Cyber Knights 1.0

1

In her six years as a surveillance officer at the Casino Martinique, Maria Cisneros had earned something of a well-deserved reputation for being able to spot cheaters or scammers in record time. At the moment, however, that reputation was on the line, for she found herself having one hell of a time trying to discern how the man wearing a tweed jacket and rumpled khaki trousers was able to walk away from three different poker games a big winner without her being able to discern how he was cheating, or if in fact he was. That he could simply be a professional who was preying on rabbits, rank amateurs who came to Vegas to enjoy a serious game of poker with likeminded people or to see if they could beat the big boys, could not be discounted. Either way, the pit manager was concerned with the character Cisneros had come to refer to as Mr. Tweed.

It didn’t take long before she was able to see he didn’t have a colleague at the table who was either swapping cards with him or in a position that allowed him to read the hands of the other players and pass that information on to Mr. Tweed. Mr. Tweed was also not a mechanic, a player who used sleight-of-hand techniques to improve his odds of winning. Only after she had worked her way through the entire list of known techniques without being able to come up with an answer did she call her shift supervisor over to see if he could unravel this mystery.

Ambling over to the console where Cisneros was monitoring a trio of screens, each with a different view of Mr. Tweed, Jack Hughes placed a hand on the back of her seat and leaned over. “Don’t tell me Maria the Magnificent, the undisputed queen of the surveillance room, is having a spot of trouble,” he whispered in her ear.

Though annoyed by Hughes’s use of the moniker her coworkers had for her, Cisneros sighed as her shoulders slumped. “I’m afraid so, boss man. This one’s got me and the pit manager stumped.”

“What’s he been doing?” Hughes asked as his eyes darted from screen to screen, carefully watching how the player in question was dealing the cards to the others at his table.

“He’s been playing hit and run all night, going from table to table after he’s won a big hand,” Cisneros explained as she too watched a CCTV screen, now tightly focused on the way Mr. Tweed was handling the cards. “Each time he moves to a new table after cashing in most of his chips, he starts by playing small, throwing in only what he needs to in order to stay in the game awhile, even if he does have a good hand. Then wham! He goes all in when there’s a big pot on the table and he’s sure he has a winning hand.”

Like Cisneros, Hughes could see the player they were watching was dealing correctly. It was only when he’d finished doing so and after he’d taken a long, hard look at his own cards that Hughes saw a tell he hadn’t seen in decades. “Son of a bitch!” he muttered before chuckling to himself.

Unsure why her supervisor was acting the way he was as they watched Mr. Tweed use the pinkie of his left hand to pick his nose, Cisneros frowned. “What?”

“Can you give me a close-up of his face?” Hughes asked.

Without bothering to answer him, Cisneros zoomed in on Mr. Tweed’s round face that was as dispassionate and inscrutable as a member of the Imperial Chinese Guard.

Straightening up, Hughes used the hand he’d been resting on Cisneros’s seat to give her a pat on her shoulder. “Tell the pit manager to relax. I’ll handle this one myself.”

“If you say so, boss man.”

As he was leaving the surveillance room, Hughes called out over his shoulder to no one in particular, “If anyone asks, tell them I’m on my dinner break.”

With his full attention focused on the garishly made-up octogenarian across from him who always stopped talking about her grandchildren whenever she had a good hand, Tommy Tyler didn’t notice Jack Hughes coming up behind him until he spoke. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, you have to walk into mine, you wretched little taffy.”

Over the years, Tommy had come to appreciate there were some people who were totally forgettable, the sort who came into his life and out again quicker than a greasy burger. Jack Hughes wasn’t one of them. Memories of a character like him were the kind that didn’t diminish one jot over the years.

Taking care to lay his cards facedown on the table, Tommy turned in his seat, ignoring the glare from the player to his right when his knee brushed against one of the man’s legs.

“Your joint?” Tommy intoned playfully as he rose from his seat to greet a friend he hadn’t seen in over fifteen years.

“In a way, it is,” Hughes replied as he reached out to accept Tommy’s hand. “I’m the senior surveillance supervisor.”

“You? Someone hired you to keep an eye out for miscreants like me?”

“It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.” Hughes grinned as he continued to match the way Tommy was pumping his hand. “What do you say the two of us head off to one of the restaurants, order the biggest slab of beef they have, and catch up on old times?”

“Love to, as soon as I finish this hand,” Tommy replied as he tried to pull his hand away from Hughes.

“Oh, I don’t think the nice people here would mind if you called it a night,” came the response as he glanced over Tommy’s shoulder at the other players seated at the table without releasing the grip on his friend’s hand.

“You back rooming me?” Tommy asked as he cocked a brow.

“Me? No. I don’t do that sort of thing. They do,” he replied, tilting his head off to one side to where a couple of uniformed security officers were standing side by side just behind a casino pit manager with a scowl on his face, all of whom were watching their every move.

“Well, since you put it that way, I guess I will take you up on your kind invitation.” With that, Tommy managed to free his hand, collect his winnings, and left a tableful of tourists and wannabe card sharks scurrying to collect their own chips and flee before someone came by and took them away.

The restaurant Hughes led Tommy to was a steak house located within the casino. Over a couple of juicy prime cuts and baked potatoes the size of a football used by the mini rugby league, the two men caught up on what each of them had been up to after they’d left the army.

