---

 

On the following Wednesday night I held a brief meeting at Susan's place, where I bought together Talia, Beverly, Pete, Sunhee, Yana, Vassily and Susan for the first time.

The first order of business was to get those who had cellphones to turn them off, and pull out their batteries. There were a few nervous looks among them after we had all done this, as though they were wondering what they had gotten themselves into. I had spoken to each of them individually, as well as Carl Choi by telephone over several calls, and although I hadn't been at all specific they had all indicated an interest in helping out.

Then we got Carl on my laptop using CU-SeeMe, and I held the first meeting of what Susan jokingly called the C4 gang. "The Cambridge Card Counters Consortium."

"Carl's in California," I reminded her.

"Okay, C5. Whatever."

After reassuring most of those present that only Carl, Vassily and I needed to be able to count — and that I was satisfied each of us was good enough at it to succeed, I ran through basic strategy, and then explained how each of us would work. I didn't explain any of the things that Pete and Talia and I had planned, because even though I trusted everyone I wanted to keep that information as tightly held as possible, and despite all our precautions there was always the possibility that the Feds might have bugged Susan's house.

Introducing friends is always tricky: I always want people I love to get along with one another as well as they do with me, but of course that's not the way friendship works. Some of them, at least, hit it off. Sunhee and — improbably — Talia seemed to bond strongly.

Before we finished our planning for the evening Pete ran through the way we were to use images in email to communicate. We would avoid using our phones, which we would assume were compromised by Whitwell or other, more nefarious interests. SMS was allowed, but only if we kept the messages non-specific. If there was trouble at any time, an SMS with the word "Cambridge" would let everyone know that they should fall back on our emergency plans. I didn't want to worry my new team with tales of the people I knew who had died, but I impressed upon them the need for absolute secrecy. We ran through the encryption process a few times, and Pete handed out floppies with copies of the EzStego program for everyone to load onto their PCs.

As I drove home with Pete and Talia I discovered how it was that Talia had learned so much about Whitwell. After Sunhee's phone message to me, several months earlier, Talia had called her, intrigued, and the two of them had communicated via their cellphones, several times. It seemed Sunhee had discovered a notebook that had belonged to Dan, which had contained a lot of information on the team, and on what Dan knew about Whitwell, the Casinos, and other things related to his work. Sunhee knew a great deal about Arun's team, and that meant Talia did, too.

That accounted for the comments Talia had made to me weeks earlier, when I had wondered how she knew so much. Now my only concern was whether or not Whitwell, Arun's people, or Treasury had gone to the trouble of tapping Talia's and Sunhee's phones. I reinforced to both of them that using steganography was crucial to staying alive.

On Thursday night I went to talk some more with Beverly. Obviously I didn't want her playing in Vegas. Apart from anything else she had Samantha to take care of. But there were things she could do to help Talia with the exploits we would need to confuse Whitwell and create a distraction, and I needed to talk her through the process for all that. I worried about exposing her to the business, but I also wanted her to feel she was earning some of the money that would flow from the C5 success. No matter how much I tried to help her financially, Beverly only really felt comfortable with money when she earned it herself.

While I was visiting Beverly, Talia did a little extra-curricular research on the rest of Arun's team, using tools I didn't even know about. I didn't even know she was going to do it until after the weekend. In retrospect, I think she should have tried out for a job with Richard Deuchar at Command Dynamics, because she compiled a small dossier on each member of Arun's team, except me, and uncovered a lot of the information Lucy had already given me, just from online searches. In conjunction with Sunhee, Talia actually pulled an all nighter. She told me later it was to get in practice staying up late while we took the Casino in Vegas, but I think part of the reason for her efforts was that she liked showing off in front of Sunhee.

I didn't get a chance to talk to Talia before I flew out on Friday morning, but as I later learned Talia did get a chance to talk to Sunhee in the morning, and share some of the results of her research. Sunhee took it from there, and found out things that I should have known earlier. I had never felt the need to find out before.

 

~o~O~o~
 

We had the semblance of a plan. I had given Susan my cash, which she in turn had passed on to Tom, who had performed some legal chicanery on it somehow, after which it came back to Susan as a regular bank transfer from some company in the Caymans. Don't ask me how. I wondered briefly why, if legal money laundering was so easy, Arun's friends were going about it the hard way, with a team of unreliable Harvard kids. I was sure it was safe, or Tom wouldn't have let Susan's name be associated with it, but I didn't ask too many questions, just in case.

I showed Susan how to package up money for transit to Vegas. She laughed a lot when I described my origami padding, which I had had to give up after I started on Estrogen. We worked out more traditional methods, including simply wiring about $120,000 of it directly to an account in Susan's name in Vegas. After all, we wanted the Feds to know Susan had this money. That was the entire point.

Pete and Vassily were in, too, with the little money they had left. Their business had taken a serious tumble since the Command Dynamics relationship had turned sour following the security breach and the theft of the patents, but they both saw this as an attempt to claw back some income and get some revenge at the same time. I was a little concerned that maybe it wouldn't all work out, and they'd be left with nothing, and I was very concerned about the amount of time they were spending away from the business, helping me, but Pete reassured me that they knew what they were doing, and Vassily pointed out that as one of the putative counters he was going to be directly responsible for ensuring the C5 team was successful.

So I shut up, pulled myself together, drank lots of coffee with Beverly, and got ready to take on Treasury, Arun, the Casinos, Whitwell, and Arun's Russian friends, all in one night, with an untested team of novices.

I organized one night's play at Foxwoods in Connecticut, which had been expanded only a few years earlier. Because Arun's team had always focused on the Mohegun Sun, I hoped that Foxwoods would be less alert to possible counters. Vassily, Yana, Sunhee, Susan and I all went down to the casino on a weeknight and played for about 3 hours in two teams of two, with one person running security, and we at least proved that Vassily could count and Sunhee made a passable smurf too. Yana was more in the wizard/princess mold, and was more than capable there so long as she didn't show her teeth too much.

We won about $25,000 from a small stake. It was almost fun.

In the meantime Pete worked with Talia on ways to get into the Whitwell database, and specifically on ways to inject new data into Whitwell's system without triggering alerts. I tried to stay out of their hair, and prayed they knew what they were doing.

Susan and I both got our hair done on the Thursday, from Stella, in exactly the same style. I had to apologize to Tom, since he loved Susan's long hair and wasn't happy about seeing 12 inches lopped off, and I also gave Susan a hug of thanks when it was done. "It's no big deal," she said. "Long hair can be a hassle. This feels fantastic."

Stella took photographs of the two of us. "I've never done twins before," she said. I was going to convince her we weren't twins, but decided to let the comment go as a vote of confidence.

All of us had agreed that the Koh family and the Huang family would get a small percentage of our final winnings, if any. It wasn't making up for Dan, or for Lucy, but it was better than nothing at all.

