Jackpot

21

The camera on Bingo’s drone was destroyed when the Americans shot it, but Bingo was able to hack into the municipal camera system and track the Americans as they sped away toward a waterfront warehouse. Once he saw agents pick up pieces of the drone and load them into their vehicles, he knew they would eventually trace them and come up with the programming code he’d used with Sonny Ma’s digital fingerprints all over it.

His work was done, so he headed back to the casino to check in with Ziggy Peng. And to see if Dale Gai had managed to get herself into any more trouble.

Nobody paid attention to Dale Gai except Bingo. Well, nobody paid attention to anything other than Dale Gai’s looks except Bingo. Bingo was not interested in romantic entanglements, but Dale Gai intrigued him. She was smarter than the other security assistants who had worked with Ziggy Peng, though Ziggy didn’t seem to realize it.

Dale Gai had only been working at the casino for a month the first time Bingo encountered her. At first, he suspected she was a spy. Then he wondered if she was looking for revenge against someone in the organization. Eventually, though, he figured out that she was none of those things. She appeared to be playing a long game, more focused on Arrow Donaldson than any of the people involved in the day-to-day operations of the casino. No one else was smart enough to figure this out, and Bingo wasn’t going to let on what he knew, so he continued to watch to see if one day Dale Gai would do something he could benefit from.

One thing he knew they shared in common was a love of gambling. Baccarat was the most popular game at the casino and was very popular among his friends and family because they believed in fate, and baccarat was as pure a game of chance as you could get in a casino. But Bingo, and Dale Gai from what he’d seen, preferred blackjack. It was also popular with the casino crowd, and if you knew what you were doing, you could make some decent money once in a while. He sat down at one of the tables when he returned to the casino, but after a couple of bad hands, he left the table and went to the security suite to find Ziggy Peng.

Ziggy was not in his office and Dale Gai didn’t seem to be around, either. Bingo knew better than to ask anyone in the tight-lipped security office if they knew where either of them were, so he let himself unassumingly into Ziggy office. Maybe the man had left a clue as to where he might be or what he might be up to.

He noticed immediately that Ziggy’s office chair was pulled up close to the security monitors in the far corner of his office. Bingo had a program on his phone that he used to monitor activity on Ziggy’s computer, and it didn’t take long to figure out Ziggy had been watching Dale Gai and the American they’d called Stone Barrington. The last bit of video Ziggy had watched was of Dale and Stone entering one of the casino’s hotel rooms. Bingo wrote down the number and headed to the room.