by Mick Farren
Even at six in the morning the gambling room still did a roaring business. The rule in the casinos was no windows and no clocks. They were a world of gaudy hope and equally gaudy despair. It seemed to Vickers that there were a disproportionately large number of Japanese in the room, or maybe they were Koreans. Lines of them were bent over Mydak machines, concentrating on the concave screens and mechanically palming the rollers, hanging in like obsessives as the machines nibbled away at their credit. They seemed as fixated by the glowing, interlocking patterns of color on the screen as with the occasional credit leaps that showed on the win counter. "I can bring a baby Mydak to your table if you like." The waitress had returned with his food. He shook his head. Casino gambling was a vice in which he never indulged. He had no desire to become addicted to trying to beat out a Mydac machine, baby or full-sized.
"No thanks, I prefer just to eat and watch." She set his food down with a look of deepening suspicion. If she hadn't reported in on him already, she undoubtedly would now. As she departed, he raised his scotch to the mirrored ceiling and then poured it into the milk. Beyond the glass, out in the gambling room, a crowd was gathering around one particular table. Vickers guessed someone was having a big win. Those who hadn't been suckered into a machine were homing in on the lucky streak, probably hoping that some of it might rub off on them. It was rumored that the casinos staged regular, spectacular winning streaks just to encourage the others. Up in a high, vaulted section of the room's ceiling, a show had started among the intersecting, triangular beams. Holographic dancers swivelled in midair while human trapeze artists flew through and around them. After a short while, Vickers had to stop watching. There was something about the spectacle that made him non-specifically uneasy. There was a hypnotic quality to the way the solid bodies arced in and out of completely insubstantial ones. He distrusted anything that seemed hypnotic. It usually meant that it was. Even the corner store was stacked with little subliminal mindfucks to make you spend or consume or not steal the merchandise. He concentrated on his eggs.
After he'd lingered in the restaurant as long as he could, even listening for a while to a drunk in a cowboy hat recount tearfully how he'd lost all his money and his girl friend without even leaving the hotel, Vickers paid his check and went looking for a clothing store, a washroom with a shower and a barber shop. Part of the reason people were giving him strange looks was that he'd been in the same clothes for four days, or maybe it was five. Inside of forty-five minutes, he felt at least partway to being a new man. Normally he wouldn't have been seen dead in a tan jungle suit, but it did blend him with his surroundings. He'd had to use his card to pay for the suit. He no longer had enough cash. Hotel security would know where he was but it didn't really matter, he was about to leave the Pyramid. It was almost time to make his call.
As he hit the street, the noise and heat hit him. He'd been inside the Pyramid for long enough to have forgotten what protected environments the Las Vegas hotels really were. There was a pale blue desert dawn beyond the lights and already the air smelted like burnt metal. A doorman dressed as an ancient Egyptian soldier waved up a cab with his spear. Vickers ducked into its haven of air conditioning.
"Just head down toward the old part of the Strip."
Even in the dawn the sidewalks in front of the older casinos, with their threadbare, gum-trodden carpeting had a complement of aimlessly wandering crowds. Mostly they were guaranteed structurals in gaudy trylon slowly shuffling and trying to make sense out of an endless holiday. Vickers reminded himself that, as far as all the world, with sole exception of Victoria Morgenstern was concerned, he was also terminally unemployed. In fact, he was worse off than the hordes on the sidewalk with their matador pants and Hawaiian shirts. He hadn't been bought out of his life with the promise of a pension. He'd simply been fired.
Las Vegas had to be one of the most thoroughly policed cities in the world. They stopped the vags and bums and homeless roamers at the city limits while, inside, it seemed like every block had its squad of uniformed cops, private security or rubberroom squads of parapsychs to deal with flips, screamers and the silently berserk. When the major industry is supplying the fantasies of greed to tourists, it was important to make sure that all the tourists had the price of admission.
