by Jon Land
A quiet murmur sifted through the crowd.
“That wasn’t for pleasure,” Kern tried to insist, putting his glasses back on and taking them off again. “It was more a trip to ascertain the true boundaries of Mr. Sterling’s intention to invest heavily in our state’s gaming industry.”
“Then I assume you reported this trip and meeting to the proper ethics officials.”
Kern stiffened, just enough to show his discomfort. “This hearing is not about me, Ms. Burns.”
“Then perhaps it should be. Would you like to explain, for the record, your relationship with Aldridge Sterling?”
“That’s irrelevant to the purpose of this hearing.”
“Is it, Mr. Kern? In spite of the fact that this is the same Aldridge Sterling who’s been buying up King Midas World and Tyrant Global bonds at less than fifty cents on the dollar after the recent ordeal at the Seven Sins and the publicity stemming from last week’s hearing before this board. Wouldn’t you call that a bit coincidental?”
“Not at all.”
“What about this?”
Naomi touched the proper icon on her phone app that functioned as a remote control. Instantly the picture of Kern and Sterling together was replaced by six pages arranged side-by-side in two rows across the wide screen.
“These are recent brokerage statements showing a position with Sterling Capital Partners, modest by Sterling Capital’s usual standards but still amounting to over five hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Recognize them, Mr. Kern?”
“I can’t say I do.”
“You should, because the brokerage account numbers linked back to a woman with the same name as your wife.”
Kern didn’t turn around to look. “Since when is making a wise investment a crime?”
“When it’s a potential ethics violation definitely worthy of an investigation. Why else would you hide it by having your wife use her maiden name? At the very least,” Naomi continued over the murmur that had intensified through the crowded chamber, “You cannot expect to keep overseeing this particular investigation as a fair and impartial arbiter. Unless you’d like to further explain your relationship with Aldridge Sterling and your association with his attempt to buy the Seven Sins on the cheap.”
“This insolence has gone far enough,” Kern said. He slammed his gavel down on the desktop and started to rise. “And this hearing is adjourned.”
“Mr. Chairman!” Naomi shouted loud enough to freeze Kern in his tracks. “Before we formally adjourn, I respectfully request that Mr. Tiranno’s gaming license and access to his own properties be restored. Otherwise, you leave me no choice but to seek an injunction in—”
“Mr. Tiranno,” Kern blared without the microphone, interrupting her, “provisional access is hereby granted to you for the Seven Sins property until such time that this commission can reach a final resolution.” He rapped the gavel again. “We are adjourned.”
At that, members of the press gathered in the chamber stormed the dais, surrounding Kern before he could exit and battering him with questions. Michael actually had to dodge a pair of television reporters when he stepped into the aisle himself, looking up toward the back row where FBI special agent Del Slocumb was just pocketing his phone. He nodded Michael’s way, smiling almost imperceptibly. The man with the Mont Blanc pen, though, was gone and Michael thought he recognized him from his ridiculous comb-over exiting the chamber just as his Samsung Galaxy buzzed with an incoming text from Scarlett.
WATCHING YOU ON TV RIGHT NOW.
Michael turned toward the camera following him and smiled.
ONE HUNDRED THREE
VADJA, ROMANIA
“My god, it’s incredible,” Raven said, shaking her head while continuing to study the thermal imagery of the mountain the old man had indicated, courtesy of a satellite feed arranged by GS-Ultra.
“Looks like the old man was right,” Alexander nodded, his eyes flashing like the lights of a computer.
“Not bad, eh, mate?” Paddy asked Alexander.
“How much you say this is costing my boss again?”
The big Brit winked. “I didn’t.”
“My God,” Raven said, continuing to focus on the prints papering the walls, “these big patches of red show the largest concentration of men, right?”
“The bigger blips are more likely machines,” Paddy explained, “but you’re right as rain for the most part. Thing looks to be a dozen stories high and you can even see from the scoring where Black Scorpion added the top seven or eight levels.”