Finally, I planned for us to fly into Vegas more than 24 hours before the Harvard team was due, to give us time to boost our stake. It wasn't a lot of time, especially given all the work we needed to do as well as our actual playing. But with the changes in the dynamics of Arun's team, and my increasing isolation from Alice and Arun, I didn't think we could wait another week. We had to move on Arun's team, and soon.

 

~o~O~o~
 

Before I left Boston, Beverly had said one final thing to me as I left the house on my way to Logan. "Expect something you didn't expect. I learned that living with Paul. I know I sound paranoid, but you need to plan for the idea that something unexpected can wreck your plan. Have a fallback."

"Yes, mother," I joked.

"Your mother would … Never mind. Just be careful."

"Fortune favors the bold," I said. But I didn't feel bold. I felt nervous, and stupid. Beverly was probably right. Our plan — what little there was of it — had too many single points of failure. I needed some fallback options.

 

~o~O~o~
 

Vassily, Yana, Sunhee, Pete and I flew into Vegas on August 18th, a Wednesday. I had told Arun and the rest of the team I was going to LA to see my grandmother, as an excuse for not flying in with them on the 19th.

Pete rented a car at the airport, a Chrysler convertible, and we drove down the strip to the Bellagio, where we'd be staying for the next few days. On the first I would move to the Grand, where the team usually stayed, but I planned to use the Grand as the gambling venue for my new mini-team, and that meant staying away from our field of play.

It was Sunhee's first time in Vegas, and she was like a kid, her head whipping from side to side as we drove, trying to take it all in. Pete and Vassily sat in the front, while we girls were crammed into the back seat. Yana's knees were practically on her chest, there was so little legroom, but Sunhee had a good view of the strip. It was a typical Vegas August day, bone dry and baking hot even in the late afternoon. I wore a Sox baseball cap to try to shield my face from the sun. Pete thought it was hilarious, since it was the first and only time he'd ever seen me exhibit any interest in sport.

We checked in. I put everyone's rooms on my black Amex. At the Bellagio I was registering with my real name, paying with my real credit card. Even though Sunhee now knew where my money had come from, she still made an 'ooh' sound when she saw me hand it to the clerk at reception. I prayed the staff didn't remember Alexandra Leung. It would only be when I moved to the Grand with Arun that I would become Alexa Chin again.

I also fervently hoped Arun's friends didn't have a way to track my credit card usage. I wanted to believe Amex was a discreet company — I had heard that the British Royal Family used the cards — but who knew? So much depended on secrecy.

I had booked separate rooms for Pete and me. I wasn't sending a signal: I just couldn't afford the distraction. Pete and I had almost been back to our old friendly selves since the phone call I made to him when he was at Fenway, but there was still a tension between us. When friends sleep together, and it doesn't work out, it's a very hard thing to overlook. I had realized that I loved Pete, very deeply. It was more than just a crush. And there was a lust component, too. I had become attracted to him in a very physical way, a way I didn't fully understand yet. Looking at him sometimes made me feel confused and aroused, in a very different way than had ever occurred when I looked at Alice years ago. It was disturbing. It was even more disturbing because I knew that Pete was someone I could never have as a partner. Even though I knew he was my friend, we couldn't be lovers. Every time I gave the situation any conscious thought it made me despair, so I tried not to think about it. I rationalized that we were too busy to allow ourselves to be distracted by emotions.

After settling into our rooms and showering we met with Susan and Tom at the pool bar for our council of war. I had been drilling each of them individually during the preceding two weeks, to train them in their respective roles, but that night we were going to be doing more than card counting. We were going to be hacking into a computer system, impersonating hotel staff, and breaking the law in a dozen different ways. I looked around at my team — my real team, my friends and family — and hoped as I'd never hoped before that they all acted as smart as I knew they were.

Pete drove me over to the Bank of America branch on Spring Mountain Road, where they knew me as Alexandra Long and where I kept a safe deposit box, and I retrieved the remaining $30,000 the IRS didn't know about. It, and the $120,000 I'd unpacked from behind the fridge in Somerville, that Tom had laundered and Susan had brought with us, were all the liquid assets I had left in the world. It wasn't a big stake, but it was going to have to do. If it all went wrong I was never going to be able to pay the bill on my Amex statement. I had to count, like I'd never counted before, with Vassily and Carl, and Sunhee and Yana had to learn to be Wizards, fast.

Back upstairs in my suite at the Bellagio we played a few mock hands so Carl could get a feel for the flow of the counting. Carl seemed smitten by Sunhee, and didn't focus all that well on the cards, which worried me. Then we did a cellphone check, and I ran through our emergency options in the event we had to bail from the MGM Grand. Our fallback rendezvous was the Mexican cafe at the front of the shops at Ceasars, which was only a short walk from the Grand and offered multiple exit routes. Everyone also had Beverly's phone number, back in Somerville. Beverly had promised to be up all night that night and the next, running communications for us and sending SMS alerts if anything went wrong. I had purchased new phones for the entire team, including Beverly, with new numbers, so with any luck our SMS messages wouldn't be intercepted, but I warned everyone to be careful with comms all the same. I had sent everyone a list of the new contact numbers via email, in a photo of Dan I had encrypted with EzStego, and pre-programmed Beverly's number into each handset.

"I have to tell all of you, this is serious stuff," I said. "Y'all might be thinking about how much I made these past few years, and wondering how hard this could be, and I'll be honest, most of the playing is not that hard."

I knew from the expressions on Susan's and Sunhee's faces that they didn't believe me. "Alright, actual counting is hard, but that's my job, tonight. You all have your own jobs, and only Vassily and Carl and I need to count, so the rest of you just need to stay in character and relax but stay alert. Susan just has to get used to pretending to be me. It's just really, really important that you all stay focused, and watch for signals."

I looked around at each of the people I loved, and hoped I wasn't making a huge mistake. "And whatever happens, if anything seems wrong, if you see anything at all — anything at all — that seems off, I want you to know that you can walk away. Walk away, and let Beverly know immediately. I want you all to check, right now, that you have her number." People dutifully checked. Obviously my attempts to strike the right note of seriousness and discipline were working. "Tonight we need to make at least another sixty grand. But if we don't, we can work to an alternative. What's most important to me — to all of us — is that we all stay safe."

I remembered back to the first security briefing I had had in Cambridge, in 1996, after I'd been formally inducted into the team. It felt like a lifetime ago.

 

~o~O~o~
 

We hit the floor in ones and twos. I had given Susan a red dress that I played in often, and she had glammed up the way I did when I played. The expression on Tom's face as he looked at her, then at me, was priceless.

In contrast, I was wearing black jeans, black long-sleeved top, and glasses instead of my usual contacts. Where Susan's hair was tied back in an elegant enamel clasp, mine was loose, draped partially over the left side of my face. I wondered whether Whitwell's software would go crazy if it saw what it perceived to be the same person in two different places. I figured not. Surely they had to allow for identical twins. And Susan and I didn't look exactly alike. Tonight, we looked very different.

