Shadowrun 44 - Drops of Corruption

by Jason M Hardy (epub)

  The other players at the table seemed preoccupied by figuring out just what Alex’s strategy was. He played a few bad hands, possibly trying to bluff, but his betting was so timid that he never forced any other players away. Inevitably, it turned out they had better hands, and Alex lost.

  Sometimes, when he folded, Alex would turn his cards over as he threw them in, which no real gambler ever did. Once, the other players caught him folding a pair of jacks. Another time, he threw out the ace and queen of clubs. This caused no small degree of agony among the other gamblers, as they couldn’t help but think of all they could have done with those wasted cards. Still, by not playing them, Alex was continuing to wave good bye to considerable sums of money, which helped lessen the other players’ pain.

  In the end, the other gamblers adopted Kader’s strategy—they didn’t think about why Alex was doing what he was doing. They just accepted it—assumed that no matter what he did, he’d lose money—and they shifted their focus to the other, more skilled players.

  Kader caused them a lot of trouble. His demeanor ,md movements were all predictable, but he kept changing his betting patterns, so no one could get an easy read on them. Only some unlucky draws and a few ill-advised doubling bets placed when he traded in his two hold cards after the fifth shared card was dealt kept him from completely dominating the table. The other gamblers tried to work together to slow him, but poker is not a loam sport, and they mostly succeeded at passing chips between themselves rather than realizing any gains.

  Then, right around the time the others expected Alex to signal the cashier for more chips, one of them glanced al his stack. The first surprise was that he still had one— the other players had all assumed he’d be down to a dozen or fewer chips at this point, but he had a healthy collection. That led to the second surprise—it was possible that in the last hour or so his stack had actually grown bigger.

  No one at the table had a clear memory of how that might have happened. Had Alex been the only one to bet on a few hands, sneaking his way into some small but useful pots? Had he bought more chips while they weren’t paying attention? Neither lapse in attention seemed likely to anyone at the table, but the physical evidence of the chips showed that something had happened.

  The chips didn’t calm Alex down any. The whole table watched as he glanced at his cards, waiting for the cheek muscle beneath his left eye to twitch upward, the sign that he was holding something good. The higher the twitch, the better the hand.

  On one particular hand, his face stayed still, but he threw in fifteen hundred nuyen anyway. None of the other faces around the table changed, but everyone felt like raising a skeptical eyebrow. The bet was clearly a bluff.

  Four of the seven other players folded, grudgingly, wishing they could be the one to expose Alex’s ploy. Three others, Kader included, stayed in. A few raises were placed, and Alex called them all. Finally they were ready for the flop.

  It came out queen of spades, eight of clubs, six of hearts. Alex and Kader stayed in, the other two went out. Kader saw his chance. He had a stack of chips twice as big as Alex’s. All he had to do was put in a bet that would equal Alex’s remaining chips. If he had a brain in his head, Alex would fold, taking a significant loss but staying in the game. If he was insane, or really liked losing, he’d match Kader’s bet, reveal his bluff, and be out of the game—or forced to buy more chips.

  Kader made a bet more than big enough to sink Alex if he matched it. Everyone waited for the inevitable fold. It didn’t come. Alex called Kader’s bet, going all in.

  An involuntary sigh left the lips of most of the players. This was it. Kader was taking all the mark’s money, leaving none for them. Too bad.

  Kader turned over ace-queen, both clubs. A strong hand, even if Alex hadn’t been bluffing.

  Alex turned over the other two queens.

  Kader remained expressionless, but the other players couldn’t help but gasp and blink a few times. Clearly, Alex had suppressed the tic—at least this once.

  The final two cards did nothing to the hand—a four and an eight that gave Alex a full house he didn’t need. He took the substantial collection of chips into his now-large stack.

  It was time to get serious. Whether he had finally learned something or whether he’d been playing them all along, Alex’s money would now be a little more dif-ficult to take. The other players decided they couldn’t play lazy anymore.

