Death Prefers Blondes

by Caleb Roehrig

  It was at that point that Valentina hurled her drink in Margo’s face, and Margo tackled Valentina over the back of the banquette. Moments later, two very large men scooped both girls off the floor, and Margo and Axel found themselves being escorted very roughly back outside. They’d been standing at the curb together in silence for a moment, waiting for the valet to bring the car around, when Axel finally started to giggle.

  “‘Cut you in half and count the rings’?” He repeated, his eyes crinkling. “‘Start with the ones I got from fucking your dad’? Did you really say that?”

  Margo started to giggle, too. “Valentina brings out the best in me, I guess.”

  They grinned at each other stupidly for a moment, and then Axel reached out and took her hand. “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “You know what you did.”

  Margo shook her head. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “No one’s going to remember what Ryan said to me.” Axel gave her a little smile. “No one’s even going to remember I was there.”

  Margo didn’t say anything for a moment. “It was worth it.” She shot him a sly look, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “While I was busy mashing Valentina’s face into the floor? I figured out what our next job is going to be.”

  11

  At the turn of the twentieth century, Bunker Hill was the most exclusive neighborhood in Los Angeles, a rise just west of City Hall that bristled with the mansions of railroad tycoons and oil barons; fifty years later, the posh district had subsided into slum-like conditions, the stately buildings rotting on their foundations; and by the seventies, the entire community was gone—stamped out completely to make way for an aggressive program of urban renewal.

  Where ostentatiously gabled homes once stood, skyscrapers now reached for the heavens—dizzying columns of darkened glass that fed a vain city its own reflection. It was into the underground garage for one of these, a fifty-five story tower bearing a distinctive thunderbolt M insignia, that Margo steered her car the next Thursday afternoon. A backpack over her shoulders and her face scrubbed clean of makeup, she practiced an innocent expression as she took an elevator up to the lobby.

  “Miss Manning!” A stocky guard in a dark uniform saw her coming as she crossed the cavernous entryway, his voice booming off polished stone the color of honey. Marble gleamed underfoot, on the squared-off support pillars, and reflected in the floor-to-ceiling windows that fronted the street. “Nice to see you again. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  “Hi, Lloyd. My dad sent me with some things for Dr. Khan.” She angled her shoulders helpfully, showing him the backpack.

  “No problem. Let me just call down and let them know you’re here.” Lloyd backed to the desk, picking up a phone. “Dr. Khan expecting you?”

  Margo made a face. “Maybe?”

  He inquired after Harland while he dialed, and she offered an awkward response, saved when someone picked up the line and Lloyd turned his attention to the receiver. “I’ve got Margo Manning up here with a delivery for Dr. Khan.” He listened for a moment. “Okay, you got it.” Hanging up, he smiled again. “I’ll just log you in, and you’re all set!”

  The elevators to the rest of the building were in a deep alcove off the lobby, and when Margo boarded one, Lloyd leaned through the doors to swipe his key card over the scanner mounted on the wall panel. He even punched the button for the sub-basement level where the lab was located—as if Margo could have gotten into the secured underground parking facility in the first place if she didn’t already have her father’s master key card. But she smiled and said thank you as the doors slid shut, and then flexed her jaw when the elevator plunged, her eardrums popping.

  When the car slowed and the doors opened again, she faced a sterile waiting room, colorless and drab with a few stiff chairs against the wall. There was a young man seated at a reception desk, and behind him a sturdy gray door bearing an emphatic sign that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.

  “Hi there,” the receptionist said, adjusting his glasses and giving her what he clearly thought was an irresistible smile. “Dr. Khan will be out soon, if you’d like to take a seat?”

  He wasn’t even finished speaking, however, when the gray door creaked open and Dr. Nadiya Khan herself appeared. Disarmingly petite, her black hair cut sleekly just beneath her chin, the woman’s dark brown eyes radiated intelligence. With a perfunctory smile and a soft accent, she said, “Margo, it’s so nice to see you again.”

  “Stuff from my dad,” Margo explained. “Do you have a minute? He said you might want to make some notes or something for him to look over.”