Carl and Vassily went off to separate tables, and before long I noticed Carl signal Susan into a hand. Eventually Vassily called Yana into a hand, and soon I was able to call in Sunhee. Of all our crew, I was most worried about Sunhee. She was certainly smart enough to play, but she was the youngest of us, and I felt responsible for her after what had happened to Dan.

As it turned out Sunhee played impeccably, and left the table when I signaled the deck was cooling. It was all I could do not to follow he with my eyes as she walked away, but I wasn't supposed to know her. I only hoped that Tom, who was running security, was on his toes.

After signaling Yana into a hand, and then bringing Pete in a little later in the evening, I was exhausted. I hadn't counted for some time, and I had never had so much at stake.

When we regrouped later that night in the club at the Bellagio, among the pulsing beat and impossible-to-bug noise, Carl told me that collectively we had increased our stake to slightly more than $240,000. He seemed overjoyed. "Alex! This is fantastic!"

I patted him on the shoulder. "Glad you're having fun, Carl." Then I texted Beverly to go to sleep, and crossed the floor of the club to find Sunhee and hug her.

There was one last thing. Before I could go to bed, I had to make one last call to McCarran, to VegasJets. Now that I knew we had the cash, I wanted Susan, Tom, Pete, Yana and Vassily out of Vegas on a charter, before the Harvard team's post-mortem. I had spoken to Sunhee, and I knew that there was no way she'd leave Vegas until she was sure we'd achieved our goal, but it was important to me — more important than all the money I had ever had — that everyone else was free and clear as soon as Beverly gave the signal. I arranged to charter a Gulfstream V, which had the range to get to Logan nonstop. I gave them my Amex as a guarantee, called Amex to make sure the charge would be approved, and fell sleep in bed, alone.

We were set for the main event.

 

~o~O~o~
 

The next morning Pete drove off in the rental to the back of the MGM Grand where he'd done the warchalking a month earlier. He was going to check to make sure Talia would still be able to access the Whitwell account using the wifi later. But he came back with some alarming news. The wifi signal at the Grand had become weaker, somehow. It was still available, but it was almost impossible to sustain a connection from the alleyway behind the hotel.

"What's happened?"

"I don't know," Pete said. "It's not a security change, or our credentials wouldn't work at all. It might just be that they've moved the wireless base station. Or they've installed some equipment, somewhere, that's interfering with the signal. Hell, it might just be the motor in a refrigerator."

"Talia can login from another network though, right?"

"Maybe," Pete said. "But …"

"But?"

"There might be some protection against logins from outside the right IP ranges. Or they might have — if they're smart — they might have some alarms that trigger if that happens."

"So we're fucked," I said.

"Sheriff, this is no time to panic," said Pete, quoting Toy Story. "Alex, when was the last time you had to impersonate hotel staff?"

"You're joking, right?" I said. He wasn't.

It wasn't a good plan, but it was all we had. I hung around the MGM Grand lobby for a while, observing the staff. I tried not to be too conspicuous, but maybe I wasn't too successful, because when Yana came walking in to the lobby unexpectedly at noon she asked me what I was doing.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"Looking at where we will play tonight," she said. "You?"

I explained to her that I was trying to work out how to steal a staff ID. She laughed. "Alex, you have no experience in such things, do you?"

"No," I admitted. "It's that obvious, huh?"

"Have you seen someone whose ID you wish?"

"Um … There's her." I indicated a young Asian woman at the end of the reception desk. She didn't look that much like me except that she was Asian, and around my age, and she was thin.

"Then you leave this to me," Yana said. "I come find you in an hour or two. It must be her, or it can be any young woman?"

"Asian would be good," I said. "But anything. But how?"

When I hesitated, she pushed me away. "Go! You make too much disturbance if you stay."

I was glad to get away. I knew Arun and the rest of the team would be arriving in Vegas in the next few hours, and I wanted to keep a low profile until they arrived.

I don't know how Yana did it, but about 90 minutes later she knocked at the door of my room at the Bellagio, holding the staff ID of the young woman we had been watching behind the reception desk.

"Americans are very careless," was all she said.

 

~o~O~o~
 

Sunhee and Carl had procured kitchen whites from a restaurant-supply company somewhere on the south side of Vegas, and with my stolen ID affixed and a laptop and wireless router Pete had bought that morning, hidden in a cardboard box that had previously contained canned tomatoes, I nervously made my way through the back entrance of the MGM Grand. I had my hair up, tied back securely in a small neat bun like any other female hospitality worker. I kept my eyes focused on a point only a few yards in front of me, desperate to avoid eye contact.

The MGM Grand is huge. When it first opened, back in '93, it was the largest hotel in the world. It's even more huge now, since it was expanded in 2005, but even back in 1999 it was a big hotel, and the kitchens are vast and the staff were too numerous to count.

As I entered I felt the same sense of fear I had felt years earlier at the Lake Charles Casino in Louisiana. I strolled through the kitchen areas expecting someone to tap my shoulder from behind at any moment. The fact that nobody did only heightened the sense that they would at any moment.

But nobody stopped me. One guy looked me up and down as I passed his workstation, but he didn't seem to be concerned that he didn't know me. I tried to regulate my breathing to stay calm, aware that if appearing panicked was the surest way to draw attention to myself.

After walking about 150 feet into the depths of the building, I reached a point about midway into one of the kitchens, near some shelving that contained flatware, napkins, sauceboats and other miscellaneous tableware. There was a noticeboard adjacent to the shelving, containing what looked to be a roster with some names and days on it. Bennett, Da Silva, Arias, Rodriguez were at the top of four columns, with other names underneath. I guessed they were the key chefs. Next to the shelving was a phone, and next to the phone were two internet ports. One of them had some kind of electronic ordering system connected to it on another shelf to the right, and the other one was vacant. Above all this was a small corkboard with hundreds of notes pinned to it. Below the ordering system was a small shelf, partly hidden by a stool propped in front of it. It wasn't ideal, but it was in front of me, and it would do.

I bent down, popped the cardboard box onto the shelf, and looked for a power outlet.

There was a double outlet about three feet away, further along the wall next to a door. The ordering system was plugged into one outlet, but the other was free. I prayed the power cords on the wireless router and laptop charger would reach. They did.

Trying to turn everything on was the hardest part. I was certain someone would interrupt and challenge me at any moment, and I was beginning to sweat. But the dozen or so people I had seen since I entered had all been focused on cleaning cooking equipment, or mopping the floor, or checking off lists and other administrative tasks. In this part of the kitchens, at least, I had lucked into a quiet time.

After the Windows 95 startup came up on the laptop I logged in as fast as I could, praising Pete in my head for having the good sense to disconnect the speaker in the laptop so the Windows startup chimes didn't sound. Then I draped a napkin over the keyboard so the lid wouldn't close. I prayed Pete's scripts would work and the laptop would acquire the network as planned, but I didn't think I could hang round to find out for sure.