“I tried the police for a while, but it didn’t suit me,” Hughes explained. “It was too much like the army, with the added disadvantage of not affording you an opportunity for a change of scene every now and then.”

“And you get that here, in the middle of what the Americans call a desert?” Tommy asked incredulously as he was about to shovel an oversized piece of beef into his mouth.

“Oh, the scenery this place offers is far better than any the regiment ever offered us,” Hughes shot back as his eyes cut over to a table of young, smartly dressed women who were obviously enjoying a girls’ weekend in Vegas.

“And what does your wife say about your bird-watching?” Tommy grinned as one of the girls, a fair-haired lass with a pair of legs that went on forever, caught him staring at her. By way of response, she smiled and gave him a wicked little wink.

“‘Where’s my alimony check, you bastard?’”

“Oh,” was all Tommy could think of as he turned his attention back to Hughes.

“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.

“Let me see the next hand that was played in this game,” Tommy asked quietly without taking his eyes off the screen.

Without a word, Hughes reached out with his right hand, scrolled down the list of screenshots to the next one, and clicked the mouse.

This time, Tommy’s attention was immediately drawn to the bets. Still, before asking Hughes to show him the next screen, he inspected the cards being displayed as well as the user names. He did the same with the third screenshot, but he stopped looking at the cards or the user names, focusing his entire attention on the bets as Hughes progressed from one round to the next.

For his part, the dispassionate expression he’d affected ever so slowly morphed into a knowing grin as Hughes realized Tommy had caught on to the quirk that made this particular group of players stand out. Still, he kept his own council, waiting until Tommy had decided he’d seen enough.

“Well,” Tommy finally intoned. “Either you have a group of grannies who are on the dole playing this game or the bets are being used to transmit a message. How many of these types of games are there, and how often do these particular users play?”

Easing back into his seat once more, Hughes knitted his fingers together and brought his hands to rest on a paunch that had long ago lost all definition. “These particular players show up on our website about once a week. Though they change their screen names every few months, it’s the way they bet, regardless of what hand is being played, that’s caused the algorithm we use to sniff out quirky behavior to flag this lot. What we can’t figure out is what kind of code this is.”

“Ever hear of JN-25?” Tommy asks his friend.

“Can’t say that I have. What kind of program is it?”

“It’s not a computer program. It was a cipher the Jap navy used in World War II. It was made up of words, phrases, numbers, and letters that were each assigned to a set of numbers. The sender looked up the word or phrase he wanted to use in a code book, found the numbers next to it, and encrypted the numbers when sending the message. All the addressee needed to do was look up the numbers and write down the word or phrase they represented.”

Hughes, having worked with contractors and sales reps of software companies long enough to be leery of someone who came up with an answer as quickly as his friend had just done, remained skeptical. “Since when have you become a history buff?”

“Since I started working for someone with a desk across from mine who likes to pass the time rambling on about why Hannibal was completely daft for even thinking about taking elephants across the Alps and thinks spending a weekend perched on Hadrian’s Wall dressed like a Roman soldier is as close to heaven on earth as you can get.”

“I know what you mean.” Hughes snickered before returning to the matter at hand. “Try spending all your time around jokers who live, eat, and sleep nothing but gambling and how to keep people from cheating the casinos built to cheat them out of their life savings.” After a pause, during which Hughes waited for Tommy to continue with the point he had been making without him doing so, he sighed. “Okay, I’m game. What makes you think the bets are a code?”

“I’m willing to wager you another free meal at that posh restaurant we ate in,” Tommy declared with an air of confidence. “I expect if you were to go back and look at all the bets made by this crew that’s giving you the willies, you’ll find their bets all consist of five digits. Never any more, never any less.”

Hughes didn’t need to go back and look. He already knew this to be the case. “Okay, so someone is using the game to send messages back and forth. That’s easy enough to fix. Even I can stop that.”

Tommy looked away from the monitor a moment and took to regarding his friend out of the corner of his eye even as something of a plan began to gel in his head. “I wouldn’t advise that, mate. Not until you find out who these blighters are and what they’re up to.”

“I expect you’re going to tell me why I need to worry about that.”

“I will, but not here,” Tommy replied as he glanced about the room, taking note once more of one of Hughes’s people, who had been doing a pathetic job of pretending he wasn’t watching them. “All this high-powered thinking has left my throat parched.”

“Should I even bother to ask who’s buying?”

“You can always ask, mate, but it’ll be a waste of time, since I’m sure you already know the answer,” Tommy shot back with a sly wink as they both came to their feet and headed for the door.

In a quiet booth tucked away in the corner of one of the casino’s bars, Tommy took his time to explain to his friend why he needed to find out who was using the poker games as a way of passing messages. “Whoever came up with this system has dedicated a whole lot of time, money, and brainpower generating the code books and distributing them. They’re not about to abandon the system simply because you freeze them out. They’ll just go to another outfit’s site and carry on.”

“So long as they’re not here, what do I care?” Hughes replied offhandedly before taking a sip of his beer.

