by Jeff Abbott
AND AROUND THE CORNER came Felix.
I felt my chest heave in relief. He and Mila must have followed me. I knew they would. They’d figured out Lazard was the target in Vegas from Glenn’s cell phone text.
I heard Janice say, “Felix?” in surprise, in shock.
He was in a dark maintenance suit, and he carried a shotgun.
“Freeze,” he said in a voice more like steel than his own.
“Glad you’re here,” I said, stepping toward him. He looked at me like he didn’t know me and he smiled.
“Sam. Sorry.” And he slammed the butt of the shotgun into the side of my head.
I fell across the leather ottoman. Stars dancing through my eyes, thinking, No, that’s not right.
I heard a scream—Janice—the booming blasts of the gun, a horrid wet sound, the answering fire of a pistol, screams again, someone begging. I was sprawled on the leather, no one aiming at me, trying to bring my brain back to focus.
I raised my head.
Carnage. The second thug was dead, felled by the shotgun. Janice was…gone. Belias was gone. It’s unnerving to have a room full of dangerous people and misplace two of them. I felt a trickle of blood on the side of my head where the edge of the gun’s stock had struck me.
Lazard had taken cover behind the couch. Firing at Felix, who blasted back.
I rolled off the ottoman and then Lazard was shooting toward me, tufts of stuffing dancing in the air like pollen as the bullets tore the leather. I rolled up into a ball under the marble table. I was hurt, didn’t know how much, and people were trying to kill each other.
Then the shooting stopped.
“I don’t want to kill you,” Felix yelled and I hoped he was yelling it at me. The gun I’d taken from Randy. I’d dropped the gun when he hit me. Where…oh, Lazard had taken that gun. That was unfortunate. I stayed under the marble table.
“I want information,” Felix yelled. “I’ll let you live for information.”
“What?” I yelled.
“Shut up, Sam,” Felix said. “This has nothing to do with you.”
I begged to differ, but I don’t argue with shotguns.
“Why does Belias want you dead?” Felix asked. “Tell me and you live. Lie and die.”
“I think he wants to silence us,” Lazard said, his voice shaking badly. “Me and Barbara Scott. And…”
So Felix wasn’t on my side anymore. He’d destroyed my attempt to get information out of Belias. Let’s deal with the new reality. I inched under the marble slab of the table, looking for a way to get to Lazard. If he shot Felix and killed him, he’d kill me. He owned the casino, and one assumed he could get more Randys to help him clean up the mess. But Felix, Felix could be reasoned with, right? I knew Felix. At least I thought I did.
Then a chilling thought occurred to me: Where was Mila?
“And? Is there a third one?”
“If I tell you…you’ll just kill me.”
“Stop shooting at me and at Sam, and come out and let’s talk,” Felix called to Lazard.
“No. You shot Andy.”
“Andy would have shot me. Forget Andy. Focus on your future,” Felix yelled.
Andy and Randy. You can’t make this up. “Belias!” I yelled. “You two are missing the point. Where’s Belias?” I didn’t care about the garden snakes in the room, I wanted the cobra.
“Sam, stay down,” Felix ordered me. “Stay out of this, please.”
At least the shooting had stopped. I wondered if either of them had run out of ammunition.
I thought Lucky Lazard might respond to negotiation. “Lazard, I work for some people. We can hide you, hide your daughter until this is over. You don’t have to be afraid of Belias. I need you to stop him. It’s over now, you can see that. He’s over.”
“He’s far from over. He’s…” And he stopped.
“What’s he planning? What’s going to give him so much power?” I said.
“I shouldn’t have helped Belias…We shouldn’t have helped her…” Lazard’s voice, earlier a bullhorn, went soft. “Me and Barbara Scott and Rawlings…”
Rawlings?And Belias wasn’t a “her.”
“I won’t hurt you. Tell me what he’s doing,” Felix said. “Tell us where he and Janice will go.”
Well. Felix had his own agenda. And if I got out of this alive, I’d give some serious thought as to what it could be. He could have shot me dead, first and easiest. He hadn’t. So he might be willing to talk to me. “Tell us,” I said, like we were still working together.
