The Silver Bell

7:41 p.m. Las Vegas Boulevard, southbound.

"Eleven minutes," said Juno, on the line. "Maybe twelve. I'm lying. I don't know. I'm really bad at timing things when I'm scared."

"Where are you?" said Vega.

"In the vault. The armory. The big steel door." A small, shaky laugh. "I'm sitting on the floor behind a crate of grenades and a rocket launcher that says Do Not Use At Receptions. I've never been so happy to see a sign."

"Is the door holding?"

"For now. They've got something on it. It's making this—" A shrill, grinding whine came down the line, a noise like a dentist's drill the size of a refrigerator. "That. That sound. It's a thermal lance. I looked it up. It's on the internet."

"How long?"

"The door's four inches of tool steel, so I think—" A pause. "Ten minutes? And there's the other thing."

"What other thing?"

"My rig." Juno's voice dropped. "They're in it, Vee. Rurik's hacker. He's in the Foundry's network, through the chapel. He's been in it since the mirror went down. I can see him on my screen. He's pulling the satellite key."

Vega's blood ran cold.

"The drive."

"The drive. The one from Chicago, the one you stole. It's plugged into my laptop. It's the master key to the whole constellation, all forty-one satellites. If he gets it—" Juno swallowed. "He doesn't just get the Foundry. He gets every camera, every encryption, every secret Roman's ever bought. He gets the whole sky."

"Can you pull it?"

"I can't. It's locked to my terminal. If I yank it, the transfer freezes. But the transfer isn't stopping. It's at sixty-three percent." She took a breath. "I'm stalling. I'm feeding him garbage. Every time he gets close to the key I swap in noise. But I can't do it forever. He's better than me."

"You're better than anyone."

"I'm better than anyone," Juno agreed, with a flicker of her old fire. "I'm just not better than the clock."

Vega gripped the wheel.

…

The Charger was dying, and she was driving it anyway.

Daisy had come through the chandelier with one windshield cracked from corner to corner, a headlight dangling by a wire, the front bumper gone, and a long ugly gash along the passenger side where a bullet had walked from fender to door. Steam rolled from the hood. The temperature gauge sat at the top of the dial, trembling. Somewhere beneath her feet a belt had begun to scream.

She had the pedal on the floor.

Beside her, in the passenger seat, Roman sat with his cane across his knees, perfectly upright, watching the Strip go by in smears of white and gold. He had said nothing since the atrium. His face was pale and set. His lips were moving, ever so slightly, as if he were counting. In the back, Silas sat squeezed against the door with a rifle across his knees and a field dressing on his arm, his gray eyes fixed on the rearview mirror.

"Sheriff," he said.

"I see them."

"Two. Three."

"Four," said Vega.

They had appeared at the Flamingo intersection: four black-and-white Interceptors, rolling out of a side street in perfect formation, lights blazing, sirens screaming, strung across the road in a rolling blockade. They had the look of men who had been told exactly where to be. The lead car carried a spotlight, and it swung round and bathed the Charger in white.

"This is the Clark County Sheriff's Department," said a loudspeaker. "Pull your vehicle over."

"That," said Silas, "is Rurik's sheriff."

"I know."

"We cannot stop."

"I know!" She stamped on the clutch. "Hold on to something."

"To what?"

"Anything!"

She wrenched the wheel.

The Charger hurled itself across three lanes of traffic and onto the sidewalk. People scattered like pigeons. A hot-dog cart went over. A man in a cowboy hat dropped his margarita and flattened himself against a wall, and the car went by him so close that the mirror knocked the hat off. She took the curb at fifty, the suspension crashing, the frame groaning, and flew down the pedestrian walk in a shower of sparks, past a Roman statue, past a fountain, past a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty who looked up from her phone and said, quite distinctly, "Oh, come on."

"They are following," said Silas.

"Of course they're following."

"I would suggest an alternate route."

"I've got one."

"Where?"

"Under."

