CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Christ,” he said, rubbing the side of his face. He tasted blood from where his teeth had cut his cheek. Damned if she and Elizabeth didn’t have the same right hook.
“I should’ve just shot you,” she said. “You’ve been dead for almost two years. Might as well make it real.”
Her breath shuddered and he realized how close to tears she was, that she was trying valiantly to stay in control. He imagined it was more than just a shock to see him standing there after she’d watched him fall to his death.
“Look,” he said, raising his hands palm out in surrender. “We can either stand here and argue about the past, or we can do the job we’ve come for. I’m assuming there’s a reason you’re in Dubai trying to break into this vault.”
“Yes, though I’m sure it’s not as lucrative as the reason you’re here. What are you stealing this time?” she sneered.
“Launch codes to a Russian nuclear weapon,” he said. “Ten days ago, Mittal won them in a poker game. He’s a brilliant man, but he doesn’t have the scope of understanding of what it means to have those codes. I’m surprised he’s still alive. Every unsavory country in the world has him as their number-one target. The idiot. My mission is to retrieve them.”
“Your mission?” she asked, eyes narrowed. “Who are you working for?”
“I don’t mean to point out the obvious,” he said, ignoring her question, “but you’re trying to break into the vault as well. It seems you’ve a case of the pot calling the kettle black.”
“I’m not after the son,” she said. “At least, I don’t think I am. He seems to be a fairly straight arrow from what I can find. I’m after the father. They call him The Sultan.”
Dante nodded, already putting the pieces together from everything he’d read about Raj Mittal. “Human trafficking,” he said, before she could. “You suspect he’s using this location as a holding site?”
“I do,” she said. “This vault is the size of a bank. It’s temperature-controlled, and there are vaults inside the vault. I can’t think of a safer place to hide that kind of inventory.”
“You must have watched the 60 Minutes special just like I did.”
Her mouth quirked with the beginnings of a smile before she quickly stifled it. “I resigned from Interpol,” she said. “Beck and I had a little disagreement over my coming here.”
“Oh, good,” he said. “Then we’re both likely to be arrested if we keep standing here.”
“Fine, but when this is over we’re going to have a short conversation.”
“And then what?” he asked.
“I’ll either let you live or I’ll kill you. I’m having trouble deciding.”
“Darling, you know that kind of talk turns me on. Let’s focus on the job and then we can have foreplay later.”
She growled low in her throat and he grinned, turning to the security panels on the outside of the vault door.
He hit a button on his watch and said, “Elaine, are you there?”
“Of course,” she said. “Where else would I be?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “We’ve picked up a passenger. Meet Liv Rothschild.”
“Lovely to meet you,” Elaine said. “I’ve seen your name in the archives. Your picture is lovely. I thought of having my human form have hair like yours, but it didn’t fit my personality.”
“Umm . . .” Liv said, raising her brows.
“You and Liv will have to get acquainted later,” he said. “We’re standing outside the vault door. Have you gotten any alerts from security that there’s been a breach?”
“No, Lord Malcolm. Everything has been quiet.”
He rolled his eyes at the use of his title. “I’m starting the vault process in three . . . two . . . one . . .”
“Countdown engaged,” Elaine said.
The vault locks had to be opened in stages. The first stage was an old-fashioned tumbler dial that was more for show than it was for purpose. Dante had to admit, it had made for good television, although the producers had blurred out the numbers as Mittal opened it. Elaine had used a special technology to go through the tape again and unblur the combination.
She’d sent the combination to his watch, and he quickly turned the dial: 36 left—2 right—16 left—9 right. When the last tumbler fell into place, he pulled the lock out and a panel opened on the side wall.
He opened his bag and took out an electronic device that snapped around his throat, pressing the button to turn it on, then put in an earpiece with a mic that curved down to his mouth.
The panel had opened to a black screen; there was a steady red line that ran across it, waiting for him to speak the passcodes in Mittal’s voice. The technology he was using was new, but Elaine had insisted it had been thoroughly tested with results in the ninety-eighth percentile. It was the other two percent he was worried about.
“Albarakuda . . .
Mmusiba . . .
Alssulta . . .
Yasmin . . .”
Each time he said a word, the red line showed the sound waves of his voice and then turned green, showing it was a match. When he said the fourth word, the panel in the wall closed and another panel above it opened, revealing another flat screen. It wasn’t as sophisticated as the retinal scan they used at Gravediggers headquarters. There was nothing on the open market or even in private R&D labs that came close to the sophistication of the equipment The Gravediggers used. They knew this because The Shadow was everywhere, and no secrets at any level were safe when Eve wanted to know something.
Drawing a small black box from his bag, Dante handed it to Liv for her to hold as he opened it. Inside were contacts, the brown lenses encrypted with electronic replicas of Mittal’s retinas.
Dante carefully put a contact on his finger, mentally counting down the seconds in his head before the retinal scanner retreated back into the wall as a fail-safe. He blinked rapidly as the contact slid into place, and put the second contact in. Then he turned to the screen and stared at it, keeping his eyes open as the green light passed back and forth.
There was a slight pause as the machine processed the information, and Dante stole a glimpse at Liv. She bit her bottom lip and held her breath, then jumped as the retinal scanner beeped and receded into the wall.
Another panel opened—the last phase of the security system—and this time the black screen emerged from the wall and went horizontal, the screen facing up. He pulled a slim square case from his pack, about a foot wide in both directions, but only an inch or so thick. He handed the case to Liv and whispered, “Hold it steady,” as he carefully lifted the lid to expose the delicate pieces of flesh inside.
There was a hard plastic imprint of a hand inside the case, and inside the hand was a thin layer of synthetic skin that replicated Mittal’s handprint. He placed his gloved hand directly into the hand in the case, moving it from side to side and from front to back so the skin would adhere completely to the glove. When he lifted his hand, the thin layer of skin was attached to his glove.
