The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller

by Karen Robards

  So he was either a total sociopath, or her origins and/or the contract on her life had no bearing on his presence in Macau.

  He said, “You know I know you’re lying, right?”

  Her brows twitched together. “Are you going to help get this monster off me or not?”

  “Sure.” His eyes twinkled at her. “Just as soon as we’ve finished our chat. This is better than having you in handcuffs, or a jail cell. My guess is that you could escape from either of those. This, not so much.”

  “I’m suffocating here.”

  “I’m betting you can hold out a little longer.” His face changed, grew serious. “Thayer’s here in the casino, isn’t he? If he is, if he’s anywhere in Macau, we’re going to catch him. This is your chance to make a deal before we do. Tell me where I can find him, give me a statement detailing what you know about the things he’s done, and you walk. Absolutely free. With immunity. No charges brought. Trust me, it doesn’t get any better than that.”

  So he hadn’t recognized Mason as the old guy sitting next to her. Well, she’d barely recognized him herself, and she’d known him all her life.

  “You know what you can do with your offer, right?”

  His lips tightened. “If you refuse, the flip side is I have you arrested and you spend the next couple of decades in some shitty jail. Believe me, Thayer wouldn’t turn down a deal like that for you.”

  “Well, gee, now that you put it that way...” She let her voice trail off tantalizingly. Then she added, “The answer’s still no.”

  His lips tightened even more. If she’d thought his mouth could look cruel, now she was sure of it.

  “To earn that kind of loyalty, he’s got to be more to you than a boss. What, is he your lover or something? Because you should know those May-December things almost never work out.”

  “Bite me.”

  He bent to pick up something from the floor. When he straightened she saw to her horror that he had her purse in his hands. It had fallen to the floor beside her when she’d landed.

  “That’s private. Put that down,” she snapped. Too late: he was already unzipping it. “I have personal things in there!”

  “I’m counting on it.” As he rifled through the contents, she got a glimpse of her Ann wig, the clothes she’d worn earlier and her small makeup kit, which he unzipped and looked inside. Then he came up with her passport. Or, rather Kangana’s passport. He flipped it open. “Kangana Bhatt, huh?” He looked at her skeptically and said, “Just so you know, your wig’s crooked, Kangana.”

  Then he shoved the passport back in her purse and continued rummaging.

  Any minute now he would find the secret panel beneath the lining that concealed her other IDs.

  She said, “Look, anybody could come out of those offices back there. Anybody could come in from the casino. These two goons could wake up. I’d really rather not be here when that happens. If what you want is to talk, could we please do it someplace else?”

  “Think I don’t know that the minute I let you up you’re going to try to take me out and run away?” He fished the cigarette lighter Mason had given her out of her purse and looked at it. Bianca held her breath, but he dropped it back in her purse without seeming to notice anything amiss.

  “You can’t keep me trapped here forever.” Even to her own ears she sounded cross. “Did I mention that Paulo here weighs a ton and I’m having trouble breathing?”

  “I can keep you here—or somewhere—as long as I need to. You don’t seem to have grasped it yet, but I currently have you in custody. All I have to do is make one phone call, and it gets official. The people I have searching the casino for Thayer will show up here and put you in handcuffs and leg shackles or a straitjacket or whatever it takes to keep the lid on. Then you’ll be loaded on a private plane to be flown to an interrogation site, where, believe me, you won’t be able to escape. Once all that starts to happen, by the way, the deal I offered you is off the table. Right here, right now, is your one chance.”

  As he spoke, he felt the outside of her purse, ran his hands over the bottom and the straps, plucked at the clasp, while she watched with bated breath. Well, the thing was supposed to be pat-down proof. Hello, extreme field test.

  Time to change tactics. Stop being so in your face. Make him think he had a chance of persuading her to turn on Mason. All she had to do was persuade him to help her get out from under Shamu. Then they’d have a whole different conversation.

  “Say I decide to accept your deal. What then?”

  “First you have to convince me you mean it. You can start by telling me where Thayer is. If your information checks out, we’re good to go.”

  “How do I know you’ll keep your promise about giving me immunity?”

  “You have my word.”

  Batting her eyes at him was probably too much, she decided. Especially since she was flat on her back with the human equivalent of a Mack truck parked on top of her. Instead she gave him her best, big-eyed, Bambi-who’d-just-lost-his-mother look and said, “I want to trust you.”

  “You can. As long as you’re straight with me. Let’s start with, where’s Thayer?”

  She closed her eyes. Her lips trembled briefly. Then she firmed her lips, opened her eyes, and, with the air of one who’s just come to a momentous decision, said, “He’s supposed to meet me at the blackjack tables in the casino. He hadn’t shown up yet when I saw you. He should be out there looking for me as we speak.”

  Her hope was that he would decide to haul her to her feet and march her out to the casino floor to lure and/or identify Mason.

  Crossing his arms over his chest, he studied her face. Her purse, thank God, now dangled unmolested from his wrist.

  “Try again, beautiful. Think I don’t know when I’m being played?”

  “I am not playing you. You say you want me to trust you. How about you try trusting me?” Angry, frustrated, she gave Paulo another abortive shove. His shoulder rose, fell. Then to her alarm he snorted and moved a little.

