Post by Bagpipedisaster on Oct 13, 2007 0:30:23 GMT 1
JANE DOE “VANISHING ACT”
SYNOPSIS
At Intertech Headquarters, a non-descript government vehicle pulls up to a security kiosk. Inside the car is Russ O’Connor (Tom Schanley), a government agent who flashes his credentials to the guard before entering. O’Connor heads into an antiseptic work room where Miles Crandall (Aaron Lustig), a mild-mannered computer-tech type, is logging off his laptop computer.
Outside the building, Pilot Lloyd McMasters (John Mese) prepares a turbo prop plane for flight. O’Connor escorts Crandall to the plane, flanked by other agents. From the Intertech Air Services offices, O’Connor and the flight controller watch the plane take off, monitoring it on the radar screen as it heads to Washington. But the plane suddenly disappears from the radar screen for about 10 seconds and they lose radio contact with McMasters. When they regain contact, McMasters is woozy, having been knocked unconscious. He barely manages to land the plane. Agents converge on the site and find that McMasters is the only one aboard. Crandall and his laptop have disappeared mid-flight!
Cut to the suburbs, where we meet the Davis family. Cathy (Lea Thompson) is an attractive, intelligent woman with two kids: 16-year-old Susan (Jessy Scharm) and 12-year-old Nick (Zack Shada). Cathy designs puzzles for a living and we first meet her as she’s testing her latest creation with her son. He has a head for mind-teasers, just like his mom. But not Susan, who’s popular in school and trying out for the cheerleading squad. Susan needles her brother for being a misfit; he accuses her of being a conformist – and they’re both right. Typical feuding siblings.
Cathy’s husband Jack (William R. Moses) will soon be home, so she decides to rush off to the market before dinner. On the way, it quickly becomes evident that Cathy is being followed by non-descript government cars. Surprisingly, Cathy revs the motor and starts handling her vehicle with the skill of an experienced stunt driver. In short order, she loses her pursuers, only to be cut off by a helicopter that lands in the street. Out steps Paul Darnell (Joe Penny), a handsome, well-tailored man she knows only too well. He needs her help, he tells her. She goes with him.
Darnell brings Cathy to a secret National Security Agency Command Center and fills her in on Crandall’s mid-flight disappearing act. He explains that Intertech had been developing a top-secret communication satellite for the government and the software was stored on Crandall’s laptop. They need to find the computer scientist and his research, Darnell explains, before it gets into the wrong hands.
The mystery is precisely the kind of puzzle Cathy was good at unraveling two decades earlier, when she and Darnell were colleagues. Cathy is reluctant to help at first, explaining that she left the cloak-and-dagger life for one of domesticity. But a good puzzle is something that’s hard for her to resist. Back home, she tells Jack that she’s considering taking on an assignment from the U.S. Puzzle Company, which will require field work, executive meetings and lots of secrecy. Jack is supportive, as always.
The next day Cathy tells Darnell she’ll do it. He assures her that it’s a safe assignment, just mental gymnastics, but she knows it’s never that easy. She asks what her code name will be. He tells her: Jane Doe.
At Intertech headquarters, Cathy gets to work. First she checks Crandall’s workroom for clues. She learns there is no chance that Crandall made a copy of the program, because there was an NSA agent with him all the time. The room is totally secure.
Cathy meets Heather Turnbull, Crandall’s slightly nervous assistant. She tells Cathy that Crandall was a quiet man, was married long ago and has a sister, Eunice, who calls sometimes, but not often. Cathy tells Darnell she wants a copy of Crandall’s files, phone numbers and the address of his sister.
When he introduces her to Trevor Martin (Tom Virtue), who runs Intertech, Darnell introduces Cathy as Marge Redmond. (Later we learn this is the bimbo Darnell took to the college freshman mixer instead of Cathy. These two have a history beyond work.)
Cathy wants to see the air services control office. There she gets all the information on Crandall’s flight from Martin. Leo Perkins (Jim O’Heir), the flight controller, tells Cathy the plane went below his radar at about 200 feet, coming back on 10 seconds later. Cathy asks to see all video of the departure.
Word comes in that McMasters, the pilot, has regained consciousness. Cathy goes to interview him with Darnell. McMasters says he can’t remember much, only that he blacked out. He doesn’t know how he got the bump on his head. They inform him that Crandall is missing. He didn’t know that.
