The top floor of the hotel, so she recalled had once been up for sale for around a hundred million dollars, a sum so vast she wondered why anybody would bother paying so much money for something so comparatively small. She knew that the suite held three bedrooms, two bathrooms, an expansive lounge and terraces that overlooked Central Park in its entirety, but she knew that any folk with funds like that could buy a five bedroom mansion outside the city and be blissfully happy in retirement for the rest of her life for a tenth of that sum.
‘How the other half live, eh?’ Vaughn said, clearly thinking the same thing as her.
‘I wouldn’t want to be any one of them,’ Lopez replied. ‘So much money that you no longer have any sense of its value.’
Vaughn raised an eyebrow. ‘I’d give it my best shot.’
The drone was now behind the penthouse suite, where two terraces looked out to the west over the cityscape. Lopez guided the drone closer to the terraces.
‘Take it easy,’ Vaughn cautioned, ‘we don’t want them to see it.’
‘I’m on zoom,’ she replied calmly as she flew the drone around the south side of the suite, seeking the lounge windows. ‘I doubt they’ll ever know the drone was there.’
The drone drifted around to the east side, moving back over 5th Avenue and Central Park as Lopez fought to get a good line of sight into the building. The large windows reflected the bright morning sky, the sun behind the drone and the reflected light obscuring the interior of the suite.
Lopez’s heart skipped a beat as she saw movement among the light playing on the windows, the reflections of clouds translucent enough to see suited men standing inside the building.
‘Here we go,’ she said as she guided the drone in closer.
The interior of the suite was colored in shades of magnolia, the dark suits of the circle of men within contrasting sharply with their surroundings. Lopez peered at the gathering and thought she saw a single gray suit among the black.
‘Almost there,’ she whispered.
The drone hovered, descending slightly, and as Lopez got her first glimpse at the men’s faces so the sun broke through the clouds and a brightly reflected flare of sunlight ripped across her field of vision.
‘Damn!’
Lopez guided the drone to the right, hoping to change the angle of view of the drone and lose the reflected sunlight. The drone flew sideways and she glanced at the power bar to see that it was already two thirds depleted.
‘Less than ten minutes,’ Vaughn warned her. ‘Get the footage, Nicola.’
‘Stand by,’ Lopez replied in a whisper that she barely heard herself, manipulating the controls carefully.
The brilliantly flaring reflection of the sunlight faded out as the drone maneuvered to one side, and then the image cleared and Lopez gasped. She saw Gordon LeMay standing in the center of a group of men, all of them clapping and smiling as one of them handed LeMay a flute of champagne.
‘I’ve got you now, asshole,’ she chortled in delight as she watched LeMay sip from the flute as he shook the hand of a tall, sepulchral looking man dressed all in black.
‘We’re getting half of them,’ Vaughn said from the front as he watched the display and the faces of the men upon the screen. ‘Damn, we’ve got Majestic Twelve on film.’
Gordon LeMay sipped the champagne in the flute and acknowledged the smiles of greeting on the faces of the men with whom he was sharing the most expensive apartment in the western world. Truth be told he was completely amazed that he had been allowed to even enter the same room as these men, all of them worth billions, perhaps trillions of dollars each, all of them wielding more power than Presidents and Prime Ministers the world over, all of them part of a shadowy network of businessmen shaping world events to suit their own needs. Perhaps that was how they had become so wealthy and so powerful, by joining the cabal, and suddenly he found himself thinking that he too might become as wealthy and as powerful as the men around him.
‘So, how does it feel to finally be here?’ Wilms asked LeMay as he approached him.
‘It feels good,’ he replied, ‘I’m relieved to be here, for sure, I don’t mind saying.’
LeMay took another sip from his champagne and glanced out of the window across the stunning vista of Central Park and the city, and almost immediately his eye caught upon the black speck on the immaculately polished glass windows, sharply contrasted against the vibrant New York morning sky.
LeMay had spent the last thirty years working for the FBI and knew just about every surveillance trick in the book. To believe for even an instant that any agency would have been foolish enough to place a bug on the outside of the window itself seemed so outlandish that he could not even begin to entertain…
LeMay saw the speck move across the sky and then come to an abrupt halt, and in a moment of clarity he realized that he was not seeing a tiny object at the distance of the window but a larger one outside the building. He turned to Wilms, his eyes wide as he opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came forth.
LeMay tried again, but his voice was a mere croak that whistled from somewhere deep inside his throat. He felt his legs start to lose rigidity beneath him, swayed as Wilms snatched the champagne flute from his grasp as two more men moved in behind LeMay.
LeMay toppled sideways, unable to control himself as he was caught before he hit the thickly carpeted floor of the apartment. The two men lay him down on his back, and LeMay stared helplessly up at them as the members of Majestic Twelve moved into a circle around him and stared down with a strange, detached interest.
For a brief moment LeMay wondered, hoped, that this was all some bizarre ritual, a part of his acceptance into Majestic Twelve, but somehow he knew that it was no such thing.
Number One looked down pityingly at LeMay as he spoke.
‘Dear Gordon, such a shame to have been deceived in such a way, but I’m afraid that deception is what we’re all about. Surely you must have known that a man with such shamefully limited financial means could never expect to become a member of our cabal?’
LeMay tried to answer, his mouth gaping open and closed.
‘He looks like a beached fish,’ Number Three said as though examining an injured insect. ‘For God’s sake, put him out of his misery.’
‘Not yet,’ Number One replied, ‘we can’t allow the Defense Intelligence Agency the luxury of recovering his body with that implant in place, can we? Better that we remove it soon and ensure that they don’t learn anything of our identities.’
LeMay felt tears flood his eyes as he tried to understand what they were referring to. He tried again to speak but nothing came out, his body completely paralyzed and his heartbeat feeling slow in his chest.
‘Pancuronium bromide,’ Victor Wilms explained, staring down at LeMay. ‘It’s used with general anesthesia in surgery for muscle relaxation. Side-effects include moderately raised heart rate, excessive salivation, apnea and respiratory depression, rashes, flushing, and sweating. Did you know that in Belgium and the Netherlands, pancuronium is recommended in the protocol for euthanasia? After administering sodium thiopental to induce coma, pancuronium is delivered in order to stop breathing.’
LeMay knew that he would die if he did not do something to prove his worth to the group, and he looked at Wilms and swivelled his eyes back to the suite’s main windows. Wilms frowned for a moment as LeMay repeated the motion, and then he turned his head and stood up and he noticed the speck hovering outside the suite.
Wilms’s composed expression collapsed into panic.
‘We’re being watched!’
The twelve members of Majestic Twelve whirled to look out of the window, and in an instant they all saw the drone staring back at them. For a moment it hovered there right before them and then it suddenly descended and shot out of sight toward the north.