He placed his palm on the flat screen and waited as it was scanned, feeling the heat from the scanner through his glove. There was a pause and a long beep, and then the round steel door opened on silent hinges.
“My goodness,” Elaine said. “That was quite a nerve-racking experience. If I were human, I’d be dead from holding my breath.”
“Interesting,” Liv said. “You’re AI?”
“I’m a GenXI prototype,” she said. “There’s not another in the world like me. I have independent thought capabilities. And they are working on giving me emotions.”
“Impressive,” Liv said.
“I know,” Elaine answered.
Dante rolled his eyes. Liv had no clue just how close they’d come to being caught. “Nerve-racking” didn’t begin to describe it. If he’d taken three more seconds, the entire system would’ve gone into lockdown and they would’ve been trapped until the guards were alerted.
“Go and search for the girls,” he told Liv. “Keep an eye out for a titanium briefcase.”
The vault was so bright it made his eyes water—white walls, white floor, and white lights—and it was cold, well below a comfortable temperature. The space was larger than it had seemed on television. His estimation of it being the size of a tennis court was off. It could easily be double that.
There was a central room lined with open shelves piled with stacks of cash in multiple currencies. There was also a row of filing cabinets. It made sense Mittal would want to keep sensitive documents that he might need to reach quickly closest to the entryway, along with the cash. Since he was a gambling man, Dante was willing to bet there were also multiple passports and identities in the files. Most of the filthy rich had them—just in case.
From the main room, there was a hallway to the left, right, and straight ahead, and the hallways were lined with clear doors so the interiors could be seen easily. Vaults within a vault. It was where Mittal kept most of his art collection, trading out pieces to display in the house from time to time.
“Hurry and see if the girls are in any of the interior vaults,” he said. “What’s your plan once you find them? How are you going to get them out?”
“We’re going to go out the front door and draw as much attention as possible. And then pray nothing goes wrong.”
“If you don’t mind a suggestion . . .” he said.
“I mind,” she said. “But I’ll listen anyway since little girls’ lives are at stake.”
“There is an old sewage pipe in the dungeon that leads to the sea. We can use it to move quickly and safely outside the palace, and we can all be extracted from there.”
“That’s all fine and good, except they sealed off the entrance to that pipe in the fifties,” she said.
“I’ve been in Dubai for a week,” he said. “I haven’t spent my time here twiddling my thumbs. The pipe has recently been unsealed.”
“How did you manage that?” she asked.
“Three nights ago there was a fireworks display as they celebrated the city’s Day of Remembrance to honor the dead.”
He saw the light come into her eyes as she took the thread of what he was saying and ran with it. “And you timed your small explosions at the end of the sealed pipe to match the fireworks.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Now, go find your girls.”
She nodded and headed toward the interior vault doors.
“Elaine, bring up the holographic image of the briefcase the codes were being transported in,” he said. “There are several briefcases in here.”
A hologram image of the briefcase shot up from out of his watch, giving him a three hundred and sixty degree view. But it didn’t help. The briefcase wasn’t there.
“I’m not seeing anything like this,” he said.
“I would imagine that if he removed them from the briefcase, he’d still have them in a lockbox,” Elaine said. “It’s only a few sheets of paper, easily lost if not contained.”
He quickly made his way down each of the hallways, looking inside each of the clear doors.
“Any luck?” he asked Liv as he passed her to peer inside each of the smaller vaults, searching for any sign of a black titanium briefcase.
“They’re not here,” she said, fists at her hips, red flushing her cheeks. And then she kicked the wall in frustration.
“That makes two of us who got faulty intel,” he said, feeling his own frustration rise. “No launch codes.”
“Look at the last room on the end,” she told him.
Dante went to the last room and looked through the clear door. There were bowls on the floor, some filled with water and others with what looked like the remains of rice. And there were crumpled blankets on the floor and a bucket in the corner that he assumed was what they’d used for a toilet.
“This is fresh,” he said. “Elaine, can you check to see when the vault door was last activated?”
“I can pull the data only from the electronic door that leads from Mittal’s office,” Elaine said. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean that the vault was entered. Stand by.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Liv said.
“We need to get out of here and regroup,” he said. “Something’s not right.” He’d learned to listen to his gut over the years, and he wasn’t going to start ignoring it now.
“What about the launch codes?” she asked.
“Either he’s got them somewhere else, or he’s sold them without our knowledge.”
“Or maybe someone else got in here to steal them first,” she said.
“Or that,” he agreed.
The vault was last accessed at zero three hundred hours,” Elaine said.
“Shiv Mittal wasn’t back in the palace until late yesterday,” Dante said. “And he was in his suite at the time of entry. I saw him leave after three a.m.”
“Like you said before,” Liv said. “Raj is still calling the shots where his son is concerned, and he’d know about his acquiring the launch codes in that poker game. Who’d know better how to ramp up the bidding between competing interests? So if the father accessed the vault and knew his son had obtained the launch codes, it’s probable he took the girls and the codes. Those launch codes in the hands of Raj Mittal are much more dangerous than in the hands of his son.”
“I’ve hacked into the security cameras,” Elaine said. “They show Raj Mittal entering the office just before the key card time stamp. But he immediately disconnected the security cameras, so there’s no visual of him leaving with the codes or the girls.”
“I’m convinced,” Liv said.
“Then let’s hunt that bastard down.
“I’d love to,” she said. “But here’s my dilemma. What if the launch codes in your hands are just as dangerous as in the hands of Mittal?”
“I guess you’re going to have to trust that I’m one of the good guys,” he said, moving toward the exit.
“Not bloody likely,” she said, following him.