Singularity

by Steven James

“You’re going to get the codes from the base’s engineer?”

  If Jesús wasn’t the person orchestrating the project, he’d at least been well informed about the plans that had been put in place.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have him yet?”

  “We will. Tonight.”

  “We?”

  “I have an associate.”

  “The woman.”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “You seem rather confident in her.”

  “She’s quite good at what she does. And so am I.”

  Jesús took a moment to watch the candles flick and dance, throwing their strange and subtle shadows against the walls. “And you know where the airstrip is?”

  “It’s all been arranged.”

  They spoke for a few minutes about the details of who would be receiving the delivery, what to do if things didn’t go as planned, and the transfer of money and of the essential information for using the device once it had changed hands.

  Derek said, “I have a request of my own.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m planning to move our research out of the States. There’s been more turnover in the department than I’m comfortable with. I’d like to relocate to a place with fewer liabilities and less possible exposure. Because of that, I’d like to renegotiate the terms of our agreement.”

  A small silence. “Renegotiate.”

  “Yes. I’d like to change the means of payment for my cut. I’m not interested in money.”

  “Drugs?”

  “No. Volunteers.”

  “Go on.”

  “I need you to do what you specialize in.”

  “And which specialty would that be?”

  “Kidnappings.”

  A mock scolding finger. “Ah, now, that’s never been proven.”

  “Of course not. But I’ll be needing more volunteers to continue my research. I think you can help me.”

  “From here in the States? Because, depending on the numbers we’re talking about, it might attract undue attention.”

  “Mexico is fine.”

  “People disappear mysteriously from my country all the time.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “How many volunteers do you need?”

  “Fifty.”

  Jesús didn’t flinch at all when Derek mentioned the number. “And you’re going to paralyze them all?”

  “Locked-in syndrome. And we’ll need all ages, both sexes, to study how neural impulses change over time and with the physical development of the body.”

  “Children too?”

  “Yes.”

  Jesús walked to one of the candles, licked his fingers, closed them over the flame to extinguish it, then gazed at the colonel through the rising tendrils of smoke. “I choose the people.”

  “Certainly.”

  “But I need to know you’re serious about this.”

  “What would convince you?”

  His gaze went to the suitcase near the door. “A demonstration.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Derek saw the short, stocky man who’d met him at the airport grin and roll up his sleeves.

  Ah. That kind of demonstration.

  “Of course.”

  Derek removed the arm from the case and turned to the other man, the tallest one in the room. “Can you hold this for a moment?”

  Somewhat taken off guard, he accepted the robotic arm. Derek was careful to hand it to him upright so that he was holding the base and the robotic hand was near his throat.

  Then he turned toward the brutish man and prepared to defend himself.

  To everyone in the room, it must have looked like Derek was just readying himself—and he was—but he was doing something else as well.

  Derek was concentrating on sending the appropriate neural signals to the electronic array implanted in his left forearm.

  As the stout man came at him, the fingers of the robotic arm twitched slightly, and then his associate who was holding the robotic arm said the last words he was ever going to say: “¿Qué está pasando?”

  Derek’s Spanish wasn’t what it could have been, but he could at least make out that the guy was asking what was happening.

  Well, he was about to find out.

  The robotic arm twisted, the hand bent and clenched tightly around the giant’s throat. He grabbed at it to try to pull it off, but since it had the grip strength of nearly twenty men, that was not going to prove very effective.

  The bullish man who’d been coming at the colonel turned to look momentarily at his partner, and that was a mistake. Derek was on him and in two moves had disarmed him. He shot him through the left eye and then whipped around and placed a bullet in the foreheads of the two men holding the AKs before either of them could even raise their weapons to fire at him.

  While the driver quivered in fright, the man on the floor who was choking writhed and tugged futilely at the robotic arm. With his throat completely closed off, he made no sound, but his face was getting red and his eyes were bulging out. It wouldn’t be long now.

  Derek faced the driver, who held up both hands and begged in Spanish for his life. Derek glanced at Jesús, who signaled for him to spare the driver, which he did.

  Jesús scanned the room disapprovingly. “Good help is hard to find.”

  “If they were good, they wouldn’t be lying dead on the floor.”

  “Indeed.”

  Both of them turned their attention to the choking man.

  Derek decided to end things quickly and had the robotic hand close completely, driving its fingers through the man’s throat and ripping out his jugular vein. A spray of hot blood shot through the air, the man convulsed, and then, as his body became still, the blood pooled profusely on the floor.

  “That,” said Jesús, “is very impressive.”

  “Thank you.”

  Derek retrieved his needle and thread from the man’s pocket, then, through his thoughts, he released the robotic arm’s grip on the corpse. “How far would you have let them go with me?”

  “Just far enough.”

  “I understand.”

  Using the shirt of one of the dead soldiers, Derek wiped as much of the blood off the robotic hand and arm as he could.

  The drug lord and the avenging hero gazed at each other. Neither appeared afraid. Neither was.

  The driver stood nervously watching them, his eyes glued on the gun that Derek still held. Then his gaze shifted to one of the dead man’s AKs and Derek said, “I wouldn’t advise it.”

