Black Scorpion (13 page)

Since he couldn't hear the gunfire, those impacts that sprayed flecks of limestone into the air froze Ilie each time, forcing Scarlett to tug him even harder. She heard him whimpering, knew she needed to stay strong if she wanted to save the boy as well as herself.

They reached the foot of the mountains as more gunfire concentrated their way, disappearing into the brush to leave the bullets and gunmen behind them.

But not the last of the screams. Scarlett pictured the faces of her fellow workers and team members, friends now. Thirty-five of them, mostly college age. Wide-eyed and bright, but no more.

Their screams curdled Scarlett's blood. She grabbed tighter hold of the boy so as not to lose track of him in the cover of the brush and woods, finding renewed purpose in saving him, as if saving herself was not enough. She waited for the sounds of pursuit and more gunfire trained their way, certain they'd be coming before too very much longer.

And they did.

Just a single set of steps, though. Scarlett and Ilie rounded a bend leading up a hillside that formed the lowestmost reaches of the mountains that ringed the area like vast stone sentinels. She yanked the boy to a halt, pushed him away from her and signed for him to stay still and quiet. She'd hoped to find a severed branch to slam like a baseball bat into the gunman's face when he rounded the bend. But finding none, she opted for the biggest rock she could hold comfortably, lurching back upright just as their pursuer drew close enough for her to hear his boots thrashing through the ground thickets.

Scarlett lunged out when she first glimpsed him in a hazy blur. She'd planned to crash the rock into his face, but he sped past her, already grinding to a stop when she pounced. Hitting him once in the back of the skull and then again, again, and again as he dropped to his knees and fell over face-first.

Scarlett grabbed Ilie by the hand and led him on an erratic path through the thick and gnarled brush. Finally the boy tugged at her sharply and collapsed to the ground in exhaustion, eyes still wide with terror. Scarlett crouched even with him, hoping she didn't look as scared as she felt.

“The village!” she said, making the sign for that as well. “We need to get to the village!”

Ilie nodded, slowly recovering his breath.

This way,
he signed, grabbing hold of her to pull himself back to his feet.

 

TWENTY-SEVEN

L
AS
V
EGAS,
N
EVADA

There was no way at that point to either retrieve the body or to determine its identity. Michael initially figured someone must have slipped, or been jostled, into the Daring Sea when the power went out. Then Alexander pulled him aside, the night continuing to grow worse by the moment.

“There's been a breach in the Daring Sea,” he reported, adding, “one of the suites.”

*   *   *

Those dark five minutes had plunged the entire city of Las Vegas, the Strip in particular, into utter chaos. Traffic remained gridlocked and dozens of accidents had been reported after the traffic signals went down. The Strip itself remained a parking lot, a scene turned all the more frantic and bizarre by tourists spilling into the streets in search of answers. A fair number, fearing terrorism, rushed to pack their bags and flee the city. What they didn't know was that McCarran Airport had been shut down in the wake of the now confirmed crash of a commuter jet coming in for a landing just as the power died on the runways. The commuter plane slid onto the equally darkened tarmac where it collided with a cargo jet and burst into flames on impact. There were some survivors among the eighty-five passengers but the exact number kept changing.

At first Michael rode Alexander's shadow through the clutter, trying to reassure the guests and stem the panic. But he quickly gave up when his efforts proved fruitless.

“They need us in the control room, Michael,” Alexander told him, after listening to a hushed message from a security guard.

*   *   *

The Seven Sins had been built with virtually every eventuality in mind, but there was no precise procedure to follow for something like this. The authorities had been alerted as soon as the return of power allowed, and the next step was to retrieve whatever was left of the victim's remains via robotic submersible. Eventually, a diver would need to be sent into the waters, but that required the great whites to be herded into the holding area, where they were regularly vaccinated to protect against bacterial infections, no small chore.