“Two reasons,” Tommy explained as he was holding up two fingers of his right hand in front of his friend’s face. “First, these people are probably up to something that is not in the best interest of your adopted country. Whether they’re druggies or terrorists doesn’t matter.” Pausing, Tommy thought about that a second before he corrected himself. “Well, it does matter. Given my druthers, I’d rather they be druggies. You can avoid that lot if you’re careful. Hopped-up hajjis, on the other hand, would love to pay a visit to a place like this to make a statement and wreak havoc on the people who messed with their system and extract a bit of vengeance before cashing in on the seventy-two-virgins deal.”

Tommy allowed this thought to sink in as he took another slurp of his beer before continuing. “The second reason is connected to the first in a roundabout way. Let’s just say the people who are passing messages are martyrs in waiting, using your system to post messages to each other or, even more likely, the leader of a group passing on orders to various cells. In the wake of a major attack, when the people at the NSA stop reading Kim Kardashian’s e-mails and turn their attention to figuring out how they missed the warning signs, they’ll trace the hajjis’ traffic back to you. If your site was the first one they used, I imagine you’d come under some heavy-duty scrutiny, the kind I expect your boss, his partners, and their accountants are keen on avoiding.”

“No doubt about that,” Hughes muttered. “If you think the lads who work for HMG’s Revenue and Customs can be brutal, try dealing with the American IRS.”

“And finally,” Tommy added as his face lit up with a broad, toothy grin. “Think of the plaudits you and your boss will get if you manage to uncover a covey of nasty little bastards intent doing more than running about crying ‘Death to America!’ for the TV cameras.”

After staring down at his beer and mulling over what his friend was saying, Hughes looked back up at Tommy. “That’s three reasons, mate. Are you auditioning for a Monty Python revival?”

Tommy gave his friend a wink. “Well, you know what they say — nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

After sharing a good laugh over that, Hughes asked Tommy if he’d mind meeting the boss.

Making a show of being excited, Tommy leaned over the table toward his friend. “Bruce Springsteen? You know him?”

“Sean Woodard, ya bloody gork. If we’re going to go poking around where we don’t belong, I’m going to need your help and his permission.”

“And I’m going to need to be compensated for my time and troubles. Be advised, I’m not a cheap date.”

“You never were, you wretched little taffy.”

After sharing another round of laugher, the two men finished their beers. While Hughes was signing the check for the drinks, a check he would never need to pay, Tommy did his best to keep from smirking. Not because he was on the verge of extending his stay in Vegas without having to spend a single quid of his own. Rather, the opportunity to use and rummage about the state-of-the-art systems Hughes relied on was too good to pass up. While Andy always made sure he kept the systems and software they used back in the UK up to speed, sometimes investing in what Tommy thought to be obscene amounts of money on them, Tommy had learned over the years you could always pick up a trick or two by taking a quick peek into someone else’s toy box.

Finished with the waiter, Hughes turned to Tommy. “Ready to go, mate?”

“I am, provided the price is right.”

Rolling his eyes, Hughes shook his head. “You bloody mercenaries.”

“Hello, Pot. This is Kettle. Send color, over,” Tommy fired back as they were sliding out of the booth.

“I’ll need to talk this over with the boss first, to find out just how eager he is to solve this mystery.”

“I’m here all week,” Tommy replied. “Just do me a favor and the next time you decide to sneak up behind me and ruin a perfect setup, leave the Joe Pesci character and his friends behind.”

3

An early morning call the next day from Hughes woke Tommy from a peaceful slumber, one brought on by a long but successful night in the card room of another casino. Informed by his friend to meet him in the lobby of the hotel, Tommy expected to be taken to a plush office inside the Martinique. Instead, Hughes drove out of town to an impressive walled estate set atop a ridge with a spectacular view of Las Vegas. “This is only the third time I’ve been up here,” Hughes explained while they were waiting for the massive driveway gates to open. “Sean Woodard prefers to run his little empire from here, away from the day-to-day bump and grind. He comes down from Mount Olympus only when he needs to prove to the media he’s not being held captive by the mob or some unscrupulous Mormon business manager.”

“With a setup like this, you can hardly blame him,” Tommy muttered more to himself as he took in the opulent oasis perched on the otherwise barren landscape that Woodard called home.

After being met at the door by a young, fair-haired woman wearing a simple white shirtdress, Tommy and Hughes were led to a shaded patio where Sean Woodard was seated at a table. Coming to his feet, he greeted the two men by flashing them his signature smile and offering Tommy his hand.

“Would you care to join me for breakfast?” he asked without waiting for Hughes to introduce Tommy, leading Tommy to assume the notorious casino owner not only knew who he was but probably every single detail about him a man like Woodard considered worth knowing.

Never having been shy when it came to accepting an invitation to enjoy free food, Tommy grinned. “A man would have to be a fool to say no.”

Though he’d already had breakfast, Jack Hughes also accepted Woodard’s offer, but for entirely different reasons. Like everyone else who was a part of Sean Woodard’s world, Hughes knew you didn’t say no to him, not if you wished to remain working in the gaming industry.

“I’ve been told you and Jack served together in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards,” Woodard declared by way of opening up a casual, seemingly friendly dialogue.

“That’s right,” Tommy replied as he took up the glass of mimosa offered him by a young brunette in a white shirtdress exactly like the one the girl at the front door had been wearing. “The Welsh Cavalry, and proud of it,” he declared as he lifted his glass as if in a toast, one Hughes readily joined in on.

