by Donn Cortez
“What finally brought things together for me was the fire hose,” said Greg. “I’ll get to that in a minute. We start with the dirigible.” He hit a key and an object shaped like a short, fat cigar appeared over one of the buildings. “It was inflated on the roof of this building, next to the Panhandle. Someone in a third building—probably across the street and between the first two—controlled it remotely via radio. It crossed the distance between the two buildings without being noticed, probably at a greater height.”
The dirigible moved across the screen. “Once it got there, it came back down and started circling within sight of the north end of the penthouse. The sound system started to play prerecorded music, to make sure people noticed it.
“Back at the launch point, Fyodor Brish is preparing for his own launch. He gets inside the air cannon he’s set up, wearing only a pair of swimming trunks and holding the activator in one hand.
“Meanwhile, the dirigible—apparently piloted by a clown, who’s actually just an inflatable dummy—has gotten the attention of just about everyone at the party. To make absolutely sure everyone’s eyes are on it, the person controlling it activates an ignition device, which causes it to burst into flames.” The wire-frame dirigible was now outlined in glowing red and orange. “It contains a mix of hydrogen and helium, which makes it burn slower. It takes at least three full minutes to slowly spiral down and crash in the parking lot of the Panhandle.”
“And somewhere in those three minutes,” said Nick, “Mr. Brish blasts off.”
“Right,” said Greg. He hit a key. A small human figure arced from the top of one building to another. “Landing in the rooftop pool. This isn’t as improbable as it sounds; it’s well within the range of what human cannonballs do, and that includes water landings.”
Sara nodded. “So he makes splashdown, and loses the remote on impact. We find it later, at the bottom of the pool.”
“He doesn’t have time to look for it,” says Greg. “This whole thing is on a very tight schedule. At that very second, Alisa Golovina and her oversized, bandage-wrapped friend are pushing the intercom button for the private elevator that leads to the penthouse. Brish has to leap out of the pool and get to the doorman in time to vouch for his two accomplices.”
“And they have to get upstairs before the elevator shuts down,” said Nick.
“Exactly,” said Greg. “Because the second the dirigible hits the pavement, someone frees the trained bear. It charges into the casino, with two of its friends in tow. Now the pandemonium really starts. The fake security guard trips the fire alarm, sending the elevators into lockdown on the ground floor. The bear ignores the kitchen and heads straight for the elevator, where our fake security guard is waiting for it. The bear traps him—sorry, her—against the elevator door and pretends to menace her.”
“Security overrides the door, hoping to give the guard a place to escape to,” said Sara. “Door opens, guard jumps inside. Bear charges and wrestles with guard.”
“Who creates a very bloody, very effective illusion of being mauled,” said Greg. “Enough gore splashes around that it obscures the camera in the elevator—fake gore that’s been carefully mixed to do exactly that. The elevator door shuts.”
Nick tapped a pencil on the table. “Once that happens, the guard hits the down button. Elevator goes to the basement level, bear gets out and makes a circuit of the whole floor, making sure every single person stampedes outside via the fire exit. Phony guard gets up and adds a little more gore to the camera lens just to be sure.”
“Meanwhile, things are happening upstairs,” said Greg. “Brish, Golovina, and the wheelchair mummy ignore all of the people outside staring down at the burning wreckage and head straight for one of the back bedrooms. Once inside, they open the window and pull a bunch of equipment from a compartment under the seat of the wheelchair: pulleys mounted on clamps and a bunch of rope. They run the rope out the window, and Ms. Golovina kicks off her shoes and goes for a little stroll down the side of the building.
“When she reaches a particular hotel window—one that’s been tinkered with from the inside, letting it open—she goes in. Then she has to get from the hotel room to the part of the roof where the elevator machine room is, so they can break in—but that’s only two stories, straight up. I think a professional acrobat could handle that pretty easily with nothing more than a grappling hook and twenty feet of clothesline.”
“So far I’m with you,” said Nick. “Is this where the fire hose comes in?”
