Dead Six (58 page)

While the main attention was elsewhere, I grimaced, stumbled, and caught myself on the edge of the buffet table. There was a servant by my side almost instantly.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“My arm hurts. Oh, my chest.” I gasped and wheezed, doing my best to contort my face. The servant was on a radio, and I had a guard on each arm helping me toward the exit within seconds. In the background, the prince was giving his opening comments. Most of the power brokers did not notice my exit. Big Eddie winked.

We had memorized the layout of the palace. Every room and corridor was known to me. I knew exactly where I was as the guards pushed my wheelchair down the marble hall. The infirmary was the tenth room on this wing. The guards chattered into their radios, asking for one the prince’s physicians to meet them.

“Oh, the pain.” I was really milking it. “It is my heart again. Summon my men; they have my special medication.”

“Do as he says!” one of the guards ordered as he rolled me into the white-walled room filled with state-of-the-art medical equipment. They gently lifted my padded bulk onto a padded table. There were two guards in the room now.

This was right where I needed to be. The building plans indicated that the infirmary backed up to the secondary security-control station. They shared the same wiring conduit behind the walls. The plans said that the access panel was ten feet from the northwest corner. Reaper figured that it would look like a half-size metal door with electrical warning stickers on it.
There
.

“Dr. Karzi, it is Al Falah, one of the guests. He has fallen ill. He says it is his heart,” one of the guards exclaimed as an older man entered the room, pulling a white smock over his starched shirt and tie. He rudely pushed the guard aside and pressed his fingers against my neck. He scowled.

“That is odd,” he muttered. “Describe your pain.”

“It hurts.” I held up my arm and risked a glance at my watch. I had been playing sick now for three minutes, which meant Carl had probably tripped Starfish’s timer by now. “I need my men . . . my medicine . . .” On cue, Reaper appeared, being led by a third guard. He gave me an imperceptible nod.

The doctor began to open the front of my traditional dress. “Your heart rate is only forty beats per minute. Something is abnormal.” There were some downsides to having ice water running through your veins.

“I have his medication,” Reaper said, holding up the briefcase he had been allowed to obtain from our car. Sadly, there were no guns in it, because we had been certain that even in this scenario, they would probably still give it a cursory check. He opened the case.

The doctor was going to figure out something was wrong any second now. The guards looked more concerned for my health than for any trickery. Well, they should be concerned; Al Falah was buddies with every badass terrorist in the business. I was the equivalent of a rock star to these guys.

Several stories below, Starfish was counting down to firing. I was technically illiterate, but Reaper had done his best to educate me. Starfish was a NNEMPD, a Non-Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse Device. When Starfish’s timer hit zero, it was going to use a small amount of explosives to cause a compressed magnetic flux. It would nail every electronic device within a couple hundred yards with the equivalent of getting struck by lightning ten times in a quarter of a second.

Reaper came out with a syringe full of amber liquid. He tapped it and squirted a bit out to remove the air bubbles. The doctor glanced at him. “This isn’t a coronary. What is his condition?”

The lights went out, plunging the room into pure black.

“Just plain mean,” Reaper answered.

I nailed the doctor with an elbow to the face and then sprung off the table, moving in the direction of the three guards. I couldn’t see, but I had been expecting this. They were caught by surprise. A shape moved in front of me. I kicked straight out, low and fast, and caught someone in the knee. There was a scream. A hand grabbed my thobe and pulled. I grabbed the wrist, twisted it, and levered it down, snapping bones. I palm-struck that guard in the throat and put him down.

The emergency power kicked on a second later. The place was certainly efficient. The third guard was down, Reaper’s syringe in his neck. The man with the broken knee fumbled with the strap over his pistol. I snap-kicked him in the face, and he was done.

Reaper retrieved the briefcase and sprinted to the access panel. He opened it, revealing a twisted pillar of wires and fiber-optic cables. He immediately went to work. Starfish wasn’t powerful enough to destroy everything, just the unshielded electronics that were close to it. It was at ground level and wouldn’t travel very far. Inside the palace, it would have fried a lot of stuff, but the main security system would be shielded. But that was okay. We didn’t want to take it out; we only needed to give them a surge hard enough to force them to restart.

