Deep Fire Rising

by Du Brul, Jack

  A moan of frustration and mounting agony escaped his lips. He jerked the material again as a gust of wind worried at the top edge of the sheet, finding and expanding a small wrinkle until a square foot of the cloth had lifted from the glass. Mercer’s pace doubled, then doubled again. The fear of the entire sheet peeling away from the glass made him dig his rubber-soled shoes into the window. His heel caught a rubber gasket separating two of the enormous panes. The wrinkle settled when the wind died again and he stopped dead. He’d slid eight feet. The top of the sheet was a mere foot below his own shattered window.

  He hadn’t heard a guard’s weapon in ten seconds or more.

  As insane as the stunt he was trying to pull off was, he knew it wouldn’t be enough. He was helpless and the gunmen would be in his room in moments. It would take no time for them to figure where he’d gone and blow him from the building with a burst from a machine pistol.

  There was only one way to increase his speed and that was to diminish the hydrostatic pressure on the glass. Because he couldn’t reduce his weight, he had to reduce the area of cotton. And once he did, there’d be no going back.

  “As if I can go back now,” he muttered and hunched his shoulders, peeling the lower third of the sheet from the window.

  Mercer accelerated like a skier bursting from knee-high powder onto an icy patch of trail. In a fraction of a second he knew he’d never recover. He felt he was already hurtling down the building too fast, and every foot he dropped stripped more of the sheet from the glass and sped his plunge.

  Wind rushed past his ears as he struggled to flatten the sheet again by stretching his arms as far as they would go. The effort made his upper body tremble. He spread his feet wide, hoping his wet slacks would give him a measure of control. His heart beat in his throat and he hadn’t taken a breath for what felt like hours.

  He didn’t dare look down, but as soon as the thought popped into his head, he did. He’d slid eight of the eleven stories and could judge how quickly the ground was rushing up to meet him by the expressions on the two pool workers staring up at him. Their mouths widened the farther he plummeted. Yet it didn’t appear he was going as fast as he thought. He’d slowed and the impact wouldn’t be too . . .

  A window exploded to his right, razor shards cutting his side and outer thigh. Another burst blew a pane of glass above him and caught him in an avalanche of deadly fragments. He didn’t need to look up to know at least one of the gunmen stood in his window firing down the building’s sloped flank. The next burst would likely spike through the top of his skull.

  He was a story and a half from the ground when he released his grip on the sheet.

  At the last second before he hit the ground, he cocked his knees and launched himself from the building, vectoring the impact so that he crashed onto a neatly trimmed bank of shrubs with his shoulder and back. He rolled hard, tumbling to the lawn before slamming into a stack of lounge chairs. His entire body had gone numb for a blessed second until pain exploded in his shoulders and right leg from hip to ankle.

  “Dude, I have always wanted to try something like that!” The teenage workers had rushed to his side.

  “That was awesome,” the other said. “What was it like?”

  Nine-millimeter rounds rained from above. The first teen went down with the back of his thigh ripped wide open. The other caught a bullet in the top of his shoulder and dropped as if poleaxed, his arm barely attached to his body.

  Mercer staggered to his feet, trying to get the youths out of the line of fire—trying to save himself. Chips of concrete burst from a statue of a sphinx as more bullets peppered the pool area, some forming tiny geysers where they hit the still water. Hobbled by his deadened leg, Mercer zigzagged around palm trees and garish statues. Because the hotel was fashioned out of black glass, it was easy to see the light streaming from his shattered window and the silhouette of the gunman who’d realized his quarry had escaped. In the dying glare of the setting sun, Mercer couldn’t hope to identify the assassin, but he’d be glad to meet him again under different circumstances.

  Mercer threw an ironic wave he was sure the gunman saw.

  He reached the decorative wall separating the pool area from Luxor Drive and was just about to scramble over when a group of men, wearing the same suits as the gunmen upstairs, appeared at the hotel’s back entrance. One shouted something indecipherable and reached inside his jacket for a weapon. As best he could, Mercer launched himself over the wall, falling in an untidy tangle on the sidewalk below.

  There was no traffic on the two-lane road and the cover afforded by the parking garage was far out of reach. He looked up and down the half-mile street, as trapped here as he had been in his room. Only this time there were no crazy options. The gunmen had seen him and would be over the wall before Mercer could cover twenty yards. He arbitrarily turned to his left and began running, further punishing his injured leg.

  The sweep of headlights blinded him and the squeal of brakes sounded unnaturally loud. The car was a new silver BMW Z3, one of the more exotic vehicles a tourist could rent in the city. The driver slid the car into a controlled four-wheeled skid so that it pointed in the direction it had come. The engine snarled. Although the top was up, the passenger window was down. The driver remained hidden in the car’s interior.

  “Dr. Mercer,” a woman called. He caught a glimpse of her dark hair glittering like obsidian. “If you want to live, come with me.”

  Mercer lurched toward the car as she swung open the long door.

  “I’ve waited a lifetime to meet you, Doctor,” she said, pressing the gas even before he was fully in the car. “It’s too bad I came too late.”

  “I’d say you were just in time,” he panted.

