Black Scorpion (3 page)

Barely an hour before, she'd managed to escape her captors here—the brutal, foul-smelling men to whom Manda had been turned over. Her last memory of freedom was a champagne toast with the dashing playboy she'd met while performing at the Seven Sins Resort's
Cirque du Soleil
show called Elysium on the Las Vegas Strip. She'd been putting her gymnastic abilities to great use, was actually hanging upside down the first time she spotted him staring and smiling at her from his front row seat. He was there again at the following night's show after which there was a note from him waiting in her dressing room.

He claimed to be from Russia and swept Manda off her feet. The best restaurants, shopping, front row seats at the biggest shows in town. One glorious week later, she put in for her vacation time in order to take a surprise trip he'd planned for them. She remembered toasting their trip with champagne aboard his private jet, vaguely recalled the flute slipping from her hand.

Manda awakened some indistinguishable time later in a windowless suite fit for a queen where a man she bore only vague memories of took her repeatedly. The suite had a view facing a sea, rich with pounding waves, she didn't recognize. During the day she'd listen to those waves and whatever sounds she could hear in search of clues for where she was. She knew they must have continued to drug her, and yet what little she recalled of the man himself was that he always took her by force, brutally from behind so she wouldn't be able to see his face. And the few glimpses she caught revealed a figure shrouded in darkness everywhere.

“What do you want from me?” Manda had wailed him at one point, finally finding her voice.

The man started away from her and kept walking, didn't even give her the courtesy of looking back before he shut the door behind him, leaving her to the darkness.

That very morning, following the first night in many the man didn't visit her, she managed to hold a noxiously sweet drink in her mouth long enough to spit it out without any of her captors noticing. They packed her into the back of a windowless van where she pretended to be as dazed as the preceding days that had stretched into weeks. And when the van door was thrust open, she burst out and bolted. Manda had barely stopped since fleeing an area close enough to the city's docks to smell the salty sea air.

Now that air was rich instead with the scents rising from the handbags, jackets, belts, and satchels that cluttered the scene. She slid through thin smoke wafting off grills that featured cooked meats, fish, and chicken, some already skewered and roasting on kabob spits. Antiques were featured among the quaint shops as well, along with all manner of jewelry, embroidered artwork, and flatware fashioned by coppersmiths who practiced their craft just as it had been done centuries before in old-fashioned fire-baked kilns.

Manda cocked a gaze to the rear again, conscious of any ripples in the crowd that might indicate the men after her were closing. No sign yet, but she couldn't let herself expect them to give themselves away.

“American Embassy,” she said to a few passersby who looked friendly. “Can you tell me where I can find the American Embassy?”

A local man who spoke English finally noted her efforts and approached from the other side of the street.

“Atatürk Boulevard,” he said, indicating the direction in which the embassy was located.

It turned out to be in another section of the city entirely, adding to her desperation made even worse by the need to constantly check around her on the chance she'd been followed or spotted. With no money for a cab, no money at all, Manda's best hope of reaching the embassy was the subway, where she could either sneak on or appeal to the mercy of another friendly stranger. Having no mastery or even familiarity with the language, she didn't dare try for a police station or even approach an officer if she spotted one. A few cruised by in boxy sedans with lights on top, and Manda resisted her initial instinct to flag one down.

The stranger who'd finally helped her also pointed her in the direction of the nearest station for the Ankara subway, known as the Ankaray. It was located not far from this ring of old shops, just up the road from a gate before which rested rolling carts selling figs, dried fruits, and spices, their fresh scents already replacing those of grilling meats and leather goods she'd left behind her.

Manda stopped, swung to check the street again.

Still nothing.

She picked up her pace slightly, passing through the assemblage of rolling pushcarts and stationary kiosks. The Ankaray stop seemed so far away, but then it was upon her, and Manda descended into the cool darkness down stone stairs toward the platform below. Clinging to the hope she had made it, believing her escape to be all but complete with the rest just a formality.

Almost to the bottom, though, she saw the gate was chained shut, the station beyond unexpectedly closed.

Manda rattled the chain and kicked at the fence in frustration, feeling trapped again, frightened that all the efforts that had led to escape from her own de facto prison had gone for naught. But she wasn't about to give up after coming so far, with so much at stake. Instead, she swung to remount the stairs and find an alternate route to the U.S. Embassy.

And saw a dark figure looming at the top, staring down at her.

Manda felt her insides gnarl and knot up. She tried to swallow but couldn't find enough breath to manage the effort. She was left with nothing, no way to leave even a signal of the truth, of what the world needed to hear, to know.

Unless …

Above her, the dark figure started down the stairs, his heavy boots clacking against the concrete. Manda needed a way, any way, to leave some hint, some clue that could alert someone to her plight, her identity. As the large figure dipped into the shadows, she tore the gold pendant—her lucky charm—from its chain. She had to do anything she could to prevent others from ending up as she had. With any luck, it would be enough to help catch the men behind this.

Manda stole one last look at the beautiful raised design finely emblazoned onto a subtle ridge in the pendant's center. Then she slipped it onto her tongue and found the breath she needed to swallow hard enough to push it down. The pendant scratched at her throat, almost forcing her to gag, but she resisted the reflex long enough for it to slide on and imagined she could feel the pendant plop into her stomach as the figure reached the bottom.

A sliver of sunlight revealed him, thankfully, to be a policeman. Dressed in a navy blue uniform, he eyed her coldly, suspiciously. Probably thought she was a prostitute about to turn a trick.

Manda was reaching out to touch the officer's shoulder, ready to plead with him in English, when he rammed a knife into her gut, twisting first to the side and then up. Amanda felt herself crumpling, felt her insides spilling. She was almost dead by the time she hit the cold concrete, lying at the police officer's feet. The last thing she felt was him ruffling through her pockets to make sure there was nothing on her person that might give away her identity.