Woodard naturally thought Tommy’s brash behavior was all show, a brazen display of bravado meant to make it clear he was not in the least bit intimidated by his surroundings or Woodard himself. Little did the casino owner, a man who measured another’s worth in terms of the value he could add to his business concerns, appreciate Tommy and Jack Hughes were toasting others, men they’d served with who had long ago been added to their regiment’s roll of honor.

“Jack tells me you have a novel theory to explain the odd betting habits a group of players use on our website,” Woodard ventured as the brunette, assisted by yet a third young woman in a white shirtdress, set out before them a number of plates and bowls containing various breakfast foods.

“It’s not a theory, Mr. Woodard,” Tommy countered with a self-assuredness that came naturally to him even as he was spearing a fat, juicy banger with his fork. “The need for various scumbags to pass messages back and forth via the Internet without folks like your NSA knowing what they’re about is causing them to come up with all sorts of ingenious methods of doing so. This isn’t new. There are more than a few people in the intelligence community who believe al-Qaeda planned the 9/11 attacks on eBay using encrypted messages hidden within digital photos.”

For the first time, something Tommy said caused Woodard to react. Glancing over at Hughes, he frowned.

“It can be done, Mr. Woodard,” Hughes intoned. “Like I always tell the vendors who claim the software or hardware they’re pimping is foolproof, there’s nothing in this world that’s foolproof, since fools are so ingenious. I believe Mr. Tyler is right. The people we’re dealing with are no fools.”

“So,” Woodard continued after taking a moment to enjoy a mouthful of scrambled egg whites and spinach. “What do we do, provided we need to do anything? So far, I’ve been told this group has done nothing wrong. Their credit is good, and they adhere to all the rules governing play on our site.”

“Like I told Jack, it’s not what they’re doing to you that’s important. It’s what they might be doing to someone else and the possible repercussions that your business concerns, not to mention your reputation, might suffer if it’s discovered they were using your website to plan a sequel to 9/11. It’ll be even worse if, in the course of running this to ground, it’s discovered the scumbags had help from someone inside your organization facilitating whatever it is they’re up to.”

Again, Woodard glanced over at Hughes, who responded by doing nothing more than closing his eyes and nodding, indicating he agreed with the concerns Tommy was expressing.

With a feigned casualness that was as transparent as his smile, Woodard paused to enjoy his breakfast while mulling something over in his head. “Given your background, I imagine you have a solution,” he finally ventured offhandedly.

“Of course I do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be bothering you this early in the morning.”

“And this solution of yours, just how much will it cost me?” Woodard asked with a well-measured nonchalance.

Tommy was ready for this. Having seen through the opaque manner with which both his friend and Woodard had approached the matter at hand, he had done the math in his head, calculations that took into account the nature of the threat, the site in question, and, most importantly, the client. He also saw this as an opportunity to prove to Andy he was more than capable of handling a case like this all on his own and, if he managed to pull this off, give him something new he could use to badger Tinker Bell with. Taking up the glass of mimosa the brunette never allowed to go dry, Tommy locked eyes with Woodard. “Twenty-five hundred a day.”

“Dollars or pounds?” Woodard asked.

Though he’d meant dollars, without batting an eye, Tommy replied. “Pounds, of course.”

After doing some quick calculations in his head, Woodard asked if that included his expenses. Tommy furrowed his brow. “Ordinarily, it would not.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Woodard shot back as he tended to when he believed he had an edge with someone he was negotiating with. “I’ll throw in a free suite of rooms, meals on the house, and use of a company car whenever you need it. Will that cover your personal needs while in town?”

Though this was exactly what he expected, Tommy made something of a show mulling over Woodard’s offer before responding. “Though I expect I’ll be in for a good bollocking when I tell my boss about that part of the deal, I don’t see how I can say no, Mr. Woodard.” Then Tommy frowned. “I will need to fly in my assistant.”

“Another Welshman?” Woodard asked in an effort to lighten the mood now that he’d managed to negotiate a solution to a problem at a cost far below what he’d been expecting to pay.

“Not even close,” Tommy snickered. “This girl is as American as Yorkshire pudding.”

Appreciating the stubby little Welshman was going along with his effort to conclude the business portion of their breakfast with a spot of humor, Woodard shrugged. “Well, in that case, by all means, count her in.”

Never having had an opportunity to go to Las Vegas, although she’d always promised herself a trip, let alone doing so via the private jet sent to pick her up, Jenny Garver was in a spectacularly good mood when she saw Tommy waiting for her at the terminal of Henderson Executive Airport. Flashing him the down-home country smile that he had found to be far more alluring than he expected she’d meant it to be, Jenny made straight to where he and Hughes were waiting.

When Tommy saw the oversized red duffel bag on wheels being pulled by a comely flight attendant in a white shirtdress following her, he cocked an eyebrow. “You do appreciate this isn’t going to take more than a few days,” he muttered as he took the duffel from the flight attendant and adjusted his grip to compensate for the bag’s weight.

Clutching the strap of her laptop’s carrier, a device Jenny never allowed to be out of her control, she tilted her head to one side. “What? Were you expecting me to go about as naked as a jaybird?”

Tommy grinned. “A man can always hope.”

Unfazed by the Welshman’s brashness, Jenny snickered. “Well, now I know part of the reason you asked Susan to send me out here. What’s the other part?”

