“Nobody has the balls to admit that,” Thorp thundered. “Hell, according to scientists in Reno, clear-cutting and debris reduction that was done to supposedly prevent wildfires had the unintended consequence of reducing the habitat for aerator ants, and that was the cause of all the problems. Those forest-service people should be in prison.”
Then Thorp raised his glass. “The witch is dead. Long live the aerator ants.”
He got a round of laughs and applause.
Thorp liked the sound of his voice, of the authority in it. He held sway, feeling better and better at the sound of his own voice until somebody asked where Daisy and the mystery man he’d promised were. It was time for the girls to jump in the fountain.
Thorp was irritated. He couldn’t get her on his phone. “I’ll be back with her,” he assured them.
“Zac Efron,” the banker offered as a guess of the mystery man as Thorp was leaving.
“Not even close.”
Other names jumped out of the crowd.
Shia LaBeouf.
Bruno Mars.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Half of the names he heard, Thorp didn’t even know who they were. He assumed all of them were Hollywood types.
“Obama,” somebody yelled. Everyone laughed.
“He couldn’t get permission from his wife to come,” Thorp said, getting big laughs.
“Charlie Sheen,” someone shouted as he was walking away.
“Close,” Thorp yelled back. “Charlie and the masked man have a lot in common, as a matter of fact.”
More laughter from the drunk crowd.
He walked back between the large tents to the house, greeting and being greeted along the way. He didn’t find them anywhere in the open rooms or up in the front office, and none of the servants had seen them either. Now he was getting angry. He went down into the poker room to find Rouse.
The attorney’s stack had shrunk by a lot since he’d last looked in. Going down like the Titanic.
“Take a break, old sport, and come have a celebratory drink with me. Where the hell’s Daisy?”
There were plenty of big boys there from Vegas, some involved in the poker room while some were with the women of their choice in other rooms.
“What’s going on?” Rouse asked, irritated he had to leave his sinking ship.
“I ask a question and get one in return,” Thorp said as they moved toward the staircase leading up to the office and the balcony. “Get your smartphone. I want to see the grounds, the rooms, and the tunnel.”
Thorp glanced at the movie playing silently on the screen behind the now empty stage—Gatsby in swimming trunks on the raft in his pool, looking back behind him as the curtains to the pool entrance flapped in the breeze.
“Why are you taking me away from the game?”
“It’s time for the girls to follow Daisy into the fountain. The finale. Where the hell is that woman and where the hell is my mystery guest? Well, get your damn phone out.”
“I don’t have it.”
“You always have it. Where the hell is it?”
“He’s got her,” Rouse said, “and my phone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They’re fucking on my furniture, that’s why. I hate that guy,” Rouse said.
“You gave him your phone?”
“I didn’t give it to him. He took it and threatened to gouge my eyes out with a knife. He’s nuts. She didn’t seem all that upset, I’ll tell you that. So, yeah, he took my smartphone. Afraid I’d watch them. He wanted to go over there. Those two are love irds, if you can believe that. A killer and a whore. Hopefully they won’t propagate.”
Thorp didn’t know how to react. They had done him a huge favor. But at the same time, they were employees. They’d both abandoned their jobs at the party of all parties.
“Why the hell did they have to go to your house? We have a dozen bedrooms right here. She’s supposed to be entertaining guests, not that lunatic.”
“How the hell do I know?”
Thorp stared at Rouse. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“He said I better keep my mouth shut. He’s a scary bastard. No way you want him on permanent. And don’t tell him I said anything.”
Thorp’s mood danced around looking for somewhere to land and get back to something fun. He looked over through the trees to the dark outline of Rouse’s place.
The killer certainly deserved a reward, and Kora was any man’s reward, to be sure. But, in the back of his mind, he didn’t like that his two most prominent party employees had abandoned him. And he still couldn’t fathom why they wanted to go to Rouse’s. Thorp’s celebratory mood took a tumble. He was getting very pissed off at the two. He wanted to forgive them their moment but couldn’t. They were his employees.
I won’t stand for it,
he thought angrily. “Everybody is waiting for the girls to strip and get in the goddamn fountain. I paid a fortune for that damn fountain. You’re going to have to go over and get them.”
