Bones Omnibus (63 page)

With interest.

It was basically six days of extraordinarily high-end extortion and exploitation that left the attendees wealthy and those who the contracts were meant to help anything but.

Sharon worked for the foundation as a financial advisor to those responsible for not only maintaining but growing the endowment. Sharon’s primary interactions were with representatives of the Israeli government on one side and then a number of the world’s largest financial institutions on the other. A number of these institutions had majority stakes in the Boursa, Israel’s Tel Aviv–based stock exchange, which listed not only 600 some-odd companies, but also numerous government and corporate bonds, hundreds of mutual funds, and then an ever-fluctuating number of ETFs, or exchange-traded funds.

While the Boursa was hardly the world’s largest stock exchange, it was one of the fastest growing and had recently signed memoranda of understanding between it and the Shanghai Stock Exchange, as well as the London Stock Exchange. Those seeking to expand their wealth and influence on the Boursa were the exact type to be attracted to the Stephane Foundation’s annual conference, and it was Sharon’s job to make sure all interested parties not only were invited but were treated like royalty while in attendance.

Unfortunately, this year’s conference, held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, fell on the same weekend as the twin earthquakes, and the Boursa had all but crashed, losing investors hundreds of millions, destabilizing the Israeli Finance Ministry and the government at large, and creating a fiscal emergency that the world hadn’t seen since 9/11. For the sake of their nation’s economy, the Israeli commandos had been sent to rescue survivors and identify the dead in order that temporary reassignments of control of government finances could be made permanent and the deceased brought back to Israel for burial. To an outside observer, such a mission might seem mercenary and even cold, but with the world’s markets already trembling due to the destruction of its fifth largest economy, the city of Los Angeles, desperate measures were called for.

“Though the U.S. government cannot officially recognize the legitimacy of our mission, it has given us access to both satellite photos and heat detection intel from the initial military flyovers, which indicated there were a number of survivors still inside the hotel,” Paul explained to the team as they assembled Monday morning to go over the day’s plan. “Admittedly, that intel is now days old and reflects a pre–Second Quake reality. What we do know is that the Beverly Hilton, while not intact, did not receive the level of structural damage of a lot of the city’s other buildings, which suggests there may be survivors. But again, those survivors might not have stayed at that location. We are going in primarily to identify bodies if we can find them, extract survivors, and gather intel on the location of any that might have moved on. Additionally, we’re to recover and destroy anything confidential or otherwise potentially compromising to the Israeli mission at the conference. Are we all on the same page?”

Everyone was. Even though Arthur was semi-retired, he’d been a lawyer for decades, and whereas many might find a mission like this surprising, he understood from the get-go. His only problem with it, in fact, had been when he learned that Sharon’s rescue had little to do with her, but more her convenient ability to identify all the players, living or dead, they might encounter in the hotel.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” he had asked her. “What if the building comes down around you?”

“If it wasn’t for my position, those mercenaries wouldn’t have picked me up, and these commandos wouldn’t have saved me from the rats,” Sharon had replied. “I’m not above singing for my supper.”

An eight-man team led by Paul would go in with Sharon and Bones, while a two-man team would stay outside with the vehicle, where Arthur would be sequestered. Arthur had tried to stay out of the commandos’ way, but Paul seemed to bristle every time he saw the older man.

One more mouth to feed, one more potential liability if a fast escape was called for.

For his part, Bones had been mostly ignored. One of the youngest commandos, a man named Nashon Sahar, had fed and provided water for the shepherd and that, coupled with the apricots from Sharon, had the dog feeling better than he had in days. He was also glad to be away from the mercenaries and back in the field. He recognized and felt comfortable with the martial attitudes of the soldiers around him, though he didn’t know what would be required of him by the men.

When everyone had struck their campsites and loaded up their gear, Paul walked out of cover and onto Santa Monica Boulevard, taking the morning’s temperature. When he felt he had a good sense of it, he turned back to the men and nodded.

“Let’s move out.”