  “I can spare some time.” She held the door open. “We’ll go to my office.”

  They walked along a corridor, passing windows looking into a sanitized room full of arcane circuitry and robotic arms, and stepped into a wide area filled with workstations. Technicians sat before massive computer screens, typing in figures, checking results; if any one floor could be called the heart of the Manning Corporation, it was this one.

  Specializing in the development and application of microtechnology, Manning had designed parts and systems that were used in everything from cell phones and onboard navigational interfaces to infrared satellites and surgical equipment. What was not as widely known—not even by all of the company’s employees—was that they were also a major government contractor, outfitting the US intelligence community’s operatives with top secret, next-generation gear. Their particular expertise had resulted in the creation of items such as earrings equipped with parabolic microphones; covert surveillance devices so innocuous in appearance that they could be planted right in front of a target without arousing suspicion; and even optoelectronic lenses with night vision capability crafted to look like ordinary sunglasses.

  Dr. Khan led Margo to the door of a private office with a placard that spelled out NADIYA KHAN, CHIEF SCIENTIST. The space inside was filled with books, binders, and samples of Manning’s most enigmatic innovations—and once the door clicked shut behind them, it was also soundproof.

  “How did it go?” The scientist asked softly as she took a seat behind her desk.

  Margo smirked. “I didn’t get arrested, did I?”

  “Don’t joke about that, Margo, please.” Dr. Khan rubbed her temples and grimaced. “You must know, that is a very real fear of mine.”

  “We were careful,” the girl promised soberly. “We’re always careful.” As if to demonstrate, with delicate motions she opened her bag and began removing its contents. “The op went exactly according to plan. The wand and reverse screwdriver thingy worked like a charm, and the little EMP was a lifesaver. I already wired your cut to your account, and the transfer ought to have cleared by now.”

  “It did; thank you,” Dr. Khan mumbled as Margo set the wand, screwdriver, and pocket-sized EMP on the desk. “Did you have any trouble?”

  “With the tech? No.” Margo eyed the scientist carefully. “Is everything okay? Did something … happen?”

  “We got five more out yesterday,” the woman finally said, her eyes on the EMP.

  “Five? That’s great!”

  Dr. Khan merely shook her head. “It was supposed to have been eight. Three didn’t make the window, and I don’t know how soon we’ll be able to try again—or if they’ll still be alive when we do.”

  “I’m sorry.” Margo studied the woman’s face, pulled between grief and self-reproach. “But five more people get to live; five more people have a future again. That’s something, right? Without what you’re doing, that number would be zero.”

  “Maybe so.” Dr. Khan finally spared Margo a weak smile. “It just gets to me sometimes. The people I communicate with—for them, it’s all numbers and euphemisms. ‘Eight packages for pickup,’ ‘five successful deliveries.’ Like they’re trying to forget that they’re talking about human lives.” She shrugged lethargically. “Perhaps that way is easier.”

  For years, Nadiya Khan had b
een working with an underground organization to smuggle refugees, many of them children, out of her war-torn homeland in the Middle East; couriers ferried false papers and communiqués in and out of extremist-held territories, agents in the field guided escapees to safe houses, and collaborators provided shelter or cover. All of it was deadly work, and the amount of untraceable money needed to keep it going was incalculable. Fourteen months earlier, when the scientist had caught her boss’s wealthy teenage daughter trying to slip the working prototype of a digital safecracker into her purse during a tour of the lab, she thought she’d found her golden goose.

  She’d been right.

  “Okay, I didn’t want to say anything until the deal was finalized, but you’re going to make me cry, so you leave me no choice.” Margo straightened in her chair. “We hit kind of an unexpected jackpot, and as soon as my fence seals the deal—which could be any minute now—I’ll be putting sixty-thousand dollars into your account.”

  “Sixty-th—” Dr. Khan sat up this time, eyes bulging. “Are you serious?”

  “As a diamond heist.” Margo waited until a genuine smile broke across the scientist’s features, and then pushed a scrap of paper across the desk. “Now that I’ve got you in a good mood, here’s a short list of stuff I’m going to need to hit our next target.”

