Site selection was Problem One. Las Vegas had quickly risen to the head of the list of possibilities for a number of reasons including location, tax concessions to be granted by the state and local governments for bringing a laboratory/ production facility with several thousand extremely well-paid and well-educated workers to Sin City, and the attractions of Sin City itself.
At Who's suggestion, just about everything would go to Vegas.
Charley Who, Ph.D. (MIT), AIA, had pointed out to Aloysius Casey, Ph.D. (MIT), that all work and no play would tend to make his extremely well-paid workers dull. It was hard to become bored in Las Vegas, whether one's interests lay in the cultural or the carnal, or a combination of both.
Construction had begun immediately and in earnest, starting with the laboratories that would be under Hangar III. They were something like the BioLabs at Fort Detrick in that they were as "pure" as they could be made. The air and water was filtered as it entered and was discharged. The humidity and temperature in the labs was whatever the particular labs required, and being below ground cut the cost of doing this to a tiny fraction of what it would have cost in a surface building. They were essentially soundproof. And, finally, the deeper underground that they were, the less they were affected by vibration, say a heavy truck driving by or the landing of a heavy airplane. Almost all of Aloysius's gadgets in development were very tiny and quite delicate. Much of the work on them was done using microscopes or their electronic equivalent. Vibration was the enemy.
What Casey was working on now in Laboratory Four, his personal lab-"My latest gadget," as he put it-was yet another improvement on a system he had developed for the gambling cops, or as they liked to portray themselves, "The security element of the gaming industry."
Many people try to cheat the casinos. Most are incredibly stupid. But a small number are the exact opposite: incredibly smart, imaginative, and resourceful. Both stupid and near-genius would-be thieves alike have to deal with the same problem: One has to be physically in a casino if one is to steal anything.
Surveillance cameras scan every inch of a casino floor, often from several angles, and the angles can be changed. The people watching these monitors know what to look for. If some dummy is seen stealing quarters from Grandma's bucket on a slot machine row, or some near-genius is engaged with three or more equally intelligent co-conspirators in a complex scheme to cheat the casino at a twenty-one table, they are seen. Security officers are sent to the slot machine or the twenty-one table. The would-be thieves and cheats are taken to an area where they are photographed, fingerprinted, counseled regarding the punishments involved for cheating a casino, and then shown the door.
The problem then becomes that stupid and near-genius alike tend to believe that if at first you don't succeed, one should try, try again. They come back, now disguised with a phony mustache or a wig and a change of clothing.
Specially trained security officers, who regularly review the photographs of caught crooks, stand at casino doors and roam the floors looking for familiar, if unwelcome, faces.
When Casey had first moved to Las Vegas, he had been very discreetly approached-the day he was welcomed into the Las Vegas Chamber of Gaming, Hospitality and Other Commerce-by a man who then owned three-and now owned five-of the more glitzy hotel/casinos in Sin City.
The man approached Casey at the urinal in the men's room of the Via Veneto Restaurant in Caligula's Palace Resort and Casino and said he wanted to thank him for what he was doing for the "boys in the stockade in Bragg."
"I don't know who or what the hell you're talking about," Casey had replied immediately.
But Casey of course knew full well who the boys in the stockade in Fort Bragg were-Delta Force; their base had once been the post stockade-and what he was doing for them-providing them with whatever they asked for, absolutely free of charge, or didn't ask for but got anyway because Casey thought it might be useful.
"Sure you do," the man had said. "The commo gear. It was very useful last week in Tunisia."
"How the hell did you find out about that?" Casey had blurted.
"We have sources all over."
"Who's 'we'?"
"Like you, people who happen to be in positions where we can help the good guys, and try quietly-very quietly-to do so. I'd like to talk to you about our group some time."
"These people have names?"
They were furnished.
"Give me a day or two to check these people out," Casey said, "then come to see me."
The first person Casey had tried to call was then-Major General Bruce J. McNab, who at the time commanded the Special Forces Center at Fort Bragg. He got instead then-Major Charley Castillo on the phone. Castillo did odd jobs for McNab-both had told Casey that-and he'd become one of Casey's favorite people since they'd first met.
And when Casey had asked, Castillo had flatly-almost indignantly-denied telling anyone about the Tunisian radios mentioned in the casino pisser and of ever even hearing of the man who claimed to own the glitzy Las Vegas hotels.
General McNab, however, when he came on the line, was so obfuscatory about both questions-even aware that the line was encrypted-that Casey promptly decided (a) McNab knew the guy who owned the three glitzy casinos; (b) had told the guy where the radios used in Tunisia had come from; (c) had more than likely suggested he could probably wheedle some out of Casey, which meant he knew and approved of what the guy was up to; and, thus, (d) didn't want Castillo to know about (a) through (c).
That had been surprising. For years, from the time during the First Desert War, when then-Second Lieutenant Castillo had gone to work for then-Colonel McNab, Casey had thought-In fact I was told-that Castillo was always privy to all of McNab's secrets.
Casey prided himself on his few friends, and on having no secrets from them. He had quickly solved the problem here by concluding that having no secrets did not mean you had to tell your friends everything you knew, but rather, if asked, to be wholly forthcoming.