  “He’s waking up,” she ground out. “For God’s sake, get him off me.”

  Mickey grimaced and leaned over Paulo. Bianca thought—thank you, God!—that he was finally going to help heave him off her and got her hands in position to push one more time.

  Then a big, blurry streak of gold sliced down through the air toward Mickey’s head. Before Bianca could do anything more than watch its lightning-fast descent in wide-eyed surprise, it slammed into the back of his skull with a resounding thunk.

  Mickey dropped without a sound.

  19

  “Oh, Jesus, is he dead?” Bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet with agitation, Doc looked at Mickey’s crumpled figure. He held the gilded, baseball-bat-sized statue of—was it Bacchus? Yes, she thought it was—that he’d used to fell Mickey by its neck. Bianca recognized it from one of the niches in the hallway. “I can’t believe I just killed a cop. Do they have the death penalty in Macau?”

  “No, and he’s not dead,” Bianca said. She was almost sure, but no need to share that niggle of doubt with Doc. Paulo groaned and stirred again, distracting her. “Quick, hit this one. Not too hard.”

  That last she added as a squeaked-out rider as Doc, muttering, “Oh shit oh shit oh shit,” his face screwed up with terrible resolve, arced the statue over his head like Lizzie Borden with her ax with the clear intention of bringing it down on Paulo’s skull with all his might.

  Despite her warning, it still landed with a solid thud. Paulo went as limp as a corpse.

  Okay, not a good comparison. Fortunately, it took only a moment to ascertain that he was still breathing: she could feel the rise and fall of his chest.

  “Oh shit,” Doc said. “Oh shit oh shit.”

  “Help get him off me. Quick,” she said.

  Doc set the statue down and complied. Working together, t
he two of them managed to shift Paulo enough so that Bianca could roll out from under him.

  “Thank God.” She staggered to her feet. She felt dizzy and achy and limp from her ordeal, worried (she hated to admit it) about Mickey, even more worried about her and Doc’s prospects for escape.

  “He’s, like, a Colossus.” Doc stared down at Paulo while Bianca yanked her purse from Mickey’s limp arm. Then, unable to help herself, she did a fast check of Mickey’s pulse. His skin felt warm beneath her fingers. She could feel a reassuringly steady beat beneath. His tall body sprawled beside Paulo’s on the marble. He was slack-faced and pale. The good news was, she didn’t see any blood.

  Of course, Doc had clobbered him in the back of the head, and his hair was thick and black, so in the absence of a scarlet fountain there was really no way to tell.

  Think good thoughts.

  “It was the only thing I could think of to do.” Doc had to be in some kind of mild shock. He was sweating buckets, as white as paper, babbling. Not a surprise: she’d already figured out that violence wasn’t in his nature.

  “You did good. Are you kidding? You saved me.” Mickey and Paulo were out for the count, no question about it. But she gave Right Arm Guy a second chop in the G-spot just to be sure.

  “I saw these two yo-yos drag you back here. Then what happened?” Doc’s teeth were chattering. His hat had fallen off during his assault. Bianca spotted it, grabbed it and handed it to him.

  “Tell you later. Come on.”

  She grabbed the statue he’d set down. No point in leaving what amounted to a smoking gun behind. On the way back down the hall, she gave Bacchus a hasty wipe down and restored him to his temporarily empty niche. She knew for sure that Mickey had never seen what, or who, had felled him. With luck, no one would ever think to check the statues in the hall for any kind of forensic evidence. It was the best she could do. The statue was too big, and too noticeable, to carry with them.

  The only way out that she knew of was the door she’d been dragged in through. The cameras were a problem, but a glance at them told her that the images were not stored in the cameras themselves, which meant that they were being kept in some remote site that she didn’t have time to search for. Mickey, for one, already knew what she looked like, but for Doc’s sake she would have taken a minute to destroy the cameras if it would have made a difference.

  At least Doc was once again wearing his hat. With luck, that might shield his face.

  “Keep your head down and walk to the east entrance. You go first. I’ll be close behind you. In case we get separated, we’re heading for the top of the parking garage next door.”

  He rolled his eyes in her direction. Beneath the pulled-low brim of his hat, she could see the whites. “You got a plan? Please tell me you got a plan.”

  “Always,” she said.

  He nodded, and then he was out the door.

  Bianca spent a second contemplating reversing her dress—SiuSiu’s designs were always reversible—or changing back to Ann again. But the cameras had already recorded her going in, and they had recorded Doc going in and out. If she changed clothes, she would simply give whoever was monitoring the cameras a look at her new identity. Remembering Mickey’s crack about her wig, she gave it a tug, redraped the scarf around her head and walked out onto the casino floor.

