“He had been tracking you and knew you had purchased the tickets?” the Russian offered. “That intersection is a natural bottleneck, and he had simply to lie in wait.” He dipped the toothbrush in mouthwash and brushed hard, three or four times, before rinsing his mouth first with the remainder of the mouthwash and then with cold water, twice. He dashed handfuls of water on his face, and turned, forcing a game smile, droplets diamond-bright on water-dark lashes when he blinked. “I’m going to shower,” he said.
The American shrugged and turned his back. He didn’t want to see the cigarette burns on his partner’s chest. “Go ahead. I’ll take care of the mess. And we can figure out what we’re going to do about the assassin.”
“Do we have permission to act?” The shower door slid. The Russian’s voice rose over running water, triggering another coughing fit, but the American thought it was only a throat rubbed raw. “Or will it cause an international incident?”
“I was raised Catholic,” the American said, crouching to pull the Lysol from under the sink. “I’m a big believer in forgiveness. And one of the girls at headquarters dropped me a hint; routine tracking has turned up the information that he boarded a plane to Las Vegas yesterday morning—”
“Wonderful,” the Russian answered. “Las Vegas in July. Remind me to pack a sweater.”
“Just be glad there are benefits to taking good care of the administrative pool,” the American answered. “Other than prompt attention to our travel arrangements.”
“Benefits other than the obvious, you mean? Pass me a towel, please.”
“Only if you tell me what it is you find so obvious.”
The Russian cleared his throat. The American laughed and lobbed a towel over the cloudy glass door, trusting the Russian to catch it.
“That’s not a benefit,” he said cheerily. “That’s just part of the service, son.”
The American and the Russian.
Somewhere over the Mojave Desert, 1964.
The Russian’s hand on his shoulder awoke him on the Arizona/Nevada border. The passenger compartment of the aircraft was “darkened for night flying,” but the Russian’s reading light was on. He reached up to click it off as the American rubbed sleep from his eyes.
“Look, we’re coming in over Hoover.”
The American leaned over his partner to glance out the tiny window, down through the darkness to the spotlit face of the dam so far below. It was pretty, but he’d seen it a half-dozen times before. The Russian’s well-concealed enthusiasm amused him. “You never get tired of flying, do you?”
“It’s bourgeois to become jaded,” the Russian replied, smiling. The American sat back as the Russian unfolded his newspaper. “We’ll be arriving at McCarran Field very soon now.”
“Good,” the American answered, closing his eyes again. “Wake me up if you figure out what the hell we’re going to do when we get there.”
He couldn’t fall back asleep, however, and found himself peering over the Russian’s paper to catch a glimpse out the window as the plane swung over the mountains rimming the Las Vegas valley. A vast blackness lay below them, horizon to horizon, broken only by the grid-marked clump of lights ahead. The night air was clear and the valley flat enough that the American could make out the twin clusters of lights that were Fremont Street and the Strip. He spotted the Desert Inn, the Flamingo, the Dunes, and the Stardust as the plane made its turn to line up with the runway—and then he blinked.
Some optical distortion—a ripple in the window glass or a desert atmospheric inversion layer—caught and multiplied the lights of the city below. The American thought they extended from horizon to horizon, even the casinos impossibly magnified and reproduced, the colors of the lights shifting to greens and purples, the buildings seeming much taller and broader than they should have been. “Hey, you see that?”
By the time the Russian peered over his newspaper, the brilliant, ephemeral effect had passed. “See what?”
The American shrugged and sat back. “For a moment, it seemed like there were ten times as many lights as there should have been. It’s gone now.”
“How odd.” The Russian did glance out the window, and shook his head. “Optical illusion?”
“I imagine.” The plane touched down lightly and taxied toward the terminal under floodlights. “You know they allowed aboveground nuclear bomb tests north of here until last year?”
“I read it somewhere, yes.” Then, as the plane rumbled to a halt: “When did McCarran start using jetways?”
“Jetways?” A definite thump: the extensible passageway struck the side of the aircraft, and the American glanced at his partner. “Jetways. What do you know? The last time we were here it was still the old rolling stairs.” All around them, passengers were unbuckling seatbelts, standing, stretching after the long cross-continental flight. “Well, I guess we’re here. Would you hand me my bag, if you don’t mind?”
