Deep Fire Rising

THE LUXOR HOTEL LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

Because everything had to be trucked to the mining camp, including fresh water, showers had been strictly regulated to five minutes under a limp drizzle. So for the first time in nearly two weeks, Mercer relaxed under a pounding spray in his tiled bathroom, the steady beat of the near-scalding water working into his shoulders and back, loosening knots deep in the muscle. He’d already gone through the complimentary shampoo and lathered himself so much that only a sliver of soap remained.

His image in the vanity mirror opposite the shower stall was merely a watery outline hidden in banks of steam.

An hour after emerging from the flooded mine, Ira’s promised helicopters had arrived. One took off immediately with Red Harding, whose injuries were a lot worse than he’d led Mercer to believe. The crack he’d taken to his head had left a fist-sized depression in his skull. And while most of the men, including Mercer, had been ferried to one of the Boeing 737-200s the government used to shuttle workers between Area 51 and Las Vegas, two additional Blackhawks were dispatched to the mine area to search for Donny Randall. He had returned to the command trailer while Mercer and his team had gone to place the seismograph, but no one had seen him since. Most of his clothes were still in his room, but enough were missing to make it clear he’d made a run for it. Not that Mercer needed this further evidence to be convinced of the link between Randall and the misfiring of the explosives that caused the flood. He also now understood why Donny had used more explosives while working. He’d been hoarding the Tovex to flood the mine.

It took a second call from Ira Lasko to order Mercer away from the site. He’d wanted to assist in the search. Ira assured him that the infrared detectors placed all around Area 51 would pick up a lone man in the desert on the first pass. Randall would be in a cell inside of eight hours.

Unsatisfied, but with no choice, Mercer agreed to go only after getting Ira’s promise that he could be there when Donny was first questioned. Ira relented and told Mercer he’d be at Area 51 in thirty-six hours and they’d interview Randall the Handle together.

He had sat by himself on the flight from the secret base to Las Vegas, trying to think through why Donny had done what he’d done. There was no way he could have anticipated that Randall was planning on a murder in the mine, so he no longer blamed himself for what happened. For now he focused on his anger. The short trip gave Mercer no time to find answers. Nor did he have much time when they landed because the secure terminal used by Area 51 employees at McCarran Airport was a stone’s throw from the Egyptian-inspired Luxor Hotel.

Mercer’s last visit to Las Vegas had been during the spring break of his first year at the Colorado School of Mines. He’d known the city had grown significantly in the years since, but he wasn’t prepared for the scale of the changes. All the hotels were massive, designed upon various themes to entice gamblers, and more recently, entire families. There were fantasy castles and circus big tops, reproductions of New York City and a hotel designed to evoke Venice, Italy. The Luxor, with over four thousand rooms, was one of the largest hotels in the world, and its pyramid design made it the city’s most distinctive. Atop the three-hundred-fifty-foot black-glass structure was the brightest spotlight ever built, at three hundred thousand watts and forty billion candlepower.

While smaller than Egypt’s Great Pyramid, the design and execution of the building stunned Mercer. He became even more impressed when he entered the lobby and realized the hotel was just a shell for an atrium large enough to hold ten wide-body jets.

The statuary, carvings and faux temples could not distract from the hotel’s real attraction. From the lobby, it was just a few paces to the casino floor, where the staccato chime of coins falling into hoppers and the ringing of slot machine bells lured gamblers by the thousands.

A few of the workers made plans to meet at the craps tables as soon as they’d stowed their meager luggage. Mercer’s first interest was a couple of room service drinks and a thirty-minute shower, preferably enjoying both at the same time.

Mercer reached into the soap dish for his vodka gimlet. It was his second drink and a third waited on the nightstand for when he was dressing. He checked the time on his TAG Heuer, assessed the puckered skin on his fingers, and gave himself another five minutes before shutting off the taps.

He dialed his home phone with a towel wrapped around his waist. He gazed out the window overlooking the azure swimming pools a hundred thirty feet below his room. Two workers were cleaning the area and stacking lounge chairs. Beyond, the city glittered almost to the horizon in a thousand shades of neon. The phone rang four times before his machine picked up. He cut the connection and dialed Tiny’s.

