She noticed a crowd beginning to gather around the monster and glanced at her watch; almost half past eleven. Ray’s stuntmen-cum-actors must be about to begin their assault on the giant fire-breathing lizard.
“Anything wrong?” The flight had been glide smooth until a moment ago, when she’d noticed a little pitch and roll.
“Some strange updrafts around the casino.”
The Daredevil’s rooftop helipad loomed before them. Peta dug into her shoulder bag. She found what she was looking for but didn’t remove it. “I want you to see something before we land,” she said. “I didn’t want to be the only one in on the secret.”
“Maybe it should wait till after we land.” Arthur kept his eyes straight ahead.
“I really think you’ll want to see this now.”
She opened her hand and held the piece up where he wouldn’t have to turn his head too far to see it. After a quick first glance he stiffened and took another look.
“What in the world?”
“It’s my piece, the one you gave me.”
“But I thought—”
“I had Ralphie make a phony—and he did a masterful job. That’s what I gave Frik.”
“So he thinks he’s got three but he’s only got two. I love it! Doesn’t Ray know—?”
“Uh-uh. At the time I wasn’t quite sure about Ray. I mean, whether or not he had something to do with your, um, death, or if he and Frikkie were in cahoots. So I didn’t tell him. I’ve learned the truth, but I haven’t exactly had time to call him.”
“So you and I will be the only ones who know.” He grinned. “How do you want to work it? We can let them assemble it with the fake, and when nothing happens, pull out the real things and say, ‘See if this works better.’ Or we can—”
The interior of the cabin filled with a bright blue light. The helicopter dipped. Arthur fought the stick.
“Oh, God!” Peta cried. The light had centered on the piece in her hand, but it was coming from outside. When she looked through the window, she could follow a tightly focused beam straight back to Ray’s penthouse atop the casino. “What are they trying to do to us?”
She saw four figures rush out onto the helipad. The one she recognized as Ray began waving at her. Was he warning her off or telling her to hurry in?
The chopper was bucking like a wild stallion. Arthur forced it into a stuttering descent toward the helipad. “It’s that thing, that piece you’ve got there. Somehow it’s set off something below that’s affecting the controls.”
“Should I toss it out?” Peta said.
“Hell no! We’re notout of control, just having some difficulty is all.”
“How much difficulty?”
A tight grin. “Oh, I’d say something akin to flying through a Midwest supercell.”
“With or without tornadoes?”
“Without. But that could change any moment.” He glanced at her. “Look. An actual touchdown might be too dicey with these controls the way they are. But I can get low enough so that you can toss the piece onto the pad.”
“And then what?”
“Then we see what happens. If I get the helm back, we’ll land. If not, we’ll fly off and look for a place in the desert to put down. Either way, we’ll know the piece will be safe with Ray until we make it back to the casino.”
“Bring her down as low as you can,” Peta said. “These pieces seem to be indestructible, but let’s not take any chances.”
Arthur fought the Chief-8 downward. When the landing runners wobbled between eight and ten feet above the helipad, Peta pushed her door open. Noise and wind swirled through the cabin. Looking below, she saw Ray, Keene, and McKendry backed against the wall of the penthouse.
Frik stood at the edge of the landing circle, where the tornadic downwash whipped his hair and clothing. Peta saw his face, his tight, angry posture. He knows, she thought. He must have tried to assemble the device with the fake piece.
Was that why the chopper was acting crazy?
She cataloged her options. Fast. The way she did during emergency surgery. She could toss out the real fragment, surrendering it to Frik, or keep it in the chopper and risk a crash. Or—
“Hold her steady!” She unclasped her seat harness.
“What are you doing?”
She tucked her piece of the device into her bra. The beam followed it, making her chest glow with the same eerie blue light. “See you below,” she said.
Swiveling onto her belly, she slipped her legs through the door.
“Peta!” Arthur shouted, panic wild in his face. “Get back in here! You’ll break your neck!”
Feeling nothing except the need to take action, Peta continued her outward slide. The vortex from the whirling blades tore at her skirt, whipping it above her knees. She wished she’d worn jeans—she’d have a better view of her feet. Inching down, she kicked back and forth until her boots found the landing runner. She hooked her heels on the steel tubing, reached down and grabbed it with her left hand, then her right. Finally she kicked her feet free and swung down to hang with her boot soles only three or four feet above the helipad. She was about to release her grip when the chopper suddenly veered up and away from the roof.
The beam of blue light followed her, targeted like a laser on her chest. She repressed a scream as she looked down through hundreds of feet of empty air at the top of the giant lizard monster’s head. On the ground below, people in the gathering crowd began to look up and point. She wanted to shout, I’m not part of the damn Daredevil show! This is the real thing!
She felt her fingers slipping and tightened her grip, envisioning herself splattered on the pavement below while the onlookers applauded the realistic gore effects. The little chopper began to angle back down toward the roof. The parapet hove within reach, the chopper dipped, and Peta saw the upper edge of the wall rushing at her.
She cried out and nearly lost her grip as her right hip and thigh slammed against the concrete.