…

She had found it on Tuesday night.

She'd been poring over the county flood maps, an old habit, looking for places where a car might disappear, when she'd noticed the thick blue line that ran the whole length of the Strip beneath it. The Flamingo Wash. A drainage channel, three miles long, built in the sixties after a flood had drowned half a casino. It ran in a concrete trench thirty feet wide, with a grate at each end, and in the dry season it was empty.

It was September. It was empty.

She spotted the entrance as she came off the walk: a gap in the guardrail, a rusted ramp, a sign that said *DANGER — FLOOD CHANNEL — NO ENTRY.* She put the nose of the Charger straight at it.

"Vega," said Roman, mildly.

"Yes?"

"There appears to be a wall."

"It's a grate."

"It appears to be a wall."

"It's a grate with a lock on it." She downshifted. "Hang on. Both of you. And whatever happens, don't—"

The grate came off its hinges like a screen door.

She had a half-second to see it fly, a flat black rectangle spinning end over end into the dark, and then the headlights swallowed the tunnel and the Charger dropped.

It was a ramp. It was a long steep concrete slope, slick with a century of dust, and the car went down it like a dropped stone. The roof whipped past with a foot to spare. The engine bellowed. The sirens behind her went suddenly thin and strange as the concrete closed over them, and for a moment there was nothing in the world but the flat white tunnel of the headlights and the roar of her own heart.

Then the floor leveled out.

The Flamingo Wash opened ahead of her, a long dry canyon of concrete under the Strip, black and echoing, forty feet wide at the bottom and as straight as a rifle barrel. Overhead the roadbed rumbled with traffic. Pools of orange light fell through grates at intervals, flicking over the car like the shutters of a camera.

She hit a hundred and thirty.

"Oh my God," whispered Juno, on the phone.

"Don't talk."

"I can hear you! I can hear the engine! Are you in a tunnel?"

"Yes."

"Is it the aqueduct? You found the aqueduct!"

"I found the aqueduct."

"I love you so much."

"Juno! The clock!"

"Right! Right! Seventy-one percent."

Behind them, the first of the Interceptors came down the ramp with a crash and a shriek of metal and a spray of sparks. Two more followed. She saw their lights in the mirror, a ghastly strobing blue, and the black shapes of the cars swaying and bucking on the rough concrete, trying to keep up.

They couldn't.

The Hellcat ate the tunnel. The walls blurred. The sirens fell behind. She shot under the Flamingo and the Tropicana and the huge white lip of the Mandalay, past a wide gray storm drain and a pair of startled maintenance men who flattened themselves against the wall with their hardhats clutched to their chests. She saw an arrow on the concrete. She saw an exit sign. She saw a long steep ramp up ahead, with a light at the end.

"This is us," said Vega.

"This is us," agreed Roman, and for the first time in an hour, he smiled.

…

The Little Chapel of the Silver Bell sat in the glow of its own neon, small and pink and absurd, with the plastic bride on the roof and the cupid fountain in the yard. The street was dark. The pawn shop beside it had its shutters down. The tattoo parlor was shut.

And in the lot behind the chapel, three white vans stood in a row, doors open, with a dozen men in gray boots fanned across the back of the building, aiming at a door that glowed bright orange at the center.

"Ten minutes," whispered Juno. "Four. I think. Maybe three."

"Stay where you are."

"I'm not moving. I'm under a table."

"Stay under it."

"I'm under it!"

"Silas," said Vega. "Back door. Twelve men. One lance."

"I count fourteen."

"Roman?"

He turned his head.

"What do you need?" he said.

It was such a simple question. It came out of him without thought, quite quietly, as one asks a colleague for the salt. She heard it, and felt it go through her, a bright small shock. She had no plan. She had a ruined car and a dying engine and a lance of orange fire and a girl under a table. She had two men beside her who would, she knew, go through hell on her word.

He asked, she thought. He didn't tell.

"A distraction," she said.

"How large?"