“Jack here and I will fill you in on the way to the hotel,” he replied as he led the girl from Oklahoma out to the chauffeur-driven limousine he’d been given the use of for the duration of his stay.

Jenny waited until after she’d checked into her room and Hughes had gone to ask Tommy why he’d called on her instead of his own software expert. “In addition to being quite good at finding your way around the Internet, your boss told me your hobby is cryptography and cryptanalysis,” he offered.

Jenny shrugged. “I took a few courses in cryptography since I was thinking about going to work for the company but then chucked that idea out the window when Susan asked if I’d like to work for her.”

Having already concluded from working with him in New York that he was more hardware oriented, Jenny peppered him with a series of questions concerning what it was she would be looking for and what he wanted her to do once they’d found it. One question she didn’t ask, a question both she and Susan had pondered after Susan had agreed to Tommy’s request that she hire Jenny out for this job, was why he hadn’t called in Andy’s own software expert. Jenny couldn’t help but think Tommy, who had never missed an opportunity to engage in playfully suggestive banter with her while he had been in New York, thought he was simply trying to impress her with an over-the-top offer and first-class treatment he currently had access to in the hope he’d get lucky.

Susan thought otherwise. Tommy had struck him as more of a teddy bear than a wolf, though she did warn Jenny to keep her wits about her. What Susan suspected, in part due to a few things Andy had alluded to, was that things were not quite as cozy at Century Consulting as he would have liked. And while Tommy had worked well with Jenny, it did not take long for Susan to appreciate that putting up with his brash, almost brusque manner and personal habits that would have turned a goat’s stomach could get really old really fast. So it was more than the thousand dollars a day or a chance to reward Jenny for her efforts over the past few months that led Susan to agree to send Jenny out to Vegas. If truth be known, it was the opportunity to find out more about Andy’s operation as well as his personal life that she hoped Jenny would be able to weasel out of Tommy that tipped the scales. Had she known Tommy’s request was motivated by much the same line of reasoning, Susan G. probably would have said no.

Tommy’s insistence that he and Jenny work from an off-site location was endorsed by Hughes who, like Tommy, could not discount the possibility there was someone inside his own team who knew the online poker game was being used for purposes other than adding to Sean Woodard’s already considerable fortune. “They don’t necessarily need to be a part of the system,” he explained to Jenny, who had asked him how real such a threat was. “Far too many employees of the Martinique are paid well by all sorts of characters to do nothing more than turn a blind eye to what they’re up to or to be someplace else when they, the miscreants, walk through the doors.”

The room within the computer science department of the Las Vegas campus of the University of Nevada, which had been allocated to them for their use, came as a disappointment to Jenny, for she had been looking forward to working in what she called “the belly of the beast.” Still, the setup was, in her opinion, “not too shabby.”

Had anyone else said this, Tommy would have wondered about his or her sanity, for the room was in fact a lab where members of the computer science department’s faculty conducted research into the online behavior of organizations, government agencies, and, quite naturally, corporations like Woodard’s. “Mr. Hughes has been very generous to the university,” Hughes informed Tommy and Jenny as they were settling in at their respective workstations. “In addition to research on managing databases and data mining, they have generated some algorithms that have proven to be quite useful in maximizing the casino operations.”

“Translated into English, dear girl,” Tommy explained to Jenny without looking away from the computer monitor he was seated before, “Jack’s boss uses the school to come up with more efficient and novel ways of separating the people who visit his casino from their money.”

After tilting her head to one side and giving this response a moment’s thought, Jenny nodded. “Nothing wrong with that,” she chirped cheerily as she returned to logging in to the system. “Isn’t that what we’re doing to him?”

“We’re providing him a service,” Tommy shot back.

“I expect he sees what he does in the same light.”

Tommy was about to ask her how she figured that but decided to use this opportunity to strike off in an entirely different direction. “When I was in New York, you never did tell me how a country girl like you wound up working for someone like Susan G. in the big city.”

“You’re right, I didn’t,” Jenny replied without bothering to look away from the monitor.

After waiting several seconds for her to continue without her doing so, Tommy cleared his throat. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“How did the two of you find each other?”

“Oh, it’s a long story,” Jenny replied in a singsongy voice that told Tommy she had no intention of answering him. “Now, if you’re ready, what exactly is it we’re looking for?”

Realizing the young woman from Oklahoma wasn’t about to respond to his less-than-subtle inquiries into her boss’s past, Tommy filled her in on what he suspected and what he wanted her to look for.

Installing via a flash drive an open-source pattern-recognition program, which she’d spent several weeks tweaking, onto the system she was using, Jenny spent the rest of the afternoon playing around with various parameters as she hunted for discernible patterns, routines that were repeated in each of the games Tommy had given to her for analysis. Finally, she wandered off to find a coffee and a mosey around the campus, leaving her program chunking through her search strings. When she eventually returned an hour later, Tommy was about ready to bite her head off. Before he even got a word in, however, she plunked herself back down in front of the monitor, unlocked the screen saver, and lurched forward as something of a grin lit up her face. “Ah, there you are, you little sucker.”

“There’s what?”

“The key.”

“To the code?” Tommy asked incredulously.

“Yep! Well, at least one of them,” she corrected herself with scrupulous honesty.

Turning away from the monitor he’d been working from, Tommy slid his chair closer to Jenny’s. “Show me.”

