He was unpacking his traveling chess set when the athlete cleared his throat. “What do you think of the Englishman?”
“I hate his tailor. I’m thinking of having him killed.”
“The tailor or the Englishman?”
Backhand, the way his own partner would have served it to him, and the American grinned. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, after all. “Well, if I killed the Englishman, it would annoy our enemies; they need us all alive. But if I killed the
tailor
—”
“—what would he do for suits?”
“Exactly!”
They shared a grin before they fell silent, but the American still couldn’t shake the feeling—the uneasy prickle at the back of his neck that told him he’d missed something, overlooked something, failed to take something into account. So he paced, but he tried to do it more quietly. He put his hands into his pockets. He took his hands out of his pockets. He straightened his tie. He checked his part in the mirror and re-combed his hair. He fidgeted, in short, and the athlete just glanced over from where he was setting up the chess set, frowned, and didn’t even bother to swear. His partner was out there too, after all, and they both knew that the guy they were up against was as good as they were in every respect.
Maybe even a little bit better.
And the American was stuck in a hotel room, miles from the action, helpless if shooting did break out—relying on the English team, a dead rock and roll star, and the athlete’s partner to keep his
own
partner safe. And that tasted wrong.
He was still fretting over it when the window shattered and a lumpy fist-shaped object rolled into the room hissing ghost-white clouds of gas.
Tribute and the Last Light of the Sun.
Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
One of the things I like about Las Vegas is the short days. The ring of mountains around the valley makes for long twilights, dawn and sunset. You can watch the shadows crawl across the valley, a sharp demarcation between day and evening.
So I had no difficulty tailing Jackie and the Russian through the gloaming, though the red sunset still painted the base of Frenchman’s Mountain and winked off the tile roofs and stucco walls of the houses there, and even painted brightness across the upthrust Stratosphere tower. The shadow of Mount Charleston stretched across the valley, and that long shadow protected me. And gave me the hope that, even if Angel and the assassin knew what and who I was, they wouldn’t expect me to be on the streets so early.
Every little advantage helps.
Especially since, if the American was right about things, Jackie, Stewart, or I were the only ones who could do any lasting damage to the assassin.
The plan, such as it was, was simple—once you took the American’s extended chess metaphor out of it. The spies—with the exception of the athlete and the scholar, because the assassin might not know they were in Las Vegas yet—had faked a return to the East Coast, as if regrouping to try a different tactic. Jackie and the Russian—disguised as Stewart—would attempt to lure the assassin out under the guise of trying to track him down, and the rest of the gang, myself included, would be handy to jump the assassin when he moved.
Simple. Clever. Dangerously full of holes and ways things could go wrong in a heartbeat, but not bad for short notice. And now there was the John Henrys’ information, that the assassin had another employer. It was a good thing I was too busy walking to stop and count on my fingers all the very many ways that something could go wrong.
The athlete’s voice in my ear meant I didn’t have to keep Jackie and the Russian in sight, which was handy, and the scholar’s job was to keep
me
under observation. I caught the occasional glimpse or scent of him as I moved through the crowds, never more than a couple of hundred yards away.
Jackie and the Russian headed west past the old Debbie Reynolds—I can’t recall what they’re calling it these days—and caught a cab there, then took it to the Tropicana and switched to another one, as if they were trying to shake a tail. I waited it out in the middle of the big triangle they were driving, leaned up against a lamp-post, ignoring the occasional tourist doing a triple-take, watching the sky fade from ash to indigo and sorting through the smells and sounds of a thousand travelers from a couple dozen countries. I was close enough to get to them if there were any trouble, I hoped, God willing. The good news was that getting Stewart alive and keeping Jackie not dead until they could line up his replacement would tend to slow the bad guys down a little. And I was pretty fast, when I needed to be.
It seemed like a great plan, until a man in wraparound sunglasses and a gray flannel suit walked up to me and held up a cigar. “Hey, Elvis. Got a light?”