"Large. Loud. Something that makes them turn round."

"I see." The corner of his eye creased. "I believe I can supply that."

"How?"

"By standing in the road," said Roman, "and being annoying."

"Roman—"

"I have been told that I am very good at it." He opened the door. "Drive through the front, Vega. Through the drive-through. I will keep them looking at me."

She stared.

"The drive-through."

"You said it was a feature."

"I— That was Juno."

"It was a feature," said Roman, "and I have been waiting all day to see you use it."

He climbed out.

…

She never forgot what she saw next.

He walked to the middle of the road, slowly, with the cane in one hand, in the pool of light from the neon. He stood there in his torn charcoal suit with the blood on his cheek, tall and straight and perfectly composed, a man waiting for a taxi. He raised his free hand, and cupped it round his mouth, and called in a clear, carrying, perfectly pleasant baritone:

"Good evening, gentlemen."

They turned.

Fourteen heads, fourteen faces. A ripple of astonishment ran along the line. The lance, orange and spitting, wavered for a second at the door.

"I understand," said Roman, "that you are looking for me."

A man at the end of the line raised his rifle.

"I would not," said Roman. "I am extremely difficult to kill, and I have a very bad temper tonight. Also, you are about to be run over."

"What—"

Vega put the car in gear.

She went in through the front of the chapel.

It was a narrow tunnel, a white-painted arch beneath a sign that said *DRIVE-THROUGH WEDDINGS — SAY "I DO" WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR CAR*, with a speaker on a post and a little window with a bell. She hit it at sixty. The bell flew off its stand. The speaker exploded. A cardboard Elvis cut-out went over the hood and plastered itself across the windshield, grinning, with its arm raised in a salute.

She drove through it.

She drove through the arch and out the back, through a plywood wall, through a rack of plastic flowers, through the glass doors of the reception hall and up the aisle between the folding chairs, scattering white satin and silk lilies. The chairs went up in the air like startled doves. The altar went over. The red velvet curtain came down on the hood like a shroud.

And through the shattered back wall, in the glare of her one good headlight, she saw the lot, and the men, and the vans, and fourteen faces turning toward her with identical expressions of dumb horror.

"Surprise," said Vega.

She hit the gas.

The Charger came out of the back of the Little Chapel of the Silver Bell like a bullet from a barrel, trailing a banner of velvet and a cloud of plaster dust and a screaming Elvis, and took the first three Russians off their feet. The fourth went over the hood. The fifth hit the van. The sixth, who had the lance, threw himself sideways and dropped it, and the fierce orange needle swung round and slashed across the side of the third van, which burst into flames.

"Now!" she screamed.

Silas was out of the back door before the car stopped.

He went like a gray shadow, rifle snapping to his shoulder, firing in short controlled bursts. A man went down. Another. The Russians broke and scattered, firing as they ran, and the lot filled with the crack of gunfire and the stink of burning plastic.

Roman fired from the road.

She heard it. The flat, crisp bark of a pistol, steady as a metronome. Crack. Crack. Crack. Each shot placed with a mathematician's precision. He did not duck. He did not run. He stood in the middle of the street with his feet planted and the neon glowing on his shoulders and shot a man off the roof of a van, and then another off the bumper, and a third who had made the mistake of trying to flank him from behind a trash can.

I will not stand behind you, he had said in the dark. Over you. Let me.

She'd thought it a promise. She understood now that it was only the shape of what he was.

She hit the ground running.

…

The steel door was glowing.

It was the worst thing she'd ever seen. A square of orange light in the concrete, the metal softened and sagging, a line of white-hot slag running down the face like wax from a candle. Two inches of it left. Maybe less. The air in the little corridor shimmered with heat.

Vega went down the stairs three at a time.

"Juno!"

"I'm here!"

"The door—"

"I know, I know!" The voice came through the metal, thin and muffled. "It's the lance! It's nearly through! I can feel it on my teeth!"

"Move back!"

