Open Fire

2:58 p.m. Industrial Road, Las Vegas.

The hardest thing she ever did in a vehicle was drive at thirty-five miles per hour.

Vega sat behind the wheel of the florist's van with both hands at ten and two, her signal blinking a polite, law-abiding yellow, and eased up to the red light on Industrial Road like a woman delivering lilies to her grandmother. The van was white. The side said *PETALS & PROMISES — WEDDINGS, FUNERALS, ALL OCCASIONS.* The air conditioner blew weakly. A pine-tree air freshener swung from the mirror and gave off a smell like a hospital.

"You are gripping the wheel," said a voice behind her.

"I'm driving."

"You are gripping it as though it owes you money."

"It's a van, Roman. It handles like a sofa."

"Then you will have no difficulty with the speed limit."

She bit down on a very rude word.

They were in the cargo hold, the two of them and Silas, in the dim chilled dark among forty buckets of lilies. Roman sat on an upturned crate in a florist's coveralls. They were two sizes too short at the wrist and had *DENNIS* embroidered over the pocket. He had a baseball cap pulled low. In his lap lay a long white box tied with ribbon, and in the box, among the roses, a pistol.

Silas lay flat on the floor under a tarp of ferns, like a body.

"Dennis," said Vega.

"I have been told it is a distinguished name."

"You look like a Dennis."

"I feel like a Dennis."

"It's the shoulders."

"Be quiet," said Silas, from under the ferns. "You are distracting the driver."

The light turned green.

She drove through it at precisely thirty-five.

In her ear, small and sharp and distant, Juno's voice came through the earpiece. "Okay, okay, okay. Cop at your two o'clock. Black and white. He's just sitting. He's on his phone. I think he's got a doughnut."

"Is he looking?"

"He's looking at the doughnut."

"Good."

"But there's a second one behind him. At the gas station. And a third one, unmarked, in the lot—"

"Juno."

"Sorry. Sorry. I'm babbling. I always babble when the world might explode."

"It's okay."

"Is it?"

"Not really. But babble anyway."

She passed the first cruiser. The deputy glanced up. She raised two fingers off the wheel in a lazy salute, the wave of a florist at the end of a long shift. He frowned at the van. He frowned at the sign. He looked down at his phone again and she let her breath out through her nose, very slowly, in a thread.

One.

At the next intersection a second cruiser rolled out of an alley and fell in three car-lengths behind her.

Two.

"He's following," said Juno.

"I know."

"He's got his lights off."

"I know."

"Should I—"

"Don't touch anything."

She kept her eyes on the road and her heart at forty beats a minute and counted the blocks. The Aurum rose ahead of her like a gold tooth in the haze, eighty-one stories of bronzed glass, huge and sleek and quietly obscene. Its crown was sheathed in light. Below it, the Strip heaved with traffic.

Eight blocks. Seven. Six.

The cruiser accelerated.

Her stomach dropped. It swung out and pulled up alongside her, blue-and-white, a young man at the wheel, mid-twenties, sunburnt, with an earpiece in one ear and a look of carefully manufactured boredom. He turned his head. He looked at her through the glass.

She smiled.

It was the sweetest, stupidest smile she had ever put on. She rolled down her window.

"Afternoon, officer!"

"Ma'am." His voice was flat. "That a delivery?"

"Big wedding at the Aurum! Sixty bouquets and a thousand lilies!" She gave a small helpless shrug. "The bride's a nightmare. She wants everything by four. I'm running about six minutes late, and if I don't make it she'll cry."

"Uh huh."

"I'd offer you a bouquet, but they're all spoken for." She flashed her teeth. "Unless you want one for your girlfriend."

"I don't have a girlfriend."

"Wife?"

"Not exactly."

"Well, that's a shame." She reached across to the passenger seat, took a single white rose out of a bucket, and held it through the window. "On the house. A good-looking guy like you? Someone's going to need it."

He stared at the rose.

Behind her, in the dark among the lilies, she heard no sound at all. It was the sound of three men holding their breath.

"Ma'am—" said the deputy.

The radio at his shoulder crackled. A voice, low and clipped, said a single word she could not make out. He tilted his head, listening. His face changed. Something went across it, quick and uncertain, like a bird passing over a window.

Then he took the rose.

"Have a good one," he said.

The cruiser dropped back. It turned left at the next corner, without a signal, and disappeared. Vega sat with her hand on the wheel and her heart going like a dying engine.

"He let us go," she whispered.

"Yes," said Roman, softly, from the back.

"Why?"

