There had been no labor trouble at the Gold Rush this night, not if all the bellhops and domestic personnel around the place were any indication. Strange, but now that Lucy stopped to think of it, she had not seen a woman anywhere around the hotel and casino since she'd left the crowded lobby better than an hour ago. It was as if the female staff — the cooks, the maids, whatever — had been cleared away to preserve them from the coming storm.

Now she was all alone inside the cavernous hotel that had so quickly taken on the characteristics of an armed encampment. That was a story in itself, but first she had to be alive to write it — and she feared that if she was discovered, her short career might be abbreviated by a one-way midnight ride into the desert.

Lucy did not plan to end her days as cactus fertilizer, and she moved along the corridor with grim determination, looking for an unobtrusive exit that would get her out of there and on the street again without attracting any unwelcome attention along the way. She reached the bank of elevators, hesitated with her finger on the button, finally decided against it. If the elevator did not dump her right into the lobby, she would run the risk of being stopped at any one of several floors along the way, or else emerging into hostile hands upon arriving at her destination. No, the elevator simply was not safe enough to suit her needs.

Lucy was turning away from the stainless-steel doors when the approaching sound of voices reached her ears. She hesitated, gauging their direction, bolting as she realized that they were just around the corner from her, closing swiftly.

She retraced her steps and reached the doorway to the office she had just vacated. It was small, belonging to some middle-ranking secretary of Spinoza's from appearances, and it had yielded nothing in her search for information, but right now it was her only sanctuary.

Lucy made it to the door with heartbeats left to spare — and found it locked. She cursed the modern doors that locked themselves each time they closed, and just this once she wished that security had not become such an obsession in the hotel industry.

She turned away, pulse pounding in her ears now that the jumbled voices were almost on top of her. One of them sounded so familiar, somehow, almost... There was no time to make the connection. She was running blindly, biting off a sob that rose unbidden in her throat. There had to be some service stairs around here someplace, had to be some... And she found them, almost stumbling as she veered hard left to reach the doorway marked Emergency. If there had ever been one, Lucy thought, this must be it.

She put her weight against the door, expecting hinges stiff with long disuse, and almost fell through as it opened without resistance. She stumbled through, gasping, and just found the strength to close the door behind her.

She was clear.

She took a backward step... and bumped against the man who had been standing, watching her.

No stifling the cry this time, as Lucy Bernstein turned and recognized the man she had seen earlier with Frank Spinoza, the same face from her ordeal the night before at Bob Minotte's.

Recognition was mutual and his reaction was as coolly, cruelly practiced as a soldier's own conditioned reflex in the heat of combat. He took a closer step, the smile etched deep into his face like marks on marble. She saw his fist coming, knew that it was hurtling toward her jaw, and yet she found herself unable to avoid the blow.

Lucy Bernstein's head impacted on the concrete wall behind her and the darkness of the stairwell swallowed her alive.

Abe Bernstein paused outside the doorway of the Gold Rush presidential suite and took the time to brush imaginary lint off of his coat lapels. He wanted to look perfect for the party, give the New York imports something to remember in the final fleeting seconds of their lives. Finally satisfied, he knocked three times, not loudly, but with firm authority. The sound would carry, and he knew that they were in there, having checked in the several crew chiefs himself. There would be five of them, not counting their commander who had driven off with Paulie Vaccarelli and the hit team. Five of them with guns and the experience to use them — if they got the chance.

"What is it?" Curt, discourteous and spoken through the door, as if they had been talking to some newsboy peddling his papers.

"Room service," Bernstein told the faceless voice, struggling to keep contempt and anger from his tone. Compliments of the management.

As he spoke, he stepped back from the doorway, making room for the three mercenaries to form a semicircle at the entrance of the suite, their silenced Ingram machine pistols already primed and leveled from the waist.

Inside, the nameless crew chief was still fumbling with the lock, then he had it, stepping out to greet them in his shirt-sleeves, one hand resting on a hip beneath his shoulder holster. And the guy was good, but nowhere close to as good as he thought he was. The little backward step was adequate, the shouted warning excellent, but there was simply no way that his best fast-draw could beat the combined firepower of the three Ingrams. Savage streams of nearly silent fire converged upon him, punching through the fabric of his shirt and letting loose a crimson flood as he was blown away.

The mercenaries entered in a rush, still firing, taking out the other four crew chiefs as they were trying to respond on several seconds warning.

None of them was up to it, although the last one, lurching from the bathroom with an automatic in his hand came closest to achieving some success. He actually got off a shot before two Ingrams sliced and diced him with converging figure eights and draped him back across the leaking water bed.

Bernstein watched from the doorway approvingly, as his commandos brought the bodies all together in the middle of the room and rolled them one by one onto the plastic shower curtain taken from the bathroom. There would be some staining of the carpet even so, and most of it would have to be replaced wherever they encountered opposition, but he wrote it off to the anticipated costs of renovating the hotel.

The Gold Rush was being remodeled, and very soon it would be opening again under the new-old management of its creator. Some new carpeting and wallpaper would help create the aura of a born-again establishment.

"All right, let's go," he snapped, once again consulting the Rolex. "We can't afford to fall behind."

They had three other suites to go before the main event with Frank Spinoza, making sure that he did not have any troops at his beck and call. It was unlikely that the single pistol shot had registered with any of their targets down the hall. But even if they still possessed the slim advantage of surprise, there was no time to waste. Abe Bernstein meant to have his cleanup finished when the sun came up behind old Sunrise Mountain to the east of town. He meant for this new day to find him in control of the city he had done so much to shape and build.

It was a long time overdue, and he refused to wait an extra moment longer than he absolutely had to.

It was time, and past time, for cleaning house. And now that he had started, nothing in the world would slow him down.

Abe Bernstein had a job to do, ordained by fate, and he was working on it with a vengeance.

Mack Bolan made a drive-by of the Gold Rush, picking out the uniformed security on front and side entrances, noting their numbers and their armament. He sensed that they were bogus, knew it with a certainty when one guard stepped inside and let him glimpse an automatic rifle standing just inside the smoked-glass doors. Still he did not want a confrontation with them there, where innocent civilians might be inadvertently sucked into the cross fire.