by Cassie Cole
“What other doors are in that hall?” Bryce asked.
“Two penthouse elevators for staff,” Eddie said. “Maybe they’re making the switch up there?”
“I always wondered if a guest could bring in cash stuffed in luggage,” Bryce said. “Some of the guest we see have five or six suitcases…”
I rounded the card tables and hugged the wall.
“That complicates things,” Eddie said. “We can’t check every single bag guests bring into the hotel. There’s no way to know which one.”
“If we discover which room maybe we can recruit a bellhop…” Bryce said.
I reached the bathroom hallway. From here I could see Eddie over to the right, standing by a bank of slot machines. I turned away from him and walked down the hall.
“Sage?” he suddenly asked. “Sage!”
“What’s happening?” Xander asked.
“Sage, come back.”
“What’s she doing?”
I ignored them and pushed through the doors into the employee section.
The hall was dimly lit. On the left was a wide service elevator used to access the janitorial and laundry floors in the basement levels. At the other end of the hall were two more wide elevators. Directly in front of me was the door to the loading dock where Xander was.
“The hall is empty,” I whispered into my hand.
“Get the fuck out of there,” Eddie commanded.
I walked down the hall toward the two elevators. The directory on the wall showed that it accessed the penthouses. Probably for waiters and other staff to discretely visit those floors, but maybe also for celebrities who wanted to avoid paparazzi. I’d heard that famous singers usually accessed their rooms that way.
I backtracked and checked the only other door on this hall. It gave me a view of the stage area, where there was a guy in a wheelchair fiddling with an electrical box. Nobody else was in view.
One of the two penthouse elevators suddenly dinged, and I heard the whir of unseen machinery. The red display showed the elevator descending back to this floor. It was probably the mules coming back from wherever they were accepting the money.
I hesitated. Should I leave, or wait around and get confirmation? I could play up the dumb waitress angle, pretend like I didn’t know where I was.
Fear won out—it was best for me to get the hell out of here. I strode back down the hall toward the exit, but before I reached it the elevator opened behind me.
“Hey!” someone immediately said. “You, stop!”
I’d heard that people had a fight or flight instinct, but there was a third option rarely mentioned: freeze. That’s the impulse that took over when I heard them command me to stop. I froze and turned around with what I hoped was an innocent, confused look on my face.
It wasn’t the mules. It was two security guards, though their suits were dark rather than the white uniform Eddie wore. One of them pushed a cart ahead of him, on which were stacked two boxes covered in a sheet.
My heart raced. The money. That had to be the money!
“Do you know where Zeke is?” I asked. “Ezekiel Endarovich. He’s my manager. I can’t find him anywhere, and he asked me—”
The man grabbed my forearm and shoved me against the wall hard. “Stay right there and don’t say a word.”
He and the other guard continued pushing the cart with the two boxes down the hall. Before they reached the service elevator it opened for them, where one more guard waited. The one pushing the cart went inside and joined him, and then the door closed.
The other guard came straight back to me. “What are you doing in here?” he yelled.
“What’s happening?” Eddie asked.
Xander said, “Sage, are you okay? I hear shouting.”
“Should I go in after her? I’m right outside the hall.”
I tried to appear normal while the guard glared at me, waiting for my answer. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the elevator floor indicator. L1, which was the first laundry floor. Then L2, the second laundry floor.
“Don’t do anything.” That was Bryce. “Let her work.”
“But we have to—oh fuck,” Eddie said. “You guys…”
I stopped listening to them. “I was looking for Zeke,” I stammered to the guard. “I checked all the other areas, and he told me to come find him right away, and I didn’t want to get in trouble…”
He glared at me and opened his mouth to call me a liar, but then the door to the hall opened. The guard turned to look. I expected to see Eddie coming through and really messing things up.
What I saw was worse.
Vladimir Yegorovich stepped into the hallway, flanked by his men. The guard questioning me whirled toward him.
“Sir!” he said, then a string of Russian.
Yegorovich glanced in our direction. “I am thirsty,” he said in English. “I require a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon.”
If he recognized me as the girl he’d teased in the kitchen the other night, he gave no sign. The service elevator was already on its way back and he stepped inside as soon as it opened, then disappeared as it closed.
Relief washed over me. It washed over the guard, too.
“Well?” he finally said. “You heard the boss. Bring a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon!”
“Can… Can I get you anything?” I asked. The elevator change to L1, then L2. I needed to buy time to see where it stopped.
He looked like he wanted to yell at me, then said, “Two bottles of water. Evion brand. Not the hotel brand. It is tap water.”
The elevator hit S1. “Ice?” I asked. S2.
“No ice.”
The floor hit S3, then stayed on that. The third storage level. Bingo.
“Yes sir,” I said.
I rushed from the hall, unable to suppress my smile.
15
Sage
“You’re a fucking idiot,” Eddie said, green eyes boring a hole into me.
Bryce whirled toward him. “Dude!”
“It’s true. She is.”
