Stacked Deck

by Tracy Watkins

  She caught a view of the third man as he tracked her from one street over, a blip of movement in the dark, sliding fast on her right as he tried to cut off her downhill escape.

  She charged through one open backyard gate, then another, past a startled woman and her small white dogs barking with tiny fury in her wake.

  Her pursuer cut across below her.

  She tried to find another route, but already he was rising over a wall that separated two houses, the man moving with the agility of a gymnast.

  She fired. He twisted awkwardly, landed with a yelp and she didn’t know if she’d hit him, or if he’d twisted an ankle. She didn’t hang around to find out.

  In that instant she thought she understood something about soldiers in combat. Bone-chilling fear can paralyze if you don’t squash it quickly.

  Sprinting toward another street that bled down the mountain, she came upon a young guy straddling a blue motorcycle, the engine rumbling as he talked to a girl on the curb.

  They both glanced at Beth as she ran toward them, utterly unaware of the chaotic battle that had unfolded up the hill.

  “I need your bike,” Beth said. She’d dated an air force pilot on and off for two years and he’d introduced her to motorcycles. She’d owned a much beloved Harley for a while, but an accident and the increase in traffic had changed her mind about the joys of motorcycle riding in Vegas.

  Maybe he didn’t see the gun, didn’t believe it, but in any case he told her to fuck off.

  She was fully in the persona of the tough Vegas kid she’d once been. And her life was at stake. Beth pushed the astonished girl aside, and leveled the semiautomatic at the motorcyclist. “I said I need your motorcycle.”

  “Ron, get the hell off and give it to her,” the girl said. “She’s fucking crazy.”

  He abandoned his machine, hands up. “It’s all yours. Don’t shoot me.”

  Beth said, “You have a cell phone?”

  He nodded.

  “Then call the police and tell them somebody has been shot up on

  Peaceful Lane

  . Send an ambulance. Tell them there are three men with guns running around up there. I’ll call in the location of your motorcycle in an hour. Sorry, but I have to get out of here.”

  She mounted the bike, heeled the kick stand and roared off into the Vegas night.

  As she drove, the wind brushing across her face and the rumble of the engine on her legs, she tried to push the shock of what had just happened out of her mind so she could keep her focus on her driving. But the image of Curtis hitting the pavement, and not knowing if he was alive or dead, made her sick with apprehension.

  Beth blew through traffic on

  Nellis Boulevard

  until she felt she was well away from trouble. Then she pulled into a strip mall and dialed 911 on her cell, just in case the couple freaked and didn’t call the police. “There’s been a shooting up on

  Peaceful Lane

  . A man’s wounded or he may be dead.”

  She hung up before they could ask her anything. Then, trembling from all the madness, she called a detective. She knew most of the detectives in Vegas, but only trusted one man. He was the detective who had investigated her father’s death and had never really let it get tossed into the cold case file. His voice was soothing in her ear.

  “Detective Ayers? This is Bethany James.”

  “Hey, Beth what’s up?”

  She struggled not to sound hysterical as she told him what happened.

  “Beth, where are you?”

  “I borrowed a motorcycle from some guy to get away. He didn’t volunteer it exactly. I’ll call you later and tell you where it is. I can’t explain anything right now. But my bodyguard was hit, Curtis Sault. I want to know how he is. Call me when you know something. I need to lay low until I find out who is trying to kill me.”

  “Beth, I need you to—”

  Beth hung up. She didn’t want to get involved with the police. Not until she had things figured out. She sat there thinking for a minute, staring at the flood of traffic on Nellis. Suddenly she knew what she was going to do. Get out of town, go to Virginia and straighten things out with Oracle even if that meant severing ties. Then she would come back here and deal with this.

  She called the airport and made a reservation for the next flight out of Vegas that would get her to the WashingtonDullesAirport in Virginia. She got a seat on the redeye.

