Black Scorpion

by Jon Land

  Sterling reached the top deck to find his feeble father thrashing against two attendants struggling to keep him in his chair. He got that way once in a while, a brief moment of lucidity giving way to a violent fit that left him trying to escape the bonds of his chair to chase down some memory captured as a snapshot by his brain, which had pretty much turned to Jell-O. Doctors were able to slow the progressive effects left by his third stroke just enough to let Sterling keep him alive.

  “Dad!” Sterling called, as he approached. “Dad!’

  The old man’s eyes showed no sign of recognition when he grasped his father at the shoulders, the attendants backing off to let Sterling restrain him alone.

  “Dad,” he said, softer.

  The old man finally looked his way, toward a voice instead of a face, still showing no sign he knew it was his son standing before him.

  “Calm down, Dad, calm down.”

  Sterling wondered what the old man might’ve been thinking during these fits. Perhaps reliving a moment from the war, or an especially important speech on the Senate floor, or just some simple task left undone from a decade before marking the last time he’d been lucid.

  “How’s it feel to be totally dependent on me?” Sterling asked, crouching before his father.

  Harold Sterling thrashed in his chair some more, what might have been a brief blip of recognition flashing in his gaze as drool flecked out both sides of his mouth.

  “I’m glad that you’re here, because I can show you how wrong you were about me. I was the black sheep, the pariah, the bane of your existence not worthy of the Sterling legacy. You disowned me, but now I own you. Everything that happens in your life is at my behest. And here’s the kicker.”

  One of the white-jacketed attendants returned just long enough to hand Sterling a child’s sippy cup full of water, and Sterling eased the straw against his father’s lips. The old man opened his mouth and sucked it in, slurping up the contents so fast that water began to dribble down his chin to mix with the drool.

  “I know I’m not in your will. I know how much you would’ve enjoyed sticking that in my face. How pawning off the family fortune to charities would be the ultimate fuck you. But it isn’t. The ultimate fuck you is me keeping you alive as long as I can to deny you that satisfaction, while all your care eats up the money. I hope somewhere inside you that makes you suffer even more.”

  Sterling watched his assistant approaching, extending a satellite phone toward him.

  “It’s him,” the assistant said, a tremor of fear clear in his voice.

  Sterling took the phone in his grasp and moved to the rail, gazing up into the beautiful Mediterranean sun.

  “Hello, my friend.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  Naomi tried not to look taken aback. Instead, she rose and walked around her desk, taking the chair behind it.

  “I’m guessing you must enjoy your current posting, rank, and pay grade, Agent,” she told Slocumb.

  “Excuse me?”

  Naomi held his stare. “I understand this quest of yours has attracted plenty of attention here in Vegas, at the supervisory office in Los Angeles, and even in Washington.”

  “Really? And how would you know that?”

  “I guess you can call it common knowledge. So is the fact that you call Mr. Tiranno your ‘Wop’ Whale, an allusion to Moby Dick, I imagine. I suppose that makes you Ahab, Agent.”

  “Pierre Faustin was assigned to Interpol’s Violent Crimes Division,” he said, sounding a bit more defensive. “You’ve heard of that, I assume.”

  Naomi had, of course, but couldn’t figure out where Slocumb was going with this. “They specialize in international criminal apprehension, drug interdiction, and human trafficking—anything that moves across international borders with relative impunity.”

  “So what do you think brought a man like Faustin to Las Vegas and the Seven Sins?”

  “Maybe he was on vacation. Try the tables, maybe take in a show. Hopefully, he wasn’t a fan of Durado Segura.”

  “Or of Michael Tiranno, Ms. Burns. When I discussed Faustin’s career, notice I used the past tense. That’s because Pierre Faustin, the man who registered here two nights ago as Edward Devereaux, was suspended from duty six months back and later resigned.”

  “Interesting.”

  Slocumb crossed his legs. “What’s really interesting is he was fired for cause.”

  “What cause might that be?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not authorized to reveal the specifics, Ms. Burns, other than to say his termination was due to an investigation he insisted on continuing to follow up against the orders of his superiors.”

  “And this was for the Violent Crimes Division.”

  “Presumably.”

  Naomi hesitated, trying to find her bearings in Slocumb’s barrage of innuendo. “Am I to presume that it’s your belief Michael Tiranno is somehow a part of this investigation Pierre Faustin, aka Edward Devereaux, couldn’t let go of?”

  “You sound like a lawyer now, Ms. Burns.”

  “It’s how I respond when baseless allegations are lodged against my employer.”

  “You’re the one who suggested the connection, not me.”

  “It was a question, Mr. Slocumb, and I’m still waiting for an answer.”

  Slocumb took a deep breath. Naomi had long been familiar with how lawyers reacted in court when they needed to buy a few moments to collect their thoughts and prepare their next line of attack. Obviously Slocumb was, too.

  “A lot of beautiful women work at the Seven Sins, Ms. Burns,” he said suddenly, “don’t they?”

  “We’re hardly alone in Vegas in that respect.”

  “They come and go, yes? A great deal of turnover.”

  “The Seven Sins enjoys the least of any resort and casino on the Strip.”

