Kinetic solutions, p.4
Kinetic Solutions, page 4
Poker was a game of focus. Of insight into complete strangers across a green felt table, with pots frequently equal to an office drone’s monthly salary. And occasionally his annual one.
Bog troll grunted and ignored her.
The floor manager approached, his suit better tailored than the man outside.
“Welcome, guests,” he gushed quietly as he took them all in. “Is four sufficient or would you like to wait a bit to see who else might join?”
Carlota turned to one side and studied the room. A dozen other folks sat at tables or in chairs around the outside, relaxing, smoking, or just drinking. Perhaps they’d cashed out, or gone broke.
Or just needed time to decompress.
Carlota could not relax. She would be dead before she knew what hit her if she did.
Two fat merchants in off-the-rack suits came through the outer door as she watchec. The three men around her stirred like wolves smelling sheep. Studying the men, she had to agree. They looked like small-time players that thought they had fast-talked someone into an invite to the private rooms, rather than walking banks accounts needing to be emptied before they were sent home.
She made eye contact with the barely younger of the two, maybe only forty and slightly less squishy.
Slightly.
Carlota extended her smile in his direction and drew the man to them like magic, pulling his companion along with him like a tide going out. The floor manager turned sideways and watched with a knowing smile.
“We were just about to start a game,” Carlota offered to the men with the same breathlessness that seemed to work on most of them. “Were you here to play?”
The eyes on the older of the two nearly bugged out as he stared at her outfit. She wondered if they were from some quaint, agricultural world that didn’t have anything remotely like this casino.
Along with whatever other evils you could get into in a place without windows looking in or clocks nagging you.
“Gosh, that’d be swell,” the younger man said earnestly.
Something was off in his accent, but she couldn’t immediately place it. It didn’t fit the suit somehow, and she’d spent three decades mentally peeling away façades to find the spies underneath.
Briefly, Carlota wondered if some bureau stringer had thought to look in a high-stakes poker suite and gotten lucky to see someone that might be his quarry.
Not that she looked at all like the woman she’d been a year ago.
Or the stranger she’d assembled to replace her personnel file in those few hours between realizing that she was done and turning in her badge for the last time.
Paper had actually worked in her favor, there at the end. Electronic files could be accessed remotely and tampered with, sometimes without anyone realizing it, or at least not until it was too late to do anything about it. So everything was paper and long-term storage on film that would last for centuries.
Until someone swapped a roll when checking it in. And then accidentally put in a blank cartridge somewhere else, after thirty-seven such mistakes had been returned to salt-mine storage off sight.
The only records they had of her now were mental. People who had known her personally, or at least on sight.
Carlota figured that it would give all the other players an edge if Salonnia started off so badly handicapped. Fribourg might have images of her from as recent as twelve or fifteen years ago, depending. They might be able to age them up and get close.
At least until the Bureau told them that part of putting her back together after the…incident…had involved rebuilding her face. Subtle, to be sure, but her jawline was different. Her cheekbones had been enhanced just a little in an effort to balance out the broken bones for healing. The chin was softer.
And she’d let her hair go completely gray while recovering and as she spent time punching a stupid clock at a worthless desk.
Tonight, she presented as a thirty-eight-year-old social widow who had watched her foolish husband run off with a waitress, before cleaning him out in the divorce and starting to play the field.
In more ways than one.
It was a role she had played a few times when she’d been younger, when an overt honeypot had been more effective. The Vamp Years, as she recalled them mentally; the idiots in charge ordered her to present as a bubbly teenager too dumb to be a threat to big, bad, enemy agents.
At least until she got them asleep afterwards and could either kill them or inject a quick soporific that kept them entirely docile until pickup teams came to retrieve them.
Too many men led entirely astray by the divining rod between their legs.
Still, the two men didn’t strike her as spies. Not directly. Observers, maybe.
Bog troll had already entered the game room, so she gestured her two new marks in and let the two other men in tuxedos have a view of her bottom as they followed her.
The room was large but cozy, done in muted greens and blues that left it feeling larger than it was, while still keeping everything calm and pleasant. Octagonal table, limiting play nicely to eight, though she supposed that there might be larger tables in some of the other rooms. Comfortable chairs.
An uncomfortable waitress in a leather sausage casing accompanied them in and got drink orders. The floor manager delivered two decks of brand new cards, still in the wrapping.
The players took the stage.
Bog troll had ended up in the farthest corner from the door, with the two other tuxedos flanking him on either side. Carlota had gone right instead of left, putting her flash of thigh side next to the prettiest of the three sharks, rather than the two salesmen.
They were about to be bled dry. She saw no reason to pile on by distracting them any more than she needed to.
Plus, this way she could use that view on the one shark who held himself like an expert player.
She might need him thinking about getting her naked instead of calculating odds and counting cards.
