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 beautiful 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.