Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Spider Men

An hour and a half later, Max was literally out on a limb.

He was garbed in magician’s black: spandex tights, turtleneck, black gloves, black-masked spandex face to match his black hair and bleak expectations.

He was suspended high over the New Millennium exhibition area, a spider on an invisible web, clinging to the network of rosin-treated cables that formed a high-tech web over the entire space.

He felt like a cyberspace creature, some gaming entity loose on a hidden grid.

He’d entered this bizarre, deserted world by the lighting service tunnel. Painted matte black, light hoods studded the ceiling like black holes. They were cobras, poised to strike with shafts of illumination when turned on, ready to run through their preprogrammed schedule once the show began.

The Cloaked Conjuror wasn’t here now, nor the pupae of his spinning web diva, Shangri-La. Spiders had thousands of spawn. Max pictured Shangri-La as a sort of White Widow Spider hanging from an invisible tensile line, spinning her web, changing shapes as she changed venues.

She knew him. Knew he was in Las Vegas, in the equation. She hated him. He didn’t know why. Didn’t care. E equals mc squared. Enemy equals mega-competition squared.

This was Shangri-La’s territory. He was intruding. He moved along the taut wires, slid his gloved fingertips along the bungee cords ready to cut loose and plummet down almost to the top of the mock-onion dome far below that would soon encase the Czar’s scepter.

Guards would soon blanket this exhibition from ground zero to pinnacle. But the high-flying performers would be the last to be suspected: the Cloaked Conjurer, whom Max both trusted and dismissed; Shangri-La, for whom he made neither assumption.

Assumption.

That was what this White Russian act was all about. It took place in the flies, to use a theatrical phrase. In the heavens. Above the crowd, as in the circus. The Greatest Show on Earth. The greatest shell game.

Max felt his way, fingers and feet leading, along the hidden web, tensile rope by tensile rope. A low hissing sound intruded on his concentration, but he ignored it. This unsensed network had been strung up here to create an illusion.

From an illusion, it morphed into an intrusion.

Max stared down, almost seeing the glittering Czar Alexander scepter in place. Twenty-seven-inches long. Diameter: two inches along the shaft. The orb at the top that held the fabulous jewel? Four inches. A phallic sort of thing, suitable for giants, easily concealed upon the persons of mortal men.

Or women.

Max, hanging by his long, flexible limbs, calculated the possibilities. Capture before transfer from the bank vault to the exhibition. Substitution during installation. Virtual removal shortly after with all the eyes-in-the-sky cameras confounded. Abstraction during exhibition hours in front of dazzled tourist gazes.

How do I steal thee? Let me count the ways.

Everything below was empty now. Of treasure. Of people. It was all possibility and, for now, very little risk.

As Max meditated on this, the line of his supporting web vibrated with sudden shock. Glancing upward, he thought he saw one of the black-painted service hatches concealed in the ceiling shutting.

Max scrambled spider swift to spring onto another support rope, to cling at his concealing height. He froze while the scanning cameras cruised past him. Surely that betraying tremor, whatever it had been, had subsided enough to keep his figure safely in the dark.

Apparently it had for no alarm sounded.

For the moment.

And in that moment, Max noticed what had brushed by his supportive wire network. He stared down on a black-clad figure beneath him, dangling by one extremity. In this case a crucial extremity. The neck.

The figure spun on its only support line, a noose, invoking the reverse image of the slender white filament that had been the rehearsing pale silhouette of Shangri-La.

This figure was no artful flutter of tattered robes, but the double of Max himself: black-clad, male, athletic, and dead.

Just as the audible alarms blared their shrill mechanical warning, Max swung from unweighted line to line, back to the claustrophobic shelter of the lighting conduits.

One line was like the deadly third rail on a subway system, one line he didn’t dare touch. That was the tense vee of wire dipping down to the glistening empty onion dome, bearing the pendant of a dead man like a human jewel. His limp black feet almost touched the tip of the scepter’s soon-to-be housing.

Was this some gruesome obstacle the Synth had set up to make Max’s test all the harder? A warning that he had better succeed?

Maybe.

Or maybe more than one cabal of thieves had its eye on the scepter.