Temple noticed that the paired gun barrels had lowered slightly. The masked invaders were surprised by what they were hearing. Could the Synth talk itself out of such a double-barreled threat?
“What of this Phantom Mage you mention?” one Darth asked.
Carmen stood, also sensing their confusion. “Only our most prized and recent recruit. He was a marvel. He could have produced the Strip-long illusion you demanded. He maintained his anonymity to the last, but I know he was Max Kinsella, playing a double game as himself and this lowly nightclub magician named the Phantom Mage.”
Temple felt a gentle tap on her calf and glanced down without moving her head.
Her eyes finally had adapted to the room’s dimness. She saw a long black furry tail.
Louie!
No. This was a longer-haired, plumed tail. Midnight Louise had guided her here.
Thanks a lot, sister, Temple thought. Maybe you can distract them while I claw out my gun.
“Who the bloody hell is Max Kinsella, and why would anyone want to kill him?” one transgendered voice demanded.
The three Synth members seemed struck dumb, as Temple was. Come on; Max had starred in a major Strip hotel show, billboards and all! True, he’d performed sans surname, but the Mystifying Max had been huge until he had first disappeared two years earlier. Where had these Vader creeps been, on the dark side of the moon?
“Did one of you, perhaps?” the other Vader twin asked.
The entire scene was getting so absurd and Alice-in-Wonderlandish that Temple was forgetting to be afraid and was getting angry instead. Which was dangerous, but also liberating.
She waited for the Synth’s answer—her presence “unbeknownst,” as some put it, to the others, making her the third armed but so far invisible person on the premises.
“We don’t know,” Hal said. “As we told you, Cosimo was our maestro, our go-between. He’s the one who would tell us what to do, when we were called upon. Meanwhile, I guess we felt useful, part of a pending, monstrously amazing illusion, our parting shot to the world that had once applauded us. We were all in the same sorry boat—passé and poor. Cosimo waved his magic words, and we believed we’d get the best revenge—living well. We trusted him.”
“And he betrayed us!” the pair of Darths said as one.
“I doubt it,” Czarina said.
“You saw it in your crystal ball?” a Vader jeered.
“No. I just knew Cosimo. We trusted him because he was a straight shooter.” She regarded the leveled weapons. “Oh.”
“Perhaps Cosimo was robbed,” Hal said. “If you knew of this … hidden treasure, wouldn’t others of your … type also possibly know of it?”
Silence prevailed. Temple was watching a true stalemate. The intruders wanted information, not blood. The Synth as represented here certainly was nothing sinister, although that Ophiuchus and alchemy mumbo jumbo would appeal to anyone with an occult mind, like those drawn to magic. Someone had been playing both ends against the middle, and it was getting obvious to everyone in the room that they all might be the “ends.”
Standing there, Temple let the key phrases stamped on her mental tape recorder replay: money and guns and explosives, oh my … stockpiled for years, oh my … all-time major Vegas heist, oh my … a team of magicians providing a distraction … just cause … bloody hell.
She remembered that some 2001 Al-Qaeda surveillance tapes of Vegas casinos, including New York, New York, with its faux-Manhattan exterior skyline, had turned up from foreign sources years later, and that Mohamed Atta and his 9/11 suicide crew had visited Vegas before the world-devastating plan was put into motion on the other coast… .
Terrorists were drawn to Vegas as a target … of destruction or bankrolling. Civic powers were always underplaying, perhaps even concealing, that fact to keep the tourists coming.
And … years ago, before 9/11 in 2001, before the previous bombing at the Twin Towers in Manhattan, another terrorist group had issued a “dead or alive” Western-version death fatwa on a teenage Max Kinsella for his youthful antiterrorist activities. The Irish Republican Army, aka the IRA. Temple knew Max’s thriller-novel past, but had always considered it a cul-de-sac of personal ancient history. Not a current concern.
The connections jumped synapses in her brain, jumbling around, not adding up to a scenario she could link into anything sensible.
The Synth members were having trouble too.
“Look,” said Hal, striding forward, “you’ve—”
Carry a gun in your purse, and you’re depending on crooks to give you time to react.
Hold two guns in your hand and—
The chilling, preliminary double clicks seemed simultaneous with a booming, double-rapping sound. The burnt whiff of firearms discharge in the small room was overwhelming. Temple’s hands clapped over her ears before her conscious mind could kick her in the damn-fool shins.
The motion brought every eye to her … and then came the sickening sound of clicks from all sides, triggers being pulled to release a hail of … not bullets, but—
—hidden doors all around the room springing open at once! A swarm of black screaming figures leaped through them like a circus act of black panthers—a riot of cats hurtling onto Darth Vader cloaks and climbing them, heavy fabric rending with audible groans from the weight of three swarming feline bodies to a cloak. The wearers bent at the knees, screaming as leaping cats clung with all fours to their forearms, while the third attached to each climbed their heads from behind to start clawing the sinister face masks, all the while screaming like, well, tomcats fighting, a sound echoed in double strength by their startled victims.
By then, both visitors’ guns had hit the carpeted floor with a thunk, thunk.
Apparently the Darth Vaders were all scary masks and no bloodlust. They’d fired warning shots into the floor. Now they were cursing and backing away in tattered cloaks through two of the open doors, pursued by … cannibal cats.
Temple had no intention of following the fading Vader invaders, even if they were disarmed. The Neon Nightmare offered too many escape routes. Carmen was eyeing the fallen semiautomatics like a hungry tiger, but the other two were staring at Temple. Temple heard a soft click behind her and felt an opening door bump her rear. She knew it was time for a dramatically astounding exit.
“Sorry,” she told the literally shell-shocked Synth members. “I was looking for the restroom. This place is a maze. Anyone ever tell you that? And you have a very bad infestation of really big rats. I won’t be coming back.”
By then the attack cats had also ebbed into the “maze.” Temple backed through the door Midnight Louise had opened, leaving the Synth still immobile and herself in the slightly lambent dark. Which was lit by an honor guard of vivid green irises pointing the way to a presumably vermin-free path downward and out to the main nightclub floor.
She took it and would ask questions later.
At least she knew for sure that Max’s magic fingerprints had been all over this place. If he had also been the Phantom Mage, the odds he had died were fifty-fifty. What Rafi had described had sounded too traumatic for any sane person to set up for himself. On the other hand, a master illusionist like Max would want any feigned final exit to look impossible to survive.
Murder in 3-D
When Temple awoke the next morning, she felt as if she’d been in that old Memorex tape commercial. “Was it real? Or was it Memorex?”
Her memory felt hung over. The Synth showdown she’d witnessed at Neon Nightmare unwound in her mind like a dream, even though a nightmare scenario involving disgruntled but corny stage magicians, the disbanded IRA, and Max Kinsella was starting to add up to something big.