“These people aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box, that’s for sure. They’re recycling their avatar names too often, along with the same crypto keys. By doing so, they’ve handed us a crib that will allow us to crack their code.”

“So what is it they’re up to?”

With furrowed brow, Jenny looked away from her monitor and over at Tommy. “Hold your horses, cowboy,” she chided. “How about giving me some elbow room here and a chance to go in and root around some?”

Pulling away, Tommy threw up his hands, palm out. “Okay. Sorry. I was just curious.”

“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” Jenny muttered distractedly even as she was turning her full attention back toward the screen, sporting a fiendish grin as she took to twirling the trackball with an alacrity that even impressed an old hand like Tommy.

With nothing to contribute at the moment and having no wish to interfere with Jenny as she blitzed through screenshot after screenshot of games that had been recorded and saved by Hughes’s people, he eased away from her, leaned back in his chair, and turned his attention into figuring out how he could wean some useful information concerning Susan G. from the girl. That, he concluded, was obviously going to be a greater challenge than cracking the code and tracking down the people they were being paid to nail.

4

It took Jenny late into the night and most of the next day, but by the time she and Tommy joined Jack Hughes at the Martinique’s own steak house for dinner that evening, she had a firm grasp on what they were dealing with and how the casino’s online game was being used. Over a porterhouse so raw Tommy found he could not help but ask if it was really dead, Jenny laid out her findings, doing so in the same manner she’d been trained to by Susan, who frequently had to remind the girl from Oklahoma that she, Susan, was a dyed-in-the-wool technophobe.

“When you get into the swing of things, it’s all pretty basic,” Jenny pointed out as she sawed off a hunk of red, semi-raw meat Tommy half expected to moo. “The key I used to unlock the system was the names the participants used for their onscreen avatars.” Pausing, she popped a chunk of beef in her mouth and closed her eyes as she savored the taste of fresh, grain-fed beef cooked the way she liked it.

Like Tommy, Hughes couldn’t help but be mesmerized by Jenny’s behavior, which he found to be as appalling as it was alluring in a strange, down-home country way.

“Though the participants in the game regularly changed the names of their screen avatars for each session, they linked the initial session keys to the avatar name sets and then were dumb enough to reuse them.”

“So you know who these people are,” Hughes interjected as Jenny set aside her fork and took up her glass of Coors Light.

With the graceful ease she’d perfected while attending the University of Oklahoma, Jenny was able to shake her head even as she was sipping her beer. “Haven’t a clue,” she blurted as she put down her glass, took up her knife and fork, and went back to sawing away at what was left of the sixteen-ounce hunk of beef in front of her. “I can tell you what they’re up to, though.”

“And that would be…?” Hughes asked, doing his best to keep the exasperation he felt over the tortuous manner with which Jenny was laying things out.

“The people are using the game as a commodities market. The person who opens the game is selling something to the other players.”

Hughes’s exasperation with Jenny’s manner evaporated. “Drugs?”

“That’d be my guess. It’s all rather slick, if you ask me,” she went on without waiting for Hughes to absorb the import of her revelation. “After the seller has managed to bring all the potential buyers to the virtual table, he uses the first game to issue a challenge using a common encryption key. Each buyer is then required to answer using a unique response. By doing so, the seller is able to find out if everyone at the table is legit. If they are, the seller sends a code letting everyone know the game is clean.”

After another break in her narrative in which Jenny took her time to enjoy more of her steak, she explained how the seller went about soliciting bids and, when he was satisfied, arranging for the delivery of the commodity.

“In game two, the seller states both the quantity he has to offer and his price. The other players who are the buyers bid against each other starting in the third game. Those who can’t keep up drop out, just like in a regular poker game. Those who ‘win’ a hand are then provided with the time and location of the delivery using the encryption system Tommy here discovered,” Jenny declared as she waved her steak knife, still slick with blood, in his general direction. “Pretty neat, huh?”

While neither Hughes nor Tommy would have used the word neat to describe how Sean Woodard’s game was being used, both had the same question. After glancing at each other out of the corners of their eyes, they turned their full attention back to Jenny. “Okay, where do we go from here?”

Before answering, she swallowed the last of her steak, set aside her knife and fork, and took a sip of beer, after which she shrugged. “Haven’t a clue. It was my understanding all you wanted us to do was to find out what the little varmints were up to. Unless there’s something else you want, I was planning on heading up to my room and getting changed before heading out to see what kind of trouble I can get into. You gents care to tag along?”

As much as Tommy wanted to say yes, the look he saw in his friend’s eye told him their day was far from over. So he demurred as politely as he could, waiting until Jenny had gathered her things up, thanked Hughes for the dinner, and took off. Turning to Hughes, Tommy sighed. “Well?”

Hughes took a sip of his own beer before answering. “Looks like you and me will be headed back up to see the boss tomorrow morning.”

“What about Jenny?”

Before answering, Hughes glanced over at the entrance of the restaurant where Jenny had disappeared. “Unless you have something you need her for, I think it would be best if we dealt her out of the next hand.”

Though Tommy did have something he wanted to go over with Susan G.’s assistant, it had nothing at all to do with what Hughes was talking about. “Let her have some fun,” he finally muttered. “She earned it.”

“Will she be all right on her own?” Hughes asked, betraying his concern for the girl’s safety.

