RainStorm

ever run. The last thing
    Kanezaki or his superiors would want would be a paper trail for the
    General Accounting Office to follow.
    "What if you actually win something?" he said.
    "I'll be sure to report it as taxable income."
    He laughed at that, and I said, "We're done?"
    "Sure. Oh, just one more thing. A little something. Last night
    someone got killed in your neighborhood."
    "Yeah?"
    "Yeah. Broken neck."
    "Ouch."
    "You would know."
    I knew what he was thinking. Kanezaki had once watched me
    take someone out with a neck crank.
    "Actually, I wouldn't know," I said. "But I can imagine."
    I heard a snort. "Just remember," he said, "even if we're not
    there in the room with you, we're still watching."
    "I've always suspected that you guys self-select for voyeurs."
    "Very funny."
    "Who's being funny?"
    There was a pause. "Look, it might be that I owe you. But not
    everyone here feels that way. And you're not just dealing with me.
    Okay? You need to watch yourself."
    I smiled. "It's always good to have a friend."
    "Shit," I heard him mutter.
    "If I need anything, I'll contact you," I told him.
    "Okay." A pause, then, "Good luck."
    I pressed the "end" key, purged the call log, and turned the
    unit off.
    He hadn't seemed particularly perturbed about the late Karate.
    Possibly indicating that the CIA wasn't affiliated with him. Or
    maybe there was an affiliation, and Kanezaki-san was simply out of the loop.
    I kept walking. Macau breathed around me, deeply, in and out,
    like a winded animal.
    in the evening, Keiko and I decided to enjoy a little gambling
    at the Lisboa. I couldn't continually set up for Belghazi in the
    hotel lobby without drawing attention to myself. And trying to
    wire his room the way I had Karate's would have been too risky-- if his bodyguards swept for bugs and found something, they might
    harden their defenses. So I decided my best shot at intercepting him
    would be not to follow, but to anticipate him.
    This can be easier than it might sound. All you have to do is put
    yourself in the other party's shoes: if I were him, what would I do?
    How would I look at the world, how would I feel, how would I
    behave? Just good, sound, Dale Carnegie stuff. Appreciating the
    other guy's viewpoint, that kind of thing. I'm-okay-you're-okay.
    I'm-okay-you're-going-to-die.
    Performing this exercise with someone as security-conscious as
    Belghazi, though, is tough, because the security-conscious tend to
    eschew patterns in favor of randomness. Random times; random
    routes; when possible, random destinations. They deliberately avoid
    getting hooked on anything--lunch at a certain restaurant, haircuts
    at a certain barber, bets on the horses at a certain track--that the
    opposition can dial into.
    But Belghazi's security consciousness wasn't perfect. His behavior
    suffered from what software types call a "security flaw"--in this
    case, his compulsion to gamble.
    That compulsion was probably part of what had enabled the
    Agency, and, perhaps, Karate, to track him to Macau to begin with.
    It was the same compulsion that I was now working with to get in
    of the few, who were of course hypocritically lauded by the many,
    the latter barely pausing in their infantile partying to wish the soldiers
    good luck at war.
    But none of it mattered to me. I had seen it all before, when I
    had first returned from Vietnam. I'd done my bit of soldiering. It
    was someone else's problem now.
    Keiko and I got out of the cab in front of the Lisboa, and I felt
    my alertness bump up a notch. I don't like casinos, in Macau, Las
    Vegas, or anywhere else. The entrances and exits tend to be too
    tightly controlled, for one thing. The camera and surveillance networks
    are the best in the world, for another. Every move you make
    in a gaming hall is recorded by hundreds of video units and stored on
    tape for a minimum of two weeks. If there's a problem--a guy who's
    winning too much, a table that's losing too much--management
    can review the action and figure out how they were being scammed,
    then take steps to eliminate the cause.
    But it's not just the operational difficulties. It's the atmosphere,
    the scene. For me, gambling when there's no hope of affecting the
    odds always carries a whiff of desperation and depression. The industry
    recognizes the problem, and tries to compensate with an
    overlay of glitz. I suppose it works, up to a point, the way a deodorizer
    can mask an underlying smell.
    We went in through a set of glass doors and rode a