"Nah, never married. Figured it's best to wait till I really settle into a career and stuff."
"Yeah. Maybe I should've done that."
"You move around a lot or something?" Nichols said.
"Something," I said, as the dealer raked in my chips from her twenty-one against my twenty.
"What'd you do before the forensic thing? I've asked a couple times and you just said nothing, didn't answer at all. What's up with that?"
A cocktail waitress arrived with her tray of goodies and put two new shots of tequila before each of us. I picked one of mine up and took care of it, then picked up the other one, along with my chips, and motioned with my head for Nichols to follow. He did.
OUT ON FREMONT STREET, we walked beneath the garish animated canopy as it splashed the street with never-ending swaths of color and light.
Nichols said, "Now you gonna tell me what you did before?"
I walked a few steps without answering, then killed the shot of tequila I'd walked out of the casino with. (Rules are made to be broken, remember?) I looked at Nichols, knowing I shouldn't answer his question. But I wanted to answer it. I needed to answer it, had needed to answer it for so many years.
CHAPTER 24
AIRBORNE
CHRISTINE GAMBOA
THE FLIGHT REACHED altitude and the seat belt light dinged off. Christine watched as Sasha pulled a flask from his pocket and drew a long sip. She could smell the pepper vodka as he passed the flask to her. She shook her head. "No, thanks."
"Ah, kohona, you—"
"Stop calling me that, Sasha. If I were a ‘special girlfriend’ you cared about, you wouldn't have been tracking me, wouldn't have been waiting for me on this plane."
"Sasha only want to help you, Chrissy."
"I'm not an idiot."
"Oh no, you are very smart girl. I think maybe too smart, is why you now to run away."
"What does that even mean?"
"Too smart. Know too many things, too many dangerous things. So you try to go."
Christine said, "Whatever you think I know, you're wrong. I don't—"
The look on Maslov's face, which had been amiable and warm until that moment, went cold and hard. "You shut up. You shut up with lies to me!" His voice was quiet, hissing, terrifying.
She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, but said nothing.
"You take our half the million dollars for computer instructions," Maslov said. "Do not to tell me you know nothing. Why you decide to run?"
Christine didn't bother wiping her eyes again, and let the tears stream down her face. She nodded. "I was afraid."
"I think you afraid. And something else, too."
She shook her head.
"I think you thought to stop operation, but you want to get away from SPACE first. No connection. Make hard to figure out it was you who go to police."
This was her nightmare, the worst-case scenario unfolding at 35,000 feet. She stared at the video screen in the seatback in front of her and thought how nice it would be to be as carefree as the sitcom actors looked on that screen. She dried her tears and made a decision to stop the tears. Maybe she couldn't be carefree, but she didn't have to melt into pitiful mush, either. She turned and looked at Sasha. "So what is it you have in mind? How are you here to help me?"
Sweet, cordial Sasha was back. "Right now, no one else knows these things. Only me, me and my loyal people. I think is best to stay this way, yes?"
"And what do you want in return for that?"
No more tears came, but his smile did raise goosebumps all over her body.
FREMONT STREET
LAS VEGAS
"YOU GONNA ANSWER your drinking buddy or what?" Nichols said, giving me a little spur with his elbow.
"If I tell you, you take it to the grave. I like you, Jimbo, but if you ever breathe a word of this, you will have betrayed me. I don't like betrayal. Deal?"
Nichols gave a little laugh. "Sure, man. I get it. If I tell, you'll have to kill me, right?"
I didn't laugh. "No, I won't kill you. But I will track you down and give you an ass whipping like you've never imagined. I'm serious. No joke."
No more laughing. "Okay, Sam. Never pass my lips. You have my word." He extended his hand and we shook on it.
We were walking past a bench beside the sidewalk. I stopped and sat. Nichols joined me. "I spent seven years working for the government, most of it overseas."
"Military?"
"Yes and no. We were trained by the military, different special ops groups. After the training, which all took place under false names, we disappeared from the books. We didn't exist anymore."
