Top Secret Twenty-One

by Janet Evanovich

“So who’s number one if it’s not Semov?”

  “I don’t have a number one.”

  “They have cameras all over the place in these casinos. Do you have someone watching the monitors for a guy with one eye?”

  “The feeds are being watched at Rangeman.”

  “And nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Maybe we should go downstairs and circulate,” I said to Ranger. “We could mingle. Keep our eyes open.” Have a gelato.

  Ranger stood and stretched, his black T-shirt rode up, and I caught a glimpse of two inches of brown skin and hard abs and almost had an orgasm.

  “Babe,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  “Yep. Why?”

  “You sort of moaned.”

  “Gas.”

  “Understandable.”

  We took the elevator to the lobby and looked in at the bar. Filled with men speaking Russian.

  “Jackpot,” Ranger said. “Go do your bimbo thing.”

  I sidled up to a couple men but didn’t get much response. I tried my luck at the other end. Nothing happening. I went back to Ranger.

  “No one wants to talk to me,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s because you’re wearing a T-shirt advertising beer and these men all make vodka.”

  I looked down at my shirt. “This was supposed to be my day off. I wasn’t dressing for success.”

  Ranger slung an arm around my shoulder. “Let’s see what they’ve got in the hotel shopping arcade.”

  Three stores. One selling magazines and candy. One selling beachwear. One selling bimbo clothes. Perfect.

  “We just need to swap out the T-shirt,” Ranger said. “The jeans are good.”

  “They fit better before lunch.”

  Ranger pulled a white T-shirt off the rack. “Try this.”

  It was a stretchy little job with a low scoop neck, cap sleeves, and HOT STUFF spelled out in rhinestones across the boob area.

  I tried it on and it fit okay. I had a little cleavage that was all my own. I wasn’t sure I lived up to the message.

  I peeked out of the dressing room at Ranger. “What do you think?”

  “I’d give you the keys to my car.”

  “You do that all the time anyway.”

  “Ever hopeful,” Ranger said.

  I marched over to the bar and got into a conversation with one of the men.

  “Nice shirt,” he said. “Is it truly?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m smokin’. Are you one of the vodka people?”

  “Yes. I’m a very big vodka man.”

  “I have a friend with the trade show. He has a patch over one eye.” I covered my eye with my hand. “Like this,” I said. “Do you know him?”

  “I don’t know this patch.”

  I moved down the bar to another Russian.

  “Howdy,” I said. “Do you speak English?”

  “Yes. Very good English,” he said. “I mostly speak to hot girls.”

  Fifteen minutes later I said adios to the last Russian at the bar and returned to Ranger.

  “That was fast,” Ranger said.

  “When you advertise hot on your chest like this, the conversation progresses pretty quickly. No one’s seen Vlatko.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE LOBBY WAS relatively empty. No one checking in or out. Two older women talking to the concierge. He gave them a map and they walked away. A service elevator to the side of the concierge desk opened, and six men in regulation military uniforms stepped out, followed by a man in a more elaborate uniform.

  “General Semov,” Ranger said.

  Semov looked fit. Ranger had already briefed me on him, so I knew that he was fifty-three years old and had been married for twenty-three years. His inner circle knew he was unfaithful in a way usually seen in rock stars and NBA players. FBI intelligence knew that his more talkative girlfriends suffered unfortunate and fatal accidents. People who were close to him suspected regular Botox injections and an occasional peel. His face was said to be as smooth as vanilla custard. Personally, from this distance I thought he looked a little scary.

  The seven men crossed the lobby to the guest elevators, where an elevator was being held with the door open. The men got into the elevator, the door closed, and presumably the elevator whooshed Semov up to the tenth floor.

  “So much for the Semov experience,” I said to Ranger. “Was the FBI able to get onto the floor to check his air handler?”

  “Yes.”

  We traded the lobby level for the casino level and wandered around. I didn’t expect to see Vlatko here, but we checked anyway.

  Morelli called at five o’clock.