“And this must be the Soviet command and control bunker,” Alexander noted, pointing to what looked to be an underground level where the heat signatures recorded by the satellite imagery were pink, instead of red.
“But what do you make of this, mate?” Paddy asked him, gesturing toward what looked to several more heat signatures also underground, but above and to the right of the command and control bunker.
“Where I expect to find Black Scorpion himself once we’re in,” Alexander told him. “Exactly where his private quarters should be given the schematics.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m coming along to take charge of the rest of the men and make sure we get the door open for the babe here.”
“Babe?” Raven raised.
“Spoken with the utmost respect, my lady,” Paddy said, feigning a bow.
“Speaking of which,” started Alexander, “you’re a bit long in the tooth for a mission like this, Sergeant-Major, don’t you think?”
“Bollocks, mate! Why should you young blokes have all the fun? Experience is what it’s gonna take to pull this off and I got that coming out my arse. And know what else I got? Enough arthritis to tell the weather better than any damn weatherman, and right now my knees say there’s a bloody storm brewing for tonight that’ll make for ideal cover.”
“He’s right,” Raven told Alexander, checking the latest weather forecast on her phone.
“Lucky for us, then.”
“And we’ll need plenty of it, mate,” Paddy added, “to take down all these bastards.”
ONE HUNDRED FOUR
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
“Del Slocumb?” Naomi repeated, having trouble believing his role in what was transpiring all over the world, as Black Scorpion’s cells were being taken down in a series of near-simultaneous strikes.
“With a little help, actually a lot of help, from Homeland Security,” Michael told her. “Homeland handled the bulk of the international coordination in conjunction, I’m guessing, with the CIA. But Slocumb was smart, and ambitious, enough to make the call to them himself once the chief of the Las Vegas police confirmed Victor Argos’s story. I’m sure that pissed off his superiors no end but he was actually following protocol. Homeland saw it as a national security issue and pushed the red button all over the world.”
“How many sites was this coordinated effort able to hit?”
“A dozen at last count, with many more reports yet to come in,” Michael said, as the Tyrant Class Gulfstream streaked toward McCarran. “But those are just the primary sites, and they don’t include the strikes stateside which are being kept under tight seal, including Las Vegas itself. Thanks to the intelligence provided by Raven Khan, there are hundreds of others that need to be dealt with fast, before those cells have a chance to close up shop once word of the international effort gets out. Our advantage right now is the disparate cells have no knowledge of each other to prevent one from giving up another.”
“Meaning we’re using one of Black Scorpion’s greatest strengths against them. And the cells that are alerted will end up on the run, flushed into the light. You’re destroying Black Scorpion, Michael.”
“I haven’t destroyed anything, not so long as my half brother is still out there.”
“There’s something else. It’s about Hans Wolff,” Naomi continued, handing Michael her phone after jogging the screen to an e-mail that had come in during the hearing. “Prepare yourself, because you’re not
going to believe this.…”
* * *
And he hadn’t, just one more incredible piece of information piled atop all the others in the past week.
Stepping through the entrance to the Seven Sins felt like the first time for Michael, bringing him back not to the gala opening but to the official completion of construction when he entered the lobby alone without fanfare or paparazzi. The smell of fresh granite, polish, lacquer, wood, wax, and cleaning solvent had dominated the air. Only a portion of the electricity had been switched on, so the lobby was lit only by the meager spill of work lights leaving the bulk of it bathed in shadows. But that didn’t stop Michael from seeing everything, all the fruits of his labor realized. He had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn’t still dreaming, since it had been his dreams that had brought him to that moment.
That’s what he felt like now, a mere forty-eight hours after being barred from entering his own property. No one seemed to notice Michael through all the bustle and activity in the lobby. Just the way he liked it, since it gave him the opportunity to see the Seven Sins as others saw it, appreciating the spectacle and magic of it all the more along with the vision that had spawned both. Even though his goals now stretched far beyond this property and the city, the resort would always form the foundation on which everything else was built, would always be home. That explained why being barred from entry two days earlier angered him so much. He’d already lost one home.