  She spoke from the driver’s-side shadows. “I’m sorry, but I am. You see, you’re going to die anyway.”

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  Before Mercer could react to her statement, she cranked the nimble little car onto Mandalay Bay Road and then onto Las Vegas Boulevard, the casino-lined stretch of highway known around the world as the Strip. She blew through a red light and accelerated away from the traffic snarl she’d created.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, Doctor.”

  Mercer struggled to find his mental equilibrium in the wake of what had just happened. As the adrenaline wore off, his legs and shoulder throbbed in time with his still-pounding heart. His breathing came in deep gasps. “Exactly how many ways are there to interpret ‘you’re going to die anyway’?”

  “What I meant was that they will keep coming after you,” she said from the shadows. “They want you dead.”

  As they tore past one of the Strip’s more garish neon signs, a wash of pink and teal light flooded the dim interior of the BMW. Mercer finally got to see his rescuer.

  She was in profile, her mouth held taut in concentration, and the lights played against her smooth skin, kaleidoscoping in the planes and angles, at once making her beautiful and demonic. Her hair was shimmering black, cropped short around her head and curling in tendrils down her slender neck. She looked at him at that moment.

  She wore black-framed designer glasses that gave her a no-nonsense air. Her large eyes were almond shaped and wide spaced belying some Asian ancestry. Above them, her brows were saucy arcs. Had he not just escaped his second assassination attempt in four hours, he would have found her attractive. Stunning, actually.

  And then he looked closer at her eyes and saw what drew him so quickly. It was the eyes themselves that he would know forever and how her beauty made the pain in them that much more difficult to witness. In them he saw a despair that seemed to drop into infinity, as if she’d seen horrors no person should ever see. It was like looking into the suffering eyes of a refugee child. Or those of a mother who’d just lost one. Whatever had led her to this moment had so haunted her that it looked as if she’d never come back.

  Mercer had to fight himself to put aside the upwelling of empathy she evoked and concentrate
on what had just happened. He asked the most obvious question. “Not that I’m not grateful, but I know you didn’t happen along at the right moment, so do you mind telling me who you are, who those gunmen were and why they want me dead?”

  “My name is Tisa Nguyen.” Her last name was a common Vietnamese surname, but her first, which rhymed with Melissa, was one Mercer had never heard before. “And those men were sent to kill you because of your work at Area 51.”

  That she used the name of America’s premier research facility wasn’t a surprise. After all, it was one of the best known secrets in the world. What startled him was that it seemed everyone and their sister knew he was working there. Ira Lasko was in for a shock if Mercer somehow survived long enough to tell him.

  He noted that she hadn’t given the assassins’ identity.

  Tisa guided the car onto a cross street and then rocketed up a ramp onto I-15 heading north. Commuter traffic was thick but she seemed immune to it, exploiting the tiniest opening and using deft touches on the accelerator and brake to keep them rolling at a steady eighty miles per hour. She handled the car like a professional race driver.

  “I can’t tell you who the gunmen were. I’m sorry. But please know that my saving you tonight is an indication of my sincerity.” She paused. “I didn’t think it right that you should suffer for something out of your control.”

  “Lady,” Mercer flared, “the past twenty minutes has been about as out of control as things can get. Since you knew where I was staying and what was about to happen, don’t you think you could have just called to warn me?” She tried to interrupt, but Mercer overrode her protests. “Thanks for your help, but why don’t you just pull off at the next exit and let me out?”

  “I tried calling,” Tisa snapped. She spoke English with an accent, French and something else. “Several times. You never picked up and then just before they were to hit your room, the line was busy.”

  Mercer opened his mouth and let it close. What she said was plausible. He’d been in the shower for a half hour and then dialed Harry almost immediately after he toweled off. Maybe she had tried to warn him. That still didn’t negate the fact that she knew exactly what time the gunmen were making the hit. Meaning? Meaning either she’d been tracking them or she was part of their team. He chose his next words carefully. “You know they killed at least one woman that I saw.” He kept his voice mild to heighten the barbarism. “Probably got two or three security guards too.”

  His hoped-for reaction of guilt never came. Tisa barely blinked at the news. “It could have been worse,” she finally said.

  “Worse? I just told you innocent people are dead and you say it could have been worse. I think you could have saved them. I think you could have stopped them by warning the hotel or something. Don’t you realize their blood is on your hands?”

  “Theirs isn’t the first, Dr. Mercer,” she said matter-of-factly. “And it certainly won’t be the last.”

  A tense minute went by. Mercer studied her profile, conflicted by her beauty and seeming indifference.

  “I was too late to stop them from attacking your room,” she said at last. “But I could try to save you if they failed. I’ve put my life at risk just by helping you, though it doesn’t really matter.”

  “What doesn’t matter? That innocent people are dead or that you may be next?”

  “Actually, none of it.” They sped up to ninety miles per hour as traffic thinned.

  Mercer had heard enough. He hadn’t needed Tisa to figure out that the attack concerned Area 51. He was thankful for his rescue, but he wasn’t going to put up with her nonanswers. He would know the truth after he and Ira grilled Donny Randall, who no doubt had some connection to the gunmen. And the truth, he knew, had nothing to do with Ira’s bogus cover about a nuclear repository. Terrorists didn’t assassinate miners for digging a waste dump. They’d attack the nuclear materials en route or hit the site after it was full.

