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

She sat up and stared down at him, her cheeks flushed, her mouth a thin, angry line. “I never wanted you to leave.”

“I know,” Gunnar said. He rested his hand on her thigh and tried to find the words to make things right. “That’s why I left. I did it to make things easier for you.

“Easier?” A dark chuckle spilled out of Ray. “You took off in the middle of the night so I wouldn’t have a choice. That wasn’t your decision—”

The sound of screaming brakes killed the brewing argument before it could gather a head of steam. A tremendous crash rattled the windows of their suite, followed a split second later by the unmistakable churning light of a fireball.

Gunnar hooked an arm around Ray’s waist and dropped her off the side of the bed away from the windows. “Get down,” he whispered. “I need to see what happened.”

The bodyguard slithered off the bed and onto the floor, careful to stay to the left of the windows. He peeked around the edge of the blackout curtains and cursed. Someone had driven one of those Hummer limos through the crowds in front of the Bellagio. Traffic on the Strip was too dense for the driver to have built up much steam before the collision, but the oversized vehicle was massive enough to plow through the stone railing that surrounded the fountain’s basin. It had made it a few more yards, smearing pedestrians along the ground beneath it like meaty crayons before it rolled to a stop a few feet from the pool.

And then it blew up.

No. Judging by the crown of twisted metal that jutted up around a hole in the middle of the limo’s roof, something inside had exploded. The bodyguard’s mind went to a bomb, then discarded the idea. It could have been an explosive, but it was more likely a party bottle of nitrous combined with some idiot’s blowtorch of a bong lighter.

Still, he didn’t like the coincidence of a freak accident happening so close to Rayleigh’s room. He glanced at the bed and saw her peeking over the top of the rumpled sheets. “No one knows you’re here?”

“I took two days’ vacation from work and drove into Vegas in a rental,” Ray said. “I dropped it at the airport, then took an Uber to the MGM and rode the monorail up to this end of the Strip.”

“You did good,” Gunnar said. Rayleigh had covered her tracks as well as an untrained person could manage. But if YmirRe knew she’d made a run for it, they had the resources to dig in deep. He and Ray had to move.

Now.

“Grab your stuff,” he said. “It’s time to get the hell out of Vegas.”

Chapter 2

GUNNAR DRAGGED THE heavy blackout shades closed and grabbed his clothes off the floor.

“What did you see?” Rayleigh asked as she hustled toward the bathroom.

“Car accident,” Gunnar said. He could be overreacting, but his years as a bodyguard had taught him to pay attention to the cold fingers of dread when they brushed the back of his neck. The limo plowing through the crowd had been weird, but he couldn’t shake the feeling it was only the tip of a much nastier iceberg of trouble headed their way. “But it’s got my spider sense tingling. Time to move.”

Gunnar threw his clothes on and dropped onto the foot of the bed to get his boots on. He double-checked his firearm to the sound of Rayleigh tossing her toiletries and makeup into a bag. They met at the suite’s entrance a few seconds later, and Gunnar raised a finger to his lips to hold off any questions from Ray.

He stifled a cough and pressed his ear to the door to listen for sounds of trouble. He heard muffled shouts from the opposite direction of the elevator banks. Gunnar eased the hotel room’s door open and took a quick peek up and down the hallway. He took Ray’s hand, pulled her down the hallway to the elevator banks, and jabbed the “Down” button with his thumb. He eased her back against the wall and stood in front of her, his hand in the small of his back. If anything went wrong, the bodyguard wanted to be between danger and his charge. And if things went really wrong, he wanted easy access to the semi-auto.

Dual chimes rang out from the elevators as the doors to the car next to Ray and the one across from her opened at the same instant. A family of five spilled out of the nearest elevator, the three kids yelping in surprise as they tried, and failed, to swerve around Gunnar. The youngest girl, who couldn’t have been more than ten, bounced off his knee and caromed into her older brother. The pair of them went down in a confused tangle, and the mom screamed bloody murder. The dad, a fireplug of a guy in his middle years with a beer barrel for a gut, shouted something in a hoarse voice, took a good look at Gunnar, and shut his piehole to hustle his family away from the blond giant.

“Why do people bring their kids to Vegas?” a familiar voice asked as a trio of black-suited men stepped out of the elevator across from Gunnar. “Ridiculous.”

Arthur Drake, six feet of snake oil shoved into a tanned hide, gave Gunnar a broad, insincere smile. It was the same expression the dark-haired man had worn five years before, when he’d ended Gunnar’s cushy corporate security gig at YmirRe with a single lie.

“Well, look who it is,” Arthur said. “Prince Charming came back to rescue his damsel in distress. It’s a twofer!”

The men on either side of Arthur went for the guns holstered inside their jackets, but Gunnar was faster on the draw. He whipped his pistol up and squeezed off a trio of shots. One of the guards