cargo compartment from the front seats, Salome heard the driver lower his window and mumble in Chinese. A buzzer sounded. The van turned, rolled forward, stopped again. “Here,” the driver said. Salome pushed aside a sink and hopped out the back.
She found herself in the center of a five-car garage, its concrete floor spotless. Around her: a yellow Lamborghini Aventador, a red Ferrari 288 GTO, a white Rolls-Royce Phantom, and an orange Porsche Carrera GT, a twin of the car that had killed the actor Paul Walker
.
All spit-shined each week so that they gleamed under the halogen lights that hung from the ceiling.
The cars were flawless, worth millions of dollars. They were protected by a fire-suppression system that could fill the garage with a nontoxic foam in twenty-five seconds. Yet as
vehicles
they were basically useless. Duberman drove them once a year at most. They didn’t even have gasoline in their tanks. Gas was flammable and corrosive, and its impurities might leach out and damage their fuel lines since they were run so infrequently. They might as well have been gold bricks with rubber tires.
Still, they served a purpose. Duberman brought in his biggest 88 Gamma bettors to see them, along with his other collections in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
Lose $2 million, you can sit in them. $5 million, start their engines. $10 million, maybe I’ll let you drive one.
The whales coveted these invitations, though Salome couldn’t imagine why. For the money they gambled away, they could have bought the cars themselves.
Duberman himself traveled in a four-ton gray Bentley sedan outfitted with armor plates and inch-thick windows that would stop anything up to a .50-caliber round. The security at his mansion was similarlyover-the-top. The property was hidden from the street by a reinforced concrete wall ten feet high and three feet thick, built to survive a five-ton truck bomb. A mantrap ringed the inside of the wall. Five feet wide and fifteen deep, the trap was hidden under the narrow green lawn that Duberman’s engineers had carved out of the mountain.
Duberman’s security hadn’t always been so oppressive. He’d added a lot of it since his wedding two years before. Salome supposed the additional protection made sense. His wife, Orli, was a celebrity in her own right, a Victoria’s Secret supermodel. And they had two infant children, obvious kidnap targets. But Salome wondered sometimes if Duberman had added the extra security to make himself feel better about the risk he’d taken funding their operation. Though he surely knew that all the mantraps in the world wouldn’t stop a Delta team.
The van pulled out. Salome was briefly alone with the cars. Then the house door opened to reveal Gideon Etra, Duberman’s personal bodyguard.
“Salome.”
Etra knew her real name. But both he and Duberman usually used her cover name, which she had borrowed from a famous biblical vixen. According to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Salome danced before her stepfather Herod so seductively that he offered her whatever she wanted. She demanded the head of John the Baptist. Despite his misgivings, Herod gave it to her.
For a dance.
She had picked the name as her legend almost ironically. She was no one’s courtesan. She could have been pretty, but she didn’t want to be. She didn’t wear makeup and left her brown hair in a boring shoulder-length cut. Though she had an athlete’s body, trim and fit, she hid it behind neutral-colored suit sets. She wore a wedding ring, too, discreet white gold, though she had never married. The clothes and ring were the female version of camouflage, her way of making herself forgettable.
Nonetheless, she had grown to love her chosen name. Lately, as herplan moved ahead, she found herself wondering if it didn’t carry its own biblical magic. A foolish thought, but one she couldn’t shake.
“Gideon.” She reached for the Ferrari’s door. “Want to go for a ride?”
Etra blinked, then