“Forget it,” a voice sneered.

“Nice way to answer the phone,” Mercer said to Paul Gordon.

“Hey, Mercer! Sorry about that. I’ve got caller ID,” Tiny explained. “I recognized the seven-oh-two area code but not the number. I figured you were a Vegas bookie looking to give me odds.” Apart from owning the tavern, Gordon ran a rather lucrative illegal sports book. “What are you doing out there? Harry said you were kidnapped by some government types for a job.”

“I was. Is he there?” Talking with Harry always lightened Mercer’s spirits and cleared his head.

“Yeah, hold on.”

Mercer could hear Tiny speaking to Harry and mentioning that he was in Las Vegas.

“You son of a bitch,” Harry rasped when he got on the line. “Why didn’t you tell me where they were sending you?”

“I didn’t know myself,” Mercer said quickly.

“How long are you staying?”

Mercer could sense the wheels already turning in Harry’s head. “Just the night,” he lied, knowing if he’d said two Harry would be on the next plane. He was dressing as he spoke: black slacks, a white oxford and an unstructured sports coat.

“Goddamn it. You just called to yank my chain, didn’t you?”

“Harry. I can’t believe you’d think that of me,” Mercer said innocently. “I thought that maybe you were worried and would like to know I was all right.”

“Screw you and your all right. You called to bust my balls about being in Vegas.”

“I would have called even if Ira had sent me to West Podunk, Wisconsin.”

“And I would’ve said you deserved to be sent there, you bastard.” Harry softened a little. “Where are you staying?”

“Luxor.”

“Do me a favor.”

“You want a shot glass?”

“Why? I steal yours. From the balcony outside your room you look right over the casino. See if you can take the phone out so at least I can hear it.”

Mercer laughed. “Are you that desperate?”

“I haven’t gambled since Tiny and I swiped your Jag to go to Atlantic City.”

“That happened last summer. Are you forgetting you hit the tables pretty hard when we were in Panama?”

Cackling, Harry said, “Last summer? Hell, we took your Jag again a couple weeks ago when you were in Canada.”

Mercer shook his head. He should have known. “Hold on, let me see if the cord will reach.” He slipped his feet into rubber-soled leather moccasins. “Also, I’m on the eleventh floor so I don’t know if you’ll hear much.”

After untangling the long cord from where it coiled behind the bed, Mercer crossed to the door. “Almost there, Harry.”

Because the Luxor’s rooms overlooked the casino floor and sound echoed in the enormous atrium, the doors were soundproofed. When closed the room was silent, but as soon as Mercer swung it open, he was hit by a wall of sound from a few thousand gamblers, the music from a lounge, and the insistent chorus from the slots. “Here you go, buddy,” he said and held the handset over the balcony so that maybe Harry could hear the infectious din.

The scream should have come from down below, the joyous shout of a lucky winner at a roulette wheel or slot machine. But it came from Mercer’s right, down the long corridor that terminated in a corner of the pyramid near one of the hotel’s elevators, called inclinators because they rose at thirty-nine-degree angles. And the scream was an expression of horror, not excitement.

In a rush, three men dressed in matching suits raced from the elevator alcove. The woman who’d screamed tried to run away from them, toward Mercer, but in her high heels she was overtaken in a few paces. Two of the men cradled machine pistols with curved magazines and long silencers. The third appeared unarmed. As they reached her, the unarmed man casually shoved her in the shoulder, flinging her into the waist-high railing. Her scream rose in pitch as momentum tumbled her over the rail. She was gone in a swirl of her orange skirt.

Mercer turned to run, only to see another pair of gunmen emerge from the elevator alcove in the opposite direction. Harry’s voice scratched from the forgotten phone.

The woman’s shriek suddenly cut out.

Without knowing how he knew, Mercer was sure the men were coming for him — to finish the job Donny Randall had failed. He launched himself back into his room, the only direction open to him. The move bought him a little time but also meant he was trapped. There were no connecting doors between the hotel rooms.