We’d all met at the diner once our shifts were over, even though it was late. We were the only table, and the waitress who brought us a pot of coffee looked as tired as I felt.
I kept my face calm as I regarded Eddie. “We needed info, so I seized on an opportunity.”
“It was reckless,” he insisted. “We’re not in a rush. We can afford to take our time.”
“You said it yourself: you weren’t allowed back there. A ditsy waitress can get away with a lot without anyone batting an eye. You brought me in on this to help gather info…”
“We didn’t bring you in to get caught.”
I gritted my teeth. “Which I didn’t.”
“You did get caught!” Eddie insisted, gesticulating with his hands. “You got away with it, but you still got caught. That guard will remember you. So will Yegorovich.”
“I doubt Yegorovich will remember me,” I said, but he was right. The guard would surely remember that I had been in the hall where I shouldn’t have been. Anything I did in the future would look doubly suspicious because of that.
But it was worth it. Wasn’t it?
Bryce cut in before Eddie could launch into another angry tirade. “Sage. Are you certain it was two boxes?”
“Positive,” I said. “They weren’t perfectly aligned, so I could see the fold in the sheet covering them. Two distinct stacked boxes.”
“How tall were they?”
“Umm…”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. Then he held out his palm flat between us. “This tall? Or this tall?”
I held my hand up to my collarbone. “About here. And this wide.” I showed him with my hands.
“And the push cart was a couple of inches off the ground.”
“I guess. Why does it matter?”
He sat down and started scribbling on a napkin. “Two boxes. About two feet to a side. That’s eight cubic feet each…”
“Oh,” Xander said. �
�I see what you’re doin’.”
“What?” I asked.
Bryce shushed me while he bent over the napkin. It seemed like he was doing math. Finally he looked up and grinned.
“The volume in those boxes might be closer to $16 million.”
“$4 mil each…” Eddie said. Xander whistled.
Holy moly. My mind couldn’t even fathom the difference between $3 and $4 million. Both were impossible numbers to imagine in my bank account.
“Hey, that was valuable info to get, wasn’t it?” I said with a weak smile.
Eddie’s smile disappeared. “Not for the risk you took! We could have gathered that info in—”
“We can argue about what she did later,” Bryce cut in. “We now know the money is coming from one of the penthouses.”
“And that Yegorovich himself checks on it after arrival,” Xander added.
“We also know it’s kept somewhere on S3,” I said. Eddie’s anger aside, it felt good to have contributed a crucial piece of information to the heist.
“Eddie?” Bryce said. “What can you tell us about S3?”
He still looked unhappy as he pulled out a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket. He unfolded it on the table and weighed the corners down with salt and pepper shakers.
“Here’s a scan I took of the building blueprints. S3 is one big underground warehouse. S1 and S2 are heavily utilized by employees moving supplies around, but as far as I can tell nobody goes down to S3. That service elevator also has a badge reader on it, but it’s not required for any of the other floors.”
“Meaning it probably exists to limit access to S3,” Xander said.
“Bingo.”
Bryce nodded and looked at me. “There was a guard waiting in the elevator?”
“Uh huh. Then the guy with the cart joined him.”
“Okay,” Xander said slowly. “Assuming we can somehow neutralize the two guards…”
“Hold on a second,” Bryce said. “The third guard stayed above, but that might only be because of Sage’s presence. On a normal night he might escort it down too.”
“Then assuming we can somehow neutralize three guards,” Xander said, “and steal their badges without raising suspicions on the security feeds…”
“Actually, that’s one point in our favor,” Eddie said. “That employee hall doesn’t have a single security camera. It’s a blacked out area.” He glared at me. “I know because I checked after our wandering waitress risked blowing everything.”
“Figures. Don’t want cameras picking up the transfer of dirty money,” Xander said.
“Thank God for small miracles,” Bryce muttered.
“So,” Xander went on. “We knock out the three guards, steal their badges, take the elevator to S3, pray there aren’t any additional guards waiting… And then what? Take the money back upstairs and walk out the front door with it?”
“Well…” Eddie said. “There’s another problem.”
“Of course there is,” Bryce said, blue eyes looking tired.
Eddie pointed at the blueprint scan. “See these reinforced areas in this corner? I’ve never seen anything like that. So I took it to my guy…”
“Wait, what guy?”
“My guy,” Eddie said, offended. “He’s an architect. Don’t worry, I only showed him that corner of the map. Nothing else that could distinguish it as the Volga Casino.”
Bryce rolled his eyes.
“I took this to my trustworthy guy, and he said he’s seen that structural reinforcement before. It’s common in banks.”
It took a moment for that to sink in. “No…” I said.
“Yep. It’s a vault.”
I rounded on Bryce, “You said they wouldn’t store dirty money somewhere like that! That a fancy vault would attract too much attention. That it would be easier to keep it low-key…”
“I thought so,” he said, a worried expression on his handsome face.
“Okay,” Xander said, drawing the word out to three syllables. “So we have to get down there and possibly break into a goddamn vault. Assuming we can do all that, what’s the escape plan?”
