The Dark Circle, page 25
Brianna’s face disappeared, and a Thai girl emerged into view across the room, carrying one of the silver trays I had placed in the portal opening. She was wearing what looked like diaphanous silk lingerie trimmed in lace and red satin ribbons. It took me a few moments to realize it was body paint and she was naked. As she served Friar Tuck, he reached out and roughly pawed the cheeks of her ass.
After three other cult members sat down at the table, I decided it was time to do a short recon of the rooms beyond the steel door. Brianna had left the key in the lock. I took it and closed the door behind me.
The arched corridor of stone walls and floors was lit by halogen floodlights embedded in small, recessed holes along the sides, just enough to keep the hallway shadowy and mysterious. The sound of a male voice calling on the handheld radio broke the silence, and it was alarmingly loud.
“Two-zero-three-eight secure,” I repeated softly, and it went dead again. I turned the radio off.
Coming to the end of the first passageway, I turned left, away from the noise of the revelers in the great hall. This corridor led to the second elevator. There was no guard on duty as I approached the black steel door. I wondered if one could be waiting inside. Using my pencil flashlight, I examined the control pad mounted next to the door. It didn’t seem to require a passcode from this side either.
Pulling out the .45, I aimed it at the door and hit the button. The door glided open. The elevator was empty. Working my way back along the corridor toward the great hall, I came to a massive oak door with brass fittings. I inched the handle around and cracked it open.
I knew this room.
It was the ceremonial chamber I had seen in the videos, with twelve throne chairs surrounding the circular cushioned pad in the middle. There was a staleness in the air, a residue of sweat and cigars. The house of horrors was already lit for the night’s main event. I took a flash drive out of my pocket and placed it under one of the chairs, hidden in the shadows.
Back in the main passageway, I came to another closed door, this one only five feet high with a flat metal plate mounted on it. I put the flashlight to it. The letters read “WARNING: HAZARDOUS VOLTAGE.”
The utility door was locked, but one of Brianna’s electronic passkeys opened it. Leaning down, I stepped inside, closed the door behind me, and turned on the flashlight. It was the power control center for the underground complex. Next to the large circuit breaker panel box was a smaller one labeled “ELECTRICAL SERVICE MAIN DISCONNECT.”
Farther down the same passageway, I came to two more enormous carved doors which led into the great hall. Behind them I could hear one of the knights bellowing with laughter and some of the others joining in.
As far as I could tell, Lauren had fit into the small serving team without suspicion, safe for the time being.
At the far end of the main corridor, there was a bank of twelve bedrooms, six along each wall. The last one on the left had to be the one described by Brianna, where Frank Bull had taken her down for her first visit. It had a bed worthy of Windsor Castle. There was no sign anyone had arrived recently to use it. I tossed one of the flash drives across the bed and heard it hit the stone floor.
Having finished the circuit, I decided to immobilize the elevator that led up to the Mattaway Grill. We only needed one to escape, and I thought our chances would be better going through the underground garage than the kitchen. I also wanted to eliminate the possibility of reinforcements coming from there.
Reaching the service room again, I went first to the portal opening. I could see the same cult members at the table, although one of them was now sitting slumped forward as if he was asleep. The others were watching the two little Thai girls performing a ceremonial dance, accompanied by recorded music, under the lights nearby.
I went to the room where I had left Chuck on the floor. He hadn’t moved and was still breathing easily when I turned on the light. “We’ll be out of here soon,” I said, reaching into the cutlery drawers and picking up a steel cleaver and a butter knife.
I hit the elevator button again and stepped inside. Using the butter knife, I removed the screws holding the cover plate for the control switches. Inside, I found the machinery’s wiring. Pulling them out, I held the wires against the edge of the control box and severed them with the cleaver.
There was an inch-high opening between the top edge of the elevator car and the surrounding shaft. I remembered seeing a couple lengths of reinforced steel construction bars lying at the back of the utility room and went to retrieve them.