Mercer dropped the phone and ran to the bed, where his bag lay open. The Beretta 92 lay nestled atop a polo shirt. He snatched it up along with the spare clip and racked a round into the chamber.

Pandemonium would be erupting down in the lobby. The horror over the woman’s death would spread through the casino, but it would take precious minutes for the hotel’s security staff to figure how and from where she’d fallen. Mercer had just seconds before the assassins reached his room and forced their way in. Even the thickest soundproofed door would eventually fail under the onslaught of so many automatic weapons. The casual brutality of the woman being pushed over the balcony began sinking into his gut. He didn’t notice his hand tightening on his pistol until the knuckles turned white and his wrist shook.

The phone wasn’t an option. It would take too long. The concierge was trained to deal with lost luggage and ticket requests, not a report about armed men gunning for one of their guests. Mercer’s eyes swept the room. He broke his problem down to its component parts, examined them individually, and built it up again to give him his only solution.

He snatched a book of matches from a table and leapt onto the bed. His hands remained steady even as his heart fought to escape his chest. He struck a match and touched off the whole book, sending a sulfurous cloud directly into a smoke detector. The hardwired unit began screaming at once.

Mercer then reached across to where a sprinkler head poked from the wall. He worked under the assumption that water wouldn’t erupt from the pipe if a guest smashed off the head through stupidity or rage. By triggering the fire-control computer with an activated smoke detector, he hoped the system would discharge water and alert those in charge of security. This way whoever was sent rushing to his room would know they were facing an emergency.

He made sure his weapon was on safe and the barrel pointed away before smashing it into the steel sprinkler head. Compressed air began to hiss through the torn metal and he hit it again, breaking off the head. A second later, a gush of rust-stained water blasted from the pipe in a jet that nearly reached the sloped windows on the far side of the room.

Twenty seconds had passed since he’d jumped back into his room. He figured it was enough time for the gunmen to…

The buzz-saw whir of an automatic weapon muted by a silencer was further quieted by the thick door, but the subsonic bullets had little trouble chiseling through the wood.

Mercer dropped to the floor and fired two careful shots on each side of the door, anticipating the shooter was flanked by his two backups. His 9mm sounded like a cannon compared to the silenced weapon, and his bullets punched much larger holes through the hardboard and soundproofing material. He heard a grunt of pain and fired twice more, aiming lower, as he expected the hidden gunman to be falling to the floor.

The auto-fire stopped for a moment.

Mercer aimed farther from the door, punching four successive holes in the wall, trying to use his suppressing fire to herd the assassins away from his room.

Keeping low, Mercer dashed across his room, snapping out his empty magazine and slamming home his only spare. Numbers swirled in his head as he looked out and down the building’s flank. The hotel was three hundred fifty feet tall and about six hundred feet wide at the base. His room was on the eleventh floor. That put him a hundred twenty feet off the ground and roughly one hundred sixty feet back from the outer edge of the pyramid. The slope was thirty-nine degrees, too steep to slide down without special equipment, and Mercer had no such gear.

Before the assassins regrouped again, Mercer fired at the door several times, hoping to keep them from destroying the weakened lock with a concentrated burst. The center window on the western side of his room had a stencil that read BREAK AWAY GLASS. FIRE DEPT. USE ONLY. He pumped two shots into the window, but the double pane refused to shatter until he heaved a desk chair through it. The desert heat swirled into the room, sucking the stench of gunpowder and fear from the air. Far below stood the well-lit pool and beyond was a parking structure. While Mercer had never been bothered by heights, knowing what he was about to attempt made his vision swim.

He fired again at the wall adjacent to the front door.

The sprinkler had pumped hundreds of gallons into the room, soaking everything. Mercer stripped off the bedspread and blanket and tore away the saturated top sheet. One of the gunmen threw himself at the mangled front door. Mercer triggered off two quick rounds before the man could try to break through again. His ears ached from the booming concussions. Like a washerwoman hanging laundry to dry, Mercer took the wet sheet to the smashed window and unfurled it as high up the side of the building as he could. He pressed it smooth against the glass. The lower edge ran with water.

