by Lee Goldberg
Magar stopped at the door, put a gloved hand on the wall to steady himself, and, raising one foot at a time, used the edge of the brick planter box full of fake flowers on either side of the entrance to scrape the shit off the bottom of his running shoes. He’d need a hose to get the stuff out of the treads.
Satisfied that at least most of it was off, he went inside, crossed the courtyard to the stairs, and quietly went up to Margo’s apartment door. He looked around to make sure nobody was watching from their windows, removed a lock pick from his coat pocket, and opened her door in about two seconds. It wasn’t exactly a high-security building. He took one more look around, wiped his feet on her welcome mat, and slipped inside her apartment, closed the door gently behind him, and locked the dead bolt.
Magar positioned himself beside the door so he could break Margo’s neck as soon as she came in, drag her body into the bathroom, strip her naked, put her corpse in the bathtub, and start the shower.
The apartment smelled of fried eggs and coffee and it made his stomach growl. He decided he’d stop at the Bagel Nosh on Wilshire for breakfast after the killing. A jalapeño cheese bagel, a couple of eggs, and a hot cup of coffee would be a nice way to finish off the morning and his career as a field agent. He was heading straight back to Moscow today and, he was certain, to a desk job some place where a jalapeño cheese bagel would be impossible to find. He was going to savor every last bite.
CHAPTER FORTY
Ian Ludlow’s House. Malibu, California. November 14. 6:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.
Ian slipped out of bed, careful not to wake up Mei, who lay naked on her back, snoring away. He put on his bathrobe and trudged to his office, nodded good morning to the skeleton in the corner, then sat down at his desk, powered up his computer, and checked out the news on CNN.
He learned that, during the night, Vibora cartel assassins crossed the border and attacked Eli Tanner’s ranch, killing over two dozen members of his militia. Now the president of the United States, outraged by the attack, was on his way to Dunn, Texas, to meet with the grief-stricken families of the victims.
Ian switched to the Fox News site and pulled up a video clip of Dwight Edney, reporting from Los Angeles, with images of the coroner’s wagons and sheriff’s department vehicles at the Tanner ranch as his backdrop.
“Jim-Bob Sanderson was the only survivor of last night’s massacre. He joins us now from his hospital bed in Houston to tell us about the horror he witnessed and the atrocities that he endured.” Edney turned to face the big screen behind him, which showed a man bandaged like a mummy, with only his eyes and mouth visible. “How many assassins were there, Mr. Sanderson?”
“It was too dark for me to count,” Jim-Bob said. “But if I had to guess, I’d say fifty or sixty. Some of them was naked, like Navajo Indians, covered in the blood of the men they’d already killed.”
It was too dark for him to count the men, Ian thought, yet not too dark to see they were covered with blood. How did that work? It was a contradiction in his story that he knew Edney would let slide.
“Where were you when they attacked?”
“I was on foot patrol around the perimeter of the Tanner family home and the bunkhouse area,” Jim-Bob said. “When the Jeeps sped in, I thought it was our guys, coming back in to change shifts, but it was the Viboras, using the vehicles they took from the men they’d killed out on the spread. The Viboras started lobbing grenades everywhere and shooting anybody that came out of the buildings.”
“What did you do?”
“I started shooting at them, of course,” Jim-Bob said. “I must’ve killed half a dozen of them before I ran out of ammo and they wrestled me down, still swinging, gouging, scratching, biting, and clawing. Whatever I could do.”
“You weren’t going down without a fight,” Edney said.
“I’ve got rattlesnake blood in my veins.”
Ian had no idea what that meant.
But Edney nodded, so apparently he understood. “Then what happened?”
“They stripped me stark naked and dragged me in front of their leader, the Golden Devil.”
“You’re referring to the Viboras’ top assassin,” Edney said, “a man with gold-capped teeth, each one symbolizing a family that he’s slaughtered and a mother that he’s raped.”
