She had no opportunity to chat with him until dinner was over and the dancing began.
“Are you able to dance?” he asked, taking her hand in his.
“Yes, I think so.”
“I’ll skip the complicated moves and keep it simple.”
“Nothing in my life is simple, especially not the tango.”
He laughed.
Giambi whirled her on to the floor careful of her foot, but she had it securely bandaged and indicated that it was not a problem. They got into a more vigorous mode, and for a moment she forgot about everything else in her life and concentrated on the art of the dance.
Giambi held her and guided her with grace and style. She moved with him, close to his body, tangled in the heat of the tango.
She saw JD watching them from the table. The scene reminded her of Al Pacino’s dance in Scent of a Woman. Or, if Giambi had his way, it might be more like Last Tango in Paris.
Beth was astounded at his energy. She was beginning to believe him when he said he had fifteen good years left.
He whirled her to the Argentine Nuevo tango.
“How did you become such a good dancer?”
“One of my wives was from Argentina,” Giambi said. “She insisted I learn. Once I did, I became so popular with the ladies it made me bad husband material. She divorced me.”
Beth laughed as she spun through space, the aches and pains in her feet, legs and arms making their presence known, but she ignored them.
Finally after a complicated move, her battered body won out. “I have to take a break,” she pleaded. “I’m still suffering the overall effects of the car crash.”
He apologized profusely, with a gallant bow, and they walked off the dance floor.
“I want you and JD to come with me tomorrow to meet Feodras on his yacht,” he ordered while they walked back to his table.
“The Greek?”
“Yes.”
“I take it he’s a potential investor in Giambi Enterprises. Does that also include your racing team.”
“We’ll see.”
He wanted her to meet a few of his guests, but she pleaded a need to sit. She really feared that he would introduce her to someone who might recognize her beneath her disguise. Like the guy from Aruba.
“It’s worse than I thought,” JD said when she was able to free herself from Giambi, who was once again on the dance floor with one of the many beautiful women at the party.
“Worse how?”
“Giambi’s not going to survive in Monaco very much longer. We’re talking days, maybe hours. He’s talking about getting out before they kick him out.”
“Doesn’t it take a lot to even start the process?”
“Not when you think you could be raided. Last thing in the world he wants is a bunch of detectives lugging all his records, computers and stuff out of here. Believe me, you don’t have much time.”
“When is the movie scheduled?”
“It’s supposed to happen pretty soon.”
“He says he wants us to meet the Greek tomorrow.”
“Yeah. The man is worth a billion or more. Big Formula One fan. And a poker player.”
Beth was curious why she’d never heard of him on the circuit, but she didn’t pose the question to JD.
JD continued, “If the cops make a show, maybe I can delay them and give you time. I know how to shut the whole place down. There was an incident about four months ago when the TV cameras went down.”
“What happened?”
“It was like panic city. Giambi and half the security crew were in the power room. Giambi thought the shut down was the prelude to some big heist. He had the money rooms locked down, every guard in the place ready for battle. It was all caused by a rat.”
“A rat, in a hotel like this?”
“It came up through somewhere. Was living in the power room. Ate through a bunch of cables. I guess it liked the taste. Got electrocuted and caused a momentary malfunction in the camera system, which operates independently of the rest of the systems. It has a backup and is never supposed to fail. That night, for about forty minutes or so, it did. If you can’t get your thing done during the movie, shutting down the camera is a possibility.”
“You can make it go down?”
“I was there. I watched what they did to fix it. I could bring it down again. If I had to.”
“I don’t think you will. I just need about twenty or thirty minutes to dump his files.”
They started back to Giambi’s table.
“Can you do anything to get this film going? I’m getting nervous.”
“I’ll get some people to get on him about it. Otherwise he’ll dance until dawn.”
Giambi was talking to a group of men when he spotted her. She saw a man she recognized and she would have just as soon avoided the situation, but Giambi was enthusiastic about showing her off.
He brought her over and introduced her around. One of the men she’d met before, under different circumstances, in a poker game in Martinique.
Her chameleonlike transformation was so effective the man, like the one from Aruba, showed no signs of recognizing her as far as she could tell. But she was itching to get out of there.
Giambi made some announcements about upcoming events in his life. The building of a casino in Kestonia. “Las Vegas in Eastern Europe is the future,” he announced to great applause.
And then he waxed poetic about the future of Formula One, the royalty of racing. He sounded like a man who was not on the verge of losing, but one on the verge of making his greatest deals.
Then he announced the film, a compilation of the greatest moments in Formula One racing from the beginning up to JD Hawke’s brilliant, if turbulent, career. “A career that will be resuming very soon.” That to another robust round of applause.
He came back to the table as the giant screen rose from the back of the stage. “Very impressive,” Beth said.
“I know when I like something, or someone, very quickly. It’s an instinct developed over a lifetime.”