The only way he could survive the drop down the side of the pyramid was to slow his descent. His shoes wouldn’t provide nearly enough drag against the windows so he had to improvise. His desperate plan was to expand on the simple childhood experiment of sticking a wet washcloth to the side of a bathtub. Hydrostatic pressure made it cling to a flat, clean surface, often requiring surprising force to dislodge it. If the sheet he’d unrolled was large enough, the drag of the cloth against the building would save him from tumbling down the slope and smashing into the ground at near-terminal velocity.

Standing at the angled window, it took all of his discipline to fire off the last rounds in lengthening intervals, hoping that when he emptied the magazine, the assassins would pause for the moments he would need to make his drastic slide down the building.

Who the hell are they? he wondered, then shook the question from his mind. It didn’t matter. Not until he was well away from the hotel.

Eight, nine, ten. He gave it one more second, took a deep breath, and fired his last shot.

He dropped the Beretta and jumped onto the windowsill, keeping one hand on the metal frame to steady himself as his equilibrium seemed to dissolve. The wind chilled his still-wet hair. Details on the ground that appeared crisp when the window was intact now looked indistinct, rendered vague by the height. A hundred and twenty feet was nothing when seen horizontally, yet viewed vertically, from the top down, it seemed to drop forever. The half-million-gallon pools looked as small as puddles, the cars atop the garage like toys.

Mercer put it all out of his mind. He had to lean awkwardly to grasp the closest downslope corner of the sheet. The far corner was a further six feet away. Clamping one corner of the sheet in his right hand, he threw himself out the window. Automatic fire erupted outside his room and was answered by the unsilenced blast of a security guard’s side arm. Mercer twisted as he flew, landing flat on his back against the pyramid and immediately began sliding down the slick sheet. His fingers worked frantically to grip the far edge of the material. He just managed to grab a handful before he slipped entirely free.

And then nothing happened.

Mercer dangled from a soaking three-hundred-thread-count sheet on the side of the Luxor Hotel with his arms stretched wide as if he were being crucified. The sheet remained stuck to the glass as though glued. Far from slowing his descent, the queen-sized swatch of cotton arrested it completely. His weight couldn’t overcome the viscous bond between the sheet and the windows. A dark hundred-forty-foot void sucked at his feet.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

He heard several more earsplitting shots from inside the hotel, followed by a muted fusillade from the unknown assassins. The corridor outside his room had turned into a pitched battle while he was pasted to the side of the building like an insect on flypaper. He had no illusions that the undergunned security guards could prevent the assassins from eventually swatting him off.

Mercer jerked his arms, trying to unstick a little of the sheet. He slid a few inches before the bedding became glued again. The strain of holding the material sent pain pulsing from his shoulders. He next tried to shimmy his hips, wriggling back and forth. He gained another foot and this time the sheet didn’t stop fully. It continued to ooze down the building, but at a snail’s pace.

A moan of frustration and mounting agony escaped his lips. He jerked the material again as a gust of wind worried at the top edge of the sheet, finding and expanding a small wrinkle until a square foot of the cloth had lifted from the glass. Mercer’s pace doubled, then doubled again. The fear of the entire sheet peeling away from the glass made him dig his rubber-soled shoes into the window. His heel caught a rubber gasket separating two of the enormous panes. The wrinkle settled when the wind died again and he stopped dead. He’d slid eight feet. The top of the sheet was a mere foot below his own shattered window.

He hadn’t heard a guard’s weapon in ten seconds or more.

As insane as the stunt he was trying to pull off was, he knew it wouldn’t be enough. He was helpless and the gunmen would be in his room in moments. It would take no time for them to figure where he’d gone and blow him from the building with a burst from a machine pistol.

There was only one way to increase his speed and that was to diminish the hydrostatic pressure on the glass. Because he couldn’t reduce his weight, he had to reduce the area of cotton. And once he did, there’d be no going back.

“As if I can go back now,” he muttered and hunched his shoulders, peeling the lower third of the sheet from the window.

