“It’s not all that bad,” Hughes countered. “She was tired of my nomadic ways. Wanted a little place where she could grow her precious flowers and play with her grandchildren when my Emma finally settles down and finds a man that she considers to be good enough for her.”
Tommy chuckled. “Good luck there, mate. If I recall right, that girl of yours has your gypsy blood. She’ll never settle down.”
“I don’t know,” Hughes opined. “Girls are different, you know.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Tommy replied dryly as he glanced over to see if the fair-haired girl was still watching him.
“How about you?” Hughes asked when he noticed what Tommy was up to. “Other than the obvious, what have you been up to over the years?”
“I guess you could say I finally settled down, after a fashion.” With that, Tommy related how, after the Gulf War in ’91, he’d left the army, as well, drifting from job to job until a man he’d never given a second thought to walked into the electronics shop he was working in at the time and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. “For a former Green Jacket and a guy who considers living like a Roman soldier fun, Andy Webb is amazingly switched on when it comes to computers and such. It’s his knack for putting two and two together and always coming up with five that caused me to throw in with ’im.”
Tommy’s revelation that he was employed by a cybersecurity firm and the memory of how he was able to take one look at a complex system and figure out how it worked in no time flat caused Hughes to pause as he mulled a thought over in his head.
Never one to miss a tell that was as obvious as the one Hughes betrayed, Tommy leaned back in his seat, knitted his fingers together over his stomach, and grunted, “All right, you filthy Welshman, what’s going on in that head of yours?”
“I’ve got a problem you just might be able to help me with.”
“I’m on holiday, you know,” Tommy shot back when he realized Hughes had just left memory lane and was now edging his way onto another path, one Tommy suspected just might be profitable.
“If you’re still as good as you used to be, I’m sure we’ll be able to find a way of making it well worth your while.”
“We?”
Realizing he’d let his hand show prematurely, Hughes harrumphed. “Let’s say we finish up here and go up to my office. I’ve something I would like you to take a look at.”
Tommy was considering his answer when he noticed the girls at the table he’d been eyeing were getting up and preparing to leave. When the faired-haired one he’d been flirting with walked away without looking back at him, he sighed as he reached out and took up his beer. “Well, seeing how I’ve been banished from the card room, I might as well.”
Though Hughes had watched the way his friend had been eyeing the girl and knew his disappointment had nothing to do with being “advised” to stop playing and call it a night, he didn’t let on. Vegas was, after all, about dreams, some of which had nothing at all to do with gambling, at least not the sort that involved games of chance.
2
For Tommy, there was nothing quite like being afforded an opportunity to spend time in a room crammed with computers. Like a child in a toy store, he found he could not help but be impressed and excited in equal parts by the layout and sophistication of Casino Martinique’s system used to keep an eye on every aspect of the casino’s operations from the surveillance control room Jack Hughes ran. It relied on more than cameras to track the activities of the casino’s patrons. From the time they entered the Martinique until they had left it, more often than not considerably poorer, a number of systems and sensors collected information from casino-issued smart cards to the Wi-Fi signals emitted by the patrons’ own mobiles.
“Welcome to my world,” Hughes declared as he and Tommy stood behind the rows of surveillance officers seated at desks on which multiple monitors were set. All the desks, including the one at the rear of the room Hughes went over to, faced a wall covered with a battery of monitors of various sizes, including one oversized screen right in the middle.
“Quite a little setup you’ve got here,” Tommy muttered as his eyes darted about, taking in some unique details he’d never seen before that he wanted to take a closer look at, provided he was afforded an opportunity to do so.
“It beats the hell of the Scimitar they used to cram the two of us into,” Hughes muttered as his eyes swept the room, looking for any hint the people he was responsible for weren’t paying attention to what they were being paid to do or were engaged in an activity not sanctioned or condoned by the casino’s owner.
Noticing a familiar look, Tommy chuckled. “I expect you have your hands full keeping this lot ploughing a straight furrow.”
Glancing over at his friend out of the corner of his eye, Hughes grinned. He was pleased his suspicions about Tommy Tyler had been spot on. He’d not lost what many back in the regiment had thought was an almost supernatural ability to spot things they were oblivious to. Whether it be spoil from a freshly dug fighting position an inattentive foe had left in plain view, the one loose connection in a wiring harness of a crippled vehicle, or the way people were behaving, Tommy had used his ability to latch on to the minutest detail, neatly fitting it into an overall picture that made sense to him and, more importantly, could be taken advantage of. He relied on this ability when playing the sort of head games all enlisted men engaged in when dealing with NCOs and officers, or using it to give him a nearly unbeatable edge when playing poker by studying the habits and behaviors of the people he was up against. Like a hawk perched high above the fray, Tommy would patiently study his intended prey before swooping down when, and only when, he was sure of a quick, clean kill.
“Funny you should mention that,” Hughes muttered in a low voice before turning his back on his people, going over to his desk at the rear of the room, and taking a seat. “There’s something I’d like you to look at.”
Having assumed there was more behind his friend’s invitation to allow him to see a room that came close to rivaling the NSA’s ability to monitor the activities of the people it was pledged to defend and protect, Tommy nodded. “Sure thing.”
As Tommy was settling into a seat Hughes had pulled over next to his, Hughes scrolled through his files until he came upon one that archived the activities of the casino’s online gambling site. “Our Web poker games pull in more in a single day than the card room does in a week,” Hughes stated as he was searching for a file. “The programs we rely on to ensure it is secure from hacking or manipulation are state of the art. We’re always on the lookout for anything that even hints at being out of the norm. When we do come across an anomaly, especially a recurring one, we either sort it out ourselves or we bring in an outside firm that deals with such things to find out what’s going on.”
“A firm like the one I work for,” Tommy interjected by way of reminding Hughes he was neither a free agent when it came to dealing with cyber-related security matters nor willing to do something for free that Andy normally charged for, not even for a mate he’d ridden into battle with.
“I expect, yes,” Hughes mused while he was opening a file. “Despite our best efforts, every now and then, something comes along that stymies our in-house experts as well as the techno-nerds my boss relies on to keep us ahead in the high-stakes game of can-you-beat-the-house. Now, tell me what you see,” he continued as he eased back in his seat to allow Tommy a better view of the screenshot he’d pulled up.
The scene on the monitor displayed a virtual overhead shot of a game of straight poker in progress. Other than the user names displayed at the seats currently occupied, the current bets made by each of those players, and the faces of the cards being held by one of the players, the one who had access to this particular screenshot, nothing else was showing. Right off, Tommy inspected the cards that were being displayed. It was not a particularly impressive hand, consisting of the ace of hearts, king of hearts, queen of clubs, ten of hearts, and the two of clubs. Next, he took his time as he went from one user name to the next, trying to see if any of them could be a clue as to who was playing, what they were up to, or if they spelled something out when combined. When he could see nothing that betrayed a discernible message, he looked at the bets each of the players had placed. It was only then that he noticed anything resembling a pattern.