"I'm all the way back!"

"Further!"

"There's no further! There's a wall!"

She had a pistol. She had a fire extinguisher. She had a dim, mad, fleeting recollection of something she'd read about thermal lances, and the way that the metal went soft but not through, and what happened when you hit it with something cold.

She yanked the extinguisher off the wall.

She hit the door with a full blast of CO2.

The glowing square screamed. The steel contracted with a crack like a rifle shot. A shower of sparks leapt out of the seam, and a plume of white vapor, and the whole thing shuddered on its hinges. She hit it again. Again. Then she dropped the extinguisher and put her shoulder to the door, her whole weight, with her boots braced on the floor.

"Push!" she screamed.

"I'm pushing!"

"Harder!"

"I'm on the other side!"

It gave.

The door swung inward with a groan, and the heat rolled out of the vault in a wave, and Vega fell through it, onto the concrete, on her hands and knees, in a haze of smoke.

Juniper Park sat under a table in a lime-green cardigan with a laptop clutched to her chest and a grenade in each pocket, her glasses crooked, her face smeared with soot. She looked up. Her eyes were enormous.

"You came," she said.

"Of course I came."

"I knew you'd come."

"You said you were under a table."

"I am under a table." She dissolved into a sob, a hiccup, a giggle. "Oh my God. Oh my God. You drove through a chapel."

Vega hauled her out by the collar and hugged her so hard that a grenade fell out of her pocket.

"Careful!"

"It's not armed."

"How do you know?"

"I labeled them!"

The thing on the table gave a long, low, chirping beep.

They both looked.

The laptop sat on the table with a thin black cable running to a small silver drive. On its screen, a bar was creeping toward the right, thin and green and relentless. A number blinked beside it.

*97%.*

"Oh no," said Juno.

"What?"

"He's almost through. I was— I put the laptop down to— I didn't— Vee, he's going to get it." Her hands flew to the keys. "He's going to get the whole sky—"

"Can you stop him?"

"I can try—"

*98%.*

"Juno!"

"I'm trying!"

*99%.*

Vega didn't think. She grabbed the silver drive in her fist and wrenched it out of the port.

The screen went white.

A shriek tore out of the laptop speakers, a long electronic howl. The bar froze. The screen filled with rolling lines of code, red and green and yellow, a blizzard of glyphs, and then, one by one, they began to die. Lines winked out. Windows closed. The whole display collapsed inward, like a star going dark.

For a moment there was silence.

"You," said Juno faintly, "are insane."

"Did it work?"

"I think— I think you killed the connection. He's out. He's out." She stared at the screen. "You pulled the drive. The transfer was at ninety-nine. He had one percent left. He'd have had it in four seconds."

"I know."

"You didn't know."

"I had a feeling."

"You're going to give me a heart attack."

"That's the plan."

"No, but listen." Juno seized her sleeve. Her face had changed. The terror was gone, and in its place was something sharp and fierce and luminous, the look she wore at three in the morning when a lock finally opened. "Before it died. In the last second. When the connection snapped. I got a burst."

"A burst of what?"

"His side." She was typing, fast, with her tongue between her teeth. "The buffer. It dumped everything. All the files he was working with. All his notes. It's a mess, it's in Russian, I can barely read it, but there's a—" She stopped. Her fingers went still. "Vee."

"What?"

"There's a schematic."

"Of what?"

Juno turned the laptop.

On the screen was a diagram, a clean black-and-white plan in the unmistakable hand of a professional. It showed a building. Eighty-one floors. A gold tooth in the Las Vegas haze. And deep in the foundation, below the parking levels, below the freight docks, below everything, a small red circle, with a note in careful Cyrillic, and a number beside it.

*00:38:44.*

It was ticking.

"What is that?" whispered Vega.

"A timer."

"For what?"

"I don't read Russian," said Juno slowly, "but I know what that word means. Everybody does. It's on all the old movies."

She touched the screen.

"Bomb," she said.