Ernie looked at him. “Tell me, where would you go if I didn’t take you back?”
Dimitri’s head snapped around and he gave the big cop a long, appraising look. “Me? Where would I go? Oh, abroad, definitely abroad. Paris, and the south of France, I think. I have always wanted to eat my way through the finer restaurants in Provence.”
“You wouldn’t stay around Philadelphia or New York? All those pockets to pick?”
“Ernest,” he shook his head. “As I’ve told you, I think of myself as a ‘liberationist Robin Hood,’ ” he said with a pleasant smile as he looked down at the items he took from the two hoods. “One thing is absolutely certain, you would never see me back at your O’Hare Airport or in Chicago, for that matter. No, not ever, my friend.”
“Good,” Ernie smiled as he picked up the radio, the telephones, the keys, the key cards, the wallets, the pistol, and jammed them in his jacket pockets. “Want some coffee?” he asked.
Dimitri looked at the 7-Eleven building and looked puzzled. “What do you purchase in a place like this? Gasoline or coffee? And why would I want to ruin the wonderfully lingering taste of that fine meal with something like that?”
Ernie laughed. “Point taken,” he said as he got out of the car, paused, and looked back inside at the smaller man. “By the way, I may be in there quite a while,” he added as he closed the car door and walked away.
Dimitri looked down. When he saw the big cop had left all the cash from the two wallets lying on the car seat and the car keys in the ignition, he smiled.
Twenty minutes later, Bob sat in the captain’s chair on the flying bridge watching the exterior camera feeds from the Bimini Bay, when his cell phone rang.
“Burke here,” he answered.
“Hey Bob, are any of your guys free at the moment?” Ernie Travers asked.
“Yeah, I think the janitors just came back.”
“I’m in the parking lot of the 24-hour 7-11 over on Baltic, west of Pennsylvania. Can you send one of them over here to pick me up?”
“Something wrong?”
“No, no,” he heard Ernie laugh. “I just need a ride.”
“Problems with the rental car?”
“No, I think it’s fine, last time I saw it.”
Bob frowned, trying to make sense of what the big cop had just said. “And your Greek friend Dimitri? Is he fine too?”
“Oh, he’s fine, too, the last time I saw him.”
This time, it was Bob’s turn to laugh. “I assume there’s a story in there somewhere.”
“You may so assume. But the good news is, there were a lot of pockets picked tonight, and I have an interesting collection of toys to show you when I get back to the boat.”
Former U.S. Army Captain Randy Benson sat in the Bimini Bay’s Risk Management office with Theo Van Gries and two of his men — Reggie MacGregor, a surly Brit who had been given the boot by the British SAS a few years before, and Eric Smit, one of Theo’s former Dutch Marine NCOs, who were on their break. His other three men were patrolling the Bimini Bay and Tuscany Towers, while Benson and Theo sat at the room’s two computer monitors watching live, rotating, quarter-screen video feeds from the complex’s security cameras. Smit napped on the couch behind them, while MacGregor had chosen Shaka Corliss’s large, over-padded desk chair. He had his feet propped on the edge of the desk as he flipped through a stack of porn magazines he found in the bottom drawer in Corliss’s desk.
Theo preferred the human touch, which is why he had his men on random patrols of the casino buildings and grounds. Benson, on the other hand, preferred to systematically work the cameras. Watching the fast-moving, black-and-white video feeds was mind-numbing work, but the cameras took him places it would take a handful of mercs an hour or two to cover on foot, Benson thought. With over one hundred cameras inside the building and another thirty outside, he initially set the camera feeds on a two-second rotation, which meant it took almost two minutes. After the first thirty minutes, he began to eliminate cameras that he felt covered areas that would not be of much use. He quickly eliminated over half of them, allowing him to concentrate on the entrances and the more heavily-trafficked public areas, and to slow the rotation to four seconds. The full rotation still took two minutes. He knew he would get a migraine if he kept it up for another day or two. Theo on the other hand, did not even try. He took manual control of his video feeds and bounced around from camera to camera, based on what he thought looked interesting.
