Chapter 8
gone
NICOLAI
“What the hell do you mean she’s gone?” I demanded into my phone.
The lighted numbers above the lift flashed one floor up and stopped.
“I had her. She was here,” Ueli argued. “She dropped and was like the rock, and then she went away—”
Lexi was out there in the streets. My Lexi was out there on the streets alone.
The lift was taking too long. I sprinted for the stairs.
The bang of the heavy door slamming behind me echoed on the concrete of the empty stairwell and steps leading down too many floors.
The imperative drummed in my head: get to Lexi, get to Lexi, get to Lexi.
Expedience warred with caution for I would be no good to rescue her with a broken leg, but I had to reach her.
I stuffed my belt in a jacket pocket.
Boarding school trains one’s liver for drinking, but those years were also an excellent opportunity for adolescent daredevils to hone their skills with no adult supervision.
I swung over the metal railing, hung from the slanted bar for an instant while I scoped my target on the next floor-level down, and undulated my body, swinging out as I released and sailed.
Falling was a rush.
The landing jarred me from the soles of my feet to my hips but nothing cracked, so I swung over the next rail and the next and the next, and then only seconds later, I was standing on the ground floor before the elevator had descended even one stop, dragging open the lobby door, dodging through the crowd, and running toward the sunlight.
Get to Lexi.
From the corner of my eye, Nechtan and my Delta Team were staring at the lifts as I sprinted past them.
Ruoxi saw me, pivoted, and gave chase. The others followed.
People thronged the lobby: men in suits or sloppy athleisure wear, women in professional outfits or sundresses, uniformed bellhops and concierges and waitstaff, and twitchy security personnel with guns under their jackets.
Against the other wall, Lexi’s bright blond hair fluttered, and I spied her bobbing gait amidst the crowd.
I diverted, sidestepping and weaving between oblivious hotel guests and their very alert security staff whose hands hovered nearer their weapons than usual.
A few steps, and I was in front of my Lexi.
She ran straight into my chest, looked up at me, and threw her arms around my chest. “Nicolai!”
Instinct gathered her into my arms, but training took over and I twisted, shoving her against the wall behind me. One arm fenced her in. My other hand hovered near my new handgun poking into the small of my back. “Stay there.”
“Ueli was forcing me into the car, and I didn’t know where you were!” she exclaimed.
“It’s all right now.” My attention scoured the crowd for the Russian intelligence agent from my suite or anyone examining us too closely. “Stay behind me.”
Her hands alighted on my waist from behind as I assessed the situation.
“I didn’t know what to do. You weren’t in the car, and Ueli was going to leave with me to go somewhere else.”
“It’s all right now.” Even though it certainly wasn’t.
“Ueli wouldn’t tell me what was going on.”
I didn’t take my eyes off the throng. “Minor situation. It’s handled.”
From the dozens of faces in the lobby, a bulbous face, the Slavic pout of his mouth, and his sharp gaze jumped out at me.
The SVR officer who’d materialized in my suite was sitting at the bar, sipping a clear cocktail despite the early hour. His knowing eyes met mine through the crowd, and he swiveled back to his drink.
I tapped my watch’s voice button and then wrapped Lexi in one arm behind my back. “We’re going outside. Walk quickly but don’t run.”
Ueli and his operators would hear what I’d said over our channel. They were my safest option at that moment.
I positioned Lexi between my body and the wall and moved toward the exit, my arm around her shoulders, ready to force her to the floor and gather her underneath me, if necessary.
As we approached the darkened glass exit glowing with sunlight, my security entourage assumed the square formation, more and more pairs of operators accreting around us with each step.
Ueli yanked the door from the outside as we approached, startling the concierge who’d been holding the door, anticipating the mob of us walking toward him.
We broke out into the glaring sunlight, a desert blast akin to a Dubai afternoon, and I hurried Lexi a little faster with my hand on her upper arm. She picked up her pace at the instant I pressed her.
At the black vehicle, she glanced up at me as I took her hand and lifted, helping her inside. She clambered in, and I stepped in right after her with one last glance at the sidewalk.
Every person standing there, from tourists to uniformed hotel and restaurant workers, seemed an instant away from producing a concealed weapon and opening fire.
As my leg cleared the car’s frame, one of my staff shoved the door closed. Ueli was half a step behind my pace, vaulting into the front passenger seat, and the engine roared as Ueli slammed his door.
Lexi plastered herself against my side, and I wrapped both arms around her, savoring her soft body in my arms, because this moment almost never happened. “He was in the bar,” I said to Ueil in the front seat. “As we were leaving, the man who’d been in my suite was sitting in the bar.”
The agent’s description poured out of me, as I’d been trained to notice height, weight, coloring, and mannerisms since childhood. “I’m certain he was Russian intelligence. No one else would threaten so casually. We can get the video from the bar and identify him.”
Ueli asked, “Have you downloaded any new phone apps lately?”
