The Player, The Thief and The Broken Heart - Chapter Eighty-Eight - Jimmy Figures Out the Real Game Being Played

Jimmy followed his dad to the same corner where he'd practiced with that safe. Some sort of temporary operations center had been set up with radio static buzzing and tables surrounded by men and women wearing military-style headphones. With so many people inside the old aircraft hangar or whatever this place was, the space seemed so much smaller.

They headed toward a long banquet table covered in pizza boxes. He sniffed at the pungent smells of wing sauce. There were still a few cartons of chicken left. He'd eat later. His body wasn't awake enough yet to rouse his appetite, never mind his stomach. Mr. Hermann cleared away the surface at the far end for them to sit around: for himself, Jimmy, his dad, Rebecca, and some other agent who was introduced as Commander Weiss.

"Just so we're clear," Jimmy's dad said in a low voice to him, "I never worked for the FBI in any capacity until a few months ago. I've been living in Austin Texas the past bunch of years working a regular straight job as a chief security officer for this big bank."

Jimmy nodded, too tired to care about much of anything right now apart from maybe setting his head down someplace. Preferably with Jeannie by his side. Snuggling next to her a couch would be nice.

"As for our reunion? My old enemies started tailing me as soon as I showed my face in this state. I would of never come back except they was making threats on you."

Jimmy shrugged. There were times in his recent past he would have welcomed an unexpected stray bullet taking him out. Now, at least, wasn't one of them. For so long, he'd idealized his dad, this absent, half-remembered figure, and now as he stood before the old man, he felt indifference. Maybe that would change too. He hoped it would. Right now he was seeing his dad too much through his mother's eyes.

"But I couldn't just meet with you, see? Had to get you where there'd be too much armed security and not only that, but other rival gangs they wouldn't want to mess with. Like Burkhard's outfit."

"This is where I'm starting to get lost," Jimmy said, wavering on his feet. The room was starting to darken and it wasn't the lights that were dimming. Either his eyes were closing or his brain was wanting to shut off.

The old man sighed. "There was a real robbery going down last night. Yushenko had been tipped off ahead of time and figured it would be a good opportunity to take them out. As we speak Burkhard's goons are being rounded up. However with his goons around the Dunes Casino, and secret service operatives from three different countries coming in and out, along with undercover feds, I figured it would be pretty much the safest place in all of Vegas for the two of us to meet up."

"Only your enemies were still onto you," Jimmy said, hoping he'd managed to figure out at least one piece of this shit show.

"Correct."

Rebecca snorted. The word had triggered her for some reason.

"Hence the Oceans Eleven rip-off down in the basement room. Hey—it worked! What can I say, I've been out of touch with whatever's been going on in these parts. I barely had the connections to get past Yushenko's security and get that all set up. Especially with that Ray Levkin douche running things."

Rebecca snorted again. "Show him your badge."

He reached into his wallet and pulled out a white card with his picture on it along with the Nevada State seal. Jimmy read the text underneath. "Emergency door inspector?"

"A classic ruse. You make up some obscure government department and then act like the most tyrannical, pettiest bureaucrat, reciting pages of municipal regulatory code until they cave."

Jimmy recalled what Jeannie had told him and said, "But why did you need to get past Yushenko's security when ..." Something in her expression made him stop. They hadn't been bullshitting to Jeannie. And then, like that finally tick of a safe combination, it clicked.

Rebecca cleared her throat. "I can only disclose what I've been cleared to disclose. Such as that the heist was bogus—a ruse to get our agents closer to the poker game."

"Even I figured that much," Jimmy said, spreading on the sarcasm like peanut butter.

"And next you're going to inform me—or maybe not—that the entire poker game itself was a honey pot."

Rebecca narrowed her eyes at him. Jimmy could tell by the way she flexed her fingers that she was dying for a cigarette. His dad, too raised his brows at him. "A honey pot?"

"Lure assorted crooks into one place on false pretenses and begin the arrests." He couldn't suppress his grin as he added, "And Yushenko wasn't one of them."

Jimmy figured this must have come as news to his dad, as the old man made himself scarce without saying a word. Rebecca leaned closer. "Please tell me you're not serious."

"I've known Eric almost as long as I've known Jeannie and I've known Henry since high school. A back door hack into a high tech security system that isn't discovered for an entire year? This isn't some municipal government website where nobody gives a shit—this is fucking casino!" he rasped. "Eric and Henry are smart but they're not that smart. No way."

Rebecca leaned back in her metal folding chair, eyes still narrowed. She held her arms, elbow cupped in hand and fingers curled near her mouth as if she were smoking a cigarette. He'd bet money she was imagining puffing away at one now. "I'd like to hear your theory, then."

Jimmy noticed one of the radio operators had quieted. Other people listening in added to his nervousness. "Yushenko's on your team. I'll bet he's even Slavic of some kind, maybe Serbian or Polish or some shit, but he ain't Russian. He just plays a semi-convincing part."

"Interesting," she said, blowing a deep sigh out of the corner of her mouth. "Since when are you an expert on Eastern European ethnic groupings?"

"Buddy from high school was Latvian. He hated everyone east of the Rhine except for other Latvians unless he was around only other Latvians, so he was always 'Russians are like this' or 'Bosnians are like this'. Half the time he had a point." It hadn't taken Jimmy long to figure out political correctness had never made its way east of the Rhine.

"He didn't hate people west of the Rhine?"

"'Nothing but a bunch of Germans,' he said."

Rebecca chuckled.

"I'm right, aren't I."

She glanced sidelong at a man Jimmy surmised ranked higher than her. He tipped his head once and her attention turned back to him. "What else convinced you of this, apart from the lax security procedures on the tech end."

Jimmy had caught his second wind. He went into rant mode, glad Rebecca didn't interrupt. If he stopped he might not get started again. "At the time I thought it was very odd that you gave me a card key that didn't take me right up to the penthouse floor. I had to walk up more than five flights of stairs! Including floors that weren't covered by our replacement security feed. All while cracking that safe I kept thinking, why the hell would she do that? Why? She'd never slip up with the card reader when she uses one hundreds of times every shift! The only answer I could come up with was that you needed me to be seen by their security—and that would be their cue to start moving into position. And you had to have your people ready to start moving from far enough away that no one in that hotel casino could have been alerted in advance, so I'm thinking you needed at least an hour. And me getting caught was part of the plan except that something went screwy—I'm not even going to try guessing what, my brain's too fried. And the rest—like you being marched out by fake cops—was all theatre for the poker players and their cohorts, the ones you really wanted to round up. You couldn't use real cops without having a paper trail they could have cottoned onto and plainclothesmen wouldn't have worked for your audience."

A shadow fell across the table in front of Jimmy. He looked up to see Le Bon standing over him. "Most curious. What do you reckon was my role?"

Jimmy chuckled, his brain firing on all cylinders. Probably thanks to the caffeine in Jeannie's cola. "Globalization! Law enforcement is still largely a national matter while most crooks are all about open borders. Although just like crooks, everybody likes to protect their own turf. I'm sure Interpol or whatever Germany goes with—I'm assuming Burkhard's a Kraut—had their own guy too."

Le Bon's eyes twinkled but it was the glint of a dagger blade that had just been unsheathed. Jimmy lowered his head. "I'll shut up now. Honestly there is only one thing I care about and I already know the answer is that I'm shit out of luck with that."

"What might that be," Le Bon asked without any inflection in his tone.

"The money. A million bucks, man. My life would be set!" Jimmy folded his arms on the table and nested his head in them. His eyes closed. He was fading fast again. Which was just as well. He already knew the answer. There was nothing.