If Castillo asked about these people in Las Vegas, he would tell him. If he didn't ask, he would not.
And, as quickly, he had decided if these people were okay in General McNab's book, they were okay-period.
Unless of course something happened that changed that.
Casey had called the man who owned the three glitzy hotels-and was in business discussions leading to the construction of the largest hotel in the world (7,550 rooms)-and told him he was in.
"What do these people need?" Casey asked.
He was told: secure telephones to connect them all.
While AFC had such devices sitting in his warehouse, these were not what he delivered to the people in Las Vegas. The secure telephones they used thereafter had encryption circuitry that could not be decrypted by even the legendary National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. Casey knew this because the NSA's equipment had come from AFC Corporation.
And after that, and after writing several very substantial checks to pay his share of what it had cost those people to do something that had to be done-but for one reason or another couldn't be done by the various intelligence agencies-Casey realized that he had become one of the group.
No one said anything to him. He didn't get a membership card.
He just knew.
He became friendly with the man who owned the glitzy hotels, and not only because one of his hotels had a restaurant to which lobsters and clams were flown in daily from Maine. The man who owned the hotels was from New Jersey. Politicians and high taxes, not the cuisine, had driven him from the Garden State. They took to taking together what they thought of as One of God's Better Meals-a dozen steamed clams and a pair of three-pound lobsters washed down with a couple of pitchers of beer-once or twice a week.
One day, en route to the restaurant, Casey had witnessed one of the gambling cops intently studying the face of the man who happened to be walking ahead of Casey.
"What's that all about?" Casey had asked his new friend the casino owner between the
ir first pitcher of beer and the clams, and their lobsters and the second pitcher.
The problem of controlling undesirable incoming gamblers was explained.
"There has to be a better way to do that than having your gambling cops in everybody's face," Casey said. "Let me think about it."
The AFC prototype was delivered in three weeks, and operational a week after that. All the photographs of miscreants in the files were digitalized. Additional digital cameras were discreetly installed at the entrances in such positions that the only way to avoid having one's face captured by the system would be to arrive by parachute on the roof.
The computer software quickly and constantly attempted to cross-match images of casino patrons with the database of miscreants on the security servers. When a "hit" was made, the gambling cops could immediately take corrective action to protect the casino.
The owner was delighted, and ordered installation of the system in all his properties as quickly as this could be accomplished.
But Casey was just getting started. The first major improvement was to provide the gambling cops with a small communications device that looked like a telephone. When a "hit" was made, every security officer in the establishment was immediately furnished with both the digital image of Mr. Unwelcome-or Grandma Unwelcome; there were a surprising number of the latter-and the last known location of said miscreant.
It hadn't been hard for Casey to improve on that. Soon the miscreant's name, aliases, and other personal data, including why he or she was unwelcome, was flashed to the gambling cops as soon as there was a hit.
The next large-and expensive-step had required the replacement of the system computers with ones of much greater capacity and speed. The owner complained not a word when he got the bill. He thought of himself, after all, as a leader in the hospitality and gaming industry, and there was a price that had to be paid for that.
The system now made a hit when a good customer returned to the premises, presumably bringing more funds to pass into the casino's coffers through the croupier's slots. He was greeted as quickly and as warmly as possible, and depending on how bad his luck had been the last time, provided with complimentary accommodations, victuals, and spirits. Often, the gambling cops assigned to keep them happy were attractive members of the opposite gender.
Good Grandmother customers, interestingly enough, seemed to appreciate this courtesy more than most of the men.
The new system soon covered all of the hotels owned by the proprietor. And the database grew as guests' pertinent details-bank balances, credit reports, domestic problems, known associates, carnal preferences, that sort of thing-were added.
For a while, as he had been working on the system, Casey had thought it would have a sure market in other areas where management wanted to keep a close eye on people within its walls. Prisons, for example.
AFC's legal counsel had quickly disabused him of this pleasant notion. The ACLU would go ballistic, his lawyers warned, at what they would perceive as an outrageous violation of a felon's right to privacy while incarcerated. He would be the accused in a class action lawsuit that would probably cost him millions. What Casey was doing when his cellular buzzed in the lab deep beneath Hangar III was conducting a sort of graduation ceremony for a pair of students who had just completed How This Works 101. He had just presented the graduates with what looked like fairly ordinary BlackBerrys or similar so-called smart-phones.
Actually, by comparison, the capabilities of the CaseyBerry devices that Casey had given the two students made the BlackBerry look as state-of-the-art as the wood fire from which an Apache brave informs his squaw that he'll be a little late for supper by allowing puffs of smoke to rise.
The students were First Lieutenant Edmund "Peg-Leg" Lorimer, MI, USA (Retired), and former Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley, USMC.
When the Office of Organizational Analysis had been disbanded and its men and women ordered to vanish from the face of the earth, Casey had had a private word with Castillo about them.
Neither Bradley nor Lorimer had a family-perhaps more accurately: a family into whose arms they would be welcomed with joy-and neither had skills readily convertible to earning a decent living as a civilian. There was not much of a market for a one-legged Spanish/English/Portuguese interpreter, or for a five-foot-two, hundred-thirty-pound twenty-year-old who could give marksmanship instruction to Annie Oakley. Further, there was the problem that they, too, were expected to fall off the face of the earth and never be seen again.
