The next thing he knew, Gozan was shaking his arm, saying, “What did you do to her, Khezzy?”
What did he do?
What he always did. He put something in her drink. He played with her for a while, then he passed out. Khezir said to his uncle, “What’s wrong?”
Gozan had turned on the bedside lamp. He was wearing an undershirt and nothing else, and his hair was flying everywhere. The skin under his eyes sagged. He looked tired and old, and Khezir had never seen him look so afraid. Not once in his life.
Gozan bent over the girl on the bed, slapped her cheeks lightly, and cooed, “Wake up, please. Wake up.”
He pinched her nostrils closed, waited. She sputtered, and then coughed, thrashed her head from side to side, said, “I’m…Don’t forget…to take out…the dog.”
“She’s fine,” said Khezir. “She’s a sleepyhead. Where’s my knife?”
“What do you want with your knife?”
“Cut the wrist ties, of course. Uncle, are you drunk? What is wrong with you?”
“Your knife is in my bathroom. On the floor.”
“You took my knife?” Khezir asked. “No, I did not take your knife. Would I ever take your knife? You left it in there.”
“That’s crazy,” Khezir said.
He got out of the bed, stepped into his shorts, and walked into Gozan’s bathroom, where he found the woman on the floor, blood soaking into the cream-colored bath mat and staining her yellow hair.
He stared at her. Her name was Margot or Margaret or something, the peachy woman his uncle had talked into coming back with them. Her neck was cut. He liked to do that, but lightly, sex play. Not like this, her head almost separated from her body. Yes, he had cut off heads, but not in play.
His knife, the one with the black stone handle and the serrated blade, was next to her.
“I didn’t do this,” Khezir said, looking at his uncle.
Gozan said, “Well, I didn’t do it. I don’t even know if I fucked her. I think I showered. My hair is wet in the back.”
Khezir stared. He had bought the bottles himself at the liquor store. He had opened the bottles and poured the drinks into the glasses. He had put in the pills himself.
Had his uncle drunk from the wrong glass? Had he?
“The door is locked,” Khezir said. “One of us did it, but it doesn’t matter. You call them. I’ll shower and dress. Don’t worry, Uncle.”
Gozan found his mobile phone and forced himself to make the call.
“Balar,” he said. “We have a problem. It was a mistake, but someone is dead.”
Chapter 83
GOZAN WENT TO the door of their shabby room at the Armstrong Hotel and looked through the peephole. He opened the door for Balar Aram and his crew, who came in, moved through the suite like smoke, looked right through Gozan.
Gozan called out, “Balar, she’s in there.”
Balar went into the master bathroom, saw the dead woman lying nearly decapitated on a lake of blood on the floor. Balar’s eyes passed over the corpse. Then he went into the adjoining room, where the other girl was lying on the bed, her arms tied behind her back. Passed out cold.
Balar pulled the window drapes closed.
He said to Gozan in Sumarin, “This is not a holiday, stupid. This is work. And now you and your demented nephew have gone too far. Yes, Kheziralar. I mean you.”
Gozan said, “I told you that this was a mistake.”
Balar entered the smaller, second bath, yanked the shower curtain from the rod, spread it on the floor. He told Khezir to help him move the girl from his bed to the bathroom floor, and when she was lying on the plastic curtain, Balar took a gun from his inside jacket pocket. He screwed the suppressor onto the muzzle and shot her once in the head, twice in the chest.
Fffut, ffut, ffut.
Gozan felt his own blood leave him. It was as if the lights were flickering. He wasn’t a crazy man. He wasn’t evil. He didn’t want these women to die.
Balar was saying, “Gozan, put on your shoes.”
Gozan got into the small elevator with Balar, stood next to him, smelled what the man had eaten for dinner, and tried not to panic or get sick. He kept his eyes on the café menu on the panel above the buttons and asked no questions, because he knew none would be answered.
The car bumped to a stop. Gozan and Balar got out and walked toward the reception desk, where a stout middle-aged woman in a hotel uniform put down the phone and smiled.
