Full Force and Effect

47

Caruso had found the phone; it was in a wheeled roll-aboard whose lock he picked in twenty seconds after spending a minute checking it for telltales. Within three and a half minutes of entering the Frenchwoman’s hotel room he had the device downloading to Gavin’s specially designed unit.

And then, within seconds of his beginning the download, the frantic call came from Ryan telling him the woman was loose and on her way back to her room. Caruso was less worried about her showing up while he was here — to travel from the thirty-ninth floor to the thirty-first floor she’d first have to go down to the lobby to reach the other elevator bank — and more worried about how the hell she knew he was here in the first place. She’d gotten a call, Ryan said, so Dom assumed she had confederates in the hallway who had seen him, confederates who were somehow patched into hotel security cameras, or confederates who had bugged her room.

Whatever the case, it meant unknown parties were involved in this and aware of him, and this meant trouble.

Dom wasn’t sure what to do, so he called out to Clark. “John?”

“I’m in the lobby, watching for trouble heading your way. Don’t see anyone, but get out of there. Could be someone already up on that floor.”

“This download is gonna take a few more minutes.”

Clark said, “It’s too late for covert. They know there was an intrusion. Just snag the phone and bolt.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

Caruso slipped the two phones joined with a cable into his backpack and started for the door. Her suite was similar to Ryan’s; there was a small hallway that ran along the kitchenette and hid the front door from the living and sleeping area, and Dom ran for it, but once he turned into the little hallway of the suite, he saw the latch of the door slowly lowering.

It was too late to escape out the front.

Caruso turned and ran back into the suite, leapt over the coffee table and onto the sofa, then over the back of the sofa to the balcony door. He unlocked it and flung it open, then started outside.

There was a boom of a handgun discharge in the room behind him, then the crashing of glass right next to his head as the sliding glass door shattered. Dom took the eight-foot-deep balcony in two bounds, rolled over the side of the railing, grabbing the metal bar on the outside of the balcony, then scaling down quickly to the bottom of the railing. A second loud report from the room sounded closer than the first, and Dom struggled to hold on as his feet dangled thirty-one stories over Las Vegas Boulevard.

He heard Clark in his ear calling to him, but he concentrated on swinging his body back, away from the building, to pick up some momentum. He’d just started his swing forward when he felt his fingers slip off the metalwork of the balcony above his outstretched arms, and he looked up just in time to see an Asian man in a black hoodie leaning over the side, a suppressed pistol in his hands.

Dom swung to the balcony below him, let go fully now, and crashed onto a padded settee and then through a plexiglass bistro table. The crash knocked the wind out of him, and he knew he’d battered his arms and ribs, but he fought his way to his feet and looked back and up.

The Asian assassin could not see him from the balcony above, but he must have dropped to the floor of the balcony, because Dom now saw the pistol appear at the end of an arm that waved back and forth, pointing down to the balcony where Dom stood.

With a flash and a loud boom, the man fired. The round crashed through the locked glass door just three feet to Dom’s left.

He dove to the ground on his right.

Another round barked; this one hit the glass closer to Dom.

Dom leapt back to his feet, grabbed a metal chair, and swung it up and out at the gun. He struck it as a fourth round fired, and he knocked the weapon from the man’s hand. It arced out away from the building and fell from view.

Dom didn’t want to wait around to see if this assassin had a backup, so he turned and ran through the shattered glass door. This room was empty, thankfully, so in seconds Dom was in the hall, and in seconds more he was in the stairwell. He raced down thirty floors in five minutes, adrenaline propelling him most of the way.

By the time he made it to the ground floor, Ryan and Clark were out front, waiting for the valet to retrieve the Mercedes. Dom walked up next to them without a word, and when the car came he helped Jack get his luggage in the back.

They were back on Las Vegas Boulevard before the first responders pulled up out front with reports of shots fired high in the massive tower.

