Jackpot

5

The Golden Desert Casino and Resort looked like a stack of giant cargo boxes that had been designed by an abstract artist, painted in metallic pastels, and dumped in the middle of the Cotai Strip’s more traditionally garish luxury hotels and resorts. It was one of the ugliest things Teddy had ever seen, and he had been a lot of places and seen a lot of ugly things.

“Why does it look like that?” Teddy asked Dale Gai.

“The architect owed the government much money and agreed to do upgrades to the casino for free to help pay back the debt. Everyone assumes it was a terrible joke he played on the government that they didn’t get.”

“Why would the government give money to remodel a casino owned by an American billionaire?” Teddy asked.

“The casinos are the shining stars of Macau. How they look and how much money they make reflects on the government here, good or bad.”

“And the Golden Desert was reflecting badly?”

“No, nothing like that. The Golden Desert is the brightest of the shining stars. But they wanted it to be even bigger and more elaborate.”

“And Arrow Donaldson went along with it?”

“Arrow Donaldson didn’t have a choice.”

Dale led Teddy through the lobby of the hotel and up to the top level of the largest of the gaudy storage crates, where the security offices were housed in a spartanly furnished office suite full of uniformed security officers working on computers. Along one wall was a massive array of security monitors.

Stone Barrington stood in the middle of the room. When he saw Teddy and Dale approaching, he came over to greet them, then led them to a luxurious conference room with plush carpet and warm wood tones and, more importantly, generous glasses of cool whiskey. Dino Bacchetti, the police commissioner of New York City, Peter Barrington, and Ben Bacchetti were already seated at the table.

Stone thanked Dale. Dale smiled, nodded, then left the room. When the door was closed, Stone took a seat at the head of the table and picked up a remote control in front of him and played a video.

When the video was over, Teddy said, “Again. From the beginning.”

The video scurried backward before starting again. Nothing changed.

Finally, Teddy looked away from the screen and turned his attention to Peter and Ben.

“It looks real, doesn’t it?” Dino said. “If I hadn’t been sitting across from the both of them when this was supposed to be happening, I would be sending them off to jail myself.”

“It’s just so obvious,” Stone said.

Teddy nodded and looked back at the video monitors. Ostensibly it showed Stone Barrington’s son, Peter, and Dino’s son, Ben, at a high-limit poker table. The two men were cheating, and not subtly — pulling chips off the table when it looked like their bets were going to go bad and adding chips when their bets paid off.

The time stamp on the video was from two days ago. Peter, Ben, and Stone were all in town for the Macau Film Festival. China was the biggest market for U.S. films and, in particular, for Centurion Studios, where Peter was a director, Ben was the president, and Stone was a majority investor.

Macau was far behind the mainland China and Hong Kong film industries and didn’t have any formalized film schools or training programs. Seeking to expand Centurion’s share in the crowded Chinese market, Peter and Ben were part of a program to share their expertise in exchange for priority influence with their films.

“What do the security people here say?” Teddy asked. “Casino security bosses don’t normally let a bunch of folks sit in their camera vault unattended, especially not Chinese security bosses and American visitors.”

“Never could put one past you, could I?” Stone stood up and put his hand on Teddy’s shoulder. “I’ve worked with the head of gaming security in Macau before on a sensitive matter, so he owed me a favor.”

“This isn’t just about the video, is it?” Teddy asked.

“A few days before we found out about the video, we received this at our production office,” Ben said. He handed Teddy a typewritten letter demanding they hire the Solid Gold triad to provide security for the set or suffer further attacks.

“‘Further attacks’?” Teddy asked. “There have been other attacks?”

“They were small things that we didn’t even think about at the time,” Ben said. “Like, kids throwing rocks at the set and some punks on motorcycles driving by and threatening us. We just assumed it was locals hazing the foreigners.”

“But then this big guy showed up one day and ripped the air conditioner right out of our production building and ran off with it,” Peter said. “The next day we received the letter, and we went to the film festival organizers to ask for their help. They assigned us Dale Gai for protection, and to serve as liaison to the security team for the casino and the festival.”

“So it’s a good, old-fashioned protection racket,” Teddy said.

“With a new, high-tech twist,” Dino said.

Stone downloaded the security footage to a thumb drive for Teddy and told him they were heading back to the U.S. that night.

“The festival is almost over, and this is too much. But I want you to stay behind and find whoever is responsible. They tried to make our sons appear to be criminals.”