“Well,” said Robert Love, glancing over the half dozen unconscious bodies sprawled around him, “I see my warning didn’t take.”
“Shut up.” Without his clown outfit, he wasn’t nearly as frightening.
“Search him,” the bad Jane said.
I set the bomb case on the floor and gestured at Love with my NC gun. “Stand up and lean forward. Put your hands flat on the table.” Love did as he was told. I moved around behind him. Feeling under his jacket, I found a hand ax tucked into his cummerbund. I pulled it out and set it aside. I checked his pockets. “He’s clean,” I announced.
“Good. Now explain to him what the situation is.”
“There are some people waiting to meet you in the VIP parking garage,” I told Love. “So we’re going to walk out of here now. You’ll stay in front of me, go where I say, not make any sudden moves, not make trouble.”
“Interesting plan,” said Love. “But as I can only assume you’re taking me to be tortured and murdered, what’s my motivation, exactly, for not making trouble?”
I kept the gun on him as I transferred the case from the floor to the table. I showed him what was inside it. “You know what this is, right?”
“I recognize the brand name. I can’t say I’ve seen that particular model before.”
“It’s got a damper switch on the back,” I explained. “If the switch is on, the blast is limited to an area roughly the size of this room. But if the switch is off, everyone within two hundred yards gets turned to ashes.”
“I see. And in the latter case, will you be one of the dead?” He tilted his chin to indicate my glasses. “I’m guessing your controller won’t be happy if you fail to bring me out of here.”
“He’s got that part right,” the bad Jane said.
I leaned in close and pressed my gun to Love’s temple. “If I fail this mission,” I told him, “it means I’ve blown my only chance to see my brother again. And if that’s true, I don’t care what happens to me. Are we clear?”
“Yes,” said Love. Then he smiled. “So shall I keep my hands up while we’re walking, or will that be too conspicuous?”
“Don’t worry about being conspicuous.” I pulled back but kept the gun pointed at him. “Take your clothes off.”
“What?”
“Strip. Everything, even your socks and shoes.” I lifted the bomb out of the case, then pulled up the case’s lining to reveal a button-down shirt, khakis, and a pair of loafers. “These should fit you. The stuff you’re wearing now goes in a pile on the floor. Put your little ax in the pile, too.”
“…and as far as the organization knows, I died in the explosion.” He nodded. “Tricky. Very tricky.”
“Dixon will figure it out eventually. But by the time he does, it’ll be too late to do anything.”
“So you get to see your brother again, and stick it to Dixon on your way out. I can see now why you turned.”
“Less conversation, more action,” the bad Jane said. “We don’t have forever here.”
“Let’s go,” I said, waving the gun. Love changed his clothes. When we were ready, I set the timer on the bomb.
Neither one of us looked like a high-stakes gambler now, but my invisible status held, and nobody paid us any mind as we left the room. We crossed the casino floor without incident, the bad Jane directing us towards a private elevator whose doors opened as we approached. I pushed Love inside.
In the parking garage the bad Jane, maybe worried about a last-minute change of heart on my part, was standing back at a safe distance from the elevator. She’d called in backup: eight guys dressed as parking valets, all packing Troop-issue NC guns. The bad Jane’s own gun was still holstered, but she held the detonator for my wristwatch ready in her hand.
I’d taken off the glasses but my vision was crystal-clear. Even from fifty feet away, I could make out the little hairs on the back of the bad Jane’s thumb as it hovered over the detonator button. I could see, and count, the beads of sweat on the foreheads of her backup team, and the grains of dust on the van they’d brought to carry Love away in. I saw the eddies of hot air rising from the engine of the bad Jane’s sports car where it sat parked beside the van. And I saw the bad Jane’s jaw muscles tighten, as she realized her concerns about a double-cross were justified.
“Where is he?” she said.
“Where’s who?”
Her thumb tensed. “Don’t fuck with me, Jane. Where’s Love?”