The chopper wobbled away and back again, ramming the small of her back against the edge of the parapet, twisting her body and tearing her right hand free of the runner. Clinging by one hand, she felt wind catch her skirt and wrench her back and forth.
With her free hand, Peta tore open the skirt’s hook and loop closure, and the skirt dropped away. Arthur must have regained a modicum of control because the chopper lifted and angled back over the helipad, bringing her shoes to within a yard or so of the surface.
That was more than good enough for Peta. She released her grip and dropped onto the hard concrete surface.
The relief of feeling something solid beneath her gave way to a blast of pain as her right ankle buckled. Instinctively she rolled as she fell, and felt the piece slip from her bra and tumble away…
…to land at Frik’s feet…almost as if it wanted to be there.
He snatched it up and raised it above his head. The beam of light focused on the piece, making it look like he held a blue sun against the night sky.
“You gave me a bad moment there, Peta!” Frik said, shouting over the noise of the chopper. “I thought we were going to lose this!”
He ran toward the penthouse, brushing past Ray, McKendry, and Keene, who were hurrying forward to help Peta. She struggled to her feet. Her ankle blazed with gut-wrenching agony. She glanced up and saw that Arthur had full control of the chopper now. Removing the piece had worked. She gave him a thumbs-up. He nodded gravely through the bubble.
She turned back to the other men and pointed toward Frik’s retreating back. “Stop him!”
Her shout was lost in the wind and the engine noise, and she doubted McKendry and Keene would have been much use anyway. They stood frozen on the helipad, eyes fixed on the chopper, gaping at Arthur. She saw Keene grab Ray by his shirt and point to the chopper, shouting something she couldn’t hear, doubtless something about a dead man piloting an aircraft.
No help there. Ignoring the stab of pain each step sent up her leg, she hobbled after Frik
on her own. He had all of the pieces now. If she didn’t do something right away, he would assemble the artifact and take possession of it. Too many people had died because of his obsession. She couldn’t let him have control of it.
She stepped through the sliding glass door into the great room and stopped. Frik was nowhere to be seen. He had what he wanted. Could he already have gone?
A bright blue glow from the rear doorway answered her. She reached the lab and found Frik hovering over the four assembled pieces, guiding hers—the fifth and last—toward its position.
Her piece clicked into place. Immediately, the glow disappeared. The device sat cold and dark and apparently inert on the workbench, looking for all the world like nothing more than an oddly mottled Easter egg with an extra nodule on one side.
It was as if Frik had turned off a light.
He turned to face her. “What is this, Peta? Another goddamn fake?” He pulled over a metallic briefcase that sat open on the lab table. “I’ll just have to take this back to my own labs and figure it out.” He extended his scarred left hand toward the object.
She lunged, reaching for it with both hands. Though she did not yet fully understand why she felt so passionately about it, every instinct told her to stop Frik from removing the device. He grabbed her arms. She struggled to release herself from his grasp.
Suddenly, time seemed to slow down. She watched as if through a heat mirage as a ripple ran over the surface of the spheroid, followed by another and another, blurring the edges of the separate pieces. Fusing them into a single object.
At its center, a tiny spot of bright white began to glow, and then light was everywhere, blasting through Peta like a storm wind through a screen door, engulfing her in heat like the heart of the sun. Consuming her and everything around her.
43
When the white light faded and she began to recover her senses, Peta thought for a moment that the world had been turned on end. But the problem wasn’t the world. She was the one who was upside down, lying on the floor of Ray’s penthouse lab, staring up at the underside of the main table and the solid gray line of the ceiling beyond it.
Reoriented, she jumped to her feet. Her body responded at once, but she felt weightless, as if she had floated to a standing position in a flying dream.
On the table, the artifact had returned to a state she could only think of as dormant. It looked like nothing more than a chunk of rutilated quartz from somewhere in Arizona, or a pretty colored rock that some collector had picked up on Montserrat to remind himself that a sleeping volcano could look like any other mountain until it erupted.
“What the fuck?”
Frikkie’s left hand appeared on the far side of the table as he pulled himself up off the floor. Staring at it, Peta flashed on what it had looked like minutes ago as he’d reached for the artifact: severely scarred from the fire that had killed Paul Trujold. Now, it wasn’t scarred at all. The skin looked smooth and healthy.
No amount of plastic surgery or expert grafting could have achieved that result in so short a time, she thought, as Frik’s head came into view.
Immediately, she noticed that the scarring on his face was gone too, as was the damage to his eyelid, which had given him the permanent sleepy-eyed look of a myasthenic in the throes of crisis.
That was when it occurred to her that she was standing with her full weight on her twisted ankle, but there was no pain. Her side and back, which should have been covered with cuts, bruises, and abrasions from her ride on the runner of the helicopter, felt fine. If anything, she felt as if she had just come from an hour with a masseur. She reminded herself that she was a physician, a scientist. Perfect cures didn’t happen this way, in a split second. Miracles, as they said, took a little longer.
Reluctantly, she acknowledged the certainty that had been taking shape in her mind. It had to be the artifact. There simply was no other answer. They had both touched it; they were both made whole.