“It is. But if an object’s function defines its label, then it wasn’t a fire hose at all.”
Sara arched an eyebrow. “Are you saying a fire hose should more appropriately be called a water hose because of what it does? That seems like splitting hairs.”
“Not fire or water, actually. It was hooked up to an air compressor.”
A look of comprehension spread across Nick’s face. “The indents we found in the carpet.”
“Exactly. The hose was hooked up to that at one end, while the other was run back up to the roof.”
“For what purpose?” asked Sara.
“Because it was the easiest way to move these.” Greg held up one of the Panhandle’s casino chips. “Pneumatically. They literally piped them up to the roof from the hotel room. And all those chips clinking together in transit would have produced a tiny amount of wear and tear on each chip.”
“The fine powder we found in the hotel room,” said Sara. “Residue from all those chips knocking together.”
“That’s what I figure.” Greg hit a few more keys, and the simulation changed to show the top of the Panhandle, with the elevator machine room in the background. “So here’s where the pulleys come in. They attach them here to the pipe, here to the edge of the roof, and here to the top of the elevator shaft.”
“To lower the chips all the way down to the top of the elevator car parked in the basement?” said Nick. “Why not use the hose method again?”
“Two reasons,” said Greg. “First, possible damage to the chips—twenty stories is a long way to fall, even inside a cloth tube. Second, because twenty stories is also too far to push chips up.”
“Wait,” said Sara. “You’re saying this was all about a switch—that they stole real chips and replaced them with fakes?”
“Please,” said Greg, holding up one hand. “Refrain from making any conclusions until the end of the presentation.” He turned back to the screen. “Here’s where it gets interesting. The number of chips we’re talking about is the entire alternate set for the Panhandle, around two hundred thousand clay-composite disks, each one weighing eight point five grams. That works out to roughly thirty-eight thousand pounds’ worth of casino currency—and that’s where our friend the strongman comes in.”
“He’s a strongman, not a superman,” said Nick.
“True, but let’s not forget the pulleys. If they were rigged at a three-to-one ratio, that drops the weight to around twelve hundred fifty. Or to put it another way, he has to haul a little more than three hundred pounds up twenty stories, four times. Believe it or not, that’s doable.”
“Wow,” said Sara. “Really?”
Greg shrugged. “I did some research on strongman competitions. There’s no event that correlates exactly, but there is something called the loading race, where competitors have to haul weights of up to three hundred sixty pounds over a distance of fifty feet, five times in a row. That works out to moving eighteen hundred pounds a distance of two hundred and fifty feet. Anyone who can do that could probably move twelve-fifty a distance of two hundred feet.”
“Except one’s vertical and the other’s horizontal,” Sara pointed out.
“True,” Greg admitted. “But you have to admit it’s in the realm of possibility.”
“Let’s say it is,” said Nick. “They lower the fake chips down and haul the real chips up, using the strongman in the penthouse bedroom as their engine. Then what?”
“Then they transfer the r
eal chips to the hotel room by simply reversing the air flow. The pulleys and rope are moved to the hotel room and removed later, but not the wheelchair—it gets left in the penthouse bedroom. Once she’s finished transferring the chips, the ersatz security guard scales the maintenance ladder in the elevator shaft, changes her clothes, and climbs down through the hotel-room window.”
“I think I know who that guard might be,” said Nick. “Nadya Karnova has the right height, build, and expertise, and whoever was pretending to be mauled by that bear had to be an expert. Not a lot of female bear experts on our suspect list.”
“How about the remote pilot for the dirigible drone?” asked Sara. “You run into any possibilities?”
“Maybe,” said Nick. “The pyro guy who showed me around was helpful after I applied a little pressure, but I got the feeling he wasn’t telling me the whole truth. And from what I saw, building and flying a craft that like that are well within his capabilities. Too bad we can’t prove it.”
“I guess all of it’s possible,” admitted Sara. “But there’s only one way to know for sure.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” said Greg.