He wasn’t going to lose another.
Michael realized he hadn’t called Scarlett yet with the news. He pulled out his phone, wondering where she might be on the property. According to the time displayed, and assuming all had gone according to plan, the attack launched on Black Scorpion by Alexander and Raven would be commencing any moment.
More guests brushed past him, the Seven Sins returning to the life he knew and loved. That’s when Michael spotted the figure of the rumpled man with the bad comb-over he recognized from both Gaming Control Board hearings. The man was seated within the lobby’s Peccato Bar Lounge, checking his phone and seeming to pay Michael no heed whatsoever, until he looked up and their eyes met.
The man’s showed no spark of recognition, showed nothing at all before returning his gaze to his phone. But something about his gaze left Michael unsettled enough to start toward him. Searching for the nearest plainclothes members of the Seven Sins security force, in the same moment the explosion sounded outside on the Strip.
ONE HUNDRED FIVE
HOIA-BACIU FOREST, ROMANIA
Alexander watched his men strapping on their parachutes aboard the Lockheed L-100 Hercules aircraft, a civilian version of the special-ops-favored C-130 and available thanks to the blank check Michael had provided GS-Ultra. It would be flying under the false designation of a commercial airliner to avoid detection or scrutiny. That meant they’d have to make a HALO jump from around twenty-five thousand feet, the altitude typical in this airspace. All the men hired for the mission were trained in high altitude low opening jumps, well used to completing the initial portion in free fall while breathing oxygen from a small tank.
Alexander could feel the chop in the night air as soon as the jump bay opened, already wearing his wet suit over his combat garb. They would be dropping straight into the night and storm while on oxygen for several minutes until low enough to deploy their chutes, through the cloud cover and into the manmade lake that enclosed the mountain fortress of Black Scorpion.
Dropping straight into the teeth of the storm left Alexander feeling virtually weightless in the grasp of what felt like a tornado’s funnel cloud that whipped him about in all directions. He and the others managed to shed their oxygen masks and get their chutes opened at the proper time, resulting in a mad jockeying to stay on course. Alexander found himself holding his breath along with everyone else until the lake came up faster than expected, the dark waters feeling like concrete that collapsed beneath him on impact.
He went under into the total blackness, almost twenty feet down before he began the swim back to the surface, fighting against the sensation of decompression the free fall on oxygen had left on his brain. He shed his chute and readied his scuba gear, while inventorying his troops. One of Paddy’s operators had died of a broken neck on impact with the water and one of Alexander’s shattered his ankle, splitting the bone through the skin. Alexander helped him shed his chute and equipment and then left the man to reach shore on his own.
Alexander felt the chill of the lake waters through his wet suit as he led the remaining twenty-two men slowly to the bottom fifty feet down. Unlike traditionally formed lakes, this unusually large manmade one had a uniform bottom that might as well have been a swimming pool’s. Alexander shined his underwater flashlight ahead in search of one of the hatches accessing the tunnel system that ran under the lakebed and linked the former nuclear silos together. He believed he’d swam over three of those silos already, noticeable for the darker patches of lake floor and slight depressions that came with the settling of their camouflaged structures.
Alexander spotted one of the tunnel access hatches just after passing the third depression. He positioned himself properly and started twisting on the wheel, fearing the years may have seen it welded shut or, at the very least, rusty and stuck from disuse. The Soviets, though, built such facilities intending them to last forever and, sure enough, the wheel turned easily after some initial resistance, then opened with a ssssssssssssssss into an underwater airlock that maintained a constant pressure to prevent flooding.