“Oh, him…He got off between floors. He claimed it was a security issue, said he knows too much to let himself be captured. Personally, I think he’s just a wimp about being tortured by psychopaths.” I waited a beat, then added: “Oh yeah. He said to tell you the Scary Clowns have sealed off all the exits from this building. None of you are getting out of here alive.”
Her backup guys started exchanging glances, but the bad Jane herself was unmoved by the threat. “None of us?” she said. “Not even me?”
“Especially not you. I’m going to kill you myself, right after you tell me where Phil is.”
“Sure you are…Good-bye, Jane.”
As Love and I had walked through the casino, we’d passed by a Vegas version of an old-fashioned carnival wheel. Now I imagined that time was like that, a big wheel of fortune, and I reached out, mentally, and stopped it in its spin. Next I focused on my arm, telling myself that the bones in my wrist and hand were elastic. When I felt them start to stretch, I brought my arm up sharply. The Mandrill watch slid off with its clasp still fastened, and went flying across the garage like a guided missile, zeroing in on a cluster of four parking valets.
I let go of the wheel of time. The bad Jane’s thumb came down, and half of her backup detail disappeared in a yellow-orange flash.
“What the fuck?” the bad Jane said. Some instinct had enabled her to protect herself by redirecting the energy of the blast around her; her hair was mussed, but otherwise she was untouched. Her surviving minions weren’t as lucky: dazzled by the explosion, they were staggering in blind circles.
I held up the auto-injector I’d found in Love’s pocket when I’d searched him. “Love took a sample of my blood before he let me out of the Mudgett Suite,” I explained. “He wouldn’t say why, but when you told me that X-drugs were DNA-specific, I started to get an idea.”
“The Scary Clowns have X-drugs?”
“Yeah. And speaking as a connoisseur of controlled substances? I’m pretty sure their shit’s better than yours, Jane.”
“Let’s find out,” she said. “Let’s play.”
She dropped the detonator; I dropped the auto-injector; we both went for our guns. We both tried to stop time again, too, and in the slow-motion world that resulted, the shots we fired were actually visible. The bad Jane’s NC gun spat thick jagged bolts the color of arterial blood; my own gun sprayed wispy white lines of narcolepsy. None of the shots connected, and after dodging back and forth for a moment, we both rolled for cover.
Crouched behind the polished bulk of a silver Mercedes, I listened to the stumbling of the parking valets until I had a clear picture of where they all were. Then I thumbed the dial on my NC gun to MI and popped up firing. I’d killed three of them and was about to shoot the fourth when I heard the beep of a Mandrill bomb being activated, and the soft swoosh as the bad Jane lobbed it overhand in my direction. I put a hand on the roof of the Mercedes and flipped myself up into the air. My foot connected with the incoming bomb and kicked it back the way it had come, with a slight course correction; it smacked into the chest of the last valet and detonated.
The blast, much more powerful than the previous one, broke the windows on most of the cars in the garage; as I dropped back to the ground I had to cover my head against a shower of safety glass. By the time the rain stopped the bad Jane had gotten back in her sports car and was revving the engine for a getaway. As she reversed out of her parking slot, I jumped up again, using the hood of the Mercedes as a springboard to launch myself through the air. I landed on the ro
of of the sports car even as the bad Jane was shifting into forward gear; when she hit the gas, I reached down through the broken front window and gave the steering wheel a hard yank. I rolled clear as the car swerved into a concrete pylon.
The crash killed the sports car’s engine. The bad Jane fought free of the deflating air bag and crawled out over the crumpled hood. Back on my feet, I tried to draw a bead on her, but then another Mandrill bomb came skittering across the garage floor, its countdown timer reading 0:01.
I closed my eyes and teleported behind another concrete pylon. The bomb detonated, shattering more glass. An alarm began to wail—and beneath that, I heard the bad Jane’s footsteps receding, and the sound of a stairwell door.
The stairs led back up to the casino level. By the time I got there, the bad Jane was out of sight. As I stood searching for some sign of which way she’d gone, a security guard approached me. I recognized him as the same guard who’d eyeballed me when I’d first entered the building, and I hesitated, not sure whether he was a Troop member, a Scary Clown, or a civilian.