“Sam, shut up. This has ceased to be your problem.”
I shut up. I looked out from the table. Lazard stood. He’d run out of bullets and he’d tossed the gun on the couch. Felix stood, the shotgun across his arms. I recognized the shotgun. He must have gone to my bar in Vegas, The Canyon Club, and armed himself. I pulled myself up from the floor very slowly. My head ached.
“Sam, sit down, or I’ll kill you,” he said.
I sat. “Belias?”
“He took the elevator down with Janice. They got out in the cross fire when I took out the muscle.”
“They’re running,” I said. “Where are they going?”
“Chicago. But it won’t matter. Rawlings will run now. I’ll call him and tell him to run,” Lazard said. His hands shook in relief that the shooting was over.
“Felix, you’ve been keeping secrets,” I said.
“Shut. Your. Mouth,” he hissed at me.
I shut up.
“What is Belias doing? What’s his scheme?” Felix said.
“You act like you already know,” Lazard answered.
“I already suspect.”
“He’s going to own the president.”
“President of what?” I asked.
Lazard looked at me and laughed.
“Outside, both of you,” Felix ordered.
“Felix, where is Mila…?”
He gestured at me again. With the shotgun. “Shut up. Outside. Now.”
“Why outside?” I said.
“Because you’re not the boss anymore, Sam.”
He followed Lazard and me out onto the patio, gesturing us forward with the shotgun. Las Vegas lay before us in the desert sprawl. I would have liked to have seen the view at night.
Lazard turned to face him and Felix asked, “Can you expose Belias? Did you leave anything behind that can incriminate him?”
“And have my daughter lose her fortune? No. Just the stuff in the bedroom safe.”
“I’d like the combination, please.”
“No.”
“I will shoot off your arm. The combination, please, Lucky.”
“Seven-three-six-eight-zero.”
“Sam, go get the safe open. Bring me what’s in it.”
I hesitated.
“Sam, please. Do as I ask and I’ll tell you where Mila is. She’s perfectly fine.”
I obeyed. I found the safe in the floor of the bedroom closet. Entered in the numbers. No burning smell this time, no heat against the metal. The door clicked open. I pulled open a closed folder of papers, one of those kinds of folders that has a fold-over top and a brown elastic band to secure it. I opened it.
“Sam. Doesn’t take that long,” Felix yelled at me.
My head throbbed but it was clearing. Faces on the paper. Barbara Scott, a famous writer, I’d read one of her books. I hadn’t heard she was dead. Other faces I didn’t know. And then the face of a senator from New Mexico and her husband, a woman who’d been mentioned as a replacement for the recently fallen vice president. I’d seen her multiple times on the news this week, but only when I was checking to see if I was on the news myself.
This was it. If this woman was named the new vice president…and then something happened to the president…
Shock twisted in my chest. Belias owned her. That had to be the explanation. But why start killing off the other members of the network, why rid himself of the powerful people he’d built and cultivated?
<
br /> “Sam!” Felix said. “Out here, now!”
I closed the envelope. No time to go through it all, although I wondered if I locked myself into the room how long it would take him to reach me. Annoyingly there was no weapon inside the safe. Or in the closet. I just had the envelope that he wanted, nice and fat.
I walked slowly back out into the den, one hand holding the envelope, the other pressed against my bloodied head. I’d borrowed one of Lazard’s shirts for a bandage. “I don’t feel well,” I said. The two men were glaring at each other—Lazard sick and raging about being backed into a corner and Felix desperate to get the information that I’d been here to collect.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” Felix said. “I’m not one who has anything personal against you. Give me the envelope.”
I said to Lazard, “I can’t believe you knew this about Belias.” And while looking at Lazard, I threw the package right at Felix’s face.
A weighted object, thick with paper, can do damage, thrown correctly. The envelope—heavy, worn—caught him right in the face. He staggered back, just a step, but by then I was launching myself on and over the patio table. I hammered my foot into Felix’s chest. He staggered back, and then Lazard threw himself at Felix, knocking him back. Lazard looked like a former linebacker and Felix looked like a thin tree, all wire and muscle. Lazard tried to wrench the gun out of Felix’s hands.
