by Jeff Abbott
“Is the hostage unharmed?” Belias asked.
“Yes. Banged up a bit. She’s kind of hot for a cougar.”
“How charming. Did you hurt her?”
“Not much. Not more than we had to.”
Belias folded his hands behind his back, studied the counter that showed the elevator rising. “Sam, would you be so kind as to kill this man?”
The orange man and I both froze. Belias stepped back, away from us, waiting, his words heavy in the air. You can either believe the words someone says or not, but you threaten someone with death, they react.
The orange man went for his gun.
There’s not a lot of room to fight in an elevator. The key to victory in an enclosed space is brief, savage blows delivered to whatever vulnerable spot you can reach. You have no room to retreat. So you have to overwhelm quickly.
The orange man was bigger than me and thickly muscled. But I thought his power might be derived from a gym (where he no doubt acquired his sunset hue) and not from fighting.
Often, I’m wrong.
He had his hand going for the gun in his jacket holster and I slammed the heel of my foot hard into his chest and pinned his hand where it was. Against the gun. Do the math and he still had one hand free. Which he used to upend my leg, piledriving me back into the other side of the elevator.
Belias stood there, unmoving, watching the floors tick by as we zoomed toward the penthouse.
The orange man grunted, pinning me against the wall, which hurt, but now I wasn’t off-balance for one second. That took the weight off my free foot so I kicked upward, catching him in the armpit. He stumbled back, releasing me to go for his gun and I knew that was a tactical mistake. You already have a weapon; it’s called a hand.
The gun caught in the holster, jammed between us. I powered the heel of my hand hard into his throat. He choked but didn’t ease up. He still had his one hand free, hesitating on how to punch me. I closed my fist around his and powered it back, forced his fist back into his own throat. That really hurts. He coughed hard, a wheezy, broken noise, and for one second I thought I’d cracked his trachea. But now he yanked the gun free of the holster—easier to do since we weren’t tangled up together.
“Just a few more floors, Sam,” Belias said.
I closed a hand on the gun. It was capped with a suppressor so that gave me more gun to grab. You never think of that as a shortcoming of a suppressor, do you? It is. He had his hand on the handle but I had the rest of it. I slammed the gun upward into his chest. Now if he pulled the trigger, pressed against his own chest, he’d shoot off a chunk of jaw. But he controlled the trigger, not me.
I didn’t want to kill the guy. Not that he knew or believed that even if I’d announced it. He used his strength to push himself off the wall, launching me back into the other side of the elevator. But I kept the gun pressed hard against him, pushing its shape into his hard chest.
Then he took a chance. He slammed a fist into my face. It hurt. But it meant he wasn’t pushing back against me with both arms. He sacrificed half his strength on the risk of a punch. Mistake. I took the punch and didn’t block it because I kept my hands on the prize, the gun.
I got a finger on the trigger. “Let go,” I said. “Or I’ll pull the trigger.”
“No!”
“I won’t kill you. My friend is overly dramatic.”
He grappled and I turned the gun down and pulled. The bullet hit his foot, punching a neat bloody hole where his big toe was. He screamed and let go and I slammed a blow hard into his throat, then another into his jaw, then two more into the back of his head. He crumpled.
I glanced up at Belias, who studied the orange man’s injuries, as though evaluating my work.
“I told you to kill him.”
“You seem to have mistaken me for your attack dog,” I said. “I decide when I kill someone. Not you.”
“When those doors open, you may not have room for so many morals.”
The elevator chimed, and the doors to the penthouse slid open. I raised the stolen gun.
63
Sunday, November 7, early afternoon
IF LUCKY LAZARD is in this network, they’ll either meet in his penthouse or elsewhere in the casino. No other public spot.” Felix’s voice had a confidence that Mila had not heard before. He and Mila had flown commercial to Vegas. They’d driven to Sam’s bar in Las Vegas, The Canyon Club, and Felix called Jimmy, then gave the phone to Mila, who stayed in the car, while he ran in to pick up needed equipment—a generic maintenance uniform, electronic passcards, a smartphone wired to scan alarm entry codes, and weapons. He took a shotgun and ammo, packed in a canvas tote, a Glock in a holster, and Mila took a telescoping baton he brought her. She hid it in her boots, under her jeans.
