Court of Appeals because the government agreed to whittle down its request so it was less of a fishing expedition. They’d only get three years’ worth of scripts from Las Vegas and a halo of Nevada zip codes, and the writers’ names and addresses would be suppressed. If any “leads” were developed from this universe of material, the government would have to go back with fresh probable cause to obtain the writer’s identity.
The scripts started pouring in, mostly on data disks but also in boxes of printed material. The FBI clerical staff in New York went into printer overdrive, and eventually Will’s office looked like a caricature of the mail room at a Hollywood talent agency, film scripts everywhere. When the task was done, there were 1,621 Nevada-pedigreed screenplays sitting on the twenty-third floor of the Federal Building.
Without a road map, Will and Nancy couldn’t skim too hastily. Still, they quickly found a rhythm and were able to slog through a script in about fifteen minutes, carefully reading the first few pages to get the gist, then flipping and scanning the rest. They steeled themselves for a slow, laborious process, hoping to wrap up the task within one painful month. Their strategy was to look for the obvious: plots about serial killers, references to postcards, but they had to stay vigilant for the nonobvious-characters or situations that simply struck a responsive chord.
The pace was unsustainable. They got headaches. They got irritable and snapped at each other all day then retreated to Will’s apartment to make cranky love in the evenings. They needed frequent walks to clear their heads. What really made them crazy was that the vast majority of scripts were complete and utter crap, incomprehensible or ridiculous or boring to the extreme. On the third or fourth day of the exercise, Will perked up when he picked up a script called Counters and declared excitedly, “You’re not going to believe this, but I know the guy who wrote this.”
“How?”
“He was my freshman roommate in college.”
“That’s interesting,” she said, uninterested.
He read it much more thoroughly than the others, which set him back an hour, and when he put it down he thought, Don’t give up your day job, buddy.
At three in the afternoon Will made a notation into his database about a piece of dreck concerning a race of aliens who came to Earth to beat the casinos, and grabbed the next one in his pile.
He gently kicked Nancy’s knee with the tip of his loafer.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she replied.
“Suicidal?”
“I’m already dead,” she answered. Her eyes were pink and arid. “What’s your point?”
His next one was titled The 7:44 to Chicago. He read a few pages and groused, “Christ. I think I read this one a few days ago. Terrorists on a train. What the fuck?”
“Check the submission date,” she suggested. “I’ve had a few with multiple submissions. Writer changes it and spends another twenty bucks to register it again.”
He punched the title into his database. “When you’re right, you’re right. This one’s a later draft. I rated it zero out of ten for relevance. I can’t read it again.”
“Suit yourself.”
He started to close the script then stopped himself. Something caught his eye, a character name, and he began frantically paging forward, then sat upright, flipping faster and faster.
Nancy noticed something was up. “What?” she asked.
“Gimme a second, gimme a second.”
She watched him make frantic notes, and whenever she interrupted to ask what he had, he replied, “Would you please just wait a second?”
“Will, this isn’t fair!” she demanded.
He finally put the script down. “I’ve got to find the earlier draft. Could I have missed this? Quick, help me find it, it’s called The 7:44 to Chicago. Check the Monday stack while I check Tuesday.”
She crouched on the floor near the windows and found it a few minutes later, deep in a pile. “I don’t know why you don’t tell me what’s going on,” she complained.
He grabbed it out of her hands. In seconds he was shaking with excitement. “Good Lord,” he said softly. “He changed the names from the earlier draft. It’s about a group of strangers who get blown up by terrorists on a train from Chicago to L.A. Look at their last names!”
She took the script and started reading. The names of the strangers floated off the page: Drake, Napolitano, Swisher, Covic, Pepperdine, Santiago, Kohler, Lopez, Robertson.
The Doomsday victims. All of them.
There was nothing she could say.
“The second draft was registered April 1, 2009, seven weeks before the first murder,” Will said, kneading his hands. “April Fool’s Day-ha, fucking ha. This guy planned it out and advertised it in advance in a goddamned screenplay. We need an emergency order to get his name.”
He wanted to envelop her, lift her off the ground and swing her in a circle by her waist, but he settled for a high five.
“We’ve got you, asshole,” he said. “And your script pretty much sucks too.”
Will would remember the next twenty-four hours the way one remembered a tornado-emotions rising in anticipation of the impact, the blurred and deafening strike, the swath of destruction, and afterward the eerie calm and hopelessness at the loss.
The Ninth Circuit granted the government’s subpoena and the WGA unmasked the writer’s personal data.
He was at his PC when his inbox was dinged by an e-mail from the Assistant U.S. Attorney running the subpoena. It was forwarded from the WGA with the subject line: Response to US Gov v. WGA West re. WGA Script #4277304.
For the rest of his life he would remember the way he felt when he read that e-mail.
In complete and lawful response to the afore-referenced proceedings, the registered author of WGA Script #4277304 is Peter Benedict, P.O. Box 385, Spring Valley, Nevada.
Nancy came into his office and saw him frozen like marble at his screen.
She drew close until he could feel her breath against his neck. “What’s wrong?”
“I know him.”
“What do you mean, you know him?”
“It’s my college roommate.” The image of the scripts on Shackleton’s neat white desk rushed back in, his insistent words, I don’t think you’re going to catch the guy, his palpable unease at his spontaneous visit and-one more detail! “The fucking pens.”
“Sorry?”
Will was shaking his head in lamentation. “He had black ultrafine Pentels on his desk. It was all there.”
“How can it be your roommate? This doesn’t make any sense, Will!”
“Jesus,” he moaned. “I think Doomsday was aimed at me.”
Will’s fingers danced over his keyboard as he feverishly hopped from one federal and state database to another. As he hunted, he repeatedly thought, Who are you, Mark? Who are you really?
Information started hitting his screen-Shackleton’s DOB, his social, some old parking tickets in California-but there were maddening gaps and shrouds of obscurity. His photo was blacked-out on his Nevada driver’s license record, there weren’t any credit reports, mortgages, educational or employment records. There were no criminal or civil proceedings. No property tax records. He wasn’t in the IRS database!
“He’s completely off the fucking grid,” Will told Nancy. “Protected species. I’ve seen this once or twice but it’s rare as hell.”
“What’s our move?” she asked.
“We’re getting on a plane this afternoon.” She’d never heard him sound as agitated. “We’re going to make this bust ourselves. Go start the paperwork with Sue, right away. We’ll need a federal arrest warrant from the U.S. Attorney in Nevada.”
She brushed her fingers against the back fringe of his hair. “I’ll make the arrangements.”
A couple of hours later a car was waiting to take them to the airport. Will finished packing his briefcase. He checked his watch and wondered why Nancy was late. Even under his subversive watch, she had retained the virtue