If I’d had sense, I would have run. If I was still CIA, I would have grabbed the package and run. And there would have been a Special Projects extraction team ready to pull me to safety, to a debriefing room with medical staff and bad coffee and quiet and a nice, warm feeling of safety before I went home and curled next to Lucy’s warmth. But all that was gone. And Felix had questions to answer for me.
I grabbed the package and I ran to the edge of the patio. Below was the smooth glass drop, the artificial canyon, down to the curving driveway. Forty-eight stories below. To the driveway that led up to the Mystik and the permanently green, desert-defying acreage below.
“I’ll throw it off,” I said.
They ignored me—so much for shock value—and fought over the gun. Fine. I timed it as they spun together, leveled a kick into Lazard’s head and he stumbled, dropping, blood welling from his mouth. He staggered away. Felix levered the gun back at me, and I slammed my hands into the barrel, knocking it to the left.
The gun fired.
Lazard didn’t scream. There wasn’t a mouth to scream with. He was shredded and the blast threw him over the edge, out into the blue, and I didn’t see him tumble and spin forty-eight stories down to the driveway below.
Because Felix wrenched the gun free and shoved me with it. He hesitated. Deciding whether or not to kill me.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t.”
He threw the gun at me—so therefore it was empty—and I caught it, and while I did that he drew a Glock from a holster under his shirt. “Sit down, Sam, or I’ll blow your brains out.”
I sat. “We have to get out of here; the police will be on their way.” The casino’s owner having plummeted from the roof? The casino security guards would be here in moments.
“Yes. They will. And you’re holding the shotgun that killed him. I suggest you tell them that you are CIA and get your old masters to hold your hand again. Maybe they’ll get you out.” He scooped up the package and stepped back. “You’re done following Belias and his network. They’re no longer your concern. I’ll take care of them from here.”
“Why?” I said. I had no idea why he had betrayed me, what his agenda was. “Why?”
Sorrow, I thought, twisted his face. “I’m letting you live, that’s enough. Call the CIA when you’re arrested. They’ll help you, I think.”
“Where is Mila?” I yelled.
“Back in San Francisco. She wasn’t going to risk being spotted by Belias since she’s supposed to be dead. She’s not your concern anymore.”
The elevator doors slid closed.
I ran, pressed the button again. The elevator continued its descent away from me. Randy was dead, a single bullet in his head. Someone had killed him exiting and I figured it was Belias.
Stairs. There had to be stairs. A fire escape. I found a door tucked in the back. Locked. Of course. Lazard had been keeping Janice a prisoner here; he wasn’t going to risk maintenance or anyone else coming up the stairs and surprising him during this meeting. And I had an awful feeling the keys were in a pocket forty-eight floors below me.
I hate feeling trapped.
I glanced over the edge of the patio. Small crowd gathering below, around the broken body of Lazard.
And on the side of the building to my left, moving, a circular sled type of contraption, blasting the windows with water.
An automated window washer. I’d noticed it on the way into the Mystik. The cables attaching it to the building were thirty feet to my left.
I could stay and explain the two dead men and the dead multimillionaire at the base of his casino, and then I’d be spending plenty of time in a Nevada jail and maybe Leonie would take off with my son forever and maybe the CIA wouldn’t come and help me after all, no matter what I said.
I ran through the penthouse. I found the cables for the automated washer gently banging against a window. I grabbed a heavy teak chair and smashed against the glass. It cracked. I hit it again. The chair shattered the window and sailed out into the void. I looked down, worried that I could have hit bystanders below. But this curve of the building looked out over the rest of the Mystik complex, so the chair and the glass plummeted onto the rooftop of the casino that extended out from the building.
I needed protection for my hands. I still clutched the shirt I’d taken from Lazard’s closet for my bloodied head.
And heard the elevator door chime. I figured Felix got out on a lower floor, and the return trip of the elevator was bringing—
“Security!” a voice bellowed.
No time to think. I could only pray that the automated washer’s cables could hold my weight. Surely they would have tensile strength to hold me? Right?
