Private Vegas (Private 9)

Balar pulled the window drapes closed.

He said to Gozan in Sumarin, “This is not a holiday, stupid. This is work. And now you and your demented nephew have gone too far. Yes, Kheziralar. I mean you.”

Gozan said, “I told you that this was a mistake.”

Balar entered the smaller, second bath, yanked the shower curtain from the rod, spread it on the floor. He told Khezir to help him move the girl from his bed to the bathroom floor, and when she was lying on the plastic curtain, Balar took a gun from his inside jacket pocket. He screwed the suppressor onto the muzzle and shot her once in the head, twice in the chest.

Fffut, ffut, ffut.

Gozan felt his own blood leave him. It was as if the lights were flickering. He wasn’t a crazy man. He wasn’t evil. He didn’t want these women to die.

Balar was saying, “Gozan, put on your shoes.”

Gozan got into the small elevator with Balar, stood next to him, smelled what the man had eaten for dinner, and tried not to panic or get sick. He kept his eyes on the café menu on the panel above the buttons and asked no questions, because he knew none would be answered.

The car bumped to a stop. Gozan and Balar got out and walked toward the reception desk, where a stout middle-aged woman in a hotel uniform put down the phone and smiled.

“Good evening, gentlemen. How may I help you?”

The woman’s name tag read L. Bird.

Balar said, “Miss Bird, my name is Colonel Balar Aram. I am from the Sumar mission to the United States.” He spoke quickly and with a heavy accent.

“Oh,” said the desk clerk. She looked at the ID the man presented.

Balar said, “Your guests Mr. Remari and Mr. Mazul are of the royal family of Sumar, and their lives are in imminent danger. I must take them out by the service elevator. Do you understand? No one can use the elevator until we are gone. You have the credit card imprint?”

“For Mr. Remari? Yes, absolutely.”

“Consider this express checkout.”

“Absolutely,” the woman said again. She gave Balar the key to the service elevator and directions to the alley behind the hotel, and he gave the woman a hundred dollars.

Gozan sat with Khezir in the rear of the SUV as the Black Guard cleaned the room, removed the bodies through the back door, then returned to the reception area, where they destroyed the computer at the front desk and ripped out the surveillance camera. He could hear the muzzle fire through the glass when they shot the clerk.

Khezir said, “I hear sirens. Do you hear them?”

It was about two o’clock in the morning. Gozan wasn’t sure he and Khezzy were going to see the sun come up. Since its socialist revolution in the 1950s, Sumar had been a secular state. But if Gozan had believed in a God, now would have been the time to pray.

Instead, he just said to his nephew, “Don’t worry, Khezzy. Balar is taking care of us. We will be okay.”

Chapter 84

IT WAS EVENING in Aspen: birds calling out to one another, nice smell of evergreens and meadow grass in the air, no traffic on Ridge Road.

Christian Scott thought he was going to like his new assignment.

He was parked on the side of the road behind a clump of conifers, tracking Bryce and Barbie Cooper so he could warn Bryce if he saw he was about to get murdered. Jack felt he owed it to Hal Archer to get leverage that might knock some time off Archer’s inevitable life sentence, so he’d sent Scotty.

With the help of Private’s intelligence division, Scotty had gotten into the Coopers’ enormous house, planted bugs, cloned Barbie’s phone, and when their chauffeured Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud pulled onto Ridge Road heading south, Scotty knew where the couple was going.

In a little while, Robert Redford, superstar and environmentalist, would be showing his film Watershed at a benefit to save the Colorado River held at the summer home of publishing magnate Jean-Claude Dressler.

Scotty followed the Rolls as his laptop read out details about Dressler’s forty-million-dollar home, the forty thousand square feet of glass, mahogany, and limestone in the style of Tuscany circa the eighteenth century.

Scotty was wondering how all this luxury squared with preserving the environment when he saw the compound up ahead: several gabled stone buildings with tall windows giving views across the entire Owl Creek Valley.

Scotty followed the Rolls over a bridge spanning a stream and onto the cropped lawn serving as a parking area, and the valet waved him in. Scotty got out of his car, put on his shades, rolled up the sleeves of his good-to-go-anywhere Armani jacket, and texted Mo-bot. He told her not to worry. “No one plays boring white guy like me,” he said.