The Scam (10 page)

“Yeah?” Garver replied. He was the only man who worked for Trace who didn't feel the slightest need to grovel to him.

“Pack your mallet,” Trace said. “We're going to Macau.”

T
hanks to the success of
The Lego Movie,
there was a mad scramble among Hollywood producers to make films based on children's toys. So perhaps it was inevitable that Mr. Potato Head would inspire a new animated feature. But few people, besides savvy studio accountants, could have foreseen that it would be an all-potato adaptation of Charles Dickens's
Great Expectations.
The novel was in the public domain, meaning that it was free to use, saving the producers the money, time, and creativity required to come up with an original story suitable for talking potatoes. The studio accountants were thrilled.

The movie's cast recorded their parts individually in a studio located in a small office building on Hollywood Way in Burbank. The studio had originally been a dentist's office and still smelled like mint mouthwash. Not because the scent had tenaciously lingered through the remodeling, but because the voice actors were constantly sucking on breath mints and throat lozenges.

One of those actors was Boyd Capwell, a fortyish man with great teeth, a strong chin, and perfect hair who behaved as if he was always playing to an audience or a camera, even when they existed only in his mind. Boyd was in a soundproof booth the size of a closet. He was facing the window into the control room, where the director and the sound editor were watching him.

He'd been cast as the voice of Magwitch, the escaped convict that young Pip encounters one fateful, foggy night in a churchyard cemetery at the beginning of Dickens's tale. Magwitch was described by Dickens as a fearful man in leg irons, wearing wet, filthy clothes and a dirty rag tied around his head, who'd limped and shivered, glared and growled. So Boyd was limping and shivering within the cramped confines of the booth as he recorded his lines into the microphone. He wore tattered clothes and a dirty rag on his head, and addressed a potato in his hand as if it were young Pip. It was a pose intentionally reminiscent of Hamlet.

“You'll bring me a file to cut these chains and food to fill my stomach, you little devil, and you won't say a word to anyone.” Boyd spoke with a heavy Irish accent while he glared and growled. “Or else my friend who is hiding in the marshes will cut you into fries and shred you into hash browns for us to eat.”

“Cut,” the director said into his microphone. His name was Milt Freiberger, and he was a twenty-year veteran of Saturday morning cartoons who was making his first feature film. He took off his tortoiseshell glasses, rubbed his eyes, and ran his hands through his thick, curly hair before speaking quietly and patiently. “Boyd, what are you doing?”

“Acting.”

“Yes, I know that. But this isn't the same performance you gave in the audition.”

“That's because all I knew then was that I was auditioning for an animated version of
Great Expectations,
” Boyd said. “I wasn't aware that the characters would be potatoes.”

“What difference does it make?” Milt asked.

“It goes to the essence of the characters. I have to embody that. I've spent the last two weeks eating nothing but potatoes to fill myself with the taste, smell, and texture of the noble tuber.”

“I see,” Milt said. “Why are you using an Irish accent?”

“Because I did my research. Clearly, Magwitch is an Irish lumper, the prevalent variety of potato at the time. But here's where it gets interesting. Twenty years after this story ends, the Irish lumper crops were decimated by a horrible disease, causing the great potato famine of 1845, so my accent is also dramatic foreshadowing.”

“But in the Charles Dickens novel, Magwitch wasn't Irish.”

“He wasn't a potato, either.”

“Go back to the cockney accent you used in the audition. And please, stick to the lines as written, too. You're supposed to say to Pip that your friend will ‘cut out your heart and your liver, roast them and eat them.' You changed it to something about French fries and hash browns.”

“Because Pip is a potato,” Boyd said, shaking the potato in his hand for emphasis. “He doesn't have a heart or a liver.”

“He's got arms and legs and he talks,” Milt said. “So he has a heart and liver.”

“That makes no biological or botanical sense.”

“Mr. Potato Head is a plastic toy potato that you can snap different facial features onto, like noses, eyes, ears, and mouths, to create new characters,” Milt said. “It's not an actual potato. None of these characters are. Think of them as people who happen to resemble potatoes.”

Perhaps Boyd might have argued the point, or even given in to the director's wishes, but then he saw Nick walk into the studio. Boyd didn't know anything, really, about Nick or his partner, Kate, or Intertect, the mysterious private security company they claimed to work for. All that Boyd knew, and all that really mattered to him, was that whenever they showed up, it meant he'd have a chance to earn $100,000 by playing a character in an elaborate con to capture a criminal. The colorful roles they gave him were played on the stage of life, where a bad performance could get him killed. The danger made the roles even more thrilling.

“I quit,” Boyd said.

“You can't quit,” Milt said.

“Take it up with my agent,” Boyd said, pointing to Nick. “He just walked in.”

Milt turned to Nick. “He has a contract. If he walks, I'll ruin him in this business.”

“If you had that kind of pull,” Nick said, “you wouldn't be directing a cartoon version of
Great Expectations
with talking potatoes.”

“
The Lego Movie
made half a billion dollars worldwide, and Legos aren't even characters. They're plastic bricks. Mr. Potato Head is a beloved global personality, an icon. We could top what Lego did.”

“If you do, then you won't care that Boyd walked, will you?” Nick said. “You'll be too busy basking in your success.”

