Downfall

by Jeff Abbott

  She drove the BMW back to the neighborhood off Haight where she’d left her own car. Locked it up and wondered how long the starred window would hold or if someone would soon steal the BMW. That would be a bonus. She left the keys in the ignition and she found her car and she drove away.

  Holly’s hands weren’t shaking now.

  56

  Saturday, November 6, late evening

  THE PALACE OF FINE ARTS was illuminated, soft glows of light kissing the statues of the goddesses, the pillars. Belias stood and waited and watched us approach.

  Mila stood in black pants, a dark turtleneck that rose to her elegant jawline, dark jacket. A dark wool cap, folded once, covered her hair. She had been careful to tuck in all the loose strands.

  Belias wore a dark trench coat. The kind that could hide a weapon. I was unarmed, so was Mila. You don’t walk around in San Francisco, in a place where innocents could gather, hoping to start a firefight.

  “I hope you brought money, big man,” Mila said to him. “What we know will cost you pretty pennies.”

  “I asked you to come alone, Sam,” Belias said.

  “We are never alone, Mr. Belias,” Mila said. “We have many friends in high places.”

  It was a knife under his skin, under his ego, her saying that, and he smiled a coldly wicked grin. “I made the high places, little girl. I put people there. The secret is in choosing the exact right person for the exact high place. Do you know how grateful they are? How frightened an insecure person is, who thinks he or she doesn’t earn their success? They’re clay in my hands.” He laughed and gestured with his pale hands. “You get rid of the obstacles for them, they’re like children. Slightly insecure children who’ll do what you ask because they don’t know how to get up if they fall down.”

  “You profile them; then you approach them,” I said.

  “I profile them; then I give them a break and then they’re mine.”

  “Like Sam. You think you want Sam,” Mila said. “Silly rabbit.”

  “Whatever you and your bartender friend are,” he said, “mercenaries—hired security—adventurers—whatever…”

  “You didn’t guess,” Mila said. “I am so disappointed.”

  “Whatever you are,” Belias said. “You’re done. Your partnership is dissolved.” He glanced at me.

  She raised her hands and snapped her fingers. “Threats over. We have the information from Glenn Marchbanks. Names. Proof of your network. Pretty pennies time, right, Sam?”

  I stayed put and she threw me a glance of surprise.

  “She’s only here because I felt she should face her accuser.” I glanced around. No one close to us. A few people on the opposite side of the huge pond. Not crowded. The concrete columns were wide. A lot of places to stand unseen.

  “What?” She turned toward me. “What does that mean?”

  Belias said, “You called the Rostovs, sweetheart. I’ve been monitoring their phones. That’s how I knew they were coming after Sam. And that’s how I knew that you called them and offered Sam on a plate. I hate women who pretend to care.” Sudden venom in his voice.

  “Sam…this is not true.”

  “Shut up.” I took a step toward her.

  “We know what you are, Mr. Belias,” Mila said. “If anything happens to me, you will be exposed. You, your entire network of the wealthy and successful. I will see to that.”

  “No, he won’t,” I said. “I will see to that.” I took another step toward her.

  “Sam, he is lying.” Desperation tinged her voice.

  “I heard the tape. I heard the call.” I took another step toward her. She retreated one step, behind a pillar.

  “Sam,” Belias said. “She can draw the Rostovs into a trap we set, yes?”

  “No,” I said. And I pushed her up against the pillar, my arm encircling her throat, her eyes wide with fright. I jerked her hard against me and the soft crack of her neck was loud in the hush of the pillars. Over her shoulder I saw Belias flinch. He was used to weapons and the distance they gave you from death. She sagged against the stone, and I held her in place and yanked the dark knit cap down, over her face, over the collar of her turtleneck. It covered her head, no skin showed. I tucked her hands into her dark coat and I eased her into the water, calling to the ducks as I did. She hardly made a splash as I shoved her toward the center. Belias thoughtfully tossed bread from his pockets to the ducks, who scattered. To those across the expanse we didn’t look suspicious, I supposed. No one screamed, no one hollered. Mila, silent, gone, drifted into the black. But it wouldn’t be long until she was spotted in the night gleam of the water.