I grabbed another pile of napkins from the shelf above and draped them over the electronics, then pushed the stool back into position in front of the shelf. The power cables running to the outlet, piggy-backed on one another, looked ridiculous, but with the stool back in place it wasn't obvious what they led to.

As I had in Lake Charles, I went straight for the door I'd come in, as quickly as I could without running. Again, nobody said a word.

All we needed was a couple of hours.

 

~o~O~o~
 

As I was heading back to our hotel I got a text from Pete that said "ntwk ok", which meant he was sitting in a car at the back of the Grand logged into the wireless router I'd just installed on the hotel's internal network. He would already have sent the same message to Talia, so by now she'd be logged into the same network, using what would appear — to anyone looking at the network — to be a machine located inside the MGM Grand. It should be relatively simple for her to access the other subnets, and she already had Pete's Whitwell credentials. As I was showering she had already obtained Root access to the database, and was beginning to modify the profile information on some individuals and insert some new information on others.

 

~o~O~o~
 

After the shower I had to go to a team meeting with my old Harvard team. It seemed strange, after a single night with my friends, to now have to think of Alice and Arun and the rest of them as a team. I knew now what loyalty was. We had never had that on Arun's team.

The team meeting was every bit as strained as the one back in Boston. We all knew what we had to do, but there was so much tension between the five original members of the team — Arun, Alice, James, Emily and me — that it was beginning to infect the new members, too. Alice, in particular, seemed wound unusually tight. Sally asked Arun a question about the rendezvous point — she had heard it sometimes closed early — and Alice snapped at her, that nothing in Vegas ever closed early. Sally was startled, because it was very unlike Alice to snap at anyone. Arun snapped at people all the time when he thought they weren't on the ball, but he was usually the only disciplinarian on the squad.

I tried to keep to myself. My mind was elsewhere, on the team I had assembled, of people who really mattered to me.

After the meeting, outside the suite, Alice approached me. She seemed to find it hard to meet my eyes, and I made the conversation even harder by glaring at her fiercely throughout.

"Alex, I'm, uh …"

I let her sweat it out.

"I'm sorry," she finished.

"Sorry for what?" I knew how women played this game, now. I could be a bitch if I had to.

"About, you know, not telling you about me and Arun."

"It doesn't matter, really. You can sleep with anyone you want."

"It's not about that, Alex."

"Alice, it's not that you didn't tell me about him – okay, it is that you didn't tell me about him." I exhaled a deep breath that I hadn't known I had stored up inside me. "I thought we were close. But what it's really about, is that you lied to me. You lied to me."

I think she wanted to say something more, because she moved her lips as though she was going to say something. Instead she turned away, and walked back into the hotel suite.

 

~o~O~o~
 

Back at the Bellagio, my new team was down in the bar, drinking soda and mocktails, all clustered around one of the only decent-sized tables there.

"Sunhee, you are going to follow Arun around," I said. "And wherever possible sit just to his left, and mimic his bets. Do you know how to do that?"

"I think so. But if I have a different hand, I won't win, right?"

"Well, you'll be in the hand at the same time he's in the hand. If he's betting big, it's because the count is high. You should be alright. Sit on twelve if you have to, just don't bust out."

"But he will move tables, right?"

"Right. So you will follow him to his new table."

"Isn't that going to make him suspicious?"

"Yes. That's the point. I want you to make him nervous."

"What if there's no seat to his left?" Vassily asked. "If he sits right at the end of the table?"

"He'll try to resist that," I said. "He never likes that position. But if he does, Sunhee should just drop out of play and stand behind him."

"That will still make him nervous," Sunhee said.

"Exactly," I said. "Now, here's the thing. No matter what happens, you need to be on the floor no later than 8.00pm, because Arun will be there soon after and it's better if you're there before him. Even if I'm not there, you should still be there. Unless -" I reinforced this by looking everyone in the eyes, one at a time — "unless you get a text from Beverly telling you to abort. Do you understand?

Everyone nodded.

"And if you abort, you go to the airport."

Everyone nodded again.

"And?" I looked questioningly at Susan.

"We go to VegasJet, not the main terminal," Susan said.

"Unless?" I said to her.

"Unless I have to be you. Then I go to the lawyer's, then get to Grandma's, and everyone else goes to VegasJet." The others looked mystified about this, but it was best that only Susan and I knew about the aspect of the plan involving her and me. I was the weakest link in the team — the person Whitwell and Treasury and the Russians already knew. If anything was going to go wrong, I was the likely vector for it. Maybe I was breaking my promise to Tom, asking Susan to help me in this way, but I felt like she was our only insurance.

As I listened to them recite the fallback plans I was mostly satisfied. Not relaxed, but no longer on the verge of panic.

We discussed strategy for a while longer. Susan and Sunhee, in particular, were worried they would make a mistake at the tables. I reassured them. "Up until Talia does her thing, you should either run your own count, or copy whatever Arun or James or Alice do," I said. "We will make a lot of money that way. But after Talia injects some profiles, you should stop playing, or you should bet lightly, because things are going to get screwy, and I don't know exactly what effect everything will have on actual play at the tables – except that it will throw Arun, and he'll begin to lose. So don't bet once Talia has injected data."

"I still don't know how we're going to know that," Yana said.

"Trust me, you'll know," I said. "When you see someone led away from a table? That will be when."

 

~o~O~o~
 

Before I went back to the floor I decided I had to do one final check on the kitchen. I planned to ditch my kitchen whites for a black dress and heels I was carrying in a white plastic shopping bag. My purse, containing my cellphone and money, also went in the bag. The dress was microfiber, and wouldn't wrinkle. Later, as part of one of my fallback options, I was planning to exchange it for something completely different, but at this stage of the evening it was the best thing for a quick and easy change.

That would come later. In the meantime my hair was still tied back, and in my whites I hoped I was still anonymous enough to get through the kitchen. This time, as I went through, the kitchen was crowded. It was seven pm, and they were geared up for dinner. A tall guy in a chef's hat stared directly at me. He was standing talking to a blonde woman who was also in whites, and I could sense he was going to challenge me. I kept my head down and tried not to make eye contact. "Hey," he called, as I rounded a corner and disappeared from his view. "Hey!"

I stopped, and put my head back around the corner. If I wanted to do this properly, I had to be brazen. "Yes?"

"Who are you?"

"Lisa," I said in what I hoped was a casual tone. I tried to resist glancing down at my ID. I hoped I'd remembered the name right.

"You're new?"

"Yes. Well, no. I was here last week." I don't know what made me think of that, but it seemed better than just saying yes.

It seemed to work for him. "Which team are you on?"