  “It’s hell here,” he said. “It’s started to rain and we’re all locked in the house with the kids running around screaming about Transformer zombies. And Bella is on a rant about your grandmother. I can’t tell if Bella’s overmedicated or under-medicated. Where are you? What’s with all the bells and gongs going off in the background?”

  “I’m in a casino in Atlantic City with Ranger.”

  “This must be Torture Joe Day.”

  “It’s business. We’re looking for Vlatko.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” There were some fumbling sounds from the phone and I could hear Morelli yelling, “Anthony junior, don’t feed him any more candy.”

  “Is Anthony junior feeding candy to Bob?” I asked Morelli.

  “No. He’s feeding it to Uncle Manny. You remember Manny, right?”

  “A hundred years old, no teeth, drools, smells like canned peas.”

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “We found a guy who’s missing a heart.”

  “Only one?”

  “So far.”

  “Let me talk to Ranger,” Morelli said.

  “No. You’re going to yell at him.”

  “I’m not going to yell at him. I’m going to threaten him with police brutality and dismemberment Italian style.”

  “That’s sort of yelling.”

  More phone fumbling noise. “Bob, drop it!” Morelli shouted.

  “Now what?”

  “He’s got my Aunt Momo’s dentures. She takes them out when she eats. I have to go. He ran upstairs with them.”

  I disconnected and put my phone back into my pocket.

  “Everything okay in Trenton?” Ranger asked.

  “Yep. Same old, same old.”

  Ranger put his finger to his ear. “Tank has a visual of Vlatko. Mezzanine level, convention center.”

  We were standing near the front door. Ranger turned and ran out of the casino, down the boardwalk, and into the convention center. He crossed the floor to the escalator and took the steps two at a time while I scrambled to keep up. He stopped at the top of the escalator, and I came up behind him, gasping for air.

  “Tank lost him,” Ranger said, moving toward one of the concession stands. “He exited through the door by the frozen yogurt bar.”

  Ranger unholstered his gun, and we opened the door and looked into a service area with two elevators and a stairwell. No cameras. This was a major security flaw, but not unusual. The hotel had cameras only in areas available to guests. We took the stairs to the ground floor and then down one more level. We opened a door onto a maze of hallways, mechanical rooms, and storerooms connecting to the main part of the hotel.

  “He can move around undetected down here,” Ranger said to Tank. “Call Mac and tell him you had a visual and he needs to have a man go through the belowground service area.”

  “Is Mac the FBI guy?” I asked.

  “He’s not my primary contact. He’s boots on the ground.” Ranger holstered his gun, and we stepped out of the service area and into the casino. “I want to go back to the room so I can look at the hotel blueprints.”

  Hal was in the suite, but the computer guy was gone. Ranger unrolled the blueprints, found the lower-level print, and set a couple bottles of water on it to keep it from rolling back up again.

&nbs
p; “Do you think you have him trapped?” I asked Ranger.

  “I’m not counting on it. He’s insane, but he’s not stupid. I’m sure there are ways to slip out of that underground maze.” He marked the blueprint with a red marker. “These are the exterior exit points. Two are to the rear of the building. A loading dock and a single door. I have a man on both of those. Plus the hotel has extra security there because Semov and his entourage are using the back door. Employees for the most part enter through a side door and go to various locker rooms. Eventually the locker rooms lead to the underground service corridors.”

  “And you have a man on the employee entrance?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the elevators and stairwells?”

  “They go to all floors, and on each floor they empty out into the service pantry. Extra linens and toiletries are kept there. Room service passes through there. And next door to the service pantry is the mechanical room with the air handlers, among other things.”

  “Can you go directly from the service pantry into the mechanical room?”

  “No. They’re side by side, but you have to go out one door and in another. And when that happens you’re caught on camera.”

  “So now we sit and wait?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to go for a gelato?”

  Ranger looked at me like I had corn growing out of my ears.