“Sure, man,” I said, and dug under my coat. I’ve got no excuse at all for not noticing that I couldn’t smell him or his cigar, even in all that crush of people. And when I looked down, somebody close by moved, sharply, and a patter like rain on window-glass fell all around my feet. Pale gold beads bounced on the pavement.
I was already moving, dropping to my hands and knees to count them, when I realized what they were.
Wheat. Grains of wheat.
Oh, so screwed.
“One,” I counted, and picked up the first grain. “Two. Three. Four . . . ”
The man in the gray suit pulled his glasses off, and the ropy blood behind them spilled down his face from a shattered cheekbone and an empty eye socket. “Five.”
“That was almost too easy, King,” the ghost of Benjamin Siegel said through his handsome, ruined face.
“Six. Seven. Eight.” I picked up another grain of wheat, and heard screaming, people running on the street, and then as a white van pulled to the curb, a gun barked not far away.
And I smelled the scholar die.
The Russian and the Decadent American.
Somewhere in Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
The Russian could only assume that Jackie wasn’t leading him astray.
He
couldn’t see their guide, or even hear John Henry’s voice. All he could do was follow Jackie—first through their diversionary tactic, and then down the sidewalk towards a sushi place on Tropicana.
People turned to stare at them, and it wasn’t just due to Jackie’s scrawny-muscular flamboyance. It wasn’t curiosity—or not just curiosity. There was sharp hostility in it, and a little bit of fear, and assumptions the Russian wasn’t sure he cared for—much as he hadn’t been sure he cared for the assumptions buried under the looks he got when he first came to America, before he’d schooled his accent into something more British than Soviet. Between his annoyance at that, and the way his worries about who might be tailing them kept him hyper-alert and on edge, it was no surprise that he almost walked into Jackie when Jackie stopped short on the sidewalk, and then led him jerkily through the parking lot, threading between shining sun-hot cars in prismatic colors such as the Russian had never seen. Jackie crowded him into a reeking corner behind the dumpster, and the Russian went, trying to make it looks like a quick assignation if anyone should happen to be looking.
The flies were terrible, and they seemed to like the smell of his hair pomade. But it was far from the worst thing he’d endured, and he gritted his teeth and kept his hands at his sides. “All right, Doc,” Jackie said, staring into thin air. “What have you got for me?”
The Russian folded his arms and settled back against the wall to wait. There was a certain amount of entertainment in trying to figure out Doc’s half of the conversation from Jackie’s, but the Russian knew better than to give it more than half his attention. This was a role he played well—the weather eye, rear-guard, while his partner’s focus was on a subject. And if Jackie wasn’t his usual partner, so be it.
He did pick up on Jackie’s frustration, though, and from the angle of his questions he understood that Doc had made an executive decision to follow the stranger—Felix Luray—rather than to keep his tail on the assassin.
Which was good news, because he’d eavesdropped on a series of cell-phone calls and found out who Felix Luray was—and while the Russian had never heard of the Prometheus Club, the lift of Jackie’s eyebrow when he mouthed the name made him think of another enemy from ages past.
“So he’s in the sushi bar?” the Russian said, looking where Jackie looked, although he couldn’t see anything. The heat of the sun on his hair made him dizzy. He wiped sweat off his forehead onto the back of his hand.
“Doc says yes,” Jackie said. Slowly, and dripping with something the Russian couldn’t quite identify. “Things have just gotten very complicated.” And then Jackie pressed his fingertip against his ear, a gesture almost everybody had to be trained out of, when wearing a wire, and said, “Hey, base?”
Hands by his side, the Russian listened to his own earpiece, and heard nothing, not even static. “The dumpster,” he said, and stepped out from behind it, gesturing Jackie to stay back. His sidearm was a comfortable bulk in his armpit. It didn’t help his awareness of how exposed he was.
He didn’t think it was the dumpster.
“Partner?” Nothing. Nothing at all, and it caught his breath up sharp. “Tribute, can you hear me?”
Adrenaline could still make his hands shake, even now. He slid one under the lapel of Stewart’s jacket, touched the butt of his gun. He forced a breath through the tightness in his throat and called on the widow, expecting silence.