The ancient game had been focused on odd numbers, using four suits of thirteen cards each. In the old times, you got two cards dealt, one up and one hidden, then bet. After that, a third card. Then a fourth. Then a fifth.
There was a variant with seven cards dealt, but you ended up burning most of the deck each hand when you had eight players. Six here was less complicated.
Still, the bog troll spoke.
“Six hand stud?” he asked, in a voice remarkably clear and crisp on such an ugly man.
Truly, a face for radio.
Carlota had played almost every variant of stud poker in the galaxy. Six was a rarer one. It caused the math to be far more obscure than five or seven.
She wondered if that was a comment on the other two wolves in the room with him, as the man hadn’t yet identified her as a serious player.
He would learn soon enough.
Everyone assented and began to pull cash to buy chips.
She wondered how interesting things would get.
6
Carlota studied the remaining players.
On one hand, three hours had passed relatively quickly. Even pleasantly.
On the other, the bog troll was a serious player on a whole other level from the two men in tuxedos who had been standing around when she first arrived. The middle of those three was already bust and gone, along with the older of the two salesmen.
That left her, the younger salesman, the prettier male, and the bog troll with the lovely radio voice.
The remaining tux liked to be called Donel, but he wasn’t going to be around long enough to matter. And flop sweat was among the most unsexy things Carlota knew.
But that was why you played games like this. To see who the serious players were, and who were mere poseurs to be discounted fairly quickly.
The younger salesman was named William. Not Bill, like his friend might have done. William. Spoken with seriousness the one and only time he’d needed to correct anyone.
Carlota had split her attention between William and the bog troll, who was really named Armand. She could sit and listen to Armand read a comm directory.
She and William had come out a little ahead over the last few hours, until she was up about eighty-five thousand cedis right now. Not what she’d hoped for tonight, but she also hadn’t been expecting someone like Armand at the table.
Ringer.
Only four of them left, with Donel obviously needing to win the next hand to remain. The other two were already outside the room. William dealt.
Carlota studied her two cards, both Empresses in gold and blue. A powerful leading hand.
She raised Donel’s two hundred to five hundred and everyone called. Just marking her scent on this one, so far. She’d bluffed a few hands tonight with nothing better, at times when some of the other players had been willing to fold instead of paying for knowledge.
Armand had a red Jester showing.
The next round delivered her a Seven of Stones. Worthless, but nobody else was feeling bold enough to challenge. Or to push Donel entirely out by raising more than he might have on his person or available to call on sudden credit.
Armand had added a red Emperor to it, suggesting that he was going for a straight or possibly a royal flush, depending on colors. Betting got a little stronger, but nobody folded.
William had a pair of sevens showing and started betting and raising as if he had the third one down. Carlota called but didn’t push things, as she’d gotten the black Empress, giving her three of a kind and a mathematical edge, depending on Armand.
Donel was down to a few hundred cedis at this point. He grinned when the bet came around and folded.
“I’m just not feeling it tonight,” he said with a shrug, picking up his last few chips and tossing them into the pot so he could walk away without taking anything.
It didn’t make that much of a difference, but it caused the room to pause for a long moment as he exited, trying to put on a brave face for her that Carlota didn’t find all that appetizing after watching him at his most emotional.
Armand was actually a more interesting person, from the tidbits he’d let drop.
Carlota’s only worry at this point was that William really was a stringer for somebody’s espionage agency and had recognized her. His partner had been the first to exit broke, but that also gave the man the perfect excuse to slip out and call for backup.
Not many people would be dumb enough to try to take her in here. Casino security would see them as potential armed robbers and drop a planetary moon’s worth of trouble on them immediately, before trying to sort things out later.
They took a dim view of threats to their customers.
However, they might try to follow her later. As if Carlota had just innocently decided to come to this casino and spend several hours in a single public place, playing.
Fools.
Armand had sneered at Donel’s back as he left. Carlota turned back just fast enough to catch it. They shared a smile and he nodded like a schoolboy caught sneaking out at night.
The next round of cards caused William to bet heavily, raising every time it came to him. Armand was pushing the man in ways he hadn’t before, as if he’d developed a sudden antipathy to the salesman.
Or wanted to get rid of everyone else so he could have a clear chance to seduce the woman.
Bog troll, certainly. But a mannered one. And smart. With a baritone voice that just soothed her nerves to listen to. She might not say yes, but she wouldn’t immediately say no either.
Life was to be lived. That had been what had driven her to take such insane risks in the first place. Montague expected her to sit passively at a desk filing paperwork and answering questions for people who had never held a gun, let alone used it on someone.
Until she turned sixty or something, changing into a withered husk of a woman forgotten in the basement because those men upstairs couldn’t imagine that any woman was their equal in competence, to say nothing of their better.
And most of them thought that a woman had already lost her bloom by thirty. Morons.
She’d just been getting started.
Finally, everyone settled in, but the pot was over one hundred thousand cedis now. And there were still two cards left.
