by Jon Land
“It’s just you and me,” Michael told him. “I would’ve invited you out to breakfast, but since I’ve been barred from my place of business, I don’t know when my next paycheck’s coming.”
“What do you want, Tiranno?”
Michael dangled the Lamgorghini’s keys. “Let’s go for a ride.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s time we had a talk, you and me.”
Slocumb stiffened again. “I’m afraid I can’t—”
“It’s in your best interests. And…” Michael tossed him the keys, Slocumb snatching them cleanly out of the air. “… you can drive.”
* * *
Slocumb drove slowly and clumsily at first, having trouble getting used to having the paddle shifters on the steering wheel.
“That’s why you want to have your hands in the ten and two positions, instead of the nine and three,” Michael instructed. “Remember, there’s no clutch. You only need one foot to drive, just like an automatic transmission. But keep your left foot on the rest to maintain your balance at high speeds. Welcome aboard the Tyrant Class model, the only one currently in existence. Isn’t that right, Angel?” he said, words aimed at the touch screen that controlled virtually everything in the car.
“Yes, Michael, it is,” a sultry female voice returned.
“Say hello to Agent Slocumb, Angel.”
“Hello, asshole.”
“Angel,” Michael scoffed playfully, “you should be ashamed of yourself.”
“I couldn’t help it, Michael.”
“Very funny,” Slocumb snickered, still trying to familiarize himself with the controls. He adjusted his hands and Michael watched his fingers tighten, looking uncomfortable. “How fast can this thing actually go?”
“Two hundred miles per hour, give or take. I’ve driven the track at those speeds but the same principles with this baby apply when it comes to braking for a corner on regular roads. What you want to do, Agent, is brake hard initially and then pull off gradually, rather then depressing the pedal slowly. If the strength of the brake was on a scale from one to ten, with ten being the strongest, you want to start at ten and get to three before you even start to turn the steering wheel.”
“Wow,” Slocumb said, trying just that at the next street.
“See, we both love a great ride. We both appreciate what true power can yield.”
Slocumb seemed too focused on the road to respond.
“I think you’re as ambitious as I am, Agent, in your own way. I think you latched on to me to further your career and now you can’t let go even though the weight of this is bringing you down. What if I could give you something bigger, something that would make you famous in the annals of law enforcement? I’m talking book deals, talk shows. Naomi told me you and she met at the Mob Museum. Well, you listen to what I have to say and you’ll end up with your own exhibit, bigger than Estes Kefauver or Elliot Ness ever dreamed of being. I’ll really miss our friendly little chats once you get promoted to Special Agent in Charge of a big office, maybe even an assistant director in Washington.”
Slocumb continued to keep his gaze fixed forward out the windshield, never even turning Michael’s way. “I need to advise you that anything you say to me can and will be used against you in a court of law.”
Michael rolled his eyes. “Save the speech for true criminals, Agent. We’re just having a friendly conversation.” He pointed ahead of them. “Take that ramp up there for the freeway and open her up a bit. Speed limit’s seventy-five, Agent, but I don’t suppose I need to remind you of that.”
* * *
Slocumb eased onto the ramp accessing the freeway. The Lamborghini rumbled on, straining a bit like a thoroughbred being held back down the stretch. Welcoming the burst of acceleration that followed Slocumb’s entry into the climbing lane as he merged with traffic by flying past all of it in an effortless burst.
“Two words,” Michael said, once Slocumb was neatly settled in the right lane doing sixty, the Lamborghini bucking as if begging for more. “Black Scorpion.”
Slocumb looked his way briefly, a combination of recognition and disbelief flashing in his eyes. “Nasty bastards from what I’ve heard. But you might as well have said ‘boogeyman.’ And it’s out of my jurisdiction anyway. They don’t operate in the U.S.”
“Wrong again, Agent. It was the boogeyman who kidnapped Amanda Johansen. The man who arranged it all is waiting to have a talk with you and anyone else you want to bring in. Not too many, since you don’t want somebody else getting the credit for the bust that will allow you to write your own ticket. This man will confirm everything I’m saying is true. He can’t wait to talk to you.”
“How’s that exactly?”
“Let’s just say he found God and wants to clear his conscience. And you don’t have to just take his word for it, Agent, because it turns out the chief of the Las Vegas police department is on the boogeyman’s payroll, among other officials I’m sure you’ll want to have a friendly little conversation with.”
Slocumb looked across the seat again, warily, as if expecting Michael to go on and hoping he wouldn’t. “Say I was interested.”
“What if I had a list of where Black Scorpion’s largest cells were headquartered across the United States, as well as Europe, the Middle East, South America, Asia, Russia, and beyond?” Michael told him, thinking of his conversation with Raven Khan the previous night. “Imagine being celebrated as the hero who brought down the world’s largest criminal organization, now operating freely right here in the homeland. Who better to coordinate the international effort to take them down than the FBI? You are the FBI, aren’t you?”
Slocumb’s eyes narrowed. “Which begs the question, how do you know all this?”
“Amanda Johansen worked for me. Enough said?”
“No, not even close.”
“Then pull the car over and get out. Angel will call you a cab. Won’t you, Angel?”
