Downfall (33 page)

I
F 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.

T
HE 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 degrading. 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.

A
ND AROUND THE CORNER
came Felix.

I felt my chest heave in relief. He and Mila must have followed me. I knew they would. They’d figured out Lazard was the target in Vegas from Glenn’s cell phone text.

I heard Janice say, “Felix?” in surprise, in shock.

He was in a dark maintenance suit, and he carried a shotgun.

“Freeze,” he said in a voice more like steel than his own.

“Glad you’re here,” I said, stepping toward him. He looked at me like he didn’t know me and he smiled.

“Sam. Sorry.” And he slammed the butt of the shotgun into the side of my head.

I fell across the leather ottoman. Stars dancing through my eyes, thinking,
No, that’s not right
.

I heard a scream—Janice—the booming blasts of the gun, a horrid wet sound, the answering fire of a pistol, screams again, someone begging. I was sprawled on the leather, no one aiming at me, trying to bring my brain back to focus.

I raised my head.

Carnage. The second thug was dead, felled by the shotgun. Janice was…gone. Belias was gone. It’s unnerving to have a room full of dangerous people and misplace two of them. I felt a trickle of blood on the side of my head where the edge of the gun’s stock had struck me.

Lazard had taken cover behind the couch. Firing at Felix, who blasted back.

I rolled off the ottoman and then Lazard was shooting toward me, tufts of stuffing dancing in the air like pollen as the bullets tore the leather. I rolled up into a ball under the marble table. I was hurt, didn’t know how much, and people were trying to kill each other.

Then the shooting stopped.

“I don’t want to kill you,” Felix yelled and I hoped he was yelling it at me. The gun I’d taken from Randy. I’d dropped the gun when he hit me. Where…oh, Lazard had taken that gun. That was unfortunate. I stayed under the marble table.

“I want information,” Felix yelled. “I’ll let you live for information.”

“What?” I yelled.

“Shut up, Sam,” Felix said. “This has nothing to do with you.”

I begged to differ, but I don’t argue with shotguns.

“Why does Belias want you dead?” Felix asked. “Tell me and you live. Lie and die.”

“I think he wants to silence us,” Lazard said, his voice shaking badly. “Me and Barbara Scott. And…”

So Felix wasn’t on my side anymore. He’d destroyed my attempt to get information out of Belias. Let’s deal with the new reality. I inched under the marble slab of the table, looking for a way to get to Lazard. If he shot Felix and killed him, he’d kill me. He owned the casino, and one assumed he could get more Randys to help him clean up the mess. But Felix, Felix could be reasoned with, right? I knew Felix. At least I thought I did.

Then a chilling thought occurred to me: Where was Mila?

“And? Is there a third one?”

“If I tell you…you’ll just kill me.”

“Stop shooting at me and at Sam, and come out and let’s talk,” Felix called to Lazard.

“No. You shot Andy.”

“Andy would have shot me. Forget Andy. Focus on your future,” Felix yelled.

Andy and Randy. You can’t make this up. “Belias!” I yelled. “You two are missing the point. Where’s Belias?” I didn’t care about the garden snakes in the room, I wanted the cobra.

“Sam, stay down,” Felix ordered me. “Stay out of this, please.”

At least the shooting had stopped. I wondered if either of them had run out of ammunition.

I thought Lucky Lazard might respond to negotiation. “Lazard, I work for some people. We can hide you, hide your daughter until this is over. You don’t have to be afraid of Belias. I need you to stop him. It’s over now, you can see that. He’s over.”

“He’s far from over. He’s…” And he stopped.

“What’s he planning? What’s going to give him so much power?” I said.

“I shouldn’t have helped Belias…We shouldn’t have helped
her
…” Lazard’s voice, earlier a bullhorn, went soft. “Me and
Barbara
Scott and Rawlings…”

Rawlings?And Belias wasn’t a “her.”

“I won’t hurt you. Tell me what he’s doing,” Felix said. “Tell us where he and Janice will go.”

Well. Felix had his own agenda. And if I got out of this alive, I’d give some serious thought as to what it could be. He could have shot me dead, first and easiest. He hadn’t. So he might be willing to talk to me. “Tell us,” I said, like we were still working together.

“Sam, shut up. This has ceased to be your problem.”

