Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (27 page)

“Hold his other arm! Hold it! CIA,” she hissed to Raquel Welch as she held the pad closer over his nose and mouth, feeling the boy’s struggles begin to subside.

Raquel Welch grabbed the boy’s free arm, shoved it under her famous bottom and sat on it. It was so great working with an actress who could take direction.

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“Hold this,” Olivia said, giving the arm with the watch on it to the startled man on her other side, whom, she later discovered, was a senior executive at DreamWorks. “He’s a terrorist. Don’t let go.”

As the startled man gripped the boy’s arm and up on stage the Best Actress finally got to find out who she was, Olivia pushed back his sleeve and wrested the watch off the now-limp wrist. A bomb-squad officer was halfway along the row, treading on people, pushing towards her. She reached out, handed him the watch, took her phone out and said, “Scott. He’s out cold. The watch is with the bomb squad. We can clear the auditorium.”

The danger of an override detonation was gone, but seventeen statuettes were still ticking away in the audience, primed to blow before the end of the show. They somehow had to get them out without starting a panic. Olivia saw officers appearing from the aisles and doorways and seats within the audience, attempting to collect the Oscars. Already it wasn’t going well. The winner of the Best Foreign Language Film award, a lanky figure with a drooping mustache and striped bow tie, was refusing to hand his over, generating an unseemly tussle with a senior member of the fire department.

Out in the foyer, the area around the gentlemen’s rest rooms was cordoned off. Officers were ushering any remaining stray guests out into the street. An Englishman in a dinner jacket was arguing with a security guard who was refusing to let him back into the hall. “But I’m nominated for Best Picture. My category’s up next. I only came out to practice my speech in the bathroom.”

“Sir, if I told you what was happening in there, you’d be straight back into that bathroom.”

“I can’t believe you’re being so obtuse. What is your name and staff number?”

Two men in blast protection suits with
BOMB SQUAD
written on the back thudded at speed through the foyer, each clasping half a dozen Oscars in their arms. They dived into the men’s rest room.

“You still wanna go back in there?” said the officer.

“Er, no, actually, no,” said the Englishman, “no,” and he ran for
_p. 303
his life out of the exit and down the red carpet. There were sounds of panic from the auditorium. Another bomb-squad tech appeared with two Oscars and ran for the rest room. “Only one unaccounted for,” he yelled.

Onstage, Meryl Streep was following orders, trying to surmount the rising pandemonium and keep the show running. “And the Academy Award for Best Picture goes to . . .” she said, drawing the card out of the envelope, “
Existential Despair
.”

Just then, a burly uniformed figure strode on stage and held up his hand for calm. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, but no one could hear above the uproar. As Meryl Streep helpfully gestured the police chief closer to the microphone, an enormously wide man, the executive producer of both
Existential Despair
and the Wall Street musical, lumbered onto the podium, followed by the two men who had actually produced the movie. As he put himself between the police chief and Meryl Streep, lunging at the replacement statuette, Scott Rich appeared on stage scowling, marched up to the large producer and punched him full on the jaw. At which the other two men joined in and punched him too. “I’ve been wanting to do that for years,” one of them said rather loudly into the microphone.

“People,” Scott Rich said, taking the microphone. “PEOPLE,” he bellowed. For a moment there was total silence.

“Scott Rich, CIA. We had a serious situation. It is under control. Whether it stays under control depends on you and whether you behave like heroes. The world is watching. You need to leave the theater by the front exits only: that’s here, and the first balcony here, and the next two balconies here. You need to move calmly, you need to follow instructions and you need to move fast. Okay, over to you.”

As the audience filed out of the theater, the combined security forces were frantically scouring the building. Seventeen Oscars were buried under blast plates and blankets in the gentlemen’s rest
_p. 304
rooms, the surrounding area cleared. There were two minutes to go until the timers were set to blow, and one remaining Oscar was unaccounted for. The recipient, a thin, worried-looking girl who’d won the award for her role as Best Supporting Actress in the Chairman Mao film, was nowhere to be found. The crowds were still streaming out in a reasonably ordered fashion; only the security forces were aware of the bomb that might still be lurking in their midst.

Olivia stood flat against the wall, concentrating hard, then suddenly it came to her. She dialed her cellphone. “Scott,” she said, “I bet I know where she is. No one’s seen her since she went backstage. I bet she’s throwing up.”

“Okay, I’m on it,” came Scott’s voice. There was the sound of hurrying footsteps for a few moments. She glanced, terrified, at her watch again. “Okay. Now listen to me, Olivia. I’m right there. I see her; I’ll get her out. I’ll deal with it. There’s nothing you can do. We have one minute left. Get out of the theater. Now. I love you. Bye.”

“Scott!” she yelled. “Scott!” But the line was dead.

She looked desperately around and started heading for the stage, trying to keep to the outside of the crowd as if it were a current—sticking to the edges where it was less strong, so she could move more easily. But as she moved forward, a huge rumbling roar began from the foyer, the ground beneath them shook, and the walls seemed to bend outwards. There were screams and panic and a smell of acrid smoke—like fireworks only more acidic—and then more explosions followed immediately by another blast ahead, from backstage.

Olivia jabbed frantically at her phone. “Scott!” she yelled desperately. “Scott!” But it just rang and rang as the crowd started to scramble and surge in all directions. Olivia pressed herself against the wall and stood perfectly still in the middle of it, wide-eyed, watching. Slowly, she began to realize that it was all right. The bomb squad had done the job with the bombs in the rest room.
_p. 305
The walls were still standing, the blast had not penetrated the auditorium, there was no shrapnel, no blood, no bodies. No one seemed to be hurt. Except for the one man she loved.