“Good evening, gentlemen. How may I help you?”
The woman’s name tag read L. Bird.
Balar said, “Miss Bird, my name is Colonel Balar Aram. I am from the Sumar mission to the United States.” He spoke quickly and with a heavy accent.
“Oh,” said the desk clerk. She looked at the ID the man presented.
Balar said, “Your guests Mr. Remari and Mr. Mazul are of the royal family of Sumar, and their lives are in imminent danger. I must take them out by the service elevator. Do you understand? No one can use the elevator until we are gone. You have the credit card imprint?”
“For Mr. Remari? Yes, absolutely.”
“Consider this express checkout.”
“Absolutely,” the woman said again. She gave Balar the key to the service elevator and directions to the alley behind the hotel, and he gave the woman a hundred dollars.
Gozan sat with Khezir in the rear of the SUV as the Black Guard cleaned the room, removed the bodies through the back door, then returned to the reception area, where they destroyed the computer at the front desk and ripped out the surveillance camera. He could hear the muzzle fire through the glass when they shot the clerk.
Khezir said, “I hear sirens. Do you hear them?”
It was about two o’clock in the morning. Gozan wasn’t sure he and Khezzy were going to see the sun come up. Since its socialist revolution in the 1950s, Sumar had been a secular state. But if Gozan had believed in a God, now would have been the time to pray.
Instead, he just said to his nephew, “Don’t worry, Khezzy. Balar is taking care of us. We will be okay.”
Chapter 84
IT WAS EVENING in Aspen: birds calling out to one another, nice smell of evergreens and meadow grass in the air, no traffic on Ridge Road.
Christian Scott thought he was going to like his new assignment.
He was parked on the side of the road behind a clump of conifers, tracking Bryce and Barbie Cooper so he could warn Bryce if he saw he was about to get murdered. Jack felt he owed it to Hal Archer to get leverage that might knock some time off Archer’s inevitable life sentence, so he’d sent Scotty.
With the help of Private’s intelligence division, Scotty had gotten into the Coopers’ enormous house, planted bugs, cloned Barbie’s phone, and when their chauffeured Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud pulled onto Ridge Road heading south, Scotty knew where the couple was going.
In a little while, Robert Redford, superstar and environmentalist, would be showing his film Watershed at a benefit to save the Colorado River held at the summer home of publishing magnate Jean-Claude Dressler.
Scotty followed the Rolls as his laptop read out details about Dressler’s forty-million-dollar home, the forty thousand square feet of glass, mahogany, and limestone in the style of Tuscany circa the eighteenth century.
Scotty was wondering how all this luxury squared with preserving the environment when he saw the compound up ahead: several gabled stone buildings with tall windows giving views across the entire Owl Creek Valley.
Scotty followed the Rolls over a bridge spanning a stream and onto the cropped lawn serving as a parking area, and the valet waved him in. Scotty got out of his car, put on his shades, rolled up the sleeves of his good-to-go-anywhere Armani jacket, and texted Mo-bot. He told her not to worry. “No one plays boring white guy like me,” he said.
“As long as you don’t dance,” she quipped back.
Up ahead, Barbie Cooper gripped the crook of her husband’s arm as she wobbled toward the house, her heels
poking holes in the lawn.
Barbie filled out her small silver dress in a wonderful way, and she looked up into Bryce’s face with adoration. When her wrinkly husband leaned down for a kiss, she made it good, pressing her supersize chest into his, putting her hand to his cheek, laying it on him for all she was worth. Which, according to the numbers they’d cranked out at Private, was half a billion dollars if he died, far less if they divorced.
That big, full-body smooch looked weird and gross and made Scotty pretty sure that Barbie Cooper wasn’t looking to get divorced. Scotty felt very bad for the old man.
He started walking, caught up to the Coopers at the entrance to the Dressler manse, stuck out his hand, and said, “Bryce, I’m Chris Scofield, Scofield Systems. Oakland.”
Bryce looked understandably perplexed.