When a clue is found in the high desert, Darnell and Cathy head there to check it out. They arrive at a dirt path where a cluster of NSA agents are huddled with their car and white forensics van. They have found a parachute strap, confirmed to be from their plane. They also find tire prints and footprints of two, maybe three men – and a pair of glasses located between the chute and the dirt path. Cathy considers this evidence to be too obvious, possibly planted. Darnell considers the puzzle solved and tells Cathy her work is done. In his opinion, Crandall parachuted out of the plane and had men waiting to take him away.
Suddenly realizing that it’s time for daughter Susan’s cheerleading tryout, Cathy leaves, making it to the school just in time. Susan gets on the squad; Cathy is proud; Nick is a bit jealous.
Cathy picks Nick’s fine mind for his insight regarding the Crandall mystery, although she keeps everything hypothetical. When she meets Darnell at the supermarket, their rendezvous site, she tells him she believes the case isn‘t really solved, that there’s more to it than meets the eye. He tells her to stay on the case and report only to him.
Cathy heads back out to the high desert, this time alone. She meets a man named Tad (Tait Smith) who rides his off-road vehicles in the area. He gives Cathy a ride on his ATV to the spot Crandall supposedly parachuted to. He says it’s impossible for anyone to have landed there, because he was near there and saw nothing.
Cathy goes to meet Eunice (Cissy Wellman), Crandall’s sister. She spoke to Crandall once a week, but he didn’t call her a few days ago on her birthday, which surprised her. She claims to know nothing about his work.
At home, Cathy talks with Jack about her puzzle, which she’s calling Super Spy. They also discuss Nick and how he’s depressed because he’s unpopular in school. Elsewhere in the house, Susan is playing music too loud. Cathy goes to her room to tell her to turn down the music and sees a girl, one of Susan’s fellow cheerleaders, who is an uncanny look-alike for her daughter. This gives Cathy an idea.
At Intertech, Cathy sits in the pilot’s seat of the turbo prop plane with the flight controller. She learns that, with the thingypit door closed and his earphones on, the pilot might not have heard the fuselage door open. The air speed of the dive the plane went into, it is theorized, probably would have closed the fuselage door. She asks about identifying the plane and is shown the clearly marked tail numbers. She’s also told about a nearby airfield called Whitman.
At the Whitman airfield, Cathy meets a man named Lacey Hartmann (Rick Ravanello). She weaves a tale about wanting to rent a turbo prop plane to take her friends out. He lets her inside the thingypit. Then she checks out the exterior. It is an exact double for the plane they flew Crandall in, but the numbers differ. After thanking Hartmann and saying goodbye, she sneaks back to the plane, touches the numbers on the plane’s tail and discovers that the black fresh paint is still wet. She’s on to something. But Hartman spots her leaving and makes a call.
Cathy and Darnell meet again in the grocery story and she tells him about the second plane and how she believes it is somehow linked to the mystery. Darnell pays a visit to Hartmann, questioning him, ostensibly hoping to pressure some information out of him, but actually just trying to make him nervous.
After the interrogation, Cathy follows Hartmann. She sees him meet McMasters, the pilot of Crandall’s plane, in a restaurant. Hartmann is worried and tells McMasters that the feds are all over him. Hartmann wants the money he is owed for his participation in their caper; he wants to disappear. McMasters agrees and offers to drive him to the airport to make sure he gets out of the country. He’s going to dispose of Hartman’s car, too.
Cathy follows McMasters and Hartmann and watches helplessly as McMasters rams his car into Hartmann, killing him as he is pushed into the water. After that, McMasters drives around a warehouse building into a cul-de-sac. But when Cathy turns in, McMasters and his car have disappeared!
Cathy meets Darnell at the grocery store. His men have found Hartmann’s body – right where she said it would be. But no sign of McMasters. The next day, in broad daylight, Cathy stakes out the area during lunch time. She sees a side of a building open – a secret door concealed by trash dumpsters that are bolted to the wall. She sees a car go in the building. She sneaks inside and looks around. In a room inside the building, she observes that Crandall is being held captive by McMasters and his henchmen. Crandall refuses to give them the code for his software program. When Cathy makes a noise, the thugs search the building to see if anyone is there, but she gets away undetected.