  “I commend you and Mr. Tiranno for that,” Slocumb told her. “But, tell me, have any of the girls employed here gone missing recently, say in the past few months?”

  “I’m not sure I understand your question.”

  “Then let me be more specific. Have any participants in your Elysium Cirque du Soleil show suddenly needed to be replaced without explanation in that time frame?”

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  “But you could find out. And if I’d posed the same question to him, would Michael Tiranno’s answer have been the same as yours?”

  “What are you alleging here exactly, Agent Slocumb? And what does any of this have to do with Pierre Faustin’s presence at the Seven Sins?”

  “We could assume the connection lies in an international investigation Faustin was supervising under the radar.”

  “Then you choose to dismiss the fact that Faustin was fired for cause, that he wasn’t working in any capacity for Interpol when he came here, that he registered under an assumed name. I’d say that throws his credibility into serious question.”

  “Challenging an investigator’s credibility is a defensive reaction, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, if this Faustin, or Devereaux, was still an investigator. We’re dealing in supposition here, not facts.”

  Slocumb appeared to be beaming, enjoying a rare moment of seeming to hold the upper hand. “Well, Faustin’s dying inside the Seven Sins, and the bizarre circumstances surrounding his murder, aren’t supposition at all.”

  “Murder, Agent?”

  “Did I say ‘murder’? My apologies, Ms. Burns. I meant to say ‘death.’ Surely you acknowledge a man dying in a hotel owned by the man he came here to investigate is beyond coincidence.”

  “Can you definitively confirm that this investigation Faustin was conducting even involved Mr. Tiranno?”

  “Like I said, I’m not—”

  “—authorized to reveal the specifics. Yes, I remember, Agent Slocumb.”

  Slocumb leaned forward to shrink the distance between them. “Look, Counselor, we both know Michael Tiranno blew up the former Maximus Cas
ino on the eve of its opening and built the Seven Sins atop its ashes. Oh, and did I forget to mention he also buried his archenemy, the casino mogul Max Price, in those millions of tons of debris?”

  “You never forget to mention that, Agent.”

  “Now let me tell you something else. I think your boss is frustrated by the old boys’ club colluding to make sure he can’t expand his brand in Vegas. I think the Gaming Control Board sniffing around his financial difficulties and irregularities is really pissing him off. I think the cost overruns related to Mr. Tiranno’s obsession with completing this Forbidden City of his on the top floors of this monstrosity you call a hotel is driving him toward bankruptcy. And if he happened to find out an Interpol agent had information that could complicate things even further…”

  “Former Interpol agent,” Naomi corrected quickly.

  “… I think he may have reacted preemptively.”

  “Preemptively?”

  “Let me put this another way, Ms. Burns. To your knowledge, did Mr. Tiranno have any contact with the man registered here as Edward Devereaux?”

  “As I’ve already said, not besides signing an autograph for the man in our souvenir book. Mr. Tiranno probably signs more than a dozen of those a day.”

  “But yesterday eleven of those who got his autograph managed to stay alive, didn’t they?” Slocumb’s expression remained flat and intense at the same time, a man playing with the house’s money. “Does the name Amanda Johansen ring any bells?”

  “Not to me.”

  “She was the player in your Elysium show I just mentioned. She disappeared six weeks ago, last seen here at the end of her shift. A missing persons report was filed by her roommate after she never returned from a sudden vacation she took with a very wealthy man she told the roommate she was having an affair with, and her cell phone went unanswered.”

  Naomi continued to hold Slocumb’s gaze when he paused, hating the fact he’d caught her off guard.

  “Amanda Johansen was found murdered in Ankara, Turkey two weeks ago,” Slocumb resumed, when Naomi remained silent. “She was only recently identified with the help of DNA samples, thanks to a certain former Interpol agent who was following up another investigation.”

  Naomi rose from her chair. “Anything else, Agent?”

  “Oh, yes. Did I forget to mention Amanda was pregnant?”

  FORTY-FIVE

  RETEZAT MOUNTAINS, TRANSYLVANIA

  Raven Khan walked around the grounds at the foot of the Retezat Mountains that alternated between tall grass colored a vibrant green and rock-strewn gravel. The bulk of the gravel was packed down in the area around the unearthed remains of some archaeological find now left, along with everything else, abandoned to the wind.

  She knew a sanitized scene when she saw one, mostly because she had been party to sanitizing plenty herself. And this reeked of just that.

  There were no tents, no trash bins or bags, not even any darker, flatter patches of ground indicative of a standard-size archaeological dig team settling down for a while. There was nothing, but in nothing there were indications of plenty.

  According to the intelligence she’d gathered, the archaeological dig that had attracted the interest of the same shadowy figure behind the human cargo of the Lucretia Maru had been fully operational just two days ago. While it was certainly possible they’d pulled up stakes in the forty-eight hours since, it seemed inconceivable they wouldn’t have left some trace of their presence behind. More likely somebody had cleaned up after them.

  Further scrutiny of the grounds in what she estimated would have been closer to the center of their camp revealed a few stray expended bullet shells cloaked by stones and ground debris. That area must’ve been washed of blood and swept of such shells, but a few had clearly escaped the sweep. And she found additional evidence of gunfire, lots of it, in chipped portions of tree bark that bore the distinctive signature of bullets of a caliber normally associated with assault weapons.