  Ten minutes later, she and Doc emerged onto the fifteenth-floor roof of the adjacent parking garage. The roof was essentially a helipad, and just as Mason had said, a small white and silver helicopter, its rotor stilled, waited at the far end. It was nearly 1:00 a.m. No moon, no stars. The heavy black blanket of clouds was so close that she felt like she could almost reach up and touch it. The stiff wind blowing in off the water was cool and heavy with the promise of rain. It ruffled her wig, caught the ends of her scarf, the edge of her dress. As she looked around, then rushed to check the helicopter—only the pilot, with whom she exchanged a few brief words, was aboard—she was thankful for her long sleeves. Dim halogen lights on tall metal poles were set into the waist-high concrete wall that formed the edge. Supplementing their frosty glow, the strobescent neon of the Cotai Strip painted the rooftop with a kaleidoscope of ever-changing pattern and color. The color of the moment was blue, and even as she looked around more carefully, probing the corners and the shadows at the base of the light poles and the freestanding generator, the hue changed to red.

  “So where is he?” Doc was still bent over, hands on his thighs, gasping from the rushed climb up fourteen flights of stairs it had required to reach the roof, when she rejoined him. He’d accepted the explanation for taking the stairs that she’d tossed over her shoulder—elevators are death traps—without argument, but that hadn’t made getting up to the roof any easier on him. On the way, she’d given him the abbreviated version of what he’d missed, ending with the fact that Mason had a helicopter waiting on the roof to whisk them all away.

  “Don’t know,” Bianca said. Mason should have been there. He’d had ample time, way more than they’d had, to make it. The pilot, who spoke only Mandarin, had seen no one, he’d told her in response to her question. Was she ready to go? he’d asked. No, she’d replied in the same language, and turned away. Not until Mason came.

  Something, clearly, had gone wrong. Her pulse was already heightened from the escape. Now she could feel it racing. She was tense, on edge with the knowledge that by now the pursuit had to be under way. They couldn’t wait around for long—but she couldn’t leave Mason. Had he been captured? Or worse?

  Walking over to the half wall, she leaned over it, looking down. If anything terrible had happened, she would expect to see police cars, or ambulances, or some kind of obvious official presence, on the street below.

  The street was packed. Cars crawled along, bumper-to-bumper, their lights spearing the pedestrians streaming along the sidewalks in front of the casinos. The Wynn’s water show was at its height: vividly colored plumes of water danced in the wind, watched by a large, amorphous crowd. Across the street, the square was a hotbed of activity. The paper lanterns strung between the trees looked like stars at that distance.

  The glittering, glitzy Cotai Strip seemed very much business as usual.

  Closer at hand, the floors of the parking garage below emitted a faint, whitish glow. They were configured like the tiers of a wedding cake. The fifteenth through the eleventh floors were the same size, and the smallest. The tenth through the fifth floors were about twelve feet wider all around. The extra twelve feet on the tenth floor formed an open observation platform that at the moment held only a few people, most of whom were standing at the rail observing the water show below. The fifth through the second floors were about twelve feet wider still. The bottom floor was the widest of all.

  Because, Bianca suspected, of the casinos, suicide was not an infrequent occurrence in Macau. The owners had built that parking garage with an eye to making sure that anyone leaping from it wouldn’t end up going splat in the street.

  Except for the fifteenth and tenth floors, the floors were entirely under roof.

  “What do we do?” Doc joined her at the wall. He had his breathing mostly under control now. “You know the cop and those other guys have regained consciousness by now. Or someone’s found them. They’ll be looking for us hard.”

  “I know.” Hands curling around the rounded edge of the wall, Bianca stared sightlessly out into the night. Then she remembered something and felt a spurt of excitement. “Quick, give me your phone.”

  Doc looked at her in surprise, but fumbled in his pocket and handed it over. “Why?”

  “Because I gave Mason mine.” She was already punching in the number, which she’d memorized.

  When it started to ring, her eyes widened. She could hear it. Not through the phone. From somewhere outside.

  “Where are you?” she asked without preamble when Mason answered. She was already looking over the edge, loo
king down, because the ringing had seemed to be coming from below.

  “Tenth floor of the parking garage. We’ve got a problem. They’re working on the elevators. Until they get finished, this is as high as they go.”

  “Oh, no.” Bianca thought of him in the wheelchair. This was bad. Also, something he should have known. “So how did you get down to the casino when you got here?” Her voice was tinged with exasperation.

  “I came by limo, not helicopter. Never leave the same way you go in, remember?”

  She did. It was one of the rules. Not that it mattered now.

  “Any way you can get up the stairs?”

  “No.” His tone made it definite.

  “Holy hell. All right, we’ll come down and help you up.”

  “Five flights? I don’t think so. I put any weight at all on this leg, I’ll bust a hundred different things open. I’m going back down to the street.”

  “And do what? Catch a taxi in your wheelchair?”

  All of a sudden Bianca saw him. He’d come out into the tenth-floor observation area and was rolling along in his wheelchair as he talked on the phone. The tourists who’d been watching the water show had turned away from the rail—a glance told her that the show had ended—and he fell in behind them, heading, presumably, for the elevator.

  “Stop,” she told him. “Stay where you are. Look up and you’ll see me. I have an idea.”

  Mason looked up. The small, flip-open phone was held to his ear. His face was a pale oval in the multicolored darkness.

  Bianca didn’t wave. There was no point: he clearly saw her, although he didn’t wave, either. What he needed was an elevator. She was going to provide him with one. Well, the field version of one.