"Like the CIA? You became spies?"
I shook my head. "No. Spies have legends where they're deployed, but they're ultimately still on record with the agency. We weren't. There is no record anywhere that I ever had one minute of affiliation with the United States government. On paper, I was a traveling tech consultant my entire adult life."
"Are you shitting me, man? Sounds like a movie."
I looked at him. "James, do I look like I'm shitting you?"
"No," he said. "You sure don't."
"We were deployed in two-man teams called BAM squads, and we were the ultimate in covert, the blackest of black ops."
"BAM?" Nichols said.
"By. Any. Means. We did the stuff the military isn't allowed to do in today's pussified environment."
"And you did what, exactly?"
"Whatever had to be done."
"Give me an example."
I blew out a long breath, and could still taste the tequila. I had dozens of stories I could tell, but like many men of war, and like many policemen who encounter awful things, I had one story in particular. The one that haunted me. The one I could never push far enough back in my mind, the one I couldn't contain inside my soul. I'd had opportunities to tell it to off-the-books shrinks who work for the government, but never had. Truth is, I never trusted anyone enough to talk about it, especially from the government. Yet here I sat on a public street in Las Vegas, drunk, about to spill it to someone I'd known a couple weeks. Was I crazy? Drunk or not, I knew not to do it. I knew that if it ever got out that I had told anyone, I'd disappear from the earth, and not just from records. I knew all this, but still I started talking.
"My first partner was a guy we called Ditto. On our second mission, we were tasked with grabbing a Taliban asshole from some no-name village, after—"
"Afghanistan? Or Iraq?" Nichols said.
"Afghanistan. We were supposed to grab him, take him outside the village, and find out what he knew about an upcoming attack they had planned against some of our guys. We went in at some ungodly hour in the middle of the night and snatched him from his bed without much of a fight. Took him a couple clicks outside the village, up a hill and into some woods. We started interrogating and he kept insisting we had the wrong man, that he didn't know anything. Which is exactly what about ninety percent of them say. After an hour of beating him and tazing him and burning him with a propane torch, we still had nothing. He was still insisting we had the wrong man. The picture in my pocket made it clear we had exactly the right guy.
"I got tired of his bullshit." I stopped talking, my eyes closed, the scene as vivid in my mind as Fremont Street was right then when my eyes were open.
Nichols sounded scared of the answer, but asked it anyway: "What'd you do?"
"I started by tying him to a tree, standing up with his back to the tree, and plucking out his left eye." Nichols's eyes were huge, the glassy sheen of alcohol fast clearing. "There this guy was, his eye hanging by the optic nerve, screaming like you wouldn't believe. He still didn't break, so I popped out the right one next."
"Ho-ly shit," Nichols said.
"Yeah, it was pretty freaky, but you can usually pop the eyeballs back in and they're fine."
"Well, that's…good to know."
"Then I went for what we were taught as 'the ninety-nine maneuver,' because once you've done enou
gh to make them believe you capable of anything, ninety-nine percent of all guys on the planet fold to this threat."
"Oh hell," Nichols said. "Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell, tell me you didn't—"
"I cut all his clothes off him, stretched his dick out, and put a knife at the base. Told him he had ten seconds to talk, or I'd turn him into a eunuch. I still remember looking at him, seeing his eyeballs hanging on his face and realizing that he had no choice but to watch. His eyes were pointed straight at his crotch and he sure as hell couldn't move them." I stopped talking, my eyes closed again, reliving it for what felt like the millionth time.
Nichols said, "And?"
"I cut his dick off. And the instant the blade was all the way through and his dick came loose in my hand, a round from an AK-47 hit the armor plate on my back. Knocked me down, and I instinctively rolled away when I hit the ground. Good thing, because the fire kept coming from some guy charging through the woods toward us, bellowing like a stuck bull. I found cover behind a fallen tree, and when I looked back at the dickless guy through my night vision, the guy with the rifle was at the tree, hugging him, talking to him."