“I uh, I don’t quite remember…”
“That’s okay. There were a lot of us there when we had lunch at Donald Ross last year. And you must be Barbie.”
Barbie gave Scotty an appreciative look, patted him down with her eyes. Then she said, “Scofield Systems. Is that computers, Chris?”
Still chatting with the Coopers, Scotty gave his fake name to security, and thanks to Mo-bot’s superior hacking skills, Chris Scofield was on the digital guest list with a star next to his name, meaning “big donor.” And as he was also engaged in conversation with Bryce and Barbie Cooper, well known in Aspen society, Scotty entered the private enclave without questions.
Now, all he had to do was stay close enough to Bryce Cooper to make sure that his cute little wife didn’t kill him.
Chapter 85
VAL KENNEY ENTERED Las Vegas’s famed CityCenter, determined not to be awed by this glittering constellation of resorts, hotels, high-end retail shops, and million-dollar condos, all of it a monument to greed and excess.
Val had grown up poor, the child of a working single mom, and they’d lived with Grandma in Liberty City, a black ’hood in Miami. She had nothing against money. It provided necessities and comfort and also the means to help those in need, and that she loved. But Val’s ambitions didn’t run to amassing wealth. She wanted to raise her own bar, do good and achieve big things.
That’s why she was here.
Olsen taught his how-to-catch-a-rich-husband class in his condo in Veer Towers, the residential complex composed of two buildings, each thirty-seven floors of modern luxury encased in glass and golden panels, their tops craning outward, so that neither building would interfere with the other’s view of the Las Vegas cityscape.
Val took the escalator to the main floor of the North Tower, traveling up through a vast, futuristic lobby that made her feel as though she’d been living in a cave until today, when she had somehow stepped into the twenty-second century.
She told herself to get a grip.
She looked like she belonged, dressed to impress in a brilliant cherry-red-and-white print Rachel Roy dress that skimmed her curves without hiding them, the hem ending just above her knees. Her black shoes were pointy toed with three-inch heels, which would make her the tallest woman in almost any room.
As she headed toward the elevator bank, Val had an unexpected flash of fear. In a few moments, she would be entering Lester Olsen’s home with a wireless microphone nestled in her cleavage, a digital recorder in her handbag. And then she was going to lie her face off.
Would she get away with that? Really?
Val remembered the last thing Jack had said to her before she left LA; “I have one hundred percent confidence in you, Val. But if you become afraid for your safety at any time, get the hell out. Okay? Get the hell out and call me.”
“Okay,” she had said. “I’m going to be fine. And thanks for having faith in me.”
No question. She had faith in Jack. And she would not disappoint him.
Chapter 86
THE ELEVATOR WHISPERED Val upward, and twenty-seven floors later, the doors opened into a private foyer facing a closed mahogany door. Val tapped numbers onto a keypad beside the door, and a female voice asked her name.
“Valerie Fernandez.”
A buzzer sounded and the lock clicked and Val pushed open the door, stepped into both her false identity and an astonishing room. It was elegantly furnished in white leather and steel with marble floors and modern artwork, and a great wall of windows admitted all of the light in the sky.
A very fit woman in a smart geometric-print dress, her blond hair pulled up in a ponytail, crossed the room, shook Val’s hand, and said, “Hi, Valerie. I’m Norma Tiefel. I work with Mr. Olsen. Would you please fill out this form? I’ll be back in five minutes.”
Val took the clipboard and went to one of the handsome steel-frame-and-white-leather sofas with an unobstructed view of the gambling capital of the world.
A silver pen with her name etched on its side rested at the top of the clipboard. Val had to smile at the pricey party favor. She used the pen to complete the form with her phony background, addresses, career history, and net worth, which she listed at $294,000, including the value of her fictitious condo in LA with its $210,000 mortgage.
She was a young woman on the way up, right?
As she answered the questions with a straight face, three other women came in, one at a time, and took seats around the room. They were all attractive, all in their twenties, and all, apparently, had ten thousand dollars to give Mr. Olsen for the secrets to marrying up. Waaaaaaay up.
