Sin City, Wednesday

2:20 p.m. McCarran Executive Terminal, Las Vegas.

The heat hit her like a hand.

Vega came down the airstair of the Citation into a blast of dry, white, brutal air that smelled of jet fuel and hot asphalt and, faintly, of money. The tarmac shimmered. The mountains stood on the horizon like a row of burnt loaves. Somewhere over the fence a slot machine was ringing, or she imagined it was. Everything in this city sounded like a slot machine.

"A hundred and one," said Juno, behind her, in the voice of a woman being slowly baked. "It's September."

"It's Nevada."

"It's hell." She was wearing the lime-green cardigan. She had refused to take it off on principle. "Why do people live here? Is this a punishment?"

"It's the city of second chances."

"It's the city of heatstroke."

"Same thing," said Silas, drily, and went down the steps with his sunglasses on.

They had come in two planes, an hour apart, by two routes, under four names. The decoy convoy had gone to Henderson. The real team had gone to the executive terminal at the far end of the field, where a pair of unmarked vans stood idling on the apron and a thin sunburned man in a baseball cap waved a clipboard at nobody in particular.

Roman came last.

He descended slowly, on the cane, in a gray suit and dark glasses, with the stillness of a man who had decided how much the leg would be allowed to show. At the foot of the stairs he stopped and turned his face to the sun. For a moment he stood there, tall and silent, with the heat shimmering around him, and the baseball-cap man's clipboard lowered by a degree.

"Mr. Ashcombe," he said, faintly. "Welcome back."

"Back?"

"You were here in 'nineteen, sir. For the thing."

"Ah," said Roman. "The thing."

"It was a very good thing."

"It was a disaster."

"It was a good disaster, sir," said the man, and Vega caught Juno's eye and bit the inside of her cheek.

…

The safehouse was a wedding chapel.

It stood on the old Strip, south of the casinos, between a pawn shop and a tattoo parlor, a squat pink stucco building with a white steeple and a neon sign that said *LITTLE CHAPEL OF THE SILVER BELL — QUICKIE MARRIAGES — NO WAITING.* A plastic bride stood on the roof with one arm raised. She was missing a hand.

"No," said Juno.

"Yes."

"We're hiding in a wedding chapel."

"It has excellent sight lines," said Roman, getting out of the van.

"It has a drive-through."

"That is a feature."

"It has a fountain. In the shape of cupids."

"The cupids are structural," said Silas. "The fountain's basin conceals a bunker."

"Of course it does."

The inside was cool and dim, and smelled of dust and lilies and old carpet. There were rows of white folding chairs. A fake altar. A red velvet curtain. On a shelf by the door stood a collection of framed photographs, couples in their thirties and nineties and teens, grinning in front of a painted sunset, and at the back of the room, in a glass case, a rhinestone jumpsuit on a mannequin.

"Is that—" Vega began.

"The owner's father," said Silas. "He was a celebrated Elvis. He died in 'ninety-eight. His son has been a friend of Mr. Ashcombe's since a certain incident involving a tax auditor."

"An incident."

"I do not recall the details."

"Because you don't want to."

"Because I was unconscious," said Silas, with dignity.

They set up in the back. It took an hour. The chapel had a back office with a steel door, behind which a staircase led down into a concrete room lined with racks of weapons. Vega, who had seen a great many armories, found herself standing in the doorway with her mouth slightly open. There were rifles, in oiled rows, and shotguns, and compact black submachine guns that looked like toys. There were boxes of ammunition stacked to the ceiling. There was a rocket launcher in a corner, with a little hand-lettered label that said Do Not Use At Receptions.

"That's my favorite," said Juno.

"They're all my favorite."

"No, but this one has a sign."

Roman had gone straight to the long table in the center. He stood leaning on the cane, with the weight on his good leg, and spread out the blueprints of the Aurum under the buzzing fluorescent light. He did not look up.

"Callahan."

"Yeah?"

"Come here. I would like to show you something."

…

By nightfall she had ridden the Strip four times.

She did it in a rented sedan, white, beige, forgettable, a car chosen for its total absence of personality. Silas drove the first lap. She drove the second. The third and fourth she took alone, with the windows up and the AC on high, in a pair of oversized sunglasses and a baseball cap, studying the city the way a surgeon studies a body.

It was a monster. She understood that by the second pass.

The Strip was four miles of artificial canyon, a river of light and noise, twenty lanes wide in places and clogged with tourists. It had no logic. It had no grid. It had a hundred side streets that fed into a dozen service alleys that bled into parking structures the size of airports, and each of them was a possible exit and a possible trap. She counted. She counted the way she'd done in the jungle, in the dark, in the rain: fast, intuitive, with the whole of her mind. By the fourth lap she had drawn an entire map on the back of her eyelids.

Seven ways out of the Aurum. Two of them good.

And she saw them.

She saw the first at the corner of Flamingo, a black SUV with tinted windows idling at a red light, three men inside, and one of them, in the passenger seat, watching her sedan with an expression of patient interest. She saw the second in the line of the Aurum's valet drive: two vans, painted like laundry trucks, with no laundry logos on the windows. She saw the third at a gas station on Koval, a pair of men in cheap suits drinking coffee, who had very good shoes.

