Cut and Run 3 - Fish and Chips

his palm.
    “Shit,” he said again.
    He squinted at the mechanism. He didn’t recognize the model, which meant it wasn’t American, Russian, or British.
    “Shit, shit, shit.”
    Del Porter wasn’t who they thought he was. The Bureau had nabbed somebody else’s informant. And whoever was behind Del Porter’s spying probably knew Ty and Zane’s secret as well.
     
     
    T Y STEPPED into the ornate casino room and looked around quickly, searching out Zane or any of the other members of the team who might have been hanging around. Where the hell were all the nosy support personnel when they were needed? Ty still hadn’t spotted a single one of them.
    He moved through the crowd slowly, seeking his partner amid the throng of gamblers, but he knew the poker game wouldn’t be out here. The ship-run games and tables were a joke, so the high rollers who had come to play had claimed a private room for hosting their own evening “tournaments.” Ty scanned the back walls over the gaming tables, finally seeing a door behind a strategically placed decorative screen. It was possibly a staff entrance, but more than likely it was the private room that played host to all the whales.
    He made his way toward it, the little iPod held tightly in his hand, hidden inside his pocket. Zane had their only gun, and Ty hadn’t even grabbed a knife for fear of not being able to conceal the weapon well, and he felt naked as he moved through the crowd.
    He stepped behind the screen to find an intimate, richly decorated room with a private bar and six draped tables. He stopped at the entrance, looking for Zane eagerly. If they could get what was on that iPod to someone who could speak the language, it might be enough for them to end this assignment tonight. Not only that, but the possibility that Del was an informant might be enough to make the FBI pull him and Zane completely off this goat rope. They could be screwing around in a foreign entity’s investigation, and the Bureau hated sticky political messes.
    Most of all, though, Ty was concerned that whoever Del was reporting to might be on board with them and may have already made him and Zane as frauds.
    He spotted Zane, sitting with his back to the entrance at one of the closer tables. Ty shook his head. Zane must have been the last one to arrive to settle for sitting there, facing the wall. Ty moved slowly, circling around a little so Zane would see him approach in his peripheral vision.
    Zane was sitting back, relaxed in his chair, mostly sideways to the table, legs crossed primly as he’d taken to doing when acting as Corbin. There was the faintest of cold smiles on his lips, but his dark eyes were hooded and blank. The look was intensified by his now standard all-black suit ensemble. He held a snifter of something that was a rich caramel color in the hand away from the table — the other men had glasses as well, and the bottle was there on the table. There was a decent amount of chips stacked in front of him. If he saw Ty, Zane gave no sign of it as he watched Vartan Armen, who was considering his own cards.
    Ty slowed, looking around the table. He’d never had occasion to play poker with Zane, but he could imagine his partner was good at it. He was a hard man to read and almost obsessively observant of small details. He continued to move closer, carefully coming up on Zane, hoping he looked suitably embarrassed to be interrupting.
    He put a hand on Zane’s shoulder, letting it slide up to his neck as he bent next to him. Both Armen and Bianchi looked up at him, as did the two other men at the table, but Zane didn’t acknowledge him.
    Ty waited a moment, watching the other players. Armen frowned a bit under Zane’s scrutiny and looked at the stacks of chips in the center of the table. Each chip was labeled as $1,000 — and there were a lot of chips out there. Armen smiled, set down his cards, and added two more even stacks of chips to the pile.
    Ty watched the game briefly. If it had been Zane’s money, he might have waited, but it wasn’t, and Ty’s hair was blond until they could get out of here. He put his mouth closer to Zane’s ear and whispered, “I need to talk to you.”
    Zane’s attention had transferred to the next man around the table, who had just as much a poker face as Zane. “Not now, doll,” Zane drawled as he set down his glass in front of him.
    Ty blinked at him in surprise. He looked down at the cards in his hand and then over at the other men