  As she read through the items, Dr. Khan made a face. “We have some of these things in the vault already, and a few of them I can jury-rig from existing parts, but the others…” She glanced up at Margo, eyes doubtful. “I’ve got a pretty healthy discretionary budget, and your father allows me a lot of freedom to explore new tech and requisition prototypes, but … a fingerprint duplicator is going to raise some eyebrows.”

  “Really? Seems like the CIA or whoever could get a lot of use out of something like that.”

  “They could. They probably have a few already,” Nadiya answered smoothly, “because they haven’t asked us for any.” The scientist sat back, tucking a hand beneath her chin. “Margo, ever since your father stopped coming into the office, oversight of the lab has changed. Harland would let me commit murder down here, so long as I produced results; I built those heat-neutralizing bodysuits for you, if you’ll recall, and he found a way to sell the designs to the government. But since he’s been gone, Addison Brand has assumed many of his responsibilities, and he’s taken a significant interest in research and development. He wants an explanation for every expense—and even though I don’t technically answer to him, his questions are difficult to ignore without drawing scrutiny neither of us need.”

  “So don’t ignore them,” Margo returned. “Just tell him … I don’t know, call the thing a miniaturized 3-D printer, or whatever—there’s got to be a million applications for something like that.”

  Dr. Khan nodded, but with a cryptic frown. “My concern is not that he’d try to stop me from making the device.” If she had more to say on the subject, she stopped herself. Gesturing to the wand, screwdriver, and EMP, she murmured, “I appreciate your bringing these items back so quickly.”

  “I always do,” Margo chirped, which was mostly true. The sunglasses and comms were more or less on permanent loan from the lab’s vault, as the team used them so frequently and—due to severely restricted access—the odds anyone would notice them missing were slim to none. “Thank you for letting us use them in the first place.”

  Dr. Khan met Margo’s eyes with a very serious look. “Thank me by not getting caught.”

  12

  The pistol-shaped enclave of West Hollywood, less than two square miles of homes, heartache, and glittering nightlife in the middle of LA, was mobbed that Friday evening. Tourists flocked to its famous Sunset Strip, while locals overflowed the watering holes on Santa Monica Boulevard—including the Ruby Lounge, a gay bar that hosted a wild, twice-monthly drag show called Tuck/Marry/Kill. Ruby’s was always packed, but that evening, one dressing room in the back remained conveniently empty.

  “As you all know,” Margo began, leaning against a dusty countertop, her back to a row of vanity mirrors, “Valentina Petrenko is a sleaze and a cankerous asshole.”

  Leif leaned into Joaquin, smelling of soap, the hair behind his ears just a little damp from a recent shower. A smile in his voice, he whispered covertly, “I keep forgetting that you fancy Malibu types are friends with Valentina Petrenko.”

  “Please, we are enemies.” Joaquin smiled a little, too. The last to arrive, Leif had chosen the seat right next to him, flashing him a furtive grin that made it feel like there was some kind of private joke between them.

  “What you may not know,” Margo continued brusquely, “is that her father, Arkady Petrenko, is an avid collector of art and antiquities. He gets most of it from auctions or private buyers, but I happen to know that he’ll buy from the black market, too, if he wants a piece bad enough. Name something obscure and valuable, and he’s got a pile of it in his actual fucking castle: tapestries, rare books, religious artifacts…” She paused, looking around the room. “Royal jewels.”

  “I feel like that’s my cue or something,” Davon remarked drolly, sweeping the wild blond curls of a wig over his shoulder. He and Axel, both regular performers in Tuck/Marry/Kill as Dior Galore and Liesl Von Tramp, were in full drag—heels high, waists snatched, their faces beat to the gods.

  For Joaquin, drag was a hobby, a game of dress-up in wearable art; for Axel and Davon, it was art. A consuming, transformative, fulfilling art that demanded everything and gave back more. The only time Joaquin ever saw his brother smile anymore—really smile, the way you do when it’s for yourself and nobody else—was when he was onstage.

  “Axel!” Margo barked the boy’s name out like a headmaster from some BBC boarding school drama. “Describe what Valentina was wearing to her birthday party.”

