Another very small news item reported young Cox getting out of the hospital three months later. The bullet that had been meant to kill him had merely grazed the side of his head. The police theorized that he had been the second one shot, sleeping in the room with his other brothers, and that perhaps the noise had woken the third boy, who was shot near the door. Perhaps that accounted for the miss, they told the reporters; between the haste and the trauma of killing his own kid, Cox senior had botched the job.
“The hand of God pulling the gun away,” said one of the detectives.
I tried some more search terms in the database but didn’t come up with anything else. Danny had me go over to Google and see if the courts or police departments had anything online, though we figured it would be pretty useless. It was now after two Vegas time, which meant five A.M. back East, still too early to call the local police and see if there were any old-timers who might remember something.
“So now we know why Cox hated gambling,” said Danny. “And probably Vegas. That accounts for the certificate you saw and then some. He blamed them for killing his family. But why would somebody kill him?”
“Because he knew something that they don’t want known, or he wanted to do something they didn’t want done,” I said. I went back to the email program and wrote a little thank-you note for Karen, attaching an IOU for a more personal show of my appreciation.
“Maybe he already did it,” said Danny.
What had Cox done? He’d kept me on the East Coast, away from Vegas.
Shadow—assuming he was tied to the apartment we’d seen—wanted me here.
“It might be that they wanted me out of the picture. He helped, but he knew too much and he was killed,” I said.
“Or maybe this has nothing to do with you or even Vegas,” said Danny. “Maybe his murder is about his father’s death thirty years ago. Maybe he figured out who did it, went to the police or threatened to, and they bumped him off.”
“Danny, you’re not jumping to conclusions anymore.”
“Didn’t you tell me to stop thinking like a cop?”
“Yeah, but since when did you start doing what I told you to?”
Danny laughed, then got serious again. “I don’t know. Some of the guys I’ve talked to said Cox’s information occasionally was decent. He was certainly not a rocket scientist, but I don’t know how crocked he was. And I don’t think he’d be so dumb that he would try to take you out.”
“Come on. I think we ought to see if they’re still serving decent drinks in this town,” I told Danny. “And then I heard about a place back in the city that’s supposed to be haunted by the ghost of Dean Martin.”
If Dean Martin does haunt Las Vegas, I didn’t find him that night. I did manage to get a few hours of sleep before driving up to Nellis Air Force Base, where an AH-6 had been placed at my disposal for an aerial inspection of the parade area. Nellis is a U.S. Air Farce facility, a humungous collection of runways and hangars and test ranges. Besides the “official” sections of the base, Nellis is the doorway to some of the USAF’s “black projects.” The infamous Area 51 is located a short hop away; when UFO enthusiasts gather on the nearby ridges with high-powered binoculars and telescopes to look for flying saucers, what they’re actually seeing are high-tech Air Force projects being put through their paces.
At least that’s what the Air Force says. They may just not want to admit that they believe in little green men like the rest of us.
My helo ride lasted about forty-five minutes. Security checkpoints had already been set up around the Strip, and teams had begun implementing random searches of traffic.
How do you keep one car bomb out of the center of a city? You can’t, not dependably, not forever. Maybe you can shut down Las Vegas, but can you shut down Sacramento the same day? You close down Des Moines—what about Urbandale up the road? Or Pleasant Hill? Or West Des Moines? That’s why dealing with terrorists at the source is so important.
In one sense, the fact that these assholes like to go for really big targets makes the job a little easier. They want to take down symbols, and in their minds, Urbandale—and with respect, even Des Moines—just don’t cut it as symbols. The Palisades Shopping Mall would have qualified only because it was so close to New York City that the media would have come running. Vegas, on the other hand, was a supersize target, the capital of sin and decadence in their eyes, probably even more potent than D.C. or New York.