Cathy goes to the NSA command center and tells O’Connor that she has found Crandall. O’Connor and his men infiltrate the warehouse, but Crandall is no longer there. Darnell joins Cathy and O’Connor at the NSA Command Center to discuss what has happened. O’Connor tells her that McMasters was in the CIA Special Ops before they canned him. He can disappear in a minute with his skills.
Cathy tells O’Connor and Darnell how she imagines the kidnapping happened. We see her version of the story: Hartmann is dressed to look like McMasters. He is the one who pilots the plane that left Intertech. McMasters flew the identical turbo prop plane from the Whitman airport under the radar. When Hartmann’s plane disappeared off the radar, it was McMasters’ identical plane that took its place.
Later, Cathy is making dinner for one of Jack’s associates when she gets an idea. She visits Eunice, Crandall’s sister, and gets e-mail copies of his correspondence with her. Cathy returns home, reviews the e-mails and, just as she gets her family to bed, receives a call from Darnell, who tells her that Crandall is dead.
Cathy goes to the marina where Crandall’s body was found on a boat. Checking his laptop, Cathy finds that all the files have been deleted. But she also figures out that the laptop on the boat is not the same laptop Crandall had on the plane. She heads to Intertech and pays a visit to Trevor Martin, who was in on the kidnapping caper, has the real computer and is trying to figure out Crandall’s password so he can sell the information on the black market. Cathy proves she’s right by typing in the right password, which she figured out from poring over Crandall’s e-mails to his sister. Case closed – or so it would seem.
O’Connor leads Cathy to an underground parking lot, then pulls a gun on her and demands the laptop. He was in on the plot, as well. But just as it looks hopeless for Cathy, a gunshot sounds, O’Connor crumples and Darnell appears from the shadows.
Back home, Nick seems to be on the road to popularity in school, having won a class election. Susan is dejected, having been passed over for head cheerleader. Jack wonders if Cathy might be called for another job. She assures him it was a one-time thing. Just then, the phone rings. The Declaration of Independence has been stolen – and Darnell needs Cathy’s help to solve the puzzle of yet another mystery.
(source: Hallmark Channel)
Stars:
Lea Thompson
Joe Penny
SYNOPSIS
At Intertech Headquarters, a non-descript government vehicle pulls up to a security kiosk. Inside the car is Russ O’Connor (Tom Schanley), a government agent who flashes his credentials to the guard before entering. O’Connor heads into an antiseptic work room where Miles Crandall (Aaron Lustig), a mild-mannered computer-tech type, is logging off his laptop computer.
Outside the building, Pilot Lloyd McMasters (John Mese) prepares a turbo prop plane for flight. O’Connor escorts Crandall to the plane, flanked by other agents. From the Intertech Air Services offices, O’Connor and the flight controller watch the plane take off, monitoring it on the radar screen as it heads to Washington. But the plane suddenly disappears from the radar screen for about 10 seconds and they lose radio contact with McMasters. When they regain contact, McMasters is woozy, having been knocked unconscious. He barely manages to land the plane. Agents converge on the site and find that McMasters is the only one aboard. Crandall and his laptop have disappeared mid-flight!
Cut to the suburbs, where we meet the Davis family. Cathy (Lea Thompson) is an attractive, intelligent woman with two kids: 16-year-old Susan (Jessy Scharm) and 12-year-old Nick (Zack Shada). Cathy designs puzzles for a living and we first meet her as she’s testing her latest creation with her son. He has a head for mind-teasers, just like his mom. But not Susan, who’s popular in school and trying out for the cheerleading squad. Susan needles her brother for being a misfit; he accuses her of being a conformist – and they’re both right. Typical feuding siblings.
Cathy’s husband Jack (William R. Moses) will soon be home, so she decides to rush off to the market before dinner. On the way, it quickly becomes evident that Cathy is being followed by non-descript government cars. Surprisingly, Cathy revs the motor and starts handling her vehicle with the skill of an experienced stunt driver. In short order, she loses her pursuers, only to be cut off by a helicopter that lands in the street. Out steps Paul Darnell (Joe Penny), a handsome, well-tailored man she knows only too well. He needs her help, he tells her. She goes with him.
