One-Eyed Jack (24 page)

Doc’s coughing made him easy to keep track of, if you were one of the ones who could hear him. It was a little creepy to look over and see him sitting
inside
the widow, though, especially when she was as oblivious to his presence as if he didn’t exist.

Which, I suppose some would argue, he didn’t

Anyway, Stewart drove, and Doc navigated, and the rest of us crammed in however we could, and it wasn’t long before we figured out we were headed for one of two places; Boulder City, or Hoover Dam—there aren’t a lot of way stations south and east of Vegas—and my money was on Hoover. A sucker bet, and if anybody had been willing to take it, I would have collected.

We drove across the dam to Arizona and then back to Nevada, just to make Doc and John Henry sure. Both of them agreed; they could feel the American and the athlete, and they were a little closer to the Nevada than to the Arizona side of Hoover Dam . . . and more or less straight down. The spies were awfully quiet. Especially the Englishman. Although the Russian did comment that he wasn’t sure whether he was anticipating the opportunity to test his demolitions expertise on Hoover, or dreading it.

Fortunately, not while we were anywhere near the checkpoint.

“Well, it will be tricky,” Stewart said, after we’d pulled into the parking lot of the Hacienda Hotel and Casino, a little south of Boulder City along US 93. The hotel and its environs crouched in a little clearing chiseled out of the canyon wall like a cavity in a tooth. The Russian wanted to know if it was the same company as used to run the Strip’s Hacienda. He got very testy when I had to admit I didn’t know. Maybe he just missed his partner, and was taking his worry out on the surroundings. Fucked if I know, but it did make me wonder if Stewart and I were that annoying about each other. I shot him a look to see what he thought, and cracked up hard when I caught him looking back, at just that second.

All right. Maybe only half as annoying.

The Russian got us checked in—or, actually, he got himself and the widow checked in, and they smuggled the rest of us in with their card keys—and we went upstairs to hole up and wait for nightfall. Because nighttime, of course, is just when you want to try to sneak into a government facility that’s under military guard because of fears of terrorism.

But this was all in a day’s work for the spies, right?

Right.

That’s what I was worried about too.

The American in the Wrong Place at the Right Time.

Somewhere inside Hoover Dam. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

The American woke slumped against a wall, sitting. He had a headache and his hands were cuffed over his head, which made it—all things considered—a reasonably typical day. He was in an echoing room that smelled of damp concrete, which also wasn’t too unusual, and there was a knee pressed up against his thigh.

That struck him as a bad sign, because the last thing he recalled was a shattering window, and the athlete diving for cover. He cracked one eye, saw the athlete drooping like so much dirty laundry, and sighed. It took a certain amount of effort not to mouth the words along with Angel when she spoke . . . from a safe distance, of course. “So good of you to join us.”

“Not at all. I can’t think how I would have refused.”

His neck ached horribly, the best clue so far as to how long he’d been out. Six or eight hours at least, he estimated, which was bad, because it meant at least another fourteen hours before Tribute would be able to follow their scent to wherever they’d been taken. A lot could happen in fourteen hours.

On the other hand, his partner wouldn’t quit looking for him, and neither would the athlete’s.

Angel smiled coldly, right on cue as she swam into focus. She wasn’t alone. They never were, when it would be convenient, and the American didn’t bother trying to charm her. He didn’t think that it would work this time. Instead, he turned his attention on the assassin who stood beside her, narrow-eyed and thoughtful, and enjoyed Angel’s wrath that she wasn’t his focus.

“Here to eat me?” the American asked, raising an eyebrow, forcing himself to move as if he wasn’t in pain. He nudged the athlete’s knee hard as he straightened his legs in front of him, and had to assume that the assassin noticed.

“Unfortunately,” the assassin said, “that particular culinary adventure will have to wait. Unless you’d care to tell me where you left your partner.”

“It would be out of character,” the American admitted.

“So is fighting on the wrong side,” the assassin said. He glanced at the athlete and then at Angel; his eyes met the genius’s, and she nodded and turned away. The American tracked her until she ducked down an open corridor. He wished he found the lack of a cell door more reassuring.

