Top Secret Twenty-One

  “I need to put you on the mezzanine level this morning. It’s going to be a mob scene when everyone leaves the convention center and moves into the ballroom for lunch. Find a place where your back is to the wall and you can watch the people entering the ballroom. Vlatko has probably changed his appearance. Colored his hair, ditched the patch, added a beard, whatever, so you need to look for other things, like suspicious behavior and the tattoo. You have an advantage because you’ve actually seen him.”

  “How soon do you want me out there?”

  “I’d like you in place by ten o’clock.”

  A buffet had been set out on the dining table. Croissants, bagels, smoked salmon, cream cheese, little jars of jam, pots of coffee, a large platter of fresh fruit. A container of orange juice. No waffles drenched in syrup. No donuts. No eggs Benedict.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and selected a croissant.

  “Have there been any more Vlatko sightings?” I asked.

  “No,” Ranger said. “I have someone watching the ladder running up the side of the building, but Vlatko hasn’t used it.”

  “Maybe he’s already infected his target and he’s on his way back to Russia.”

  “That’s possible,” Ranger said. “That’s why the polonium is so useful. You can eliminate someone and no one necessarily knows for days, maybe weeks or months.”

  I took a call from Connie. “I can’t find anyone to bond out Forest,” she said. “He’s homeless, and he stole food to feed his dog pack, so I don’t think he’s looking at a lot of time. I expect he’ll get a week in the workhouse at the most. Problem is, he won’t come to trial for weeks. Are you good with his dogs until then?”

  “I’ve got Briggs babysitting. He seems to be doing okay. I asked Lula to look in on him.”

  “I haven’t seen Lula. Maybe she went to your apartment before coming here. How’s it going? Where are you, anyway?”

  “Atlantic City.”

  “The hardship assignment.”

  “Yeah, I’m here with Ranger, drinking coffee and eating croissants.”

  “I hate you. Did you sleep with him?”

  “That’s a complicated question.”

  “You did!”

  “No.”

  “Okay, I don’t want to know any more, but I expect details when you get back.”

  I hung up and called Lula.

  “Where are you?” I asked. “Did you check in with Briggs?”

  “Yeah, I’m in your parking lot. He’s turned into one of those dog nuts. And I tell you I can’t blame him. Those critters are cute as anything. And they aren’t even demons. I mean, they don’t have rotating heads or glowing eyes or nothing. One of them tried to nip at me, but Briggs says that dog has trust issues, so I didn’t take it personal. The rest were all dancing around and looking happy. And I’m even getting used to the way they vibrate. I mean, I like things that vibrate anyway, you see what I’m saying?”

  Oh yeah.

  “I’m stuck here in Atlantic City,” I said. “I’m hoping to get home later today or tomorrow, but maybe in the meantime you could make sure Briggs has enough food. He’s stuck there without a car.”

  “He said he had a job interview today. I don’t know how he’s getting there. Taxi, maybe. He didn’t ask for help.”

  I hung up and called my mom.

  “Just checking in,” I said. “I’m out of town on a job with Ranger. Is everything going okay there?”

  “Your father is out with the cab. And your grandmother is on one of those senior trips for the day, so it’s nice and quiet here.”

  “Where’s Grandma going?”

  “Atlantic City. She said she felt lucky.”

  Crap! Double crap!!

  “When did Grandma leave?”

  “About a half hour ago. Your father took her to the senior center. They have a good deal. She gets the bus trip, a roll of tokens for the slots, and a ticket for the all-you-can-eat buffet.”

  “Do you know what casino she’s going to?”

  “No. The seniors get a bunch of deals. They don’t always go to the same casino.”

  I hung up and called Grandma. No answer.

  Okay, what are the chances it would be this casino? Slim. It was a crummy casino. And it was filled with booze salesmen. There were lots of other casinos in Atlantic City. So I shouldn’t worry, right?

  Ranger gave me an earbud a little before ten o’clock. “I have this set so you can communicate with me and with Tank. He’ll be watching the video feeds.”