I had no answer for that. I remembered the chart I had seen on the noticeboard near the laptop. I tried to remember one of the names on it. "Rodriguez," I said, praying he wasn't Rodriquez. He looked Hispanic. Maybe I was fucked.

"Okay," he said. "I didn't think he was on tonight?"

"He's not," I said. "I was just checking some ordering. He asked me to. I'm just leaving."

"Okay." He seemed satisfied, and he turned back to the blonde.

I went to the laptop as fast as I could without arousing even more attention. I couldn't believe he'd accepted my explanation. From the look of the napkins arranged over the top, it appeared to be undisturbed. I didn't want to touch it again and risk discovery, so I kept on into the kitchen, and then out to the service corridor beyond.

 

~o~O~o~
 

As I left the kitchen my heart was still pounding, and once clear of other people I sped up to make sure I kept to schedule. I knew Sunhee would be just about to make it to the table, and even though she had acquitted herself well the night before I was worried, still very worried, about leaving her on the floor for any length of time without me. It wasn't that I didn't think she was capable. And given Arun's Prosopagnosia, I wasn't worried about his remembering her. But after what had happened to Dan, I couldn't have faced her parents if anything went wrong. And I liked her. She was fierce, and sweet, and smart and she reminded me so much of Dan and yet was completely unlike him.

Because I was in a hurry I rounded the corner in the corridor leading back to the playing rooms with some momentum, and I smacked right up against an extremely large man in a black suit. He grabbed my arm to steady me. "Easy now."

"Excuse me," I said, attempting to extricate myself from his grip. He wasn't letting go.

"Miss Alex Jones." It wasn't a question.

"Let me go, please."

"I have someone who wants to talk with you," the man said. Before I could stop him he had stripped the bag containing my dress and heels from me, and had grasped both my hands in his. He wasn't really all that big – probably no taller than Pete, and with a similar build – but he had a grip of iron on my hands. I could almost feel the bruising beginning.

I realized that in the corridor I had no hope. There was nobody else around to witness the spectacle. But I tried my best anyway. "You can't hold me. It's illegal."

"Is that right?" He seemed mildly amused.

"Let me go. I was just leaving the casino."

"This won't take long." He let go of my hands, but only so he could pull my arm to get me to move down the corridor away from the playing rooms, toward the service elevators. I decided to let myself go slack, slumping toward the floor in an attempt to force him to drag me. It was a risk. I thought I might twist an ankle. But as I started to slump he didn't try to pull me up. Instead, in a fluid movement, he swept his other arm under my legs and took his hand from my arm. Then he more or less threw me over his shoulder, and began carrying me toward the elevator.

I like to think I behaved moderately intelligently. I only said "put me down, you motherfucker" once, maybe because it elicited an actual chuckle from him. I waled upon his back with my hands, then tried to make a fist and punch him in the kidney. It didn't seem to slow him down any.

I was more than alarmed. I was humiliated. I knew that if I had still been a man, I would be no match for him, but he would probably have hit me or locked my arm behind my back to frogmarch me. Because I was a woman, he simply picked me up. And laughed when I struggled.

We got into the elevator. It was hard for me to see anything except the floor because my hair had started to come loose from the bun and was now hanging down over my eyes. I kept hitting him, and it must have at least irritated him slightly, because as we were going up he said "there's really no need for that," although more in the tone someone would use on a child than in anger.

I started swearing at him again. Every epithet I had ever heard. And I kept hitting him. He had a firm grip on my legs. There wasn't anything I could do to get free. I tried to reach for the bag, which he had slung over his other shoulder. But it was further up his back — I couldn't reach it, or get to the cellphone inside it.

As he was carrying me I heard Beverly's words run through my brain. "Expect the unexpected."

Once out of the elevator I understood from the pattern on the carpet that he was walking in a semi-public area of the casino. I hoped to heaven we would meet someone who would appreciate that a man carrying a screaming woman was inappropriate and possibly worth calling the cops for. But in only a few short steps we arrived at a door, and again, in a quick series of movements that made me think he'd had some practice at this sort of thing, he set me down on my feet, grabbed both my hands in one of his, and turned a door handle to an office. Then he thrust me inside, letting go of my hands as he did so.

I was red-faced, out of breath from screaming, and had a kind of tunnel vision, I think maybe from all the blood rushing to my head while I'd been hanging from his shoulder. I brushed my hair back from my forehead so I could see past it, and a vague image of the room came through the pounding in my skull.

Inside the room were two men. One, an older guy, was facing me when I came in. The other had his back to me and was doing something with a camera and a laptop. When he turned around I realized who it was.

Will. Will the supposed I.T. guy, from that evening gambling at the MGM Grand months ago.

"Hello, Alex," he said gently.

I think I slumped against the door. Just looking at his face elicited a welter of emotions. That night at the Grand, that authentic, real connection I had thought I had felt. That had been fake, too.

"You …" I began.

"I'm sorry, Alex. Yes." He flipped open his badge. It didn't look like FBI, or anything like that. It looked more like a dollar bill with a passport page added. "Will Coles. Thank you for all your help."

It took me a few moments to get everything to register properly in my brain. I didn't understand. As far as I knew, the FBI had only become involved in investigating Arun's team after Lucy had died. This wasn't an FBI badge. And Will certainly didn't look anything like Grieves from Treasury or Special Agent Jones.

The confusion must have registered on my face. My mind was doing gymnastics without a mat or a horse or anything to hold onto. When I had entered the room I had half expected to be walking into my death, or at the very least a major beating. Instead Will – if that was his name – was looking at me somewhat sympathetically. And the other guy was politely holding out a chair and motioning for me to sit. The guy who had led me to the room gently steered me and I slumped into it, all of my momentum gone in a sudden evacuation of everything I ever thought I knew. Just what the fuck was going on?

"You fuckers," I said. Behind me I heard a muffled chuckle from the guy who had carried me.

"She didn't really want to come."

"This is totally fucking illegal," I said.

"Many things going on here tonight are illegal, Alex," 'Will Coles' said. "Some are more illegal than others. You're dressed in an interesting way to play cards, aren't you?" He stared at the MGM Grand ID I was still wearing. "Lisa Teo," he said. "That's a new one for you, am I right?"

"Fuck you."

"I apologize for any roughness," he said. "But time is of the essence. Are you okay?"

The older guy poured me a glass of water and set it on the table. I was going to refuse it but my throat was hoarse from yelling and I didn't think it would be drugged. If they had meant to kill me they would have done that sooner. I swallowed the water and finally asked: "What the fuck is going on?"

"Alice Kim."

"What about Alice Kim?"

"You know her well."

"I thought I did. Well, no, not really. I mean, I've known her for a couple of years, but I discovered recently that I don't know her at all."

"Arun Kapoor?"

"Do you government guys not talk to one another, or something?"

"Treasury and the FBI think Arun Kapoor is laundering money for a drug syndicate," Will said.

"Yes?"

"That's not why we're here," Will said.