The mention of a killer with gold teeth made Ian think of Jaws, the towering killer with metal teeth in The Spy Who Loved Me. Perhaps the movie was closer to reality than he’d ever imagined. The thought tickled something in the back of his mind.
“Yeah, it was him, covered in the blood,” Jim-Bob said. “He told me he was letting me live to deliver a message.”
“What was that message?”
“He said this is what will happen to anyone who stands in our way. Your border means nothing to us. We’ll take Texas the same way we took Mexico.”
“Chilling,” Edney said. “What happened next?”
“He ordered his men to throw me on a cactus.”
“They crucified you,” Edney said. “On a natural cross.”
That was a stretch even for Edney, Ian thought. But he had to admire the audacity of reaching for a Christ metaphor.
“That’s right,” Jim-Bob said. “Then they gathered up their dead and went back into Mexico, leaving me there to bleed.”
Edney grimaced, feeling Jim-Bob’s pain. “You, sir, are a hero and a patriot. On behalf of a grateful country, I thank you for your bravery and your sacrifice.”
“Just doing my duty,” Jim-Bob said and saluted, though Ian wasn’t sure why. Perhaps he was saluting the American flag that was entwined graphically in the show’s logo, which took Jim-Bob’s place on-screen as the set’s backdrop.
Edney turned to the camera. “This was an act of war, the massacre of innocent civilians on American soil by the armed soldiers from the drug cartel that controls Mexico, a terrorist state on our open southern border. How many more American men, women, and children have to be slaughtered before we retaliate? How long can the United States of America allow these craven assaults on its citizens, its sovereignty, and basic human decency?”
Ian clicked off the video. The attack on the Tanner ranch, and Edney’s colorful rhetoric, didn’t surprise him. They both felt like natural escalations in the story, raising the stakes, increasing the pressure, and advancing the plot.
But what was the plot?
He glanced at the James Bond movie posters on his wall as he often did while thinking about a story. One of the posters was for You Only Live Twice and depicted a tuxedo-clad Sean Connery in his stocking feet using only his big toes to clutch a rafter and dangle upside down above Blofeld’s secret base in a volcano as it explodes. He felt that mental tickle again, as he had earlier when he’d thought about Jaws. What was his subconscious trying to tell him?
Before he could give the tickle, or the questions about the Vibora attack, any consideration, there were multiple electronic beeps and several windows opened up simultaneously on his computer screen, displaying the video feeds from his security cameras around the property.
A landscaping crew, wearing wide-brimmed hats and covering their faces with scarves to protect them from the dust, were clearing brush with Weedwackers on his neighbor’s hillside behind his house and were working their way down toward his fence.
Ian thought it was odd. November wasn’t usually the time of year for brush clearance and it was also very early in the morning to be starting such noisy work. On the other hand, this was basically the countryside, homes were far apart, and noise wasn’t usually an issue.
His computer dinged again and several video windows opened up with live feeds from his front-yard security cameras. A landscaping truck with a tarp over its bed pulled up across the road from his house. A black-haired white woman and two men got out of the truck. This drew his attention simply because he couldn’t remember ever seeing a woman on a brush clearance crew before. He used his mouse to zoom in on her as she and the two men walked back to the truck bed and pulled so
mething out from under the tarp.
All three of them were holding AK-47s.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Oh shit!
Ian quickly pulled back the zoom, as if that would put some actual distance between him and the shooters.
He grabbed for his desk phone, brought the receiver to his ear, and dialed 911.
And that was when the dial tone went silent and electrical power went out in his house.
His computer screen flickered for an instant before the backup batteries kicked in. He’d installed the batteries to give him an extra few minutes to save his work in case of a power outage.
On-screen, he could see that the landscapers on the hill behind his house had put down their Weedwackers and were now carrying drip torches, the kind firefighters used to create backfires.
His bladder suddenly felt like it was going to burst as he realized what was happening.
They’re going to burn down my house.
