Dark Sundays Read online

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  He turned back to face her, took a step closer. “There are some who say it does not exist.”

  “I’ve heard that argument. Usually in court, declared by the lawyers of certain Italian families.”

  “That’s just denial. In the case of the Red Mafiya, no one is saying that certain crimes are not being committed—they’re saying there’s no central organization, no coordinated group.”

  “That seems unlikely.”

  “No. It is simply Russian.” He gestured at her with the dart, still holding it by the tip. “It is a direct outgrowth of communism. Under that regime, there were two kinds of criminals: the ones who learned how to manipulate the system and those who lived entirely outside it. For the first type, dishonesty became another facet of survival, something that was part of everyday life. You learned what rules you could break, where you could buy black-market goods, who you had to lie to if you didn’t want to be hauled in by the secret police. As in any closed system, there was competition, and those who proved better at it than others. Those who learned how best to break the rules, prospered.

  “The second type dwelled entirely outside the law, true rogues. Their existence was even more precarious, the conditions harsher and more unforgiving, the competition ruthless. Over time, the weak were caught and destroyed; only the strongest, the fiercest, survived.

  “And then the Wall fell, and those who had spent their entire lives learning to evade authority, to lie and cheat and steal as a matter of everyday life, were suddenly given the opportunity to join other cultures, live in other countries. Countries where the laws were not so Draconian, the punishments not so severe. Places that, in comparison to what they were used to, seemed rife with weaknesses to exploit, loopholes to be explored.”

  “Not so much a land of opportunity as a sea of potential victims?” Sara asked. “That seems like a pretty bleak view of humanity.”

  “Bleak? No. It is simply. . . Russian.” Dyalov walked up to the dartboard, pulled out his two darts, then returned and nodded at one of his bodyguards. “Boris? A moment, if you please.”

  Boris rose and was beside Dyalov in one long-legged step. He was tall but gaunt, his eyes dark and sunken, his head shaved. A blurred tattoo of an angel was partially visible on his neck.

  “Boris is ex-military as well. They had a very special way of playing darts in his unit. Boris, if you wouldn’t mind demonstrating?”

  Boris strode toward the dartboard, where he turned and stood to one side. He put out an extremely large hand, palm down, fingers extended as widely as possible, and placed it over the bull’s-eye of the dartboard. The tips of his fingers reached past the edges of the inner ring.

  “The rules are very simple,” said Dyalov. “Two players take turns placing a hand on the board. Once placed, any movement is a forfeit. Points are scored as usual—except that any dart embedded in flesh counts double whatever space it’s over. If it falls out before the player’s turn is over the points are disqualified, so the darts are generally thrown a little harder than normal. A bull’s-eye is particularly difficult to accomplish.”

  Sara realized that the dots on the back of Boris’s hand weren’t freckles. They were scars.

  “The hand on the board must be the same one the player throws with,” Dyalov continued. “It’s a game with more subtlety and strategy than might at first be apparent. A skilled player will try to target the web of skin between the fingers, whereas a novice will rely more on brute force. It is a game of nerves and endurance as much as accuracy.”

  He threw a dart, putting more effort into it than he had previously. The dart hit the board between two of Boris’s fingers with a different sound than before. Boris didn’t twitch. A thin line of red began to trace its way down the back of his hand.

  “You see,” said Dyalov, carefully lining up his next throw, “the fact that Russian names have come up in the course of your investigations does not surprise me. Circus performers, factory workers, blackjack dealers, it doesn’t matter. If a group of Russians—any group—have found a way to make some money by breaking the rules, then that is what they will do. And they will not stop, or be intimidated by the authorities.”

  He threw another dart. Thwuck, between the thumb and forefinger. Boris stared at Sara with dead eyes.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” said Dyalov. He glanced at Sara with a friendly smile, then leaned back and threw the last dart forcefully. It impaled Boris’s hand, dead center. The flights on the darts quivered slightly, but the hand itself was utterly still.

  Boris smiled.

  “Come back and visit anytime,” said Dyalov. “Perhaps we can play again.”

  Andolph Dell stared moodily out the penthouse window at the skyline of Vegas. “You’re sure?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” said Greg. He glanced at Nick before continuing. “We’d like you to pull a representative sample from the casino floor so we can check them.”