  “Um.” Axel squirmed, his taffeta frock rustling. “A really tight bandage dress that should’ve stayed back in 2011 where it belonged, and an emerald necklace so fucking big it could’ve anchored the Queen Mary.”

  “That necklace,” Margo announced, sweeping an iPad up from the countertop to display a black-and-white portrait of a cheerless woman in lace, “once belonged to a Russian princess named Xenia Zavadovskaya.” Atop the princess’s head, a complicated tiara perched on a coil of dark, wavy hair, and across her collarbone spread an array of gemstones the size of poker chips. “Her family fled the Bolsheviks for Western Europe in 1917, where they quickly sold or bartered her emeralds. Sometime between then and now, the jewels found their way into Petrenko’s hands. It’s hard to estimate how much they’re worth today, but if I had to guess, I’d say a shitload.”

  She swiped up another portrait, this one of a frail woman with a diadem of dark, shining stones, with matching starbursts at her ears and around her throat. “Countess Yekaterina Golovkina. She was killed in the revolution. I don’t know where her earrings and necklace ended up, but I saw this same ruby crown on Valentina’s head at her sweet sixteen sophomore year. And there are a lot more examples.

  “Long story short: With the Communist uprising, a lot of bluebloods headed for the hills, taking with them only what they could carry. And since jewels are lightweight and useful as currency, they were popular.” Margo looked around the room again. “It’s anybody’s guess how many pieces that once belonged to Russian nobles still survive a hundred years later, but Petrenko has made a lifelong quest out of obtaining as many of them as he can—and by any means possible.”

  “So that’s the target, then?” Leif asked. “Petrenko’s jewelry collection?”

  “That’s the target.” Margo swiped to another picture on the iPad, this one an aerial photo of the Petrenko home in Topanga Canyon, lifted from a profile in People magazine. “I’ve been inside Valentina’s actual fucking castle before, and the whole place is one big exhibition gallery. But because of their value, and because they weren’t all procured through legal channels, Arkady can’t display his prize pieces openly.” On the screen, she zoomed in to a rear corner of the imposi
ng residence. “For that reason, he converted this turret into a special showroom for his most precious items, all of which are displayed in bulletproof cases fitted with biometric locks. That’s where the jewels are.”

  Tentatively, Joaquin raised his hand, his cheeks already warm as he prepared to ask a question. At school, everyone just waited for him to fuck up, sneering at his humiliation every time he was called on in class—and it was no less intimidating to be a newcomer to this group, where they threw around official-sounding jargon they’d spent most of a year learning together. “Um, what’s a bio-whatsit lock?”

  “Biometric,” Leif answered, and Joaquin was relieved to see his smile was friendly. “It means the lock includes a mechanism that measures a physiological trait—like a fingerprint or a retinal pattern—so it can only be opened by specific people.”

  “Okay. Sure.” Joaquin nodded, although he’d only followed about half of that. When Leif addressed him, their knees had brushed together. And now they were still together. They were still touching, and it was like a marching band had come crashing into the room, stomping in a big, obvious circle around the point where their legs touched, and heat swept back up Joaquin’s neck and into his face.

  “Before anyone asks, I’m already exploring a solution for those locks,” Margo went on, impossibly oblivious to the touching knees, “and we should know soon if it’s workable.”

  “I don’t mean to sound negative, girl,” Davon remarked, “but how are we supposed to storm an ‘actual fucking castle,’ anyway? I mean, my broadsword is in the shop, and this place looks a little … fortified.”

  “Yeah. About that.” Margo shut off the iPad, studying the blank screen. “Before we put this to a vote, there’s two things you guys need to know: First, Arkady Petrenko is kind of a security nut. He’s got powerful friends, but also some powerful enemies, and two attempts have been made on his life back in Russia—part of the reason he lives in the US full-time now. The goons who pulled me off Valentina at Astrology? They were her personal bodyguard detail. To put it bluntly, his castle is protected like he’s expecting trouble, and he has an armed patrol guarding the place twenty-four-seven.”