Page 67 of Blood Stone

Chapter Fourteen

Kate stood up and addressed her meeting. “A minor emergency. It sounds like we’ve got the first two scenes scheduled. Given the short hours we’ll have for filming, that might be as ambitious as we can get. If you can all go back and figure out what night scenes you can be ready for soonest, we’ll continue with the night schedule for now. No need to kill everyone’s sleep schedule with too many changes.”

They all stood up and stretched.

“Email me your best schedules and I’ll amalgamate from there,” Kate told them as she followed them out of the trailer.

She hurried over to the extras tent, which would be empty today and rounded the canvas to the front and ducked inside. It was a well organized chaos inside, with dressing areas, lighted mirrors, tables and chairs, racks of costumes and the processing area – a big empty area fronted by a long bench where the P.A.s sat with their laptops and processed the extras through the agency-supplied databases, checking them in and out to ensure they all were on-site and got paid. Stories about extras signing up for three movies in one day then taking the day off to go to the beach and collecting three days’ worth of pay at the end of the day had been around since the golden age of Hollywood. Running their own database check was one way of circumventing those types of scams. Only the extras that were actually on-site and in costume got paid.

Adrian was standing in the big open area. So was the computer guy. Kate reached for his name. Henry.Terry. And there was a third guy between them. A small man, which made Kate realize that Terry was a lot taller than she had first noticed. He was at least as tall as Adrian.

The man standing between them was short, with shorn greying hair that was thinning on top. But he had sharp clear eyes that from where she stood seemed either light blue or grey. But his face was unlined and his neck, disappearing inside the leather jacket, was thick with muscle.

“What’s going on?” Kate demanded, looking from Terry’s angry face, to Adrian’s carefully neutral one. The guy between them seemed unconcerned.

Terry shook the man’s arm and for the first time Kate noticed that both Adrian and Terry had hold of an arm each.

“Terry caught him rooting around in the server trailer,” Adrian said.

“He left the door open,” Terry added.

Kate could feel tiredness pulling at her. All this drama over a minor case of unlawful entry? But there was more to it than that – the fury boiling around the room told her that much. She couldn’t afford to blow it off or she would offend someone. “Explain it to me,” she said to Terry, who was the most upset one in the room. Tent.

“The sand storm,” Terry said, as if that explained everything.

She frowned. “What about it?”

“He left the door open and the wind blasted the sand into the computers. They’re delicate. More delicate than your average laptop. They’re supposed to be kept in cool, perfectly dry conditions, which is why they get their own air conditioner and generator. The sand didn’t do them any favours at all. The network is down. The sand scoured the first two towers.”

Kate grabbed for her cellphone, alarmed. Of course, she reasoned to herself, she was worried about everyone not being able to conduct business. How this would impact morale.

“Relax, your cellphone reception isn’t carried by the network. But if you have apps that demand a Wi-Fi connection, they won’t work,” Terry told her.

She put her phone back in her pocket. She hadn’t even thought about Wi-Fi-based applications.

The first thing she had flipped open was Twitter.

What had she been thinking of?

Kate glanced at Adrian. “How did you get involved?”

“I saw them scuffling, outside the trailer.” He shrugged. “I helped out.”

She looked at the mystery man. “And who the hell are you?”

The man grinned. “Bob Gunther. Senior Writer forHollywood Tales.”

“A journalist? Let’s see your credentials.”

His smile grew wider. “That’s for the old school.Talesis a news site.”

“A blog newspaper,” Terry interpreted with a snort. “How the hell did you get a seat on the press bus without credentials?”

“Just lucky, I guess,” Bob replied, his grin positively radiating good cheer.

“Then let’s see some I.D., asshole,” Adrian growled, reaching into the man’s jacket.

“Hey!” Gunther called, his smile evaporating. He pushed Adrian’s hand out of the way. “Easy, dude.”