Tribute and the Scholar.
Las Vegas, Summer, 2002.
My plane taxied up to the gate at McCarran International Airport a little after 1:00 a.m. I’m limited to short flights for practical reasons; the good news is, the redeye is usually uncrowded.
I love Las Vegas.
Nobody ever notices me in Vegas. Now that I was on my own, I was thinking of staying on permanently.
Don’t get me wrong. I never expected to survive. I thought I’d go down into oblivion with Sycorax, red stain of my borrowed blood on her lips and a fistful of my hair knotted in her hand. I never expected to see another sunrise. Not that I’ve seen one in twenty-five years, mind, but you know what I mean. But one minute my gut was clenching, twisting around my poisoned dinner, and the next Sycorax was staring at me in glazed shock, her pale hands fastened on her own wax-white throat as she sank to her knees.
If I’d known it would be that easy I would have handled this
years
ago.
If I’d known Jesse would leave me alone for half an hour if I did it . . .
Eighteen hours later, I was on a plane, and less than two hours after that I was stepping across the band of desert heat between the cool of the airplane and the air-conditioned jetway and following the cattle through McCarran’s D gates to the tram.
There’s a funny thing about Las Vegas. You keep seeing people you think you might halfway recognize. Some of them are minor celebrities, lounge acts, washed-up actors, and pop stars who were the Next Big Thing twenty years back. And some aren’t.
So people turned to look at me, one or two, as I made my way from the tram over the gaudy carpet and down the escalators. But they weren’t surprised, not at all.
I had no luggage to claim; we learn to travel light. But McCarran makes you exit through Baggage Claim whether you need to or not, and I had “Go Down Moses” stuck in my head, somehow—you know,
Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt’s Land. Tell ol’ Pharoah, Let my people go
—and was concentrated on not singing it too loudly where anybody could hear me. Which is how I almost tripped over the spy.
I wasn’t supposed to know he was a spy. I was supposed to see an athletic, black-haired white man in a polo shirt and khakis, turning to hand a cased tennis racket to his companion. The other cat was black, broad-shouldered, wearing his hair parted on the side and greased in ringlets in a style I hadn’t seen since I was a
young
mortal man. They both reeked of Brylcreem.
It smelled like 1965.
I wasn’t supposed to see the way their eyes met for a moment before they glanced over each other’s shoulders, either, or to notice that their three-dialed waterproof wristwatches matched. But I’ve shot up a TV set or two in my time, and I noticed, and stepped wide to go around the pair rather than bumping shoulders with the athlete. A little faster, a little smoother than a mortal man should have managed, and the black man’s gaze locked on me like a gunman’s sights.
And he blinked, and tilted his head to one side, and then offered a wry, contemplative smile. “King,” he said. “I didn’t know you were in the game.”
“I’m not,” I answered without bothering to fix my voice. “I’m the real thing. More or less.” And I showed him the fangs.
He stepped back: one, two—the racket case raised defensively in his hand—and I beat it for the exit while his partner was still turning to see what had caused his dismay. There was a taxi waiting.
I took it.
There’s real, after all. And then there’s
real
.
And if I was going to spend any time in Las Vegas, I was going to have to find out what was going on to bring two of
those
to the streets of Sin City. And not its native media ghosts, either.
No, a couple of strangers in town.
The Assassin and the Man Behind the Curtain.
Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
There were two men already in the office when the assassin got there; one dead, and one alive. The dead one stood behind the live one. The living one was hunched over a laptop computer. The dead one was peering over the living one’s shoulder, trying not to drip brains down his back.
Bugsy Siegel looked up when the assassin walked through the door, and frowned. For a dead man, he had an effective stare. He hadn’t died pretty, and it still showed.
Ghosts don’t heal, and when Bugsy was shot, the hitman put enough lead into the back of his skull that much of his face came off the front side when it exited. One eye was missing, the cheekbone shattered, the empty socket oozing clotted blood and matter. The back of his head was a pulpy mess; it contrasted vividly with his dapper charcoal double-breasted suit.
