Private Vegas (Private 9)

Chapter 106

I WAS HOME at my beach house with the air-conditioning on high, wearing a suit and tie for my nine p.m. teleconference with the COO of the Hong Kong office. We were getting into the nitty-gritty of the operations budget when I got an urgent text from Mo-bot saying, Turn on the tube. It’s about the Sumaris.

I typed, I was there when they went down.

Mo-bot returned fire in caps. GO TO CNN. NOW.

I told Fred Kam that I had to call him back in five minutes, then I switched on the tube. I found the story running on CNN under the banner Breaking News.

I was looking at one of those picture-in-picture views. There, on the small picture, was a large, bearded man identified as Colonel Balar Aram of the kingdom of Sumar. He was behind a podium that bore the emblem of the United Nations, and he was wearing a stiff, sand-colored uniform with ribbons over the breast pocket, stars above the brim of his hat.

Surrounding the small picture of Colonel Aram was a larger picture of a violent protest on a wide, dusty street. The crawl at the bottom of the screen said, Sumari protesters storm the American embassy in Larumin, capital of Sumar.

The street protest was moving toward a two-story gray building with an American flag flying over the door. The protesters were highly agitated; street-wide chains of angry men with banners reading Down with the U.S.A. Down with American pigs. As I watched, they began throwing stones and bottles at men leaving the embassy heading toward black cars.

I tuned into the interview. Anderson Cooper was saying, “Colonel Aram, you are head of Ra Galiz. That’s the special forces division of the Sumari military.”

“Yes, and in particular, we are the official guard to the royal family. Both Khezir Mazul and Gozan Remari are cousins to King Naraal, may he live forever, and the royal family has sent a formal rebuke to the United States for this outrage against our country.”

“As I understand it,” Cooper said, “Mazul and Remari are being questioned in the murder of a desk clerk in a hotel in Los Angeles—”

“That is a lie and it is an obscenity,” Aram interrupted. “Our people are principled. T

hey would never kill anyone unless it was on the battlefield. And never a woman. Khezir Mazul is a national hero, and his uncle Gozan is a learned man, a scholar. He has no violence in him.”

Aram continued, “The arrest and attempted expulsion from the U.S. is an outrage against a law-abiding nation. Prince Khezir and Prince Gozan will be released, not because of diplomatic immunity, but because the police cannot charge them. There is no evidence of any kind. This is just like when the Italian diplomat Carlo Rizzo was arrested on the word of a chambermaid.”

In the background picture, cars were being rocked on the street in Larumin, protesters trying to open the car doors. It was maddening. How had Mazul and Remari become the victims of this story?

Maybe that had been the idea from the beginning.

I’d been looking at the Sumaris as criminals attacking women of Los Angeles. But maybe they’d been playing on the world stage from the beginning.

Chapter 107

I CALLED LUKE WARREN and he answered on the first ring.

“Did you hear, Jack? About the protest at the UN special session?”

“I saw it and I think I finally get the whole Remari-Mazul crime spree. I think this was a publicity stunt,” I said. “See if you agree. They did the crimes without any fear of doing the time and now the United States is being accused of setting them up. We don’t have a particle of proof, so we’re being painted as villains.”

“The rapes? The assaults? This is good publicity?”

“Had you ever heard of Sumar before these guys came to LA?” I asked him.

“Not really. I wasn’t much of a student,” the captain said.

“Well, Luke, you’ve heard of Sumar now. Look what Remari and Mazul have brought home to their nation: Headline news. A beleaguered small country, a little-known hunk of rock, is victimized by the U.S.A. See? No one will remember what they were accused of and yet they’re in the big time now. Sumar will be recruiting their army on this bull crap for decades.”

Warren said, “Well, back here on the local scene, Mazul and Remari will be released in the morning. We have nothing on them. No confession. No evidence. No blond female complainants. No bodies. Even the drunken doorman has gone underground. We have nothing on them at all.”

“I’m sorry, Luke. They played all of us. They got us good.”

PART FIVE

A FAMILY AFFAIR

Chapter 108