They parked at a bar, a few streets away from the Mystik. Felix said, “I don’t want our license tags on the lot’s security cameras.”
“Jimmy is unhappy we’re here,” Mila said. “He is not convinced this is worth doing.”
“He’ll get over that.” Felix checked the shotgun, then zipped up the canvas tote.
Mila frowned. “We go in shooting to save Sam? He wants to get in close to this man, learn all his secrets.”
“If Lazard is one of his people, we might learn enough of his secrets right now to bring him down. We only need one person willing to cooperate. And he and Belias are cornered here.”
Mila nodded. “But penthouses have keys.”
“The security company that runs the private floors’ elevator access, we have a master key code for their systems.” He held up a card. “This should get us access via the private elevator or the stairway.”
“Or the penthouse must have a service elevator.”
“That’s the better choice,” he said. “And I’ve got a maintenance uniform.”
“Get dressed then.”
He ducked into a men’s room and emerged two minutes later. He carried the canvas bag to hide the shotgun and a spare for Mila, and he had the master key clipped to him, along with an ID that approximated the look of the Mystik’s employee badges.
“You are certainly prepared,” she said.
“I work fast.”
“So, the service elevator.”
“Service entrance back here,” Felix said. “Let’s see if our master card works.” He ran it along the scanner and the door clicked.
They stepped inside the service entrance. Like an amusement park, most of the necessary work of the casino is hidden from tourist eyes. They saw a trio of maintenance personnel, a woman in chef’s whites pushing a tray, another woman pushing cases of beer on a cart.
“This way,” he said. Mila followed him down the corridor, sticking close, since she wasn’t in uniform and didn’t have a badge, but they walked with brisk certainty and that is half the trick to a disguise. She saw a sign for a service elevator: PENTHOUSE ACCESS—CLEARANCE REQUIRED.
“There,” she said. They followed the arrow down an empty, small corridor. They were alone. “We can take it to the floor below, and then if Sam needs us…”
Felix turned and hit her, hard, in the side of the head. She was stunned and she fell back against the wall. He hit her again, in the stomach, then at the base of her neck, and she went down, nerveless. He took the baton from her boot under her jeans, and he slid the key and shoved her into a storage room.
“This is for your own good,” he said. She tried to stand and he hit her with a brutal, precise punch in the throat. She slammed into the shelves, dazed. “Forgive me, Mila.”
She gasped, choked, coughed, managed to breathe. He took her phone. “I need you to do what I say. Stay here for the next hour or Sam may well die. Do you understand me? Stay here.”
She managed a nod.
“Don’t raise a fuss. But stay here. I’m so sorry.”
Felix shut the door.
She lay on the floor, anger blinding her. Her own good? What did he mean? She slowly got to her feet. She couldn’t believe he’d
taken her down—she was better than that. And he’d been so…polite about it.
Sam. She had no way to reach him, no way to access the elevator to the penthouse.
She reached for the door and the knob turned, and Mila started to put the lie in her mouth that she’d taken a wrong turn, or just push past whichever custodian was standing there.
But it was Holly Marchbanks with a gun leveled at her. Capped with a suppressor.
“You made a mistake,” Holly said. “I never did think your boyfriend came over to our side.”
She fired.
64
Sunday, November 7, early afternoon
THE ELEVATOR DOORS OPENED. A man stood on the other side, looking bored, until he saw the unconscious thug in the elevator and me aiming said thug’s gun at him.
His hand moved toward his own holster and I said, “Don’t,” and he didn’t. He froze, staring at the orange man sprawled on the elevator floor. He looked at me with pure hatred. He was taller, even bigger than the orange man, thicker in the chest, broader in the shoulders.