The two trucks were empty except for their drivers and the civilians, Sharon in the lead vehicle, Arthur in the rear. The commandos crept alongside the trucks as they slowly made their way down Santa Monica into Beverly Hills. They passed beautiful but decimated houses on the right and brutalized office buildings as they went. A long stretch of twisted chain-link fence looked less like it had been in an earthquake and more a tornado, as it had been wound in on itself to the point that it had gouged great holes in the ground around it.

The commando team kept moving, passing the intersection with Beverly and then coming to a relatively undamaged stretch of road that probably survived solely because both buildings and trees had been pulled back far enough away from the street to leave it unaffected. They soon reached a sign that announced the Beverly Hills Police Department on their left, but they could see nothing of it. The police headquarters, the library, and the courthouse had not only been flattened, they’d also crumbled down into the multi-level parking garage below, leaving little trace.

“That it?” asked Nashon, who was on point.

Paul looked up ahead and saw the Beverly Hilton rising on the right, obscured only by the bell tower of an Episcopal church that had somehow managed to say upright. From that distance, the Hilton looked as if it had suffered a bomb blast that had shattered all its windows and generally made a mess of things, but it also looked relatively intact.

The Hilton was actually a series of buildings that included the main hotel, a ten-story, V-shaped building that contained 570 rooms, but also two additional buildings that housed innumerable ballrooms and conference rooms that extended out from the main structure, bordering on either side a long, U-shaped driveway/turnaround that could accommodate the countless limos and town cars of the hotel’s most famous annual event, the Golden Globes.

Unlike the sheer devastation seen elsewhere in Beverly Hills, the miraculous sight of the still intact Beverly Hilton would give anyone reason enough to believe that someone inside during the quake may well have survived.

As they reached the hotel, Paul switched from speaking seldom to hand signals only. He signaled for the two trucks to stop at the mouth of the driveway but still out of sight from anyone passing on Santa Monica.

In Nashon’s care at the end of a makeshift leash, Bones watched as Paul went first down the Hilton’s driveway, his eyes everywhere at once, looking for movement. The team leader looked like a gunfighter in a movie stepping through a quiet Old West town he felt sure was teeming with the enemy on both sides. He walked with his hands wrapped tightly around the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, swinging it in different directions as if hoping any would-be sniper might flinch and give away his position if finding himself on the wrong end of a gun barrel.

There were actually a handful of bodies lying around the driveway, which only added urgency to Paul’s caution, but when he got closer to them he could see that they’d died of severe trauma, likely after falling or jumping from the windows above. Disturbed by the sight, Paul moved on and tried to shake the images from his head.

Through all of this, Bones remained completely still. He understood what was required of him and maintained his rigid composure.

It was about a hundred yards from the mouth of the driveway to the hotel entrance, ground Paul covered in a little more than a minute. The hotel lobby appeared open air until one realized that all the glass had been blown out, and the flapping curtains and splintered marble weren’t simply evidence of a crazy architect’s mad aesthetic. Paul peered into the dark recesses of the building for a moment, but then turned back to his men and nodded.

“Let’s go,” Nashon whispered to Bones.

The commandos, Sharon, and the shepherd now moved down the driveway to join Paul. They were just as careful as their team leader, knowing that some ambushes simply hold their fire until the point man has passed, but no attack came. As the soldiers’ boots crunched down on the broken glass of hundreds of different windows, Bones stepped lightly to avoid getting shards in his pads. For his part, Nashon couldn’t help but stare up into the wall of potential snipers’ nests above them, all empty hotel rooms, all with wind-carried curtains to mask the movements of a rifleman.

After they reached the hotel’s entrance without incident, Nashon and the others could immediately see that visibility would be spotty at best. There was some breakage that allowed light in here and there, but the group could see that large chunks of the ceiling and walls had crashed down, smashing through the floor into whatever was underneath, which would make for treacherous going. It would be impossible to tell how stable the ground beneath their feet would be.

Paul turned and nodded to Nashon.

“Let the dog go.”

“Just like that? What if he wanders away?”

“This is his job. If he wanders away, then he’s no use to us anyway.”