Unable to help himself, Tommy guffawed. “If you ask me, it’s the people she runs into tonight you need to be concerned about.”

The two men parted with a laugh at the shared thought of the Oklahoma girl raising mayhem. While Hughes settled up the bill before heading up to the casino’s surveillance center to check on things, Tommy made his way out into the night as he, like Jenny, set off to see just what kind of mischief he could get into.

After leaving a message for Jenny the next morning, informing her she was free to do whatever struck her fancy for the day provided she stayed in touch just in case they needed her again, Tommy and Hughes headed out to brief Sean Woodard on what they’d found and find out what he wished to do.

Escorted once more onto the shaded patio by another comely young woman in a white shirtdress, Tommy explained what Jenny had found while enjoying what amounted to his second breakfast of the morning. In doing so, he used terms that were decidedly more technical than the girl from Oklahoma had in order to make what they’d accomplished come across as far more complex than it had been. Hughes, who’d served with Tommy, understood what he was doing. “The last thing you want is for an officer to think he can do something on his own” was a favorite witticism of his he had frequently shared with his fellow NCOs. “It makes them think they don’t need you, leading them to do things they shouldn’t be doing and creating messes that are twice as difficult to sort out than if you’d tackled them on your own in the first place.” So as he had often done while with the colors, Tommy used this opportunity to reinforce the idea his services were indispensable to Sean Woodard.

For his part, Woodard did his best to nod his head from time to time to show he was following what Tommy was saying and ask what he hoped were intelligent questions. Having no desire to spoil his friend’s fun and wishing to drive home the point he really had had the need to call in an outside expert, Hughes said very little. It wasn’t until Tommy had finished that Woodard turned to his surveillance head and asked him what could be done to stop the illicit use of the online poker site.

Having already gone over this in his own mind, Hughes didn’t hesitate to suggest they go to the FBI with what they had and allow them to handle it. “If we were to shut down the site, the criminals would only move on to another gaming site. While it would solve our short-term problems, I expect in time they’d be caught.”

“So?” Woodard muttered dismissively.

“So,” Tommy chipped in, “whoever looked into the matter, whether it be your FBI or ATF or whatever, would, in time, track the miscreants back to you. That would lead them to ask why you hadn’t reported their activities to them right off, causing the investigators to suspect you were in on it.”

Having no wish to open up his business affairs to the close scrutiny of an agency like the FBI, Woodard didn’t need either man to say another word. Instead, he turned his attention back to Hughes, who quickly laid out a course of action he thought would be the fastest way of ridding themselves of the whole mess. “Tommy has suggested that he and his team put together a package that lays out the mechanics of the scheme, providing just enough details of how it works to allow whoever it is that conducts the investigation to delve into the matter without our needing to do any more or to lead them — that is, their techies — back to us. It’ll not only keep them out of our hair but also give them an opportunity to show their bosses just how bloody smart and indispensable they are.”

“I like that,” Woodard muttered as he slowly nodded his head before turning his attention back toward Tommy. “How long will it take for you to pull everything together and hand it off to Jack?”

Easing back in his chair, Tommy made a great show of knitting the pudgy little fingers of his hands together and resting them on his paunch as he took to gazing up as if going over complex calculations in his head. “Oh, two, maybe three days. No more than four,” he added, glancing back down at Woodard.

Cutting his eyes over to Hughes, Woodard regarded him quizzically.

Though he suspected Tommy and the energetic young woman from Oklahoma wouldn’t need more than half a day since they already had most of it pulled together, Hughes nodded.

Satisfied the pair of Welshmen had a firm handle on the issue as well as a solution he could live with, Woodard turned his attention back to Tommy. “In that case, I’ll not keep you gentlemen any longer.”

Appreciating they’d been dismissed, Tommy rose to his feet and took Woodard’s proffered hand. “It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

“Likewise,” Woodard responded offhandedly as he turned his attention to a fetching young brunette in a white shirtdress who’d come up behind him bearing a stack of documents.

Only after they were in the car and well away from Woodard’s walled estate did Hughes glance over at Tommy out of the corner of his eye. “It’s not going to take you three days to finish up, is it?”

“Do you really want to know?” Tommy asked as he eyed his friend.

Snickering, Hughes shook his head. “No.”

“Good! Now, where are we going to have lunch?”

“You just had breakfast! Two of ’em.”

“So?”

Knowing better than pointing out the obvious and just as eager to spend as much time with an old army buddy swapping war stories, Hughes sighed. “What’ll it be? Chinese, Italian, or Thai?”

“Why not all three?”

5

Hughes waited until the morning of the third day after their final meeting with Woodard to set up a meeting with the FBI. At Tommy’s request, Hughes went alone with instructions to make no mention of the role either Tommy or Jenny had played in the affair.

“You appreciate I’ve been doing this on the QT,” Tommy explained. “The last thing I need is for some kid in the FBI contacting my boss and asking all sorts of questions he can’t answer.”

“You do appreciate the check you’re going to be paid with is going to be made out to Century Consulting and not you personally,” Hughes pointed out as he was getting ready to head out to the federal building on West Lake Mead Boulevard.

“I know. I might be a crafty little git, but I’m not stupid.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Hughes muttered. “You’re forgetting the time I left you in charge of the Scimitar in Sennelager and came back to find you’d managed to mire it in muck that was up over the road wheels.”