Back to the questionnaire. Val checked off boxes for the traits she most looked for in a husband, writing, I would be a great asset to a wealthy man: a social companion and intellectual peer in the form of a loving and attractive wife.
Ms. Tiefel collected the forms and left the room. The four women waited, made small talk, wondered if there would be an elimination round. And then, long, tense moments later, the door opened again and Ms. Tiefel came back into the room with a good-looking man in his midthirties. He was beautifully dressed in summer-weight wool, a blue jacket, gray pants. He had a clear, almost luminous complexion and remarkable long-lashed, copper-brown eyes. The one-word description that jumped into Val’s mind was winner.
Olsen clasped his hands together and Val saw that his fingers were twisted from the breaks he’d sustained. They still looked painful, but there was no pain on his face. Ms. Tiefel said, “Ladies, I’d like you to meet a man who changed my life, Mr. Lester Olsen.”
Olsen smiled, then addressed the small group.
“It’s my pleasure to welcome you all to Love for Life and a day that could entirely transform your future. Please come with me. It all starts now.”
Chapter 87
VAL WATCHED LESTER Olsen swivel in a white leather chair, the panoramic view of Las Vegas fanning out behind him, a golden backdrop that suggested endless marital possibilities.
He put his hands on his knees, leaned slightly forward, and said, “You’ve all heard that it’s just as easy to love a rich man as it is to love a poor one, and, ladies, that just isn’t true. It’s easier to love a rich man. Much easier.
“Love and marriage—any marriage—takes work, but being the wife of a wealthy man is work with multimillion-dollar benefits. I’m talking about priceless jewelry, classic cars, private jets, and incredible yachts. The exceptional world of the very rich includes invitations to the White House, club memberships and box seats, staffs of helpers in every home, and first-class travel to any event in the world. The wife of a multimillionaire has access to the best of everything the world has to offer.
“The very best of everything,” Olsen said, letting the idea have the floor. “You can have that.
“But it takes work to land your own dear Mr. Megabux, and it takes work to keep him happy. Are you ready to go to work, ladies?”
Spontaneous applause broke out, Olsen smiled broadly, and Val thought that this man was a gifted motivational speaker. At the very least.
Olsen said, “Very wealthy men are generally complex and smarter than your average white-collar guy. They can
be egomaniacal. They can be demanding and short-tempered, and, of course, they’re always right.”
There was appreciative laughter from the ladies. Olsen smiled and went on.
“Guess how many ultra-high-net-worth individuals there are in this country—that is, individuals worth fifty million or more. No, let me tell you. There are one million multi-multimillionaires living right here in the U.S.A.
“Now, there’s a catch. Most of these men are married, and nearly all of them are in high demand. But you can shift the odds in your favor if you know how. And that’s why you’re here today.”
Olsen was beaming with enthusiasm. He told his little group what the course would cover, spoke of elocution, etiquette, relocation, jobs to take, events to attend, how to be a smart learner and a fascinated listener.
He said, “If you do well in this course, the odds are that one of you four women will marry a mega-multimillionaire. Or perhaps you’ll fall in love with a regular millionaire, but you will find money and love for life. There’s even a chance that all of you will be wearing thirty-carat diamond rings by the end of this year.”
Val saw that the women sitting around her were smiling, almost purring, Uh-huh, uh-huh, as Lester Olsen stirred their fantasies of wealth beyond imagining.
Val wanted to make sure her mic was still in place and that her machine was still recording, but she forced herself to keep her hands still and look eager as Olsen said, “Say good-bye to Target and Payless. You have to dress well, and go where the wealthy men are.” Olsen smiled at Leila, Angie, Krista, and Val. “Rent a studio in the champagne-and-caviar section of town, or simply shop there. Be seen. Splurge on good seats at sporting events or gate-crash after the ticket takers are gone and have a drink with the guests in the hospitality tent.”
Val saw an opportunity to steer the conversation where she wanted it to go.