Both men, Casey had told Castillo, had become skilled in the use of the state-of-the-art communications equipment that OOA had been using. Casey intended to keep providing similar equipment to Delta Force, and with some additional training, Bradley and Lorimer could assume responsibility for training Delta troopers to operate and maintain it.
So far as their falling off the face of the earth, Casey said, they would be hard to find in Las Vegas and next to impossible to find if they moved in with him at the home Charley Who had built for the Caseys on a very expensive piece of mountainside real estate that overlooked Las Vegas. Now that Mrs. Casey had finally succumbed to an especially nasty and painful carcinoma, there was nobody in the place but the Mexican couple who took care of Casey.
And to keep them busy when they weren't dealing with the equipment for Delta Force, or keeping an eye on the communications network used by those people, they would be welcomed-and well paid-by the gaming industry as experts in the digital photo recognition and data system.
Not thirty seconds after Casey had handed Lorimer and Bradley their new cell phones, vibration announced an incoming message on the peoples' circuit, and Casey thought he had inadvertently pressed the CHECK FUNCTIONING key.
But he checked the screen and saw that there was indeed an incoming message.
It's from Colonel Hamilton.
I wonder what the hell he wants.
When, inside his Level A hazmat gear, Colonel J. Porter Hamilton had pressed the TRANSMIT button for his cellular phone, and given his name, the following had happened:
An integral voice recognition circuit had determined that he was indeed Colonel J. Porter Hamilton and, at about the time a satellite link had been established between Hamilton and Las Vegas, had announced that Encryption Level One was now active.
By the time Hamilton spoke again to report the delivery of biohazardous material to his laboratory and what he planned to do about it, the cell phones in the hands of those people had vibrated to announce the arrival of an incoming call. Their cell phones automatically recorded the message, and then sent a message to Hamilton's phone that the message had been received and recorded.
He had then broken the connection.
When those called "answered" their telephones, either when the call was first made, or whenever they got around to it, they would hear the recorded message. A small green LED on the telephone would indicate that the caller was at that moment on the line. A red LED would indicate the caller was not.
Casey saw that the red LED was illuminated.
Hamilton's off-line.
I wonder what he wanted.
As he touched the ANSWER key, he saw that both Lester and Peg-Leg were doing the same thing.
Hamilton's message was played to them all.
"I wonder what the hell that's all about," Casey wondered out loud.
"He said, 'identical to what I brought out of the Congo,'" Peg-Leg said. "What did he bring out of the Congo?"
Both Peg-Leg and Aloysius looked at Lester, whose face was troubled.
"You know what Hamilton's talking about, Lester?" Casey asked.
Bradley looked even more uncomfortable.
Casey waited patiently, and was rewarded for his patience.
"Colonel Torine would, sir," Bradley said finally.
"How many times do I have to tell you to call me 'Aloysius'?" Casey said.
He pushed a button on his CaseyBerry.
"Jake? Aloysius," he said a moment later. "Got a mi
nute? Can you come to my lab?"
"Captain Sparkman would know, too," Bradley said.
"Sparkman with you?" Casey said to his telephone, and a moment later, "Bring him, too."
Casey pushed another button and said, "Pass Torine and Sparkman," and then looked at Peg-Leg and Lester. "They're in the hangar."
He pointed upward.
Colonel Jacob Torine, USAF (Retired), and Mr. Richard Sparkman (formerly Captain USAF) got off the elevator ninety seconds later.
They were dressed almost identically in khaki trousers, polo shirts, and zipper jackets, and had large multibutton watches on their wrists. Their belts held cases for Ray-Ban sunglasses. They both had clear blue eyes. No one would ever guess that they were pilots.
"What's up?
"Listen to this," Casey said, and handed him his Caseyberry, and motioned for Lester to hand his to Sparkman.
Both listened to Colonel J. Porter Hamilton's message.
Sparkman's eyebrows rose in surprise.
Torine said, "Oh, shit!" and then asked, "When did you get this?"
"Just now."
"Not good news," Torine said. "What is the exact opposite of 'good news'?"
Casey said, "What's he talking about? What did he bring out of the Congo?"
Torine exhaled.
He looked around the laboratory.
"I don't suppose this place is bugged?"
Casey shook his head.
"We went over there in Delta's 727," Torine said. "It was painted in the color scheme of Sub-Saharan Airways-" He stopped. "Why am I telling you this? You know."
"Go on, Jake," Casey said.
"We landed at Kilimanjaro International in Tanzania. Uncle Remus and his crew went by truck to Bujumbura in Burundi. There's an airport at Bujumbura but Castillo decided we'd attract too much attention if we used it, particularly if we sat on the runway for a couple of days, maybe longer.
"Uncle Remus infiltrated Hamilton back into the Congo from Bujumbura. And then when Hamilton found what he found, and the shit hit the fan, we got a message from Uncle Remus to move the airplane to Bujumbura, yesterday, and have it prepared for immediate takeoff.
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