Bad Monkeys (22 page)

“Once I’m on board,” I said. “And what’s my job going to be? Phil’s assistant? His number two?”

“More like his number three.” She grinned. “Now come on, let’s get you cleaned up. You’ve still got J.D.’s blood all over you.”

Two hours later I was back in the sports car’s passenger seat, wearing a fresh set of clothes. Coming up on the west side of the Strip was the black pyramid of the Luxor, its glass tip shooting a beam of light half a mile into the sky.

My evil twin was giving me some last-minute instructions. “Put these on,” she said, handing me an amazingly ugly pair of cat’s-eye glasses. “There’s a built-in comm unit, and it also transmits video, so I’ll be able to keep tabs on you.” Noticing my expression, she added: “I know it’s a fashion felony, but that’s part of the point. It’ll help disguise you if you bump into any Clowns on the way to Love’s table.”

“What about Eyes Only?” I said. “Doesn’t Panopticon have face-recognition software that can pick me out, even disguised?”

“Yeah, and that software is
so
reliable…Don’t worry, we’ve got it covered. The lenses are specially treated so you can see Eyes Only sensors. Go ahead, try it.”

I put on the glasses and looked out. Above us, a billboard showed a line of half-naked showgirls, and my attention was drawn instantly to the girl with the biggest boobs. Her eyes were glowing.

“Of course,” the bad Jane continued, “spotting them is only half the battle. This car’s shielded against Eyes Only surveillance, but outside, you’ll need this.” She passed me an expensive-looking wristwatch. “State-of-the-art jamming device. It’ll shut down every Eye within line of sight.”

I read the brand name on the watch face: “Mandrill.”

“Yeah.” She shrugged apologetically. “I don’t want to be untrusting, but I figure there’s still an outside chance that you and Love are running some kind of elaborate counterscheme here. So along with the jammer, there’s a destruct mechanism that lets me vaporize you by remote control if I get a bad vibe.” Her right arm came up, and I was staring into the muzzle of my own NC gun. “Put it on.”

I slipped the watchband around my wrist. The clasp emitted a faint beep as I snapped it closed, and I didn’t need to be told that trying to undo it without permission would be fatal.

“Good girl,” the bad Jane said. She put my NC gun on safety and dropped it in my lap. “Here we go…”

Two bright-eyed statues of the Egyptian god Horus guarded the entrance to the Luxor casino. As I stepped from the car, the light in their pupils dimmed and went out. The next test was waiting just inside the casino doors: a pair of real security guards. When one of them looked straight at me I thought I was busted, but the guy just yawned and turned away.

“You see?”
the bad Jane said, a voice in my ear.
“It’s like you’re invisible…Walk straight ahead, now. The high-stakes room is at the center of the casino floor.”

I passed between rows of blackjack tables, a wave of
darkness preceding me as my Troop watch turned every king, queen, and one-eyed jack blind. Next came bank after bank of slot machines. Here the effect was more subtle: even with their Eyes Only devices jammed, the slots had lights to spare.

The entrance to the high-stakes room was a sliding door of frosted glass. The door was triggered by a motion sensor, but my watch seemed to have jammed it, too.

“Problem,” I said.

“Don’t worry. I’m patched into the electrical system. Before I open the door I need you to pay attention. Love’s dressed in a tuxedo. He’s sitting at a table with two women; they’re his bodyguards. There’s also a dealer at the table, a pit boss off to the right, and a couple other dealers cooling their heels at the back of the room. Any of them might be bodyguards, too.”

“So I need to shoot six people in, what, three seconds?”

“Two seconds if you can manage it. And
don’t
hit Love—even if he were light enough to carry, you aren’t that invisible. Can you handle this?”

“Let’s find out,” I said. “Open the door.”

The door slid aside. I stepped forward, raised my gun, and pulled the trigger six times.

“Well,” said Robert Love, glancing over the half dozen unconscious bodies sprawled around him, “I see my warning didn’t take.”

“Shut up.” Without his clown outfit, he wasn’t nearly as frightening.

“Search him,”
the bad Jane said.

I set the bomb case on the floor and gestured at Love with my NC gun. “Stand up and lean forward. Put your hands flat on the table.” Love did as he was told. I moved around behind him. Feeling under his jacket, I found a hand ax tucked into his cummerbund. I pulled it out and set it aside. I checked his pockets. “He’s clean,” I announced.