"Can I have a look at that ID again?" I asked. Will sat on a corner of the table and slid it across. The other guy held his up, but I couldn't read it from a distance. I looked at Will's.

Under the words 'Central Intelligence Agency, Washington DC' it said: "This is to certify that William J Coles, whose photograph and signature appear here, is an accredited agent of the United States Government on official business for the Central Intelligence Agency."

I put my head in my hands. I couldn't think of him as Will again. Now he was Agent Coles. "How many of you assholes do I have to satisfy?

"What?" Agent Coles said.

"I really, really don't have time for this."

"Alex," Agent Coles said gently. "We're not here to make your life hard. We think you could help us."

"Everyone thinks I can help them," I said, removing my head from my hands and straightening up. "There are only so many hours in the day."

"Alice Kim," Agent Coles said.

"She plays cards. She lies about her personal life. She steals data. Um …"

"Yes?"

"I can tell you some about Alice, I think, but …"

"But?"

"I really have to be somewhere."

"I need to keep …" Agent Coles hesitated.

"You can't let me go?"

"Where do you have to be, right now?"

I had what seemed to be a flash of inspiration. "Come with me. You can play alongside me. Just don't make me look guilty. Not yet. Can we do that? Or is against some kind of oath or something?"

"Alex, we need to talk about Alice Kim," Agent Coles said. "We don't need to play cards."

"I need to play cards," I said. "Or people will get hurt."

I stood up and went to go to the door, but the guy who had carried me in was standing in the way. His eyes flicked to Agent Coles, seeking instructions.

"Alex, there are some things you should know before you step outside. People are going to try to kill you."

"And this is news?" I asked, turning back to face him. "Two of my friends are already dead. If that's all you've got, then I don't need to stay. I need to be with people."

"Do you mind telling us what's going on? We know you're planning something … Miss Teo."

"I can't."

He looked at the guy blocking the door. "Alex, we believe Arun Kapoor –"

"– Murdered my friends. Yes, I know."

"If you would let me finish, please. We believe Arun Kapoor is actually being run by Alice Kim."

"Wait, what? Run?"

"We believe Alice Kim is a North Korean agent. We believe she controls the money your team plays with. She directs Arun Kapoor."

"North Korean?"

"You thought it was Russians, right?"

"Yes." Now I needed to find out more. I sat back down. "I don't understand any of this."

"That's what I thought," Coles said. "The guys at Treasury aren't too sharp. Yes, Arun has Russian contacts. But the money laundering is actually to fund other activities. Principally, we suspect, it's to fund domestic spying operations in the United States. Mostly industrial espionage. The Russians are just thugs for hire, and they help to distract law enforcement from the bigger picture."

"So, that means …" I suddenly wondered whether I was saying too much. I could hear Tom's voice in my head, warning me to be quiet.

"We don't know what it means, other than that you seem to have some scheme you're involved in that's separate from Alice's team's plans. We'd like to know what that is, and whether you're on the right side or not."

"I suppose that depends upon what the right side is," I said.

"The right side," Coles said, "Is the side that's going to win. And that would be ours."

I thought of Sunhee and Susan and Vassily and Yana, out on the floor. And Pete in the alleyway behind the casino, crouched over a laptop. And Talia and Beverly in Somerville. We had our own side.

Coles continued. "We've been observing you, and your friends, and we believe you are planning something. We'd like to know what it is. We'd like to know now."

"I do have a plan," I said. "And it needs to be acted on now. I would be very happy to sit here and talk more, but people are depending upon me."

"I'm not going to let you walk out of here without telling me what you're doing," Coles said.

"I don't think you have a choice," I said, standing again. "If you don't let me go, Arun Kapoor and Alice Kim are going to be scared away. They're going to take a hiatus from playing. Is that what you want?"

"It's a start," Coles said. "Besides, I think Alice Kim has plans to have you killed, so why would you not being around scare them in any way?"

"Because so far," I said, trying not to sound like I was explaining something very basic, "All the people who have gone missing or been killed … it's all been at Alice or Arun's behest. They knew about it. But if I'm not on the floor, soon, they're going to suspect something is going on."

Coles did a beat, then nodded. "I can see that." It seemed as though he and the other guy hadn't quite thought that angle through. "What happens if you don't show up?"

"They'll abandon play. Then they'll go back to Boston. Then they'll try to find out what happened to me." I moved toward the door again. "Maybe you can make something look like an accident, maybe not. It's them you have to convince."

"We're not going to kill you, Alex."

"If you're not going to let me go, you're going to have to. Because if I stay here, other people are going to get hurt, and I can't have that on my conscience."

I motioned to the Agent to stand away from the door. He didn't budge.

"You mentioned something about Alice Kim stealing data," Coles said.

"Yeah, she sabotaged a company a friend of mine runs."

"That would be Peter Johanssen?"

"Yes." It wasn't surprising that Coles knew the name of my housemate, but it still shook me to hear him link Pete to my misadventures. "Look, I really, really have to go. Can we make a deal?"

"We can certainly make a deal, Alex," Coles said. "We'd like to talk to you in more detail."

"If you let me go, I promise you can question me at the end of the night."

"That's not much of a deal."

"And I promise you won't have to worry about Alice after that."

"But you won't tell me what you're going to do."

"No."

"Then I can't let you go."

"You don't have much of a choice. If you don't, your entire case against Alice Kim is going to go pear-shaped."

"I work for the Central Intelligence Agency, Miss Jones. We don't make cases."

"You know what I mean. If Alice gets spooked, you have nothing."

"You don't scare easily, do you?"

I was going to laugh, but I stifled it. I was fucking terrified.

"Look," I said, and I turned back to face the guy at the door, motioning again for him to move. "This is really not getting us anywhere." I briefly looked over my shoulder at Coles as I took a step towards the guy at the door. "How about this: you can follow me, if you want. As long as you don't make it too obvious."

There was an incredibly long period where I stared at the guy on the door, without looking away. Eventually Coles must have motioned, because the Agent stood away from the door.

I grabbed my bag from him as I walked past.

"I'm not against you," I said to Coles as I left. "I think we have common interests. But I have my own side."

 

~o~O~o~
 

I walked out of the room and down the corridor. Behind me I could see Coles and the other Agent standing in the doorway. Before I got to the corner of the corridor I stripped off my kitchen whites, down to my underwear. I didn't much care that they were watching, but I turned so my back was to them anyway. Fuck them. What were they going to do? Arrest me?

How could I ever have been so gullible as to accept Coles at face value?

I put on the black dress, thankful for wrinkle-free microfiber, and then I pulled on my heels. I extracted my cellphone and purse and put my shoes and the kitchen whites in the bag. Then I dumped the bag at the side of the corridor, looked back at Coles, undid the hair that was still caught in what was left of my bun and smoothed it out with my hands, and disappeared around the corner, heading to the floor near the restaurants.

