Max buckled the bungee cord to his leather cummerbund and checked it twice.
Up here at the pyramidal peak of the club called Neon Nightmare the only music from below that drifted up was the thrumming beat of the earthshaking bass.
Earplugs.
That was the next piece of equipment he needed to add to his arsenal. Tonight he’d have to work in the matrix, though.
That was the heart of his new act: movie Matrix- style leaps and capers, not to mention vertical wall walking.
The black stretch velvet cape swirled around him, obscuring the hooks and wires that made his current magic act fly.
He was like a puppet on a hundred-foot-high stage, clinging at the top of the flies to a tiny parapet at the pyramid’s peak, waiting to take the plunge into the limelight.
At thirty-four, this was a hell of a way to go without a stunt double, but he’d been training hard to press his advantage in having breeched the Synth’s secretive walls as a whole new performing personality.
The Phantom Mage. Part Batman, part Spider-Man, part Matrix-man. What a way to reinvent his performing career, and all for the sake of espionage, not fame and fortune.
When he’d been a full-time magician, the Mystifying Max had been renowned for defying gravity.
Now, in this new act, he’d be defying both gravity and death. The gravity of death.
If it worked and his act pulled the attention of the self-absorbed party people below, he would prolong his chance of learning something solid about the sinister Synth, which might be the magicians’ version of Murder Inc.
If it didn’t work, he’d be another magician/acrobat that couldn’t, and would have to start all over again from square one to position himself inside the heart of darkness known as the Synth.
Death-defying leaps into free fall seemed the better course.
Max pulled once more on the steel hook, waiting for the pulsing drumbeats that were his curtain-raiser, and leaped into the dark noise below.
The rush of wind, his cloak billowing like wings, the stomach-churning swoop caused an adrenalin rush.
He was upside down like a bat (Count Dracula was another compelling media role model), but he forced his body to stay loose, so he wouldn’t fight the sudden jerk at the end of his elastic tether.
He rebounded in the spotlight, the drums echoing his accelerated heartbeat. His booted feet touched one side of the pyramid, then bounced off the other, the rhythm quickening to the drumbeat until he was banging back and forth at the pyramid’s narrow apex like a human Ping-Pong ball.
The applause was deafening, even up here.
All eyes focused on him as he dropped thirty feet and began walking on air in the blinking images of strobe lights.
His hands rained glittering tubes of light on the revelers below, who donned them like Mardi Gras necklaces.
This hokey idea was a hit!
Now the audience was an eerily lit part of the show.
Max glanced to the dark tinted glass that hid the high, overlooking balconies from the dancers below.
Were the people inside impressed? Did they accept him as what he claimed to be? A performer irritated at the trend of outing time-honored magic-act trickery. An old-style magician with a bone to pick.
And a compelling illusionist in his own right.
Right.
He couldn’t help thinking how Temple would cheer him on, if she only knew. How much she hated that he’d been forced to abandon his livelihood, his art, for the shadowy world of the undercover operative.
She’d fought Molina like a tiger to defend him while he was gone, knowing nothing of the facts involved in his disappearance.
Loyalty like that was unheard of in the double-agent world of espionage. You couldn’t buy it, you couldn’t bully it. You couldn’t live without it once you’d had it.
The hoots and whistles and the applause rang hollow, after all.
There was only one person he wanted to see him do this, now, who would bring the joy of his achievement home to him.
He could climb the interior of a modern pyramid like a human fly, but he couldn’t manage to spend the time he needed with the woman he loved.
And who still loved him. He hoped.