She shook her head at herself and her ridiculous willingness to believe in magic. Fact: Antibiotics and aspirin were miracles. Fact: People couldn’t walk on water without webbed feet.
Fact: That thing over there was not God any more than Frik was the devil.
In the throes of intellectualizing, Peta almost missed seeing Frik reach out to grab the device. Using a reserve of strength she didn’t know she had, she shoved him away from it. Taken by surprise, he staggered backward. His carotid pumped.
“Out of my way, bitch!”
Frik’s rage at Peta’s continued attempts to thwart him was palpable. She braced herself for his assault.
“I suggest you move away from the artifact, Frikkie.” Arthur stood framed in the doorway into the lab.
Frik stopped in his tracks. Very slowly, like someone in an Abbott and Costello movie, he swiveled around. It occurred to Peta that the Afrikaner had been so busy grabbing for the piece of the artifact she had dropped that he hadn’t taken the time to notice who was piloting the helicopter.
“I wish everyone would stop looking at me as if I were a ghost.” Arthur stepped into the lab. “If you want to find out how alive I am, why don’t you try to touch that device.”
“Why don’t you try to stop me.”
Frik took a step toward the table. Arthur moved to intercept him. The Afrikaner spun on his heel and charged at his old friend.
Caught off-guard by Frik’s change in direction, Arthur didn’t have time to brace himself. The two men tumbled, ass over elbows, through the door and back into the great room.
Recovering his feet, Frik grabbed Arthur by the jacket and lifted him into the air. As he rose, Arthur thrust out his leg, catching Frik in the groin just as Ray and McKendry and Keene charged in from the helipad.
Arthur bounced lightly to his feet. “Stay out of this. He’s mine.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Frikkie said in a stage whisper.
It had become obvious to Peta that an all-out physical battle between Arthur and Frik was inevitable. Arthur was taller, Frik broader. They weighed about the same, and since the miraculous actions of the artifact, both were fit and hugely strong. Without intervention, it would be anybody’s victory.
As if to prove her right, Frik rushed toward Arthur, who prepared to block the Afrikaner’s charge. Too late, Peta noticed that Frik had grabbed a vase filled with roses and baby’s breath and flung it ahead of himself. Arthur’s blocking punch shattered the crystal, sending water and flowers and splinters of glass flying everywhere. And blood. Arthur’s blood. Spurting from his knuckles.
That was enough for Peta. She wasn’t about to let Arthur be annihilated. The others could stand by out of respect for his wish to deal with Frik on his own terms; she couldn’t. There was no way that she could endure it—or live with herself—if he died again. This time for real. She dashed forward, ready to attack Frik.
And stopped.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose. She felt as if something had hit her at the base of her neck and a jolting shiver ran down her spine and up again.
Disoriented, she turned around.
The lab was bathed in an eerie glow, the way light looks from twenty feet underwater. She tried to call out to the men. No sound emerged. She faced them and tried again. This time her voice rang out loud and clear, but the fight claimed their full attention.
Pressing his advantage, Frik grabbed Arthur by the shoulders and spun, hurling his former friend over a plush leather chair and into an antique coffee table. He threw the chair out of the way and dove. Arthur was ready. Catching Frik with his feet, he propelled him through the air, to land with a thud by the sliding glass doors to the helipad.
With a handspring, Arthur was back on his feet, running toward his opponent. As Frik struggled to stand, Arthur kicked him in the chest, sending him crashing through the closed half of the glass door.
“That one’s for Simon,” Arthur yelled.
Cheering, Keene and Ray and McKendry moved toward the helipad. Spurred on by their su
pport, Arthur started forward. Through the commotion and the shattered glass, Peta could see Frikkie roll to his knees and come up throwing something. The Grenadian shielded himself from a shower of pebble-sized chunks of glass.
Frik, backing up onto the wide roof, motioned for Arthur to come and get him.
Hoping that the other three men would have the sense to make sure the right man won, Peta started after them. Their attention was focused on Arthur and Frikkie, rolling near the low parapet at the edge of the roof, first one on top, then the other.
She looked back into the lab.
The artifact had transformed into a single brilliant, shapeless white mass. She saw what might be the outline of a face in the glow as the object left the table and began to float, infinitely slowly, toward the tall ceiling. The image of the strange mural in the undersea cave rose in her mind. Was this what the painter had been drawing?
Midway between the table and the ceiling, the device ceased its motion and hovered.
The lights in the suite flickered and went out, leaving only the green glow of emergency fluorescents. In the moment before their screens popped like balloons pricked by a dozen pins, she saw on the security monitors that downstairs in the casino, machines were wildly spewing out money.
Glancing to the side through Ray’s wall of glass, Peta watched the city lights of Las Vegas blink out. A wave of black washed over the neon city, leaving Las Vegas Boulevard in darkness. An instant later, almost as if it had been timed, fountains of sparkling red and orange and yellow shot from the roofs of the other casinos, starting from the southern end of the strip at Mandalay Bay, rushing toward the Daredevil Casino and beyond.
In homage to the midnight hour and the start of 2001—the true millennium—the nine minutes of planned fireworks crackled and flashed and boomed from the Strip’s megahotels.
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