She’d be more worried if Armand was dealing, but William had the cards and hadn’t struck her as the kind of sharp who could deal off the bottom as needed.
Could he?
Was that the secret? Two men, one an expert player who could force things and string them out all night, while the other called for the cavalry?
Salonnia wouldn’t know her for gambling. Not unless they went back and interviewed a few folks who had retired out of the building a decade or more ago. And her personnel file had evaporated, if you wanted to look something up.
That left memories.
Or maybe he was an outsider? Fribourg? Aquitaine? Someplace even more exotic?
They might have files on her. Not great, but a definite head start on the locals. She’d done that on purpose, to make the game more equitable.
And to show everybody in the galaxy that she was still a top-notch agent and player.
William dealt Armand the red ten, suggesting a royal flush was coming. Carlota got a blue six. William got a gold four. Betting and raising got ugly again, as if William thought he could push the other two out of the game. She matched him. Armand did as well.
The pot was approaching two hundred thousand cedis. A lot of money for an evening, let alone a single hand of poker.
She listened to William speak as he got excited. There was a verbal tic there. A falseness in his tones that she could detect. They were speaking in Arabic tonight, but he had a strange accent, as if English might be his native tongue.
Definitely not Salonnian, then. Possibly Aquitaine, but they tended towards Bulgarian as the main tongue, though many folks were bi- and tri-lingual, depending on where someone might live.
English more strongly suggested the Fribourg Empire had gotten here finally. They had the farthest distance to travel, assuming they hadn’t activated local assets.
Or did they wish to keep those spies hidden yet, as they would need to work closely with Salonnian authorities and agents?
One didn’t want to give away everything. That would be like walking into the room naked. Useful once, but then you didn’t have any surprises left to spring on someone later.
Last card, dealt face down like the first one. One less round that a seven-card version, with that much thinner odds to make your best five cards from. But down, unlike five-card.
Secret.
Open for interpretation. For bluffing.
For lying.
“Ten thousand cedis,” William opened, even before Carlota had looked at her card.
Armand studied his hole card and smiled like he’d just drawn what he needed. With the Emperor, Jester, and Ten of Swords—all red—showing, he could be sitting on the Crown Prince and Empress he needed to take any pot.
“Raise forty thousand,” Armand said in a friendly tone. He turned to Carlota. “Fifty to you.”
She knew within a few hundred how many cedis were piled haphazardly in front of her, unlike the ordered piles of the two men.
She pulled her sixth card and slumped slightly. Not much. The sort of thing that might be interpreted as an unconscious twitch. As if there was anything like it at this table. William was an exceptional player, but she had math on her side. He was pushing, but she was dead certain that the man was bluffing.
Or buying time. There was always that.
Armand was a ringer. She’d like to sit in a gallery sometime, just to watch him put on a master class in poker for players who thought they were the shit. As he methodically cleaned every single one of them out.
The last Empress stared back at her, winking almost.
Carlota willed her entire body to perfect stillness . Not that of a statue, but not that of a woman who had just drawn the red Empress that Armand would have needed to complete his hand. Four Empresses. With what he had, the man couldn’t be sitting on anything more than three of a kind.
William might have four sevens. She couldn’t be sure without paying for the privilege, but she was certain now that Armand was bluffing. Hard, but he had all that excess cash in front of him that he could afford to.
Carlota mulled her options with a platinum chip in one hand.
“Fifty?” she confirmed, just to watch William fidget with unnecessary energy.
Had he meant to send Armand the red Empress and screwed up his count? It was possible. It was also possible that this was an honest deal.
She’d have to brace the man and then probably read his personnel file to be sure, assuming a Fribourg agent in the field.
“Sure, I’ll call that,” she offered with a shrug in her voice, counting and tossing in a number of five-thousand-cedi chips from the back and bottom of her pile.
There were still an awful lot of chips in front of her.
“Call and raise,” William snapped, throwing more chips into the enormous pile growing between them. “Another fifty thousand.”
That left him without a lot of chips left. Carlota had just fallen below breaking even for the evening, entertainment notwithstanding. Armand smiled like a shark and counted a strange number of chips.
“Fine,” he said. “And I’ll raise you fourteen thousand, six hundred, and ten cedis. That will leave you enough for dinner.”
Carlota just barely managed to keep her jaw from falling open. That looked like a remarkably accurate assessment of what William had in front of him at this exact moment, minus maybe fifty for food later.
Armand smiled at her. It was a friendly smile, as opposed to the harshness he’d reserved for Donel and others earlier. He had to know he couldn’t beat William. Why was he doing this?
She counted nearly sixty-five thousand cedis and slid them into the pot. Now, she was in bad shape, if she lost.
Carlota had come in here tonight to win enough money that she could live nicely for a couple of years without having to risk tapping into any banks or places where someone might have once remembered her having an account. All the better to vanish.