  The battle became more even. Most pots went out uncontested, with only one player willing to place a bet. The few times more than one bet went down, the betting was light. No one took much damage, no one gained much ground. They were feeling each other out all over again.

  The new evaluation of Alex tagged him as just a poor poker player, rather than a spectacularly bad one. His tells and tics had decreased, but he still didn’t have much of a feel for when to play, when to fold, and how to draw other players into a bet. Once they stopped relying on his face to tell them what he had, and focused solely on his betting patterns, the other players started siphoning away Alex’s chips again.

  Then luck kicked in. On one hand, Alex held ten-six, while one of the other players went in with jack-jack. Alex was on the verge of a big loss when the final card, a seven, filled Alex’s inside straight and he took the pot. On another hand, his suited nine and ten beat an ace and jack when the final card gave him a club flush.

  Every hand wasn’t like that, but too many were. The players kept going up against Alex, knowing that, in the long run, skill beats out luck most every time. And Alex kept getting the cards and winning pots.

  The last straw came in a head-to-head against Kader. His face still blankly dour, Kader drew Alex into a pot with a relatively small eight-hundred-nuyen bet. Alex stayed in. After the three-card flop (nine-six-two), the two players made a few more jabs at each other, raising and re-raising, but never large amounts. The pot grew slowly, but it grew.

  The fourth shared card, the jack of diamonds, gave the advantage to any player holding another jack. Kader and Alex seemed neither fazed nor encouraged, and another tepid betting exchange ensued.

  The fifth card was a queen. Finally, the two players decided to go for the jugular. The bets hit twenty-five hundred nuyen, and went up from there. Neither was ready to go for a knockout blow, but both were hoping to do some real damage. Finally, Kader put his last chips into the pot. Thanks to his run of luck, Alex had about half his stack remaining in front of him.

  Kader got ready to turn over his cards, but a quick wave from Alex stopped him. Alex had one more option left to him—double his bet and replace his hold cards with two new ones. He took it.

  All his chips were in, and he was depending on the luck of the draw to put him over the top. It was a ridiculous move, but that kind of thing had been working for Alex recently.

  He flipped over the two cards he was throwing away as he discarded them, an unusual move. Ace-king. Fine cards to bet with, but, given the shared cards, probably not a winner. Every other gambler at the table agreed, without saying anything, that he should have folded after the fall of the fifth shared card.

  Alex received two new cards. Kader showed what he had—queen-jack. Two pair, both of them high. A quality hand.

  Alex flipped over his draw. First a ten. Then an eight. Kader made an instinctive reach for the pot, until he realized—8-9-10-jack-queen. A straight. A winner.

  Kader and Alex stood at the same time. Alex was not foolish enough to reach a conciliatory hand to Kader, who was already stalking off. He gazed at his considerable stack of chips for a few moments, then apparently decided he’d ridden his luck long enough. He raked in his chips so he could cash them in.

  By the time he’d assembled all of them, Kader was nowhere in sight.

  Bannickburn wasn’t sure what the best part of X-Prime’s performance had been—the fact that he’d cleaned Kader out, like he was supposed to, or the fact that he’d won so much from the other players in the meantime. Since all of X-Prime’s original stak
e came from Cayman’s pickpocketing exploits, the final winnings were pure profit. It would make a nice bonus for the team.

  f irst, of course, they had to finish the mission. Kader was mad, but he wasn’t humiliated. Not by a long shot.

  True to the propensities revealed by the file Jackie had stolen (a file that provided crucial information for X Prime as he worked to win Kader’s money), the mafioso had retired to the bar to reduce the pain of his losses. When he won, Kader drank wine; when he lost, he drank whiskey. By all accounts, Kader could hold his liquor quite well, so Bannickburn could take his time before approaching him. Which was good—walking up loo soon would look suspicious.