“Dialing now, Michael.”
“Hold on,” Slocumb blared toward the screen.
“Yes, asshole.”
He snickered again but didn’t pull over. “If you’re wrong, or setting me up, I’ll bury you, Tiranno.”
“If I’m wrong, Agent, I’ll give you the shovel.”
NINETY-EIGHT
HOIA-BACIU FOREST, ROMANIA
Vladimir Dracu felt the scorpion venom pulsing through his veins, mixing with his blood to fight back the disease that otherwise would have consumed him long ago. He had ordered Armura to remain outside his quarters in the mountain fortress so he might be alone with his thoughts.
Right now, the indescribable agony slowly ebbed to be replaced by a soothing warmth indicative of the venom laying waste to the pestilence that was turning his body against itself. Feeling the euphoria beginning to take hold, Dracu studied his priceless collection of paintings. No matter how many times he looked at them, he always saw something he’d never noticed before. Yet they never changed, remaining forever frozen in time just as he felt the venom did for him. His appearance had remained the same for twenty years now, the scorpion venom seemingly having stopped aging in its tracks along with the disease that would still ultimately kill him.
But who knew when now, who knew anything like that for sure? The venom could halt the process, though do nothing to reverse the ravaging effects the disease had already produced. Often he’d watched his veins grow flush with dark color after a sting, knowing that the pain was soon to follow and would remain until the color receded. Maybe someday it wouldn’t recede. Maybe someday it would cling to his veins and mark his final undoing before the wretched disease could finish its work.
Or maybe there was something out there that could prolong, even assure, his survival indefinitely. Something currently in the possession of his half brother.
He looked up and suddenly, amid the euphoria seizing him, the paintings spread about the walls didn’t look as they normally did, the light striking them differently for some reason in that moment
. Light changed everything, light controlled what you could see and couldn’t see. Light could reveal incipient beauty or ugliness and sometimes, depending on one’s perspective, they were one in the same.
But Dracu had learned long ago light was something that could not be controlled with near the same effectiveness as darkness. Darkness bred fear and fear made people predictable, reducing lives to their most base form. So he had come to embrace darkness, to master its exploitation and simplicity. As a child, light had neither brought his father to him, nor saved his mother, nor kept him from a life of unspeakable pain, both physical and psychological. Light had not stopped him from becoming a victim.
So Dracu had turned to darkness. When he killed his first love, when he murdered his own father, when he came back to Romania after the fall of communism to build Black Scorpion, when he returned to the farm that should’ve been his home to confront Michael Tiranno. There was no point in trying to find light amid the darkness; much better to turn that light dark.
And thus control it.
He wondered if his half brother understood the true purpose behind the plan that had begun when he rescued Niels Taupmann from the gulag. But Michael Tiranno wouldn’t, couldn’t, because he lived in the light and like virtually all men was blind amid the darkness. He’d never be able to conceive of Dracu’s true intentions because to do so intrinsically meant understanding the depths of depravity from which he had risen. His half brother considered himself a victim, too, forever scarred by witnessing the massacre of his family at Dracu’s very hands. But that experience had hardly been enough to turn him away from the light, because Michael Tiranno chose to battle the tides, swimming upstream into that light instead of joining the smooth currents of darkness.
Because the relic was his. For now.
And in just over twenty-four hours Dracu would not enter the light so much as drag the darkness with him over it. An eclipse of his making was coming and he couldn’t wait for that magical moment when darkness at last swallowed the light, literally as well as figuratively.
He found himself studying a landscape draped almost entirely in shadows, a painting Niels Taupmann had drawn for him of a single farmer working in fields ahead of an approaching storm.
“There’s something you need to see in this,” the old man had said proudly, upon presenting the painting to him.
“What might that be, Professor?”
The old man had gone back to sucking on a marijuana blunt. “I don’t know.”
Today, though, Dracu looked at the landscape and grasped the message Taupmann had instinctively fashioned. The farmer could no more avoid the storm building overhead in the painting, than Michael Tiranno could avoid the one about to consume him. But it wasn’t enough for Dracu to imagine the fall of the Tyrant any more than it was to imagine the farmer being swept away by the winds and torrents.
“A man with your vision? You are a great artist, my friend, on a different canvas of your own choosing.”
More of Taupmann’s words, Dracu finally able to understand the old man’s message: He needed to be there, inside the painting drawn by his own hand featuring a storm of equal savagery. He needed to witness the ravaging of Michael Tiranno’s world firsthand, not while standing back as he was to this landscape. Because he was the artist and this was all happening based on his own notion of what the world’s shape should be and where he should fit within it.
And then, for the first time in all the times he’d studied Taupmann’s painting, Dracu realized the farmer’s gaze was tilted toward the sky and the source of his own coming destruction. Just as Michael Tiranno needed to see the source of his to realize the fury about to consume him and swallow all he had built.
Not from here, Dracu thought, feeling the scorpion venom spread the pleasure through his veins, not from my old home.
From my next one.
Where he would reclaim not only his destiny, but also the means to achieve it.