“You killed Randy,” he said.
“He’s not dead. Keep your hands where I can see them.” The private elevator wouldn’t go back down without being summoned by someone with a penthouse card, but I thought it best Randy’s journey be at an end. “Drag him out of the elevator,” I said.
The other guy moved past me slowly, watching the gun, and took Randy by his shoulders and pulled him out. The blood from his foot left a smear. The elevator door slid closed but the elevator stayed in place. He pulled the shoe off Randy’s foot, the blood gushing from the wound.
“Do you have something we can staunch it with?” I asked and he glared at me.
“Leave him, it’s not fatal.” Belias fished the key off Randy and nodded politely at the second man. “You might get to live if you cooperate,” he said. He stepped close, relieved the man of his gun, frisked his leg. He found a long, wicked stiletto. “My goodness, we were expecting trouble. All this for me.”
He pushed the man along past the hallway that led to the elevators and out into the main room. Las Vegas spread out beneath us, grand towers close and in the distance, a bizarre landscape of Eiffel Tower and pyramid and castle and glass towers, a medley of toy buildings pressed close together.
Lucky Lazard stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by a giant square of leather sofas gathered around a huge circular marble table. I knew his face because you couldn’t own a bar in this town and not know who he was—he owned bars, casinos, apartment buildings. A king of the desert. A woman—Janice Keene, I presumed, because her daughter looked very much like her—sat on the couch. Her hands were bound but she wasn’t gagged. She had a busted lip and her cheek looked bruised. But she was lovely, like Diana.
Our gaze met for a moment; then her stare went to Belias.
Lazard saw the guns. “What’s the meaning of this?”
“You know, Lucky,” Belias said, “if I order you to turn off the cameras so there’s no record of my coming and going, then I sure don’t expect you to have…guests.”
“These are my security guards.”
“You don’t need guards with me.”
“Don’t I?”
“They shot Randy in the foot!” the guy volunteered. “In the elevator!” As though that compounded the breach of etiquette.
“She lied to me. You sent her. I didn’t want to believe it, Belias. I’ve been good to you.” He sounded incredulous.
“You’ve been the best.”
“I know what this is about,” he said. “I know. Put Randy in the other room. Andy, it’s going to be okay. I know why this is happening.”
“Okay? Okay? No, it’s not okay. Randy’s shot. Nothing is okay,” the second man said.
“If you don’t want things to get worse, go into the other room.”
“No, stay put. I don’t want him making phone calls,” Belias said. “What is this about, Lucky? I’m curious to hear your, no doubt, brilliant theory.”
“She’s like me. One of yours. Now I think you sent her, since you’ve come in with muscle.”
Belias said very quietly, “Why would I do that?”
“Because Glenn Marchbanks wanted to revolt against you. He wanted to grab control. I told him to forget it. I told him there was no reason.”
Belias looked almost amused. It made me uneasy. “How did you even know about each other?”
“He was trying to figure out who you are and who all you’ve recruited. He figured out me.”
“And what? Just asked you?”
“No,” Lazard said after a moment. “It was coded. A couple of things he said to me when we met a couple of times at business conferences. We were both keynote speakers. He said something about deals with the devil. Then he showed me his I Ching necklace. The visual password. I told him we weren’t supposed to know about each other, I wasn’t interested.”
“So he wanted you to join his little project.”
“Yes. And I said no.”
“And didn’t warn me.”
“He was feeling me out. He was worried what would happen if you got caught or arrested or sick with cancer”—and he glanced at Janice Keene—“or if you just got hit by a bus.”
“Glenn was disloyal. You should have called me the moment he contacted you.” Belias seemed to notice Janice. “And, Janice, you fumbled this, but that’s a separate conversation. How badly did he hurt you?”
“They hit my head against a desk and a wall. Hit me hard. But I’m okay.”
“She does, in fact, have cancer,” Lucky said. “Did you know that?”