I jammed them both into the narrow opening above the roof of the car and slid them in until they hit the side walls of the shaft. The elevator wasn’t going anywhere until someone came down to repair it.
In the few minutes since I had last looked through the portal into the great hall, I sensed that something had changed. There was a different tenor to the voices, and someone’s laughter reached the edge of hysteria. When I looked through the portal, the dance had ended, and I couldn’t see any of the women. Two knights began yelling at one another, and one of them pulled out his ceremonial dagger.
There was no time to shoot video. I had to move quickly. These men were degenerate pigs without the stimulation of opioids, and with a substantial dose in them, there was no telling how they would act toward the women.
Locking the steel door to the service room behind me, I started quickly back down the first passageway. I had just turned onto the main corridor when I heard a door slam loudly up ahead and the sound of someone coming toward me. There was no place for me to hide.
As the figure came closer, I saw he was wearing the knight’s robe, tied at the waist with a silken sash. He was holding his mask in his hand and lurching, not walking. In the light of the halogen bulbs implanted in the wall, I immediately recognized him. His face was a fixture on cable television, as the dedicated attorney fighting to compensate victims who were abused by their scoutmaster or had swallowed asbestos. His name was Kelsey Briggs, and according to Fab he had a good chance of becoming the next state attorney general.
He didn’t see me or take in the fact I was there. I don’t think he saw anything. About fifty, with silver hair, straight nose, and patrician face, he collapsed onto the stone floor and began retching up bile.
It was the same reaction I had seen at the Slope Day celebration—or at least one reaction. I walked past him and headed straight for the great hall. It was clear the knights were starting to fall.
I suddenly heard a wrenching scream up ahead, coming from the great hall, and my first instinct was to run toward the source. I was moving fast along the passageway, when I came to the small door of the power control center.
It struck me that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I quickly unlocked the door with the electronic passkey and leaned inside. Turning on my pencil flashlight, I flipped the switch down at the control box labeled “Electrical Service Main Disconnect.”
The lights in the main passageway went dark, and the blackness seemed total, but the screaming continued, now obscured by more shouting and outcries. I ran to the still-closed doors to the great hall. Swinging one of them open, I stepped inside and pulled out the .45.
I had forgotten the candelabra in the center of the huge dining table. In its sputtering glare, my mind registered a surreal scene out of Dante’s second circle. I tried to grasp all of it at once. At the far end of the table, one knight was sitting at his place, fully slumped over, with his face hidden in a platter of meat. He was the one I had seen through the portal opening and thought was asleep.
Two other cult members were clumsily grappling with one another on the stone floor, their faces no longer concealed by masks. One was trying to gouge out the other man’s eyes with his fingernails.
On the other side of the table, a knight was standing and facing toward me, his hips churning as he attempted to assault Brianna, whose back was pinned to the table, her red and blue silk robe pulled above her thighs. She was scratching at his face with her fingernails and fighting him off with wild kicks. Closer to me, on the stone floor, another monster was kneeling over something, and as he rose up for a moment, I saw that it was one of the tiny Thai girls. I reached him in three steps and slammed the butt of the .45 into the back of his head. He crumpled over, and I kicked his body off the girl. She was crying uncontrollably, and I set her down on a couch along the nearest wall.
I was running back to the table where Brianna was still wrestling with her drug-crazed predator when out of the corner of my eye I saw a large blur rushing toward me. Lit in the gout of yellow flame from the candles, I could see him clearly. Above his demented eyes, I saw the shock of curly red hair and remembered the football player with gorilla-like arms we had identified in the photograph, from his championship ring. He was still wearing it as he launched himself toward me.
Bowling into me with full force, he took me over backward. The back of my head hit the stone floor with a crack and bounced upward. My .45 was knocked out of one hand, my flashlight from the other. I was still woozy as I made it back to my feet.