"Because someone told him to." He was silent for a moment. "Rurik does not want me stopped. He wants me inside."

"That's—"

"Yes."

"That's worse."

"Considerably," said Roman. "Drive, Miss Callahan. We are late for a wedding."

…

6:58 p.m. The eighty-first floor.

The conference room was a lozenge of glass and walnut, forty feet by sixty, with a window the length of one wall and the city spread beneath it like a spill of jewelry. The sun had gone down in a blaze. The Strip was beginning to glow. At a long table in the center, covered in white linen, sat a leather folio, a crystal inkwell, and a pen.

It was a heavy pen. Black lacquer, gold nib. It lay across the folio at a precise angle, as if someone had measured.

Roman looked at it for a long time.

He stood at the head of the table in a charcoal suit, with the cane hooked over his arm and his hands folded in front of him. He had put on a tie, which Silas had pointed out was unnecessary and Roman had called essential. Behind him, against the wall, stood Silas, in a black jacket, with his eyes half closed and a hand that never left his belt. At the far end, two senators in dark suits were talking quietly to a woman in a navy blazer. She was holding a stack of documents. She was a federal prosecutor. She had not looked at the pen.

"It is a handsome pen," said a voice at his elbow.

He did not turn.

"I commissioned it myself," the voice went on. "A Parisian house. The nib is eighteen-karat. It writes like a dream. I had two made, one for each of us." A low, pleasant laugh. "I thought we might do it together."

"Mr. Rurik."

"Mr. Ashcombe."

Roman turned his head.

He had never seen him in person. He had seen photographs, three, taken from a great distance, and a ten-second video from a Prague airport. None of them had prepared him. Nikolai Rurik was a tall man, taller than Roman, and thin as a rapier, in a beautifully cut suit the color of wet slate. His face was long and pale and perfectly composed. His hair was silver, brushed back, immaculate. He had gray eyes. They were the same gray as Roman's own, which was an unpleasant thing to discover, and which Roman noted without comment.

"You have come a long way," said Roman.

"I have wished to meet you for a very long time."

"I was not aware that I was a celebrity."

"You are my life's work." Rurik smiled. "A little melodramatic, perhaps. But I am Russian. It is a national failing." He extended a hand. "I sent champagne."

Roman looked at the hand.

He took it.

It was dry and cool and absolutely steady. Rurik held on for exactly one second longer than courtesy required, his eyes on Roman's face, with an expression of intense scholarly interest, like a collector studying a rare insect. Then he let go.

"I drank it," said Roman.

"Ah! And?"

"It was excellent."

"I thought you would think so." A flicker of amusement. "Eight months, Mr. Ashcombe. Eight months I have waited for this evening. I confess I am looking forward to the ending."

"So am I."

"Are you?"

"Very much."

He said it quietly, with no inflection, in the voice of a man ordering dinner, and he saw a very faint line appear between the other man's eyebrows. It was gone in an instant.

Rurik turned. He picked up the pen, and weighed it in his fingers, and set it down again.

"Shall we?" he said.

The room went still. The senators had stopped talking. The prosecutor stepped forward, with her folder. A clock somewhere ticked softly on the wall. Roman took a step toward the table and laid his palm on the back of the chair.

Six minutes past seven, thought Roman, and did not look at his watch.

Beside him, in his earpiece, so soft that no one else could hear it, Juno said:

"Roman."

"Yes."

"Something's wrong."

"Explain."

"My mirror. It's—" Her voice cracked. "It's going down. Someone's pushing back. Somebody's in the system, they're good, they're really good, they're—"

Down below, through the soles of his shoes, there came a thud.

It was a deep, dull, solid sound, like a door being kicked in, a long way off. Then another. Then a rattle, like a fistful of gravel thrown at a window. The senators turned their heads. The prosecutor frowned.

"What was that?" she said.

Rurik looked at his watch.

"Ah," he said, with deep regret. "I believe that is the wedding."

The lights went out.

…

7:06 p.m. Las Vegas Boulevard.

It had been the longest three hours of her life.

She sat in the Charger on the fourth level of a parking structure across from the Aurum, with the engine off and the windows down, and listened to the sound of a city getting ready to bleed. Daisy was cool under her. The leather was the right temperature. On the passenger seat lay a headset, a map, a flask of cold tea, and a pistol she had hoped not to need.

"Vega," said Silas.

His voice came through in a blur of static. Behind it she heard a sharp series of cracks, like a wooden fence being snapped.

"Go."