Belias smiled. “I’m not here to talk about her. I’m here to talk about you.”
“What is it you want from me?”
“I want you to untie her and apologize.”
“After you sent her to kill me?” Lucky’s face reddened with rage.
“I sent her to spy on you,” Belias said. But he looked at Janice as he said it. She met his gaze without blinking.
“Spy on me with a gun.”
“Glenn is dead,” Belias said. “Not by my hand, either.”
Now I flinched because I thought, He can’t tell Janice what’s happened with Diana. She’ll know he’s after her daughter. I was more than willing to tell her—as soon as I got her out of here. She was the key. I didn’t care about Belias and his squabbles with his gold-plated underlings.
“Glenn…I told him he was foolish, that he shouldn’t do this…” Lucky began.
In the midst of their bickering, I could feel the weight of the thug’s stare on my shoulders. “You shot Randy,” he hissed. “He’s gonna lose a toe. I hope you like to dance, because I’m going to shoot off all ten of your toes, one at a time.”
“Randy was armed and I wasn’t,” I said. “Think about that for a minute.”
He shut up.
Lazard kept pleading his case. “Look, I told Glenn to settle down. I didn’t tell you because you’d kill him and you’d lose a valuable man. It was a temporary insanity with him. If he recruited anyone else, I don’t know about it…”
“Anyone else,” Belias said.
Lazard wiped his mouth. “Barbara Scott is dead. Did Glenn get to her?”
“That must be why Barbara is dead, then,” Belias said. “No other good reason.” I thought he was going to laugh for a moment.
“What do you want? I’ll make this right.” Now I could hear the undertone of fear in Lucky Lazard’s voice. Now I was seeing the man he was without his master behind him. Standing on his own.
“What is it you want?” Lazard asked again. “You want me to prove loyalty to you? What do you want?”
“First off, apologize to Janice. Hitting a cancer patient? That’s low, even for you.”
“I’m sorry, Janice.”
“Now. Take a knee.”
I saw Lazard’s face flush red. Who kneels to anyone anymore? An ancient custom, one stripped of purpose unless you’re being knighted. It’s degr
ading. It reminds us that we haven’t come that far from the days where people owned each other or owed their lives to liege and lord. It’s not so many turns around the sun since those days.
“Belias, this is silly…”
“Kneel. Or I’ll send Janice or Sam over to your daughter’s house.”
Lucky’s jaw worked.
I didn’t appreciate him offering me up to kill an innocent kid. “I thought you didn’t make threats.” I made my voice cold. My hands tensed. I couldn’t let him kill Lazard in cold blood, but if I made a move, the angry guard would go for me. I had to wait and see what deal they struck.
“Promises,” Belias said with a smile. “Not threats. Kneel, Lucky, and I’ll let you live.”
“You’ll let me live.” Lazard laughed. “I mean, this is all very grand-sounding language. I can bring you down is the plain way of putting it. Anything happens to me, the truth about you comes out.”
“I expect a Vegas man to be a better bluffer. If you do that, your estate loses everything. It’ll be tied up in court for years, people you stepped on suing you. People you cheated, people you wronged. Your daughter will never see a penny of it. Hurting me is hurting her.”
And then I saw the truth of it in Lazard’s eyes: he was bluffing. Because what a neat little world Belias builds for his network, I thought. He lifts them up the ladder but they can never step off it; if they do, those that follow—their kids, their families—fall as well. Look at the Madoffs. Look at the corrupt executives who get exposed. The wealth and the power vanishes with the truth.
You never, ever got out of Belias’s debt.
So Lucky Lazard knelt. “I swear I don’t know of anyone else Glenn recruited.”
“That’s what I needed to know,” Belias said softly. “But that’s not why you’re going to die, Lucky. It’s because…you and Barbara know too much. And I think you know why.”
I saw a dawning realization shift across Lucky’s face.
And, impossibly, behind us, I heard the barest chime.
The elevator doors opening.
65
Sunday, November 7, early afternoon