“As you all know, we’re headed for the U.S. to attend a convention and try to sell our beer. In addition, I’ll be meeting with members of the U.S. government and will be discussing our recent trip. Hopefully, we’ll be able to trade for some intelligence on our next objective. But that’s for me to worry about. What you are going to be doing is selling beer. Gurum will be running that side of things. I don’t want any caillean stuff to interfere. Gurum has done a good job this far and it’s time for us to backstop him. The girls will be wearing traditional dress, handing out beer and smiling at the customers. The boys will be making sure the customers keep their hands to themselves. Pictures may be taken. In that case, smile for the camera. I don’t know how much of it Adams, Vanner and I will be available for, so you’re mostly going to be on your own.
“Las Vegas is called Sin City. There are various vices available to the visitor. But I know that the Keldara are far too meek and gentle to engage in such things as fornicating with prostitutes, gambling and drinking.”
He waited for the expected chuckles to die down and then shook his head.
“Okay, so maybe you’re not. But there are lots of ways to get in trouble that you’re not aware of. So most of the trip I’d like you to stay around your rooms or down at the booth on your schedule, which we’ll come up with and publish. I’ll try to squeeze out some free time so you can see the town with local guides. After the convention, though, I suspect it will be back into the belly of the beast. So have as much fun as you can.”
“Kildar,” one of the Keldara women said as he hung up. “Phone.”
“Jenkins,” Mike said, picking up the handset.
“Parker,” the caller said, briefly. “Answer to your question: Your activities came to the attention of MI-6. They put the Georgians together with the Americans and came up with you as being the likely person. When we were questioned on it, routinely, we were noncommittal. They apparently have specific concerns, unspecified according to the report. My guess is that they want to talk about their unspecified concerns.”
“We’re carrying our gear,” Mike pointed out. “A search of the plane will lead to embarassing questions. For that matter, we’re going to need some interference run in the States.”
“You’re not debarking or unloading until Las Vegas, right?” Parker asked.
“Correct.”
“It’s handled,” Parker said. “When you land in Vegas, get your troops settled in at whatever they’re doing. You’ll be contacted at your hotel and flown out to Nellis for debrief and data comparison.”
“Got it,” Mike said. “Anything else?”
“Not here.”
“Out, then,” Mike said, hanging up the phone.
“Kildar,” Vanner said as he finished. “We’ve got something.”
“Something useful?” Mike asked. “Finally?”
“Very.”
“There were over two hundred file snippets on the hard drive,” Vanner said, leaving his trayback down with the laptop on it as the plane descended. “I haven’t had time to look at all of them, much less get a feel for who all the people on them are, but I found this…”
He hit play and the screen showed a masked but naked man in bed with two women, girls really. One of them Mike recognized immediately as their target, the other was unknown.
“The other female is Ludmilla Seventy-Eight,” Vanner said, continuing to let the video stream without sound. The scene was pretty clear. Neither of the women were having fun as the man worked “Ludmilla” over with what looked like a soldering iron and a pair of pliers. The target, Natalya, was simply chained to the bed in a position where she had to watch.
“The video is broken, but the end is there,” Vanner continued in a strained voice.
The next snippet showed the same scene, but in that portion Ludmilla was on her face with the masked man apparently taking her anally. From what was visible of her back, she had apparently been whipped in one of the missing segments. As Mike watched, the masked man wrapped a thin cord around the girl’s neck and strangled her while he was taking her. When her struggles had ended, permanently, the man got off of her and the video abruptly ended.
“There’s no way to tell that that’s Grantham,” Mike commented.
“Well, there’s one corroborating item,” Vanner said, backing the video up and turning on the sound while handing Mike a pair of earphones.
Mike didn’t really want to watch the video again but he put on the earphones anyway.
“Fucking bitch,” the masked man snarled. “Little fucking whore. I’m going to do you in every hole and then fucking kill you. You’re playing with the big boys, now! Beg me for your life and you might live, bitch…”
The video continued in the same vein for some time and Mike finally hit the pause button.
“And?” he asked.
“Here’s a video of Grantham talking to the cameras,” Vanner said.
Mike watched that video as well and listened to the voice with his eyes closed, then played the snuff film as well with his eyes closed.
“Same voice,” Mike said, shaking his head.
“I thought so, too,” Vanner said. “But something was bugging me about it. So I took a good look at the video.”
He brought up a screen capture in PhotoShop. The capture was of the masked man, stretched out next to the murdered girl and working her over. He’d apparently stretched his back and he was at full height.
“The bed is a standard European double,” Vanner said, bringing up a ruler tool. “The height of the bed is seventy-eight inches.” He laid the ruler down and got a length off of it. “Senator Grantham is six foot one or seventy-three inches.” He laid the ruler down and got the height off of the figure in the video.
“Doing the math,” he continued, pulling out a cocktail napkin and sketching the numbers on it, “I get that the guy in the video is only five feet ten inches tall. More like five nine. Max of five eleven.”
“So what’s with the voice?” Mike asked. Something was nagging at him about the video but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
“Various ways it could be cloaked,” Vanner said, shrugging as the wheels chirped on touchdown. “There’s a device that goes on the vocal cords that can change a voice. Not perfectly, but close enough for this. Not my area of expertise and I don’t have the equipment to do a really tight voice compare. But what this looks like is a deliberate frame of the senator by person or persons unknown.”
“And you can bet that Traskel is in it up to his patrician eyeballs.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Mr. Jenkins,” the first man through the door said, holding out a limp hand to be shaken. “Horace Wythe-Harcourt of the Foreign Office. A pleasure to meet you.”
“And you, sir,” Mike said, nodding as two more men came through the door of the plane.
“Jasper Drake, MI-5,” the second man said, nodding. “And my counterpart from MI-6, John Carlson-Smith.” Drake was tall and slender with an air of respectability about him that would have done for a banker.
“Pleasure,” Carlson-Smith said, shaking Mike’s hand firmly. Carlson-Smith was a short-coupled, broadly muscled blond man with a nose twisted from a fight.
“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” Mike asked, waving them to seats in the office compartment.