Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(10)

Pixie held up the back of her hand, showing me an X drawn in black sharpie.

“Faust, do you even know what ‘straight edge’ means?”

“Deeply unsatisfied?”

She got up to leave.

“Hey, c’mon,” I said. “I’m sorry. Please, sit down. Tell me what you’ve dug up.”

She dropped back onto the bench with a heavy sigh. “Nothing. Less than nothing. I’d divide nothing by zero, but that could cause the universe to crash. Carmichael-Sterling Nevada doesn’t have a firewall; it has a godwall. Their network is protected by key fobs using forty-bit rolling codes, their ports have password encryption that makes the NSA look like AOL—”

“Pix?” I said. “Pretend for a second that I’m not a hacker.”

“I’m a jobber in a tag-team cage match against John Cena and The Rock. My partner just got laid out cold with a folding chair, and the referee is looking the other way.”

“Still losing me, but closer to my wheelhouse. You’re saying it can’t be done?”

“It can’t be done with this equipment. My laptop’s a beast. I built it myself, but there’s a limit to what I can brute-force. We have to get in there. Boots on the ground.”

That was the answer I was afraid of. Pixie was a friend-of-a-friend from years back, through a heister I knew when I worked for Nicky Agnelli. When she wasn’t feeding the hungry and protesting for social justice, she was one of the best mercenary hackers in the business. She already had a beef with Lauren Carmichael, since the Enclave—Lauren’s grand ambition, a resort that would make the rest of the Vegas Strip look like a beggar’s slum in Calcutta—was going to wreak environmental horror on our already-strained ecosystem.

What I knew that Pixie didn’t, and my own reason for wanting to take the Enclave down, was that it wasn’t really a resort. I didn’t know what it was, exactly, but I’d seen blueprints with deliberate dead ends, stairways to nowhere, and zigzagging hallways that looked like the outlines of magical glyphs.

Whatever Lauren was planning, it was an occult operation on a massive scale. Her architect, a man named Tony Vance, had told me that Lauren and her cabal were the good guys. That they were going to save the world.

I kicked Tony off the edge of a building the night he drowned his own daughter in a bathtub. Whatever Lauren’s master plan was, it was no definition of “good” I was familiar with.

Killing Tony hadn’t slowed the construction down any. Now I was exploring other options. I couldn’t worm my way into Lauren’s little fiefdom, but I had a would-be Robin Hood who shared my agenda.

“By ‘in there,’ you mean…” I dreaded the answer.

“Inside the Carmichael-Sterling offices. All I need to do is get to a router closet and put a tap on their lines. Crack them open from the inside out. Easy-peasy.”

“Not happening.”

“I’m not new at this game,” Pixie said, frowning. “This better not be some protect-the-poor-innocent-girl shit, Faust. I’ve social-engineered my way into way scarier places than a real-estate development company.”

I shook my head. “They’re bigger than you think. What are our other options? There’s got to be another way.”

“Not if you want access. I can’t do this from the outside. And if I can’t, you won’t find anybody in the business who can.”

My phone rang. Cait, the screen read. Probably calling to read me the riot act for letting her sleep. I fished out a couple of rumpled fifties from my pocket and pressed them into Pixie’s hand.

“Here. For your work today. Give me tonight to think it over, and we’ll decide tomorrow.”

“Your donation is appreciated,” she said, getting up and walking back to the soup line.

I cupped my hand over my other ear to drown out the din of the crowded hall as I answered the phone. “Hey hon,” I started to say, “sorry about the—”

“You need to get down here,” she said. “Now. Ten minutes ago. And wear something nice.”

“Wait, what? What’s up?”

Ronald Reagan once said the nine scariest words in the English language were, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” In one fell swoop, Caitlin beat that with six of her own.

“Prince Sitri wants to meet you.”

? ? ?

It wasn’t every day that I was summoned to an audience with a creature older than Rome, who could probably burn me to ashes just by thinking about it. I wore my nice jacket and a deep purple tie.

Winter didn’t look much like a nightclub from the outside. It was nestled between tourist traps on the north end of the Strip with only a small brass sign and a slim blue neon arrow to point the way down a short flight of steps to the door. There was a line out front every night of the week, though, snaking down the block and around the corner. I’d never been there. I wasn’t much for nightclubs, and besides, I knew who owned this one.

Caitlin met me at the sidewalk, dressed to kill in a black dress with one flared lace shoulder. She pulled me into an embrace that nearly lifted me off my feet.

“Aren’t you excited?” she said, beaming.

More like scared shitless, but I put on my best smile for her.

“I’d feel better if I knew what this was about,” I said as she took my arm and led me past the line, up to a pair of bouncers in wraparound shades.