by Jon Land
“This is what we know, Michael,” Naomi Burns reported as soon as she spotted him enter, having distilled the most vital information from the constant flow of reports coming in. “All of Las Vegas was affected, including the control tower at McCarran. There were reports of a crash that was just confirmed, but details remain sketchy. This blackout took out cellular service as well and even our security guards’ backup walkie-talkies stopped working, along with the backup power system.”
“What do we know about the breach?”
“The Daring Sea suite where it occurred,” she informed him, “was registered to a man named Edward Devereaux. He checked in last night while you were getting acquainted with Durado Segura. Nothing stands out as irregular in his registration information at this point, other than the fact that he paid with a cash deposit of five thousand dollars.”
Meanwhile, emergency procedure was to immediately evacuate all levels of the Daring Sea suites until such time it could be confirmed the breach was contained and no further danger existed. Michael couldn’t count the number of people who’d told him he was crazy for even considering the construction of underwater lodging within a marine environment. As a result, those Daring Sea suites were built with so many redundant protocols and safeguards as to be as safe, if not safer, than ordinary aboveground rooms. Among these protocols was the fact that each suite was sealed as tight as a submarine, so if the glass did somehow crack or rupture the entire underwater structure wouldn’t flood, and any damage could be contained to that single suite. The glass itself was eleven inches thick; three even, separate layers finished on both sides with a special clear polymer. Michael had ordered his engineers to go beyond even what was required of him by state and city building officials who had advanced their own stringent demands to discourage him from the effort in the first place.
The glass walls of the Daring Sea suites had endured every test imaginable from high-powered bullets to explosions mimicking a terrorist attack. Understandably, that left Michael uneasy over what could have possibly caused an actual breach in a facility that had suffered not so much as a crack or fissure in any of its glass in its entire history of operation.
The investigation into the source had already begun by the time he and Alexander reached the control room, with the lowering of a small robotic submersible into the Daring Sea to provide a firsthand view of the suite in question.
“The breach occurred on sub-level four, suite number forty-one.” Naomi turned back toward the wide screen monitor following the submersible’s descent. “Robbie should be coming up on it now.”
“Robbie” was the resort’s pet name for the submersible, after the famed robot from old movies and television shows.
“Here we go,” said Naomi, as Robbie approached what looked like an empty chasm amid an otherwise intact bank of individual glass walls so wondrously constructed as to appear to be a single sheet.
“Do we have an exact time for the breach?”
“No, Michael,” Naomi told him, “but it was shortly after the blackout struck, almost immediately, that we know for sure.”
Michael looked toward Alexander, the two of them sharing the same thought.
The pressure resulting from even a minor breach in the glass on its own would be enough to rupture the entire wall, but not right away. It would take time, certainly enough time for Edward Devereaux to safely flee and return to the surface either by elevator, if they were still working, or up one of the myriad of emergency stairwells. That indicated the breach might have been caused by a catastrophic event that had ruptured all the glass in a single moment, something that seemed unlikely at best.
“No evidence of a blast or explosion?” Michael said, wondering, when Robbie came up on the missing glass wall.
“No signature I can see, whatsoever,” Alexander told him. “This was no bomb, Michael, no terrorist attack.”
They all continued to watch as Robbie steered toward the breach and entered the Daring Sea suite to a surreal scene of chairs, pillows, magazines, clothes, luggage, a Bose Wave radio, lamps with their cords still connected to the wall sockets, and a laptop all floating in the water.
“Indications are,” said a technician viewing the screen with them, “that the victim either swam or floated into the Daring Sea where the sharks found him. But that doesn’t explain their erratic behavior.” He turned to look toward Michael. “I watch them every day and I’ve never seen them act this frenzied, not even close.”
“Do we know anything else about the victim, Naomi?” Michael asked.
“Just the usual stuff on the registration form. He listed his occupation as sales and left an address in France.”
“Sounds routine.”
“Maybe not,” Naomi told him. “In addition to Devereaux paying in cash, the clerk at the VIP desk remembers him writing down an address, then tearing up the form and requesting a new one.”
“As if, what, he’d forgotten it?”
“I don’t know, Michael. It just struck her as strange. We just learned that the business number he left in Paris doesn’t exist. And the residential address he gave us on the replacement form turned out to be a water treatment facility.”
“Normally that would be funny,” Alexander noted.
Michael shot him a look. “Not tonight.”
“There’s something else interesting,” Naomi noted. “As his preferred charity, Devereaux chose the International Center of Missing Persons and Exploited Children.”
“Do we have a picture?”
Naomi touched a button on the keyboard before her and a grainy shot captured of Edward Devereaux at the VIP registration desk upon check-in filled the screen.
“Wait, I recognize that man,” Michael said. “I signed a Seven Sins souvenir book for him just before the blackout.”