A second security guard tackled me from behind. He locked an arm over my windpipe and tried to shove me up against the wall, but he was no bad Jane: I melted out from under his chokehold, reappeared behind him, and gave him a double shot of narcolepsy to the back of the head. Then I turned to deal with the first guard, but he’d already been knocked senseless by a burst of sound from a brass-belled Clown horn.
“Hello again, Jane,” Robert Love said. “Enjoying the rush?”
“Yes, actually…But you could have told me in advance.”
“What, and spoil the surprise? That wouldn’t be very tricky.” He giggled, but then his grin turned to a grimace. “Ouch!”
“Love?”
I was worried he’d been shot, but he didn’t fall down. He stretched out his arm, opening and closing his fist. “Must’ve pulled a muscle climbing out of the elevator…No matter. Listen: I’ve got Clowns on X-drugs guarding all the primary exits, but that will only delay her. You need to hunt her down before she finds another way out.”
“Right…” I stared at the casino floor, focusing on the individual fibers that made up the carpet. Out of the thousands of random impressions left by passing gamblers, a fresh set of footprints appeared, as visible to me as tracks in grass. “Got her.”
I sprinted away at superhuman speed. The bad Jane’s trail led out under the pyramid atrium, where another pair of security guards tried to get in my way. I’d just finished taking them down when I heard a horn blast off in the distance. I ran towards it, and the bad Jane came darting right in front of me, her hair more than just mussed, now—she looked like she’d been through a tumble dryer. She saw me and tried to snap off a shot, but the barrel of her NC gun had cracked, rendering it as harmless as the toy it appeared to be. A look of real fear came into her eyes then, and she took off in a blur.
I stayed right on her heels. I could sense that she was almost out of power, in need of another dose, but between the Mandrill bomb explosions and the horn blast, any X-drug vials she was carrying would have shattered by now. All I had to do was keep pressing her until she was completely tapped out.
I chased her into a corner of the atrium, where she broke through another stairwell door. The stairs went up, the flights staggered to follow the incline of the pyramid. The geometry of it made me dizzy, so I forced myself not to look up the central well and just concentrated on running. By the time I passed the fifth landing, it was more like flying.
We flew up and up, all the way to the top—I nearly caught her at the three-quarter mark, but she put on a final burst of speed and pulled away again. Then I was at the top landing, in front of a door that radiated heat. The door was unmarked, but if you were going to make a sign for it, the symbol off the organization coin would have been a good choice.
I nudged the door open and stepped into the eye of the pyramid. It was like stepping into the sun: the Luxor’s searchlight was the size of a swimming pool, and though it pumped most of its energy into the sky, enough reflected back off the inside of the glass cap to turn the room into a bake oven.
My pupils shrank to pinpoints as I climbed onto the catwalk that encircled the searchlight. The air above the light was one big heat-shimmer, but I thought I glimpsed a human outline on the far side of the catwalk.
“You might as well show yourself,” I said. “I know you’re here, and you don’t have enough juice left to get past me.”
She solidified. “Careful with the gun.” She gestured at the glass walls. “If you miss…”
“I’m not going to shoot you. I need you awake so I can beat the truth out of you.”
“The truth.” She smiled. “You sure you want the truth, Jane? Because the truth is, even if you get me to tell you where Phil’s hiding, you won’t save him. He belongs to the Troop now. You might catch him, but you won’t turn him. He’ll curse you for even trying.”
“Why don’t you let me worry about that?”
“I know you are worried about it. That’s why there’s a part of you that really would like to shoot me, to shut me up before I can talk. Go on, check it out.”
I glanced down at the gun in my hand.
The dial was turned to the MI setting.
“Yeah,” the bad Jane said. “If you kill me, Phil gets away, and then you can go on pretending there’s hope. But there is no more hope, Jane. You had your chance to protect Phil twenty-three years ago. Now he’s got power, and position, and a purpose—more than you ever had—and he’s never going to give that up willingly. He might have shared a little of it with you, but that chance is gone too. So all that’s left is death. You can hunt him down and execute him, like the bad monkey he is. Is that the truth you’re looking for, Jane? You want to be responsible for finishing Phil off?”