He had the cab pull up by the Xanadu's watercade. He climbed out and crossed the street, away from the complex of lasers and fountains and kept going for two blocks until he was fairly confident that no one was following, then he looked for a phone booth. He called information for the main number for Global Leisure and, after a final look 'round, he tapped it in. The voice was simulated feminine, programmed mildly sexy.
"Global. Can I help you?"
"George Revlon, please."
"One moment."
A human voice came on the line. The computer on the board had clearly been alerted.
"Can I help you?"
"I'd like to speak to George Revlon."
"Your name, sir?"
"Vickers."
"Will you please hold, Mr. Vickers? I'll try and locate Mr. Revlon."
This was going as well as could be expected. After a short wait, Revlon came on the line.
"Vickers?"
"So, does Mossman still want to see me?"
"Indeed he does. In fact…"
"Don't worry about it. I'm coming straight in."
He hung up. There was no point in waiting any longer. He'd proved that Revlon was connected with Global. Now he had to take his chances.
"You don't mind if I call you Mort, do you?"
Vickers shook his head. Herbie Mossman could call him anything his heart desired. When you're that powerful, you tend to get your way whether anyone minds or not. Where other corporations had tense little oligarchies at the top of their towers, Global Leisure was an absolute, magnificent dictatorship. For fifteen years, Herbie Mossman had balanced his warring factions one against the other and made himself indispensable to all. The concept of a single overlord, a boss of bosses went deep into the roots of the Global's corporate tradition. There was little shame at Global Leisure that they were descended from an organization that, sixty years earlier, was known as the Mob.
"I have a problem with you, Mort?"
"I hope nothing that can't be worked out, sir." Mossman formed his two index fingers into the approximation of a steeple. He didn't tell Vickers to call him Herbie. His pudgy fingers were encrusted with gold. He was about the fattest man that Vickers had ever seen, an emotional baby with a mind like a vise who had long ago abandoned all ideas except power and gluttony. He suspected that Mossman was actually too fat to walk. His rolls of flesh, that could scarcely be contained by a dark-blue bell tent of a funsuit, sagged and flowed and sweated into a monster of a chair, a creation of chrome and black leather that contained him like a vat. The whole thing was mounted on a rugged set of servotracks, the kind that they use on guard robots.
"I have to decide whether to accept you on face value or whether you are something much deeper and dangerous. I have to entertain the possibility that Victoria Morgenstem is using you under the deepest of deep cover."
"Victoria Morgenstem was holding me under house arrest and might well have had me executed if I'd stayed around."
"You are still alive, though, aren't you?"
"I hope you won't hold that against me."
Vickers could feel sweat under his right armpit. Mossman wasted no time in conversational detours.
"I don't hold anything against you, Mort. This is pure business. It may even be that Morgenstem is using you without you knowing it. I have to satisfy myself as to what you are and how you will affect me. Bit by bit, the process reduces it to a single question for me: should I let you run or do I need to neutralize you?"
"I'm a little confused. Why should I be of any concern to you at all? I'm an out of work corpse. I'm in enough trouble already."
Mossman's voice came out like slow gravel.
"But you are a corpse, Mort. You're a corpse and
you're in this town. This is my town, Mort, and any kind of corpse causes me concern. I wonder who you might be here to kill, Mort." He made a dismissive gesture that might have been a shrug in a man who wasn't too heavy to raise his shoulders. "You might have come here to kill me."
There was silence in the room. George Revlon was standing a little behind Vickers on his right. Mossman's personal attendant, a world-class muscle builder called Chuck, stood further back on his left. Both seemed to be waiting for an answer. All Vickers could do was look pointedly around the penthouse. The top of the Global tower was a cluster of transparent domes of four-inch blown plexiglass. They all belonged to Herbie Mossman. They were his private domain from which he could personally watch the sweep of his desert empire. One dome was his vast office, a second housed an equally vast dining room, another his pool and the one that was a constant opaque black hid his legendary bedroom. In the office, as the sun rose higher, light sensitive pigments progressively filtered it through a screen of deep gold. It was like being dipped in maple syrup. Vickers' chair had been set at sufficient distance from Mossman's huge desk and huge chair to make it feel like an inquisition.