Michael felt Alexander grasp his arm firmly. “The Las Vegas police want to see you.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes, the FBI is on the way.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
RETEZAT MOUNTAINS, TRANSYLVANIA
Ilie led Scarlett along the lower line of mountains, clinging to the protective shroud of the woods at their base while never letting go of her hand. The clamminess of the late morning had given way to a day warm and breezy beneath a sun rising high in a clear sky. Its warmth baked the sweat soaking through Scarlett’s shirt, gluing it to her flesh. Her cargo pants were even worse, sodden with so much perspiration the heavy cotton and polyester material seemed to squish as she moved.
It felt surreal, unreal. Her mouth was bone dry but felt coppery. And she smelled blood, too, as if residue of the massacre were somehow clinging to her nostrils. She chased the memory of the awful screams from her ears, knowing she was lucky to be alive. The boy, too.
Could it be the remains of the ancient manuscript the gunmen were after?
The possibility alone left Scarlett trembling. She never should’ve inspected it on site, should’ve kept its existence an utter secret and smuggled it out of the country somehow. That meant the responsibility for the deaths of her entire team may have rested, partially at least, with her.
Oh God …
Right now Scarlett could only focus on reaching the town of Vadja to call for help. Justice had to be done. Rampant corruption or not, even Romanian officials would respond appropriately to a mass murder.
Faster, she signed to Ilie, faster.
TWENTY-NINE
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
Needing to recharge his mind after his lengthy interview with the police, Michael headed for his private dojo next to the bubble glass office from which he worked at the bottom of the Daring Sea. He loved training with Alexander in hand-to-hand combat and all manner of weaponry, especially knives, while completely surrounded by sharks. His favorite moments were when one of his sharks seemed to hover outside the thick glass enclosing the five-thousand-foot glass-enclosed space watching. Occasionally the shark would veer and shoot away as if shot by a cannon, only for Michael to see
Assassino prowling around the glass in its place, sometimes nuzzling it with his snout. Michael enjoyed nothing more than meeting Assassino’s eyes, the big fish in those moments seeming to grasp what he was doing.
Today a fight between one of his other great whites and a tiger shark over the remnants of a side of beef dominated the action beyond the glass. The two monsters moving with a grace and agility developed over millions of years of evolution that itself looked terrifying and natural at the same time. Everything fluid, no wasted motion whatsoever. Man could learn a lot from them.
After completing his hand-to-hand and knife combat training with Alexander, Michael paused atop the straw tatami mats.
“This is just the beginning,” he said, after Alexander tossed him a towel. Directly to his rear stood a canvas-covered makiwara board that looked like an archery target from his knife throwing practice. “But you know that already, don’t you, Alexander?”
His interview with the police had been detailed, but ultimately unproductive. It was clear they had no idea what had shut off all the power for those five minutes. The entire Strip and surrounding area had gone dark. They had no suspects. They probed Michael for some connection to the death of Edward Devereaux which, in itself, was hardly surprising given that Michael’s seemed to be the first name that came to mind whenever something unusual happened anywhere in the city. This time the difference lay in the detectives’ probative questions about the hotel itself and how a death like this could possibly have happened. Any connection to the greater blackout suggested possible murder, while a mere random occurrence suggested a tragic event linked to some structural flaw in the design of the Daring Sea suites. And, as a precaution, the FBI had ordered all those suites closed until further notice, although Michael had steadfastly refused their overtures to shutter the entire hotel.
None of which boded well for Michael, the Seven Sins Resort and Casino, or Tyrant Global. The FBI decided not to interview him until tomorrow, when Michael’s old friend Special Agent Del Slocumb promised to handle the chore himself.
He continued to look toward Alexander, as a huge chunk of meat descended from the Red Water feeding time for the sharks above. Snatched up by Assassino, himself, in a wild flurry that scattered the rest of the sharks.
“There’s a predator out there,” Michael told Alexander, “and we’re the prey.”
PART THREE
THE DEVIL
If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.
Genghis Khan
THIRTY
VADJA, ROMANIA
The convoy of massive black Range Rover SUVs, their windows blackened, thumped down the flattened earth road like steel monsters from a far-off future. It seemed to stretch forever, a dust storm kicked up in the convoy’s wake. A road that could for days be traveled only by single flatbed trucks lugging loads from farm to market seemed to rebel against their presence, slowing their approach to the town center with pits and potholes forged by the last storm and the one before that.
At the first sign of their presence, Scarlett and Ilie had veered farther up through the hillside that steepened appreciably as they drew closer to the actual mountain range itself. Scarlett assumed the vehicles had taken one of several major spurs that ran off the Transfagarasan Highway to reach such an out-of-the-way spot settled by gypsies years before, atop land to which no one else had laid claim.
She had mixed a bit with the villagers and enjoyed hearing tales of their rich history that had been waylaid in large part by the efforts of former communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu to end the roaming that had for so long defined their lifestyle. So the gypsies who’d managed to survive the Nazi onslaught had become virtual prisoners placed, for no better alternative, in fixed locations that could be best described as internment camps that replaced their traditions with strict rules and regulations often brutally enforced.