The thing I hadn't mentioned to Coles, as I had bluffed my way out, was that – if our plan was working – Arun and Alice would think I was on the playing room floor already. Because Susan was out there, impersonating me. I had invited Coles to follow me, but he had stayed in the room with the other guy. I guess he knew where I was going to be. I wondered how long it would take for him to show up.

I also wondered who I was going to have to account to, at the end of the night. Would it be Coles? The FBI? Grieves and his Treasury team? It didn't really matter — I was going to have to account to someone.

I came out of the corridor into a flock of accents. The Casino was unaccountably full of Eastern European men. I thought I recognized a little Russian, and was about to panic. But while I was sliding past two of the men I overheard another language that I was pretty sure was something different. Eastern European, but different somehow.

I came to one of the open areas on the floor, trying to orient myself and find the high roller's lounge. The Russians or whatever they were spoke loudly, behind me. Then I saw a sign over at the intersection of the lobby and the playing floor, which told me what was going on. "Welcome, World Chess Champions," it said. I could relax about the Russians.

It was 8.30pm. It was past time. I sent a text to Beverly saying "going in", and walked through the gaming rooms.

Halfway across I ducked into a bathroom and applied a little of the makeup I had in my purse. I wasn't wearing much, because that night I was more interested in staying off Whitwell's radar than sticking out in my usual Wizard visage, and I still wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do when Alice or Arun realized that there were two of me on the floor. I brushed my hair out, half covering one side of my face, the side I would try to keep to Arun and Alice and other team members, and walked out of the bathroom again. I wasn't playing the role of Japanese princess tonight, but I felt more in the mood than I had before.

As I entered the high roller section of the playing rooms the attendant nodded, then looked momentarily confused as he looked my dress up and down. My first thought was that my dress was askew somehow, but then I wondered whether he had seen Susan and was trying to reconcile the clothes she was wearing with what I had just worn past him.

Across the room I could see Sunhee sitting next to Arun. He wasn't discomfited yet, but that would come in time, as she kept distracting him. At another table I noticed Yana subtly doing her best to get James to look at her instead of concentrating on his count. She had worn an extremely low-cut dress, exposing a very impressive décolletage, and I could tell that – even at a distance – all the men at the table were having trouble focusing. James was doing his best to stay cool, but when she leant over to ask him for advice I could detect his nervousness from several tables away.

Nervousness and distrust aside, I had confidence in the Harvard team's ability to perform under pressure. That was why I had told Sunhee to shadow Arun's bets. My friends and I would make a lot of money tonight, before Talia began to disrupt things.

I sat at a nearby table and put a thousand dollars on the table. In that room, it barely registered, and they gave me ten one hundred dollar chips. I put one out on the felt. A waitress walked by, and I asked for a club soda.

I tried to keep myself turned away from Alice and Arun so that my hair was always concluding my face, but I still had a reasonable view of the room. Three tables away Susan was doubling for me, at a table where Emily was counting. I felt momentarily guilty that I hadn't taken Emily into my confidence. She was one of the early players on Arun's team, and while we hadn't been close we had spent a lot of time together, and I had nothing against her. But I didn't trust her enough to risk Susan and Sunhee and my real team.

I couldn't tell from a distance exactly what was going on, but Susan sure seemed to be playing the Wizard part well. I waited for her to notice me, but she seemed too engrossed in the action at the table. That was the difference between her and me. I was always — almost always — aware of things around me when I was playing. Since Henry and Lake Charles, I was always on the lookout for the signal to abandon ship. Susan was too fixed on the action on the felt.

After about two hours that felt like ten I felt my phone vibrate in my purse, which I had put next to my ankle down on the floor. It was just a short alert, probably a text message. There wasn't much I could do to look at it, not while I was on the floor.

I played another hand, keeping my eye on Sunhee and Susan. I noticed Vassily, across the room, keeping a close watch on Yana. He was just behind a table that Alice was playing at. Carl was at the same table, matching her bets the way Sunhee was matching Arun's. I could tell Alice was irritated, but not distracted. A few tables away, Arun was more discomfited by Sunhee's presence.

Vassily caught my eye and nodded almost imperceptibly. It was a sign that things were about to begin.

The first real indication that things were moving was a little after midnight, when an older man entered the room with his wife. He was maybe about sixty, had plenty of sandy gray hair, and was wearing a dark gray suit. It wasn't exactly standard attire on a Saturday night in Vegas. He sat at the table next to me, and drew some chips. I thought I heard the dealer say something, but all I caught was a fragment that sounded like "eerie."

I played my cards desultorily, not paying as much attention as I should have been. Oddly enough I won two hands in a row by standing on 15 while the dealer busted.

After about two dozen hands there was a small disturbance over at a table on the far side of the room. Emily was sitting there, undisturbed, while a middle-aged woman was being escorted from the room. Almost as soon as she had been led away a security guard approached the older man who had just sat down at the next table. "Senator Geary?" I heard the guard say. "I was wondering if we could talk for a moment."

'Senator?' I thought.

The gray-haired guy looked startled, but he laid his cards down and left them on the felt. Because he was facing toward me I could almost hear him, and because I could see his lips I could pretty much understand every word.

"Can I help you?"

"Senator, we'd just like to have a short discussion about something."

"Something?"

"Our head of security would like to talk with you."

The security guard ushered the Senator out of the room. I noticed Emily and Sally, the counters at Arun's and Alice's tables respectively, had both been distracted by the disturbances. Good. One more disturbance would be all that was needed to completely disrupt their counting.

Less than two minutes after security had led the Senator away they swooped on a man in his mid-thirties sitting at the same table as James, Carl and Yana.

It was clear, in the few hands after that, that Arun, Alice and James began to lose, badly. It wasn't easy for me to see Arun's play, but I observed Alice lose at least fifty thousand dollars in only a few hands.

Finally, exasperated, Arun stood up to leave his table. He looked around for a signal from Ziyen as to where he should go. Ziyen indicated a table further away from me, where Audren, one of the new team members, was counting.

I knew I should hang around to make sure Sunhee and Susan were okay, but I was beginning to get concerned about exactly what was going down behind the scenes. In the hope that there might be some clue in the unread text message I had received I decided to step out into the lobby and consult my phone.

There was a text from Beverly. "T done says U have 30 mins." That would have been fifteen minutes earlier.

I went back into the room. This time, Susan saw me almost as soon as I entered. She finished her hand, gave the prearranged signal — a sweep of her hand under her chin — and made for the ladies room. I waited a few moments before following.

There was an attendant inside the restroom, which I should have remembered in our planning phase. I slipped her a hundred dollar bill and motioned with my hand, and after a moment when she looked at me like I was a sasquatch she followed my gesture and went into one of the stalls. Then Susan and I began exchanging clothes. It took us barely two minutes. I did my makeup and she helped me fix my hair the way hers had been styled, pinned at the side with a red lacquer clip. Once I looked the way she had when we'd entered, I went back out onto the playing floor.