Mercer accelerated like a skier bursting from knee-high powder onto an icy patch of trail. In a fraction of a second he knew he’d never recover. He felt he was already hurtling down the building too fast, and every foot he dropped stripped more of the sheet from the glass and sped his plunge.

Wind rushed past his ears as he struggled to flatten the sheet again by stretching his arms as far as they would go. The effort made his upper body tremble. He spread his feet wide, hoping his wet slacks would give him a measure of control. His heart beat in his throat and he hadn’t taken a breath for what felt like hours.

He didn’t dare look down, but as soon as the thought popped into his head, he did. He’d slid eight of the eleven stories and could judge how quickly the ground was rushing up to meet him by the expressions on the two pool workers staring up at him. Their mouths widened the farther he plummeted. Yet it didn’t appear he was going as fast as he thought. He’d slowed and the impact wouldn’t be too…

A window exploded to his right, razor shards cutting his side and outer thigh. Another burst blew a pane of glass above him and caught him in an avalanche of deadly fragments. He didn’t need to look up to know at least one of the gunmen stood in his window firing down the building’s sloped flank. The next burst would likely spike through the top of his skull.

He was a story and a half from the ground when he released his grip on the sheet.

At the last second before he hit the ground, he cocked his knees and launched himself from the building, vectoring the impact so that he crashed onto a neatly trimmed bank of shrubs with his shoulder and back. He rolled hard, tumbling to the lawn before slamming into a stack of lounge chairs. His entire body had gone numb for a blessed second until pain exploded in his shoulders and right leg from hip to ankle.

“Dude, I have always wanted to try something like that!” The teenage workers had rushed to his side.

“That was awesome,” the other said. “What was it like?”

Nine-millimeter rounds rained from above. The first teen went down with the back of his thigh ripped wide open. The other caught a bullet in the top of his shoulder and dropped as if poleaxed, his arm barely attached to his body.

Mercer staggered to his feet, trying to get the youths out of the line of fire — trying to save himself. Chips of concrete burst from a statue of a sphinx as more bullets peppered the pool area, some forming tiny geysers where they hit the still water. Hobbled by his deadened leg, Mercer zigzagged around palm trees and garish statues. Because the hotel was fashioned out of black glass, it was easy to see the light streaming from his shattered window and the silhouette of the gunman who’d realized his quarry had escaped. In the dying glare of the setting sun, Mercer couldn’t hope to identify the assassin, but he’d be glad to meet him again under different circumstances.

Mercer threw an ironic wave he was sure the gunman saw.

He reached the decorative wall separating the pool area from Luxor Drive and was just about to scramble over when a group of men, wearing the same suits as the gunmen upstairs, appeared at the hotel’s back entrance. One shouted something indecipherable and reached inside his jacket for a weapon. As best he could, Mercer launched himself over the wall, falling in an untidy tangle on the sidewalk below.

There was no traffic on the two-lane road and the cover afforded by the parking garage was far out of reach. He looked up and down the half-mile street, as trapped here as he had been in his room. Only this time there were no crazy options. The gunmen had seen him and would be over the wall before Mercer could cover twenty yards. He arbitrarily turned to his left and began running, further punishing his injured leg.

The sweep of headlights blinded him and the squeal of brakes sounded unnaturally loud. The car was a new silver BMW Z3, one of the more exotic vehicles a tourist could rent in the city. The driver slid the car into a controlled four-wheeled skid so that it pointed in the direction it had come. The engine snarled. Although the top was up, the passenger window was down. The driver remained hidden in the car’s interior.

“Dr. Mercer,” a woman called. He caught a glimpse of her dark hair glittering like obsidian. “If you want to live, come with me.”

Mercer lurched toward the car as she swung open the long door.

“I’ve waited a lifetime to meet you, Doctor,” she said, pressing the gas even before he was fully in the car. “It’s too bad I came too late.”

“I’d say you were just in time,” he panted.

She spoke from the driver’s-side shadows. “I’m sorry, but I am. You see, you’re going to die anyway.”