  “I’m just saying, they have a gazillion flavors of gelato at this little kiosk next to the all-day breakfast place,” I said. “And I thought it might be refreshing.”

  Ranger smiled. “There are times when I seriously consider marrying you, but then I get yet another black mark on my path to enlightenment and forgiveness and I scratch marriage off my bucket list.”

  “Really? You think about marrying me?”

  “Marrying you might be extreme, but once in a while I think about sharing my closet.”

  “You have a really great closet.”

  It was a big walk-in with beautiful cherry cabinets and wall-to-wall carpet. Ella kept Ranger’s clothes perfectly pressed and orderly. She folded his underwear and matched his socks. She lined his dress shirts up with the hangers all going in the same direction. Of course it was all made easier by the fact that Ranger only wore black.

  “So about the gelato?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t mean to be listening in or anything,” Hal said. “But if you’re bringing gelato back, I like Banana Sunrise.”

  This two-hundred-and-fifty-pound guy who looked like the Hulk, if the Hulk wasn’t green, liked Banana Sunrise gelato.

  We stepped into the hall, and Tank told Ranger he had another visual. Vlatko was on the ninth floor, moving from the service pantry to the mechanical room. And he didn’t have the patch. He was wearing dark glasses.

  Ranger went through the seventh-floor service pantry and ran up two flights of stairs. I ran behind him and hit the service pantry just as he was out the door. By the time I reached the hall he had his gun drawn and the mechanical room door unlocked.

  Cautioning me to stand back, he pushed the mechanical room door open and stepped inside. I moved to the open door and waited there while Ranger searched the room.

  “He’s not here,” he said. “You can come in.”

  I stepped in, and the door locked behind me. “Did Tank see him leave this room?”

  “No. There must be a way out that doesn’t show on the blueprint.”

  “The window,” I said.

  The window was frosted and closed but not locked. Ranger opened the window and looked out. A wrought iron ladder ran up the side of the building, from the second floor to the roof. An emergency fire escape. Even if the building was burning I’m not sure I could bring myself to use it.

  Ranger closed and locked the window, went to the air handler, and used his penknife to remove the side panel.

  “If Vlatko wants to use the aerosol polonium, this is probably how he’ll do it,” Ranger said. “Or at least this is how he’d hoped to do it. He could put the canister in here, on the coils, set the timer, and the air handler fan would blow the polonium into the guest rooms.”

  “Do you think he’s changed his plan? He has to know we’re here looking for him.”

  “If he was sent here to get a job done, and he was sent with a very specific weapon, like the aerosol polonium, he might not have a lot of flexibility. And unless he has sophisticated listening equipment, which I doubt, he has no way of knowing how many people are looking for him.”

  “Wouldn’t he assume you’d be working with the FBI after he set the polonium off at Rangeman? That’s considered nuclear terrorism.”

  “I’m pretty sure I know his mindset, and he’d assume I was hunting him on my own. Vlatko works alone, and he sees me as his Western counterpart.”

  Ranger screwed the panel back in place. “I’m sure there’s access to the roof from inside. There are water-cooling towers there for the air conditioners, and those units need maintenance. So there has to be a stairwell going to the roof from the tenth floor, and it would be part of the behind-the-scenes service network.”

  “So Vlatko could be avoiding cameras by using the outside ladder to get to the roof and hook up with the service stairwell there.”

  “Looks like it. He’s also more difficult to spot without the eye patch.”

  We left the ninth floor, rode the elevator to the lobby, and Morelli called.

  “You’re not coming home, are you?” he asked.

  “It’s doubtful. We know he’s here. He gets picked up on the hotel security feed once in a while, but we can’t get to him fast enough.”

  “I’d be happy to help, but I suspect you’ve got a small army there.”

  “I’m not sure what we have here. I’m not totally in the loop. And I think you don’t want to be either. It sounds like you survived the party.”

  “Barely. And Bob chipped a tooth off Momo’s uppers. It’s going to cost me a fortune. So what are you doing right now?”

  “Ranger and I are in the lobby. We came down for gelato.”