"We have lost the building. The mirror is down. Rurik's people hold the elevators. The senators are in the panic room. Reyes has the east stair." He drew a ragged breath. "The convoy is pinned."

"Where?"

"The Convention Center overpass. Four vehicles. Kessler's men are on the ramp. They have anti-tank weapons. Reyes's nephew is in the lead car with a hundred and forty rounds and an expression of regret." A pause. "He is not going to last."

"I'm nearest."

"You are three minutes away."

"I'm two."

"Callahan—"

"Rule two," she said. "Ask me."

A silence, with gunfire in it.

"Vega," said a different voice, deep and rough and unhurried, and her heart gave a violent lurch. "Will you?"

"Hold on," said Vega.

She turned the key.

…

The Charger went down the ramp like a dropped knife.

She took the first turn on two wheels. The second she took with the tail hanging out, the rear tires screaming, the smell of burned rubber filling the cab like smoke from a battlefield. The parking structure was a spiral, tight and low and dark, and she took it at fifty, her hands moving on the wheel in short precise corrections, the way a pianist's move on keys. A pillar flashed past, a hand's breadth from her mirror. A sign. A startled couple. A woman with a stroller who dived behind a Buick.

She hit the street at seventy.

The Strip was a wall of headlights.

She had known it would be. She had known that a Thursday night in the world's capital of excess would be jammed from curb to curb with tourists and taxis and drunks. She did not slow. She dropped into third and slammed the gas and the Hellcat roared, a deep, hungry, glorious bellow that rattled the windows of the shops, and she shot between a limousine and a tour bus with a foot to spare on each side.

A horn blared. A man shouted. A flash of pink flamingo, and a doorman's open mouth.

"Left," said Juno, in her ear. "Left, left, there's a gap—"

"I see it."

"It's a bus lane!"

"Even better."

She took the bus lane. It was clear. She ran it for two hundred yards at a hundred and ten, past a row of startled commuters, and shot out across a six-way intersection in front of a garbage truck. The driver stood on his brakes. The truck jackknifed. She glimpsed his face through the windshield, a pale oval, mouth open, an expression of religious awe.

Sorry, she thought.

The Convention Center rose on her right. The overpass ran across the road ahead, a long concrete arch, and above it she could see the flash and flicker of gunfire. Smoke curled up into the sky. A black SUV lay on its side across the on-ramp, burning.

"I'm here," said Vega.

"Where are you?"

"Underneath."

She braked. She looked up.

Four armored Suburbans sat in a tight square on the roadway above, doors open, windows webbed. Two were on fire. Men in black crouched behind them, firing over the hoods. On the near side, at the foot of the ramp, a scatter of Kessler's people had set up behind a pair of trucks, and one of them had a long green tube on his shoulder. As she watched, he leaned forward and fired.

The rocket went up in a streak of white.

It hit the lead Suburban.

The blast threw a column of orange into the dusk. Debris rained down on the pavement. Someone screamed, high and thin and young.

Vega put the car in reverse.

"What are you doing?" said Juno.

"Backing up."

"Why?"

"For momentum."

She floored it.

The Charger went up the ramp backward at sixty. It was a trick she had learned from a Belgian in Gary, a stupid, beautiful, completely unnecessary trick, and it worked every time. The rear bumper slammed into the first of the trucks. Metal shrieked. The truck spun like a toy. A man flew sideways, arms wide. She cranked the wheel, handbrake, a hard clean spin, and the car whipped round and faced the road, nose up, engine bellowing.

She saw the rocketeer.

He was reloading. He looked up, saw the black car, and his face went slack.

She didn't hit him. She was not a savage. She put the Hellcat's grille a foot from his knees and he threw himself over the guardrail with a yell and dropped fifteen feet to the street below.

Then she was through.

She went up the ramp and onto the overpass, between the burning Suburbans, with bullets ringing off the roof like hail, and slewed to a stop in the exact center of the square.

"Get in!" she screamed. "Get in!"

The back door flew open.

A young man tumbled in, six feet five, in a bulletproof vest two sizes too small. He had a gash across his forehead and a pistol in each hand and a face the color of cottage cheese. "I'm—my uncle sent—"

"You're Reyes's nephew."

"I'm Mateo."

"Get down, Mateo."

"Yes, ma'am."

Four more men piled in after him. Five. Six. They piled onto the seats and into the footwells, in a heap of arms and legs and weapons, with a hand clutched on her headrest and a boot on her shoulder. The car sagged on its springs.

"Is that all?"

"There's two more!"

"Then go get them!"

They went. They came back with a man in each arm, one limping, one unconscious, and shoved them in on top of the pile. The door slammed. Vega didn't wait to count.