Earlier, Benson had asked Martijn how he could access the video feeds from earlier in the week. Martijn showed him where he could find them in the computer’s data directories, but warned that with so many cameras, the files were huge. The recordings for the past forty-eight hours were kept in the video system itself. After that, they rotated onto the casino’s main security server, where they remained for eight more days before being recorded over, one day at a time.
Ten days, Benson thought. That was cutting it close before the video would be recorded over, but he still had time. By then, he had become intimately familiar with the layout of the security cameras, the zones, and how to navigate through the system. So, when Theo left for a “walk about” floor check, Benson quickly scanned through the backup directory on the server. He found the listing for the Bimini Bay’s recordings from nine nights before and queued up the video he wanted for the card tables on the casino’s main gambling floor. Rotating from camera to camera, it did not take him long to find his old comrade-in-arms, Vinnie Pastorini, sitting at a high-stakes blackjack tables that night. He had a short stack of chips in front of him, and a cute young brunette hanging all over him, laughing, drinking, and having a great time.
Benson paused the video playback for a few moments and zoomed in on the girl’s face. He had never been terribly good at names, but he never forgot a face, especially a cute one like hers. Over the years, he had met many of Vinnie’s girlfriends, but he had never seen this one in the flesh. Four nights before, however, he had seen several framed photographs of her and Vinnie. They were sitting on a shelf in the living room bookcase of the house they shared in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Both photographs had been taken at a party or reception of some kind. Vinnie looked surprisingly good in his formal dress blues and the girl would look good in anything. In the first photograph, they sat cheek to cheek at a large, round-top table covered with champagne glasses and silverware.
In the other photograph, two couples stood side by side in front of an altar, laughing and smiling. Vinnie and the girl were on the left. On the right was none other than Major Robert T. Burke and a woman in a wedding dress. Benson had no doubt that it had been taken at Burke’s recent wedding. That photograph was interesting, but Benson’s eyes returned to the shot at the poker table. The girl looked spectacular, but the small, gold lion’s head hanging around her neck at the poker table looked even more spectacular. Benson never forgot a face — same face, same girl, wearing his gold medallion.
The online property records of Cumberland County, North Carolina, revealed that the house had been purchased two months before, for cash, and was owned in common by U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Vincent Anthony Pastorini and a Patsy Steinhauer Evans, citing a suburban Chicago address. Vinnie paid cash for the house? Cash! Benson had been inside it twice. He was no expert on North Carolina real estate, but he guessed it had to be worth $250,000, even down there. That raised the burning question of where did Vinnie get that much goddamned cash? As everyone at Fort Bragg knew, Vinnie and money were never long-term friends. He went through it faster than he made it. So, if the money for the house hadn’t come from the girl, the infinitely more troubling explanation was that Vinnie had already begun selling the gold, selling their gold, selling his gold!
Eighteen months before, when the first malodors began to emanate from the CIA’s joint operation in Mosul, the Army CID questioned him and the other Army personnel assigned to that unit at least a half-dozen times. That neither surprised nor overly concerned Benson or Theo Van Gries. Theo ran
the unit for the CIA, which was notoriously more understanding about trifling matters like this than the Army. So Theo was able to run interference with the uniformed branches for the time being; as long as no one found the gold, and no one talked.
Bringing Vinnie in was Benson’s idea. The sergeant had not been part of the museum heist itself, but he had been shipping materiel in and out of country for Delta for months. Theo needed to get the gold out of the country before the CID found it, so they struck a deal with Vinnie. He provided the perfect cover and was able to smuggle it back to Fort Bragg. He was then to sit on it until the others were able to rotate out of the war zone, in return for a share. Unfortunately, his greed and gambling addiction must have gotten the best of him. After six months, Vinnie became very uncooperative and uncommunicative with his old partners and stopped answering Theo’s phone calls. Benson and Kowalski were Americans. They already had phony IDs and phony passports, so Theo sent them back to the States to track Vinnie and the gold down, and beat it out of him, if necessary.