She saw twelve more by sunset.

They were everywhere. They sat in parked cars, and bars, and shuttle buses. They stood at crosswalks with their earbuds in. They leaned on pillars outside a pawn shop and scrolled their phones. They wore ordinary clothes, and they did not look at each other, and they did not look at her, and every single one of them had the same dead, flat, professional stillness around the eyes.

Kessler's, she thought. Rurik's. Both.

It was a lot more than she'd expected. She counted again, to be sure. Then she parked, in a lot behind a casino, and put her forehead on the steering wheel for ten seconds.

Two hundred, she thought. At least. In a city of two million tourists. With another two hundred we can't see.

She sat up and took out the burner. She dialed.

"Report," said Silas.

"It's worse than we thought."

"How much?"

"They've got people on every corner of the Strip. I counted fifty before I stopped. I think it's closer to three hundred." Her voice was flat. "That isn't a gang. That isn't a crew. It's a militia."

"Rurik has always had deep pockets."

"It's not just the money. They've got help." She watched a black Escalade glide past the lot entrance, slowly, as though looking for something. "Three of those SUVs are government plates. Nevada. Two have the little blue sticker, the one for the sheriff's department. One's got a federal tag."

A very long silence.

"That," said Silas, "is not good."

"No."

"Rurik has bought a sheriff."

"At least one. And someone in the Bureau." She exhaled. "Silas, if this goes sideways, we don't just have the bad guys to worry about. We have the cops."

"I understand."

"Where do we run?"

"I will give that question to Mr. Ashcombe," said Silas. "Come back. Now. Not by the Strip."

…

The war room was the chapel's basement.

It was lit by a single long fluorescent tube and a hundred glowing screens. Juno had commandeered a table in one corner and spread it with seven laptops, four cables, and an open bag of gummy bears. She sat cross-legged on a plastic chair in the glow, with the headset round her neck and her fingers going like a pianist's. On the screens, in tiny gray squares, scrolled the view from the Aurum's own cameras: elevators, corridors, a long empty conference room with a table and a vase.

"I'm in," she said, without looking up. "I've been in since noon."

"The mirror?"

"Loaded. It's sleeping. When I wake it, anything I want, they'll see an empty floor." She popped a gummy bear. "Thursday at six-thirty. I'll start the loop."

"Good."

"There's a catch."

"There is always a catch."

"It only works in the building," said Juno. "Once you leave it, I'm blind. There are four hundred cameras on the Strip. I can't touch those. Every street, every light, they're run by the county, and the county's—" She spread her hands. "Compromised."

"So you cannot help us on the road."

"I can talk to you on the road. I can see what you see. But I can't change it."

"Understood."

Roman straightened.

He had been silent for some time. He stood at the head of the table, with his weight on the cane, studying the map. It was a large map, laid out on the old cloth, the Strip in red, the Aurum in a heavy black circle, with colored pins for everything that was known: Kessler's people in blue, Rurik's in white, local law in yellow. There were a great many yellow pins.

He looked up at Vega.

"I have a problem," he said.

"I thought you might."

"The signing is in the Aurum. The Aurum is Rurik's. Everything we do tomorrow occurs on his ground, in his building, under his cameras. I will be in the eighty-first-floor conference room, with three senators and two prosecutors and a pen. I will be unarmed. I will be surrounded." He paused. "If the building falls, I cannot get out."

"I know."

"Silas will be with me. Reyes's men will be in the walls. But the people who plan these things know it. They have been building this trap for eight months. They will have thought of every exit I could use, and closed it."

"Not every one."

"No." His gray eyes held hers. "The one they have not thought of is you."

She stood very still.

"Rurik knows that I have a driver," said Roman. "He does not know that she is the best in the world. He thinks of you as a risk, a variable, a piece of the machine. He did not, in all his planning, imagine that you would be the one thing he could not close." He laid his finger on the map. "I am going to give you the most important task in the operation. I do not mean the van."

"What do you mean?"

"The retreat."

The room was quiet. Even Juno had stopped typing.

"Every exit," said Roman. "Every route out of the Aurum, out of the Strip, out of this city. The planes, the roads, the service tunnels, the places we can hide. I want you to draw the entire map. I want you to know it as well as you know your own hands." A pause. "And tomorrow night, if it all goes to ruin, and it may, you will call the retreat."

"Call it."

"You will decide who leaves and who remains. You will say go. Or you will say stay. And whatever you say—" He drew breath. "Silas will obey. Reyes will obey. I will obey."

She stared.

"Even if it's you."

"Especially if it is me."

"Roman, that's—" She could not find the word. "That's your life. That's the whole organization. You can't hand that to one person."

"I am not handing it to one person." His voice was very quiet. "I am handing it to you."

She heard Juno draw in a breath.

Her ears were ringing. She stared at the map, at the red lines running like veins, the pins, the heavy black circle, and thought that of everything in the world that could have been given her, a key, a ring, a jewel, a name, none of it could have been so heavy. None of it was so intimate.