  “Let’s walk,” I said. I didn’t wait for him as we stepped from the lit glow of the pond and began to hurry in the darkness along the curving arc toward Baker Street, out from under the arches and the mosaics.

  “I didn’t expect you to bring her,” he said.

  “I wanted to make a point,” I said. We walked, not glancing back at the pond.

  “It’s awful at first. The betrayal of a good woman.”

  “Like Svetlana Borodina?”

  I thought he might fall out of his skin. And if we hadn’t been hurrying away from a murder scene, he might well have stopped to stare at me. But he kept walking and he recovered his expression of neutrality. “Well. An equal.”

  “I’m more your equal than Roger was.” I so wanted to call him Kevin. But if I was wrong, if that wasn’t his name, then there was no point. “But I understand why you don’t like Russians.”

  He cleared his throat. “So. You were CIA and now you’re not.”

  “I made some interesting contacts in the course of my work. Underground, around the world, mostly in Europe. Mila was one.”

  “And the bars are a front.”

  “It gives me legitimate cover for my income. Mila was good at finding information that people will pay for, the highest bidders. I helped her.”

  “And Diana Keene came to you?”

  “A friend of a friend.”

  He studied me. “So Mila’s partners won’t be happy with you.”

  “She had a junior partner. The man you saw at the Marina house. He’s very sick with cancer. Money will keep him happy. I’ll take care of it.”

  “But you’ll need a job now.”

  “I forgot,” I said. “You’re in the business of granting wishes.”

  “I’ve already done you a big favor by getting rid of the Rostovs.”

  “I’m sure you enjoyed sticking it to another Russian.”

  I held up the I Ching necklace I’d taken from Holly Marchbanks’s house. “Subtle influence. Your specialty.”

  Then I put the chain on, tucked it under my shirt. A sign binding myself to him.

  Now for a moment he stopped. He laughed. “I’ve never quite recruited someone this way.”

  “You lost Roger,” I said. “The situation requires speed.”

  “Lost is one way to put it.”

  “Mila would have killed him. You did him a favor.”

  He turned his face away from me for a moment. “I had to kill him.”

  “Just as I had to kill her.”

  It was a fearful symmetry, joining us in murder, and Mila had seen it immediately, the way to tie to this man. “You’re in trouble. You need someone good in a fight right now.”

  Belias let that pass and said, “What else do you know of my troubles?”

  I gave him the phone I’d taken from Glenn Marchbanks’s house. “Glenn was conspiring against you. He was trying to ID the rest of your network of golden boys and girls, and he was trying to find out about your and Roger’s past in Britain. This guy in Vegas Glenn contacted, is he one of yours?” We were past Baker Street now, and behind us I heard a cry, a woman scream something about a body in the pond.

  “This is my car here,” Belias said. “Let’s find a better place to talk.”

  You say you hack lives now, Belias? I thought. You just got hacked yourself.

  We got in
and drove away.

  57

  Saturday, November 6, late evening

  THE WOMAN STOPPED SCREAMING, “There’s a body in the water,” when Mila, floating on her back in the broad pond, drifting back into the sheen of the lights, arose from the water and waded to the shore. Then Mila bowed dramatically to the four corners of the compass, as though acknowledging an invisible audience.

  “What on earth are you doing?” the woman’s companion asked.

  “Performance art,” Mila said. “I thought the pond was for swimming with the muses.” She pointed up at the statues of the goddesses. “Now I have my inspiration, I take my leave.”

  Once the brief screaming stopped, and people saw the woman in the pond was fine, the scant crowd lost interest. Bizarre behavior was a given in San Francisco.

  Mila ran to the car. When she was inside, she stripped the plastic bottles she’d cut open and hid underneath her turtleneck. Her throat was bruised slightly, but the crunch of the plastic had made a nice substitute for the sound of bone breaking.

  She called The Select. “Felix? It worked…What’s the matter?”

