RISK

AuthorHouse

Chapter One

Another performer hailed her as she walked toward the mammoth, vinyl covered enclosure. "Want to finish this?" the girl asked, proffering a half full bottle of the health drink that Cirque insisted they have. Michelle declined with a polite smile as she thought about how much she'd rather be drinking a cold ale in a nice trendy bar down in the Loop.

Nadine, the girl who offered her the obnoxious tasting elixir, was one of the other eleven young women who'd trained with her in Montreal. Drafted from college gymnastic teams from the U.S. and Canada, they'd all spent a grueling year training to do various, acrobatic, circus acts under the tutelage of Cirque's militaristic coaches. After five months of Olympic level rigor, it was determined that her strongest suit was balance, so she then trained for the Celestial Circle, which was one of the most difficult and dangerous acts in the program.

As she stood in the darkness just inside the performer's entrance and scanned the seating area, Michelle noted that the audience was light, only a third of the cavernous tent's capacity. It was the third day of sparse attendance, and although the lowest priced tickets cost $80, rumors of the Chicago run being cut down still circulated.

The music changed, and the lights now illuminated the huge steel circle that hung over the stage.

Michelle calmly walked to an area barely out of the spotlight and kicked off her clogs. She took a resin bag from a grotesque looking, costumed caricature and applied two poufs of the chalky powder inside of it to the soles of her wire walking shoes. And despite the highly effective efforts of the management to distance the company from the image of a circus, Michelle was still a wire walker at the end of it all. In a traditional circus, the overly stylized man who handed her the resin bag would be a clown. But at Cirque, he was referred to as a "comique." There would be no grand announcement by a top-hatted ringmaster nor a whistle blast to signal the start of her act, she simply strolled in total anonymity into the spotlight.

As the suspended metal circle hung at floor height, Michelle stepped into it with ease and took a few steps to the front and back while the apparatus was slowly raised in the air. Next a motor that made the giant circle revolve was engaged, which drew some "oohs" and "ahhs" from the audience as Michelle slightly jogged to keep up with the ever revolving hoop.

In the initial development of the apparatus and subsequent training of the gymnasts to perform on it, the coaches had established that beyond a brisk walk the only feat that could be performed safely on it was a leaping split. Michelle always executed this daring act flawlessly, but something was wrong tonight. Her wire shoes felt gummy and seemed to be sticking to the metal. Because of this hindrance, her takeoff for the leap had been slow, and she nearly lost her balance upon landing. Fear, an emotion she seldom experienced, set in. Her common sense told her to signal for the lowering of the rigging.

She shrugged off her fear and replaced it with caution, a much more functional emotion that she'd been taught to use at the training center in Montreal. She wrapped her arms and legs around the metal hoop and rode it to the top. Ideally, the motor that turned the giant circle would be turned off long enough for her to swing her body over to the outside top of the rigging. Then the motor would be started again and she'd resume walking on the outside of the circle. It was certainly a breathtaking finale to the act as there was no balancing pole customarily seen in a conventional high wire act nor were there "safety zone" platforms at either end of the wire.

Michelle swung her body to the top of the circle and settled for a moment in a crouched position. She then re-established her balance and stood as the circle turned again. Normally, she would only take a few steps to finish the trick. Then, wrapping her body around the rigging, it would be lowered to the ground. That's the way the act always ended, except tonight. To the horror of the otherwise blasé audience, her first step proved to be her last. Her feet became hopelessly stuck to the metal. In a sudden panic, she tried to wrench herself free, causing her to lose her balance and sending her hurtling headlong to the stage fifty feet below.

In the case of nearly all daredevil feats gone awry, audiences never scream at first; the screaming comes shortly after. At the moment the mishap occurs, there's usually another sound; a very audible mass intake of breath, something akin to a room full of old people preparing to blow up a balloon. But tonight, this stunned audience, who sat helplessly in the world of Cirque, painfully exhaled as they viewed the twisted body of a dead girl.

Chapter Two

"Uh huh.... I see ... Good. Uh huh. Let me know. Bye".

The man, who'd taken the call, returned to the window, but remained silent. He quietly knew that the second window gazer would inquire about his covert conversation.

"Do you really think these calls should be coming here?" the shorter man asked with a trace of apprehension in his voice. "Are you going paranoid on me, Gilles?" said the tall man as he turned toward his inquisitor, Gilles.