“I like a man with good instincts.”
“Ah, what I’d give to be thirty years younger.”
She smiled. “JD wouldn’t have a chance.”
“You have that exactly right.”
When Giambi was whisked away by someone wanting to introduce him to another guest, JD made his way over to Beth.
“Good conversation?” he asked her.
“He said if he were younger, you wouldn’t have a chance.”
“What I hear about his youth, he might be right,” JD said. “Fortunately, he’s old.”
“I have a sweet spot for older guys.”
“I’m thinking it ain’t that sweet.”
Tango eventually gave way to some forties music and then to younger music.
The old bull and the young stud vying for her attentions might have made the night more enjoyable if she wasn’t obsessed with getting upstairs.
Finally, at one in the morning, the movie was set to roll. Giambi returned to the microphone to narrate the action with his humorous running commentary.
“I’m going up. If he misses me, I have a little headache and I’m taking a nap. I’ll be down later. I’ll have my earpiece in, so let me know what’s going on about every fifteen minutes or so.”
JD watched Anne leave. Watching her dance he’d had a foreign idea enter his mind—this was the kind of woman he could get serious about. Not too serious. He didn’t want anything or anyone getting in the way of his ambition to rise to the top of Formula One. Still, if it came down to it, this was definitely the type of lady he really could get with.
If she succeeded, what would that mean? If she failed, then what?
Good luck, girl, he thought as she disappeared.
He turned to the montage of his racing career and reality sunk in.
This would have a bad ending, he thought. He wouldn’t survive without her if Giambi came tumbling down. She had seduced him into becoming an
agent of his own destruction, and he could only shake his head at how this had happened.
Chapter 22
F earing a raid at any minute, Beth cursed the slow private elevator to Giambi’s suite, knowing this could be the moment she’d been waiting for ever since her father was killed. She had no desire to see it ripped from her by politics.
The list of the men behind the major cheating crews would be a great start, but what she really wanted was enough information on Giambi’s illegal activities, and his blackmail situation, to force information out of him directly. She wanted just one name. And she’d come to believe that Giambi had that name.
If she found the key to the identity of his blackmailer and the name of her father’s killer, she would have her win-win. Her stomach knotted, the memories so intense she was hardly breathing and had to force herself to calm down.
The night had been like any other. She was playing cards and listening to music. It was hot and the air conditioner was broken and she had a fan on. It kept blowing the cards all over the place. She was waiting for her father to come home. To tell her if he won and they were rich, or if he’d lost and they were going to have to figure out how to pay the rent and get food. That’s how it was. And somehow, she had adjusted to it. And then the knock on the door. The cop. The look on his face. Never, never, never would she forget that. The look on his face. Later she would know him. And he would be the person who would help her. But that night he was the bearer of the worst news she could ever have imagined.
Now, as the elevator finally let her into the small alcove of the great room, she breathed.
She walked out in the middle of the great room and yelled, “Is anyone here?”
Silence.
“Hello! Anyone home?”
She walked to the kitchen. “Anybody here?”
When she was sure the place was empty, she hurried down the hall past the grotto pool into Giambi’s quarters and then his office.
Using the key JD had made for her, she went to the desk. The possibility that the laptop might not be there, that he’d moved it to keep it out of the hands of authorities who might raid the place, was her biggest fear.
“Be there,” she said quietly. “Please be there.”
She inserted the key into the lock and turned. Half a dozen clicks opening all the desk drawers greeted her effort.
At least that went well.
She pulled the middle drawer and a sleek HP Pavilion zd8000 emerged and rose on its typing platform. She quickly inserted her CD and a flash drive.
On the tiny radio she asked JD how things were going.
“Movie has a long way to go. Giambi is still with the same group. They’re having a good time by the sound of the laughter.”
“Keep me informed. I’m in.”
“Okay.”
While the program went to work she began searching through cabinets, opening desk drawers, looking for files, notebooks, records of any kind.
He had plenty of everything. Cash, guns, passports. But no cheaters list.
C’mon, Salvatore, where is your list of bad people. I know you have it. If it’s not on the computer, it’s got to be somewhere else.
She found the safe and that was where it might be, but she had no way to open it. She’d need a master safecracker for that.
It won’t matter, she thought, just as long as I get enough leverage from the computer.
She read through a few notebooks but found nothing of specific interest.
Then, with the program still working hard to break down the code, she went into the bedroom to see what was there.
Giambi was very neat. And everything was of the highest quality—from the dozens of handmade suits, shirts and shoes in the closet and a room big enough to be its own apartment, to the silk sheets that covered his bed.
When JD informed her that the movie was nearing the end, she told him she needed just a little more time. The program had broken through the codes and she was downloading his entire file base.
Time was pressing on her now.
She got constant updates on what was going on in the ballroom and where Jason, Giambi and Vincenzio were.