I shut up. I looked out from the table. Lazard stood. He’d run out of bullets and he’d tossed the gun on the couch. Felix stood, the shotgun across his arms. I recognized the shotgun. He must have gone to my bar in Vegas, The Canyon Club, and armed himself. I pulled myself up from the floor very slowly. My head ached.

“Sam, sit down, or I’ll kill you,” he said.

I sat. “Belias?”

“He took the elevator down with Janice. They got out in the cross fire when I took out the muscle.”

“They’re running,” I said. “Where are they going?”

“Chicago. But it won’t matter. Rawlings will run now. I’ll call him and tell him to run,” Lazard said. His hands shook in relief that the shooting was over.

“Felix, you’ve been keeping secrets,” I said.

“Shut. Your. Mouth,” he hissed at me.

I shut up.

“What is Belias doing? What’s his scheme?” Felix said.

“You act like you already know,” Lazard answered.

“I already suspect.”

“He’s going to own the president.”

“President of what?” I asked.

Lazard looked at me and laughed.

“Outside, both of you,” Felix ordered.

“Felix, where is Mila…?”

He gestured at me again. With the shotgun. “Shut up. Outside. Now.”

“Why outside?” I said.

“Because you’re not the boss anymore, Sam.”

He followed Lazard and me out onto the patio, gesturing us forward with the shotgun. Las Vegas lay before us in the desert sprawl. I would have liked to have seen the view at night.

Lazard turned to face him and Felix asked, “Can you expose Belias? Did you leave anything behind that can incriminate him?”

“And have my daughter lose her fortune? No. Just the stuff in the bedroom safe.”

“I’d like the combination, please.”

“No.”

“I will shoot off your arm. The combination, please, Lucky.”

“Seven-three-six-eight-zero.”

“Sam, go get the safe open. Bring me what’s in it.”

I hesitated.

“Sam, please. Do as I ask and I’ll tell you where Mila is. She’s perfectly fine.”

I obeyed. I found the safe in the floor of the bedroom closet. Entered in the numbers. No burning smell this time, no heat against the metal. The door clicked open. I pulled open a closed folder of papers, one of those kinds of folders that has a fold-over top and a brown elastic band to secure it. I opened it.

“Sam. Doesn’t take that long,” Felix yelled at me.

My head throbbed but it was clearing. Faces on the paper.
Barbara
Scott, a famous writer, I’d read one of her books. I hadn’t heard she was dead. Other faces I didn’t know. And then the face of a senator from New Mexico and her husband, a woman who’d been mentioned as a replacement for the recently fallen vice president. I’d seen her multiple times on the news this week, but only when I was checking to see if
I
was on the news myself.

This was it. If this woman was named the new vice president…and then something happened to the president…

Shock twisted in my chest. Belias owned her. That had to be the explanation. But why start killing off the other members of the network, why rid himself of the powerful people he’d built and cultivated?

“Sam!” Felix said. “Out here, now!”

I closed the envelope. No time to go through it all, although I wondered if I locked myself into the room how long it would take him to reach me. Annoyingly there was no weapon inside the safe. Or in the closet. I just had the envelope that he wanted, nice and fat.

I walked slowly back out into the den, one hand holding the envelope, the other pressed against my bloodied head. I’d borrowed one of Lazard’s shirts for a bandage. “I don’t feel well,” I said. The two men were glaring at each other—Lazard sick and raging about being backed into a corner and Felix desperate to get the information that I’d been here to collect.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” Felix said. “I’m not one who has anything personal against you. Give me the envelope.”

I said to Lazard, “I can’t believe you knew this about Belias.” And while looking at Lazard, I threw the package right at Felix’s face.

A weighted object, thick with paper, can do damage, thrown correctly. The envelope—heavy, worn—caught him right in the face. He staggered back, just a step, but by then I was launching myself on and over the patio table. I hammered my foot into Felix’s chest. He staggered back, and then Lazard threw himself at Felix, knocking him back. Lazard looked like a former linebacker and Felix looked like a thin tree, all wire and muscle. Lazard tried to wrench the gun out of Felix’s hands.

If I’d had sense, I would have run. If I was still CIA, I would have grabbed the package and run. And there would have been a Special Projects extraction team ready to pull me to safety, to a debriefing room with medical staff and bad coffee and quiet and a nice, warm feeling of safety before I went home and curled next to Lucy’s warmth. But all that was gone. And Felix had questions to answer for me.