Concerned, Gilles silently looked out toward the misty sky. "It's way too early in the game to be concerned about anyone tracing calls. You watch too many cop shows. Besides, the phone company doesn't save that information beyond thirty days". "Good. So what happened then, Claude?"

The rumple-suited Gilles seated himself on the edge of the desk as though anticipating a detailed answer. He knew, however, that Claude's report on the evening's events in Chicago would be short, and no speculation on what had transpired would be forthcoming. Claude settled himself in the large leather chair at his desk, leaned back, and closed his eyes. To a casual observer this might have been construed as the prelude to a well thought out answer, but Gilles knew better. After a twenty year relationship, he knew that Claude had closed the door on today and was reviewing tomorrow's battle plan. He would, however, answer the question.

"The gross was lower than we expected, only a one-third house. The girl died, and we managed to get the stuff and dispose of it," Claude said with less emotion than contained in an opening financial report.

A quiet look of remorse fell upon Gilles's face as he stared at the darkening sky.

"I'm going to dinner now," Claude said as he rose from his chair and added, "1 don't expect there'll be anything else. But if there are any media calls, public relations will handle them tomorrow. See you in the morning."

Gilles watched him stroll into his personal elevator in the right corner of his office and waved as the door closed. He was rarely invited to dinner and was only requested to appear publicly with the owner of Cirque occasionally. Although listed corporately as partners, Claude and Gilles disliked each other. Much like the Vegas magicians, Penn and Teller, they each brought enough to the table to make the product work. And that was sufficient.

Gilles calmly exited their office building as he mulled over his conversation with Claude. Out in the warm evening air, he removed his sports jacket and swung it over his shoulder. He walked two blocks and entered his favorite restaurant and bar, a place that his extravagant partner would disdainfully regard as a "greasy spoon." Claude would hate this place, he thought with a smile as the bartender delivered the same drink that he'd served him for the last fifteen years. Tonight, Claude would be dining in some upscale restaurant with his current piece of eye candy. Later, they'd go to his penthouse two floors above the office, have a few drinks, and if he'd qualified her, they'd adjourn to the thirteenth floor to the "funhouse", which was a small room right off the elevator that was densely decorated with painfully pleasurable, adult toys. Here the girl would be chained up, slapped around, and screwed in every imaginable manner. She would then leave with at least a thousand dollars more than she arrived with.

Gilles picked up his drink and sat down in a booth to order dinner. Ordinarily, he liked the old jazz ballads that played over the house system, but tonight Billy Holiday was singing, Why Am I Here, Why Am I Living. His thoughts turned darkly introspective. He knew why he was here; because there was no place left to escape to. As to the second more cerebral question, Claude controlled not only Gilles's existence, but the end of it when he concluded that his little disheveled partner had outlived his usefulness.

In a less than brilliant legal career, Gilles LeVesque had come full circle from defending criminals to becoming one. Although hardly a moral success story, it was certainly a financial one. With a visible income of nearly two hundred thousand dollars yearly and an invisible income of several million, he was probably in better shape than his flamboyant partner. On the other side of the tarnished coin, the Cirque corporation was broke. And despite all the legal camouflage Gilles had managed to drape it with, the public revelation of that fact was eminent. That's why the current, insidious plot had been hatched and left an embryo acrobat's body in the Chicago morgue with several more to follow. If the plan worked and the morbidly titillated public turned out in strong enough numbers to see if another performer would suffer a similar fate, Cirque would limp to the prescribed finish line without an ounce of red ink showing. A financial group in Holland would buy the two units in Las Vegas, and the remaining equipment would be sold. It would be the end of what Gilles had sorely grown to think of as Cirque Morte.

Gilles elected to leave his car in the parking garage and walked the five blocks to his apartment. A burly man standing in the doorway of a tattoo shop greeted him with a nod as he ushered out a customer with a bandaged arm.

"Busy tonight?" Gilles asked the shop's proprietor and added, "You look tired." "Pretty busy. Really, I'm just tired of what I'm doing. Guess I'd like to find something creative that doesn't involve the loss of blood," replied the tattoo artist as he glanced into the crowded parlor.

Me too, Gilles thought.

Chapter Three

"Particularly for these people. They have several of their shows around the country, and you never hear about accidents".

"Oh, every so often you see something on T.V. about an accident with one of those gypsified little circuses that travel around, but not with something like this. Well, I'm going inside where it's air conditioned, maybe some of those little hotties will be practicing. Wanna come?" "I'll pass. Besides, I think they're trained not to talk to outsiders".

