Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

The Cloaked Conjuror wasn’t here now, nor the pupae of his spinning web diva, Shangri-La. Spiders had thousands of spawn. Max pictured Shangri-La as a sort of White Widow Spider hanging from an invisible tensile line, spinning her web, changing shapes as she changed venues.

She knew him. Knew he was in Las Vegas, in the equation. She hated him. He didn’t know why. Didn’t care. E equals mc squared. Enemy equals mega-competition squared.

This was Shangri-La’s territory. He was intruding. He moved along the taut wires, slid his gloved fingertips along the bungee cords ready to cut loose and plummet down almost to the top of the mock-onion dome far below that would soon encase the Czar’s scepter.

Guards would soon blanket this exhibition from ground zero to pinnacle. But the high-flying performers would be the last to be suspected: the Cloaked Conjurer, whom Max both trusted and dismissed; Shangri-La, for whom he made neither assumption.

Assumption.

That was what this White Russian act was all about. It took place in the flies, to use a theatrical phrase. In the heavens. Above the crowd, as in the circus. The Greatest Show on Earth. The greatest shell game.

Max felt his way, fingers and feet leading, along the hidden web, tensile rope by tensile rope. A low hissing sound intruded on his concentration, but he ignored it. This unsensed network had been strung up here to create an illusion.

From an illusion, it morphed into an intrusion.

Max stared down, almost seeing the glittering Czar Alexander scepter in place. Twenty-seven-inches long. Diameter: two inches along the shaft. The orb at the top that held the fabulous jewel? Four inches. A phallic sort of thing, suitable for giants, easily concealed upon the persons of mortal men.

Or women.

Max, hanging by his long, flexible limbs, calculated the possibilities. Capture before transfer from the bank vault to the exhibition. Substitution during installation. Virtual removal shortly after with all the eyes-in-the-sky cameras confounded. Abstraction during exhibition hours in front of dazzled tourist gazes.

How do I steal thee? Let me count the ways.

Everything below was empty now. Of treasure. Of people. It was all possibility and, for now, very little risk.

As Max meditated on this, the line of his supporting web vibrated with sudden shock. Glancing upward, he thought he saw one of the black-painted service hatches concealed in the ceiling shutting.

Max scrambled spider swift to spring onto another support rope, to cling at his concealing height. He froze while the scanning cameras cruised past him. Surely that betraying tremor, whatever it had been, had subsided enough to keep his figure safely in the dark.

Apparently it had for no alarm sounded.

For the moment.

And in that moment, Max noticed what had brushed by his supportive wire network. He stared down on a black-clad figure beneath him, dangling by one extremity. In this case a crucial extremity. The neck.

The figure spun on its only support line, a noose, invoking the reverse image of the slender white filament that had been the rehearsing pale silhouette of Shangri-La.

This figure was no artful flutter of tattered robes, but the double of Max himself: black-clad, male, athletic, and dead.

Just as the audible alarms blared their shrill mechanical warning, Max swung from unweighted line to line, back to the claustrophobic shelter of the lighting conduits.

One line was like the deadly third rail on a subway system, one line he didn’t dare touch. That was the tense vee of wire dipping down to the glistening empty onion dome, bearing the pendant of a dead man like a human jewel. His limp black feet almost touched the tip of the scepter’s soon-to-be housing.

Was this some gruesome obstacle the Synth had set up to make Max’s test all the harder? A warning that he had better succeed?

Maybe.

Or maybe more than one cabal of thieves had its eye on the scepter.

Who Do You Trust?

Lieutenant Molina was good to go: she wore her spring khaki pantsuit and her Glock 9 millimeter in a paddle holster at her right rear hip. Her feet were pushed into tan suede loafers that didn’t make any insecure male officers or detectives suspect she might be taller than them by more than a smidge.

She carried several pair of latex gloves and one colorless lip gloss in one side jacket pocket, her shield and sunglasses in the other.

And she was sitting on the arm of the living room couch, tapping her loafer sole on the carpet because America’s almost ’Tween Idol, Miss Mariah Molina—just thirteen and out to prove that age was justifiably unlucky for parents everywhere—was still lost in the jungle of electric cords and tubes, jars and bottles the bathroom countertop had become.

“Hurry it up, chica!” Carmen called, checking her leather-banded wristwatch. “We’ll both be late.”

“Just a minute! I only have to do one more thing.”