  I took the elevator to the mezzanine and found a place in the hall where I could see the doors to the ballroom and also the mechanical room door at the far end of the hall. The doors to the ballroom were closed, and the hallway was empty. I recognized a Rangeman guy standing by the bridge that led to the conference center.

  I was in the hall for about fifteen minutes when Grandma called.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “I’m still in Atlantic City. Where are you?”

  “I’m in some traffic on the road to Atlantic City. I’m with Lula.”

  “Mom said you were going on a seniors bus.”

  “It broke down before we even loaded onto it, so I called Lula to see if she felt lucky today, and here we are on the road. We’re trying to decide on a casino. I like the new one with the jungle theme, but Lula says she’s partial to Caesars. What casino are you at? We could come visit you.”

  “No visits! I have to work. And I’m not at a great casino anyway. Go to Caesars, and I’ll call you later.”

  After an hour I was blind with boredom. I paced the hall. I counted the overhead lights. I tried a door to the ballroom. Locked. Guess they were worried some boozehound vodka dealer would steal the silverware or sit in an unassigned seat.

  “This is boring,” I said.

  “Boring is good,” Ranger said into my earbud.

  People began drifting in from the convention center at 11:30. A few here. A few there. They gathered in clumps. They conducted business on their smartphones. They looked at their watches and looked at the closed ballroom doors. Hungry.

  I watched a man come up the escalator. He didn’t nod or wave, but he exchanged a silent communication with the Rangeman guy. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt, tan slacks, scuffed brown shoes. FBI, I thought. He looked pleasant. I could see a slight gun bulge under his sport coat, and an earbud attached by a curly wire to a battery pack. Not high-tech like mine. FBI. He’d be jealous of my earbud.

  “Hello,” I said. “Anybody home?”

  “Babe?” Ranger said.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m waiting at the service elevator for Semov.”

  “On my floor?”

  “Yes. And then I’ll stay with Semov.”

  “Okay. Over and out.”

  The man in the blue shirt ambled past me. He went to the end of the hall and used a key to open the door to the mechanical room.

  “A guy in a blue shirt just went into the mechanical room,” I said.

  “I’ve got him,” Tank said. “He’s FBI going in to check on the air handler.”

  “Just saying.”

  “Hang tight,” Tank told me.

  People poured out of the convention center and filled the corridor. The noise level rose. Men pushed against the ballroom doors and tested the doorknobs. Everyone looked happy. Lots of laughing. I figured there was vodka tasting going on this morning in the convention center. Probably they had a vodka fountain at the breakfast buffet.

  “Moving out,” Ranger said into my earbud.

  The door to the service pantry opened and Semov’s six aides strode out, followed by Semov, followed by Ranger, followed by two men with the old-school earbuds who I figured were FBI. They cut a path through the crowd, a door opened at the far end of the ballroom, and they disappeared inside.

  Moments later the remaining doors to the ballroom opened and everyone stampeded in. I looked down the hall at the mechanical room.
>
  “Did the FBI guy come out of the mechanical room?” I asked Tank.

  “I didn’t see him come out. He might have been told to stay there until the banquet is over. I can’t talk to him. He’s not on my frequency.”

  I walked down the hall and knocked on the door. “Hello,” I said. “Are you okay in there?”

  The door opened, an arm reached out and grabbed me, and I was yanked inside.

  “Oh shit!” Tank said into my earbud.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I CAUGHT A glimpse of someone in a ball cap, and I was hit in the face and knocked off my feet. It was Vlatko. He looked down at me. His hair was dark brown under the ball cap, and he had sunglasses stuck over the brim. His injured eye was horrible, stitched together in a ragged, bunched-up scar that sliced through his eyebrow and ran into his cheek. He was wearing a lightweight gray hoodie and jeans. I could see the odd tattoo on his neck.