The trip up and down the Strip convinced me of one thing: whatever they were planning, it was already there. Las Vegas Boulevard—the official name for the Strip—runs roughly parallel to I-15. Las Vegas Boulevard runs through downtown Las Vegas, but the Strip is actually to the south of the city proper. Huge hotels line both sides. Each hotel is its own world, with literally thousands of guest rooms. The gaming rooms are massive and are connected to small shopping malls filled with boutiques and different stores.
The hotels have different themes; you’ve probably heard of the most famous: Luxor, which has a pyramid and a sphinx; Circus Circus, which is a circus; and the Venetian, which comes complete with gondolas and hallways that look like they were ripped right out of the Doge’s Palace. Not every big hotel is on the Strip, and not all of the interesting things that happen or can happen in Vegas take place in the hotels, but if I took the time to describe the whole place to you, this book would be as long as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. My best advice is to plan a trip at some point. Tell ’em Dick sent you, and I’m sure they’ll lead you to what they claim is my favorite video poker machine.
“You’re welcome,” said Karen when I called her that afternoon. “And I will take you up on that IOU.”
“I hope so. The women out here are nice, but they lack a certain sophistication.”
“Don’t make me come out there and scratch their eyes out.”
“I’d like to watch that.”
“I’ll bet you would.” Karen sighed, signaling she was turning back to work. “The intelligence alerts that went out about Las Vegas have very little behind them. They were all about trains. I followed your suggestion and looked for some intersection with the Bosnians, but I couldn’t make any connection.”
“There may not be a direct connection. What we may have is a series of very small isolated cells. If so, they probably won’t connect with each other until the very last moment, when they’re called into action. Has anything new come of the check for the poison gas?”
“We’ve been tracking all of the shipments of the companies that Danny gave us,” said Karen. “We have a total of ten trucks going into Illinois at some point over the last month that aren’t accounted for after that. It doesn’t mean they were involved in anything, just that we can’t trace them beyond that state.”
In Tell-Me-Dick’s territory. A coincidence?
Probably. But I didn’t mind turning the tables on that asshole. I told Karen she ought to sic the dogs on him and see if he came up with better information. In the meantime, we were going to have to assume that whatever the terrorists were going to use had already been delivered and was in place. The hotel security teams had already begun searching for anything that might be used to store or hide poison gas. Doc and Tiffany were checking on that angle and making sure that the hotels and casino knew what they were looking for. Danny was liaising with the police. Trace and Sean were out beating the sand looking for intelligence. The rest of my team were out rattling doors and checking windows, seeing what the holes were in the net.
Around five my time, I checked with the LNG port command. The day had gone smoothly, without any attempts on the port. They had detained two people in a small boat who’d been acting suspiciously. The men had been put in jail on a disorderly conduct charge, so the locals had a chance to check them out. The thinking was that they’d been on a sneak and peak. I didn’t disagree, though by then I’d concluded that the port had been a blind manufactured by Cox.
I had dinner up at the Rio, which has a tall tower and is lo
cated opposite the Strip on the other side of Interstate 15. Shadow had not visited yours truly yet in Las Vegas, but I was sure he was out there, watching and planning. Maybe he was putting the finishing touches on tomorrow’s operation. Maybe he was just a foot soldier in that operation, with little to do.
Maybe he was in bed already, getting a good night’s sleep. Maybe he’d found one of the women in the short rayon dresses who hung out near the edges of the bars. Or maybe he was the slim guy at the table across the room, sitting by himself, sipping Perrier and looking bored.
Actually, probably not. The guy at the table across the room was Pete Simms, and he was from Wyoming. I had taken the liberty of borrowing his credit card and then running a credit check on him. Pete, if you’re reading this, you really should try to pay down some of those cards, my friend; they’re killing you with the interest.
I had dinner by myself, then went out onto the terrace and looked back over at the stream of lights.
“Penny for your thoughts,” yelled Trace from the upper level.
“They’re worth at least ten bucks,” I told her.
Never one to use the stairs when she can drop twenty feet or so, Trace swung over the railing and dropped down.
“You’re getting careless in your old age,” she said.
“I knew you were there. And Sean’s up behind that post. And Doc is just inside that window there.”
