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 being 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.