Deep Fire Rising m-6 Read online

  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 be
ing 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.”

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  Before Mercer could react to her statement, she cranked the nimble little car onto Mandalay Bay Road and then onto Las Vegas Boulevard, the casino-lined stretch of highway known around the world as the Strip. She blew through a red light and accelerated away from the traffic snarl she’d created.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, Doctor.”

  Mercer struggled to find his mental equilibrium in the wake of what had just happened. As the adrenaline wore off, his legs and shoulder throbbed in time with his still-pounding heart. His breathing came in deep gasps. “Exactly how many ways are there to interpret ‘you’re going to die anyway’?”

  “What I meant was that they will keep coming after you,” she said from the shadows. “They want you dead.”

  As they tore past one of the Strip’s more garish neon signs, a wash of pink and teal light flooded the dim interior of the BMW. Mercer finally got to see his rescuer.

  She was in profile, her mouth held taut in concentration, and the lights played against her smooth skin, kaleidoscoping in the planes and angles, at once making her beauti
ful and demonic. Her hair was shimmering black, cropped short around her head and curling in tendrils down her slender neck. She looked at him at that moment.

  She wore black-framed designer glasses that gave her a no-nonsense air. Her large eyes were almond shaped and wide spaced belying some Asian ancestry. Above them, her brows were saucy arcs. Had he not just escaped his second assassination attempt in four hours, he would have found her attractive. Stunning, actually.

  And then he looked closer at her eyes and saw what drew him so quickly. It was the eyes themselves that he would know forever and how her beauty made the pain in them that much more difficult to witness. In them he saw a despair that seemed to drop into infinity, as if she’d seen horrors no person should ever see. It was like looking into the suffering eyes of a refugee child. Or those of a mother who’d just lost one. Whatever had led her to this moment had so haunted her that it looked as if she’d never come back.

  Mercer had to fight himself to put aside the upwelling of empathy she evoked and concentrate on what had just happened. He asked the most obvious question. “Not that I’m not grateful, but I know you didn’t happen along at the right moment, so do you mind telling me who you are, who those gunmen were and why they want me dead?”

  “My name is Tisa Nguyen.” Her last name was a common Vietnamese surname, but her first, which rhymed with Melissa, was one Mercer had never heard before. “And those men were sent to kill you because of your work at Area 51.”

  That she used the name of America’s premier research facility wasn’t a surprise. After all, it was one of the best known secrets in the world. What startled him was that it seemed everyone and their sister knew he was working there. Ira Lasko was in for a shock if Mercer somehow survived long enough to tell him.