He's giving me the exits, she thought. All of them. The last thing he has.

And the reverse was equally true. He was asking her to be the one who decided when to stop.

"Rule two," said Vega.

"I am asking."

"I know. I just wanted to hear you do it."

He almost smiled. "Will you?"

She looked at the map for a long, long moment. She felt the weight settle on her, not like a chain, but like a coat, a heavy, warm, well-made coat that someone had held open.

"Yes," said Vega.

"Thank you."

"I'm going to need a bigger table."

"You shall have one."

"And a better pen."

"You shall have the best pen in Nevada," said Silas, from the wall, drily, "and a cup of tea."

…

She worked until midnight.

She drew it all in grease pencil on the back of the Aurum plan, in four colors, with arrows and times and contingencies. The service tunnels under the Strip. The freight docks. The aqueduct that ran beneath the Flamingo wash, wide enough to drive a truck. The helipad on the Tuscany roof, which belonged to a man who owed Silas a favor. Three safe locations. Two backups. A stolen ambulance. An airstrip in the desert that had been a crop duster's field. She drew the whole city, and when she stood back, it looked like a diagram of a nervous system.

It was the best work she had ever done.

The Charger arrived at eleven.

She heard it before she saw it: a low, hard, familiar growl rolling in from the lot behind the chapel, like a big cat clearing its throat. She went up the stairs two at a time. Out back, under the single sodium lamp, a flatbed truck was backing up to the loading door with a covered shape on the bed, and a man in coveralls waving it in. The tarp came off with a rasp.

Matte black. Low and wide and wicked. A faint blue shine on the hood from the lamp.

"Daisy," said Vega.

She put her hand on the fender.

The metal was cool. It had that faint metallic smell of a car that has been driven a long way and is glad to stop. The Hellcat was exactly as she'd left it, down to the dent in the left rear quarter. She ran her thumb along it and felt, in her chest, something unwind that she hadn't known was tight.

"Silas thought you would wish to have it nearby," said Roman, behind her.

She didn't turn. "It's not in the plan."

"It is not in the official plan."

"Roman—"

"There is a vehicle in every contingency. There is only one that I trust." A pause. "I should like you to keep the keys."

She turned. He stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, in the warm dark, with the cane in one hand and a mug of tea in the other. He looked tired. He looked, for the first time in days, almost at peace.

"I'm going to win this," said Vega.

"I believe you."

"I mean it. Whatever happens tomorrow. I'm going to get you out."

"I know."

She stepped into him. He set down the mug, and the cane, and held her. She felt his heartbeat, steady and slow. She felt him breathe out, long and deep, with his chin resting on the top of her head.

"I would like to say something," said Roman, "and I would like you not to answer."

"Okay."

"I am glad that it was you." His voice was muffled in her hair. "From the first night. When you came through the door with the drive and the cold eyes and the sarcasm. I am glad that it was you who came. I would not have had anyone else."

She held on.

She didn't answer. She did not trust it.

…

The message arrived at 11:48.

Juno found it. She was still at her table in the basement, with an empty bag of gummy bears and a half-eaten pizza, her glasses pushed up into her hair. She had been staring at a gray square on her screen for nine minutes. She was very pale.

She called them without taking her eyes off it.

"Guys," she said. "You need to come see this."

They crowded around her. Silas first, then Roman, then Vega, over her shoulder. The square was a camera feed, a small one, high up in a corridor. It showed a private elevator. The doors were open. A tall man in a long dark coat was stepping out of it, flanked by four others in suits. He walked with a slow, measured, patient stride. He had a face like a blade, long and pale, with silver hair brushed straight back from the temples.

"Who is that?" asked Vega.

"I pulled his passport from the Aurum register," said Juno. "Landed an hour ago. A private jet. Gulfstream, out of Moscow, by way of Reykjavik. He checked into the penthouse on seventy-nine at ten forty-two."

"Name?"

"Nikolai Rurik."

Nobody spoke.

"He's never left Russia," said Silas, finally. "In nine years. Not once."

"He's here now."

"Why?"

On the screen, the man in the dark coat had reached a door. He stopped. He turned his head, slowly, and looked directly up into the camera lens.

He smiled.

It was a small smile, a patient smile, wholly without warmth. It was the smile of a man who has been waiting for a dinner party for eight months and is pleased with the guests.

"He knows I'm here," whispered Juno.

"He does not," said Roman. "It is a coincidence of position. The camera is in his line."

"He's looking at me."

"He is looking at the lens." Roman's voice was perfectly even. "Juno. Disconnect. Quietly."

She disconnected.

The screen went black.

The room was silent. A fluorescent tube hummed. Somewhere upstairs, the plastic bride creaked in the desert wind.

"He wants to see it," said Silas, at last. "In person. The fall."

"Yes."

"A man like that does not come out of Moscow for a signing."

"No." Roman's eyes were fixed on the dark screen. "He comes for a funeral."

"Whose?"

Roman looked at her.

"Mine," he said, "I should think."