She dialed the number again. It rang and rang and rang. She sank down on the floor miserably, one big tear starting to roll down her cheek, then suddenly someone picked up.

“Scott?” she said, nearly swallowing the phone in her eagerness.

“No, ma’am, this ain’t Scott, but he’s right here.”

“He
is
? Is he all right?”

There was a silence. “Yes, ma’am. I guess you could say he’s looking a little dirty, but he seems to be all in one piece. He managed to get the Oscar right down into the lavatory bowl with a bunch of drapes on top, and he and the young lady almost got themselves under the bomb-squad van. Oh, ma’am, he wants to speak to you.” She waited, gulping, sniffing, rubbing her face.

“Is that you?” he said gruffly. “I told you not to call me at work.”

“Can’t trust you anywhere,” she said, smiling and wiping away tears at the same time. “You just can’t keep your hands off models and actresses, can you?”

Maui, Hawaiian Islands

_p. 306
A
s the air ambulance came in to land over the tropical waters of Maui, Olivia’s mobile rang. She released her hand from Scott’s for a second and pressed the button.

“Olivia?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Barry Wilkinson here. Listen. Can you do us a piece? You were there, weren’t you? The Oscars and the Sudan. We want a full I-was-there exclusive—front of the main section, whole of the News Review—and a piece for the daily, if you can run something off by eight o’clock. Just a few hundred words and some quotes. Olivia?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. Because if there was one thing she knew, it was that she didn’t want her face on the front of any newspaper. She was probably going to have to live in disguise for the rest of her life as it was.

“Listen, lovey, I know. I know about MI6. I know you went to the Sudan, because
Elan
told me. I know you were at the Oscars because I saw you on camera in a red wig. And—”

She held the phone away from her ear, glanced out of the window at where the plane was coming in to land over a curve of sparkling sea, palm trees and white sand, grinned gleefully at Scott Rich, put the phone squawking with Barry’s irate voice back to her ear and said, “Oh don’t be silly, lovey. It’s just a figment of your overactive imagination.”

Enter Olivia Joules: fearless, dazzling, independent beauty-journalist turned master spy—a new heroine for the twenty-first century from Helen Fielding, creator of Bridget Jones

At the close of the last millennium, Helen Fielding debuted the irrepressible (and blockbuster-bestselling) Bridget Jones. Now Fielding gives us a sensational new heroine for a new era. Move over, 007: a stunning, sexy—and decidedly female—new player has entered the world of international espionage armed with her own pocket survival kit, her Rules for Living, her infamous overactive imagination, and a very special underwire bra.

How could a girl not be drawn to the alluring, powerful Pierre Ferramo—he of the hooded eyes, impeccable taste, unimaginable wealth, exotic international homes, and dubious French accent? Could Ferramo really be a major terrorist bent on the Western world’s destruction, hiding behind a smoke screen of fine wines, yachts, and actresses slash models? Or is it all just a product of Olivia Joules’s overactive imagination?

Join Olivia in her heart-stopping, hilarious, nerve-frazzling quest from hip hotel to ecolodge to underwater cave, by light aircraft, speedboat, helicopter, and horse, in this witty, contemporary, and utterly unputdownable novel deluxe.

HELEN FIELDING,
a journalist and novelist, is the author of three previous novels—
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,
and
Cause Celeb
—which together have sold more than fifteen million copies in thirty-five countries.
Bridget Jones’s Diary
became a hit movie, cowritten and executive-produced by Fielding. The movie version of
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
is scheduled for later this year. She lives in London and Los Angeles.

“Recklessly cosmopolitan, jet-setting, worldly, adventurous—a 340-page romp.”

—
The Independent

“This is a girl’s own adventure—with added sauce—to rattle through in one entertaining sitting. Helen Fielding is a great comic writer.”

—
The Spectator

“Very addictive . . . Fielding’s comic talent lies in her adorable observations. . . . This is quintessential Fielding.”

—
The Observer

Jacket design and digital collage by

Steven Newman / Compression Studios

Jacket art: Glass: Mitch Hrdlicka / Getty Images

Woman:. Pete Atkinson / Images

Author photograph by Piers Fletcher

A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. 10014

www.penguin.com

Printed in U.S.A.

“If Bridget Jones shaped and named a certain kind of life in the 1990s, it looks as if Olivia Joules, Helen Fielding’s new heroine, may do the same for the new decade”

—
The Times
(London)

“Hurrah for Fielding! Yet again she’s picked up on what’s lacking in the girly train read, and whistled us up Olivia Joules: a Jane Bond heroine with a wonderfully overactive imagination. . . . Fielding’s prose shimmers and glares with wit, sophistication and humanity. . . . A brilliant comic writer, Fielding’s talent exceeds any sociological explanation.”

—
The Independent on Sunday

“Fielding is an extremely skillful and engaging writer. The book works as a fast paced thriller—I gulped it down in one reading. But it also has great charm and, in its shy fashion, a moral theme.”

—
The Telegraph

“The name is Joules, Olivia Joules. . . . Post Bridget Jones, Helen Fielding has written an action-packed thriller starring ‘a heroine for the 21st century.’ The result is a book that’s fast-moving and entertaining.”

—
The Guardian

. . . and for HELEN FIELDING

“How can a reader not love this woman?”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“Fielding is a wonderful comic novelist.”

—
Time

“Helen Fielding is bloody great.”

—
Mademoiselle

“Helen Fielding is one of the funniest writers alive.”

—Nick Hornby