Darnell brings Cathy to a secret National Security Agency Command Center and fills her in on Crandall’s mid-flight disappearing act. He explains that Intertech had been developing a top-secret communication satellite for the government and the software was stored on Crandall’s laptop. They need to find the computer scientist and his research, Darnell explains, before it gets into the wrong hands.
The mystery is precisely the kind of puzzle Cathy was good at unraveling two decades earlier, when she and Darnell were colleagues. Cathy is reluctant to help at first, explaining that she left the cloak-and-dagger life for one of domesticity. But a good puzzle is something that’s hard for her to resist. Back home, she tells Jack that she’s considering taking on an assignment from the U.S. Puzzle Company, which will require field work, executive meetings and lots of secrecy. Jack is supportive, as always.
The next day Cathy tells Darnell she’ll do it. He assures her that it’s a safe assignment, just mental gymnastics, but she knows it’s never that easy. She asks what her code name will be. He tells her: Jane Doe.
At Intertech headquarters, Cathy gets to work. First she checks Crandall’s workroom for clues. She learns there is no chance that Crandall made a copy of the program, because there was an NSA agent with him all the time. The room is totally secure.
Cathy meets Heather Turnbull, Crandall’s slightly nervous assistant. She tells Cathy that Crandall was a quiet man, was married long ago and has a sister, Eunice, who calls sometimes, but not often. Cathy tells Darnell she wants a copy of Crandall’s files, phone numbers and the address of his sister.
When he introduces her to Trevor Martin (Tom Virtue), who runs Intertech, Darnell introduces Cathy as Marge Redmond. (Later we learn this is the bimbo Darnell took to the college freshman mixer instead of Cathy. These two have a history beyond work.)
Cathy wants to see the air services control office. There she gets all the information on Crandall’s flight from Martin. Leo Perkins (Jim O’Heir), the flight controller, tells Cathy the plane went below his radar at about 200 feet, coming back on 10 seconds later. Cathy asks to see all video of the departure.
Word comes in that McMasters, the pilot, has regained consciousness. Cathy goes to interview him with Darnell. McMasters says he can’t remember much, only that he blacked out. He doesn’t know how he got the bump on his head. They inform him that Crandall is missing. He didn’t know that.
When a clue is found in the high desert, Darnell and Cathy head there to check it out. They arrive at a dirt path where a cluster of NSA agents are huddled with their car and white forensics van. They have found a parachute strap, confirmed to be from their plane. They also find tire prints and footprints of two, maybe three men – and a pair of glasses located between the chute and the dirt path. Cathy considers this evidence to be too obvious, possibly planted. Darnell considers the puzzle solved and tells Cathy her work is done. In his opinion, Crandall parachuted out of the plane and had men waiting to take him away.
Suddenly realizing that it’s time for daughter Susan’s cheerleading tryout, Cathy leaves, making it to the school just in time. Susan gets on the squad; Cathy is proud; Nick is a bit jealous.
Cathy picks Nick’s fine mind for his insight regarding the Crandall mystery, although she keeps everything hypothetical. When she meets Darnell at the supermarket, their rendezvous site, she tells him she believes the case isn‘t really solved, that there’s more to it than meets the eye. He tells her to stay on the case and report only to him.
Cathy heads back out to the high desert, this time alone. She meets a man named Tad (Tait Smith) who rides his off-road vehicles in the area. He gives Cathy a ride on his ATV to the spot Crandall supposedly parachuted to. He says it’s impossible for anyone to have landed there, because he was near there and saw nothing.
Cathy goes to meet Eunice (Cissy Wellman), Crandall’s sister. She spoke to Crandall once a week, but he didn’t call her a few days ago on her birthday, which surprised her. She claims to know nothing about his work.
At home, Cathy talks with Jack about her puzzle, which she’s calling Super Spy. They also discuss Nick and how he’s depressed because he’s unpopular in school. Elsewhere in the house, Susan is playing music too loud. Cathy goes to her room to tell her to turn down the music and sees a girl, one of Susan’s fellow cheerleaders, who is an uncanny look-alike for her daughter. This gives Cathy an idea.
At Intertech, Cathy sits in the pilot’s seat of the turbo prop plane with the flight controller. She learns that, with the thingypit door closed and his earphones on, the pilot might not have heard the fuselage door open. The air speed of the dive the plane went into, it is theorized, probably would have closed the fuselage door. She asks about identifying the plane and is shown the clearly marked tail numbers. She’s also told about a nearby airfield called Whitman.