“Self-defense is the wrong side?” He thought he caught a change in the athlete’s breathing, but couldn’t be sure. He stretched against his chains, easing his shoulder and incidentally jostling the athlete’s elbow. Yes, a definite catch in his breathing.

It would have to do.

“You know,” the assassin said, coming a few steps closer, “it would be out of character for me to pick the wrong side, too. I’m not one of the bad guys.”

“You’re not one of the good guys either,” the American said, as the assassin crouched by his feet—just out of range, if he slid down to the limit of his chains and kicked.

“I supposed that depends how you define the good guys.” He checked his watch, dark hair brushing his eyebrows.

“Seems like if the whole world is on the other side, it might be time to ask yourself if you picked the right horse.” The American didn’t lunge, for all the temptation. He pressed his back and his skull against the concrete and stretched, a loud click announcing the realignment of his neck.

“Alternately, didn’t someone once argue that if a thousand people said one thing and he said another, it was a thousand to one that he was right?” A slow grin creased the assassin’s face around his scar.

The American decided he hated the assassin’s tailor, too. “Someone even more arrogant than me?” he said.

“I think your partner’s rubbing off on you. He’s got you pretty well fooled, doesn’t he? How does it feel to be in bed with the Soviets, comrade?”

“You know,” the American answered, smiling sweetly, “I hear a rumor there are no Soviets any more. And I’d rather deal with a loyal enemy than a down-home traitor, any day.”

It would have worked, in the movies. But the assassin knew that as well as he did, and just stood up and stepped back, smoothing and buttoning his coat. “He’s told you about Dallas, then?” Smooth, testing, voice like the flicker of a snake’s tongue testing the air.

The American tried to keep his expression calm, superior, but the cool words rocked him. And the flicker of the assassin’s smile told him the assassin knew. “Funny guy. Why don’t
you
tell me about Dallas, and I’ll see how the versions mesh up?”

The assassin shook his head and clicked his tongue sadly. “Pity you’re so credulous. Get taken that way a lot, do you? Why don’t you tell me where to find him, and if I manage to bring him in alive, you can listen to his answers yourself?”

“Because you’re noted for bringing them in alive.”

“I believe you Yanks would say, ‘takes one to know one?’” The assassin gave him a wry shrug. “Ah, well. I tried.”

“And a very nice try it was.” The American knew how to get an awful lot of condescension into his voice when needed. “Now?”

“Now,” the assassin said, squaring his shoulders before he headed for the same passageway that had taken Angel away, “we wait. Or rather, you wait, and I go have dinner.”

His footsteps clicked away on concrete. When the echoes had died, the athlete raised his head stiffly, turned to the American, and said, sotto voce, “So. Tell me about Dallas. Do.”

The Russian, Underground.

Somewhere in Boulder City. Summer, 2002.

Somebody had to come up with a plan, and swiftly. Before the assassin took care of the athlete, and came looking for the rest of them. There was no guarantee that even a simple plan would work, but the Russian had always liked machinery. Which is why he knew about the hardhat tours of Hoover Dam—“Simple,” he told the other spies, Jackie, and Stewart. “We go on the tour, we slip away, and we find my partner and if we’re lucky, and we get out. We regroup here, and if we haven’t managed to take the assassin or Angel, we figure out what we do next.”

“That’d be okay,” Jackie said, crossing his arms, “if they hadn’t stopped doing the dam tours after nine-eleven. And what about Tribute?”

The Russian blinked. “What’s nine-eleven?”

“Nevermind. It’d take too long to explain.” Stewart stepped in, all efficiency, one hand on Jackie’s shoulder. Jackie leaned against the touch. “If they’ve got Tribute at the dam, we grab him. But he might be dead—”

The Englishman cleared his throat.

“—more dead. Or they might have him chained up in a bathtub somewhere drinking blood from a coffee mug, for all I know. If he’s not working with them after all.”

“Based on his behavior,” the Englishman offered, with a glance at the widow, “that is to say, based on what I’ve heard about his actions, I’m not sure what double game he could be playing that would benefit him.”

“Agree,” Jackie said. “So how do we get inside the dam? There’s just the elevators and emergency stairs.”

