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And felt better immediately. Clearer in his head. The proposition that he might be buried forever in a bomb shelter concentrated his mind.

Max needed to center himself. He went over what had happened to him in the last few weeks. He remembered the day in Jerry’s office at CCM when he got the ultimatum, and the argument that followed. He’d been hustled down to the garage, bundled into an Escalade, and driven to a jet on the tarmac at LAX. Remembered the private airstrip in Arizona, the jovial kid with an Australian accent who’d greeted him. The ride in the stretch Hummer to the Desert Oasis Healing Center.

The Desert Oasis Healing Center was like 1940s Morocco. In the healing center’s restaurant, Casablanca ’s “As Time Goes By” was piped in from hidden speakers. The waiters wore fezzes, and cabana boys waved palm fans over the swim-up bar. Unfortunately, the bar didn’t serve alcohol.

Great food, beautiful people, clean and courteous attendants. The Desert Oasis offered the usual rehab fare—the one-on-one counseling, the support group meetings, and seminars. The seminars lasted for hours. That was the worst, because they wouldn’t let anyone leave their seats to pee. They had to wait for certain breaks, and the bathrooms had only four urinals and a lot of desperate people—he’d seen one man who hadn’t made it. Ashamed and angry, the man sat down on the sidewalk and cried.

But not Max. He held it. He even joked about it. Now, he said, he knew how women felt at concerts.

The seminars were ongoing. Not rigorous, pretty much standard, except for the denied bathroom privileges.

Still.

Max had been unaffected by his previous two stints in rehab, but this one…

Something had happened to him. It was there beneath his conscious mind, like an underground stream. Moments of terror. His vision obscured by dots of light, especially when he awoke in the mornings. He suffered from vivid hallucinations. Sometimes the man in the rowboat, sometimes snarling wolves intent on ripping him to pieces, sometimes an evil knight on a big horse, swinging a mace. And sometimes just blackness and a feeling of doom. Fortunately, the hallucinations were fading. The more he walked the earth in the real world, the more they receded. But he sensed they were just around some corner of his mind, waiting to jump out at him.

It occurred to him now, imprisoned in this underground chamber, that whatever it was had been implanted in him. Into his brain. Hypnosis, maybe. The confusion, the holes in his memory, the unreasoning fear, the desire to climb to the highest place he could find and throw himself to his death.

And Max himself had walked right into this. He could have flown back to LA. He could have confronted Jerry. He could have divorced Talia and called off the adoption. It had all been keeping up with the Joneses, anyway, a photo op for Talia. The baby was probably better off in Africa.

If he’d done any of these things, the world wouldn’t have come to an end. But instead, he’d hitchhiked down the freeway and buried his wallet somewhere in the desert.

He’d done stupid things, all to avoid his own pain. An impossible task, since whatever happened to him remained unfathomable.

At least now, he had something physical to fight. He had an opponent to outwit.

For the first time in years, Max got mad.

Really, really mad.

Chapter Twelve

A COUPLE OF hours later, the door to the bomb shelter opened and Luther climbed down, his movements ponderous and timid.

Max sat up on his cot and watched him.

Once on solid ground, Luther bounded toward him. “How’s it goin’, bro?”

“I’m OK.”

“Excellent! I see you’ve partaken of the repast we left you.” Luther pulled up one of the folding chairs and sat in front of Max, their knees almost touching. “Thought you’d want to know how all this is going down.”

“I’m all ears.”

“We’re going to need your wife’s phone number.”

Max didn’t react.

“And we’re going to want you to talk to her. If you could tell her we have you at an undisclosed location, and all we want is two million dollars, and we’ll return you safe and sound—that would be marvelous. You think you can manage that?”

“No.”

“No? Wrong answer. What if I put a gun to your head? How’d you feel about that ?”

Max shrugged.

“Because we mean business. This is not a game. You are in a bomb shelter. We could seal it up and nobody’d ever be the wiser. You’d die alone. I hear starvation is a terrible way to die. No one would ever know where you went. Depend on that! So if you want to go back to your movie star life, your beautiful wife, you need to cooperate. You do see that, don’t you?”

Max stared Luther in the eye until Luther’s good eye wandered.

Luther cleared his throat. “Well?”

“Call her yourself.”

“But you’d have to talk to her! She’d have to know it was you.”

Max crossed his legs. “I’ll give you her phone number, but I’m not talking.”

“Why not?”

“That’s the deal.”

“All right, all right. Give me the number.”

Max did.

Luther leaped to his feet—amazingly quick for a plump man. He pulled out his phone and snapped a picture. “Didn’t think of that, did you?”

Max stretched out on the cot and closed his eyes. “Honestly? I would have been disappointed in you if you didn’t.”

TEN MINUTES LATER the trapdoor opened and Luther came back down the steps.

“How’d it go?” Max asked.

Luther’s face looked pastier than usual, and he had that thousand-yard stare screenwriters were always putting into their screen directions. He sat on the edge of Max’s cot, his chest sinking into his stomach like a collapsed balloon.

“You reached her?” Max asked.

Luther nodded.

“So what did she say?”

Luther stared at his hands. “She said, and I quote, ‘You can keep him.’ And then she hung up.”

Max pursed his lips and blew out a breath. “I was afraid of that.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Well tell me! This is a business transaction I’m trying to do here.”

“It starts out like any other story. Boy meets girl. They fall in love, they marry—”

“Would you please cut to the chase ?”

“OK. She hates me.”

“That’s not what I read in the tabloids. I did my homework, you know. Say, I know what you did. You have a phone I don’t know about and told her what to say. Is that it? Do you think this is a game?”

“No game. She hates me.”

“Look, I told you, I know the whole story. I know about your first divorce. I know you remarried—I read it in Vanity Fair . This time you had a new appreciation for each other, a deeper love…”

“Crap. We were both forced to go to the same wedding as friends of the bride and groom, did too much oxy, had a one-night stand, thought it would be a lark to go to Vegas and get remarried, and woke up the next day with a hangover and a marriage neither of us wanted.”

“But I don’t understand…why didn’t you just get an annulment?”

“ V.A.M.Pyre was coming out the following week.”

“The movie?”

“Yes, the movie. Jerry suggested we wait.”

“Jerry?”

“My manager.”

“And you actually did?”

Max rubbed his eyes. “There never was a right time. My film release, her film release, the Golden Globes, the Academy Awards, the Haiti relief trip, The View . There was never a moment when we could stop. The story was too good. The mags were calling it ‘a second chance at love.’ Talia’s built her whole career on being the fresh-faced girl next door. If we divorced, I’d get the blame. I’d be the bad guy. I’d be headed straight for Mel Gibson territory.” He smiled at Luther—his patented ironic smile. He felt that smile down to the soles of his shoes. “So now you see what you did? You solved the problem for her. She’ll make a beautiful widow.”