Alexander and Paddy lowered themselves into the tunnel first, the last man to reach the ladder closing and sealing the hatch behind him. The men all stripped off their wet suits, shed their scuba equipment, and geared up for the next phase of the mission. Alexander had laid it out for them as best he could with only an old man’s memory and thermal satellite imagery taken from a hundred thousand feet up in the sky to go by. The bulk of the men would accompany Paddy up into the complex, leaving him to make his way to the underground living quarters contained amid rock and shale.
Where he hoped to find Vladimir Dracu himself.
And along the way they would mine the tunnel with a bevy of shaped charges that, when added to the explosive force of identical charges placed within the complex, would rupture the structure’s integrity and bring it down, flooding it from both above and below. Nothing could be left to chance.
“Raven,” Alexander said, into the microphone extension of his lightweight tactical headset, “do you copy?”
* * *
“Loud and clear, big man. What’s the word?”
“In the tunnel and heading toward the complex now. Stand by. Move into staging position and wait for my call.”
Raven and her ten-man crew had moved up to a hidden position off the narrow trail within clear view of the waterfall, when something rustled the brush nearby. She and her men tensed, going utterly still and silent as a Black Scorpion sentry appeared out of the darkness. He was lighting a cigarette and had his assault rifle slung uselessly behind his shoulder.
Raven snapped a single fist into the air to hold her men back, then extracted a knife from her belt and slid out in the guard’s wake. She pounced on him from behind and drove the blade into his heart between his ribs, felt him stiffen without so much as a sound or breath. She covered his mouth with a gloved hand just to make sure as she lowered him to the ground and dragged him to the cover of some thicker brush.
There were likely more guards lurking about and Raven chose three men to accompany her in a sweep to locate them to eliminate the risk of being spotted and have their presence betrayed. The sweep brought her closer to the mountain itself for a look-see, to use Alexander’s term, which left her doubting the old man’s tales back in Vadja of some secret entrance to the cave system here beyond the waterfall. As far as she could tell, this was a mountain face and nothing more.
She clung to the hope she was wrong, and that the old man’s memory was right. Otherwise, she and her men would hav
e no chance to free the young women and children who’d been stolen from the village, certain then to join the tens of thousands of others who’d preceded them into human trafficking at the hands of Black Scorpion.
Raven wanted Vladimir Dracu dead more than she’d wanted anything in her life. He was the demon, quite literally it seemed now, who haunted her dreams and left her own youth shrouded in anguish and misery, the man behind the bullets that had shattered her life as a mere toddler. He had robbed her of her childhood and left her sentenced to the dark criminal underworld where there could be no trust, devotion, hope.
Or love.
And it all made sense now, her own twisted fate coming full circle. Her mother had died protecting her, just as she would die, if necessary, to save the children held hostage inside this fortress.
But she wasn’t going anywhere unless her brother’s man, Alexander, breached the entrance to the fortress behind the waterfall for her. Not used to relying on others left her cringing with an unfamiliar sense of dependence. Regardless of this man’s reputed prowess, he would need to pull off the impossible just to enter the complex contained within a mountain, never mind beat back the forces concentrated inside.
Raven had begun to fear Alexander’s part of the mission had been an abject failure, when his voice finally crackled in her headset again.
“We’re in,” said Alexander. “Get your men ready to move.”
* * *
The pressurized tunnel ended at a flat rock wall before a ladder and hatch identical to the one they’d used to access it a half mile back. This time the wheel refused to give at all and Alexander summoned one of Paddy’s demolitions specialists up the rungs to join him. The man didn’t need to ask what was required, just set the proper small charge at the proper joint and backed off with Alexander before detonating it.
The blast sound was more like a cough, enough to rattle the hatch upward and open their route into Black Scorpion’s fortress up a narrow chute. It had a single ladder climbing through the darkness and Alexander went first, popping yet another hatch open on a sub-level he didn’t recognize from the thermal imaging. But he found his bearings quickly, identifying the steel door on the left to lead to the command and control bunker and the one on the right down a hall to what he felt certain were Vladimir Dracu’s living quarters.