Nothing had changed in the few minutes I'd been gone. The atmosphere in the relatively small room was still disturbed from the earlier interventions by the security staff. I looked over at Arun, who didn't quite seem his usual cool self, and then at Alice. Something in her expression made me think she wasn't relaxed either.

In the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Susan as she exited the playing room, dressed in my clothes. I noticed Coles and his henchman follow her. That was both reassuring and worrying. She had instructions to contact Denis Powley and hide out at his place, and I figured Coles would follow her there. Would he be bold enough to try raiding a lawyer's home?

I noticed Sally signaling me onto her table. I slid into the last seat, and quickly won two hands with the table maximum. As I had received the cards for the third hand I became aware of another disturbance on the floor. Security was standing over Arun, clearly trying to get him to leave his table. At the table next to that one I could see another man — someone I didn't know — also being accosted by Security. He was casually dressed, well groomed, maybe 40. He looked foreign.

I glanced across to Ziyen, who was running security for the Harvard team. He looked terrified. I watched him give the signal to abandon ship, and I began to gather up my chips. But slowly. I wanted to see what was going to happen. Alice was still sitting at her table. Across the felt Sally had already gathered her chips and left.

Arun stood. Although he was too far away for me to hear him clearly, I could pretty much guess he was telling the two security guards and the pit boss that he was just leaving, that he wouldn't be coming with them. But he wasn't well positioned for an escape. Two of them were between him and the exit, and the other reached out to take hold of his upper arm. Arun tried to shake it off. The security guy gripped tighter.

The older man was led past my table and I heard the security guard call him Mr. Karpov as he was leading him away. Gary Karpov? The chess master? Oh baby, I thought. What had Talia done?

I finished out the hand, and stood to go. I had given the signal to Carl and Sunhee, and they were ahead of me. Yana was already at the Cashier's desk, cashing out her chips. I pretended I didn't know any of them, and strode out to the Strip and next door to the Harvard Team's pre-planned rendezvous at the Allstar Cafe.

Alice and Sally were there. "What the fuck happened?" Sally asked as soon as she saw me. "I thought they got you, too."

"No, I just wasn't as alert as I should have been," I said. I looked at Alice. She looked grim. "How are you? Who did they get?"

"They got Arun, and James," Alice said. "We'll have to wait to see who else comes back here. How many chips do you have?"

"Nine thousand," I said. "It's still early. What are we going to do about Arun and James?"

"I don't know," Alice said. "I can't believe Arun let himself be taken by them."

"Or James," I said.

"Or James. It's just not like them."

"How did they even know?" Sally asked. "I mean –"

"– There was something strange going on," Alice said. "They got that Senator, and that woman."

"They got Gary fucking Karpov," I said. "No way he was card counting."

I felt a slight vibration in my purse as my cellphone went off. I was pretty sure nobody else was aware of it.

"Buy me a drink, please," I said to Sally. "I'm just going to the bathroom."

Once in the stall in the ladies room I glanced at my phone. The text was from Beverly. "T says go now."

I exited the stall. In the mirror opposite I looked like I had aged at least ten years. Maybe it was the stress. I thought perhaps I could see a few of the suture lines from the surgery, near my temples, but I was probably imagining it.

I sent a text to Beverly. "every1 ok?" As I washed my hands and dried them the response came back.

"Susan w Powley fine others at airpt xcpt U sunhee."

I exited the ladies room, took my drink from Sally, and downed a huge gulp.

"Heard from Arun or James?"

"No."

"I don't think they're coming." I turned to Alice. "You need to get Jeff Orgun on the phone, find a local lawyer."

Alice looked startled. "You think?"

"Of course I think. And I'm going to go."

"Go?"

"To the airport. Go. You know, like leave."

"What about Arun."

"What do you imagine I can possibly do for Arun that Jeff can't?"

"We can't just leave."

"I can." I finished the rest of my drink and strolled out of the Allstar. Across the street I saw Sunhee, and behind me I heard Alice calling to me. Quickly I ran across the strip — this was before they'd put in so many impediments to pedestrians, but I was taking my life in my hands all the same. I grabbed Sunhee by the hand, and together we ran, as fast as we could in our inappropriate shoes, through New York New York and over to the cab stand.

In the cab, I told the driver to head for McCarran. I was leaving my luggage behind. So was Sunhee. It didn't matter. What mattered was that we were out of there.

Out of breath, I turned to her in the back of the cab. "Otsukaresama desu," I said.

She looked at me blankly.

"Thank you very much."

"I'm not Japanese, Alex."

"Thank you very much, anyway. I couldn't have done it without you."

"It was for Dan."

"It was. And for salvation."

If she was mystified by that comment she at least had the good grace not to ask any questions.

 

~o~O~o~
 

At the Airport, I sent Sunhee into the terminal ahead of me, with instructions to pretend she didn't know me, just in case. It was a sensible precaution. After I'd checked in, for the 8am flight, I made my way to the security line — oh, how much easier those were before 9/11 — and Coles was waiting, none too happy about being tricked by Susan and me.

"Alex," he said coolly. His eyes were darting around, I guess trying to check for Susan. Based on Beverly's most recent text she was driving down to LA to meet Tom and Grandma Rousselot.

"Agent Coles," I said, with what I hoped was the same kind of reserve. I kept my eyes firmly focused on him, as though I was unsurprised to see him. I wondered how he knew when I would be at the airport – I had originally planned to fly out later that day – but then I realized he knew my aliases, and it was probable the CIA had access to every flight manifest.

"That was some trick," he said

"I thought so. I thought you guys had been watching me long enough to have observed my sister."

"Well, we have now."

"So what can I do for you?"

"I believe you owe me."

"I owe you? Say what? I have a question."

"You have a question?" He raised his eyebrow as though he was surprised I was talking back.

"Yes. Are you really from Vegas?"

He shrugged. "Albuquerque. I still like the desert, and the heat."

"So you only lie when it's convenient."

"That's a little harsh, Alex."

It was my turn to shrug. "I call it like I see it. The way I see it, you owe me, too."

"Alex, I could have held you, the other night. Hell, I could have had your ass on a plane to Abu Dhabi."

"Abu Dhabi?" My cool was disappearing. What was he talking about?

It occurred to me that Tom wouldn't be much help with Coles.

"Never mind. The point is, I let you do your thing, and you've satisfied Grieves, I think, but you've left me … exposed." for a brief moment I recognized the Will Coles I had met at the Blackjack table all that time ago. "Now I need you to do the right thing."

"And that would be?"

"Help me land Alice's handler."

"Land? … You mean kill."

"No, I mean prosecute, Alex. This isn't James Bond. We don't kill people."

"Does that mean I can relax? You're not going to kill me, right?"

"There are worse things than dying," Coles said.

 

~o~O~o~