  He put his hand on the gear shift lever. “In ten seconds I am going to jam the transmission into neutral.”

  Tisa glanced at him, then returned her eyes to the road.

  “Unless you’re armed you can’t stop me, so why don’t you just pull over.”

  “I’m not armed,” she admitted.

  “Then stop the goddamned car.”

  Tisa ignored his demand. She spoke confidently. “Four months ago there was a seismic disturbance that was triangulated to a remote spot at Area 51.”

  “One.”

  “The epicenter was eight hundred feet below the surface.”

  The exact depth Mercer and his men had tunneled off the main shaft. “Two.”

  “Looking through U.S. Geologic Survey records, there’s no evidence of a fault in this location, certainly not that shallow. It is the first such earthquake there.”

  This part of Nevada was riddled with microfaults; many of which hadn’t been discovered. Mercer was unimpressed. “Three.”

  “The problem is that it wasn’t an earthquake at all.”

  Tisa paused and Mercer had to remind himself of his countdown. “Four.”

  “The closest analogy is that a bubble erupted inside solid rock. One second everything was normal and the next, seismographs showed a tremendous displacement of simultaneous P and S waves. As quickly as it happened, everything went back to normal. Almost like a contained nuclear explosion that only lasted for a moment.”

  “How big?” Mercer asked, despite himself.

  “Five.”

  “On the Richter scale?”

  “No. Your ultimatum. You’re up to number five. On the Richter it registered a single spike of three-point-one.”

  “Duration?”

  “Like I said, one second.”

  “That’s not possible,” Mercer stated. “What about foreshocks or aftershocks?”

  “Just the one spike.”

  While Mercer had never heard of anything like this, an unusual earthquake was no reason to have him assassinated. He asked her why.

  “What about your countdown?” Tisa asked with a little lift to her lip. Despite his palpable anger, she was teasing him.

  “I’m keeping it going in my head,” he growled, although a smile was trying to tug at the corners of his mouth. “Why would someone want me dead for working near an undiscovered fault?”

  “Because it wasn’t a fault. They believe it was a weapon test of some kind. I don’t know the details. I . . . I’m not part of the group that ordered your murder. When I learned what was going to happen, I flew to Las Vegas to save you. You’re a pawn in this. Innocent. I didn’t want to see you hurt.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at him for the first time in several miles. Her eyes went soft while her mouth remained defiant. The shock of the attack had worn to the point Mercer could admit to himself that she was achingly beautiful. “The reasons are my own. That’s all I’ll tell you.”

  “Can you at least tell me how you knew I was involved with Area 51?” He himself hadn’t known about the job until being stuffed into a government SUV.

  She laughed. “I never expected modesty from you, Doctor. It’s charming.”

  “I’m not being modest,” Mercer said.

  “In some circles, you are one of the most famous people in the world. You are perhaps the greatest prospecting geologist working today. You’ve found or been instrumental in the development of dozens of successful mines. Opals in Australia. Diamonds in Canada and Africa. The Ghuatra ruby mine in India. It’s been estimated that you alone are responsible for having one hundred million cubic yards of earth shifted in just the past eight years.”

  Mercer understood then. The way she’d been talking, with a kind of reverent fatalism, it should have been obvious. She belonged to an environmental group, one with a radical arm that decided to forgo passive protesting and turn to violence. Like some fringe right-to-life groups whose members began to gun down abortion doctors, it was inevitable that extremist environmentalists would eventually target thos
e they considered the ecosystem’s worst enemies. He still carried the scars from dealing with a similar group in Alaska a few years earlier.

  “So your people think I’m Earth’s enemy number one and that by killing me a few acres of desert will remain unspoiled for future generations to ignore?”

  She considered his accusation for a second. “Quite the opposite, actually. I do belong to a group, called the Order, and we do strive to protect the planet, but not in the way you think. We don’t chain ourselves to trees or chase whaling ships in rubber boats. Our work is more”—she searched for the right word—“consequential.”

  Mercer scoffed. “And you consider me consequential enough to kill?”

  “I never wanted you killed,” Tisa said fiercely. “But others do.”

  “Because I’m a successful mining engineer,” Mercer interrupted. “And you think my work damages the environment?”

  Tisa eyed him again. “With the exception of a few extreme cases, Doctor, one person cannot affect the environment in any appreciable way. You should stick to being modest. It suits you better. Very little of what you’ve accomplished has required any kind of adjustments on our part.”

  Mercer had no idea what she meant by adjustments. He was about to ask when she continued.

  “I’m afraid you were targeted because you stand in the way of certain people learning what happened four months ago deep under Area 51. Until they, no, I should say we—in a way I am part of this—until we learn the nature of what happened, people within the Order feel there is a tremendous risk.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  She nodded. “You don’t have any idea how much you don’t know. And I’m afraid I don’t have time to explain it to you. Well, I have the time, but you would never believe me.”

  He was beginning to think his rescuer was more than a little insane. Nothing she said made sense.