She stepped into a large “submarine chamber” as the doors closed behind her. Another Sumo type stood behind a high black podium with a computer on top and a reader that looked like a Baccarat shoe. He took her card, and the reader swallowed it up.
Game time, she thought as her calves tensed. If alarms are going to go off, it shall be now. She wondered if she’d even be able to bolt past the gorillas out front.
“List,” the man said.
She stared at him for a nanosecond before realizing what he had said. She held out her wrist, and he snapped a slim black bracelet around it—cinching it with a device that resembled a notary’s seal.
She hoped she was home free, but he pointed at her backpack. She shrugged it off her shoulders and opened the top for him. He rummaged through it perfunctorily and waved her on through the next set of doors.
Yesss, she triumphed in her mind.
The music hit her like a mortar barrage. It was German techno thumping in blast waves—making the floor vibrate as if a squad of giant blacksmiths were pounding their hammers. She’d been in plenty of nightclubs, casinos, and discos in scores of cities around the world, but this place made her stop and gape.
The Pentagon’s three stories comprised one enormous space, with a circumference of angled silver tubing arching skyward to a domed ceiling of somehow floating stars. Halfway up the tubes, nests of razor wire held disco spotlights that swung on gimbals, flashing neon like machine guns—an epileptic’s nightmare.
In the center of the space was a raised pentagonal stage, with a DJ team of Amazon-size girls in black spandex working six turntables of vinyl disks. Bracing the stage were four faux-stone towers with turrets atop, each sporting the huge head of an animatronic dragon. It was like a mix of time-travel décor—a prehistoric altar inside a space station.
There was no discernible dance floor as the packed bodies swayed and twitched everywhere. Two curved aluminum liquor bars with neon ledges flanked the space against the walls, and between the spinning revelers she saw round tables with red leather banquettes filled with drinking guests. She watched as a team of male “selectors,” bare-chested with leather vests and black bow ties, pushed through the crowd, pounced on a buxom, German-looking blonde, and carried her up to the stage.
She was clearly half in the bag, and they cooed and wooed her as she surrendered and danced solo. The crowd swarmed closer to the stage, hands thrust up and clapping to the pounding techno rhythms, and at last she pulled her tube top off. Her breasts bounced out, and the crowd roared its approval while the dragons spit gouts of flame.
This is going to be quite a challenge, Lily thought as she perused the crowd. Finding Lukacs in this mess would take some doing, but she had to make sure he wouldn’t spot her first.
She rose on her toes and twisted her head until she spotted it—a mermaid bust protruding above a recessed door.
She worked her way along the wall to the Ladies’, where a gaggle of Korean girls spilled out, laughing as they wiped powder rings from their nostrils. They were dressed to the nines and looked terribly easy. She figured that to get into the Pentagon, you had to be a very wealthy man, his squeeze, or a high-priced hooker.
Inside the restroom, Lily passed three girls at the sink, adjusting their push-up bras and makeup. She sidled up to the mirror to make sure her disguise still held up. She looked good: somewhat Eurasian but nondescript. She could play it both ways.
She looked around. For a fleeting moment, she was alone in the restroom. She tapped her right ear. “Linc, you can say anything you like to me now. No one’ll hear a bloody thing in this mêlée.”
He laughed. “Is it a wild joint?”
“It would curl your hair, luv.”
She marched out and right away absorbed the pounding techno beats into her body. She swayed her hips from side to side, clenched her fists out in front of her chest, and pumped them back and forth. She started to dance, taking a planned strategic search pattern. She’d circle the outer perimeter first and then tighten that circle, around and around, until she spotted her quarry.
She picked a sweating young Asian executive first, his open shirt displaying a gleaming, hairless chest. She gripped his shirt with her left hand, bumped her left hip into his crotch, then turned, and gave him her right one as he grinned and gripped her waist. Then she spun him, twisting across the floor in dirty-dancing pirouettes, her fingers gripping his belt buckle as her eyes took in three hundred sixty degrees behind him. Nothing yet, so she kissed his cheek, pushed him off, and rocked on to her next buoy in the sea of gleaming, bouncing bodies.
Next she chose a girl, a punky type with fire tattoos, bobbed black hair, and ample breasts. Lily gripped her muscled arms and grinned, letting the tips of her chest rub over the girl’s, and again she covered more of the floor as her green eyes flicked over faces and forms, searching for Lukacs’s silver-blond hair and angular face.
After that she backed up into a surprised, middle-aged European—a banker type— and she smeared his fat fingers to her belly and let him hump her from behind as she covered another swath of floor. She passed close to the stage, where this time a lithe, buxom redhead was cooed into flipping up her microskirt. The dragons spat flame, and the crowd roared.
She spotted him. Twenty meters from stage left, a group of men were hunched over one of the large round tables. Apparently the club was also a roving casino, without set games or playing installations. Instead, the croupiers were roving ladies dressed like German bar