"I think you know that I haven't come here to kill you, sir."
On the way up to the penthouse, he'd been scanned and body-searched no less than four times. The room itself showed all the symptoms of being equipped with a Gee Ten Thousand, which was about as far as it currently went in automated defense systems. By the way the decor was arranged, he suspected that, in any emergency, an armored steel shield would drop around Mossman while the rest of the room could be pumped full of high velocity metal fragments. Mossman caught his look and smiled a smile that was completely lacking in humor.
"Perhaps not a frontal assault, but who knows what might be contemplated in the dark schemes of Victoria Morgen-stern."
It was Vickers' turn to shrug. "She cut me loose. There's nothing else that I can tell you."
A white-coated butler appeared at the other end of the room and came silently across the acre or so of deep pile carpet. He held a silver tray in his right hand. On the tray was an extremely generous slice of banana cream pie, a large glass of chocolate milk and a large Coke. Mossman postively beamed.
"Flanders."
"Sir."
Mossman patted the left arm of his chair. "Just set it down here, Flanders."
The chair arm was quite large enough to accomodate the tray. The righthand arm had a small computer terminal built into it.
"Will that be all?"
"All for now."
"Thank you, sir."
There was silence in the room while Mossman ate. All conversation was put on hold as he shovelled pie into himself with a silver fork. His eyes were half-closed and he was clearly in ecstacy. Vickers couldn't remember seeing anyone so absorbed in their food. When he'd finished he wiped his mouth with a linen napkin. His eyes flicked to Vickers and it was back to business.
"Suppose I offered you a job, Mort. What would you do?"
"I'd jump at it."
"Without knowing what it might be?"
"I'd assume you'd want me as a corpse, but I'd take anything that'd get me out of the storm."
"From my point of view, having you on the payroll at least puts you where I can keep an eye on you."
"Then you are offering me a job?"
"Provisionally. You have a good reputation. If you're not pulling something, you'd be a valuable asset."
"I'll take it."
"I rather thought you would."
Mossman glanced down at the computer terminal. "Note to Pattel in Legal. Vickers is to put on a standard corpse indenture with the rider added to cover the special project."
Vickers raised an eyebrow. "Special project?"
"You didn't ask what the job was."
"That's right, I didn't. But now I have."
"I'm putting together an elite team for a very special project. You'll be a part of that team, Mort. That's all you need to know at the moment, except that you'll initially be based at a place in the desert just out of town. You and the others will be isolated there. You can look on it as refresher training."
Vickers tried to picture Mossman dragging his lard around a strip of blistering desert doing "refresher training." He hadn't forgotten that the man mixed chocolate milk and Coca-Cola. Something flashed on Mossman's terminal. He tapped the keyboard.
"This is very interesting." He regarded Vickers with an amused expression. "I wonder how you'd react if I told you that a Contec hit team has installed itself in your room at the Pyramid."
Vickers didn't even try to disguise his concern.
"You're not serious."
"Indeed I am. According to our tap into the Pyramid's computer, they've made a prisoner of your girl friend and are, at this moment, watching the tapes that you and she made last night."
Vickers stood up. "I have to get over there."
Revlon quickly interjected. "The woman didn't mean anything to you, did she? If you take on a hit squad actually inside the Pyramid while you're registered in the employ of Global Leisure, it could cause major intercorporation problems. I seriously advise you to accept Mr. Mossman's offer and simply leave town."
Vickers shook his head. He was tired of running; the point had come where he had to settle the situation.
"I owe Lavern that much. I'm going back over there." He glanced at Mossman. "We haven't inked anything yet. If there's trouble, you can always disown me. Everybody else does. I'd appreciate it, though, if someone could supply me with a gun."