The fall took something out of him too. As he stood again, his eyes dropped to the knife in the scabbard on his sash. Then it was in his hand. Still berserk, he rushed toward me, holding it out in front of him, blade first. I dove at his knees, toppling him over, and a sickening jolt of pain lit up my right side as he drove the knife in.
We were both slow getting up again. From my knees, I took hold of the jeweled handle to pull it out. The blade was only a couple inches into the flesh between my ribs, but he had twisted it on the way in, and the pain glared white hot. It definitely cleared my mind.
As he rushed me for the third time, I planted one foot and kicked him hard in the crotch with the other. It lifted him an inch off the floor before he went down again, to his knees, with a loud grunt. I stepped in close and hit him with the edge of my right hand behind his left ear. He fell face forward onto the floor and lay still.
In the sputtering candlelight, I found the .45 and the flashlight and ran back toward the dining table. Before I could get there, the still battling Brianna swept the candelabrum off its pedestal with one wildly swinging arm, and the great hall went black. The only light now came from the thin beam of my pencil flashlight.
I stumbled over the same two cult members who had been fighting earlier on the floor. They were still flailing at one another, and I stepped on one as I went past. It only enraged him further.
Finally reaching Brianna’s side of the big table, I found the two of them on their knees, with the man still trying to pin her down. His demented eyes shone brightly in the beam of the flashlight. The mask was gone, and I recognized the governor’s chief of staff from his many television interviews. Beyond caring, I kicked him in the face. He didn’t move again either.
I trained the light on Brianna.
She stared up at me, her eyes filled with tears. Knowing she couldn’t see me, I turned the beam on my face. As I lifted her up, she said, “I fought him … I fought him.” Her mouth was torn and bleeding, her face marked with scratches.
“I know you did, Brianna. Where is Agent Peterson?” I said, holding her steady as she tried to stand.
“One of them saw her putting something into the drinks at the bar,” she cried. “He hit her with a bottle.”
“Stay here,” I said.
I followed the flashlight beam to the bar and found Lauren lying behind it on the floor. I knelt down and put my fingers on her carotid artery. Her pulse was slow and steady, but there was a bulging bruise on the back of her head. It had bled a good deal. When I raised her up, she came awake in my arms.
“It’s me,” I said as her eyes tried to focus in the small stream of light.
“One of them … red hair …” she said.
“We’ve got to go,” I said, lifting her off the ground.
I dropped the last flash drive behind the bar before carrying her over to Brianna. I could hear someone retching uncontrollably as I told her to follow me. I led them to the tiny Thai girl I had left on the couch. She had stopped crying and now seemed to be in shock. I wanted to ask her where the other girl might be, but there was no time to look for her in the rest of the rooms.
Brianna took the girl’s hand, and together we left the hall and began the trek to the elevator at the end of the main passageway. Still carrying Lauren, with my right hand I pointed the pencil flashlight ahead of us. The wound in my side began to throb, and I wondered how much I would have left when we reached the guards.
“I can walk, Jake,” Lauren said softly into my ear.
I put her down on the stone floor. While she steadied her feet, I tried to think through what to do next. Did the elevator run on the main casino power, or was it part of the lower complex? If the elevator was powered by the lower system, no one could have left the complex to alert the guards upstairs. The knights had cell phones, but maybe they hadn’t used them.
We went on.
Kelsey Briggs was still lying on the floor of the corridor where I had last seen him. The dedicated advocate for asbestos victims didn’t look like he would be running for attorney general anytime soon. Surrounded by a pool of vomit, he looked dead. I didn’t care.
We came to the little room housing the power grid. I leaned inside and flipped on the circuit breaker. The air-conditioning system came back on with a loud whoosh. Along with a surge of cool air, the recessed halogen bulbs relit the passageway.
As we approached the elevator, I told the others to move to the edge of the side wall. The pain in my side was getting a lot worse, and part of me wanted to get the whole thing over with, regardless of the consequences. But I had the others to protect, if I possibly could.
