Michael Walsh - Early Warning

“So I guess Arnaud’s is out of the question.”

He smiled. “Arnaud’s, Galatoire’s Brennan’s, Congo Square, Exchange Alley-the whole nine yards.”

Maryam hit the radio button twice and nodded to Devlin. He took the cigarette lighter out of its holder and pressed it against his thumb. The biometric reader vetted him, and suddenly the navigator screen leaped to life. He punched in his instructions.

“Go.”

The car leaped forward, speeding west out of town and toward Louis Armstrong Airport. There would be a private plane there, fully equipped, on the director’s orders. In no time, he and Maryam would be fully up to speed and, if possible, already fighting back. There were contingency plans for something like this, but plans went out the window as soon as the first shots were fired, and from the looks of this…

No matter. He was doing what he was born to do. He was himself again.

He was Devlin.

Los Angeles

Jake Sinclair had a choice: to stay sober or to get drunk?

Not just drunk, but, like Elmer Gantry, eloquently drunk, lovingly drunk. Elmer Gantry was one of his favorite characters in literature-not that he had ever read the novel, but he had seen the movie many times over, and he loved Burt Lancaster’s performance, even if the movie left out most of the novel. He loved it so much that he owned a print of it-not a DVD, but an honest-to-God movie print-and had it shown in the screening room at his house in Loughlin Park whenever he wished. It was easy; he owned the studio.

From his custom-built, body-contoured easy chair, Sinclair looked longingly across the room at the built-in wet bar, a relict of a time when real men not only drank but also smoked.

Loughlin Park was the Beverly Hills of Los Feliz. Sinclair was very proud of himself for living in Los Feliz. Los Angeles had moved as far west as it could go without actually trying to build houses in the Pacific Ocean-although there were more than a few movie industry types of his acquaintance who were convinced they could walk on water-so now the smart money had begun to move back east, or at least as far east as Griffith Park Boulevard, where houses that might go for twenty million dollars in the bird streets above Beverly Hills could be snapped up for two or three, and yet you were still dozens of blocks away from the nearest Mexicans. Now that was what he called smart shopping.

Now, about that drink…after all, it was always five o’clock somewhere.

The house had been built by W. C. Fields when he decided to follow Hollywood ’s path westward and move in next door to Cecil B. DeMille. Although Sinclair had “modernized” the place, Mrs. Sinclair had insisted on sparing a few of the period touches, and so the wet bar still stood, its hidden refrigerators filled with designer waters like Saint-Géron, which was supposed to be a prophylactic against anemia. Mrs. Sinclair was enamored of the distinctive long-necked Alberto Bali-designed bottles. But there was no booze in the wet bar, nor anywhere else in the house, in keeping with Hollywood ’s new, healthy, raw-foods-and-Brita-filtered-water lifestyle. Thank God tennis and sportfucking were still allowed.

The reason Sinclair wished he was drunk had to do with business. Almost everything in his life had to do with business, including the current Mrs. Sinclair. She was, of course, not the first Mrs. Sinclair; Jake Sinclair eagerly subscribed to the Hollywood custom in which every man of significance is or was married to some other man of significance’s wife, and every man owned, at one time or another, a house that had formerly belonged to one of his rivals, colleagues, or mortal enemies, and then either totally remodeled it or tore down. As the saying went: Hollywood is a relationship business. And, as far as relationships went, he’d had quite a few.

Luckily, the current, although soon-to-be-ex Mrs. Sinclair was Jennifer, just like the first Mrs. Sinclair, which is why he thought of her as Jennifer II or Jenny the Second. Like some arranged marriage between European potentates in the 16th century, she had come to him as a kind of reverse dowry. Jennifer Gailliard was the daughter of one of the biggest investors in the country, an investor Sinclair had been wooing with even greater ardor than he would later woo the man’s daughter. The three-day celebration of their marriage on the island of Corfu was in all the gossip magazines-the photo rights alone went for more than $2 million to People-and it was quickly followed with the news that the bride’s father had invested upwards of $500 million in Jake Sinclair’s media company for acquisitions, with which money he partly financed his hostile takeover of Time Warner and thus now owned People. So the two million bucks was money well spent, especially since it had landed back in his pocket. Plus he had some really great family photos.

He liked Jenny the Second well enough, but he would have liked her more had she allowed him his favorite Scotch at a time like this. Which was the closing of yet another deal. For even by Jake Sinclair standards-Sinclair often thought of himself in the third person, although he rarely slipped into that particular locution, at least in public-it was a big deal. As his father often told him, it was a stupid man who could not make financial hay in an economic meltdown, and Jake Sinclair’s father had not raised a stupid child.

Which was why, at this moment, he had just decided to divorce her.

Since he had been a kid, he had anticipated this day. Not just to own a major newspaper chain, a major newsweekly, a major television network, and even a major Hollywood studio-but to own all four. The superfecta of media, made possible by other men’s blind greed, blinkered overreaching, and sheer sightless stupidity. During the 1980s, when corporations were merging faster than actors on a movie set, Sinclair-then a junior executive in a media mini-conglomerate-had watched, listened, and learned. Watched as one moron after another, so fearful of being left behind in the tsunami of M &As, had yanked the cord on his golden parachute and sold out his company for a mess of pottage and a face-saving seat on the board, which was soon revoked. One dope after another had fallen for the snake-oil salesman’s charms of “high tech” whispers and “transformative transaction” pornography. Most of them, like his principal rival, had ended up padding the beach at Santa Monica with their New Age replacement wife in tow, spouting some holistic bullshit and telling Us Weekly how glad they were to finally be out of the rat race and living on a mere million dollars a year.

Well, fuck them. They were out and he was very much in, and glad to be here. For it wasn’t an honor just to be nominated-for Jake Sinclair, the only honor that counted was to see his face on the cover of as many magazines as possible, to have his minions chart how many hits his name garnered on Google every day, to ferret out references to himself in novels, television shows, and movies, where he often appeared, thinly veiled as an Important Tycoon or a Media Mogul.

Well, fuck that, too. He was not just an important Media Mogul. He was the Media Mogul. He could afford to divorce Jenny II and get seriously involved with the Other Woman.

That was another thing. Most people laughed at him when, during a time of collapsing “old media” value, Sinclair Holdings, LLC, had snapped up failing properties like Time Inc. and the New York Times. Well, they were as dumb as the people who bailed on New York City during the Abe Beame administration, when Gerald Ford famously told the city to drop dead.

He could taste the Scotch. The cigarette, too. And, if he tried real hard, he could taste her.

Jake Sinclair rose and padded toward the bar. He pressed a switch under the sink, recessed behind the garbage disposal. The false back of one of the cabinets slid aside, revealing his private stash of Oban Scotch and Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, the ones with his initials monogrammed on each coffin nail.