I tugged my belt from my pocket and leaned forward to thread it around my waist. The Russian-made handgun in my waistband felt floppy without a belt securing it to my back. As soon as the leather pressed it down, the metal safety on its side poked into my spine. “No. Nothing.”
“But Lexi is with you.” He cranked himself around in his seat and glared at her. “Your phone has not been cleaned of the advertising spyware, ja?”
Ueli had a standard tirade about commercial spyware in phone applications being purchased and used by foreign and domestic intelligence services.
Despite military personnel dying from exercise apps on their phones giving away the locations of navy ships and temporary military installations, the right of corporations to advertise still outweighed national security and any remnants of a personal right to privacy.
Ueli could go on for hours about the intersection of privacy and security if no one intervened. Commercial spyware abuse verged on being a special interest with him.
“No, you haven’t done anything to my phone to protect us,” Lexi said to him, snark in her voice. “You can clean the spyware off my phone any time you want to.”
“Ueli, enough. You can scour her phone when we’re somewhere secure, perhaps while we’re at Clemmy’s Hermès store or the couture consultation.”
His sharp glance was an argument. “I insist we abort the previous schedule and move security to Level Two. We should proceed to the plane and travel to a secure location.”
Dear God, Ueli’s security levels and codes and protocols were exhausting. “Absolutely not. I’ll tell Clemmy we’ll meet her at the Hermès store for the Birkin purses, and we’ll proceed from there.”
Lexi’s hand slid into mine. “We can cancel going to that thing tonight. It’s fine.”
“Good,” Ueli said, starting to turn back to the front. “Cancel everything.”
“We’re not canceling,” I told Ueli. “If we canceled every engagement every time there was a threat, I’d never get anything done.”
“Your wife wants to cancel,” Ueli said, holding onto the back of the driver’s seat, bracing himself as he twisted to stare at me. His pale eyes were the color of ice storms. “You should listen to your wife.”
Lexi squeezed my hand. “We don’t have to go to that party tonight if it’s dangerous.”
Ueli sniped, “Bravado in front of the women is stupid.”
“It’s no more dangerous than my normal day-to-day routine,” I explained to her and meant it. “There are always threats. Knowing one of the current players gives us an advantage, but we mustn’t allow that to make us lax toward other, unknown threats.”
“Jeez, Nicolai. What’d you do to make people so mad at you?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t nonchalance on my part.
I’d been numb to it forever, it seemed. “Whether it’s political radicals who take offense at my ancestors or the private militia of the wealthy elites of the world because I refuse to play their depraved game of mutual assured destruction by blackmail, someone is always gunning for me. ”
She was blinking her dark eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But the driver, Mordecai, nodded. “There’s no use cowering in fear. Arrangements can be made.”
Ueli snapped at him, “Encouraging the principal to make reckless decisions is not part of the job description.”
I’d personally hired Mordecai into my security detail a few months ago.
He’d griped to me on a car ride the prior week about still being the Fucking New Guy in the group, though Dusha was warming to him.
Mordecai had grown up in an ex-industrial town in Massachusetts and attended an academy-style high school that fed into the HBCUs, but he’d enlisted at seventeen instead, eventually ending up in the Army Rangers.
He shrugged one thick-rounded shoulder under his dark suit jacket but didn’t turn his gaze from the road. He spoke authoritative sentences with a bass, steady voice. “Staying here doesn’t seem reckless. We control a lot of the variables. I’ve been in worse situations for less money, just sayin’.”
Ueli scowled. “We should retreat to Paris today.”
Lexi piped up, “Is that what you usually do when if it gets too dicey? Go back to your apartment in Paris?” She whispered to me, “You said you lived in Paris most of the time.”
“Yes,” I told her. “We often decamp to my primary residence, which is Paris. The security cameras and equipment there are top-notch.”
“Then isn’t that what they’d expect you to do?” she asked. “How do you know they aren’t herding you toward Paris, and it’s a trap?”
“Yes, Ueli.” I leaned forward. “How do we know we aren’t being manipulated? Paris might be the predictable move.”
“We don’t know.” His gray eyes narrowed as he stared at me. “In my professional opinion, a significant attack by the Russian national intelligence is more likely to take place here in Las Vegas than in Europe.”
“On American soil?” I pushed him. “You don’t think European security services, like the French, are more likely to turn a blind eye to a small, insignificant assassination?”
Ueli still held a grudge against the French for surrendering to the Nazis in World War II as if he were British instead of officially neutral Swiss. “We have mission protocols for a reason.”
“I’m a person, not a mission,” I told him. “Mordecai, continue to the original destination to meet Clemmy’s detail. Our schedule remains firm.”
“Yes, boss,” Mordecai said and spun the wheel to turn the SUV onto the Strip and toward the Birkin location.
“I advise against this,” Ueli said, his voice rising.
I held Lexi’s hand more firmly. “Noted.”