NINETY-NINE
SARDINIA
Aldridge Sterling positioned his father’s wheelchair so the old man could follow the action unfolding on a half dozen monitors dangling from the ceiling at the back of his glass-top desk.
“How does it feel, Father?” he asked, standing over his father’s form, inert save for the drool dribbling from his mouth. “How does it feel watching the son you despised becoming rich beyond anything you can possibly conceive?”
Sterling moved in front of his father, stopping short this time of sponging up the old man’s drool. He seemed to be viewing only the screen directly over him, eyes fixed forward as always, perhaps attracted by the motion of color the way an animal might. But Sterling wanted his father to see it all. He remained convinced that at some rudimentary level inside his mind, Senator Harold Sterling could indeed grasp the implied message and was being tortured by the reality of his son’s ultimate triumph even now. Aldridge Sterling would never know for sure, but the mere possibility of his father’s comprehension intensified the excitement and satisfaction that continued to unfold before him.
Sterling manually positioned his father’s head to face the first of the six screens, each split into two separate scrolls of ever-changing numbers. “That’s Hong Kong and Tokyo.” He moved his father’s head again. “London and Nassau.” A third time. “Kuala Lampur and Moscow.” A fourth. “Saigon and Seoul.” His father seemed to resist the firth turn, but Sterling persisted and felt something crackle in the old man’s skeletal neck. “Caracas and Lagos.” And one final, effortless turn. “Lichtenstein and Panama City. All offices of Sterling Capital Partners, Father. Currency is traded in pairs, the price of each set in terms of the other. What you’re watching is a hundred billion dollars being pumped into currency markets through my offices across the world. Shorting the American dollar means betting on these other native currencies to hold or increase their value as the dollar declines steeply and sharply. The difference becomes the profit. And would you like to hear how much that profit is?”
The drool was dribbling down onto Harold Sterling’s bib now.
“That’s right, father. Your son is on the verge of becoming one of the richest men in the world, maybe the richest. And you know the best of it? History will remember my name long after yours is forgotten. What was that, Father?” Sterling asked, leaning over. “At a loss for words, are you? Speechless over what I’ve been able achieve with no help from you. You know why? Let me show you.” He eased his father’s wheelchair closer to the screens. “Because I’m a fucking genius. The son you disowned doing something no man has ever done before. And the only thing you gave me was your fucking DNA and you can take that back, too, along with everything else you took away.”
Sterling stopped and angled his father’s head so the old man’s unfeeling eyes met his. “Witness your legacy, Father.
“Me,” Sterling finished.
ONE HUNDRED
VADJA, ROMANIA
Alexander rendezvoused with Raven Khan in the village of Vadja, where the same municipal building where she’d met the town elders initially became their staging ground for a planned attack on Black Scorpion. Those same elders had agreed to facilitate their needs, no longer trusting the authorities and believing Alexander and Raven, along with whoever was backing them, were the only ones who could get their children back.
Michael promised to supply any and all resources they required for men and equipment, no matter the cost, to be channeled through secret, untraceable offshore accounts. A fund he’d established after the terrorist attack on Vegas five years earlier in case a new enemy surfaced. And whatever was needed from that fund would go to the GS-Ultra group with which Paddy was associated. Alexander had then immediately reached out to his most trusted and expert contacts, relying on Paddy to add a dozen or more special operators to the number he was able to gather, along with all the equipment and ordnance required. Raven, meanwhile, summoned the best of the criminal cutthroats she used for her most elaborate operations: Killers first and foremost, all
veterans of military units, who in this case would be receiving exorbitant fees for the risks associated with their efforts. Still a bargain, given that they’d be going up against an extremely well-fortified target defended by somewhere between a hundred and two hundred men, by all indications, who were all trained killers.
The problem remained finding Black Scorpion’s headquarters. It could be located anywhere in the sprawling Black Forest, maybe underground or even under one of the myriad of lakes, for all Raven or Alexander knew. And without a firm location inside an endless forest of lore, they could not plan an attack, never mind mount one no matter the troops and ordnance Michael’s resources afforded them.
Though hardly experienced in confrontations of this scale, Raven knew they’d have to stage their attack from multiple positions at once. But there were hostages, the young women and children of Vadja, to consider first and foremost in her mind, her task being to rescue them while Alexander and his men laid waste to what was certain to be a well-defended fortress. Kill Vladimir Dracu and, if at all possible, recover an ancient manuscript of great importance to her brother.
“There’s something you need to know, big man,” Raven said. “Dracu has a bodyguard the villagers say is as big as a tree and just as strong.”
“All moot if we can’t find where he’s hiding,” Alexander said, as he continued to study standard satellite photographs and imagery of the area to no avail.
A knock fell on the door ahead of a woman with snow-white hair entering with a very old man in tow. She supported him every step of the way, like a human cane.
“You promised you would bring back our young women and children,” the woman said to Raven, not even acknowledging Alexander’s presence.
“I know. And I will.”
“You promise on your life?”
“Yes,” Raven said, nodding.
“My grandchildren are among them,” the woman said solemnly, turning toward the hobbled old man Raven realized was plagued by tremors. “This is their great-grandfather. He has something he wishes to show you.”