“The hell I am.”
54
Sydney fixed the glasses on the party and the dance stage partially visible through the trees. Now she was looking for the exulted one among the movers and shakers. She and Marco were between two huge boulders, just in front of a copse of lodgepole pine.
From where they were, she could clearly see the outdoor movie screen that Thorp had set up behind the dance floor and band. It was the scene where Nick Carraway and Gatsby talk after the party…and the famous line of Redford’s Gatsby. Though she couldn’t hear the line, she knew it.
“Can’t repeat the past? Of course you can.”
“Where are you, Thorp, you miserable bastard?” Sydney asked quietly.
She turned back to Marco, who was working on both a small laptop and an iPad. “How’s it going?”
“So far, so good,” Marco said. “I’m going to bring down the entire system. You need to contact our girl, see if she can get away and meet us. I’m bringing the systems down in a few minutes. Hopefully.”
Sydney sent Kora a text. While waiting for a response, she watched Marco. He worked fast and sure, like he’d done this many times before. She wondered if it hadn’t been for her, if he had gone to his uncle’s without running into her, if he would be with them right now. If, given his background, what he’d gone through in Mexico, that working on the other side of the law was just as easy for him.
It always amazed her when she ran into intelligent, hardworking criminals. Something in their childhoods maybe sent them off on the wrong track. All that energy and brains could as easily have gone into legitimate professions.
This guy was different. He’d had legitimate ambitions and experience and had gotten sidetracked by the murder of a colleague, just as she’d gotten sidetracked by corruption and the murder of two potential witnesses. That line she’d never anticipated crossing even for a moment had been crossed. And what was scary was how easy it was as long as there was some powerful motive.
“This program,” he said with a note of satisfaction, “isn’t readily available on the market. You need someone like Dutch, who has connections, to get one of these. I’ve seen it used. It’ll pick up signals, run them through the mill, find out what they are, what they do, and then we’ll kidnap the whole system. Basically, you ride the signals to their destination and then you’re operating like any good hacker.”
“You’re in?”
“Yeah. I’ve co-opted the program. Thanks to Dutch, we’ve already gotten all the security protocols in the system. Something went wrong, he could get in and fix it without having to reinvent its brain. But that’s the one big vulnerable spot. Somebody gets to Dutch, they get to the system. We did, and we have the access ID program that can capture and compromise the system without triggering an alarm.”
“How fast?”
“Superfast.”
“This works, you can have your way with me later.”
He smiled at her. “Didn’t I already have that pleasure?”
“That was just a little foreplay to the main event.”
“Sounds scary.”
Sydney smiled. “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
He pulled her over and kissed her hard on the mouth. “I am.” Then he said, “Let’s do this.”
55
Leon stared at the blank screen on the smartphone. One minute he was running his finger across the screen bringing up every room, every outside nook and cranny, and the next, he had nothing.
“Sonofabitch did it, brought it down,” Leon said. “He’s good.”
Kora said, “We’re getting close.”
Leon slipped out on the side of the veranda, rested the night scope in the opening of a latticed panel, and tracked along the shoreline, working up to the trees.
He finally found them—white figures in a greenish soup. The boy and his girl doing their thing. Nice. It passed through his mind to kill the bastard and Jesup, then go back to the clients and play it all off as a neat little setup.
But then he figured it was just a throwback thought. He resisted it. Chastised himself. He was moving on.
Keep focused,
he told himself. He never liked second-guessing himself and rarely did, but this whole situation in Tahoe was a brand new ball game. He’d never turned against clients before. Never even considered it.
He looked at Kora, his girl, his little schemer, and what he saw was excitement in her eyes and a slight grin on her mouth.
“What?” Kora asked, seeing his look.
“You made me think of Xenia the Janus agent, the chick in James Bond’s
Goldeneye
who liked to squeeze her adversaries to death with her powerful legs, and in so doing would have orgasms.”
She laughed. “Better watch out, dude.”
He chuckled. “Here they come. Man is gonna get a bit of a surprise.”