Meanwhile, Michael and Alexander joined Naomi Burns in the mega-resort's surveillance room, a highly equipped center dominated by the latest in security technology located directly over the casino floor. The command center featured dozens and dozens of closed-circuit monitoring screens showing every inch of the complex thanks to over two thousand cameras stretched across the property. The pictures they provided were watched over by hundreds of personnel also responsible for issues pertaining to climate control, traffic, and surveillance of suspicious persons. An endless sea of smaller screens were layered amid larger ones featuring the most heavily trafficked portions of the property, lighting the otherwise dim confines in a wash of color, a prism-like kaleidoscope that splashed over the faces of the monitors, whose eyes never left the screens for which they were responsible.

“This is what we know, Michael,” Naomi Burns reported as soon as she spotted him enter, having distilled the most vital information from the constant flow of reports coming in. “All of Las Vegas was affected, including the control tower at McCarran. There were reports of a crash that was just confirmed, but details remain sketchy. This blackout took out cellular service as well and even our security guards' backup walkie-talkies stopped working, along with the backup power system.”

“What do we know about the breach?”

“The Daring Sea suite where it occurred,” she informed him, “was registered to a man named Edward Devereaux. He checked in last night while you were getting acquainted with Durado Segura. Nothing stands out as irregular in his registration information at this point, other than the fact that he paid with a cash deposit of five thousand dollars.”

Meanwhile, emergency procedure was to immediately evacuate all levels of the Daring Sea suites until such time it could be confirmed the breach was contained and no further danger existed. Michael couldn't count the number of people who'd told him he was crazy for even considering the construction of underwater lodging within a marine environment. As a result, those Daring Sea suites were built with so many redundant protocols and safeguards as to be as safe, if not safer, than ordinary aboveground rooms. Among these protocols was the fact that each suite was sealed as tight as a submarine, so if the glass did somehow crack or rupture the entire underwater structure wouldn't flood, and any damage could be contained to that single suite. The glass itself was eleven inches thick; three even, separate layers finished on both sides with a special clear polymer. Michael had ordered his engineers to go beyond even what was required of him by state and city building officials who had advanced their own stringent demands to discourage him from the effort in the first place.

The glass walls of the Daring Sea suites had endured every test imaginable from high-powered bullets to explosions mimicking a terrorist attack. Understandably, that left Michael uneasy over what could have possibly caused an actual breach in a facility that had suffered not so much as a crack or fissure in any of its glass in its entire history of operation.

The investigation into the source had already begun by the time he and Alexander reached the control room, with the lowering of a small robotic submersible into the Daring Sea to provide a firsthand view of the suite in question.

“The breach occurred on sub-level four, suite number forty-one.” Naomi turned back toward the wide screen monitor following the submersible's descent. “Robbie should be coming up on it now.”

“Robbie” was the resort's pet name for the submersible, after the famed robot from old movies and television shows.

“Here we go,” said Naomi, as Robbie approached what looked like an empty chasm amid an otherwise intact bank of individual glass walls so wondrously constructed as to appear to be a single sheet.

“Do we have an exact time for the breach?”

“No, Michael,” Naomi told him, “but it was shortly after the blackout struck, almost immediately, that we know for sure.”

Michael looked toward Alexander, the two of them sharing the same thought.

The pressure resulting from even a minor breach in the glass on its own would be enough to rupture the entire wall, but not right away. It would take time, certainly enough time for Edward Devereaux to safely flee and return to the surface either by elevator, if they were still working, or up one of the myriad of emergency stairwells. That indicated the breach might have been caused by a catastrophic event that had ruptured all the glass in a single moment, something that seemed unlikely at best.

“No evidence of a blast or explosion?” Michael said, wondering, when Robbie came up on the missing glass wall.

“No signature I can see, whatsoever,” Alexander told him. “This was no bomb, Michael, no terrorist attack.”

They all continued to watch as Robbie steered toward the breach and entered the Daring Sea suite to a surreal scene of chairs, pillows, magazines, clothes, luggage, a Bose Wave radio, lamps with their cords still connected to the wall sockets, and a laptop all floating in the water.