25
“OKAY,” SAID GREG. He, Nick, and Sara stood on top of the simulated rooftop in the parking lot that they’d used earlier. “We’ve got an electric winch standing in for Mr. Muscles, a cargo net full of sandbags that weigh approximately a quarter of what the entire alternate chip set does, and a set of pulleys rigged at a three-to-one ratio. Instead of lifting the whole load up twenty stories, we’re going to lift it two. Multiply our results by ten, and we should get accurate data.”
“I’ll work the winch,” said Sara. “We’ll have to run it in short, slow bursts, to simulate someone hauling on a rope by hand.”
“I’m on the stopwatch,” said Nick.
Greg nodded. “Then I guess the only thing left for me to do,” he said, “is say. . . go!”
* * *
“Well,” said Sara, taking a long drink from her water bottle before sinking into a seat at the conference table, “now we know.”
Nick, already seated, put his hands behind his head. “Yeah. Too bad it’s not the answer we were hoping for.”
Greg tore open the granola bar he’d just bought from the vending machine. “Technically, the test was a success. We proved that it was possible to haul that much mass up that distance using that particular configuration of equipment.”
Sara sighed. “That was never in question, Greg. We were using mechanical horsepower, so it was simple physics. Whether or not a human being could do the same thing is still up for debate—but one thing isn’t.”
“How long it would take them to do it,” said Nick. “Using a three-to-one ratio on the pulley system triples lifting power, but it also triples the time it takes to do the job. Even if our strongman could haul that much weight up twenty stories, there’s no way he could do it in the time frame we’ve established. It’s just not possible.”
Greg nodded. “Yeah, yeah, okay. Agreed. It doesn’t work.”
“It’s not the only thing that doesn’t work,” said Sara. “We also tested the alternate set every way we could think of. They weren’t fakes.”
“True,” Greg admitted. “I don’t know how to explain that one, either.”
Nick crossed his arms. “And what about the DNA on the bandages? If we believe that, then the guy wrapped up wasn’t the strongman at all—and without him, the whole thing falls apart.”
“I realize that,” said Greg. “For a while I thought maybe they used their own electric winch in the hotel room, but there were no tool marks on the window frame where they would have had to attach a clamp and pulley. I also don’t know exactly what happened to the strongman afterward, unless he climbed down the rope and left through the hotel room—I mean, nobody saw him leave the party at all. And if that was the case, why arrive wrapped up like a mummy? Why not just climb up the rope from the hotel window once Golovina put things in place?”
“Maybe he didn’t fit,” said Sara. “He’s an awfully big guy.”
“In that case,” said Nick, “what happened to him? He didn’t just evaporate.”
“Maybe he did,” said Greg. “After all, isn’t that what spooks do?”
Greg told them about the hit he’d gotten on the government database. “So just to make things even more confusing, our circus strongman might be some kind of secret agent,” said Greg. “Or maybe just a government informer. I haven’t been able to find out anything else.”
Sara groaned. “This is like trying to hike through quicksand. Every step we take just gets us in deeper. I say we break for lunch.”
“Seconded,” said Nick. “Let’s regroup afterward—maybe some protein will recharge our brains as well as our stomachs.”
* * *
Greg was about to bite into his cheeseburger when the man in the dark green suit took a seat opposite him in the diner’s booth.
Greg paused. “Uh, hello?”
The man was in his fifties, powerfully built, with a shelf of white hair around a wide, flattened head. “Mr. Sanders,” he said. He pulled a wallet out of his breast pocket and flipped it open. “Your government would like a word with you.”
Greg put down his burger.
The man grinned. “Oh, don’t look so worried. I’m not even an active agent anymore—I’m retired, live in Henderson. Name’s Chet Caldwell. I’m here as a favor.”
Greg swallowed. “To whom?”
“The local office. They couldn’t be bothered to actually assign someone to check this out, so I volunteered. Seeing how I was in the neighborhood and all.”
“I thought you were retired.”