Boyd emerged from the booth. “If you want success to happen, Milt, you can't pretend the potatoes aren't potatoes. You have to embrace your inner potato.”

“I don't have an inner potato,” Milt said.

“Then you are the wrong man to be directing this movie,” Boyd said and dropped his potato in Milt's lap.

Nick and Boyd walked outside to the parking lot where Nick's Porsche 911 was parked next to Boyd's Cadillac CTS.

“So how much were you making as a potato?” Nick asked.

“It's not about the money, it's about living. I am an actor. I need to act, the same way that I need to breathe, or eat or sleep. I saw playing a potato as a creative challenge. I've played an apple in a Fruit of the Loom commercial, and even a pancake once, but I've never had a chance to be a vegetable, and certainly not with classy material like this,” Boyd said. “It's
Great Expectations,
a Charles Dickens masterpiece. There will never be a better vegetable part. How could I say no?”

“And, yet, you're walking away.”

“I can't work with directors who don't have passion for what they're doing. But you certainly do. What role do you have for me?”

“A powerful, vicious, and amoral Canadian mobster who is going to Macau to play high-stakes baccarat,” Nick said. “You like the game, but what you're really there to do is launder your money through the casino. You're mixing business with pleasure.”

“I'll be Tony Soprano meets Snidely Whiplash.”

“The bad guy with the handlebar mustache that Dudley Do-Right, the Canadian Mountie, was always battling in the cartoons?”

“He's a perfect touchstone for my character,” Boyd said. “I particularly like the mustache.”

“Just don't wear the top hat and black cape,” Nick said. “Keep it subtle.”

Nick and Kate spent the first part of the week establishing identities for Boyd and Billy Dee.

Kate used her FBI access to create criminal backgrounds for “Shane Blackmore,” Boyd's nonexistent Canadian mobster, in all of the key law enforcement databases worldwide. She also sensationalized the criminal files that already existed for Lou Ould-Abdallah, Billy Dee Snipes's real name, so he'd appear to be an active, brutal power player in high-seas piracy. When the con was over, she'd erase all of her creative writing.

Nick got in touch with his tech wizard in Hong Kong. They planted fake articles and references about Shane Blackmore and Lou Ould-Abdallah on the Internet, and forged the necessary passports, credit cards, and driver's licenses that would be needed.

Once Nick and Kate were done, Boyd flew to Vancouver, British Columbia, on his U.S. passport. In Canada, he switched to Shane Blackmore's Canadian passport and flew to Hong Kong. This established a trail that led back to Canada in case anyone checked into his identity.

Billy Dee flew from Las Vegas to Mogadishu, by way of London, Istanbul, and Djibouti. He spent a night in Mogadishu, and then used his Somali passport to take a flight to Kenya, a two-hour flight to Ethiopia, and finally a ten-hour flight to Hong Kong. It was a belabored way to get from Las Vegas to Hong Kong but, as with Boyd, it was necessary to establish his cover.

Nick and Kate didn't have to worry about leaving a trail. They focused instead on making the right impression. So Nick chartered a private jet for their trip. He met Kate at the Van Nuys Airport early in the morning on their departure day.

“The last time we went to China together, it was in the trunk of a '69 Dodge Charger in the cargo hold of a passenger jet,” Nick said. “This time, I thought we should go in style.”

Kate climbed the stairs to the G650, said hello to the flight attendant and the pilots, and settled into one of the eight cushy leather club chairs. The crew compartment and galley were in front of her. A credenza with a wine cooler and flat-screen TV were behind her. A couch and the restroom were also behind her.

“This is really extravagant,” Kate said. “Couldn't you have chartered something smaller and cheaper?”

“Sure, but we would have had to stop somewhere on the way for refueling,” he said. “This baby will take us straight to Hong Kong without stopping and makes a bold statement.”

“What does a bold statement cost?”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

Kate squelched a grimace. “Jessup is going to pop a hemorrhoid.”

They were an hour into the flight, Kate was halfway through her third bowl of heated nuts, and Nick reached for his messenger bag. “I'm going to teach you how to play baccarat,” he said. “I packed three decks of cards and a big bag of M&M's for the trip.”

“What are the M&M's for?”

“Gambling chips. I wanted them to have some value to you.” He handed Kate the bag of candy. “Separate these by color. Yellow M&M's will be a hundred thousand, red will be fifty thousand, blue will be twenty-five thousand, and brown will be five thousand.”

“What about the orange and green M&M's?”

“Those are for you to snack on so you won't be tempted to devour your chips.”

“My kind of game. I'm liking it already.”

“Baccarat is a lot like betting on a sporting event,” Nick said, shuffling the cards. “There are two teams, the dealer and the player. You're going to place a bet on who you think will be dealt the cards that come closest to adding up to nine.”

“What's the strategy?”

“There is none,” Nick said. “It's pure luck. Unlike blackjack or poker, you don't get to make any choices. You're dealt your cards and that's that.”

“You mean you just sit there and do nothing?”

“Yep,” he said.

“There's no bluffing?”

“Nope,” he said.

“So why is baccarat the game that James Bond always plays against the bad guys to prove how clever he is?”

“Because that's not what he's doing. He's showing them that he's willing to take huge risks and that he has unwavering confidence in his own good luck.”