  I tasted blood, and I didn’t know if it was from my nose or my mouth. I was on my hands and knees, still fuzzy from being hit.

  “What?” I said.

  The earbud was on the floor. Vlatko picked it up and smiled. “Are you listening?” he said into the earbud. “I have your girlfriend, and she’s going to be my ticket out. If anyone comes near me, I’ll gut her. You know I can. She’s already bleeding. It wouldn’t take much to finish her off.”

  Vlatko dropped the earbud onto the floor and crushed it under his heel. He grabbed me and dragged me to my feet. I looked past him and saw the FBI guy on the floor in a pool of blood. His neck had been slashed so that his head was almost completely severed from his neck.

  “That could easily be you,” Vlatko said.

  “You killed him.”

  “He came in at the wrong time. I was placing the polonium.”

  I looked over at the air handler. “You’re going to poison everyone in the ballroom?”

  “Clever, don’t you think? An act of terrorism. A political statement rather than a planned assassination of a single political figure. I admit it hasn’t gone as smooth as I’d hoped, but the job is done. And I have you. You’ll get me out of here, and then I’ll skin you alive and leave you for, what’s his name now, Ranger?”

  The dead agent, the blood, the skinning alive, were mind-numbingly terrifying. I was telling myself to focus, to be alert, not to be overwhelmed by the fear and the horror. When the opportunity came, I had to be ready to run. Yeah, right. My legs were shaky, and my heart was beating so hard my vision was blurred. Running wasn’t currently an option.

  “It won’t work,” I said. “They know we’re in here. Someone will burst in any second and stop you.”

  “It’s too late. The polonium’s in the system. In fifteen minutes it will reach the ballroom.”

  “All those people …”

  “Dead,” Vlatko said.

  Acting more from instinct than coherent thought I staggered back, flung my arm out, and pulled the fire alarm that hung on the wall. Vlatko yanked me away, but the alarm was already wailing, red ceiling lights flashing in the mechanical room. He put his knife to my neck and shoved me into the storage cabinet in the corner, and I realized how he’d managed to get into the room undetected. There was a hole punched into the wall between the mechanical room and the service pantry.

  I went through the hole, into the storeroom, and attempted to scramble away, but he was too fast. He half dragged me, half shoved me into the stairwell. There were footsteps on the stairs below us. Men running.

  “Up,” he said, the knife to my throat again.

  I stumbled on the first step and felt the knife bite into my neck. I managed to get to the fourth-floor landing, I looked over at him, and I saw no panic. No nervous sweat, no fear, no confusion. He was stone cold calm, calculating what to do next. He moved us into the fourth-floor supply room, went to the window and opened it.

  “Out,” he said.

  “Out where?”

  “Onto the ledge.”

  “Are you crazy? Do I look like Spider-Man? I’m not getting on that ledge. It’s like a foot wide.”

  “You can die here, or you can go out the window.”

  “Where am I going once I get out there?”

  “You’re going to inch your way over to the covered pedestrian bridge to the parking garage.”

  “And then?”

  “You’re going to drop onto the bridge.”

  “No way!”

  “It’s not that far. Go!”

  I crept out the window and carefully stood with my back pressed tight against the building. I’m not great with heights, and I was paralyzed with fear.

  Vlatko was out of the window, standing next to me, his hand wrapped around my wrist. “Start moving,” he said in his strange British accent.

  “My f-f-feet won’t move.”

  “I’m going to count to three, and then I’m throwing you off this ledge. You’re in my way.”

  I moved one foot, then the other.

  “Faster,” he said.

  The covered bridge to the parking garage wasn’t far away. A few more steps. Don’t look down, I told myself. Concentrate on the bridge. It wasn’t a far drop, and it had a nice wide, flat roof. I could do it.

  “Keep moving until you’re in the middle of the bridge,” Vlatko said. “I’ll tell you when to jump. We’re going to jump together.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of a sniper?” I asked him. “The FBI probably has you in their sights.”

  “You’re my insurance policy. If they shoot me now, you’ll go down with me.”