The whole time she stared at the download process.
JD said, “You need to wrap up and get out of there.”
“Okay. Another minute.”
“I think Jason is coming up. Get out now.”
“I can’t. Not yet. Delay him.”
“I’ll try.”
JD got her ten more minutes and that’s all she needed. She dumped everything onto a flash drive and got out of there.
She went back to JD’s apartment certain she had Giambi’s secrets and she couldn’t wait to see what they were.
When JD came up to his apartment she was already running files on her computer.
“Anything?”
“I don’t know yet. But it looks good. The party over?”
“Pretty much. Some of the guests are having breakfast with Giambi. Some are in the pool. He sent me up to see how you’re doing and to see if you want to join them.”
“Tell him thanks but no thanks. I’m in bed and I’m staying there.”
“Man’s in love with you.”
“You aren’t jealous of a seventy-eight-year-old man are you?”
“Hell, yes, I am. He owns the world, and he owns me. At the moment.”
“Yes, that all may be true. But you are very lucky.”
“Why is that?”
“He doesn’t own me. Go on back, before he decides to come up and check on me himself.”
It took her another hour to understand Giambi’s system and to track down what appeared to be a second and third set of “books.” The man had payments going to a lot of numbered accounts and she assumed most of them, because of their regularity and the sums, were money-laundering activities.
The regular casino books were separate and showed all the standard stuff from the casino’s supposed outlay to its take and overhead and the profit margins for every single facet of the operation, from the gaming tables, slots, shows, restaurants and bars. Normal balance sheets. Not much profit by the looks of things over the past few years.
She couldn’t find a cheaters file and that irritated her a great deal.
But what she did find were two isolated streams of payments. One monthly payment to a bank in Puerto Isla. Another to a bank in France. That one was always for the same amount and had been going on for fifteen years. The one to Puerto Isla had been going on for decades and it was increased every single year. That was the one Oracle wanted.
Beth sent an e-mail to Delphi recounting her success. The payments to Puerto Isla and the communications from someone who signed with an A indicated they were zeroing in Arachne.
When JD checked back at seven she told him what she’d found.
“These are blackmail payments?”
“Yes, it looks that way.”
“Now what? You’ve gotten what you came for, do you just leave?”
“I didn’t get everything I came for. I’ll be around until I do.”
“And then?”
“First things first. The thing I need right now is a few hours sleep. We’re going to see the rich Greek.”
“Feodras. I hope he comes through. Giambi said there was a possibility that the Greek would get me into the BMW team a friend of his owns. I could be driving in the Montreal Grand Prix in June.”
Beth ran through the notes in her memory. “The block party on Crescent Street is like no other.”
“You’ve been to party city?”
“No.”
“Oh, you need to go. No fans like Montreal fans. Giambi loves it. The race runs around a casino no less.”
“What is Giambi doing?”
“Right now, arguing whether Fernando Alonso is replacing Michael Schumacher as king of Formula One. I had to get away from that.”
“You want to be the one they’re arguing about, not Alonso.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I’m going to bed.”
“Sounds like a great idea.”
She saw the look he was giving her. “Alone. I’m tired. Cranky. Distressed. Sore. Irritable. You want some of that?”
He chuckled. “Good night, then.”
He leaned over and she gave him a quick, but decisive kiss in retreat. “See you in the morning.”
“The morning is gone.”
“See you in the early afternoon. We have to be on the roof and in the chopper by ten to one.”
She watched him go. He listened. He was very good. He must have had a good mother or grandmother.
She was exhausted and needed sleep. And she wasn’t finished yet. Giambi’s lists of cheating crews were somewhere and she had to find them, but not knowing how they would be listed, she had no idea what to look for. He had files on everything. The man obviously spent a lot of those sleepless nights with his laptop.
Finally, too exhausted to continue, she crawled into bed and didn’t even remember, several hours later, having fallen asleep.
She glanced at the clock. It was eleven forty-five. Oh, god, I should get up.
She closed her eyes—just a few more minutes—and bad things immediately came to her. Her bodyguard getting shot. If that wasn’t bad enough, she began thinking about the night the police told her that her father was dead. Only to find out he was found in the garbage.
The day that changed her forever.
She forced herself back to the present. Allison had to be right about Giambi. He, of all people, would know all the crews. She was not leaving until she got that information.
Giambi woke. For a time, after a few hours sleep, Giambi ignored his bladder and his reality and just lay there for a long moment thinking about a young woman in a black tango suit. A vision.
He didn’t, as he usually did, congratulate himself that he was alive another day, or that his party had been a success. He was imagining a black top and long, slit pantaloons and the fluid, tight, beautiful body it clothed. He was remembering the deep-throated laugh, the slope of her head, the alabaster white of her neck, the extraordinary eyes, the swell of her young breasts.
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