At the Whitman airfield, Cathy meets a man named Lacey Hartmann (Rick Ravanello). She weaves a tale about wanting to rent a turbo prop plane to take her friends out. He lets her inside the thingypit. Then she checks out the exterior. It is an exact double for the plane they flew Crandall in, but the numbers differ. After thanking Hartmann and saying goodbye, she sneaks back to the plane, touches the numbers on the plane’s tail and discovers that the black fresh paint is still wet. She’s on to something. But Hartman spots her leaving and makes a call.
Cathy and Darnell meet again in the grocery story and she tells him about the second plane and how she believes it is somehow linked to the mystery. Darnell pays a visit to Hartmann, questioning him, ostensibly hoping to pressure some information out of him, but actually just trying to make him nervous.
After the interrogation, Cathy follows Hartmann. She sees him meet McMasters, the pilot of Crandall’s plane, in a restaurant. Hartmann is worried and tells McMasters that the feds are all over him. Hartmann wants the money he is owed for his participation in their caper; he wants to disappear. McMasters agrees and offers to drive him to the airport to make sure he gets out of the country. He’s going to dispose of Hartman’s car, too.
Cathy follows McMasters and Hartmann and watches helplessly as McMasters rams his car into Hartmann, killing him as he is pushed into the water. After that, McMasters drives around a warehouse building into a cul-de-sac. But when Cathy turns in, McMasters and his car have disappeared!
Cathy meets Darnell at the grocery store. His men have found Hartmann’s body – right where she said it would be. But no sign of McMasters. The next day, in broad daylight, Cathy stakes out the area during lunch time. She sees a side of a building open – a secret door concealed by trash dumpsters that are bolted to the wall. She sees a car go in the building. She sneaks inside and looks around. In a room inside the building, she observes that Crandall is being held captive by McMasters and his henchmen. Crandall refuses to give them the code for his software program. When Cathy makes a noise, the thugs search the building to see if anyone is there, but she gets away undetected.
Cathy goes to the NSA command center and tells O’Connor that she has found Crandall. O’Connor and his men infiltrate the warehouse, but Crandall is no longer there. Darnell joins Cathy and O’Connor at the NSA Command Center to discuss what has happened. O’Connor tells her that McMasters was in the CIA Special Ops before they canned him. He can disappear in a minute with his skills.
Cathy tells O’Connor and Darnell how she imagines the kidnapping happened. We see her version of the story: Hartmann is dressed to look like McMasters. He is the one who pilots the plane that left Intertech. McMasters flew the identical turbo prop plane from the Whitman airport under the radar. When Hartmann’s plane disappeared off the radar, it was McMasters’ identical plane that took its place.
Later, Cathy is making dinner for one of Jack’s associates when she gets an idea. She visits Eunice, Crandall’s sister, and gets e-mail copies of his correspondence with her. Cathy returns home, reviews the e-mails and, just as she gets her family to bed, receives a call from Darnell, who tells her that Crandall is dead.
Cathy goes to the marina where Crandall’s body was found on a boat. Checking his laptop, Cathy finds that all the files have been deleted. But she also figures out that the laptop on the boat is not the same laptop Crandall had on the plane. She heads to Intertech and pays a visit to Trevor Martin, who was in on the kidnapping caper, has the real computer and is trying to figure out Crandall’s password so he can sell the information on the black market. Cathy proves she’s right by typing in the right password, which she figured out from poring over Crandall’s e-mails to his sister. Case closed – or so it would seem.
O’Connor leads Cathy to an underground parking lot, then pulls a gun on her and demands the laptop. He was in on the plot, as well. But just as it looks hopeless for Cathy, a gunshot sounds, O’Connor crumples and Darnell appears from the shadows.
Back home, Nick seems to be on the road to popularity in school, having won a class election. Susan is dejected, having been passed over for head cheerleader. Jack wonders if Cathy might be called for another job. She assures him it was a one-time thing. Just then, the phone rings. The Declaration of Independence has been stolen – and Darnell needs Cathy’s help to solve the puzzle of yet another mystery.
(source: Hallmark Channel)
Stars:
Lea Thompson
Joe Penny