“The east dock?” I said. “Could you get another equipment delivery to that dock around the time we need to make our getaway?”
“Maybe,” Xander said in a doubtful tone.
“Let’s back up the chain a minute,” Bryce said. He was clearly trying to be positive, but the effort seemed fake. “The money is coming from one of the penthouses. Did you see which floor?”
There were three penthouse floors. I grimaced and said, “I didn’t catch that, no.”
“Suppose we find out which floor,” Xander said. “Then we have to narrow it down to which suite. Each floor has about a dozen.”
“Might take us a while to figure that out,” Eddie said. “And if Yegorovich was smart he’d switch the suite number each time he brought the cash in.”
“You think he’s that careful?” I asked.
“I would be.”
“That amount of cash…” Xander said. “It could be brought in the front door in four, maybe five large suitcases.”
“In other words one woman’s worth of luggage,” Eddie said with a sneer.
“Hey!” I said.
He put his hands up. “Just speaking from experience. I’ve seen a lot of women come through the hotel lobby with bag carts stacked high…”
“If they’re bringing it in that way,” Bryce said to get us back on topic, “there’s no easy way to catch whoever is doing it. There are too many hotel guests coming and going at any given time.”
“Unless we camp out in the lobby and take photos of every person arriving with luggage,” Xander grumbled. “Then we pray they use the same people or luggage more than once.”
“We’re talking weeks of surveillance!” Eddie said. “Maybe months.”
There were groans around the table as that reality sank in.
“My gig ends before then,” Xander said with harsh finality. “If it’s gunna take that long then I’m out.”
“If you’re out…” Eddie said.
“Hold on!” Bryce said, leaning forward. “Everyone just calm down. Let’s focus on finding the suite they’re storing the cash. We can work backward from the elevator delivery to discover which one.”
“See, that whole thing still doesn’t make no sense,” Xander said. “Why transport the cash through the front entrance and up a normal elevator to a suite, only to transport it back down the staff elevator in crates?”
“Maybe they’re being extra careful? Multiple steps?”
“They could back a limo up to the east dock and unload expensive luggage that way,” Xander insisted. “Take the luggage straight down the service elevator to S3. Why go up to the penthouses at all?”
“Because Russian oligarchs aren’t very smart?”
Xander leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not tryin’ to be a dick about it. But I don’t think we can proceed until we know the answer to that question.”
“Sure we can proceed,” Bryce said. “We don’t care about the details. We only care that the cash is there.”
“But that’s all intertwined…”
They were getting more and more heated. I could feel the threads of our plan unraveling with each new detail. This was supposed to be an easy cash grab. But now there were vaults, and a floor with extra security, and potentially a different penthouse suite…
I looked out the window at the Vegas strip glowing four blocks away. It was all lit up, a billion lights harsh against the night sky. It still filled me with wonder. It was full of promise and hope.
A helicopter circled above the strip down to the south. Based on the location I’d bet $100 it was circling the Bellagio fountains. Mom took me on a helicopter tour of the city when I was a little girl. That was a luxury we normally wouldn’t have been able to afford, but she’d had a friend who owed her a favor. The city looked so small from up there, like I could r
each out with my hand and squeeze the buildings. I remember feeling the awe of how the helicopter could soar above all the streets, avoiding the traffic down below…
My eyes widened.
“Who cares if they’re dividing them up so they’re non-sequential?” Bryce was saying. “It doesn’t matter for our purposes.”
“Guys…” I said.
Xander shook his head. “Because anything they’re doing up there is going to involve people. And guards. Think about it: if they store it in a vault on S3, what kind of security do you think they have in the penthouse? They probably have an army up there.”
“I’ve never seen any extra security up there,” Eddie said. “Not on the schedule or when I’ve had patrols in person.”
“Guys?”
“And how much sense does that make?” Xander pointed. “Zero security precautions up into the penthouse, and then they move it down into a vault? That’s stupid. We’re missing something here.”
“Guys!” I shouted.
They all stopped and stared at me.
“They’re not storing it in the penthouse.”
Bryce frowned. “But you said the elevator…”
“The elevator doesn’t just service the penthouse floors,” I said. I had their full attention now. “It also goes to the roof.”
Roof, Eddie mouthed. His emerald eyes opened wide as he figured it out too.
“The money isn’t coming from a penthouse,” I said, pointing at the Vegas skyline. “It’s arriving on the helicopter!”
16
Sage
It felt weird entering a different casino hotel than the Volga. It shouldn’t—I’d worked at other casinos before the Volga, and it had only been a month or so. But walking into the lobby of the Grand Istanbul Hotel and Casino felt like entering another world.
With a plastic bag in one hand, I weaved in and out of the maze of slot machines and flashing lights. Casinos were designed to be as confusing as possible for patrons. They wanted people to enter and then have a tough time leaving. The longer someone stayed in a casino, the more likely they were to stop and throw down an extra few chips on the roulette wheel, or play a few rounds on a slot machine, or try their hand at video poker.