“Can’t blame that one on me, mate. That lieutenant of ours was the one who told me we had to move it.”

“Did he tell you to drive it into a mud puddle?”

“No.”

Hughes grinned. “I rest my case. Now, while you head off and get into trouble, I’ve things I need to take care of.” With that, Hughes left Tommy free to track down Jenny and see what information he could pry out of her concerning Susan G.

As before, this proved to be an exercise in futility. Catching up to her at the same roulette table he’d left her off at the night before, he peppered her with a series of less-than-subtle questions as she watched the play of the wheel, betting before each spin but betting small. Only when he realized what she was up to did he set aside his interest in the redhead she worked for and followed her lead, betting on the same spots she did.

In time, only after she’d gotten a measure of this particular wheel and run the odds in her head did she begin to bet big. And though she lost more than a few times, she was doing well enough to draw the attention of the pit boss, who, accompanied by a pair of uniformed security guards, came up to her and asked her to leave the table.

“I really don’t think you want to bother the girl,” Tommy enjoined as he stepped up next to Jenny and drew himself up. “Not unless you want to take a little trip up the mountain to Sean Woodard’s place and explain why you’re harassing his niece.”

Caught off guard, the pit boss took a moment to look back and forth between Tommy and Jenny, trying to decide if what he was saying was true. He still hadn’t come to a conclusion when one of the security guards’ radios crackled to life. After canting his head off to one side to listen to it, the guard frowned and then eased forward and whispered something in the pit boss’s ear.

In the twinkling of an eye, the demeanor of pit boss changed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tyler. I wasn’t aware who you or Ms. Garver were.”

“Well, now you know, mate,” Tommy snipped. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, I believe Jack Hughes is expecting us to join him for dinner.”

Stepping aside, the pit boss said nothing as he watched Tommy and Jenny gather up their chips and leave the gaming area.

“Is Jack really waiting for us?” Jenny asked when she was sure they were out of earshot from the pit boss.

“No,” Tommy grunted. “He’s busy keeping an eye out for people like you.”

“Oh,” was all Jenny could say as they headed back to the same steak house where Jenny, using her best Oklahoma drawl, told the waiter to rustle up a fat steer, knock the horns off, pass it over a fire, and serve it up.

As they were waiting for their meals, Tommy went back to peppering Jenny with questions about her boss he thought were innocent sounding. Having grown tired of his ham-handed efforts to pry information out of her, Jenny leaned over the table and glared.

“Look, cowboy, I expect you already know just about all there is to know about Susan, so save your breath, ’cos you’re not going to get anything more out of me.”

The young woman’s tone of voice and an expression that would have caused a lesser man to quiver were enough to cause Tommy to cease and desist. Besides, he concluded, she was right. Other than finding out if Susan G. and Andy had ever been romantically involved, something he expected even the grand inquisitor of Spain would have been unable to discover, he did know all he needed to about Jenny’s boss.

With that issue behind them, the two settled into enjoying a companionable meal together before signing the check over to their hotel account and heading off into the cool, desert night in search of a new venue where each of them could apply their own unique skills and talents to beat the house.

VIVA LAS VEGAS: THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

According to a recent New York Times news article (9 December 2013), the NSA and British intelligence were monitoring World of Warcraft and other online games in an effort to see if they were being used by terrorists to communicate with each other. The piece was published after we had started this story, and Jenny came up with the idea for this plot. Given that this is the second story line she suggested involving poker, I’ve come to the conclusion it would be unwise to play cards with her, at least when there was money on the line.

The ability of the NSA to monitor all forms of electronic communications has caused those engaging in criminal activities or waging war on the United States, the UK, and anyone who does not agree with them to explore new and ingenious methods of passing important operational information back and forth between themselves. Whether anyone has ever used this technique is a good question. Is it possible? Sure. Would it work? Probably. Is it something our cyberguardians need to keep an eye open for? I think so. I just hope they — the NSA and others — use their discretion when doing so.

HAROLD COYLE

VIVA LAS VEGAS: THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND THE STORY

The fact that criminals, malefactors, and others go to great lengths to both encrypt and hide their communications is as old as human civilization. Mary, Queen of Scots, whilst imprisoned at Chartley during the Babington Plot, used a substitution cipher to communicate with her supporters, hiding the messages in the bungs of outgoing empty beer barrels. Disastrously for Mary, Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, had already compromised both her secret communications channel and the cipher.

Most security-aware people are nowadays familiar with the concept of public key or asymmetric cryptography, however symmetric cryptographic techniques (in which both sender and recipient share a common key) are still very much alive and well.

For those who are interested in the basis for the WWII Japanese JN-25 code used in the story and also some of the tools used to defeat it, I would recommend visiting the Bletchley Park website, the WWII home of British code-breaking efforts.

Jenny used a series of open-source tools to help her first identify the criminals’ behavior patterns and then break the code. There are a wide variety of tools available for anyone interested, but for the story, we were particularly impressed by both the OpenPR project for pattern recognition and CrypTool. Her job was made significantly easier by the criminals themselves when they made the fundamental mistake of reusing their encryption key. This sort of clue or “crib” is something cryptanalysts pray for and gives cryptographers nightmares.

JENNIFER ELLIS