As she talked, she moved along the catwalk towards me. She started to get a little too close for comfort; I took a step back and my heel caught, throwing me off-balance. It was all the opening she needed. She came forward in a blur, chopping her hand against my wrist to make me drop the gun. Then her hands were around my neck.
“Don’t fight it,” she said. I tried to melt away, but she held on to me firmly, using the last of her power. “Don’t fight it, Jane…You know this is the best way.” She bent me backwards over the catwalk railing. I felt the heat of the light scorching me. “Just let go. Just let go. No more guilt for you, no more screwups, and Phil gets to go on…”
With the last of my strength, I reached up, placed a palm flat against her chest. I pushed, merged, my hand passing through her jacket, her skin, her breastbone. I grabbed her by the heart, and squeezed.
She gasped and let go of me. She tried to step away, but I lifted her off the ground.
“Now,” I said. “You’re going to tell me where my brother is…”
Her arms and legs started flailing like mad, but her slaps and kicks were nothing to me. I pivoted around, lifting her over the railing to dangle her above the searchlight. I concentrated; the light blazed up, not just like the sun now, until I could see all the way through her, all the way to her soul. Steam, then smoke, curled off of her.
“Tell me where he is,” I said. I gave her heart one more squeeze.
She threw her head back, screamed it out; the words echoed off the glass tent as the light continued to blaze.
“Thank you,” I said. “And good-bye, Jane.”
I opened my hand. Her body, limp now, slipped free. Descending, she flashed into fire, the light consuming her more thoroughly than a Mandrill bomb. Not even ashes were left.
Tapped out, dripping with sweat, I slumped against the catwalk railing.
A dark shape moved at the edge of my vision. There was a flash of pebble glasses.
“Well,” Dixon said. “That was rather medieval.”
“I didn’t like her,” I told him. “I don’t like you much, either. But that doesn’t matter now…I know where Phil is.”
“Yes, I heard. I hope
she wasn’t lying.”
“She wasn’t. But we’re going to have to move fast. By now Phil will know that this operation has gone wrong. When the bad Jane doesn’t report in, he’ll run.”
“Not to worry.” Dixon flipped open his cell phone. “I have a Bad Monkeys strike team standing by.”
“I don’t want any help. Just get me to him, I’ll go in alone.”
“You aren’t going in at all. Even if I trusted you, you can barely stand.”
“Even if you trusted me? What…Wait. What do you mean, ‘strike team’?”
“What do you think I mean?”
“No. We’re supposed to bring Phil in alive. Love promised me he’d honor True’s deal.”
“Love is on his way to the hospital,” Dixon said. “He had a heart attack—a real one. That puts me in operational command.”
“It doesn’t change the deal! You can’t—”
“You know that bomb you left on the baccarat table? The technician we sent in to defuse it said that the ‘damper switch’ was just a dummy. If it had gone off, it would have killed everyone in the casino.”
“It wasn’t Phil who put me up to that. It was her.”
“It was his plan. This is the sort of thing your brother does for the Troop. This is what he is, now…And I am not going to go in soft and risk letting him escape, just to assuage your guilt about being a bad sister.”
“You prick,” I said. “You’re just doing this to spite me!”
“I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do.” He raised the cell phone to his ear.
I scooped my NC gun off the catwalk.
“Don’t be a fool,” Dixon said.
“Don’t think I won’t…” The dial was still on the MI setting. I tried to switch it back to narcolepsy, but it must have been damaged in the fall. It wouldn’t budge.
A cold smirk formed on Dixon’s lips as he watched me struggle with the dial. “How very convenient,” he said. “To stop me, you’ll have to kill me…And as there are no witnesses, you’ll be free to blame the bad Jane…”
“Shut up!” I banged the dial against the catwalk railing. It still wouldn’t turn. “Put down that goddamned cell phone!”