Caldwell chuckled. “I like to keep my finger on the pulse of things. You know how it is.”
Greg had no idea how it was, but he didn’t think asking would be a good idea. “How can I help you, Mr. Caldwell?”
“Chet, please. You can tell me about the DNA sample you ran that turned up a hit on a classified database.”
“Oh, that.”
“Yeah. That.”
Greg hesitated. “How about a little quid pro quo?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Anything that would help me make sense of this case. Look, I know you’re not able to divulge anything classified, and I’m not asking you to. Tell you what; I’ll tell you everything I know about my investigation, and you can think it over and decide if there’s anything—a hint, a direction—that you can share with me. How’s that?”
“Keep talking.”
Greg did. He told Caldwell about the flaming dirigible, the bear attack, the involvement of the Red Star Circus and the Red Mafiya. Lastly, he told him about the bandages that had apparently swathed a Russian strongman—only the skin cells left behind had instead pointed at a mysterious individual in a government database.
Caldwell listened carefully, interrupting only to ask Greg to clarify a point or provide more information. A waitress came by halfway through, and Caldwell ordered an iced tea. Greg’s burger grew cold on his plate.
When Greg was finished, Caldwell took a long sip of his iced tea and stared out the window. “Huh,” he said.
“So. . . can you tell me anything? Anything at all?”
Caldwell scratched his chin. “I think I can. Hell, it’s all ancient history at this point—part of why I’m the one talking to you instead of two guys with earpieces and matching sunglasses. I’m pretty much ancient history myself.”
Caldwell leaned back in his seat and put one arm over the back of the booth. “How much do you know about the Cold War?”
“About as much as most people, I guess. Imminent threat of nuclear destruction, the Berlin Wall, James Bond movies.”
Caldwell snorted. “James Bond. Forget all that crap. The Cold War wasn’t about cars that drove underwater, beautiful women with kinky names, or wristwatches that shot heat-seeking missiles. It was mostly a game of hide-and-seek. The better you were at hiding
, the more you could seek. And what you were seeking was the cold, hard currency of the Cold War: information. Which, just like any currency—cash, gold, gems—grew in value as it grew in rarity.
“Some places generated secrets the way a mint generates money. Washington, Langley, Quantico. . . and here.”
“Vegas?”
“Nevada. Atomic testing, Air Force bases developing experimental aircraft, even the Hoover Dam—all of them had files with “Top Secret” stamped all over them. Secrets the Soviets wanted and did their best to get.”
“Wow. I mean, that all makes sense—I just never thought of Vegas as being a hotbed of international espionage.”
“That’s exactly what it was.” Caldwell picked up his glass and gestured with it. “A hotbed. Especially in the sixties—Vegas was already a party town, but once you added in free love, plenty of drugs, and radical politics? This place was ripe.”
Greg frowned. “Ripe for what, exactly? Were the Russians planning on starting the revolution here? ’Cause no matter how many hippies rolled through town, this place has always been about capitalism.”
Caldwell grinned. “That it has. No, that wasn’t it. See, there was one element of all those cheesy spy movies that was actually accurate: the seduction. Yes, there are actually agents of foreign powers who use sex to get close to people and learn things they shouldn’t. But sex is just the start—the real lever in cases like that is blackmail. Get someone loaded or naked or fervent, get them to shoot their mouth off, and get it on tape. Or maybe offer a nice big chunk of cash to someone who likes the craps table a little too much. Then, once you’ve got your hooks into someone—maybe a clerk at Nellis Air Force Base, maybe an engineer at the Hoover—you start to ask them for favors. Believe me, that scenario was played out more than once in this town.”
“Wait a minute. Are you saying that our suspect—”
Caldwell interrupted, talking as if Greg hadn’t said a thing. “Of course, we were aware of the situation. We had our own people in play, our own strategies to counter theirs. It was more like a poker game than chess, though—plenty of bluffing, lots of raising the stakes. And then, eventually, one side folded. The wall came down, and the Soviet Union fell with it.”