“Good. Now explain to him what the situation is.”

“There are some people waiting to meet you in the VIP parking garage,” I told Love. “So we’re going to walk out of here now. You’ll stay in front of me, go where I say, not make any sudden moves, not make trouble.”

“Interesting plan,” said Love. “But as I can only assume you’re taking me to be tortured and murdered, what’s my motivation, exactly, for not making trouble?”

I kept the gun on him as I transferred the case from the floor to the table. I showed him what was inside it. “You know what this is, right?”

“I recognize the brand name. I can’t say I’ve seen that particular model before.”

“It’s got a damper switch on the back,” I explained. “If the switch is on, the blast is limited to an area roughly the size of this room. But if the switch is off, everyone within two hundred yards gets turned to ashes.”

“I see. And in the latter case, will you be one of the dead?” He tilted his chin to indicate my glasses. “I’m guessing your controller won’t be happy if you fail to bring me out of here.”

“He’s got that part right,”
the bad Jane said.

I leaned in close and pressed my gun to Love’s temple. “If I fail this mission,” I told him, “it means I’ve blown my only chance to see my brother again. And if that’s true, I don’t care what happens to me. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” said Love. Then he smiled. “So shall I keep my hands up while we’re walking, or will that be too conspicuous?”

“Don’t worry about being conspicuous.” I pulled back but kept the gun pointed at him. “Take your clothes off.”

“What?”

“Strip. Everything, even your socks and shoes.” I lifted the bomb out of the case, then pulled up the case’s lining to reveal a button-down shirt, khakis, and a pair of loafers. “These should fit you. The stuff you’re wear
ing now goes in a pile on the floor. Put your little ax in the pile, too.”

“…and as far as the organization knows, I died in the explosion.” He nodded. “Tricky. Very tricky.”

“Dixon will figure it out eventually. But by the time he does, it’ll be too late to do anything.”

“So you get to see your brother again,
and
stick it to Dixon on your way out. I can see now why you turned.”

“Less conversation, more action,”
the bad Jane said.
“We don’t have forever here.”

“Let’s go,” I said, waving the gun. Love changed his clothes. When we were ready, I set the timer on the bomb.

Neither one of us looked like a high-stakes gambler now, but my invisible status held, and nobody paid us any mind as we left the room. We crossed the casino floor without incident, the bad Jane directing us towards a private elevator whose doors opened as we approached. I pushed Love inside.

In the parking garage the bad Jane, maybe worried about a last-minute change of heart on my part, was standing back at a safe distance from the elevator. She’d called in backup: eight guys dressed as parking valets, all packing Troop-issue NC guns. The bad Jane’s own gun was still holstered, but she held the detonator for my wristwatch ready in her hand.

I’d taken off the glasses but my vision was crystal-clear. Even from fifty feet away, I could make out the little hairs on the back of the bad Jane’s thumb as it hovered over the detonator button. I could see, and count, the beads of sweat on the foreheads of her backup team, and the grains of dust on the van they’d brought to carry Love away in. I saw the eddies of hot air rising from the engine of the bad Jane’s sports car where it sat parked beside the van. And I saw the bad Jane’s jaw muscles
tighten, as she realized her concerns about a double-cross were justified.

“Where is he?” she said.

“Where’s who?”

Her thumb tensed. “Don’t fuck with me, Jane. Where’s Love?”

“Oh,
him
…He got off between floors. He claimed it was a security issue, said he knows too much to let himself be captured. Personally, I think he’s just a wimp about being tortured by psychopaths.” I waited a beat, then added: “Oh yeah. He said to tell you the Scary Clowns have sealed off all the exits from this building. None of you are getting out of here alive.”

Her backup guys started exchanging glances, but the bad Jane herself was unmoved by the threat. “None of us?” she said. “Not even me?”

“Especially not you. I’m going to kill you myself, right after you tell me where Phil is.”

“Sure you are…Good-bye, Jane.”

As Love and I had walked through the casino, we’d passed by a Vegas version of an old-fashioned carnival wheel. Now I imagined that time was like that, a big wheel of fortune, and I reached out, mentally, and stopped it in its spin. Next I focused on my arm, telling myself that the bones in my wrist and hand were elastic. When I felt them start to stretch, I brought my arm up sharply. The Mandrill watch slid off with its clasp still fastened, and went flying across the garage like a guided missile, zeroing in on a cluster of four parking valets.