"Quite the little knight errant, aren't you, Mort? I wouldn't have expected it."
To be truthful, Vickers himself wouldn't have expected it, either.
"I'm getting tired of being bounced around."
In the back of his mind there was also an image of a trio of ballerinas sitting around laughing at the video tapes of his antics in bed. His pride gritted its teeth and wanted to hurt someone.
"You'd be a fool to go against three of them on your own."
Vickers was surly. "I can handle it."
Mossman shook his head. "You won't have to. I'll give you the backup that you need. You can go and rescue your girlfriend as a Global corpse."
Revlon's mouth opened and closed like the beak of a chicken in shock.
"It would have serious repercussions, sir. I insist."
"Don't insist to me, Revlon. Just warn the Pyramid as to what we intend and have them make the arrangements. There'll be no repercussions. They don't want to fuck with me."
Vickers' eyes narrowed. "What if they warn the Contec team that we're coming?"
Mossman dismissed the idea.
"This is hometown boy against outsiders. We have to coexist fifty-two weeks in the year. They won't warn them." Mossman's look of amusement returned. "This is a great test of loyalty, Mort. On your very first job for me, you're going up against your old employers."
* * *
Vickers gave a final tug on the blue nylon climbing rope. He hated to work either on cliffs or on the outside of buildings, but in this case there seemed to be no other way. Mossman had supplied him with two companions, an Australian surfer with an extra Y chromosome and the unoriginal name Bruce, and Frank Lang, a wiry Oriental stress freak in a black track suit who probably believed that he was the descendant of ninja. The three of them were poised on the edge of a fifty-fifth floor terrace, one floor above the suite where the Contec team were holding Lavern. Bruce seemed totally unmoved at the idea of rappeling down the side of one of the world's biggest buildings. Personal danger and the chance to hurt people seemed a natural break from beer and sun. Frank Lang, on the other hand, was a pocket package of compressed tension who might well go off like an uncoiling spring once they were inside the place.
They stood, leaning back against the anchored ropes, angling out into a fifty-story void. Inside the hotel, Pyramid security had sealed off the suite. All that remained was for the Global team to go in. They were all waiting for Vickers t
o give the signal.
He nodded and they jumped out and down into nothing. Only skill beat down the fear. Down and swing in, playing out rope all the time. Their feet hit the terrace. Bruce stumbled slightly but the other two moved forward like a textbook example. Both sets of French windows were closed. Bruce, swung the M90 off his back and started for the glass, swinging the heavy weapon like a club. Vickers allowed him to get ahead. If he fancied himself as Conan, let him go. The windows crashed into diamond smoke. Bruce was going straight through them. Subjective time had slowed. Vickers suddenly was above his fear. There was only the breathlessness and the taste of anxiety in his mouth. He was in control. It was all going to be easy. He and Frank Lang went through the glass together, exactly in Bruce's wake. Already it was carnage. Bruce had sprayed the room with the twin-barreled machine gun. The three-man hit team were dead on the floor. Walls and ceiling was riddled with bullet holes and spattered with blood. Vickers lowered his Yasha and thumbed on the safe. For a moment he thought that Lavern had been killed along with the Contec people. Then he saw Frank Lang helping her to her feet. She appeared to have had the presence of mind to roll down behind the bed when Bruce came crashing through the windows. In this, she'd been faster than the three supposed professionals. It didn't look as though the Contec team had been exactly easy with her. There was a bruise on her cheek, her robe was torn and she was secured with her own handcuffs. Her mouth moved in wordless shock as Lang started to search for the keys.
Vickers inspected the bodies. They were three men, all extremely young. It was little wonder that they'd been taken so completely by surprise. They could scarcely be long out of training school. Why had Victoria sent such babies? It would be a near miracle if Mossman didn't smell a rat. Bruce was also moving around the room inspecting his handiwork. He bent down and came up with a video tape in his hand. He grinned at Vickers.