  Silence on Morelli’s end.

  “But before this we examined the air handler on the ninth floor,” I said.

  “You aren’t sleeping with him, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good to know,” Morelli said.

  “You trust me.”

  “I do. But I don’t trust him.”

  “You’re pretty smart for a Trenton cop.”

  “I finished the Jumble today.”

  “Impressive.”

  I said good night, and looked over the list of gelato flavors.

  “There are so many,” I said to Ranger. “I can’t choose.”

  “Do you want me to choose for you?”

  “No!”

  He looked at his watch. “You have thirty seconds.”

  “I want Tiramisu. No, wait, Strawberry. Maybe Caramel Swirl.”

  “Ten seconds.”

  “Mango, Coffee, Chocolate Marshmallow …”

  “She’ll have Tiramisu,” he said to the girl at the counter. “And a large Banana Sunrise.” He turned to me. “Always go with your first instinct.”

  “You’re not having any?”

  “My first instinct is to pass.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I ATE MY gelato and commandeered the bedroom while Ranger and Hal worked at the dining table. I watched television, ordered room service, and shut the door against the stream of men coming and going, reporting in to Ranger.

  I called Connie and told her I was on a job with Ranger and might not be in the office tomorrow. I called Lula and asked her to look in on Briggs and the dogs. I got a call from Grandma Mazur asking for a ride home from Bingo.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m in Atlantic City on a job with Ranger.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being in Atlantic City,” Grandma said. “I like those all-you-can-eat lunch buffets. And I could spend some time playing the slots.
I haven’t done that in an age.”

  “I’m not doing any of those things. I’m working.”

  “Did you have a swirly frozen yogurt?”

  “No, but I had a gelato.”

  “Then it wasn’t a total waste,” Grandma said.

  From the level of activity in the other room I could guess that there weren’t any more Vlatko sightings. I changed back into my comfy T-shirt advertising beer, crawled into bed, and switched the light off. I woke up at sunrise with Ranger next to me. Naked. No surprise there. Ranger always slept naked.

  “I suppose I should be happy I don’t have half of Rangeman and an FBI SWAT team in bed with me,” I said.

  “They have a room next door, and Hal’s on the couch. If you’re really happy, I could get rid of Hal.”

  “I’m not that happy. I’m wondering why I felt compelled to do this. It’s not like I have something to contribute.”

  “The day isn’t over. And none of us have been especially effective with the exception of Tank, who spotted Vlatko twice.” Ranger rolled out of bed and went into the bathroom, and I was sorry the room was dark and I couldn’t see him better. I heard the shower running, and I went back to sleep. I opened my eyes an hour later and dragged myself into the shower. When I came out of the bathroom there was a bag from the bimbo store on the bed. A new shirt and some lingerie. The shirt was red, with rhinestones that spelled out ATLANTIC CITY. The lingerie was black and lacy.

  “Thanks,” I said when I came out of the bedroom. “It’s great to have clean clothes. I’m surprised the store is open this early.”

  “Only for you,” Ranger said. “Rafael did the shopping.”

  Rafael was obviously the slim guy at the computer. He looked up and smiled wide. “I know what the ladies like,” he said.

  Hal was at a second computer. He grinned and shook his head.

  Ranger was dressed in Rangeman black fatigues. Ready for action. He was leaning against the breakfront with a coffee cup in his hand. He was armed.

  “You look like you expect something to happen today,” I said to him.

  “Intel has picked up chatter that there’ll be an event involving Semov. Mac has two extra men on him. One with Semov, and one checking Semov’s environment. Semov is scheduled to remain in his suite until eleven forty-five, at which time he and his entourage will make their way to the ballroom, where he’ll give the keynote address. He’s vulnerable when he’s moving. He could get swept along in the crowd, and Vlatko would only need to come in contact with him for a few seconds to deliver the polonium. Personally, I don’t care if Semov lives or dies, but I don’t want to miss the opportunity to take Vlatko down.