“You didn’t see Hulk?”
“He’s downstairs by the steps watching the elevator.” It was kind of touching that the Rogue team felt they ought to watch out for me. It also told me I ought to sit on their asses a little harder. Scumbags even charged dinner to the company.
“If Shadow’s going to show, it’ll be tomorrow,” I told Trace. “But I appreciate your watching my back. I’m touched.”
“I’ve been thinking that maybe it was Cox all along,” she said. “He had access to a lot of intelligence. He knew where you were.”
“Cox was definitely involved, no doubt. But I think his game was to try to throw me off so I wouldn’t be here. He didn’t want us screwing up his plans.”
It was also possible the asshole didn’t want me getting killed and was trying to save my butt, but I didn’t want to think too charitably of a known asshole. Doc walked over with a pair of drinks. I took mine and turned out toward the city, staring at the laser shining up from the Luxor pyramid.
“Go for it, Shadow,” I thought to myself. “Take your best shot, asshole.”
Chapter
19
Monday started off with a boom and went downhill from there.
I jumped out of bed at five A.M., a few minutes before the alarm went off. I hit the head and started some light stretching to get ready for morning PT when the television timer woke up and snapped onto Fox News. I caught the broadcast in midsentence.
“…not much is known at this hour, except that the aircraft was a small plane that did not answer hails by either the ground controllers or the two F-16 fighter jets sent to intercept it. Cove Point authorities assure Fox that the situation is under control.”
Cove Point?
Son of a bitch.
Son of a fuck-me bitch.
I grabbed for the cell phone and hit the quick dial for Karen’s cell.
“What’s going on?” I asked as soon as she picked up.
“Dick?”
“The LNG port? What the hell’s going on?”
“An aircraft failed to respond to hails and was shot down,” she said. “There’s a recovery operation underway right now.”
I could see that. The network had a live feed from a helicopter circling in the distance. Several boats were rushing toward what looked like empty water, though I assumed that there was some sort of floating debris field.
“Get those boats out of there,” I told her. “Clear the helicopters. Get everything the hell out. Now!”
“What?”
“It’s a cover for them to slip in. Tell the commander to stick with his protocol on the ships and boats that are allowed in the area. They used the aircraft to get themselves in.”
“OK.”
“Call me back. Go!”
I hit the end button and then immediately called Capel, who’d come down to sit in for me at the port. I told him what I was seeing. Already there were two boats in the area that I knew hadn’t been vetted; they were speedboats. “Get them,” I told him.
I spent the next few minutes pacing around the room, watching helplessly a couple of thousand miles away as the nightmare scenario unfolded on the television screen. The news helicopters should have been shunted away from the area immediately. They were just at the edge of the exclusion zone, but the local authorities could have kicked them out if there was an emergency, and this qualified. Hell, if I’d had been there, I would have grabbed a SAM and shot the suckers down myself.
But I was glad they didn’t. The truth was, I wanted to watch. No, the truth was, I wanted to be there myself, taking aim with one of the Whiskey Cobras and firing a TOW missile up the ass of the second speedboat as it made a beeline for the harbor area. I saw the smoke from the missile as it zigged toward the boat, which was on a collision course with one of the docking areas. It hit, but nothing happened. I kicked at the side of the bed, pissed that some jackass munitions vendor had screwed up the fuse or something. Then the boat blossomed into a mushroom. The small warhead of the missile had exploded below the deck, igniting the explosives packed there. The geyser obliterated the boat, engulfing it in a massive cloud of steam, smoke, and fire. The shock was so violent that the television station’s helicopter supplying the feed stuttered in the air.
Fortunately, the speedboat had been far enough away from the dock that the explosion did no damage to the facilities. By now the other boat had also come under fire. The video caught a closeup of an F-16’s wing passing at very close range, then the feed went crazy and died. The on-air announcers started freaking, wondering if their helicopter had just been shot down. A good guess under the circumstances, though it eventually proved not to be true.