Manda pictured the pendant she'd swallowed sitting in her stomach in the final moment before her eyes locked open.

 

P
ART
T
WO

NOW

 

I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.

Alexander the Great

 

FIVE

L
AS
V
EGAS,
N
EVADA

“If you could all come forward,” began the auctioneer from beneath the covered porch, “we'll begin. I see a lot of familiar faces and the handout describes the procedure,” he added, clearly impatient to get to his next location, “so I'm going to assume there are no questions. The starting bid is ten thousand dollars.”

A bevy of hands, from virtually all of those gathered, shot up in the air, drawing catcalls from the protestors clustered on the sidewalk. All victims of the spate of foreclosures that had descended upon Las Vegas the last five years, a process further slowed by a severe backlog in the courts. A few of those protests at auctions like these had turned violent recently, leading to a police presence at all of them.

“Do I hear twenty thousand?” the auctioneer, a tall, thin man with dyed black hair matted to his scalp, continued.

A Hispanic couple stood off to the side. The man looking stiff and angry, his expression bent in a bitter scowl, seeming not to feel his wife pressed close against him fighting back tears.

The hands of about half those gathered before the modest sixteen-hundred-square-foot home on Pinecliff Drive eased upward. The home was well maintained but lacked landscaping atop its tiny yard. No garage, but there was a paved driveway where an overhang used to be until the owners removed it to make room for a basketball hoop for their sons. They'd bought at the peak of the housing boom, exceeding their means to make sure each of their boys had a bedroom to himself in a decent neighborhood, something they saw as crucial to the American Dream to which they were committed. They'd emigrated from Guatemala legally, became citizens, and found jobs in the hospitality industry that allowed them to make ends meet.

But only just.

So when the recession cost Imelda Marquez her job and her husband Juan his overtime, the struggles began. They cut back, found a way to survive until Juan was laid off, too. Odd jobs only carried so far and after countless rounds with the bank, loan modification specialists, and anyone else who'd speak to them, foreclosure had proven impossible to forestall and the auction had been scheduled for today.

“Do I hear sixty-five thousand?” the auctioneer announced, after checking his watch.

More of the crowd had peeled away at each ten thousand dollar increment until at sixty-five thousand only two active bidders remained. A pair of men sweating in their suits who represented a real estate investment trust, and a woman wearing a stylish Nicole Miller linen pants suit with white blouse and vest. The woman's dark Dior sunglasses covered part of her brow beneath a bird's nest of thick black hair and makeup so perfectly applied as to seem part of her skin. The woman stood with her back to the men from the trust that operated under several names to avoid scrutiny from local consumer groups and the kind of bad publicity its practices attracted. They had shaken their heads, faces wrinkling in displeasure when she strode onto the scene like it was some kind of red carpet event, paying them no heed whatsoever.

“Eighty thousand,” the woman called out before the auctioneer could continue, turning toward the men representing the real estate trust for the first time. “We both know you're not authorized to go above seventy-five, so let's cut to the chase. See you soon.”

“How many times does your boss plan on doing this?” one of them asked, brushing past her.

“As many times as you.”

*   *   *

Once she'd initialed the preliminary paperwork and handed over a cashier's check in the amount of twenty thousand dollars, the woman walked right past the protestors, ignoring their heckles and taunts. She rounded the corner and veered toward a Lamborghini idling beneath the only trees on the street thick enough to offer any shade.

Naomi Burns made straight for the passenger side door and climbed inside the Tyrant Class model soon to go into production worldwide, already stripping off her wig.

“Another for your collection, Michael,” she said to the man in the air-conditioned cool of the driver's seat, listening to the deceptively quiet purr of its V-12, seven hundred horsepower engine.

“You're getting very good at this, Naomi,” Michael Tiranno said, grinning.

The economic downturn had hit Las Vegas especially hard, but he took great pride in the fact that he hadn't laid off a single worker at his Seven Sins Resort and Casino, not one. The accountants had been fond of telling him how much he was losing as a result. He countered by telling them how much he'd gain in the long run and, true to his prophecy, the Seven Sins was now the highest grossing property on the Strip. Everyone wanted to know how he'd managed it, against all odds, coming out of the worst economic times imaginable.

“Vision,” Michael told them, not bothering to add how he thrived on adversity, able to win a hand against even a stacked deck.

“How much this time?” he asked Naomi, now CEO of King Midas World, parent company of the Seven Sins and all his gaming interests.

“Eighty thousand.”

“A worthwhile investment.”

“That's what you always say.”

“Some things you can't put a price tag on.”

“Does that include all forty-two homes you've purchased at auction?”

“It includes the forty-two families that still have a place to live,” Michael reminded her, “forty-three now.”

“One might say being a knight in Armani armor is bad for business.”

“God works in mysterious ways and so do I,” Michael said, smiling.

“Well, one might also say it's interesting that all the neighborhoods you're buying up are zoned for commercial as well as residential.”

“It always pays to hedge our bets. You never know, Naomi.” Michael threw open the Lamborghini's door and started to climb out. “Be right back.”

“Better hurry, Michael,” she said back to him, checking her Tyrant Class Samsung Note. “The press is already swarming back at the Seven Sins.”

“That's right. The fight's tonight. I just remembered.”

“I was hoping you'd forget,” Naomi told him.

*   *   *

The protesters were already dispersing when Michael rounded the corner and headed toward an ancient pickup truck painted with dust, its cargo bed overflowing with the displaced family's possessions. A stubborn wheel kept spinning on a child's bicycle wedged over one side, and the rest of the contents had been hastily tied down by what looked like a clothesline straining to hold it all in place.