  “Fake chips. In my casino.” Dell shook his head. “First the burning blimp and renegade bears, now this. Somebody’s got it in for me.”

  “It’s starting to look that way,” said Nick. “Any idea who it might be?”

  Dell scowled. “No. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  “Any information you could give us would help,” said Greg.

  “I said I’m not sure,” Dell snapped. “Give me some time to think about it. I’ll talk to the floor bosses, get them to yank some chips. How many you want?”

  “Five percent would probably do,” said Nick.

  Dell groaned. “Fine. But they don’t leave the casino. I’ll have my own people check them, all right? Or are these supposed fakes so good you need an electron microscope or something to ID them?”

  “No, sir,” said Nick. “Your own staff should be able to spot them fairly easily. But there is something else we’d like to take a look at.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your alternate set,” said Greg. “We’d like to pull some chips from them, make sure they haven’t been tampered with either.”

  “Fine.” Dell waved a hand irritably. “Anything else around here you think might be fake? Art, furniture, maybe my dog?”

  “No, sir,” said Greg.

  “We’ll get right to work,” said Nick.

  As they headed for the elevator, Greg whispered to Nick, “Boy, I’m really glad he didn’t have a showgirl in there with him when he asked that question.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Oh, come on, like you weren’t thinking the same thing?”

  The Panhandle normally kept about two hundred thousand chips in circulation at any given time. That meant ten thousand had to be taken off the casino floor and checked by staff, a time-consuming process.

  Greg and Nick had it easier. They planned to sample only one percent of the alternate chips, a mere two thousand tokens, enough to fill two of the clear Lucite cases the casino used for storage.

  They waited outside the basement storage room until the head of security arrived. “I’m under instructions to let you take two cases and no more,” said Tanner as he walked up. “And I’ll have to personally verify every denomination and have you sign off on the total dollar value.”

  Nick nodded. “Okay, but this will take a while. We’re not just grabbing a single crate; we’re going to have to go through all two hundred boxes and take ten from each.”

  Tanner sighed. “I’ll get a chair.”

  He unlocked the door to the storage room, then followed them in and did the same for the cage the chips were stored in. The clear plastic cases were stacked on twenty large, two-tiered metal units, ten cases per shelf, five deep and two across.

  “Let’s get started,” said Greg.

  They worked with two empty cases at a time, Nick transferring stacks of chips from one crate to another, Greg taking a single chip and putting it in his own crate while keeping the various denominations separate. Greg didn’t bother with anythi
ng worth less than twenty dollars; counterfeiters wouldn’t, either.

  “I don’t see the point of this, to be honest,” said Tanner. He pulled an office chair on casters over and sat down. “These tokens are all brand-new. Radio-frequency identification chips in them, which broadcast a very specific signal when they’re scanned. I guess you could counterfeit the chips themselves—they’re just compression-molded plastic—but there’s no way to beat the digital encoding.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Greg. “Almost anything can be counterfeited, if you’re willing to take the time and effort.”

  “Yeah,” said Nick. “You ever hear of superdollars?”

  “Don’t think so,” said Tanner.

  “They keep the actual numbers hush-hush,” said Nick, “but reliable estimates put the amount of superdollars the Secret Service has taken out of commission since the early nineties at around fifty million dollars. You know why they call them superdollars?”

  Tanner shrugged. “They have a little red S on them?”

  Nick shook his head. “It’s because they’re actually higher in quality than actual dollars.”

  Greg dropped a chip into his crate with a tiny clink. “Even better than the real thing.”

  “What do you mean, better?” asked Tanner.

  “Well,” said Nick, “for starters, they’re made out of exactly the same cotton-to-linen ratio that U.S. currency has. They’re printed on intaglio presses, which is a very specialized piece of equipment only governments are supposed to own. They even use the same high-tech color-shifting ink we use, and the U.S. government is supposed to have an us-and-only-us contract with the company that makes the stuff.”

  Tanner leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “So far, you’re saying it’s just as good. How’s it better?”

  “Quality,” said Greg. “Under a magnifying glass, some of the details of the artwork are actually sharper than the originals. Talk about taking pride in your work.”

  “So where’s this stuff come from?”