  She headed back out in traffic, turned south on Charleston heading for the freeway to McCarranInternationalAirport.

  Two hours later Beth, having learned that Curtis Sault had been taken to SunriseHospital and was in surgery, but expected to live, sat in a window seat as her flight took off from McCarran.

  She was incredibly relieved. She didn’t want tears in her eyes and the guy sitting next to her asking if she was all right. She wasn’t in the mood for conversation.

  She’d cleaned up in the ladies room inside McCarran and changed into a “What Happens in Vegas…” T-shirt and a pair of black sports pants with Las Vegas lettered across her butt in bright pink. She’d stopped at the first shop she’d come to inside the airport, having no choice but to change out of her dirty and blood-spattered clothes or she would never be allowed to board the plane. Now she looked like some kind of walking billboard, but at least she was blood-free.

  The flight would get her into Dulles at six in the morning and she intended to stop somewhere for breakfast—she was starving—then go straight to Oracle headquarters and get this thing settled.

  Beth tried to get a little sleep, but the catastrophe of having an acquaintance shot wound her so tightly she stayed awake during the entire flight.

  She was certain that because someone was trying to kill her and she was now mixed up with a homicide, Oracle would cut her loose from the mission without consequence and she could return to Vegas to deal with this situation. Convinced tonight’s attack was connected to her search for her father’s killer, she must be on the right track now, and couldn’t afford any delays.

  Allison Gracelyn was the only person Beth knew who was connected to Oracle. The organization did not advertise its existence in any way. Few knew about it at all. Fewer knew any of the people involved. Even the agents who were sent on assignments had little, if any, knowledge of other agents.

  But Beth and Allison had a special bond. Both had lost parents to murder.

  In Allison’s case, it was her mother, founder of the AthenaAcademy, where Beth had gotten her education. Allison, of all people, would understand her current situation. She was also an Athena grad and was the person who had recruited Beth.

  When Beth’s father was killed she was twelve and had no other family to take her in. She became a ward of the state of Nevada. At some point she’d been given a battery of aptitude tests. The results, especially in math, brought her to the attention of a very special college prep school, AthenaAcademy for girls in Phoenix, Arizona. Allison was still very much involved in the school.

  The academy had given Beth an education unlike anything offered in any other school in America. Besides a strong academics program she studied martial arts, learned horseback riding and analyzed war-game strategies, as well as languages and international political theory.

  The school prepared her and the other girls for much more than just higher education. It prepared them to compete with men at the highest levels of whatever careers they chose.

  For Beth, becoming an Oracle agent was the logical step for someone with her unique skills. As a professional card player, the legacy of her father, she played in high-stakes games all over the world.

  Because of her card playing, Beth had unusual access to an entire strata of movers and shakers in the shadows of global finance. This was a big asset for Oracle and she hoped it might work in her favor now, allowing her to bow out of this mission, whatever it was, without souring the relationship.

  It would be an immense loss if she had to cut her ties to Oracle, Allison and
the academy, the only family she’d had since her father’s death, but Beth was too close to learning the name of her father’s killer, and nothing short of her own death would stop her from getting that information.

  Chapter 3

  W hen the plane landed, Beth headed for the nearest food kiosk. After a blueberry scone, one almost ripe banana, a bag of spicy tortilla chips and a large black coffee, she rented an Alero from Avis.

  Once inside her car, she reminded herself what was at stake here, and rehearsed what she wanted to say to Allison. Other agents could be called in out of the cold to do this job. They really didn’t need her. And she had something else to do that was, in her mind of far greater significance.

  She had never quit anything important, let alone the most important organization she’d ever belonged to. Its code of silence and loyalty was unmatched. It was, to be sure, a lot tighter than the crumbling mafia code of omerta, or the sieve that was the CIA.

  At eight-thirty in the morning, Beth drove the Alero through the security gate to the rear of the town house that served as Oracle’s inconspicuous residential location.