  Raven felt she was standing on the scene of a massacre. She couldn’t say how she knew this; perhaps it was true that so much violence leaves its own imprint on the air, like at the sites of famous historical battles. She’d felt something amiss even before she uncovered the shells or noticed the unfinished condition of the uncovered dig. She’d felt it as soon as she approached the area after making sure her Land Rover was hidden from view under the cover of the trees at the foot of the mountain range.

  Suddenly she saw a cloud of dust lifting into the air ahead of a sedan speeding down the same hard-packed dirt road she’d taken to get here. A driver and two passengers, Raven noted, the man in charge likely to be the one in the back. After their car ground to a dust-churning stop, the three men emerged, all wearing the uniform of the Romanian police, or Poliţia Română, the country’s central unit of law enforcement. The driver and passenger remained by the car while the third, a captain judging by the bars on his uniform, headed off to inspect the grounds by himself. Hands clasped behind his back, wearing shoes ill-suited for this purpose, and carrying no weapon she could see.

  Raven settled back behind the cover of some brush and waited for him to draw farther away from his two guards.

  * * *

  Raven noticed the young Romanian police captain’s uniform was untouched by the swirling dirt when she came at him from the rear, hand looped around his neck as she pressed her pistol into his spine. Raven felt him stiffen, eyes lurching back toward the men who’d accompanied him.

  “You can’t see them because they’re in the trunk,” she told the man in English. “You understand me?”

  “I speak English,” the captain said, nodding fearfully.

  “Don’t worry, they’re still alive. Now turn around.”

  The captain did.

  “I’m not going to ask your name or tell you mine. You want to report the fact that a woman incapacitated your guards and snuck up on you, be my guest. You see what I’m getting at?”

  The man nodded, relaxing slightly.

  “I’m not going to kill you or your men, unless you leave me no choice. Just answer my questions, starting with what you’re doing here.”

  “A report was filed,” the captain said. He looked young, still in his twenties with rosy cheeks and hair that rode his scalp like a bowl.

  “By who? About what?”

  “By the owners of the dig claiming they’d lost contact with their archaeological team. About the fact they’d received a report that made them fear something very bad had happened.”

  “Then you’ll want to bring these back to your superiors,” Raven said, extending the trio of spent shells she’d found. “Who sent you here?”

  “A request from the Ministry of Culture.”

  Raven gazed about the empty expanse of land. “And does the Ministry of Culture always dispatch the Poliţia Română for such things?”

  “The dig was funded by a powerful American foundation,” the captain said, by way of explanation.

  “Then you can let this foundation know that its dig team is dead or taken, every one of them probably.”

  The young man looked down at the shells he was now holding, and let them rattle about in his hand. He seemed to quiver in the breeze, looking as if it might spill him over. Started to take a deep breath, then abandoned the effort halfway though.

  “I found two sets of tracks leading off toward the edge of the mountains,” Raven continued, “heading west. Is there a town or village in that direction?”

  “Yes,” the captain nodded. “Vadja. Gypsies mostly, the kind of folk who keep to themselves. We maintain a police post there. It’s where I’m headed next.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the post hasn’t reported in for two days.”

  “One more question before you can be on your way. What was the name of this American foundation that was responsible for the dig?”

  He pulled a piece of paper with some notes hastily scrawled on it from his pocket, squinting as if having trouble read
ing his own writing.

  “T-G-H-F,” the captain said, finally. “Tyrant Global Historical Foundation.”

  Now it was Raven Khan who quivered.

  FORTY-SIX

  THE BOEING 737

  “It’s not like you to leave something unfinished, Alexander,” Michael said, as the Boeing descended for London’s Heathrow Airport.

  “Michael?”

  “Transylvania. I saw the look on your face back in Vegas when we were discussing the bar where Scarlett called from.”

  Alexander continued to stare into the emptiness beyond. “I’ve heard things,” he said finally.

  “Things? Could you be a bit more explicit?”

  “Rumors, legends, about an all-powerful criminal organization that holds much of Romania, much of Eastern Europe, in the grip of fear. It’s run by a man who’s never been identified, never named, never even been seen.”

  “Does this man have a name?” Michael asked.

  “The same one his organization is known by,” Alexander told him, turning from the window. “Black Scorpion.”

  * * *

  The Boeing landed at Heathrow, where they were to board a smaller jet arranged by one of Alexander’s most trusted contacts that would keep the remainder of their journey as cloaked as possible.

  While waiting for the smaller jet to be prepped, Michael climbed into a waiting limousine which took him and Alexander, as planned, to the Baglioni Hotel thirty minutes from Heathrow. He registered for three nights in a suite that had been booked for him. Then, after lingering in the lobby just long enough to make sure the security cameras caught him, he and Alexander used a side exit where a rental sedan was parked with the keys on the visor. Alexander drove them back to the airport, keeping to the speed limit to avoid any police interference. Once back at Heathrow they boarded not the Boeing, but a much smaller Cessna Citation jet.