Valhalla Virus by Nick Harrow (best management books of all time TXT) 📕

The odds were good there’d be blood if Gunnar showed up on his old boss’s doorstep looking for the Valknut. Gunnar had accepted the inevitability of a fight, but he wanted to be sure the spilled blood didn’t belong to him or his allies. The bodyguard needed more information, and he needed it fast. “Where’s that asshole staying?” he asked Mimi.

“He’s over in the Villas at the Mirage,” Mimi said. “He set up shop there a few months back to work a deal with the Chinese. I may be mostly out of the game, but I keep an ear to the ground so I don’t lose sight of the big players.”

That, at least, was some good news for Gunnar. The Villas were fancy, but they were far from the most secure location Corso could’ve chosen. They were on the ground floor behind the Mirage, surrounded by walls. The location made them far easier for a determined team to enter than a penthouse suite at the Bellagio or the hotel within a hotel at the Venetian. Now all Gunnar needed was a team.

“Is there anybody left in the city that you can still reach out to these days?” he asked Mimi.

“Me,” Mimi laughed. “If you’re asking for trigger men, no, I don’t know anybody I would trust. Especially with everything that’s going on.”

Frustrated, Gunnar pushed back from the table. He finished his sandwich in a pair of vicious bites, then guzzled down the last of the bottled water in front of him. After all the craziness that went down the day before and the bizarre dream that wasn’t a dream, being cooped up underground was pushing Gunnar over the edge. He needed fresh air and sunlight. Barring that, he’d settle for a walk around Bunklerland.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s stretch our legs and figure out our next move.”

Mimi led the way outside and gave them all a walking tour of the grounds. The ranch-style home the women had spent the night in was parked in the center of the low-ceilinged bunker with painted walls and a green-carpeted floor. The ceiling was made up to look like the sky, though the painted-on clouds couldn’t hide the air conditioning vents or sprinkler heads. A kidney-shaped pool ran down one side of the house, its length framed by fake rocks surrounding a hot tub overlooking the water. A boulder beside the pool hid a barbecue grill in its guts, complete with a ventilation system that carried the smoke out through the nearby fake tree to the surface. The opposite side of the house had a parquet dance floor with a rotating disco ball, and mood lights helped complete the illusion that they weren’t buried under thirty feet of concrete.

“This is wild,” Rayleigh said, her fingertips brushing against the bark of a fake tree. “Hard to believe someone would go to so much trouble to make something so godawful ugly.”

Bridget laughed. “This is pure Vegas. I love it.”

“It may not be pretty, but it’s safe as hell. My bosses went all out on this place,” Mimi explained, “to help this place survive a direct hit from a bomb. They also did some excavation to increase food storage. There are enough canned foods and MREs hidden under that dance floor to keep four people fed for a couple of years. Wouldn’t be the tastiest thing you’ve ever eaten, but you wouldn’t die. Water tank access lines are hidden in those cabinets there. They buried a couple of five thousand gallon jobs under the concrete, so the water will last as long as the food if we cut out showers.”

Despite the pangs of claustrophobia picking at the edges of Gunnar’s thoughts, this was the perfect place to ride out the virus. Even if bad guys tried to fight their way down to the subterranean bolthole, Gunnar knew he’d be able to hold them off. Especially if his suspicions about what was behind the big wooden door he’d just found were correct. “What’s this thing?” he asked Mimi. “Gun safe?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Mimi asked. She made her way around the corner of the house to catch up to Gunnar, and her jaw dropped. “I have no clue what that is.”

“How did you miss something this big in your super-secret underground love bunker?” Gunnar asked. He grabbed hold of the heavy ring set in the door’s center and gave it a pull. The crude barrier swung open, its rusted hinges squealing like a stomped-on cat. “Holy shit.”

Mimi bumped into Gunnar’s back when he pulled up short on the threshold of the room he’d revealed. She grabbed the bodyguard’s shirt to regain her balance, then peered around his oversized frame to get a look at his discovery. “That was not here last night.”

“Looks old for new construction,” Gunnar said. The door itself was worn and weathered, like it had been exposed to the elements for decades, not tucked away in an underground bomb shelter. The interior of the room looked every bit as old as the door. Guttering candles nestled in the wall sconces provided some light, thick trails of wax dripping down the stones beneath them, but most of the illumination in the room came from the primitive table planted at its center. The furniture’s legs still had bark on them, as if they’d been hacked from a tree then split lengthwise into quarters to support the warped and knotted planks of the table’s surface. The wooden structure didn’t provide any light, but what rested atop it did.

A scale model of the bunker, its long elevator to the surface, and the two-story home that hid all of it from the surface took up most of the table’s center. It floated in the air, like a hologram, but the luminous walls looked perfectly solid. He looked under the table and felt along the ceiling for a projector but found nothing. A careful