“Security! On the ground!”
I did not care to make new friends among the Mystik’s security staff. Maybe they were buds with Andy and Randy.
Holding the shirt across my palms, I jumped.
You can’t run parkour and be afraid of heights. However, my parkour runs usually only took me up a couple of stories. Not forty-eight. That is a gulf that chokes the human brain’s processing power and I forced my gaze to stay on the cable. I grabbed it, both hands, but the shirt made the grip feel slick.
The slide down the cables, I began to pick up speed. Too fast. I looked down and nearly folded in blind terror. I felt the muscles of my arm loosen in shock and fear. I reflexively closed my fists. Didn’t stop. The shirt’s fabric began to heat under my palms. I kicked against the glass, trying to slow my descent. It worked.
Twenty stories below me, the disc wobbled, spewing concentrated water and foam, the cables bouncing hard against the glass canyon side of the casino as I slid.
Ten more stories.
Below me shocked screams drifted upward.
I lost my grip, fumbling with the cloth beneath my fingers. I would hit the disc too fast, perhaps tearing it off its moorings or bouncing off it, past the cables, plummeting the remaining twenty stories. Terror filled my body, and I hugged at the remnants of the shirt, closing arms around one cable, kicking hard into the glass, anything to slow myself.
I hit the disc, not going as fast as I had been seconds ago…
And stopped. Water misted above me, beside me. The disc was slick and wet, soapy. Not what you wanted to hang on to twenty-something stories above the earth.
Upward I looked and saw faces peering at me from the shattered penthouse window. Someone had to be controlling the washer or could gain control of it, and they’d just lower me to the ground or hoist me to the roof and I’d be arrested. I seized the cables, I kicked against the glass. The disc reared back from
the building, slammed into the glass. Again. Again. The disc wasn’t heavy, but it still packed a punch as it slammed into the side of the Mystik. Water soaked me, cleanser hit and stung my eyes. Agony.
Suddenly the water shut off. Someone was going to reel me in.
I kicked again, and the disc careened back into the window. The glass shattered. Jagged, artery-slicing blades of glass remained mired in the frame. But there was a curtain, and I seized it and pulled myself into the room.
A floor beneath my feet. I’d never been so grateful.
A naked woman, sheets pulled up to her chin, was screaming into the housephone for security, and a naked man squatted on the bed between her and me, as though he thought I might impinge upon her virtue.
I scrambled to my feet and hit the hallway. Room numbers started with twenty-three so I knew which floor I was on. I was sopping wet in full clothes—that marked me instantly. Security would have seen which floor I entered and the woman would tell them the room.
I ran. For the stairs, looking for the FIRE EXIT sign.
An alarm began to sound. A woman’s voice piped onto the intercom. “Guests, attention, we are asking for everyone to evacuate the building.” Of course they were. There were bodies up in the penthouse, and the presumed gunman was still in the building and clearly crazy. I hit the stairs, and coming down from a floor above was a security guard, young, looking scared but intent. He stopped dead when he saw me, sopping, and he knew who I had to be.
Ten feet away from me he pulled the gun. I could hear more footsteps behind him.
“On your knees, now!” he yelled.
I charged him. Slammed the gun downward toward the steps, it spoke, concrete chipping around my knees. I threw an elbow into his throat and he sagged. I smacked his head against the metal railing just hard enough to stun, not to kill.
Another one coming fast after him. Older, salt-and-pepper in the hair, thick chested. I put one hand on the railing, the other on the wall, and he ran into my sudden kick. I slammed my foot back down against his face and cracked his head on the stair. He was unconscious but okay. I took his radio off him and put the receiver in my ear.
The security teams and now the Las Vegas police were swarming on the hotel. And onto the twenty-third floor. I ran up to twenty-five, past a few hurrying evacuees. I listened to security teams begin to head toward twenty-three. In the hallway a few guests were leaving their rooms and I hung back. Two business types, in khakis and polo shirts with the logo of a software company on it, were exiting a room. Both tapping at their smartphones, lost in their own world. I stepped behind them, stuck my foot in the room’s door before it could shut.
