Black Scorpion (18 page)

“Many?”

“After last night's blackout, I should think so.”

“Oh, so you believe Mr. Tiranno was behind that, along with all the other baseless charges you've leveled against him. All the casinos were blacked out, Agent, and much of the entire city.”

Slocumb smirked, clearly enjoying himself. “I wouldn't put it past him; I wouldn't put anything past him.”

This cat-and-mouse game had been going for years now, ever since the FBI's investigation into the implosion of the Maximus Casino on the current site of the Seven Sins, for which Michael had been fully exonerated. In everyone's mind, that is, except Del Slocumb's.

“And only one casino was the site of an inexplicable death at the same time,” Slocumb continued, leaving the thought dangling.

“So now you suspect Mr. Tiranno of concocting the blackout to draw attention away from killing a man he didn't know and met only in the course of signing an autograph. Can you at least listen to yourself, Agent?”

“I'd rather listen to Mr. Tiranno explain
him
self.”

“He's otherwise detained.”

“Where?”

“None of your business.”

“Would he rather face inquiries from the State Department?”

“Is this a national security interest, too?” Naomi asked him.

“The victim was a foreign national. You tell me.”

“I can tell you Mr. Tiranno will be available to meet with you just as soon as he handles some other matters requiring his immediate attention.”

“A strange time to leave the city, don't you think, Counselor?”

“Why don't we continue this in my office, Agent Slocumb?”

*   *   *

“What Mr. Tiranno does and why he does it is none of
your
business,” Naomi said, taking the matching fabric chair next to Slocumb's set before her desk.

Slocumb smirked. “I thought Durado Segura might be chasing him.”

“Durado Segura is in no condition to chase anyone.”

“Yes,” the FBI agent agreed. “Interesting skills your boss has acquired. And always running to the rescue of pretty women in distress. I wonder if a career in politics might be in his future.”

“I was just wondering the same thing about you.”

Slocumb gazed around at the elegant furnishings that adorned Naomi's office. She had chosen the pastel wall shades, subtly colorful tapestries, and warm, milky lighting personally, creating a work environment that best exemplified her choice in wardrobe as well, color-keyed to form a perfect match with the office's light tones.

“And I know the first place I'd come for a donation,” Slocumb told her.

He hesitated to let his point sink in, his cocoa-shaded features growing tight enough to exaggerate the patchwork of wrinkles forming around his eyes and the furrows lining his brow. A marine who'd served in Desert Storm, Slocumb had a protruding chin at the bottom of a square, angular face and still wore his now graying hair in a close-cropped military style. Naomi remembered him as a smoker, but he carried no smell of that with him today and she noticed his teeth looked freshly bleached.

She made sure Slocumb could see her stiffen in response to his last remark. “I'm not sure how to take that.”

“We're just having a nice friendly chat here. There's no reason to get testy.”

“Remember, Agent, I'm still a lawyer.”

As chief executive officer and corporate counsel of Tyrant Global and King Midas World, Naomi's office was fittingly the largest on the floor, offering a view of the hotel's lavish pool and faux beach area through its one-way windows. The floors were bamboo, the furniture fitting a modern Oriental motif that Naomi found both soothing and functional, an elegant match to the office's light shading. Her favorite piece was a beautiful indoor fountain given to her as a gift by Michael's investors in the Seven Sins Macau, a nearly identical property currently under construction in that booming city. Strange how it had been so much easier to arrange the variances and building permits there than it had been for Michael originally in Vegas. Partly because of a past that was the subject of much scrutiny and legend, some of which had left Michael and King Midas World perpetual targets. The FBI's Del Slocumb was hardly the only official who'd focused his sights here, just the most stubborn and relentless, given that he blamed his lack of advancement in the Bureau on his failure to ever deliver anything of substance on Michael Tiranno.

“Did I mention Tyrant Global's seven-thirty-seven had filed a flight plan for London, Ms. Burns? Could you tell me what was so urgent there that your boss had to leave Las Vegas in the midst of such a crisis?”