The Russian folded his arm and watched. This was where he preferred to be; a step back from the discussion.

“We do as my Russian friend says,” the widow said, kicking one foot up as she perched against the windowsill.

“No tours,” Jackie started, but the Englishman cut him off.

“There are tours in 1964.”

Jackie’s eyes opened a little wider, and he glanced from the widow to the Englishman for confirmation, and then at a space in the air that might have been John Henry or Doc. The Russian smiled at being so swiftly forgotten; he was accustomed to it. “Can you get us
all
back there?”

The Englishman straightened the carnation in his lapel, and the Russian thought he saw the echo of his own grief and unease in the gesture. One dead, three captured. No guarantees they’d be able to do anything to fix it. “We can’t know until we try.”

“Doc says he and John Henry can get down inside the dam ahead of us,” Jackie said. He did look right at the Russian this time. “They can just kind of walk through it, and find the American and the athlete, and then come fetch the rest of us.”

“Easy as pie,” the Englishman said, and set his hat on his head. “Well, if we’re going to 1964, we don’t need to wait for dark after all, do we?”

The Russian nodded. The widow stepped forward, extending her hand. He was about to concentrate when Stewart grabbed his elbow. “Let’s wait until we get to the dam, shall we?”

“Of course,” the Russian said, embarrassed. “In 1964, we don’t have a car.”

“That,” Stewart said, “and we’re on the seventh floor.”

The American, On Dying with Style.

Hoover Dam. Summer, 2002.

“They’re taking their own sweet time about getting here,” the American said, some hours after they awoke. The athlete snickered, and kept working on his manacles with a bent bit of wire extracted from the American’s shirt cuff.

“They’ll be along,” the athlete answered over his soft, rhythmic raking at the lock. “Yours
and
mine. Have a little faith, mi amigo.”

“Trust in God, but keep your powder dry,” the American answered. He stretched against the chains, trying to keep his shoulders limber. They felt like somebody had cast them in hot lead and left it there to harden, despite everything he could do, and he had a great deal of respect for the athlete’s continued determination as he manipulated the wire with fingertips that had to be numb, or prickling with pins and needles if they weren’t.

Tribute started singing again, and the American couldn’t hear the pick raking the lock any more. He edged his elbow sideways, to give the athlete something to brace against.

“Hah,” the athlete said, a few moments later. The American felt the click as the athlete’s manacle slid open. “Tah dah.” And then the athlete groaned between his teeth, a heartfelt sound of agony as he brought his arm down. He flopped his hand in his lap. “It’s like meat, except I can feel my fingers, and wish I couldn’t.”

“One down.” the American breathed deeply, “three to go.”

“Oh, you expect me to rescue you too?” The athlete wiggled his fingers, wincing.

“Funny guy.”

The second lock went faster, and the sound the athlete made when the cuff opened was a little sharper. The American guessed the arm with which the athlete had initially been working wasn’t as numb, and hurt him more when the blood started flowing back into it. The American could imagine the sensation of heat like a scald, the sharpness like needles thrust into the skin. He winced in sympathy, but the athlete didn’t let it hinder him.

He pushed himself to his feet, the wire pinched between fingers flushed with returning circulation, and reached for the American’s manacles. “We’ll have you out in a jiffy—”

Of course he would. The American grinned back, and turned his attention back to the corridor. As long as the athlete’s attention was distracted, the least the American could do was watch their backs.

Which is why he saw the shadow moving in the corridor in time to warn the athlete someone was coming. “Hey,” he whispered, and jerked his chin that way. The athlete looked up, slipped the wire into the American’s hand, and slunk quickly across the close little room with its oppressive cement ceiling. He flattened himself beside the door, poised as a panther on a branch, and the American went to work on his own manacles. The wire was stiff and somewhat springy, long enough to give him good leverage against the tumblers as he raked. The manacles weren’t easy, though; the lock was complex enough to make him frown in concentration, and the numb ache in his hands didn’t help. Especially as he wasn’t looking at his hand, but keeping his eyes front, trained on the corridor, as Tribute, somewhere down the hall in the other direction, started singing “Fever.”