“Indications are,” said a technician viewing the screen with them, “that the victim either swam or floated into the Daring Sea where the sharks found him. But that doesn't explain their erratic behavior.” He turned to look toward Michael. “I watch them every day and I've never seen them act this frenzied, not even close.”

“Do we know anything else about the victim, Naomi?” Michael asked.

“Just the usual stuff on the registration form. He listed his occupation as sales and left an address in France.”

“Sounds routine.”

“Maybe not,” Naomi told him. “In addition to Devereaux paying in cash, the clerk at the VIP desk remembers him writing down an address, then tearing up the form and requesting a new one.”

“As if, what, he'd forgotten it?”

“I don't know, Michael. It just struck her as strange. We just learned that the business number he left in Paris doesn't exist. And the residential address he gave us on the replacement form turned out to be a water treatment facility.”

“Normally that would be funny,” Alexander noted.

Michael shot him a look. “Not tonight.”

“There's something else interesting,” Naomi noted. “As his preferred charity, Devereaux chose the International Center of Missing Persons and Exploited Children.”

“Do we have a picture?”

Naomi touched a button on the keyboard before her and a grainy shot captured of Edward Devereaux at the VIP registration desk upon check-in filled the screen.

“Wait, I recognize that man,” Michael said. “I signed a Seven Sins souvenir book for him just before the blackout.”

Michael felt Alexander grasp his arm firmly. “The Las Vegas police want to see you.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes, the FBI is on the way.”

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

R
ETEZAT
M
OUNTAINS,
T
RANSYLVANIA

Ilie led Scarlett along the lower line of mountains, clinging to the protective shroud of the woods at their base while never letting go of her hand. The clamminess of the late morning had given way to a day warm and breezy beneath a sun rising high in a clear sky. Its warmth baked the sweat soaking through Scarlett's shirt, gluing it to her flesh. Her cargo pants were even worse, sodden with so much perspiration the heavy cotton and polyester material seemed to squish as she moved.

It felt surreal,
unreal
. Her mouth was bone dry but felt coppery. And she
smelled
blood, too, as if residue of the massacre were somehow clinging to her nostrils. She chased the memory of the awful screams from her ears, knowing she was lucky to be alive. The boy, too.

Could it be the remains of the ancient manuscript the gunmen were after?

The possibility alone left Scarlett trembling. She never should've inspected it on site, should've kept its existence an utter secret and smuggled it out of the country somehow. That meant the responsibility for the deaths of her entire team may have rested, partially at least, with her.

Oh God …

Right now Scarlett could only focus on reaching the town of Vadja to call for help. Justice had to be done. Rampant corruption or not, even Romanian officials would respond appropriately to a mass murder.

Faster
, she signed to Ilie,
faster
.

 

TWENTY-NINE

L
AS
V
EGAS,
N
EVADA

Needing to recharge his mind after his lengthy interview with the police, Michael headed for his private dojo next to the bubble glass office from which he worked at the bottom of the Daring Sea. He loved training with Alexander in hand-to-hand combat and all manner of weaponry, especially knives, while completely surrounded by sharks. His favorite moments were when one of his sharks seemed to hover outside the thick glass enclosing the five-thousand-foot glass-enclosed space watching. Occasionally the shark would veer and shoot away as if shot by a cannon, only for Michael to see Assassino prowling around the glass in its place, sometimes nuzzling it with his snout. Michael enjoyed nothing more than meeting Assassino's eyes, the big fish in those moments seeming to grasp what he was doing.

Today a fight between one of his other great whites and a tiger shark over the remnants of a side of beef dominated the action beyond the glass. The two monsters moving with a grace and agility developed over millions of years of evolution that itself looked terrifying and natural at the same time. Everything fluid, no wasted motion whatsoever. Man could learn a lot from them.