his contact details.”
“Shoot.”
Mulberry plucked a folded piece of paper from his inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to Penner. “Cell phone number and email address. He uses the number only to check messages.” He paused. “We’ll need to meet again after your lunch with the Venezuelan.” Mulberry sighed, distressed by this unexpected turn of events.
9.
Natalie Ruvo and Bradley Bish were tautly focused on Room 8 when the green door finally opened and Josh Penner stepped into the sunshine by himself.
“Let’s go!” said Ruvo.
She jumped out of the car and strode briskly across the street; Bish followed, recording their approach on video.
“Mister Penner! Mister Penner!” Ruvo called from across the parking forecourt.
Penner looked up, shocked and surprised. “What the…?”
“We’re with TMZ,” said Ruvo. “What kind of business do you have today in a seedy motel room?”
Hearing the commotion, Mulberry peeked through the blinds… and could hardly believe his eyes. I’m going to lose my job. Any second. Why did I not give him a taste of waterboarding?
Penner dragged heavily from his cigarette, held the smoke into his lungs as long as possible, and exhaled. “You following me?”
“Mister Penner,” said Ruvo, “are you engaged in a drug deal?”
“That’s it.” Penner pitched his cigarette to the ground and launched at Bish, who saw it coming and sidestepped, keeping his camera squarely focused on the assault-in-progress. “You son-of-a-whore!” Penner snarled. “I’ll beat the crap out of you.”
“Excellent.” Bish smiled.
This stumped the movie star, and he gave pause, frozen in his tracks. “Excellent?”
“Lay one finger on me and I’ll collect fifty grand.”
“Fifty grand’s nothing to me,” sneered Penner. “It would be worth the money to beat the shit out of you.”
“Go for it,” said Bish. “I could use the bread.”
From behind the window blinds, Charles Mulberry obsessively counted his teeth, over and over again.
“Ah, you’re not worth it.” Penner spat a glob of saliva on the ground between himself and Bish so that it partially landed on one of Bish’s new white Vans. He pulled a wad of cash from the front pocket of his blue jeans, peeled a Ben Franklin, crumpled it up and tossed it at the photographer. “Buy yourself another pair, asshole.”