The 45-year-old, spectacle- wearing film writer picked up the prominent newspaper and looked hard at the story on the eighth page. What could it mean?Robert B Screenwriter, who had 14 degrees from the Sorbonne University alone, furrowed his brow as he continued to work his way through the 250-word article.
It seemed that someone called William A Donohue had been waging a campaign against the upcoming thriller Angels and Demons. Mr Screenwriter stood up from the Louis 14th chair and pulled a leather-bound volume from the Georgian bookcase that sat beside the Mascarpone window frame. Engraved on the cover were the words "Angels and Demons by Dan Brown." This was it!
He remembered the billion- selling book now. Written in a turgid prose that packed far too much information into every sentence and reduced every character to a plot-delivery system, the book detailed a scheme by the Illuminati, a secret religious agency, to destroy the Vatican by harnessing the destructive power of anti-matter. Now, following Ron Howard's film version of The Da Vinci Code(the sequel to Angels and Demons) the big-eared Happy Days alumnus was bringing this terrifying tale to the big screen.
Icy sparks of hot fear raced slowly through Screenwriter's statically pulsing veins. But who was Donohue?Suddenly, as clear as a coded message inscribed microscopically on the darkest patch of an ancient Caravaggio, memories of Donohue appeared in Screenwriter's eight-pound brain. He was the president of a hugely conservative US media watchdog that went by the name of the Catholic League. Screenwriter remembered the weighty, 61-year- old activist bawling on US TV. "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular," he had said.
Donohue believed that an earlier Catholic League campaign had been responsible for the underperformance of The Golden Compass– atheistic propaganda, Donohue believed – at the US box-office. The killer monks and scheming bishops in Angels and Demonshad persuaded him to organise his troops yet again.
Screenwriter began to feel sorry for Ron Howard. This sort of bullying was wrong. He would support the film. Then a terrible revelation struck. How had he been so stupid? Tearing the spine from his copy of Angels and Demons, he found a strip of parchment on which were written a few words in demotic Aramaic. "The terrible bear is truly the slippery fish's friend."
Screenwriter ripped the remaining pages from the book and arranged them in a complex pattern on the antique Double Gloucester carpet. Could it really be true?It was just possible that Donohue and Howard were linked by a fantastic conspiracy and were, in fact, both involved in promoting the high-budget film. After all, here was Screenwriter, an avowed enemy of Dan Brown, finding himself warming to the picture. It was dastardly, but brilliant.
A creak! Screenwriter looked up to find a one-eyed monk standing in the doorway. He had a 16th- century Prussian musket in his hand. It was pointed at the journalist’s pounding heart.