Even by the assassin’s standards, what was left of him wasn’t easy to look at. But the slow trickle of gray matter down his skull hadn’t slowed him any. “You didn’t get him,” he said, and walked through the desk and the Mage whose laptop he had been frowning at to glower at the assassin from closer in.
“No,” the assassin said. There was no point in denying it. “Hello, Felix,” he said.
Felix Luray didn’t look up from the computer. “It’s the stories,” he said, and flexed his hands together to crack his knuckles. “You’ll have to find some way to work around it, so they
can
be killed. The bad news is their fans are still out there, keeping them alive. So they’re real as . . . real as Robin Hood. Or the Easter Bunny. The good news is, capturing them should be no problem. That’s in genre.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed,” the assassin said dryly, and went to pour himself a drink. “And I can tell by the looks on your faces that Angel and Goddess didn’t manage any better.”
“Goddess is dead,” Felix said. “The revenant John Henry Kinkead bashed her skull in with a sledge hammer.”
Fumes stung the assassin’s nose. The crystal was heavy in his hand, warming quickly from his skin. He sipped. “Well, saves me having to kill her, then. Who’s ‘the revenant John Henry Kinkead?’”
“The One-eyed Jack,” Felix said. “John Kinkead was the third governor of Nevada. He died circa 1904 in Carson City. Fits the name and general description, and the timing’s right.”
“Huh.” Felix was eyeing the assassin’s glass speculatively. The assassin poured a second drink and passed it over; Felix poured half the measure on the rug, where it vanished, wicked up without a trace. Bugsy looked pleased. “What does his name win us, Mr. Luray?”
“Perhaps a little symbolic leverage,” he said with a shrug, and tasted his drink. “We’ve got the dam, but a little more never hurts. Jackie gave Benjamin a run for his money a few years back, I hear—”
Bugsy turned his head and spat. It didn’t leave a mark on the carpet. “That faggot’s no match for a real Mage, Felix. Sure, he knows a little hedge-craft. But it ain’t real magic, not the sort of thing you boys used to do.”
“Still do,” Felix said easily, and tipped out a little more vodka onto the floor.
“Well, yeah,” Bugsy said. “But what I mean to say is, there ain’t no more like you, Felix. No more like the Prometheans that built the dam, right? Or the railroad.”
“No,” Felix said, very quietly. “I’m the last.”
Bugsy grinned, sending a thick clot of blood skating down his ruined cheek. “See? You won’t have no problem with Jackie.”
The assassin smiled tightly. He didn’t mention his own research and experience, or what they had taught him about Felix Luray, and why he hadn’t been invited to the war that had put an end to the rest of the Prometheans. A pity, the assassin thought; he’d found them useful allies in the past, despite their desire to feel that they were pulling all the strings.
Still, half a Mage—a failed Mage, if you preferred, a defrocked one—was better than none.
“So I take it our next objective is neutralizing the other genius, the Stewart boy.”
“Not at all,” Felix said, swirling his drink and savoring a slow, pleased smile. “Angel took care of that while you were busy in London and New York. Everything’s under control.”
The One-Eyed Jack and the Steel-Driving Men.
Las Vegas, Summer, 2002.
The John Henrys waited for me on the corner of Third and Bonneville, across the street from the chain-link around the construction site and in the shade of some old elms and a ragged toilet brush of a Mexican fan palm. The right-hand John Henry rested a twenty-pound sledge against his corded sweat-shining dark neck, his other hammer leaned up against the gray cinderblock wall behind him. He wore canvas pants and not much else, and if the girls giggling on the sidewalk in the sweltering heat could have seen him, they would have turned to admire the ridged expanse of his chest.
The left-hand John Henry, skeletal and paper-white behind a luxuriant growth of dark blond moustache and blazing tubercular eyes, treated his terrible cough out of the silver flask in his breast pocket. That hack around a chest full of bloody slime was so much a part of his legend he couldn’t get rid of it even dead.
Like the silk cravat with the diamond stickpin, like the nickel-plated six-shooter concealed by the fall of his stylish gray coat. Stylish in 1881, that is. A little out of place as I crossed Bonneville against the light, walking through the wall of thermonuclear Las Vegas sunshine.