Nashon nodded and unchained Bones. The shepherd looked up at Paul.

“Do your thing,” said the team leader.

Bones looked inside the building and knew what was expected of him. Taking a couple of tentative steps forward, pieces of glass still crunching under his paws, Bones entered the hotel, his head low and back stiff as he kept a suspicious eye on the ceiling. He kept moving, seeing and smelling no sign of life. When he was about fifty feet into the lobby, Paul nodded to the others and they began to follow.

Bones’s eyes were the weakest part of him. It wasn’t the fact that he was in his eighth year and they were hardly as sharp as they’d once been, but more that his nose and ears were just that much better. This meant that he’d learned to over-rely on them, so the darkness of the hotel did little to halt his advance. He listened as he stepped and, more importantly, continued to inhale the cornucopia of scents wafting through the lobby.

The floor had been marble but was now jagged and broken due to the falling ceiling. Bones stayed away from the holes, as the floor was more unstable around the cracks, even though it was through them that the smells of the dead wafted up. Bones could tell that despite the building having survived mostly intact, there were still several corpses both in the floors above but also below.

Amidst all this and combed through with the now-familiar stench of pulverized concrete and rotting food, Bones could also detect the scent of the living, and there almost as many of them throughout the building as there were dead. However, they weren’t making their presences known yet.

“If he’s anything like the dogs we used in Gaza,” one of the commandos, a man named Zamarin, began, “he’s going to be responding to the living first, then the dead. Not sure why it works that way, but it seems to be how they’re trained.”

Bones didn’t hear this, having turned his attention to a broken door leading to fire stairs. He poked his head in, took a couple of deep sniffs, and proceeded inside. The stairwell was completely intact, with no real sign of earthquake damage on the first couple of floors, so Bones ascended the steps with ease, only vaguely aware that he was doing so in abject darkness.

“Lights,” Paul said, turning on the rail-mounted tactical light attached to his MP5. The other commandos did the same, except for the weaponless Sharon. She looked at the stairs but then back at Paul, a querulous expression on her face.

“What is it?”

“If the stairs are so easily accessible, why would anyone still be up there? Don’t you think the fear of a second quake would empty the place?”

“If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t underestimate the stupidity of people under duress,” Paul replied before turning to head the steps. “We’d need to sweep these rooms anyway, and no one’s coming out of the woodwork to welcome us, so wherever they are, we’re going to them.”

Bones kept moving until he’d reached the eighth floor. He smelled living things on the other side of the door but also a heavy acrid stench like phosphorus or nitrogen. Bones tried to get through the door, but it was shut tight, and he had to wait for the humans.

“The dog has stopped on eight,” Zamarin, currently in the point position, called back down to the team. Paul and the other commandos hurried up the steps as Bones whined at the closed door.

“Pull him back,” Paul ordered Nashon, who quickly took Bones’s leash and moved him away.

“Breaching in five…four…three…,” said Paul, going silent for the last two, then swinging the door open for Zamarin to head in first.

“Oh, God…!” were the first words out of Zamarin’s mouth, words that were followed by a torrent of vomit, the entire contents of his stomach.

Hearing this, Paul nodded to Nashon. “Send in the dog.”

Nashon released Bones, and he bounded up the steps and out onto the eighth floor. Actually, it was now the eighth and ninth floors of the hotel, as the ninth had collapsed down a level, giving the floor the feel of a cavernous rooftop atrium with two-story walls and windows. The outer walls had held so the framing was still in place. It just seemed the ninth floor had buckled and spilled everything out onto the eighth.

But that wasn’t what made Zamarin lose his breakfast.

There were at least four or five dozen human corpses on the level, likely hotel guests from both the eighth and ninth floors who had been killed in the initial quake, but the corpses were in no way “intact.” In fact, it was as if the bodies had been hooked onto the back of a vehicle and dragged around for a few days, allowing them to slowly be torn apart over time, the entrails consumed, and nothing but desiccated skin and muscle tissue left behind on scattered bones. In addition to the human bodies, there were also amongst them the torn and ragged corpses of around a thousand rats.