  The first time she’d been to Oracle’s nerve center, she’d expected some huge building appropriate for a major intelligence operation. Instead it was an unassuming town house as befitting its very low profile.

  Her arrival had already been cleared. The agency didn’t like more than one at-large agent showing up at any given time. It was rare, in fact, to ever be invited here and that made this even more unusual.

  Beth had never known Oracle’s leader’s identity, but she’d often wondered if Delphi was actually the code name for Allison Gracelyn. Whether or not Allison, also an employee of NSA, was Delphi she was one of the major powers in Oracle, and the one person Bethany wanted to deal with on a personal basis.

  She entered the town house through the rear, her thumb print and a retina scan necessary to get in. She went into the kitchen where a woman sat at the table drinking coffee and talking on a cell phone.

  Beth glanced at her, made a passing nod and headed upstairs. A young red-headed staffer told her that Allison was in a meeting and asked her to wait in Allison’s office.

  Beth made her way into the office. There was a desk, a laptop, a few photos of bucolic settings on the walls, a small refrigerator in one corner, a sofa against the far wall with matching chairs and an oak coffee table.

  As she waited for her former classmate, she reflected on her years at AthenaAcademy at the base of the WhiteTankMountains near Phoenix. They were some of the best years of her life.

  Everyone who attended the academy was put in a particular group. Hers was Artemis, the Huntress in mythology. She often missed the camaraderie, the competition and the fun of those years, and it brought a smile to her face thinking about all the trouble her secret, “floating” card games had gotten her in.

  And those famous words from one of her instructors: “Beth, are you trying to turn this academy into a Las Vegas casino?”

  Beth was lost in her memories when she heard Allison out in the hall talking to someone.

  Beth took a deep breath to calm down. She didn’t want to just blurt out everything in a gush of emotion. Allison was the consummate professional and Beth wanted to keep her respect and the connection to Oracle.

  Allison walked in carrying a laptop shoulder bag. She said, tongue-in-cheek, “Wow. The outfit is so—” she smiled ruefully and raised her eyebrows “—Vegas.”

  For her part, Allison looked great, her brilliant brown eyes smiling as she shook Beth’s hand. She wore a tailored gray business suit, white blouse, short hair tucked neatly behind her ears, very little makeup, but the jade teardrop earrings gave the business look a feminine edge.

  Allison motioned toward the sofa and matching chairs. They sat across from each other in the chairs.

  Beth explained the outfit and filled Allison in on the incident in Vegas and the events leading up to it, and why, because of it, she couldn’t take the mission.

  “I’m convinced the men who came after me did so on the orders of the man who runs a cheating crew. It could be the crew my father once worked for.”

  Allison studied her intently for a moment, before saying, “The man you believe your father worked for when he was murdered?”

  “Yes. I think he now realizes who I am and what I’m doing. I’m very close. I have to carry this through.”

  Allison nodded. “I absolutely understand the urgency of your situation, but we really do need you for this operation.” She smiled slightly, and rested her hands in her lap. “I really think you’ll reconsider after you hear the details and the unusual set of circumstances surrounding this mission.”

  Beth shook her head, adamant and controlled. “There has to be somebody who can sub for me. I absolutely can’t do it right now.”

  “Beth, you’re not only assuming the hit team that tried to take you out is connected to the cheating crew you’ve been tracking, but you’re convinced of it. However, you have no hard evidence to prove this, and you’ve been down this road before with other crews.”

  “I know. But I have a good feeling this time that I’m on the right track.”

  “But still no actual proof.”

  “Not yet. But I will.”

  “I can see that it’s easy to fuse your own emotional vendetta with everything that happened.”

  “I don’t think that’s what I’m doing,” Beth said, trying hard not to get defensive.

  Allison sat back in her chair, folded her hands and tucked her legs to one side, then she sat forward again and straightened her back. All tells.

  Beth knew she was in for a serious briefing.