At this point, Nichols was sober and without words, so I continued.
"I raised my N-V goggles and hit the scene with a flashlight that lit it up like daylight. The new arrival turned toward me and I couldn't believe what I was looking at. He was the guy from the picture in my pocket."
Nichols still said nothing, just gawked at me.
"The guy we'd tortured had been telling the truth all along. We had the wrong guy. We had the twin brother, a brother no one had bothered to mention to us. I screwed up, tortured and killed an innocent man. And that is the one that's haunted me forever."
CHAPTER 25
24-HOUR DINER
LAS VEGAS
THE DRINKING WAS DONE. My cathartic, if shocking, revelations had come to a close. Nichols looked about normal—well, as normal as anyone looks during breakfast at the end of an all-nighter. Thanks to my mistake of looking in a mirror in the bathroom, I knew I looked the same. We drank coffee while we waited for our order to arrive.
"You know what?" Nichols said.
"What?"
"You still never told me what happened with your marriage. Why'd you break up?"
"Lots of reasons, but looking back? When we married, I was a brash, young asshole, way too full of myself. I went and did what I did for my country, and became a screwed-up asshole, during my time over there, and especially the few years after. I was lost, distant to my wife, not there even when I was."
"You guys get along?"
I nodded. "We have a daughter, she's fourteen. We have to get along."
"What're their names?"
"Wife, Abby. Daughter, Allison."
"Abby and Ally, the A-team," Nichols said.
"Yup."
"Where do they live?"
"Here, Vegas."
"Really?"
I nodded.
"Seen them since you got here?"
"Yeah."
"I know you miss your daughter. What about the wife? Miss her?"
"Every day," I said.
"Most guys wouldn't admit missing an ex after so long."
I shrugged. "It is what it is. She was—is—the love of my life. Every day since she left? Feels like I'm living some alternate timeline, a future that was never supposed to happen."
Nichols was looking at me with an odd expression.
"What?" I said.
"I wouldn't have picked you as the sentimental type, is all. Not in a thousand years."
"Sentimental is not a word I'd use to describe myself, Jimbo."
He laughed. "Okay, I'm sure lots of non-sentimental types are sitting around pining for their ex-wives after five years. My bad."
"Smart-ass," I said.
"Just speaking truth, Sam."
"Smart-ass."
The waitress showed up with a wonderful tray full of fried pork and eggs and potatoes and grits and biscuits, and distributed it among us. We had enough grease before us to float a boat. Nichols bit into a biscuit and said through a full mouth, "Got a picture of your daughter?"
I pulled my phone from my pocket, touched and swiped for a few seconds, and handed it over.
"Man," he said. "She's gonna be beautiful. Very exotic looking."
"Thanks," I said, taking the phone back from him. "We adopted her out of a Russian orphanage when she was a little girl." I looked at the picture before putting the phone away, her blond hair, blue eyes, the dimples beside the glowing smile. I smiled back, but only for a moment. Because it only took a moment for the videos to take over my mind, videos of young girls being brutalized, some of whom looked no older than my own daughter. The smart and safe thing for me to do was to focus on the job my client was paying me for, and try to forget the rest, try to leave alone what I had no legal power to do anything about.
I've never been very good at smart and safe.
CHAPTER 26
SPACE
AFTER A FEW HOURS’ SLEEP, I was back in my workroom and in high gear on the SPACE investigation. Just before quitting for the day and going out with Nichols the evening before, I had found on Gamboa's computer what I suspected would turn out to be a major piece of evidence. I was wrong. It wasn't just major. It was huge, and I had barely scratched the surface.
The first part of the find was a simple web page on the deep web, a page that was live and operating. No graphics, just a long list of words that stretched up and down the left edge of the page. Midway down the list was the word SPACE. When I clicked it, my browser took me to another page with another simple list, but this time the list was all numbers. And because I had been buried in SPACE's electronic gaming universe for a couple weeks, I recognized the numbers. They were the network identifiers for the EGMs in SPACE's high stakes gaming area. These were the machines that had been hacked; I felt sure of it.
