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stayed close.

      This was it, he thought.

      In the ballroom, Jack Watson paced back and forth, smiling and waving to the cheering crowd. “Thank you, that’s very kind, thank you…” ducking his head a little each time he said it. Just the right amount of modesty.

      Rick Diehl snorted in disgust as he watched. Diehl was backstage, taking it all in on a little black-and-white monitor. Diehl was the thirty-four-year-old CEO of BioGen Research, a struggling startup in Los Angeles, and this performance by his most important outside investor filled him with unease. Because Diehl knew that despite the cheerleading, and the press releases with smiling black kids, at the end of the day, Jack Watson was a true bastard. As someone put it, “The best I can say about Watson is, he’s not a sadist. He’s just a first-class son of a bitch.”

      Diehl had accepted funding from Watson with the greatest reluctance. He wished he didn’t need it. Diehl’s wife was wealthy, and he had started BioGen with her money. His first venture as CEO had been to bid on a cell line being licensed by UCLA. It was the so-called Burnet cell line, developed from a man named Frank Burnet, whose body produced powerful cancer-fighting chemicals called cytokines.

      Diehl hadn’t really expected to land the license, but he did, and suddenly he faced the prospect of gearing up for FDA approval for clinical trials. The cost of clinical trials started at a million dollars, and went rapidly to ten million a pop, not counting downstream costs and after-marketing expenses. He could no longer rely solely on his wife’s money. He needed outside financing.

      That was when he discovered just how risky venture capitalists considered cytokines to be. Many cytokines, such as interleukins, had taken years to come to market. And many others were known to be dangerous, even deadly, to patients. And then Frank Burnet had brought a lawsuit, casting doubt on BioGen’s ownership of the cell line. Diehl had trouble getting investors to even meet with him. In the end, he had to accept smiling, suntanned Jack Watson.

      But Watson, Diehl knew, wanted nothing less than to take over BioGen and throw Rick Diehl out on his ass.

      “Jack! Fantastic speech! Fantastic!” Rick extended his hand, as Watson came backstage at last.

      “Yeah. Glad you liked it.” Watson didn’t shake his hand. Instead, he unclipped his wireless transmitter and dropped it in Diehl’s palm. “Take care of this, Rick.”

      “Sure, Jack.”

      “Your wife here?”

      “No, Karen couldn’t make it.” Diehl shrugged. “Thing with the kids.”

      “I’m sorry she missed this speech,” Watson said.

      “I’ll see she gets the DVD,” Diehl said.

      “But we got the bad news out there,” Watson said. “That’s the point. Everybody now knows there’s a lawsuit, they know Burnet is a bad guy, and they know we’re on top of it. That’s the important thing. The company’s now perfectly positioned.”

      Diehl said, “Is that why you agreed to give the speech?”

      Watson stared at him. “You think I want to come to Vegas? Christ.” He unclipped the microphone, handed it to Diehl. “Take care of this, too.”

      “Sure, Jack.”

      And Jack Watson turned and walked away from him without another word. Rick Diehl shivered. Thank God for Karen’s money, he thought. Because without it, he’d be doomed.

      Passing through the arches of the Doge’s Palace, Vasco Borden moved into the courtyard, following his fugitive, Eddie Tolman, through the nighttime crowd. He heard his earpiece crackle. That would be his assistant, Dolly, in another part of the hotel. He touched his ear. “Go,” he said.

      “Baldy boy Tolman has reserved some entertainment.”

      “Is that right?”

      “That’s right, he—”

      “Hold on,” Vasco said. “Just hold that thought.”

      Up ahead, he was seeing something he could not believe. From the right side of the courtyard, he saw Jack B. Watson, accompanied by a beautiful, slinky, dark-haired woman, merging with the crowd. Watson was famous for always being accompanied by gorgeous women. They all worked for him, they were all smart, and they were all stunning.

      The woman didn’t surprise Vasco. What surprised him was that Jack Watson was heading directly toward Eddie Tolman, the fugitive. That made no sense at all. Even if Tolman were doing a deal with Watson, the famous investor would never meet him face-to-face. And certainly never in public. But there they were, on a collision course in the crowded Venetian courtyard, right before his eyes.

      What the hell? He couldn’t believe it was going to happen.

      But then the slinky woman stumbled a bit, and stopped. She was wearing a short, skintight dress and heels. She leaned on Watson’s shoulder, bent her knee, showing plenty of leg, and inspected her shoe. She adjusted her heel strap, stood up again, and smiled at Watson. And Vasco glanced away from them and saw that Tolman was gone.

      But now Watson and the woman crossed Vasco’s own path, passing so close to him that he could smell her perfume, and he heard Watson murmur something to her, and she squeezed his arm and put her head on his shoulder as they walked. The romantic couple.

      Was all that an accident? Had it happened on purpose? Had they made him? He pressed his earpiece.

      “Dolly. I lost him.”

      “No prob. I got him.” He glanced up. She was on the second floor, watching everything below. “Was that Jack Watson that just walked by?”

      “Yeah. I thought maybe…”

      “No, no,” Dolly said. “I can’t imagine Watson’s involved in this. Not his style. I mean, Baldy boy is heading for his room because he has an appointment. That’s what I was telling you. He got some entertainment.”

      “Namely?”

      “Russian girl. Apparently he only likes Russians. Tall ones.”

      “Anybody we know?”

      “No, but I have a little information. And I got cameras in his suite.”

      “How’d you do that?” He was smiling.

      “Let’s just say Venetian security isn’t what it used to be. Cheaper, too.”

      Irina Katayeva, twenty-two, knocked on the door. In her left hand she held a bottle of wine, encased in a velvet gift bag with drawstrings at the top. A guy of about thirty answered the door, smiled. He wasn’t attractive.

      “Are you Eddie?”

      “That’s right. Come on in.”

      “I brought this for you, from the hotel safe.” She handed him the wine.

      Watching all this on his little handheld video monitor, Vasco said, “She gave it to him in the hallway. Where it would be seen on the security monitor. Why didn’t she wait until she was in the room?”

      “Maybe she was told to do it that way,” Dolly said.

      “She must be six feet. What do we know about her?”

      “Good English. Four years in this country. Studying at the university.”

      “Works at the hotel?”

      “No.”

      “So, non-pro?” Vasco said.

      “This is Nevada,” Dolly said.

      On the monitor, the Russian girl went into the room and the door closed. Vasco turned the tuning dial on his video monitor, picked up one of the inside cameras. The kid had a big suite, close to two thousand square feet, done in the Venetian style. The girl nodded and smiled.

      “Nice.

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