While Ryan uploaded the files taken from Élise’s mobile phone, the rest of the team broke down the safe house. Dom called Adara Sherman and delivered news that she was more than accustomed to hearing these days. It was time to do another mad scramble to get the hell out of town.

The Gulfstream took off from Henderson Executive Airport, south of the city, at one-thirty in the morning.

Adara spent much of the first hour of the flight tending to Dominic Caruso. He had quite a few cuts and bruises, but no broken bones. Ryan thought his wounds looked pretty superficial, but Adara was the team medic and for some reason she felt the need to devote a lot of attention to Dom’s injuries.

While Dom got treatment in the back of the cabin, the rest of the group sat up front and discussed the events of the evening. It was abundantly clear there was a unit of North Korean operatives, sanctioned to kill, shadowing employees of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners. It was unknown if the Sharps people were coordinating with them or not. It was also decided there wasn’t a lot for the operators of The Campus to do other than return to Alexandria and wait for Gavin Biery to unlock whatever secrets Élise’s phone held.

Ryan had been compromised in all this, because an operative of Sharps’s clearly knew, or else highly suspected, that he’d coerced her away from her hotel room at the exact moment someone was breaking into it. The original plan would have had no comebacks on Ryan, because Élise would have never known her phone had been compromised.

This wasn’t good at all from a PERSEC perspective, but there wasn’t much any of them could do about this now.

Soon after their debrief, the men lowered the backs on their cabin chairs and began nodding off.

It was five-thirty in the morning D.C. time, and two-thirty a.m. on the body clocks of the worn-out men in the Gulfstream, when the light on the cabin phone began flashing.

Adara Sherman had been sitting on the couch next to the bandaged and sound-asleep Dominic Caruso. She reached over and picked up the mobile handset. Softly she said, “Aircraft.”

“Good morning, Ms. Sherman, Gavin Biery calling.”

“Hey, Mr. Biery. All the guys are resting at the moment.”

“Aw. I bet they are just adorable. Let the others sleep, but throw some water on Ryan and hand him the phone.”

“Right away, sir.”

Adara declined the suggestion to use water, so Ryan woke to find her gently nudging him. When he opened his eyes fully and sat up, she handed him the phone.

Ryan looked at her. “Biery?”

Adara nodded with a smile.

Ryan was angry for two seconds; then his face illuminated with excitement and he brought the phone to his ear. “You can’t possibly have anything for us yet, can you?”

“You forget how good I am, Ryan. Dom sent me the files he pulled from Élise Legrande’s device. They were two-fifty-six encrypted, but with an off-the-shelf commercial security software we’d figured out a few months back. It’s really not that hard when you take—”

“Gavin, that’s great, but what did you find in the files?”

“Well… the device was a working Samsung Galaxy phone, so I found some games and stuff. A few ringtones, too.”

Ryan was annoyed, but he was glad to hear the man had a little of his swagger back after his disastrous experience in the field in Prague.

Gavin waited for a reply, and when none came he asked, “Not funny?”

“What else, Gavin?”

“Oh, yeah, right. There is an application, apparently proprietary in nature. Clearly something that she downloaded from the NewCorp applications server.”

“What does it do?”

“The program is designed to do one thing and one thing only. It is set up to manage and operate a large series of froth flotation cells in sequence. I don’t really know what those are, but that’s not my department.”

Ryan had spent the past several days at the facility; he knew exactly what froth flotation cells were. “That’s the high-tech washing machines that the ore is put into. They separate the minerals from the rest of the powder. If you are saying this program is to run a bunch of them at one time, then it’s basically the center of the entire refinery process.”

“Bingo, Jack. Apparently the North Koreans have got themselves a processing plant, but they don’t have a brain for it. They sent this sexy French mademoiselle to the American processing plant and made a copy of their entire operation’s system.”

Ryan said, “As soon as we get back, we’ve got to get this intel to Mary Pat. She knows the big picture in all this much better than we do. Hopefully this will help her figure out what the hell to do next.”