Then they heard an approaching helicopter. "Roof!" Grady yelled. He and Denniston pulled guns and ran back to the fire stairs.
As they were climbing to the top, they could hear the chopper landing. When they broke out onto the roof, Beano was waiting. He delivered a solid right cross to Grady's square jaw. The Fed catapulted back onto the landing and was out.
Alex, Tommy, and Victoria were running to the chopper, which was just setting down.
Beano looked over at a shocked Denniston, who was now holding his pistol, half-pointed at him. Beano kicked at the gun and it went flying out of Denniston's hand. He and Denniston faced off. Beano didn't think this blond pastel prince was going to be much trouble. Then he got the Vanilla Surprise: Denniston lost his temper and exploded in a rage, charging Beano and taking him down.
Tommy saw this from the helicopter and looked over at Beano, who was now rolling around with some guy in a tan suit he'd never seen before.
Tommy had thought the building was on fire and wanted to get the hell out of there. He had not seen the trash can fires because Beano had lit them and let the floor fill with smoke before breaking the windows and steering a shaken Tommy out of the conference room, where he had just finished packing up his briefcase with stock certificates. Victoria shouted, "Up on the roof!" and he'd gone without asking questions, lugging his briefcase with him. Now, he looked out of the helicopter and saw his personal corporate geologist getting pounded. He climbed down to help.
"Only got room for one more!" the chopper pilot yelled, so Tommy, who didn't want to lose Dr. Clark just yet, got out, walked over to where Denny Denniston was choking Beano, and calmly kicked the Vanilla Surprise in the head. He helped Beano up and they moved to the chopper…
"What about that other guy?" the pilot said, pointing at Denniston, who was sitting with his head in his hands.
"He said it's okay to come back and get him on the next trip," Tommy said.
The helicopter lifted off and away. They flew to a chopper pad five blocks down and were let off. Beano, Alex, Tommy, and Victoria got out, then the helicopter pilot lifted off to return for the last man on the roof. Alex was shaken. He'd had enough and wanted to go back to his office. Tommy, Victoria, and Beano cabbed back to the Penn Mutual Building and slipped into the parking garage, where they got in Tommy's rented car and sped away without being seen in the commotion.
"Here's to the fucking oil," Tommy said, as he raised a glass of Scotch and drank it down. He already looked half in the bag, grinning at his captive audience of Beano, Miss Luna, Wade and Keith Summerland. Keith still had his left ear bandaged from where Victoria had hit him a couple of days before. "Where're these fucking girls?" Tommy asked Wade, who had made a deal to have some strippers brought over from the Pussycat Theater in the Tenderloin District.
"They oughta be here any minute, Tommy," Keith said, and Tommy poured himself another glass, then looked over at Victoria.
"You say you've never been to Vegas?" he asked her, and she shook her head. "This broad looks real familiar. This is like fucking drivin' me nuts, but I'm gonna pin it down."
They were in Tommy's suite at the Ritz. He had the stock certificates in his open briefcase on the table. "So here's the deal," he said, turning back to business and looking at Beano with a lopsided grin. "Since Dr. Sutton turned out to be a fucking hemorrhoid specialist instead of a physicist, I ain't giving him his end. His twenty percent goes to me. And as for your twenty percent, Dr. Clark, I'm thinking it's way too much. What the fuck did you do?"
"Mr. Rina," Beano said. He had lost his prop glasses on the roof in the struggle with Denniston and was now squinting at Tommy, pretending he could barely see him. "I did everything. I found the field. Without me, we wouldn't have the oil company at all. We made a deal, and a deal is a deal," he said lamely.
"You got our deal on paper?" Tommy asked, grinning maliciously.
"Well, no," Beano said, "but we have a verbal agreement."
"We do? Got any witnesses to this fucking verbal agreement?"
"Dr. Sutton-"
"He don't count. Anybody else?"
"No sir, but surely you remember-"
"No, I got no recollection of no deal with you, douchebag. And since that makes it your word against mine, I sure hope you ain't calling me a liar, 'cause if you are, I'll fucking ballpeen your geeky ass through the floor." And then he smiled and looked at Wade and Keith, who were smiling with him. "This business shit ain't so tough. Everybody makes it sound tough. Not tough at all." The two ex-linebackers' smiles were strained and unnatural, like the grille of a fifties Buick. Tommy was only five-eight, but he scared the two exlinebackers to death.
Joe Rina pulled up to the front entrance of the white alabaster Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Stockton Street. He got out of his chartered limousine and walked on the balls of his feet into the lobby where Reo Wells was waiting for him. They moved without talking into the bar and sat at a table in the back. It was five-thirty in the evening, and the bar was beginning to fill up. The sounds of clinking glasses and laughter masked their hushed conversation.
"What've you got?" Joe said softly.
"I don't know what the hell's going on here, Mr. Rina, but something sure is."
"Lay it out."
"Tommy is definitely hanging with the guy whose picture you faxed to me. They been all over the place. Right now he's upstairs with the guy and some overweight woman named Laura Luna. He's also got two of your people from Las Vegas, Keith and Wade Summer-land."
Joe flinched slightly. He had fired the Summerlands for doing a chip skim in the Bahamas two months ago. He had told Tommy to take care of them; now he was hanging with them instead. He pulled his emotions back. 'What about my five million?"
"Never saw it, Mr. Rina. But that doesn't mean it's not in his briefcase or in his luggage."
"Right. How many people do you have here?" Joe asked; his anger was burning, the ash from that emotional fire making his eyes black, his voice brittle.
"Five guys, including me. All graduates of John Wayne High. Event-trained, ex-Delta Force incursion specialists."
"Okay, let's go find out what my big brother is up to." They got up and walked out of the bar right past Theodore X. Bates, who picked up the house phone and dialed Tommy's suite, letting the phone ring once and hanging up before Tommy could answer. The call would signal Beano and Victoria that Joe was on his way up.
Joe and Reo Wells took the elevator to Tommy's floor and met up with two specialists in gray suits, with eyes like licked stones. They were standing in the fire stairs. Reo referred to them only by their mission names, Doughboy and Reefer.
"Okay, you know the S.I.O.P. Get the whole unit on standby," he told them.
Doughboy, who was the unit XO, started to whisper into his walkie-talkie. After a minute, a door opened down the hall and another man in a gray suit, with an earpiece, stepped out and waved Reo over. They walked down to the door where the man was standing and entered the room without talking.
Joe found himself looking at two men and a lot of sophisticated equipment. Three tubes attached to a junction box and computer were sticking through the wall into the adjoining suite.
"What the hell is all this?" Joe demanded.
"Anti-terrorist wall scope," Reo said. "Your brother is next door in that room." He pointed to the wall with the cables through it.
Joe looked at him flatly, his expression demanding an explanation.
"If you want, we can take out his back-up right through the wall."
"How? You can't see them," Joe asked, amazed at all of the equipment that was stashed around. It had come out of four large suitcases, which lay open and mostly empty on the floor. There were two large helmets with full-face-plate visors lying on the bed. Each helmet was hooked up to an assault rifle by flexible metal cable that ran from the huge sophisticated gunsight into the left side of the helmet. Another cable ran out of the other side of the helmet and was connected to the computer, which was attached to cables stuck into the wall.