But Bouchard didn't have circus girls on his mind. He lied to Claude Marchand on the phone last night about the disposal of the resin bag, and people who lied to Mr. Marchand had a nasty habit of disappearing from the planet Earth. He knew this all too well because he'd personally attended to many of the disappearances.

He walked to the tent pole where the can holding the resin bag was attached, but as he got closer, he saw that the bag was lying on the ground. He quickly glanced around to see if he was being observed. Next, he kicked the bag cautiously and dropped his cigarette pack beside it in the event someone was watching.Then, he bent and snagged both items deftly. The bag was cold and hard as a rock, exactly what he'd been told would happen to it. The heat from the girl's hand had activated the catalyst he'd added to the bag and turned the contents to a sort of powdered super glue. It then hardened into a cold lump. And the mission was accomplished. There was a bank of Jiffy Johns next to the tent, so he deposited his deactivated death package in one of them. He knew it would be pumped out before tonight's show.

As Bouchard returned to his cohort who was seated in the marquee, he noted that a line had formed at the ticket wagon, which was unusual for the Chicago run because the bulk of the tickets for the show were sold online.

The ticket wagon was one of the few throwbacks to an old fashioned circus in evidence around Cirque, and it functioned more as a public relations booth. Wackenhut Security was the exclusive provider of guards that Cirque used in their seven U.S. operations. In most of their installations, they provided a dozen people, and only two of which had interchangeable duties. Of course, local police were employed, but they functioned mostly on the outer perimeter of the show grounds and were summoned only in the event of an emergency, such as last night's accident.

Romeo Bouchard had risen to the rank of a superintendant for the security company, therefore, he was one of the two men free to patrol all areas of any site the company had been hired to oversee. A solidly built man in his late forties with the unrevealing face of a cop, he had worked for Wackenhut for eleven years, having emigrated to the U.S. from a similar job with the company in Canada. Neither his co-workers nor employers knew anything of his private life, undoubtedly a good thing as he was a part-time assassin. He was so efficient at his sideline that he grew very popular with the underworld of Chicago.

Bouchard's last assignment had been nearly a year earlier when he'd been dispatched to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field to kill an out-of-favor mobster named Vito Moscera. Picking a day when the attendance would be predictably low, Bouchard dressed as a seat vendor and located his victim. He knew that Moscera always sat in sparsely populated areas, not wishing to be bothered by talkative baseball fans. He also knew that most of the other vendors would concentrate on the populated seating areas, leaving the fat gangster craving his favorite ballpark treat—a hotdog.

Moscera had waved franticly at the bogus seat vendor. Bouchard approached him and smiled as he gripped the silencer equipped thirty eight that was nestled among the steamed buns. Moscera unwittingly accommodated him as he hunched forward to get his wallet out and provided a perfect shield to anyone who might have been watching. Bouchard shot him once in the head and chest, two "whoofs" that went unheard through the noise of the crowd. He walked, unhurriedly, up the steep aisle to the upper corridor where he boarded a freight elevator and disappeared. He ditched the vendor paraphanalia and pocketed the gun en route. As he reached the street, the announcer called for the seventh inning stretch.

Vito Moscera would not be participating.

Unlike those who were often apprehended, Romeo Bouchard approached the business of killing in a scientific manner. He used the mathematical laws of probability as a guide. Because he employed an element of surprise and used the most suitable instrument of death, the act of killing someone was relatively simple for Bourchand. The second part of the equation, escaping the scene of the event undetected, required far more planning.

Orchestrating a deadly accident was far more complicated and pushed the odds in the wrong direction. No matter how well planned, the "accident" wasn't always deadly and potentially left a living witness to relay the events that lead up to the accident and identify the culprit responsible for it. It was for this reason that Romeo preferred more cut and dried events like the Wrigley Field contract. He could have easily declined the killing of the circus girl, but hadn't because Marchand had been a frequent, high paying client in the past. Still, there were things that bothered him. Why, for example, did the girl have to die in such a public way? If this was some tootsie that had insulted the show owner or rejected his sexual advances (the reason for two of his previous "hits" for Marchand), why not simply shoot her? The second negative element had been the pre-packaged nature of the killing device, which was a two part compound alleged to have been developed by N.A.S.A.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from RISKby JOHNNY MEAH Copyright © 2012 by Johnny Meah. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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