  That was all it took. The man nodded and actually took a step back.

  At last Jesús said, “From what I understand, you have a plane to catch? Another meeting this afternoon?”

  “At five. With Agcaoili.”

  “I hope it is productive.”

  “I’m confident it will be. And now, before I leave, just one question, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course.”

  Derek watched him carefully. “Are you the one behind all this? Orchestrating the project?”

  “Hmm . . .” Jesús reflected. “And here I was about to ask you the same question.”

  For a moment they each studied the other man’s eyes to discern if he was telling the truth.

  Derek, for his part, was convinced that Jesús wasn’t hiding anything.

  “So we have a common friend then,” Jesús said.

  “If friend is the right word.”

  “If, indeed.”

  Then Derek and the driver headed back to the airport so he could return to Las Vegas.

  When they were gone, Jesús Garcia made a phone call to have some cartel members come to clean up the warehouse and dispose of the bodies of the four men who had, apparently, not been as good as their salaries would have led someone to believe.

  Then he made one more call to see if his contact at the Las Vegas Police Department had found out for him what he wanted to know.

  The Arête

  The Arête
is something to behold.

  Over the last couple decades, location-themed casinos have become popular in Vegas. On the Strip you’ll find the Paris, the Venetian, and New York, New York. Off the Strip you have the Rio, the Gold Coast, and the Orleans.

  But just as with any trend, when guests become too used to one thing they start to look for something that’s new and different.

  However, right about the time when Vegas was rethinking the location-based idea back in 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed. The economy imploded, no one had money to come to Vegas, and real-estate values plummeted.

  So, when billionaire Clive Fridell announced he was going to build an entertainment complex here two months after the stock market crashed, everyone thought he was crazy. However, he had cash in hand, plus properties in Singapore, Dubai, and his island resorts in the Caribbean that he could’ve sold if he needed to in order to get the capital necessary to build a multibillion-dollar resort casino.

  Still, they told him he was crazy.

  Still, he built.

  And in the end, he had the last word, because if there was ever a time to buy property in Las Vegas, it was during the recession. Real estate was at decades-low prices, labor was cheap. It was almost as if Fridell had just won the jackpot at one of his own casinos.

  Five years after construction began, the Arête opened.

  The mirrored sides of the building might make you think of the Wynn or the Encore, but the sloping, asymmetrical mountain–inspired design for the top thirty stories puts it in a class by itself.

  With the world’s tallest indoor rock climbing wall on one end and one of the hottest, hippest nightclubs in North America on the other, it was clear that Mr. Fridell held nothing back when he delivered on his promise to bring Vegas a resort casino like nothing it had ever seen before.

  I leave my car with the valet, and then Fionna’s four children and I enter the Arête’s lobby.

  The kids have never been here before, and when they see the fountains and the enclosed courtyard next to the casino entrance with the indoor “mountain” and rock climbing wall that rises twenty stories, their jaws drop.

  Donnie unplugs his earbuds. “This place is sick.”

  “I’ll get you some passes,” I tell them. “So you can climb it this afternoon while we’re in rehearsal.”

  “Sweet.”

  “All the vegetation on the mountain is real, unlike at some of the resorts here on the Strip. And they don’t pipe in the bird sounds. Those are actual real birds on the cliffs up there.”

  “An aviary,” Maddie says knowingly.

  “That’s right.”

  People younger than twenty-one aren’t allowed to linger in the gaming areas or go near the machines, so we take the long, circuitous route around the casino toward Jenny’s Grille.

  On our way, we pass the escalators leading down to the backstage area and dressing rooms for the theater where I’ll be performing tonight.

  The newer casinos aren’t even typically called casinos, but rather resorts or entertainment complexes, and, truthfully, that’s a better description of what they are.

  Revenue from gaming has dropped to about 35 percent of most hotels’ income—in contrast to the 95 percent it was a few decades ago. Television and the Internet have greatly affected the design of the newer casinos here in Vegas.

  Now we have restaurants opening up with celebrity chefs, high-end shops selling designer sunglasses and purses, as well as jewelry that might easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Shows now make up a major portion of the profit, when, in Vegas’s early years, they used to be free.

  Boxing is hot again, so is mixed martial arts and UFC fighting, which help boost gaming income.

  Because of reality TV, spas and salons are popular and poker is making a huge comeback. But there are no reality shows about slot machines, and those are, at least to some degree, going by the wayside in modern Vegas.

  To address the changing trends, the Arête has fewer slot machines per potential occupant than any other Las Vegas casino. The target demographic, young affluent Asians, don’t play the slots nearly as much as middle-aged and older Americans. Instead, they prefer the gaming tables and video poker machines.

  If you look around the Strip you’ll see that the demographic is no longer rural cowboys like you find downtown at the casinos on Fremont, which is the more iconic 1950s Vegas with the casinos Frank Sinatra used to call carpet joints.

  Now, it’s the goal of luring in money from China that shapes the mood and feel of the Strip.

  Fionna and Xavier are waiting for us by the overcrowded entrance to Jenny’s Grille.

  “I put my name in,” Xavier tells us, “but there’s a twenty-minute wait.”

