A ring of duct tape dangling from his mouth, Assim walked back to the Lexan vault again. With shaking hands he taped a length of det cord along the hinge side of the door. He used smaller strips to augment the main charge. When he was done, he stood back to admire his work.
For a moment he and Evan faced each other through the Lexan.
“Ready to get yanked through the looking glass?” Assim tapped the Lexan. “We’re minutes away.”
Evan felt his heart rate quicken, so he focused on his breathing. Right now there was nothing to do but inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale.
Heading back down the aisle toward the staging point in the rear of the ballroom, Assim snapped his fingers. Two guards carried over a hefty olive green ammo can. They moved cautiously, setting down the metal box with extreme care. Assim unlatched the lid, smiled down at the contents. It took two men to lift out the initiation assembly. They did so gingerly. It was a factory-assembled unit, fifty feet of wasp yellow nonelectric shock tube wound around a coil, the blasting cap already crimped onto the end. Given that it was shock-sensitive, even a four-foot drop onto the hardwood could set it off.
The non-el shock tube, once unrolled and connected to the det cord, would function like a fuse. From a healthy standoff, Assim would flip a lever, propagating the firing impulse through the shock tube snaking across the ballroom floor to the vault door. A fraction of a second later, Evan would be lying on his back inside the blasted-open Lexan vault, bleeding from his ears.
Sensing that a climax was near, the bidders vacated their chairs, gathering around Assim.
René turned to Xalbador. “Two of our guests are missing.”
One of the other narcos said, “They’re resting in their room until the auction starts.”
“Get them,” René said.
Xalbador nodded and started out.
René turned back to the room. “Are we ready?”
Assim rose, his legs trembling from the exertion. He’d sweated through his shirt. “Just have to connect the shock tube to the det cord.”
Sark elbowed his way through the cluster. “What will you use to initiate?”
A faint whirring sound carried across the rows of empty chairs and then a loud clank. The bidders turned as one.
Evan lowered his palm from the inside panel, the vault door clicking open. He jabbed the door out, knocking the guard onto his ass, then swung it back to use as a shield. He peered from the slender gap, the Kimber .45 pointed.
“I have a suggestion,” he said.
54
Bad Dogs
From there it went fast.
Evan put his first bullet through Assim’s shoulder, making the man tumble to the side and clearing the sight line to the initiation assembly.
The toppled guard unleashed the AK at Evan, but the swung-open slab of the door deflected his fire, the rounds whining off the angled Lexan.
René looked from Evan to Assim and back to Evan, his ruddy cheeks lighting with realization. Grabbing the Widow Lakshminarayanan’s sari, he flung her in front of the initiation assembly to block Evan’s angle.
Evan shot her through the back of the calf. She screeched and balled up as he’d hoped she would. The yellow shock tube and crimped blasting cap peeked into view above the crown of her head.
Evan fired and missed, the bullet blowing out one of the legs of the piano.
From the doorway Xalbador screamed orders at the remaining guards.
René backpedaled in the surging crowd, grabbing Sark’s jacket from behind and pivoting them both, putting the man’s girth between him and the explosives.
Evan fired at the assembly again, but the volley of bullets from the guard’s AK drove the Lexan door into his arm, his shot sailing wide. The guard’s flurry was punctuated with a click, the magazine finally run dry.
Over by the doorway, Xalbador picked up the slack, firing haphazardly. His rounds sprayed the Lexan wall, but Evan tuned him out.
He aimed the .45.
Two bullets left.
The bidders stampeded for the exits, bodies and kicked-over chairs flickering across his field of vision. The blasting cap strobed in and out of view.
Even in the mayhem, he found an inner calm. Inhale. Exhale. Wait for the space between heartbeats.
He let a final cool breath pass through his teeth.
With steady, even pressure, he pulled the trigger.
The bullet struck the cap at its union with the shock tube. The first explosion was instantaneous, the shock wave lifting Assim and the widow off the floor, their limbs spread, heads corkscrewing on broken necks.
Evan withdrew behind the door into the vault, rushing to swing the hefty door shut after him. He wasn’t worried about the initial explosion. He was worried about what was coming.
The assembly was close enough to the giant spool of det cord to propogate into a bigger boom.
He didn’t have to look up to know when it happened. The air told him. The molecules seemed to still as if drawing their breath, the stunned nanosecond of calm before the hurricane.
And then everything let go.
The blast hammered the vault door the remaining inches into the frame with enough force to knock Evan across the inside of the vault. He bowling-balled through the folding chair and racked up against the rear wall.
Bright orange flame lit the world around him — it was as though he’d flown into the sun. Heat pulsed through the Lexan walls, the ceiling, even the floor. He couldn’t see anything, and for a moment he worried that he’d underestimated the charge, that he was going to bring the whole goddamned chalet down on top of him.
But a fresh wind suctioned off the flames and black smoke from all around him, the vault emerging from its sheath of fire. As the air started to clear, he looked up to see the massive chandelier plummeting down at him. By instinct he covered his head. The chandelier shattered across the transparent roof into a million brilliant pieces, each facet lit with a yellow lick of flame.
Bits of crystal tinkled across the hardwood. Bodies twitched. The entire rear wall of the chalet had blown out. Snow drifted in, swirling among the ash, settling across the piano and the corpses — a wartime tableau.
His ears didn’t ring so much as scream. His head hummed.
The vault door had wobbled open again. Sprawled on his ass inside the Lexan box, Evan blinked, trying to draw the ballroom into full focus. The scene was biblical.
They lay dead. All of them. The chairs had slid to the walls, many of them still upright. Through the gaping hole where the wall had been, Evan heard the Dobermans somewhere outside, barking and barking, notes of terror mingled with their snarls.
With a groan he found his feet and lumbered out of the Lexan vault.
The air carried the scent of sap and snow and burned flesh. Across the ballroom Sark’s charred body lay sprawled in a heap of others against the wall, his face and chest missing as if scooped out. He’d almost made it to the kitchen.
Impossibly, he wiggled.
Evan stared with incredulity. Sark heaved upward, and for a moment Evan thought he was going to sit up stiffly, a B-movie vampire rising from his coffin. But then René squirmed out from beneath the wrecked corpse. He staggered a few steps and leaned heavily against the wall.
Ash painted his forehead, and his cheeks looked raw. Evan stepped forward and raised the .45, and René swung his head heavily to face him.
The two men stared at each other across the churning air of the ballroom.
René lifted a hand, fingers splayed. “Let’s—”
Evan shot him in the chest.
René slammed against the wall. Something fell from his pocket, bouncing over the jumbled bodies before coming to rest on the floor.
A vial filled with a familiar viscous clear fluid.