  “Beth, at the moment, every graduate of AthenaAcademy must be considered a target, as well as our students. There’ve been a few attempted kidnappings. We’re all under attack. Since the school was founded it has had supporters and enemies, but there is one enemy in particular who has been there right from the beginning. We absolutely must track down this person. And for that we need your help.”

  “Am I the only one who can do this? I’m usually just given data analysis tasks. This sounds different.”

  “It is. Very different. And yes, you are the only one who can handle this, in my estimation. There are several reasons for this. The first being, we need your expertise in Monaco.”

  “Monaco?”

  “Yes. There is a casino there, the Sapphire Star, owned by one Salvatore Giambi. He’s the target. We suspect he was blackmailed by someone with a signature ‘A’ now known as Arachne. We want to know anything and everything you can discover about the blackmailer through Giambi’s financial transactions over the years.”

  Monaco was so far from Vegas that Beth just couldn’t do this, but still she asked, “The blackmailer is the person you think is the AthenaAcademy’s enemy?”

  “Yes. We think that is a very likely scenario. This goes all the way back to a jailbreak in Phoenix in 1968 and the attempted assassination of a female prisoner, known at the time as Weaver. She was about to stand trial for murder. My mother was the prosecuting attorney. Weaver was a suspected CIA assassin. She apparently believed my mother set up her boyfriend. Weaver was pregnant at the time. During her escape, her boyfriend was killed, and later she lost her baby. Weaver has since accumulated many aliases, one of them is Arachne. We suspect that Arachne is behind the attacks on Athena. We’re hoping that Giambi will lead us closer to Weaver.”

  Beth still didn’t see a reason for her role in this.

  Allison continued, “Weaver was blackmailing my mother right up until her death. Blackmail is something she’s very good at. We also believe she’s been a freelance killer across the globe for a long time. She did so much work for the CIA and its clients over the years, heavy work during the Vietnam War, that she knows where all the bodies are buried. Which means, she has information of the kind that has allowed her to make a fortune blackmailing former clients.”

  Beth could feel the tension build
ing in her neck. She tried to relax by sitting back in her chair and unclenching her hands. She’d had enough physical action to last her a long time, and really didn’t want to get pushed into the underworld in Monaco.

  “What we do know,” Allison said, “is Arachne is called different names in different places around the world. In Russia she’s known as Madame Web. We need to confirm our suspicion that Arachne is the same blackmailer Giambi has been paying for decades. What you’re being asked to do is get into Giambi’s financial universe and track down his blackmail payments to their source. This man has critical information and we need it.”

  “Why would you give me this assignment? It’s not what I do, and it’s a long way from Las Vegas.”

  “For a couple reasons.” Allison untucked her legs, stood up and walked over to her desk.

  She came back with a large white envelope. This time she sat on the sofa right next to Beth’s chair. She put the envelope down on the coffee table. “We need you because you understand the people in the gaming world. Salvatore Giambi, like any casino boss, has always had his eye on the cheating crews to protect his own business. He’s been around a long time and hasn’t been hit by one of these crews in about thirty years or so. Whatever his source, whether it’s the mob or some intelligence branch, we don’t know, but we do know he’s probably the most knowledgeable guy on the planet on this subject. That gives the two of you a bond of sorts. And his knowledge of the cheating crews was one of the reasons he was allowed to open a casino in Monaco. He protects the city from international cheating rings and the authorities allow him to run his casino.”

  Beth said, “The cheating crews that I know about are mostly out of Vegas.”

  “Giambi may not be located in Vegas now, but he was there for a time and he still has friends. He’s invested heavily in Vegas. We’ve checked that out. And the casinos he’s invested in, unlike all the rest, never get hit by the major crews. It’s like they have a protective cloak against cheaters.”

  Now Allison had Beth’s full attention. She sat straight up in her chair, leaning in close. A little jolt of excitement ran through her. “So you think Giambi might know something about the crew my father worked for.”