She put it in drive and hit the gas, and the Charger leapt off the overpass like a thing escaping its cage.

…

7:21 p.m. The Aurum.

Roman

He had thrown the table.

It had been an unplanned and wholly satisfying act. When the lights went out he had put his weight on the heavy walnut and tipped it, with a crash, into the gap between the two groups, and under its cover the senators had gone to the floor and the prosecutor had run for the panic room with her folder clutched to her chest. Silas had fired twice. Reyes's men had come out of the walls in a gray tide.

Rurik had vanished.

It was the thing Roman would remember. In the roar of the first rifle volley, in the flash of muzzle fire, he'd looked for the tall man in the slate suit and found only an empty chair. A single champagne flute, standing on the sill. A thread of expensive cologne on the air.

Rurik had left the building as politely as he had arrived.

Now Roman stood in the freight lift, with a gun in his hand and a cut on his scalp and Silas beside him, bleeding from a graze on the arm, watching the floor numbers fall.

Forty. Thirty-nine.

"They hold the lobby," said Silas.

"Yes."

"We cannot go out the front."

"No."

"The freight dock?"

"Is where Vega will be."

"Sir, she is on the overpass—"

"She will come." He said it with total certainty, in the cool dry voice of a man stating a law of physics. "She will have retrieved Reyes's nephew and half a dozen others, and she will be driving a vehicle that is perhaps forty percent overloaded. She will take the service road. She will reach the dock in under four minutes."

Silas looked at him.

"You are very sure."

"Yes."

"May I ask why?"

"Because it is the only variable in the equation," said Roman, "that has never failed to surprise me."

The lift jolted. The numbers ticked. Twelve. Eleven.

"Sir," said Silas. "The lobby. The mezzanine. Something is wrong with the doors."

"Silas—"

The doors opened.

The freight lift did not open onto the dock. It opened onto the mezzanine.

He saw it too late: the clever little reroute, the subtle shift of a switch in the machinery. Someone had changed the destination. Below him lay the Aurum's great glass atrium, three stories high, with its marble floor and its golden fountains and its enormous chandelier. A dozen men stood scattered across it, in black, with rifles at their shoulders. They had been waiting.

And in the exact center of the marble, with a flute of champagne in one hand and a lighter in the other, stood a golden-haired man in a white linen suit.

"Roman," said Adrian Kessler, and smiled. "Darling. You're late."

Silas swung his rifle up.

Three rifles lifted in answer. Six. Twelve. A circle of little red dots bloomed on Silas's chest, and on Roman's, and one on the center of his forehead, and he stood perfectly still, with his cane in one hand and his pistol hanging from the other, and looked down at the man who had killed his brother.

"Adrian," he said.

"Put it down, love."

"No."

"Then I'll have them shoot you in the knee."

"You are welcome to try."

"I intend to." The lighter clicked. A little flame rose, gold and steady. Kessler lifted it in a salute. "So many things burn, don't they? Hotels. Contracts. Boys in blue Challengers. Do tell me, Roman. Which would you like to see first?"

…

7:24 p.m. The service road.

She came round the corner of the Aurum at ninety miles an hour with eight men in the car and a hole in the rear window and her left eye full of blood, and saw the loading dock open ahead of her like a mouth.

It was empty.

"Where are they?" screamed Mateo. "Where's my uncle? Where's Mr. Ashcombe?"

"They should be here."

"They're not here!"

"I know they're not here!"

She braked. The Charger slid sideways across the concrete in a cloud of smoke and came to a halt a yard from the dock. She flung the door open. She was out before the car had stopped rocking.

"Juno! Juno, where are they?"

"I— I— I lost the feed, I can't—" Her voice came through high and cracked and thin. "They were in the freight lift. Then the lift went offline. Vee, it's not going to the dock. It went to the mezzanine. They changed the route. Somebody changed the route, it's a trap, it's a trap—"

Vega ran.

She ran through the loading bay and up the service stair, three at a time, with the pistol in her fist and the blood in her eye. She hit the fire door with her shoulder. It flew open. She came out on a catwalk above the atrium, beneath the huge chandelier, and looked down.

There was a circle of rifles.

There was a ring of red dots like a fall of rose petals.

And in the center, on the marble, with his back to a golden fountain and Silas at his side, stood Roman Ashcombe, looking up.

He saw her.

His eyes met hers across forty feet of empty air, steady, unsurprised and perfectly gray, and the corner of the left one creased.

Below him, Adrian Kessler struck a match.