“He’s going to be pissed, for sure,” Kora said. “Just don’t kill him. We need his skills. We’re only halfway there.”
He watched the thieves all cool and confident.
Twenty million and Kora. And a new life. Could buy a fucking island. Maybe he’d get one of those manmade deals the Arabs built in Dubai that looked like a palm tree in the water. They were going cheap with the economic mess the world was in. He could live like a Sultan. Hunt when the mood came over him, or when somebody in the world pissed him off enough. Be his own man, his own boss.
Then, when he went hunting, it would be solely because some asshole somewhere was being too stupid to live.
Leon the Professional felt blissful. It was one of the happiest feelings he could remember. He had a girl. He’d soon have millions. It was like a whole new world had opened up and blessed him.
Still, he really wanted to kill these two for breaking his face, humiliating him, causing him all this misery. It was going to be difficult restraining himself. If he succeeded in that restraint, it wouldn’t be for the money, it would be for his sweet, knockout little Xenia.
56
Sydney followed Marco between sumptuous flower gardens and fishponds, around a sand trap, and headed for the side of the Rouse house, accompanied along the way by the band doing a Duke Ellington number. They paused. A hundred yards away, they could see Mia Farrow and Robert Redford, Daisy and Gatsby, talking on the giant movie screen behind the band stage, the last couples standing attempting to dance the night away.
Sydney took the glasses and scanned the dancers, the crowd in front of the platform, then on past the tents to the gazebo, and up on the long, second-floor balcony. That’s where she found Thorp and Rouse. “I hope you bastards are enjoying your party,” she said quietly. “I get my way, it’ll be your last big celebration.”
They continued toward the lawyer’s house—two stories of marble and sandstone and vast windows. Marco approached the side door, the B&E bags bumping against his sides. He stopped, with Sydney just off his left shoulder with the other bag and equipment.
Marco made quick work of the side door by breaking through the long window using tape and a glass cutter.
“We’re in,” he said quietly.
They didn’t get more than three steps into the room when a female voice in the dark said, “Nice work.”
“Kora?” Sydney said.
“It is I,” she said.
Why didn’t she open the door, let us know she was there? Sydney wondered.
Kora emerged from behind a massive statue of a Roman soldier that stood at one side of the entrance to the next room, a naked statue of a woman on the other side, both over six feet tall. Sydney didn’t like something in Kora’s demeanor, maybe the inflection ion in her voice, the way she stayed back, still partially behind the statue. Something felt very wrong.
Then a man emerged from the dark into the faint light of this outer room. He wore a plastic mask and had a weapon in each hand, one pointed at her, the other at Marco.
“The thing is,” a raspy, strained voice emanating from behind the mask said, “I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. But you aren’t dead, which means this is your lucky day. We need to work together.”
Kora, now fully out into the open, also had a gun.
Sydney realized with shock that the man in the mask was the one they had fought. He was not only alive, stunningly enough, he had hooked up with Kora North. How in hell had that happened?
The idea that Thorp had orchestrated this trap was difficult for Sydney to accept. Yet here they were. She expected Thorp to emerge from the room next.
“Welcome to the Bank of Rouse,” Kora said, moving closer. She was dressed in white, a little hat perched on her head, lipstick bright red, hair cropped. A hot Daisy. “Leon here made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Isn’t that right, baby?”
Her new friend whispered hoarsely, “That’s right, Daisy, my little sweet pea. Man knows when he’s met his match.”
Kora smiled, teeth gleaming from the refracted light coming from the party next door. She looked magnificently evil.
“Sorry,” she said, “but a girl’s gotta do…and don’t worry, this is going to be a win-win situation. We’re all going to get what we want. Isn’t that right, baby?”
“That’s right, Daisy, win-win. Let’s go get into Tricky Dick’s bank and see what’s for Christmas.”
Sydney now began to see a different picture. This wasn’t Thorp. This was the two of
them
!
She sensed Marco wanted to make a move but now wasn’t the time. She gave him a look.
“Do everything nice and slow and careful,” Kora said, apparently seeing what Sydney was seeing in Marco. “We don’t want to kill you, right Leon?”