With me in it.
His landline was dead so he grabbed his cell phone off the desk but there were no signal bars on the screen. Either the hit team outside had a signal scrambler or he was simply the unlucky victim of the lousy cell coverage in the Santa Monica Mountains. Either way, he was screwed.
He glanced at the feed from the cameras in front of his house. The woman aimed her AK-47 at his door while the two men with her took positions around the portions of the house that didn’t back up to the flaming hillside.
And in that instant, he saw the newspaper story that would be written about what was unfolding:
Landscapers clearing brush with gasoline-powered Weedwackers accidentally sparked a raging wildfire that spread rapidly through the parched Santa Monica Mountains and took the home of Ian Ludlow, who perished in the blaze along with a houseguest, reportedly Wang Mei, the actress he helped flee from China.
These people were here to kill them . . . and he knew with absolute certainty that if he and Mei tried to leave the house to escape the flames, they would be gunned down.
He really, really wanted to pee.
But what he did instead was dash to the bedroom and yank Mei out of bed.
“Get up!” he yelled. “Hurry!”
Half-awake, naked, and irritated, she swore at him in Chinese.
He ignored her tirade, grabbed her bathrobe off the floor, wrapped it around her, and tightly clutching her arm, practically dragged her to the courtyard outside, which was hidden from view on the hill by the smoke and several large oak trees that had survived the explosion that had burned down his house before.
Fucking assassins, Ian thought. Why do they all hate my house?
“I’m freezing. What’s wrong?” she said. “Why are we outside?”
“There’s an armed hit team surrounding the house and they are setting it on fire,” he said. “They will shoot us if we try to leave.”
He felt silly actually saying “hit team” in conversation, but that was what it was, and they didn’t have much time. They were minutes away from being burned alive and he urgently had to piss. They had to get moving.
“They’ve come for me,” she said, wide awake and frightened now. “I knew they would. How are we going to escape?”
“We aren’t,” he said.
Ian led her to a large boulder in the center of a flower bed and, to Mei’s astonishment, lifted it up with one hand. The boulder was fake, an elaborate hatch on hydraulic hinges, and as she stepped closer, she saw that opening it had activated lights that illuminated a metal staircase that led twenty feet underground.
“What is this?” Mei asked.
“A survival bunker,” Ian said. “Ronnie Mancuso has one just like it at his ‘end of days’ property in the Nevada desert and another at his home in Tarzana. That’s how I got the idea to get one of my own.”
It wasn’t on any blueprints or construction permits for his house. He’d had an out-of-state crew of professional survivalists, recommended by Ronnie, build it for him and he’d kept its existence a secret.
“Will we be safe from the fire?” Mei asked, glancing at the embers that were now showering the back of the house.
“The bunker is made of high-gauge steel and is encased in concrete. It’s built to withstand explosives, nuclear winter, chemical attack, and biological warfare. A wildfire is nothing.”
At least he hoped so. He’d never had an opportunity to put the claims to the test. But she took him at his word and hurried down the stairs, not that she had much of a choice.
He followed after her, closing and securing the boulder hatch behind them, and then met her at the blast door, which resembled a bank vault and had a large wheel in the center.
Ian typed his code into the keypad on the wall. “This is an airtight, military-grade blast door.”
The bolt retracted inside the door with a loud clank. Ian turned the wheel, pulled the heavy door open, and reached inside to flick on the lights. He waved her inside.
“Make yourself at home,” he said.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Wang Mei stepped past Ian into the survival shelter. The interior was tube shaped, like the inside of a submarine, but furnished like a suite at the Four Seasons. The living room had travertine floors, Persian rugs, and overstuffed leather-upholstered furniture that faced a flat-screen television mounted on the corrugated metal wall. The open-concept kitchen had oak cabinets, high-end appliances, and quartzite countertops.
“You are full of surprises,” Mei said.