I pulled the syringe out of the guard, moved to the next one, and poked him in the side, careful to only give him a few CCs of the powerful horse tranquilizer. The doctor moaned and crawled toward one of the guard’s squawking radios. “Nighty night, Doc.” I stuck him in the arm and gave him the last of the drug. He sluggishly rolled over, smiled stupidly at me, giggled, and was out.

“
System report. What caused the power surge?
” It was Hassan’s voice on the radio. I picked it off of the guard’s belt. Apparently it hadn’t been hot enough to fry these.

“
Unknown, sir,
” someone else responded. “
The system has gone down. We’ll have it back up shortly
.”

“
Find out, or I’ll have you fed to the tigers,
” Hassan snapped. “
Taha, report
.”

The line was quiet.

“
Taha. What’s the status of our guest?
” Hassan sounded angry. He did not seem like the kind of person I wanted to deal with when he was angry. I had to assume that one of these men was Taha.

I made my voice as neutral as possible. “Dr. Karzi says that it was just gas. Al Falah is resting.” I began to remove weapons from the guard’s duty belts. FN FNP 9mms, good guns.

“
Fine. Get him back here as soon as you can. Hassan out.
”

I checked my watch. “Forty seconds,” I said to Reaper.

“Working on it.” He was flipping through wires like a man on a mission. “Get my computer.” I pulled the laptop out of the briefcase, opened it, and waited for his next command. It was already running and on the correct screens. We had practiced this a few times. This was his gig now.

From Big Eddie’s intel we knew that the palace compound was a closed system. There was no way to hack into the security from the outside world. If you wanted to take over, you needed to be in the belly of the beast. The design parameters told us that we had one minute from a power outage for the system to reset, and then we’d be locked out. It was a narrow window, but it was all we had.

Reaper picked a fat yellow cable and did his magic to it, clamping some sort of ring around it. He plugged a USB cable into his machine and then pushed me rather rudely out of the way.

“Thirty seconds.”

“I know. I know,” he muttered. Screens flashed by as he paged through them. “Come on, baby, come on.”

I stuffed two of the FNs inside the thobe and left the third on the countertop by Reaper. I stuck four extra magazines into my pockets. Might as well be ready, because if he couldn’t get us into their system, we were going to have a whole lot of explaining to do. And when I said explaining, I meant shooting. I also took one of the radios.

“Twenty seconds.”

Numbers were scrolling through a box on the screen. Another box was gradually filling up with asterisks below it. This was hard to watch, and my stomach felt sick at the tension. The computer beeped.

“Ten. Why did it beep?”

“Shut up, Lorenzo!”

“Five.”

The screen changed color, and Reaper clapped his hands together above his head. “I so rock! We’re in. I think I should be the new sysadmin.” Reaper began to tab through windows. Alarm systems, cameras, laser arrays, surface-to-air missiles; you name it, we had it. He immediately found the camera for the infirmary. It was a black-and-white image of the two of us standing over the computer, with a bunch of people lying on the floor. He fiddled with the track ball, and the camera rotated until it was looking at the far wall. Now it was an empty room.

“I’m going,” I said. I reset the timer on my watch. “Mark, ten minutes. Then we blow this sucker.” From our best estimates, that was how long we figured we had before system command figured out that they were compromised and the whole place locked down on red alert.

“I know the drill,” he replied, not taking his eyes from the screen. Of course he did. We had practiced this a hundred times. He was already screwing around with the palace’s communications. In a few seconds, the only people who were going to be using the radio net in this place were the ones Reaper was going to allow to do so. He didn’t need to do anything to the outside equipment; Starfish had destroyed most of that. So now he was randomly closing down interior systems. Hopefully they’d think that it was some sort of equipment malfunction and not that they were being violated by people like us.