Instead, her calm voice came back to him before he’d even finished speaking. “I can’t raise your partner,” she said.
“Do you have us in sight?” He shouldn’t have felt so relieved to step into the questionable shelter of the dumpster, but at least it appeared largely bulletproof.
“I did until you hid behind the rubbish bin,” the widow said. “How badly do you think we’ve been compromised?”
“I think we’ve gotta assume Tribute and the scholar are in trouble,” Stewart said. The wire crackled as he joined the conversation. “Lady, you’ve got your partner?”
“I never let him out of my sight without a note pinned to his shirt,” the widow said sweetly. “We need to stop using this channel now.”
She was right, of course. If Tribute, the American, the scholar, and the athlete were in enemy hands, their equipment had most likely gone with them. The Russian nodded and pulled his headset off left-handed, tucking it into the pocket of his coat.
“We’ve got other problems,” Jackie said. “Let me tell you a little bit about Hoover Dam. And Hollywood. And the Prometheus Club, on the side.”
“I’ll bite,” the Russian said, folding his arms. “Who’s the Prometheus Club?”
“The association of Magi who want to rule the world,” Jackie said. “Using massive symbolic magical emplacements to do it. Like, oh, Hoover Dam. To pick something at random. And who got very close to it, or so I hear, before they mysteriously disappeared four or five years back.”
“And that’s what were up against?”
“That’s what I suspect Felix Luray is,” Jackie said, and stuffed his hands into his pockets to sulk.
The Assassin, in the Wrong Movie.
Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
In the normal course of events, he would have been betrayed by a beautiful woman by now. It actually worried the assassin a little that he hadn’t been; it made him wonder if he had missed something, if Angel were better than she seemed. On the other hand, he thought, slipping a device that overrode the room’s cardreader into the slot on the lock, this was hardly the normal course of events.
He made sure his breathing filter was in place, listened for sounds within—there were none—slipped his pistol into his right hand, and eased the door open with his left. The lights were on inside, the air warm and dry, a contrast to the air-conditioned hall and proof of a broken window. The assassin peered through the crack on the hinge side of the door and saw no movement.
He could smell the lingering traces of the anesthetic gas even through the mask as he slipped inside and shut the door. Side-profile, keeping a narrow target, he cleared and passed the bathroom—the shower stood open and there was no room behind the door for even a slender man—and edged into the bedroom.
Two men lay sprawled unconscious, one across the bed, the other on the floor. Neither one had had time to get to his gun. It looked as if the American had been going after the gas grenade and the athlete had just managed to destroy the headset he must have been wearing.
An inconvenience, but one more than paid for by the unexpected presence of the American. A presence that supplied a problem, because it meant he didn’t know who was on the plane—
He was only just reaching for his cell phone when thunder of a distant explosion rattled shards of glass from the broken window, and the darkening sky beyond the shredded curtains smeared crimson and white.
One-Eyed Jack and the Best-Laid plans.
Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
We regrouped under cover of darkness, in the loading bay of an office block across the street from the hole-in-the-wall where Felix Luray was eating sushi alone, except for the occasional company of his cell phone. I’d risked a quick look in the streetside
window as I walked past, and from what I could make out through the blister-pocked stick-on window tint, my suspicions had been accurate. Luray wore a handmade suit tailored to fit, but what was interesting about him was the way the energies coiled and throbbed inside him and around him, drawn behind his hands when they moved, echoing every gesture.
I had half-expected I would recognize him, but this man was far too young to be the Mage who had given Stewart and me so much trouble back in the fifties. Just when you think you have everything figured—
Shit.
A linoleum-floored hole in the wall seemed like a weird place for the last Mage in America, but I guessed it was unobtrusive. Anyway, there he was, so we ditched our useless headsets and hooked back up with Stewart and the leftover spies, with Doc and John Henry waiting out of sight—even ghostly sight—where they could pick up Mr. Luray’s trail should he come out of the restaurant.