  58

  Saturday, November 6, late evening

  IN A HOUSE OF GLASS it was hard to keep a prisoner. But somewhere in Lucky Lazard’s penthouse there was a room with no windows and a locked door. Janice Keene lay in that room, in the dark, arm tucked under her head.

  I am never going to see Diana again. Ever. This would have been easier to bear from a cancer bed. She might never see anyone again. They’d take her out in the desert and kill her. Once you got a ways past Las Vegas, you could forget that civilization and buffets and European acrobatic acts and female impersonators were a few hours away. Out far from the glitter the wind and the sand would scour your bones.

  She was dozing, exhausted with fear and worry, when the door opened again. Lazard stood there alone. But he was a big, thick man with ex–football player written all over him. He had hands that looked like they would make hurtful fists. His eyes were cruel now. Except when he’d looked at his daughter. Love changes everything. She knew that truth.

  He studied her face. “Do I know you? Have I wronged you?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Have I wronged someone you love?”

  “This isn’t a grudge,” she said.

  “You see, I think it is,” he said. “Maybe you got a reason to dislike me, like you might have had a reason to dislike Barbara Scott.”

  She kept her face implacable. “I don’t know who Barbara Scott is.”

  “Bull. You look like the type who might be in a book club. Everyone knows Barbara Scott’s name.”

  “She’s a writer,” she said after a moment.

  “Very good. You have a brain. Who sent you?”

  She was silent.

  “Look, I’m under orders not to hurt you.”

  She was unsure what to think. “You take orders from someone? That surprises me.”

  “It surprises me, too, but I do.” He cracked a very soft smile.

  She said nothing.

  “You see, either you’re someone who hates me, or you were sent by someone who hates me.” He let a meaningful pause fill the air. “Or maybe you and I have a mutual friend.”

  A mutual friend. What if she said, Yes, we might? What if the mutual friend was…Belias?

  He held up the necklace. The I Ching symbol of Belias’s subtle network. She’d forgotten to put it back on after she got up in the morning. “I didn’t find this right away when I searched your luggage. I have one, too, but I don’t wear it often. Only when I have to do special work. Even though I live in Vegas”—and now he smiled—“I dislike jewelry.”

  “If I tell you the truth, what will you do to me?” She hated the whisper in her voice. She normally spoke with assurance. But just as she’d found when she got the cancer diagnosis, she didn’t want to die. She wanted to see Diana marry and have children and be a success. She wanted to see Felix’s smile more. She wanted to feel the sun on her face and the air in her lungs.

  He squatted by her, the chain loose in his fingers. “I could toss you from the top of the roof and let you fall forty-eight stories. Vegas has a regrettably high suicide rate. And someone who maybe didn’t want a bad, slow death from cancer might take that long, last step. The autopsy’ll turn up any old tumors eating you up, and the bruising from the punches will be buried under fresh impact wounds.”

  His logic chilled her.

  “Or I could give you to my bodyguards. Randy and Andy. Randy’s got a mean streak in him. I’ve had to pull him off working girls a couple of times when he started getting way too rough. He’s the kind of kid even his parents say, that boy’s not right.”

  She stared at her feet.

  “Or you could save yourself all that. You tell me who sent you, and I let you go or I give you a mercy bullet. I have my suspicions.”

  “It was a mutual friend,” she said. Wondering if he’d say Belias out loud.

  “Glenn Marchbanks. Did he send you?”

  Glenn Marchbanks. Oh. Of course. The venture capitalist with the golden touch. It made sense now. He must have an I Ching symbol, too. She blinked, processing the thought.

  “Glenn Marchbanks,” he repeated.

  But now he’d seen the tinge of shock touch on her poker face, her carefully crafted mask, and he seized on it. He grabbed her by her shoulders. “Glenn Marchbanks. He sent you to shut me up.”

  Shut you up? How could she get him to blunder a bit more, tell her what she needed to know. Glenn Marchbanks and Lucky Lazard. And Barbara Scott. She’d looked at Lucky and Barbara as victims of the network, being put out of the way. They were part of the network. Same as she was.