I let go of the wheel of time. The bad Jane’s thumb came down, and half of her backup detail disappeared in a yellow-orange flash.

“What the
fuck
?” the bad Jane said. Some instinct had enabled her to protect herself by redirecting the energy of the blast around her; her hair was mussed, but otherwise she was untouched. Her surviving minions weren’t
as lucky: dazzled by the explosion, they were staggering in blind circles.

I held up the auto-injector I’d found in Love’s pocket when I’d searched him. “Love took a sample of my blood before he let me out of the Mudgett Suite,” I explained. “He wouldn’t say why, but when you told me that X-drugs were DNA-specific, I started to get an idea.”

“The Scary Clowns have X-drugs?”

“Yeah. And speaking as a connoisseur of controlled substances? I’m pretty sure their shit’s
better
than yours, Jane.”

“Let’s find out,” she said. “Let’s play.”

She dropped the detonator; I dropped the auto-injector; we both went for our guns. We both tried to stop time again, too, and in the slow-motion world that resulted, the shots we fired were actually visible. The bad Jane’s NC gun spat thick jagged bolts the color of arterial blood; my own gun sprayed wispy white lines of narcolepsy. None of the shots connected, and after dodging back and forth for a moment, we both rolled for cover.

Crouched behind the polished bulk of a silver Mercedes, I listened to the stumbling of the parking valets until I had a clear picture of where they all were. Then I thumbed the dial on my NC gun to MI and popped up firing. I’d killed three of them and was about to shoot the fourth when I heard the beep of a Mandrill bomb being activated, and the soft swoosh as the bad Jane lobbed it overhand in my direction. I put a hand on the roof of the Mercedes and flipped myself up into the air. My foot connected with the incoming bomb and kicked it back the way it had come, with a slight course correction; it smacked into the chest of the last valet and detonated.

The blast, much more powerful than the previous one, broke the windows on most of the cars in the garage; as I dropped back to the ground I had to cover my
head against a shower of safety glass. By the time the rain stopped the bad Jane had gotten back in her sports car and was revving the engine for a getaway. As she reversed out of her parking slot, I jumped up again, using the hood of the Mercedes as a springboard to launch myself through the air. I landed on the roof of the sports car even as the bad Jane was shifting into forward gear; when she hit the gas, I reached down through the broken front window and gave the steering wheel a hard yank. I rolled clear as the car swerved into a concrete pylon.

The crash killed the sports car’s engine. The bad Jane fought free of the deflating air bag and crawled out over the crumpled hood. Back on my feet, I tried to draw a bead on her, but then another Mandrill bomb came skittering across the garage floor, its countdown timer reading 0:01.

I closed my eyes and teleported behind another concrete pylon. The bomb detonated, shattering more glass. An alarm began to wail—and beneath that, I heard the bad Jane’s footsteps receding, and the sound of a stairwell door.

The stairs led back up to the casino level. By the time I got there, the bad Jane was out of sight. As I stood searching for some sign of which way she’d gone, a security guard approached me. I recognized him as the same guard who’d eyeballed me when I’d first entered the building, and I hesitated, not sure whether he was a Troop member, a Scary Clown, or a civilian.

A second security guard tackled me from behind. He locked an arm over my windpipe and tried to shove me up against the wall, but he was no bad Jane: I melted out from under his chokehold, reappeared behind him, and gave him a double shot of narcolepsy to the back of the head. Then I turned to deal with the first guard, but he’d already been knocked senseless by a burst of sound from a brass-belled Clown horn.

“Hello again, Jane,” Robert Love said. “Enjoying the rush?”

“Yes, actually…But you could have told me in advance.”

“What, and spoil the surprise? That wouldn’t be very tricky.” He giggled, but then his grin turned to a grimace. “Ouch!”

“Love?”

I was worried he’d been shot, but he didn’t fall down. He stretched out his arm, opening and closing his fist. “Must’ve pulled a muscle climbing out of the elevator…No matter. Listen: I’ve got Clowns on X-drugs guarding all the primary exits, but that will only delay her. You need to hunt her down before she finds another way out.”