  “Surely you don’t think you can get away.”

  “It’s not over until it’s over. I’ve been in worse spots. And if I’m captured I’ll be extradited to Russia, where I’ll get bonus pay. I came here on a diplomatic visa, and I have friends in very high places.”

  I reached the middle of the bridge and allowed myself to finally look down. The cement roof was about four feet below me. If for some reason I skidded off the roof, I’d fall three stories to the street. Not a good thought.

  “Jump,” he said, stepping off the ledge, taking me with him.

  I landed hard, my legs buckled, he pulled me up and yanked me forward.

  The parking garage was a ten-story reinforced concrete structure that wasn’t totally enclosed. At each level the thick outer wall was five feet high, leaving five feet of open space between the top of the wall and the beamed structure of the next concrete deck. In theory this should have allowed the wonderful sea breeze to waft through the garage. In practice, the hotel blocked the sea breeze, and what wafted through the garage was the smell of fried food spewing out of the kitchen ventilation system on the second floor.

  The pedestrian bridge very nicely opened onto the third-floor parking deck, but if you happened to be on the roof of the bridge, there was no easy access. The bridge’s roof connected to the five-foot very solid wall of parking deck number 4. Even with a knife to my throat and adrenaline surging through me, I had no ability to get over the five-foot wall. Maybe with a running start, but that wasn’t going to happen.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” Vlatko said. “I’m going to give you a boost up, and before you even hit the ground on the other side, I’m going to be over the wall. So don’t think about running away. If you even attempt to run, I’ll catch you and kill you.”

  He gave me a boost that belly-flopped me onto the top of the wall and tumbled me off onto the floor on the other side. I landed on my back, and looked over at Ranger pressed flat against the wall. Vlatko swung himself over, and Ranger snatched him out of midair. There was the flash of Vlatko’s knife blade, and in the next instant Ranger flung Vlatko off the fourth floor of the parking garage.

  I was still on my back, and Ranger knelt beside me.

  “Is anything broken?” he asked.

  “Holy crap,” I said. And a tear leaked out of my eye.

  Ranger brushed the tear away and lifted me to my feet. We went to the wall and looked down at Vlatko, sp
rawled on the road below us.

  “Do you think he’s okay?” I asked.

  “Babe,” Ranger said. “He’s one inch thick.”

  “Your arm is bleeding.”

  “He tagged me when I grabbed him.”

  “How did you know we’d be coming over the wall?”

  “I was listening to you the whole time. I didn’t trust you to hang on to the earbud, so I had a mini-microphone sewn into your shirt. It’s just under the rolled hem on the neckline.”

  I glanced at it. “I thought it was just another rhinestone.”

  Men were running at us from all directions. Uniformed Rangeman guys, two guys in suits and ties that I knew were FBI, a hotel security guard.

  The Rangeman guys secured the perimeter a short distance from us. The two FBI agents went to the wall and looked down at Vlatko and then looked over at Ranger.

  “What happened?” one of the FBI guys asked.

  “He jumped,” Ranger said.

  The agent nodded. “I figured. I could tell by the way he sailed out into space.”

  “He released the poison,” I said. “He told me it would reach the ballroom in fifteen minutes.”

  “The fire alarm emptied the entire hotel,” the FBI guy said. “The ballroom emptied in less than ten. Right now we’re waiting for the hazmat team to suit up and go into the mechanical room to retrieve the canister. We’ll know more when they get the canister out and take air quality readings in the ballroom.”

  I looked down at my bloody shirt and jeans. “My face hurts all over,” I said to Ranger. “Where’s all the blood coming from?”

  “You’re getting a bruise on your cheek. You have a small cut on your lower lip. You were bleeding from your nose, but that seems to have stopped. You have a puncture wound on your neck.”

  “I’m a mess!”

  Ranger wrapped his arms around me and held me close. “You’re beautiful. You evacuated the hotel and you delivered Vlatko.”