  We all belong to him. Belias has sent me to kill his own. Why, why, why?

  “Are you for hire? Or one of his special friends?”

  It wasn’t really another foot of his grave that he dug then, but she looked up and she could guess what he meant. She went all in. “Special friends. You mean like you and me and Glenn all work for the same guy? A guy we all made a deal with?”

  The color went out of his florid face. “No, no. He can’t turn on me. I told Glenn to stop, that it was stupid. I didn’t side with Glenn.”

  She wasn’t sure how she could play this, but public relations work at the highest level had taught her to improvise. “Did it occur to you I wasn’t sent here to kill you?” she said.

  “What were you sent here for?”

  “To find out what you and Glenn were doing.”

  “Glenn and I were doing nothing. I told Glenn there was no need for him to try a takeover.” He grabbed her face. “Tell me the name of our mutual friend. Tell me.”

  “Belias,” she whispered.

  He slowly let her go. His face was pale. “So who sent you. Glenn or Belias?”

  She had to hope that Belias was coming for her. Lucky would have called Belias when he was under attack, so Belias had given him the orders not to hurt her. So she lied and said, “Glenn Marchbanks sent me, and you can’t tell Belias.” It was either Glenn or Belias, and maybe something bad was going on with Glenn. It sounded like it from the fragments of what Lazard had said.

  But she and Belias were both dead if she admitted he sent her.

  He stood and stepped away from her. “Oh, you’re screwed, lady. You’re screwed.”

  “I know. Please. Just let me go and I’ll go away and no one has to know.”

  “Who else did Glenn recruit for his little takeover?”

  Takeover. Glenn Marchbanks decided to slip the yoke of the debt, of the pact that had made him a success. That would not go over well. “I don’t know. Just me.”

  “Glenn gets a cancer patient to do his dirty work.”

  “Glenn will be better than Belias at running the show,” she said. She hoped she could sell this lie. You sell lies all day long, Janice. Just do it.

  “Why would you think that? What does Glenn know?” Now his voice rose i
n suspicion. “What does Glenn know?”

  “Belias is losing it. Some of us are close to arrest.” She let the real panic she felt fill her lie with fire. “He’s made mistakes. Glenn knew. He was doing it to save us all.”

  “Bull,” he said. “Belias losing it? Never. Ever.”

  “He is. He’s overreached. He’s tried to recruit the wrong people.” She fashioned the lie out of the whole cloth of her own fears. What if Belias tried to recruit the wrong person, someone he couldn’t control who decided to bolt to the authorities? It had been her constant fear the first few years, one that never relented because he was recruiting new people. Her DOWNFALL file she’d left for her daughter confirmed that. She wanted Diana to have enough information to protect herself if any of Janice’s old crimes came back to haunt her.

  Her fear was his fear, she saw in his face. “What’s your name? Who are you?” He grabbed her shoulders. “I’ll go through every business magazine and website until I find your face.”

  He was close to her now and he wouldn’t expect it so she drove the heel of her hand into his face. The pain rocketed in his eyes, and then she slammed her forearm hard into his throat. Grabbed his head and rammed it into the wall. She wrenched free of his grip and she stumbled out into the hallway.

  “No, come back here!” he yelled. “You can’t get off this floor.”

  He thought she was trying to escape. Oh, honey, no, she thought. I just need a weapon. She scrambled down the hallway, out into a large den with spectacular views of Las Vegas stretching every way. To her left she saw a breakfast table, an opening that showed the kitchen. Lots of sharp, lovely items in there.

  Lazard lumbered after her. “I’m not gonna hurt you; would you listen to me?”

  Where are the guards? she thought.

  She yanked open a drawer; utensils clattered in it with the force of her yank and no knife inside. She flung the drawer at him, backed up, fingers fumbling for the next drawer.

  Then her hands closed around a knife. She pulled it free from the slot in the drawer. Black handled, sharp edged, suitable for cutting meat.