I opened the spreadsheet that had been begrudgingly provided to me by the weenie in charge of IT, Jerry Rose. Excuse me: Dr. Jerry Rose. I was right. The list of hacked machines, which I had highlighted in red on the spreadsheet, was a perfect match for the list of numbers I was looking at on the deep web. I leaned back in my chair, stretched, and cracked my knuckles. When I glanced through the glass wall of the conference room into the anteroom, I saw that my buddy Nichols had dozed off. Good for him.
Next, I fired up a couple of apps to document everything I was about to do, everything I was about to see. The first app recorded both my keystrokes and my screen. The other one captured all the network traffic, every bit and byte this virtual recreation of Gamboa's machine would exchange with any other computer or device. With both of them active, I moved forward. “392” was the first number on the page, and by looking at the spreadsheet, I saw that its full identifier was VIP-S-392. This told me: a) it was a gaming machine in the VIP area; b) it was a slot machine; and c) its number on the SPACE network was 392.
I clicked the 392 link. When the 392 page opened, I smiled and said, "Hello, sugar." I had not seen a page like this before, but I instantly knew what it was. It was a configuration page for that machine. From right here, I could set the machine's payout rate to anything I wanted. I could change the color scheme of its screen and the sounds it would make. I had complete control. This was the smoking gun, and it was on the exquisite Miss Gamboa's computer. Time for me to visit Jacob Allen with a great big update.
THE NORMALLY DOCILE lawyer was as animated as I'd ever seen, pacing back and forth behind his desk. For the third or fourth time, he looked at me and said, "You're sure about this?"
I nodded and said, again, "I'm sure. You saw it."
He stopped pacing and sat in his big chair, then finally asked a new question. "Can we be sure it was Gamboa who was manipulating the machines?"
This time I shook my head. "No. What we know at this point is that her computer could be used to manipulate the machines. I can also tell you that the 'C-Gamboa' user account was logged in when t
hese pages were accessed on the deep web. But can I put her physically at the keyboard? No."
"By the way," he said, "I thought you had locked all the machines down so no one could get to them anymore. But you just got to them with her computer. How?"
"My computer and the computers I'm investigating are set up as trusted on the network, so I can thoroughly explore. You can rest easy, though. Aside from my machines and those you personally cleared for access, no one's getting in. The losses have stopped, right?"
"Yes. I just want to be sure they stay stopped."
"They will," I said. "Now we need to figure out the other angle of this scheme."
He nodded and steepled his fingers beneath his chin. "Who was playing the machines while they were rigged."
"Exactly. I haven't had any dealings yet with the non-IT security people, but—"
Allen dismissed it with a little wave. "The security chief is Hank Dobo. Good guy, been at this game a long time. I'll call him as soon as we're done here."
"It's not really within my purview, but it might be a good idea to put someone on Gamboa. This was a sophisticated scheme and I doubt she was in it alone."
"We've had someone on her for weeks. Unfortunately, they lost track of her."
"When?" I said.
"Last night."
CHAPTER 27
SIMFEROPOL, CRIMEA, UKRAINE
CHRISTINE GAMBOA
CHRISTINE WAS EXHAUSTED. When her commercial flight from Vegas landed at La Guardia, a limo had been waiting for Sasha and her. She napped while they rode, and when she awoke, they were at a small airport in Teterboro, New Jersey. They boarded a private jet, flew for what felt like forever, landed for fuel, then flew several more hours before landing again. She looked out the small window as they taxied, and knew she was screwed when she noticed that the fuel trucks and luggage tows were lettered with Cyrillic writing. She was in Russia or Ukraine or some such backward-ass country.
"Are we done flying?" she said.
"Almost," Sasha said. "No more airplane. Now we go on helicopter."
"Will you please tell me where we are now?"
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