  Kader was in the Gates Casino’s twentieth century-themed bar, with the taillights of finned automobiles slicking out of the wall and hard plastic furniture everywhere. Bannickburn was nearby, in the Old West Saloon, which had a few cowboy hats on the wall and little else that looked like anything from a saloon. Bannickburn also understood that this bar served sarsaparilla, but he’d never bothered to find out for sure. Regardless, with the evening he had in front of him, he chose to slick with water.

  He waited for Kader’s anger to coalesce into icy hatred—he figured it would take fifteen to twenty minutes—then wandered over. He walked slowly but directly, knowing where he wanted to go, but being in no particular hurry to get there.

  Kader saw him approaching, and gave him a look like lie was eyeballing Bannickburn to determine his coffin size. The person Kader saw looked nothing like Bannickburn—his sideburns were covered and transformed into heavy cheeks and jowls, his hair was sandy brown, his nose broad and misshapen, his brow almost Neanderthal. He looked like hired muscle who’d taken a few too many punches.

  Kader didn’t welcome him, but he didn’t stop his approach. Bannickburn knew there would be no use for small talk, so he got right to the point.

  “Tough loss,” he said.

  “Who the hell are you?” Kader hissed.

  “Your new best friend. Got a minute?”

  “No.”

  “You want your money back?”

  Kader turned to look at Bannickburn directly, looking to the elf like a mannequin in a cheap haunted house slowly rotating toward him.

  “I don’t know what you intend to sell me. I don’t care. Take your scam elsewhere. I’m done giving away money for the night.” He returned his attention to his whiskey, assuming Bannickburn would follow his orders.

  “You were cheated,” Bannickburn said. “I’ve got the proof. Just thought you’d be interested.”

  “I have no doubt I was cheated. But I have no confidence in you, whoever you are.”

  “You can call me Miller. All you need to know is I’m a sympathizer.”

  “With what?”

  “With people in your line of work.”

  Kader didn’t respond, didn’t nod, didn’t acknowledge Bannickburn at all. Bannickburn wasn’t making much headway. Kader still was paying far too much attention to his glass, and he showed no interest in the conversation. But he was still sitting there. He hadn’t forced Bannickburn away yet, and that had to be worth something. Bannickburn soldiered on.

  “I don’t know everything that’s going on with you, but I know this much—you can’t let people take advantage of you. You were cheated. The guy’s walked away from your table, he’s spending your money on some prime rib and aged scotch. I assume you can’t let that kind of thing go on. I can help you end it.”

  “You have proof of the cheating?”

  “Yup.”

  “Then why not take it to casino security?”

  “You trust them?”

  “More than I trust you,” Kader said.

  “You shouldn’t. Because they’re the ones screwing you.”

  Kader tried not to show any interest at Bannickburn’s words, but he failed. His jaw clenched, his eyes tightened. He was getting angrier, and that meant he was getting interested. The hook was going in.

  “That’s right,” Bannickburn said. “You know how Gates feels about the Mafia.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?” Kader said, almost reflexively.

  “Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. But maybe, somehow, someone on Gates’ security staff got it into their head that you’re Mafia. And they don’t want Mafia in their place, so they’re making sure you lose. If that means sending in a dupe to look stupid and then cheat you out of your money, then that’s what they’ll do. Or should I say, that’s what they did.”

  Kader took two deep, raspy breaths before speaking again. “That’s a significant accusation.”

  “Damn straight it is,” Bannickburn said. “Damn straight. It’s the kind of accusation that means nothing without some rock-solid proof.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s exactly the kind I’ve got.”

  14

  It was a tricky doctoring job. Straight trideo manipulation, Jackie could do. Give her enough time, and the job would be seamless. She’d even been getting better— the time she needed to do an acceptable job had gotten shorter and shorter, but it was still longer than the amount of time she had tonight. That meant there were going to be seams. Luckily, for this job, that was okay.

  Which was part of the trick. The manipulation had to be good enough to fool an amateur viewer who would nevertheless be giving the footage a careful look, while fake enough that a professional would be able to dismiss it fairly quickly.

  She hoped Kader was feeling talkative, or that Bannickburn would at least run his mouth long enough to give her a few extra seconds. Every little bit of time helped.