  “Well . . .” I evaluate that. “We may need to order the food to go or get it delivered to the dressing rooms. Let’s see how long it takes. Stay here, see if you can get a table and maybe order some appetizers. In the meantime, Fionna, I’m wondering if you can help me with something for a few minutes?”

  “Sure.”

  Xavier and the children take a seat with the other people waiting for tables, and he starts telling them knock-knock jokes.

  Fionna looks at me curiously. “What’s up?”

  “C’mon.” I turn toward the marble hallway to the stores. “Let’s go shopping.”

  The Black Card

  “I need to get something for Charlene,” I explain. “For Valentine’s Day. Something stunning and memorable, something that really shows her how much she means to me.”

  “Jevin, she’s going to be here any minute.” We’re walking side by side down the corridor lined with elite, designer stores. “I’m not sure we really have time to shop.”

  “What? We go into a store, choose something, buy it. In and out just like that. How long can it take?”

  “Obviously you are not a woman.” She sighs lightly. “Alright, let’s go. I suppose if we hurry we might just make it back by the skin of our pants.”

  Now that’s one I haven’t heard before.

  I pause and look at the line of shops ahead of us. “Did you find out anything from the drive yet?”

  “I’m moving through it one file at a time. Slow but sure. So what are you thinking? Clothes? Jewelry? A car? Right here in this mall alone you have Gucci, Tiffany, Breitling, Louis Vuitton, Prada . . .”

  “I’m pretty open.”

  “Well, we need to start somewhere, Jev.”

  I recall that Charlene left her cross necklace on Emilio’s body in the Philippines. “A necklace. I think I want to get her a really nice necklace.”

  “Always a good choice. Where’s the nearest jewelry store?”

  “Just up ahead.”

  I’ve never been in this store before, but when we enter I find that the place looks just like I might picture a high-end jewelry store in New York City, London, or Paris looking.

  A tall, angular man stands behind one of the glass counters. He appraises us as we enter, no doubt taking note of my jeans and tattered T-shirt, then he glances at his watch as if this has already been a waste of his time. Obviously, he doesn’t recognize me from the billboards.

  “May I help you?” he says. It sounds more like an accusation than a question.

  “I’m looking for a necklace,” I tell him. “Something really nice for a very special woman.”

  “I see.” He looks at Fionna and nods stiffly.

  “Oh, no. It’s not her. She’s here to help me choose the piece for my girlfriend.”

  “Well,” he replies vaguely. “And do you have a price range in mind?” Once again he looks askance at my clothes.

  “What kind of prices do you start at?”

  “We have a few pieces for under twelve, but if you’re looking for something more along those lines, there’s a place across the street where—”

  “What kind of prices do you end at?” Fionna asks.

  “A quarter.”

  “Of a million?”

  “
Yes. Of a million.”

  “Let’s start there,” I suggest. “See if anything catches my fancy.”

  He doesn’t reply right away. “Yes, well . . .” At last he turns to the glass case to his left, but doesn’t remove the jewelry as he tells us about it. “Here we have a graduated necklace in platinum with 204 round brilliant and marquise diamonds. Twenty-five-point-eight carats. I have some smaller carat weights and different-length necklaces—”

  Fionna shakes her head. “It’s not Charlene. Too pretentious.”

  “Agreed.”

  He spends the next five minutes going through the pieces in front of him, but nothing seems right for Charlene, and at last, when I tell him we’re just not interested in those necklaces, he doesn’t look at all surprised.

  My phone vibrates, and I see a text from Charlene that she has just parked and is on her way to the restaurant.

  I thank the proprietor for his time. He grumbles a snippy reply, so I open my wallet and hand him one of my cards. “Call me if you get anything a little more expensive but not so showy in stock.” Before I close my wallet I make sure he sees my black American Express Centurion Card. It’s a card issued only by invitation. When I got mine, the holder needed to have at least twenty million dollars of assets. There’s no limit to the card. I could buy this jewelry store and all that it contains with it.

  His eyes widen and he gulps slightly. “Sir, I—”

  I wink at him. “Right.” I gesture toward the door. “Okay, Fionna. Let’s go have lunch.”

  When we arrive at the restaurant again, we find that the wait time is still at fifteen minutes, which isn’t going to work out for us at all. Headliners never need to wait in lines in Vegas, but I don’t like skipping in front of people or drawing that kind of attention to myself.

  As it is, there’s no way we’ll get seated and served and be able to finish our meal before we need to be downstairs at one o’clock.

  Fionna suggests that she stay up here while Xavier, Charlene, and I go to get ready for rehearsal. “We’ll bring you something down,” she offers. “Special delivery.”

  “But Mom,” Maddie objects, “I didn’t get a chance to tell everyone about the immortal jellyfish.”

  “Hmm . . .” Fionna is considering things when the pager goes off, indicating that our table is ready. “Well, that’s a surprise. Okay, well, you three should probably head downstairs.” Her gaze shifts back to Maddie. “How about we get seated, then Lonnie, Donnie, and Mandie can order while we go down to Mr. Banks’s dressing room and you can fill us in.”