Ian pulled the blast door shut, locked it, and then gestured with a nod to the far end of the kitchen, where another airtight door with a hatch wheel was standing open. “Back there are two bedrooms, a full bath, a library of books and DVDs, and a storage room with enough food, water, and other supplies to last us a decade.”
The mention of the bathroom, and the water, reminded him how badly he had to piss. He hurried past her to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. For a moment, as he emptied his bladder into the porcelain dry-flush toilet, he felt both relief and peace, but the experience was short-lived.
Mei let out a short, startled scream and he knew why. He cinched his bathrobe and went to the master bedroom, where he found her standing at the foot of the queen-size bed, looking at a woman in lingerie who was sitting up against the headboard with a permanently coy smile on her silicone face and a naughty sparkle in her glass eyes.
“I’m sorry for screaming,” Mei said and tentatively poked the woman’s silicone leg. “She took me by surprise. Is she . . . a sex doll?”
Ian felt his face flush with embarrassment. “She was a bunker-warming gift from Ronnie.”
She examined the doll’s face. “She’s so lifelike.”
What Ian didn’t tell her was that she was also an exact replica of actress Denise Richards, as she was in 1997, when she starred in Wild Things and was the object of all of Ian’s teen masturbation fantasies, a fact he’d admitted to Ronnie years ago in a moment of drunken honesty. Even now in adulthood, with killers outside, a fire consuming his house, and his flesh-and-blood lover standing beside him, looking at silicone Denise still gave Ian a twinge of desire.
“Do you think I’m a pervert?” Ian said.
Mei shrugged. “Have you tried her?”
“Of course not,” Ian said. “She’s a last resort, in case I’m stuck down here alone for months or years.”
“Is there a doll here for me?”
“What for?” Ian said. “I’m here for you.”
“I was just teasing.” Mei smiled and hugged him. “Thank you for saving my life again. I’m sorry I keep putting you in danger.”
He stroked her hair and thought about what Ronnie had told him about Mei being watched, and about the assassination he’d discovered yesterday in Porto.
“I owe you the apology this time,” Ian said.
“Why?”
“I’m pretty sure that I’m the one they wanted to kill.”
She stepped back and looked at him. “Don’t be r
idiculous. You’re a novelist. Why would anybody want to kill you?”
“I read an article about an American couple who died taking a selfie in Portugal. I thought learning what happened to them could inspire a Straker story. That’s why Margo and I went there. But we discovered the accident was actually a murder. I think the killers found out somehow that we stumbled on to them.”
And then Ian had another thought that made him want to pee again, even though his bladder was empty.
Margo was a target, too. And he had no way to warn her.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Margo French’s Apartment. West Los Angeles, California. November 14. 7:13 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.
Margo felt nice and loose when she got back to her building after her run. She unzipped her waist pack to get out her house keys when she smelled shit. Had she stepped in something?
She lifted her right foot to examine her shoe for dog crap and saw nothing in her treads. But she saw bits of wet poop on her welcome mat.
The poop hadn’t been there when she’d left her apartment. She looked back now and saw bits of crap leading from the staircase right to her door.
There was somebody in her apartment.
Was it a burglar? A rapist? A serial killer?
Whoever it was, he could be waiting by the door right now to attack her as she came in. The possibility didn’t frighten her.
It excited her.
Margo knew the smart thing to do would be to just walk away, hide somewhere, and catch the assailant when he left the building.
But that was no fun.
She took out her keys, unlocked the door, and began to push it open. But before she opened it all the way, she intentionally dropped her keys, which made a loud clatter as they hit the ground.
“Shit,” she muttered for the benefit of whoever was waiting inside.
She bent down, as if to pick up the keys, but instead slipped a tiny can of pepper spray from her waist pack into the palm of her hand.
Margo hit the door low and hard, crashing it open, and dove into the room, rolled across the room, and came up in a shooting position in the galley kitchen, facing the door, where a man stood, startled by her unexpected action.