Danny, Trace, and Doc arrived while I channel-surfed for more details. Within a minute or so I found a station that was offering a live feed off a Coast Guard vessel, and it helped us analyze the situation. The two boats had been the main attack, with the aircraft a diversion to allow them onto the scene; it had almost worked. Between Capel and Karen and the security people on the scene, the boats had been spotted and targeted at nearly the last possible second. Now the Coast Guard, Navy, and Marines were throwing everything they had across the harbor, and it looked like they had the situation under control. I left a message for Capel reminding him to look for a second wave of attackers, sleepers who would be waiting to take advantage of the first wave of attacks and their confusion. I’m sure he probably thought of it himself. I can’t take too much credit for the warnings I gave, but I did give them. I only wished I’d been there to give them in person.
“I hope to hell they’re watching the water for swimmers,” muttered Trace.
“Capel’ll take care of it,” said Doc. “He knows a goatfuck when he sees one.”
“We better hope that wasn’t the opening event for a day-long celebration,” I said dryly. “Better yet, we’d better make sure it wasn’t.”
We watched for a while longer. When it seemed obvious that the situation was under control, we left to grab the rest of the team. We shook some oxygen into our brain cells with a five-mile run before breakfast, breaking into two-man teams fanning out from the three hotels where we’d stayed. I set a leisurely eight-minute pace; I knew I had hit the right stride as Danny groaned and moaned alongside me. The idea wasn’t just to get our motors running. I wanted a street-level view of the area, and jogging suits and sneakers let us do a much better job than driving around in SUVs would have.
Danny and I swung down Flamingo, running down Charlotte and then back through the lots over to Lara Ave. We skirted some of the side streets up there, slowing our pace
to take a look at what was coming before heading over on East Harmon and coming back. We were the most suspicious characters out and about, and we drew a squad car and an unmarked detective vehicle.
When we hit the Strip, two security officers on their mountain bikes rode up alongside us and asked how we were doing. Danny grunted something unintelligible, the sweat pouring off his skin. Our escorts laughed, and I did, too. They rode with us a while, then backed off.
The squad car we’d seen earlier had set up near the side of the road not too far away. Another set of security people eyed us as we hustled past the Venetian. I tried to pick up the pace to push Danny down the homestretch as we headed toward our rendezvous at Starbucks up near the Riviera, but he fell behind steadily. Finally I turned and jogged a bit in place, eyeing the nearby road as I waited.
“Time to call a taxi,” he joked as one passed.
“That one wouldn’t have done us much good,” I told him. “It’s a security patrol.”
The rest of the team had had similar experiences, being spotted by police or security patrols and then handed off for close surveillance. If the Tangos decided to attack Las Vegas with an army of joggers, the defenses were ready.
Since I was one of the guests of honor, the Las Vegas Parade committee had arranged for me to have the use of a Caddy Escalade around town. The Escalade is a great SUV, though, because of my line of work I ordinarily stick to plain-Jane vehicles, the plainer the better. People regularly tag me as a Hummer kind of guy, and, as a matter of fact, the parade people had offered me one of those, too. Again, a great vehicle, but one that sticks out pretty obviously wherever you are. You can’t be a Rogue Warrior and be a movie star, even though people think you ought to be.
With the rest of the team dispersing to their posts and my presence at the marshalling point requested, I hopped into the Escalade for the drive over to Duke Ellington Way, where the marchers and floats were being lined up. Sean came with me, double-checking our weapons and the communications system while I drove. (I’ve seen his driving. No way I was letting him behind the wheel.) He stashed my MP5 in an innocuous-looking gym bag, along with a parcel of extra clips and a backup communications unit. The heat made wearing a coat a bit ridiculous, so I angled the P7M8 in my belt and untucked my shirt. I didn’t have quite enough fat to carry it off—there are some downsides to being a fitness fanatic, I guess. I had two Glock 26s with me, one at my ankle—and you can come find the other one if you’ve got the balls for it.
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