Removing the .45 from my belt, I checked to make sure the clip was full and thumbed back the hammer. Standing at the console plate, I pushed the button. The door glided back noiselessly. There was no one there.
“Let’s go,” I said.
When we were all inside, I hit the “Up” button. The ten-second ride in the well-lit elevator allowed me to take stock of our condition. The body paint on the young Thai girl was badly smeared, and what had appeared to be enticing lingerie now looked like a mass of bruised flesh. Brianna and Lauren might have come through a tornado. Thankfully, I couldn’t see myself.
We reached the top, and the door opened to reveal an empty concrete-walled vestibule, with a steel door on the opposite wall.
“That door leads into the garage,” said Brianna. “There will be guards out there.”
Every time I moved, the wound in my side felt like my rib cage was made of broken glass. I motioned them to move to the edge of the vestibule and turned the handle on the steel door.
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He was standing only five feet away from me. Thankfully, his back was turned to the door, ready to repel any intruders looking to get to the elevator. I silently stepped forward and jammed the .45 into his back. He went slack, and I removed the Glock from his hip holster, shoving it in my hip pocket.
“Lie down on your stomach,” I said, and he did.
He was wearing a utility belt along with his holster, and it included a Taser, pepper spray, and a pair of Peerless handcuffs. I felt better not having to hurt him as I strapped his right wrist to the metal stanchion by the door.
It was the VIP garage, and mercifully there were very few cars and no people. The garage sloped up in the direction of the exit signs, and I could see a small section of night sky about twenty yards in the distance. Twenty yards. Twenty yards, and we were almost to the sanctuary of the RV in the Stoneberry campground. I had run twenty yards many times. I pictured myself carrying a ball, barreling over linebackers and defensive ends. This had to be easier.
I looked up and saw Brianna and Lauren peeking around the edge of the vestibule door. I waved them out, and the little girl, and said, “Walk behind me and spread out.”
We started up the sloping garage floor together, moving slowly because the Thai girl was having trouble walking.
The other guard had been taking a cigarette break. He came out of the space between two parked limousines, and I saw the sparks as he flicked the butt of the cigarette across the concrete floor.
He was wearing the same pumpkin-colored uniform I was, but I knew him from the traveler’s rest stop along the New York Thruway. The images came together … the same bushy blonde hairdo of the bulked-up surfer and all the cigar burns he had ground into Fab’s arm while he was waiting to kill me at the cabin.
Goldilocks looked up and saw us. He was very fast, and the Glock was off his hip in an instant as he moved smoothly into a sideways shooter’s stance to lower his target profile. The .45 was already in my right hand, and the Glock was in my left. I fired the first shot with my good hand, the right one, and saw the bullet take a big chunk out of the concrete pillar above his head.
He fired low and I felt a sharp tug on the edge of my thigh before I actually heard the shot. My round from the Glock took him under the left eye. He was probably already dead as his body staggered forward two steps and fell.
The shots had reverberated through the garage like cracks of thunder, and they were sure to draw attention. We needed to move quickly if we were going to make it. An alarm siren began to wail as we covered the last twenty feet in the garage and emerged onto the grass-covered slope overlooking the outer parking lots and the RV campground.
We could hear new sirens and alarms rising from all over the Stoneberry complex as we avoided the light stanchions crossing the parking lots and made it to the huddle of campers.
Curiosity seekers were emerging from their motor homes to find out what the ruckus was about. No one paid attention to us as bright searchlights were activated on the casino grounds, and we walked the rest of the way between family groups on their way back from the swimming pool.
After Lauren unlocked the front door, she helped me up the stairs and to the big bed in the master suite. I lay there trembling while she examined the wound in my side and soaked it with hydrogen peroxide. After spraying on anesthetic, she bandaged it with gauze and tape from the RV’s emergency kit.