At ten minutes, I exited, took a quick glance down the hallways, and then walked purposefully toward the main elevator. Some servants noticed me, but I smiled at them like I belonged there, and they let me pass. I entered the elevator and waited for the doors to close.

Nine minutes left. The elevator was secure and plated in gold and polished mirrors. You needed a card key to access anything other than the main floors. Only a handful of the staff here had the card necessary to do so. I didn’t even press any buttons, and the car began to move smoothly down. A digital display counted rapidly into the negative numbers as we headed deep into the bowels of the palace.

My radio beeped. I pulled it out. “Go.”

“
I’m in control now. I’ve locked out everyone else. They’re confused, blaming it on the surge. You’ve got two guards standing at the base of the elevator shaft, and you’re going to walk right into them.
”

“Put me through to them,” I said, then cleared my throat. I had only spoken with him for a moment, but I needed to do a real convincing Hassan, real quick.

“
You’re on,
” Reaper said, and the radio clicked.

“All guards on basement six report to the level command post.” I could only hope that those were the correct terms, as that was what they had been labeled on Big Eddie’s stolen plans. “I want you there immediately.”

“
But, sir, you said not to leave our
—”

“Tigers! I will feed you to the tigers! Hassan out.” I shouted.

“
They’re moving, Lorenzo
,” Reaper said.

At seven minutes the elevator slid to a halt at negative six and the doors whooshed open. This was the lowest floor, chiseled out of the solid rock and containing one very secure vault. The hallway was empty. The concrete floors echoed as I walked down them. The level command post was just around the corner. I needed to get past it to get to the vault room.

I slid along the cold wall. Even the desert heat couldn’t reach this deep into the Earth. I carefully took stock of the command room. I could see at least a half a dozen men through the glass doors, most of them standing, looking around nervously, waiting for Hassan to arrive.

I checked my watch. Six minutes. There was no way I was going to get past there without getting spotted. I pulled out the radio. “Need a distraction at the guard room.”

“
I’m looking through the menus. Hang on
.”

The clock was ticking. I was going to give him thirty more seconds, and then I would try to sneak past on my own. Knowing that I was probably going to get spotted, I pulled one of the pistols and checked the chamber. No time for thought, once you pick a course of action, you were committed, and you’d damn well better see it through.

“
Got it
.”

The guards shouted in confusion as the fire sprinklers came on. I was immediately drenched in the downpour. I moved quickly while they were either looking up or covering their heads. I ran, splashing down the hallway, and pushed my way through the heavy double doors at the end. Once again, I didn’t even have to swipe a card.

“Oh shit. I screwed up, chief.”

“What?” I stared at the mighty vault door. It was enormous, a circular stainless-steel ultra-modern monolith to security engineering. To a thief like me, it was the most intimidating thing I had ever seen. Multiple combination locks ringed the device, over a dozen giant bolts were compressed into the tempered steel at different angles. The fact that the sprinklers in here were dumping water everywhere made the scene slightly surreal. On the other side of that vault were the greatest treasures in the world, wealth beyond all comprehension.

But that wasn’t what I’d come for.

“That command turned on all the fire sprinklers in the palace. I’m watching the cameras. Everybody is freaking out!”

I continued down the hall. The carved stone became rougher and rougher and the passage started to trend sharply downward. I was now in the ancient tunnels that predated the construction of the palace. There were no sprinklers here, but their water flooded in a fast trail past my feet to disappear ahead of me.

“
The IT guys know something is up,”
Reaper exclaimed.
“Hurry.”

They were ahead of schedule. Why was it that nothing ever went according to plan?

The tunnel opened into a larger room. A string of lights had been bolted into the ceiling. The room was perfectly square, every surface covered in carved writing. I didn’t recognize any of the words; everything was too archaic. There was a circular indentation on the floor. The room felt
ancient.

And it should. This space had been carved over a thousand years ago by unknown hands. Discovered by Saladin’s armies, it had been used to house his most valuable possessions. Or so the Fat Man’s report had said. All I knew was that the thing I sought was under my feet.