Between them stood a big white guy with a military haircut and military bearing. He was leaning with his back to a door. She noted a gun bulge, chest-high, under the suit jacket.
The muscle’s head swiveled, took them both in.
Varjan went by a staircase to her right, saw in her peripheral vision that Potter, the Canadian assassin, was climbing with a VIP badge around his neck.
She smeared an easy smile across her face and acted a little tipsy as she ambled to the security guy.
“This where the VIP bash is at?” she asked shyly.
“No, ma’am.”
“That right?” Cruz said, also acting like he’d had a few. “I was told this was the place too.”
“Me three,” Potter said behind her.
The bodyguard seemed relaxed, in control, not bothered by them or the odd outfits they wore.
“Well, I’m Philip Stapleton, director of security for Victorious, and I can tell you there’s no party up here. Yet.”
“Yet?” Varjan said, lifting her VIP pass to show him as she slid closer.
“So we’re early?” Cruz said.
The question distracted Stapleton just long enough for Varjan to spring at him and get the blade of the carbon knife up against the side of his neck, right under the jawbone and across his carotid.
“One wrong move, and I’ll bleed you right here,” Varjan whispered.
Cruz came in beside them, took the pistol from Stapleton’s chest holster.
“Open the door now,” Varjan said.
Cruz set the muzzle of the guard’s pistol against his temple. “Your call.”
“It’s coded,” the guard said. But he gave them the number.
Potter keyed the code into the pad by the door. They heard the door lock click open. Knife blade still tight to Stapleton’s jaw, Varjan pushed him through. The other two assassins followed her, stepping inside fast.
“Nobody move,” Varjan said to the people in the room as Cruz kicked the door shut behind him. “Or this man dies.”
Chapter 97
We reached the outskirts of Atlantic City at 6:40 on Monday evening. Out the window and far below the FBI helicopter, life was going on. From that height, you’d never have known that the country had been under martial law and in the grip of one constitutional crisis after another for the past several days.
My cell phone buzzed, alerting me to a text. It was Nina Davis again.
Please, Dr. Cross. I need your help. I think someone is stalking me, not the other way around. And I’m scared.
I stared at the text, and then answered: Still tied up in the investigation. Stay home. If you feel threatened, call local police. I will call as soon as I can.
Rather than wait for an answer, I turned the phone off.
“Police lights,” Carstensen said, looking out the window on her side of the chopper. “Heading toward our landing zone. Pilot, can you find out why?”
“Roger that,” the pilot said.
Now I could see the police cars, five of them, racing east toward the ocean.
The pilot came back on. “Police in Atlantic City say there was a murder and a vicious assault and robbery in the Tropicana garage. Three victims, three assailants, all dressed in costumes.”
“As long as it’s not about us,” Carstensen said. “Put us on that roof.”
“What did they steal?” I asked.
“VIP passes to the big show.”
“What kind of costumes?”
“Didn’t say,” the pilot said. “But I’ll ask.”
We circled, the helicopter shuddering in the wind before landing on a helipad atop the Tropicana casino. We jumped out into a chill, raw sea breeze.
Carstensen spoke with the casino’s head of security while Mahoney and I hustled to a hatch and a stairway. We waited for her outside, and then we all walked together north several blocks toward Boardwalk Hall, a famous sports and entertainment venue where some of history’s greatest boxing matches had been held.
That night, however, the marquee read
The three of us went to the main gate and showed our badges and credentials to security. Carstensen quietly told the guard in charge to let us in and keep our presence to himself or she’d have him arrested for obstruction of justice.
The lobby and the hallways of the venue were jammed with video-gamers, most dressed as Victorious avatars, all pressing toward the event hall itself.
“Ten thousand five hundred capacity,” Mahoney said.
“Narrow the search,” Carstensen said. “We’re not looking in the cheap seats.”
We split up. Mahoney headed north, and Carstensen went south. I climbed as high as I could go and came out in the nosebleed section. The auditorium was already more than half full. There was rap music playing and a festive atmosphere around a large wrestling ring that filled the center of the floor. Inside the ring, there were six empty gaming stations, and television cameras on arms swung around above them.
I got out my pocket binoculars and used them to peer beyond the ring to a stage at the other end of the hall where a band was setting up. I scanned everyone on the stage but did not see who I was looking for.
Remembering Carstensen’s remark about ignoring the cheap seats, I looked all around the wrestling ring, the first ten rows, best seats in the house. Nothing.
But then I looked directly across the auditorium and one deck down, toward a row of skyboxes. Most were dark, which surprised me. Maybe e-sports weren’t a big enough business yet to attract a skybox sort of corporate clientele.
Whatever the reason, there was only one that appeared occupied. The lights were on. I moved over until I was directly across from that box and looked through the binoculars.
The first thing I saw was a woman with her back to me. She wore a glam outfit and a black wig, like the avatar Celes Chere. Beside her, also with his back to me, stood a big lanky guy wearing a black cowboy hat and the sort of long, hemmed duster that horsemen wear in the rain. Just like the avatar Mr. Marston.
I almost took my attention off the skybox but then noticed movement beyond the two. I moved another five feet to my left and saw Austin Crowley and Sydney Bronson, the wunderkind founders of Victorious Gaming, and Philip Stapleton, the company’s director of security.
Crowley was sitting forward in a club chair, fingers pressed in a steeple pose, staring through his thick black glasses at Bronson, who had his head down and was working furiously on a laptop. Stapleton was slumped in a chair behind Crowley. His eyes were closed and he was bleeding profusely from a head wound. Standing behind Bronson was a man wearing the white robes of the Victorious avatar Gabriel.
I could see only part of the angel. The cowboy blocked my full view of his head.
“Cross?” the pilot called. The static was heavy.
“Copy.”
“You asked how the assailants at the Tropicana were dressed. A cowboy, an angel, and a punk rocker.”
In the skybox, Bronson took his attention off his computer, looked toward the big cowboy, and nodded.
The cowboy walked away from the window and straight across the room to Bronson, then paused, his back to me. Bronson handed the cowboy his computer, and the cowboy left the skybox.
But if I hadn’t been standing in that exact spot, I might have missed the latex mask the guy dressed as Gabriel wore, the way his left arm dangled oddly, and what looked like a pistol in his right hand. The veterinarian and Jared Goldberg both said that the president’s killer had been wounded in the left elbow.
I fiddled with the focus, trying to make sure. But then the woman dressed as Celes Chere turned to peer out the window and down on the building audience.