  Spindle sat next to her in the small attic a few hundred meters from the casino, keeping track of her surveillance drone. The video feed was off for the time being, and Spindle was trying to move it out blind. It was slow work.

  Jackie’s mind raced as she altered angles, combined shots, and tried to make the altered trideo footage look vaguely like reality so that Kader would be convinced (hat something that had never happened really had. Soon Cayman would be here for the relay, and she’d have to hand off whatever she’d managed to do. After that, she had one more little task—another test of her (lates passwords—and then she could relax. Jack into I lie Matrix and have a little fun, instead of this cut-and-paste drudge work.

  She didn’t bother to see what Kross was doing. She assumed he was still sitting behind Spindle, face grumpy, arms folded and driving creases into the elbows of his silk suit, still angry about having nothing to do. Spindle’s light green tank top at least gave him something to look at, but that didn’t seem to be enough to cheer him.

  Keeping Kross happy, though, was not one of Jackie’s concerns. She was content to ignore him.

  She heard heavy footsteps walking up the stairs Inward their attic. Kross, playing security guard, jumped to an alert position, but Spindle and Jackie didn’t bother to turn to the door. Jackie knew it was Cayman approaching, and she knew that meant she had to be done.

  It had been exactly like fishing for marlin, an activity Bannickburn hated. He’d prefer to just sail out in a boat, zap the water with a healthy dose of electricity, and see what came to the surface, but a few people had once convinced him to spend an excruciating afternoon watching them attempt to reel in a single fish. They’d pull it in a little, then give it some play, then pull it in a little more, and on and on and on. And when it finally was over, they had a big wet fish that needed to go through an exceedingly disgusting process before it was ready to be consumed.

  The evening’s labor had been almost as difficult, with Kader shying away every time Bannickburn thought he had him interested. But he’d finally done it, and his reward should be a lot better than a dead fish.

  Cayman had walked by ten minutes ago—stumbled by, really, putting on a fine drunk act. When he bumped into Bannickburn, he passed a small disk to him. That disk now sat in a portable trideo player that Bannickburn was about to show Kader.

  “Just watch,” he said, and flipped open the p
layer’s screen. “Example number one. From the end, the hand where he cleaned you out. Take a look at his draw.”

  The trideo image started with an overhead view of Alex at the table, clumsily shuffling his chips as he contemplated his next move. It was the last round of betting, just before he threw in all his chips to get two new cards. He threw in a raise, and it was Kader’s turn to think. Bannickburn paused the image briefly, making sure he had it zoomed in on the dealer’s hands and the card shoe, then restarted the playback. Offscreen, Alex made his do-or-die bet. The dealer reached for the shoe and pulled out two cards.

  And palmed them.

  The move was incredibly fast. Bannickburn had to slow the replay down to one-quarter speed before Kader caught a hint that something was amiss. At one-eighth speed, the mobster started to see what had happened. At one-sixteenth, he was sure.

  The two cards from the shoe disappeared somewhere—maybe up her sleeve, maybe disintegrated by a quick spell—and were replaced by two cards deftly hidden in her large hands. Those were the cards Alex received. Those were the ones that gave him his final victory over Kader.

  Kader clenched his jaw, but said nothing until the replay crawled to its conclusion.

  “Show it again,” he said.

  Bannickburn obliged. It was an incredibly quick move, two cards flying in one sleeve and two new ones out the other. The dealer’s arms partially covered the move, making it difficult for the camera to get a clear view, and even harder for the other players to see anything. But this close in, and in slow motion, was indisputable proof. She had cheated, and Alex had benefited.

  Kader watched it five times, his face showing nothing. Then he stood and took a quick stride forward.

  “Bad idea,” Bannickburn said.

  Kader strained forward like a rottweiler on a leash. “It’s the only idea. There’s no choice in the matter.” “It’s what they want.”

  “They wanted my money. They got it. Now I’m going to take a little back.”