“Business.”

“You said that already.”

“Then why did you ask me again?”

“Let's discuss Edward Devereaux, who was killed here last night.”

“A tragic accident,” Naomi said, nodding, probing Slocumb's knowledge of the death as well as his intentions.

“That wasn't his real name, you know. We identified him from fingerprints lifted from the hand found in the Daring Sea. His real name was Pierre Faustin. He's a French national.”

“That much I was aware of.”

“Did you know he worked for Interpol?”

 

FORTY-THREE

S
ARDINIA

Aldridge Sterling sat at his desk within the nine-thousand-square-foot, seventy-five-meter yacht, watching the sun shine over Porto Cervo in the distance.

“I'm glad you're pleased,” Sterling said from his grand office on the upper deck of his yacht, looking out over a spectacular 360-degree view of the surrounding ocean. This while he engaged in a call over his Polycom speakerphone, simultaneously checking a screen displaying the Hong Kong markets. Yesterday, one of his wealth management funds made fifty million in the first hour of trading there, his fee thirty percent of all profits generated on behalf of his clients.

“How could I not be?” a thick, deep voice responded. “Please transfer all these funds into my offshore accounts. I will have my finance minister contact you for all the necessary paperwork.”

Sterling's primary clients, the ones who'd made Sterling Capital Partners the most successful hedge fund in the world, were primarily the heads of rogue states and nations. They came to him because he was expert in hiding their vast wealth and resources from prying eyes in their own countries as well as internationally, especially now that the American Department of Justice had become increasingly vigilant and aggressive in such pursuits. Legally established accounts in places like Panama, the Cayman Islands, and Luxembourg built up over more than a decade afforded Sterling this luxury. And his own genius at manipulating his AUM funds through shell entities that existed only on paper of his own making kept the authorities none the wiser of his efforts.

“By the way, thank you for the excellent referral last week,” Sterling said. “You may have opened up a whole new market for me.”

“Just remember that when it comes to taking out your commission.”

“Of course,” Sterling grinned. “After all, it's the people's money, isn't it?”

Sterling had had his yacht custom-made in Italy by the luxury manufacturer Benetti.
Big Whale
had been outfitted with a sprawling, view-rich master suite, and twenty staterooms that allowed it to sleep upward of forty guests. It was decorated in dark cherrywood and beige marble with leather-upholstered furniture, white carpeting, and walls covered in mauve silk. It featured a fifty-seat theater, two swimming pools, an eight-person whirlpool tub, a boardroom, a gymnasium, four Riva speedboats, a helipad on the flybridge, and an impressive array of diving gear Sterling wanted to pretend he used. The yacht's massive twin-diesel engines and twenty-five-thousand-gallon gas tanks were capable of putting out twenty-eight knots even in rough seas.

Gazing back toward Porto Cervo, though, Sterling could see any number of yachts that were even bigger than the
Big Whale
at a price tag that made his eyes bulge. Mostly they belonged to Arabs, illiterate mongrels made billionaires without ever working a day in their lives. If not for the oil over which they were lucky enough to live, they'd be dirt. He'd made many of them an even greater fortune over the years but, then, they'd made him a fortune, too.

And someday, very soon, Sterling would own a bigger yacht than theirs anyway. So big he'd turn the
Big Whale
into a dinghy for it.

“Mr. Sterling?” a male voice called tentatively from the door leading to the twenty-five hundred square feet of office space. “I'm sorry to bother you, sir,” continued the man dressed in the white uniform not of a sailor, but a nurse. “It's your father. The senator's having one of his spells.”

Barely acknowledging the man, Sterling climbed the outdoor spiral staircase up to the top deck where Senator Harold Sterling spent his days when they were here instead of New York, Palm Springs, or his estate in the Florida Keys. It was a laborious chore to have his father moved from place to place, but one Aldridge Sterling found well worth it since there was no better motivator for his relentless pursuit of ultimate success than the senator's presence.