While things had greatly improved for their people after communism’s fall, many of the residents of Vadja complained to Scarlett about the loss of the true old ways. Roaming the countryside had become akin to homelessness and poverty, leading many of what had once been called tribes to settle in villages like this where they could keep their memories and live as they saw fit.
As a result, to the occupants of those Range Rovers, the village of Vadja in Romania’s Transylvanian region must have looked plucked from another time. The central square was little more than a tight cluster of clapboard buildings with peaked roofs, comprising both homes and small businesses that served as a gathering point for the once migratory residents. They walked around socializing, enjoying a monthly community lunch, a long tradition kept up now to keep hold of as many of the old ways and spirit amid modern times as possible. Even the larger homes dotting the landscape were uniform in design, square with central chimneys and simple entryways fronted by heavy wooden porticos layered with straw matting to catch the dirt and manure laden within the grooves of the men’s work boots. Besides the farm store, combination restaurant and market, old church building, and modest town hall, no structure stood out amid the barns and storage sheds that froze the village in time.
From her perch with Ilie just short of the start of the steep mountain grade, Scarlett saw a dust cloud announce the convoy’s presence well before it entered the central square. At the final curve, the ten black Range Rovers seemed to emerge out of nowhere, as if conjured by some mystic or magician, looking as foreign here as spaceships in a modern city. Even more anomalous was the presence of an old blue bus at the convoy’s rear.
A pair of Romanian national police officers armed only with pistols, the detail assigned to Vadja, emerged from a small shack and approached the vehicles as they ground to a halt in eerie synchronicity. A small crowd of residents had gathered and the officers sifted their way through them, stopping just short of drawing their weapons when the doors to the Range Rovers flew open.
Scarlett stood alongside Ilie in a shroud of brush, watching from the hillside as upward of sixty men spilled out fast and hard from behind the Range Rovers’ blackened windows, brandishing a mix of submachine guns and assault rifles either slung from their shoulders or clutched in their grasp. All wore tight black, form-fitting masks, stitched with thick weaves of white in the pattern of a skull to make them appear like an army of the walking dead. The police officers held their hands forward in a conciliatory fashion, addressing the first gunmen to emerge when the set immediately behind those viciously gunned the officers down. Their bodies crumpled to the dusty town square paved with thin gravel, and the gunmen stepped over them as they advanced into the gathering crowd that collectively shrank back in fear.
Those who turned to flee were swiftly caught, the gunmen sweeping their legs out with blows from the butts of their assault rifles. Others who’d emerged from the Range Rovers paid the gathered townspeople no heed at all, fanning out to search the nearest of the buildings and surrounding homes, while the next wave out did their part to herd the curious and frightened townspeople into a tight cluster in the center of the square.
A third phalanx of gunmen rushed for the homes that dotted the village’s perimeter and outskirts. This while a dozen men kept their weapons trained on the increasing numbers being gathered in the town square itself, a number of the villagers not shy about voicing their protests. For the oldest among them, this brought back memories of the persecution they’d suffered under the communists, their reaction understandably indignant, while whatever urge to resist they might have felt was tempered by the bodies of the two police officers now lying atop widening pools of blood.
Though it was daytime, the sky had turned unusually dark, filled with thick black clouds that had begun to sprinkle raindrops instead of unleashing torrents of water from the sky. As if the convoy had somehow dragged the darkness here with them and would take it away again once they departed.
Some of the men who’d dispersed from the vehicles returned to the square shoving stray residents, including
the elderly and infirm, ahead of them. Another group continued the process of going door-to-door and breaking into any building that was locked, collecting those residents by any means necessary to shepherd them into the square. Others returned with several dozen grade-school-age children in tow. They ranged from six or seven years old to several boys and girls in their mid-teens.
With the village deemed “cleared,” four of the gunmen took up posts on either side of the SUV centered in the ten-vehicle convoy. Then more armed men fanned out through the crowd, their positions chosen strategically to keep all the villagers in their sights and to avoid catching each other in a cross fire should the need arise to let loose with their weapons.
The rain picked up slightly, the sky seeming darken even more, while the villagers watched a rear door of the center SUV opening to allow a figure to emerge. He was garbed entirely in black, from his gloved hands to his shoes and long coat that scraped across the ground. But what the residents of Vadja noticed more anything else was a dangling, shroud-like black veil draped over the figure’s head to conceal his face.
A second figure trailed him out the open door, the SUV rocking on its springs as if grateful to be relieved of his vast bulk. Virtually all of that bulk was muscle, showcased by a military-style jacket that fit his massive frame like a glove, only half of his face covered by a mask. The massive figure had blond hair slicked back to ride his scalp tightly. Standing as close to seven feet as six made his frame seem even more laden with rippling muscle. All told, a terrifying and impossible sight that left the villagers gawking.