Dead Tomorrow

three-card poker tables, the roulette wheels and the craps table were in use. Good. There was often a lull in this pre-Christmas period, but business was building up nicely, with yesterday’s takings up almost 10 per cent on the previous week.
    He walked across the room, passing all the tables in turn, making sure that each croupier and pit boss saw him, then took the escalator up to the high-value room. As he alighted at the top, he saw Clint straight away, standing like a sentinel at his regular table.
    Clint was here at least three nights a week, arriving around ten and leaving somewhere between two and four in the morning. They had given him that sobriquet because Macaulay’s assistant, Jacqueline, once said he reminded her of the actor Clint Eastwood.
    In the days before the smoking ban, like the actor in his early Westerns, Clint always had a slim cigar wedged between his lips. Now he chewed gum. Sometimes he came alone, sometimes he was accompanied by a woman–rarely the same woman, but they all seemed from the same mould. He was alone tonight. There had been one with him two nights ago, a tall, young, raven-haired beauty in a miniskirt and thigh-high leather boots, dripping with bling. She looked, as they all did, as if she wasbeing rented by the hour.
    Clint always drove himself here in a black Mercedes SL55 AMG sports car, gave the valet-parking attendant a £10 tip when he arrived and the same when he left, regardless of whether he had won or lost. And he gave the same amount to the coat-check girl on arrival and on departure.
    He never uttered more than a grunt or a monosyllabic word to anyone, and he always turned up with exactly the same amount of money, in cash. He bought his chips at the table, then at the end of the night handed them in at the downstairs cashier.
    Although he bought £10,000 worth of chips, he bet only with £2,000 worth of them–but that was still ten times the amount of the average punter here. He understood the game and always bet big, but cautiously, on permutations that would give him small gains, but, equally, only small losses. Some nights he walked away up, some nights down. According to the casino’s computer, he lost an average each month of 10 per cent of his initial stake. So, £600 a week, £30,000 a year.
    Which made him a very good customer indeed.
    But Campbell Macaulay was curious. When time permitted, he liked to watch Clint from the CCTV room. The man was up to something and he could not figure it out. He did not seem out to scam the casino–if that was his intention, Macaulay reckoned, he would have done it a long time ago. And most scamming tended to be at the blackjack tables, which, throughout his career, had been most vulnerable to fraud from card counters and bent croupiers. Money laundering was Macaulay’s best guess about Clint. And if that was his game, it was not Macaulay’s problem. Nor did he want to risk losing a good customer.
    Traditionally, casinos had long beenabout cash. And casino operators did not like to grill their customers about the provenance of their money.
    All the same, he did once, dutifully, mention his name to the head of the local police licensing team, Sergeant Wauchope. It was more to protect his own back, in case Clint was up to something illicit that he had failed to spot, than out of civic duty. His first loyalty was, and always had been, to the casino company, Harrahs, the Las Vegas giant, which had always looked after him.
    The name that Clint used on the guest register here was Joe Baker, so it had come as a surprise when the Licensing Officer, returning the favour, had given him the privileged information that the Mercedes was registered to Joseph Richard Baker, an alias used by one Vlad Cosmescu.
    That name meant nothing to Campbell Macaulay. But it had, for some considerable time, been on Interpol’s radar. There was no warrant out for his arrest at this stage. He was merely listed on the files of several police forces as a person of interest .

20
    Outside Bucharest’s Gara de Nord, the chauffeurclosed the door of the Mercedes with a solid thud . And for a moment, cocooned in the sudden silence of the interior of the car, on the big, soft seat, breathing in the rich smells of leather, Simona felt safe. The man who had rescued her entered on the far side and closed his door with the same thud .
    Her heart thudded too.
    The chauffeur climbed in the front and started the engine. The interior lights dimmed, then