I grabbed the package and I ran to the edge of the patio. Below was the smooth glass drop, the artificial canyon, down to the curving driveway. Forty-eight stories below. To the driveway that led up to the Mystik and the permanently green, desert-defying acreage below.

“I’ll throw it off,” I said.

They ignored me—so much for shock value—and fought over the gun. Fine. I timed it as they spun together, leveled a kick into Lazard’s head and he stumbled, dropping, blood welling from his mouth. He staggered away. Felix levered the gun back at me, and I slammed my hands into the barrel, knocking it to the left.

The gun fired.

Lazard didn’t scream. There wasn’t a mouth to scream with. He was shredded and the blast threw him over the edge, out into the blue, and I didn’t see him tumble and spin forty-eight stories down to the driveway below.

Because Felix wrenched the gun free and shoved me with it. He hesitated. Deciding whether or not to kill me.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t.”

He threw the gun at me—so therefore it was empty—and I caught it, and while I did that he drew a Glock from a holster under his shirt. “Sit down, Sam, or I’ll blow your brains out.”

I sat. “We have to get out of here; the police will be on their way.” The casino’s owner having plummeted from the roof? The casino security guards would be here in moments.

“Yes. They will. And you’re holding the shotgun that killed him. I suggest you tell them that you are CIA and get your old masters to hold your hand again. Maybe they’ll get you out.” He scooped up the package and stepped back. “You’re done following Belias and his network. They’re no longer your concern. I’ll take care of them from here.”

“Why?” I said. I had no idea why he had betrayed me, what his agenda was. “Why?”

Sorrow, I thought, twisted his face. “I’m letting you live, that’s enough. Call the CIA when you’re arrested. They’ll help you, I think.”

“Where is Mila?” I yelled.

“Back in San Francisco. She wasn’t going to risk being spotted by Belias since she’s supposed to be dead. She’s not your concern anymore.”

The elevator doors slid closed.

I ran, pressed the button again. The elevator continued its descent away from me. Randy was dead, a single bullet in his head. Someone had killed him exiting and I figured it was Belias.

Stairs. There had to be stairs. A fire escape. I found a door tucked in the back. Locked. Of course. Lazard had been keeping Janice a prisoner here; he wasn’t going to risk maintenance or anyone else coming up the stairs and surprising him during this meeting. And I had an awful feeling the keys were in a pocket forty-eight floors below me.

I hate feeling trapped.

I glanced over the edge of the patio. Small crowd gathering below, around the broken body of Lazard.

And on the side of the building to my left, moving, a circular sled type of contraption, blasting the windows with water.

An automated window washer. I’d noticed it on the way into the Mystik. The cables attaching it to the building were thirty feet to my left.

I could stay and explain the two dead men and the dead multimillionaire at the base of his casino, and then I’d be spending plenty of time in a Nevada jail and maybe Leonie would take off with my son forever and maybe the CIA wouldn’t come and help me after all, no matter what I said.

I ran through the penthouse. I found the cables for the automated washer gently banging against a window. I grabbed a heavy teak chair and smashed against the glass. It cracked. I hit it again. The chair shattered the window and sailed out into the void. I looked down, worried that I could have hit bystanders below. But this curve of the building looked out over the rest of the Mystik complex, so the chair and the glass plummeted onto the rooftop of the casino that extended out from the building.

I needed protection for my hands. I still clutched the shirt I’d taken from Lazard’s closet for my bloodied head.

And heard the elevator door chime. I figured Felix got out on a lower floor, and the return trip of the elevator was bringing—

“Security!” a voice bellowed.

No time to think. I could only pray that the automated washer’s cables could hold my weight. Surely they would have tensile strength to hold me? Right?

“Security! On the ground!”

I did not care to make new friends among the Mystik’s security staff. Maybe they were buds with Andy and Randy.

Holding the shirt across my palms, I jumped.

You can’t run parkour and be afraid of heights. However, my parkour runs usually only took me up a couple of stories. Not forty-eight. That is a gulf that chokes the human brain’s processing power and I forced my gaze to stay on the cable. I grabbed it, both hands, but the shirt made the grip feel slick.