When he and Kowalski confronted Vinnie at Fort Bragg, the conversation proved brief and rather one-sided. Vinnie claimed that the gold had been seized by US customs, and he was now in as much trouble as the rest of them were. When he then took off to Atlantic City, Benson and Kowalski followed him to the casino and finally tracked him down at Caesars. After the three thugs from the Bimini Bay dragged Vinnie back to his own hotel and eventually up to his fifth floor room, Vinnie managed to escape out the window. Benson and Kowalski were able to corner him in the elevator lobby, and, as they say, “push came to shove.” Vinnie played dumb and again refused to cooperate, which so infuriated Benson that he gave Vinnie a flying lesson out the fifth floor hallway window.
As he watched the sergeant tumble through the air toward the asphalt below, Kowalski wasn’t happy with him, but Benson was not overly worried. If the gold was anywhere, it was back in Fayetteville, and his next best choice was to “discuss” it with the girl. Kowalski liked that a lot more. When the girl put three bullets in Kowalski’s chest and winged Benson, the most Benson could say about the trip was that it had eliminated two shares of the loot. Other than that, it was a complete fiasco. The second visit to the house was proving to be another waste of time, until he saw the photograph of the girl wearing the gold lion’s head medallion around her neck, and he knew all was not lost.
After that, it wasn’t hard to put the pieces together — a girl from suburban Chicago, photographs of Burke’s wedding, the dust-up between Burke and Donatello Carbonari, threats, assaults, and now, the increasing likelihood that Burke would actually be coming here to Atlantic City to take on the New Jersey mob. That seemed too good to be true, because Burke had no idea that Theo and his Black Devils were already here to stop him. In the melee that was sure to follow, all Benson needed was to get his hands on the girl and make sure that neither Burke nor Theo walked away. Given their reputations, he was fairly certain that they would take care of that themselves. He wanted the gold, all of it, and getting rid of both of them was essential if he wanted to keep it. At the same time, finally getting his revenge on the man who had undermined his Army career from the moment he showed up in the Unit would add whipped cream and two large cherries to the top. Gramps! he mumbled to himself. Gramps! Bob Burke would pay for that.
On several occasions over the past two days of watching videos, Benson thought he recognized some faces. Could they be Burke’s men, he wondered. Unfortunately, with the long hair, hats, and constantly changing beards and mustaches, he doubted their wives or girlfriends could recognize them half the time. As Benson watched casino security gather around one of the blackjack tables to deal with two card counters, Benson’s eyes focused on the crowd. He immediately recognized Ace Randall and Joe “The Batman” Hendrix. After all the nights he spent on one rocky piece of ground or another with those men, they could change their clothes, hair, and even put on hats; but they could never hide “that look.” It was the way their heads and eyes never stopped moving, how they held their hands and fingers at the ready, and in the way their bodies moved, like jungle cats on the prowl. Deltas! That meant the last piece of Benson’s plan was falling into place. Burke couldn’t be far away. He was here!
Benson looked closer at the two loud, noxious jerks at the blackjack table. They appeared familiar. And why were Ace Randall and The Batman standing nearby, watching them? Were they their security? Or was it all some coincidence? Unfortunately, ten years in Special Ops taught Benson never to believe in coincidences.
That was when the pit boss and the uniformed casino security moved in on the two blackjack players. Benson turned toward Theo Van Gries and said, “Come over here and take a look at this, Theo,” he motioned toward his screen. “I found them.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Martijn Van Gries held his office door open. With a big smile and a dramatic sweep of his arm, he motioned for the two Geeks to step inside.
“Said the spider to the fly?” Ronald asked as he stopped in the doorway and complained loudly. The big security guard behind him gave him a two-handed shove in the back and Ronald found himself lying on his face on the carpet in front of Van Gries’s desk. Jimmy decided he needed no such assistance, and quickly stepped inside on his own.
The pit boss was last in, carrying two nearly full trays of chips, which he sat on the corner of Van Gries’s desk. “They’re all yours,” he said. “I gotta get back.” Van Gries nodded as the pit boss turned and left, closing the office door behind him.