Sterling reached the top deck to find his feeble father thrashing against two attendants struggling to keep him in his chair. He got that way once in a while, a brief moment of lucidity giving way to a violent fit that left him trying to escape the bonds of his chair to chase down some memory captured as a snapshot by his brain, which had pretty much turned to Jell-O. Doctors were able to slow the progressive effects left by his third stroke just enough to let Sterling keep him alive.

“Dad!” Sterling called, as he approached. “Dad!'

The old man's eyes showed no sign of recognition when he grasped his father at the shoulders, the attendants backing off to let Sterling restrain him alone.

“Dad,” he said, softer.

The old man finally looked his way, toward a voice instead of a face, still showing no sign he knew it was his son standing before him.

“Calm down, Dad, calm down.”

Sterling wondered what the old man might've been thinking during these fits. Perhaps reliving a moment from the war, or an especially important speech on the Senate floor, or just some simple task left undone from a decade before marking the last time he'd been lucid.

“How's it feel to be totally dependent on me?” Sterling asked, crouching before his father.

Harold Sterling thrashed in his chair some more, what might have been a brief blip of recognition flashing in his gaze as drool flecked out both sides of his mouth.

“I'm glad that you're here, because I can show you how wrong you were about me. I was the black sheep, the pariah, the bane of your existence not worthy of the Sterling legacy. You disowned me, but now I own
you
. Everything that happens in your life is at my behest. And here's the kicker.”

One of the white-jacketed attendants returned just long enough to hand Sterling a child's sippy cup full of water, and Sterling eased the straw against his father's lips. The old man opened his mouth and sucked it in, slurping up the contents so fast that water began to dribble down his chin to mix with the drool.

“I know I'm not in your will. I know how much you would've enjoyed sticking that in my face. How pawning off the family fortune to charities would be the ultimate fuck you. But it isn't. The ultimate fuck you is me keeping you alive as long as I can to deny you that satisfaction, while all your care eats up the money. I hope somewhere inside you that makes you suffer even more.”

Sterling watched his assistant approaching, extending a satellite phone toward him.

“It's him,” the assistant said, a tremor of fear clear in his voice.

Sterling took the phone in his grasp and moved to the rail, gazing up into the beautiful Mediterranean sun.

“Hello, my friend.”

 

FORTY-FOUR

L
AS
V
EGAS,
N
EVADA

Naomi tried not to look taken aback. Instead, she rose and walked around her desk, taking the chair behind it.

“I'm guessing you must enjoy your current posting, rank, and pay grade, Agent,” she told Slocumb.

“Excuse me?”

Naomi held his stare. “I understand this quest of yours has attracted plenty of attention here in Vegas, at the supervisory office in Los Angeles, and even in Washington.”

“Really? And how would you know that?”

“I guess you can call it common knowledge. So is the fact that you call Mr. Tiranno your ‘Wop' Whale, an allusion to Moby Dick, I imagine. I suppose that makes you Ahab, Agent.”

“Pierre Faustin was assigned to Interpol's Violent Crimes Division,” he said, sounding a bit more defensive. “You've heard of that, I assume.”

Naomi had, of course, but couldn't figure out where Slocumb was going with this. “They specialize in international criminal apprehension, drug interdiction, and human trafficking—anything that moves across international borders with relative impunity.”

“So what do you think brought a man like Faustin to Las Vegas and the Seven Sins?”

“Maybe he was on vacation. Try the tables, maybe take in a show. Hopefully, he wasn't a fan of Durado Segura.”

“Or of Michael Tiranno, Ms. Burns. When I discussed Faustin's career, notice I used the past tense. That's because Pierre Faustin, the man who registered here two nights ago as Edward Devereaux, was suspended from duty six months back and later resigned.”

“Interesting.”

Slocumb crossed his legs. “What's really interesting is he was fired for cause.”

“What cause might that be?”

“I'm afraid I'm not authorized to reveal the specifics, Ms. Burns, other than to say his termination was due to an investigation he insisted on continuing to follow up against the orders of his superiors.”