“You’re gonna hear from my lawyer!” Ronald picked himself off the floor and wagged a finger at Van Gries. “You can’t treat us like this,” he blustered.
“Of course I can,” Van Gries told him, sounding surprised by the statement.
“We have rights, and…”
“Sit down,” Van Gries pointed to the two chairs in front of his desk. “You were card counting. We have you on video, tonight and last night. That’s stealing, plain and simple.”
“Card counting is legal in New Jersey,” Ronald countered.
Martijn stared at him for a moment. “It’s no more legal than if I tell Robert and Anthony here to drag you out to one of our boats, break your legs, and throw you overboard in the Gulf Stream. Take your pick, because no one will ever know or care, except for the sharks, of course. Is that what you would prefer?”
“You’re just trying to scare us,” Jimmy told him, almost convincing himself.
“Scare you?” Van Gries answered. “Yes, that is exactly what I am trying to do, Mr. Talmadge, and I hope the lesson takes better than it did in Las Vegas or Connecticut.”
Jimmy listened to what Van Gries was saying, until he saw the laptop sitting on the desk. Its top was open, and one look told him everything he needed to know. The black laptop bore the distinctive, iridescent green logo of a Razer Blade, the biggest, newest, meanest gaming machine on the market. With state-of-the-art graphics, it was the only model faster than ones he and Ronald had talked Charlie out of a few months before.
“You have a Razer? That’s so sick,” Jimmy said.
“You two are gamers?” Van Gries stared at him and then smiled, “I suppose that was a stupid question, wasn’t it? What do you play?”
“Mostly World of Warcraft, but Leagues of Legends from time to time. And you?”
“Leagues, but I am into Forge of Empires now.”
“We have EON17-SLXs, but Razers are on our shopping lists.”
“Oh, you will not regret it,” Van Gries said, as he looked them over again. “When do you play?”
“Every weekend. And you?”
“When I can,” Van Gries answered with a thin smile. “But too much of my time is taken up dealing with klootzakken like you two… that means ‘assholes’ for those in the room who are not conversant in Dutch.”
Jimmy suddenly heard a man laugh. He turned and saw a large man with a neatly trimmed beard sitting on a couch along the side wall of the office reading the morning’s
Daily Racing Form. He appeared to be studying the two Geeks with the same cold, analytical stare that Jimmy remembered getting from the Deltas back in North Carolina. This time, however, there was no humor behind those eyes; and it sent a shiver down his spine. There were two other men in the room too, but Jimmy could not see their faces. They sat bent over computer monitors with their backs to him.
“If you are as smart and tech savvy as you pretend,” Van Gries continued, “you should know that the gaming industry maintains a national registry of cheaters; and your petulant, frowning faces have been on it from the moment you were tossed out of those other casinos. We are a good bit more sophisticated than most. We download that national data into our own facial recognition program, and it picked you out the moment you walked through the door yesterday. So welcome to the Bimini Bay, Mr. Barker… and Mr. Talmadge.”
“Then why didn’t you stop us?” Jimmy asked.
“Oh, last night you merely piddled about the tables, so we ignored you. Tonight, however, you crossed the threshold; and then you got quite obnoxious about it.”
“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ronald postured.
“Of course you do, Mr. Barker. You are stealing, and we become a tad medieval when we catch people doing things like that.”
“Medieval?” Ronald snorted and nudged Jimmy. “Really? What’s next? The rack? Drawing and quartering?”
While Ronald droned on with his complaints, Jimmy scanned the room. On the wall to the left of Van Gries’s desk, he saw several framed photographs and a diploma from MIT in cardinal and gray, with its distinctive gold. Below it stood a bookcase, the top shelf of which contained a row of pale blue binders with yellow, red, and green multi-colored Rubik’s Cube logos at the top of their spines, and the bold initials DACI. DACI? Suddenly it came to him — DACI! Digital Analytics Consultants, in Princeton. They must have been the ones who designed Van Gries’s software, and Jimmy knew exactly what that meant.
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