  Nick shrugged. “Oh, there are different theories, but most of the evidence points at North Korea. They’re known to have the equipment; witnesses have come forward to actually identify where the printing presses are housed. North Korean diplomats have even been arrested carrying the stuff. But it’s not like you can just march in and arrest a country, especially not one with the fourth-largest standing army in the world. If you’ve ever wondered how the guys who run the place can drive around in Mercedeses while the rest of their country starves, though, take a hard look at the next hundred-dollar bill you see. Unless you have access to a forensics lab, you’ll probably never be able to tell if it came from Washington or Pyongyang.”

  “And it’s not like this kind of thing hasn’t happened before,” said Greg. “The Nazis tried to pull the same thing in World War Two. Printed almost nine million British bank notes, with a quality so high they were virtually indistinguishable from the actual currency. The plan was to drop them from aircraft flying over England and destabilize the British economy.”

  “So what happened? Hitler get greedy and decide to keep it all for himself?”

  Greg shrugged. “That part’s a little unclear. Some people say the Luftwaffe couldn’t spare any planes for the operation, but that’s always rung a little false to me. I think the idea of dropping a bunch of money on the heads of their enemy was just too counterintuitive to them. In the end, they wound up dumping a bunch of it into a lake. The rest just disappeared—for a while, at least. Notes kept turning up in Britain for years afterward, enough of them that they finally redesigned their money.”

  Tanner nodded. “Somebody couldn’t resist keeping a little taste for themselves.”

  Nick finished a case and set it aside. “Well, it was near the end of the war; a lot of high-level Nazis could see the end approaching, and it wasn’t one where the Deutschmark became the favored currency. There is part of the story most people don’t know, though—my favorite part.”

  “Do the good guys win?”

  Nick grinned. “As a matter of fact, they do. See, the Nazis were using Jewish concentration-camp prisoners to do all the work—the engraving, the printing, everything. When the project fell apart, the counterfeiters were sent to another camp to be executed, all at once. There was only one truck at the camp they were stationed at, so it took three trips to transport them all. On the third trip, the truck broke down halfway there, and they had to march the rest of the way—but in the meantime, the inmates at the new camp staged a revolt. The soldiers that had been guarding the first two groups of prisoners panicked and ran; when the new group of prisoners showed up, there was enough confusion that they could just melt into the general population of the camp and disappear. Two days later, the Allies liberated the camp.”

  “That’s a pretty good ending.”

  “If I may?” said Greg, glancing at Nick; he nodded. “That’s not the end of the story. A bunch of the money wound up in the hands of the Jewish underground, who then used it to get refugees to Israel. Exactly how they came by the cash isn’t clear, but I’m guessing the counterfeiters figured out a way to keep a little of the cash they were cranking out.”

  Tanner laughed. “Somebody’s always skimming, huh? Even when they’re printing the money themselves.”

  “Too true,” said Nick. “So if guys in a concentration camp being watched by Nazis with machine guns can figure out a way to cheat the system, a Vegas casino doesn’t seem like that big a challenge. No offense.”

  “None taken. Well, maybe a little—you are talking about my job.” Tanner got to his feet and stretched. “You know, a casino is a lot like a little country. I’m not talking about all the touristy stuff that tries to make it seem like you’re in some idealized version of Paris or Venice—I mean the fact that each casino has a self-contained economy. Right down to its own currency.”

  “I guess that makes you a five-star general, then,” said Greg.

  “Guess so. So far, all I have to worry about is internal security. But what if one of the other casinos took the country idea a little too far?”

  Greg stopped counting chips and looked up. “I’m envisioning an army of showgirls and magicians marching down the Strip.”

  Tanner shook his head. “No, I’m talking about using the same tactics that North Korea and Nazi Germany did. Flooding another country’s economy with fake currency in order to destabilize it.”

  Nick stopped counting, too. He and Greg looked at each other.

  “You think?” said Greg.

  “It’s no crazier than using a human cannonball to crash a party.”

  “What?” said Tanner.

  “Never mind,” said Nick. “But thanks, Mr. Tanner—I think you might have given us another avenue of investigation to pursue.”

  21

  WHEN THEY WERE DONE, Greg and Nick took the chips they’d pulled back to the lab. They hauled the cases in and put them on the light table, then slipped into their lab coats.

  “Okay,” said Greg, rubbing his hands. “Here’s where it gets interesting.”

  Nick was examining the two RFID scanners the casino had given them; they looked a little like a Dustbuster crossed with an electric shaver. “If by interesting you mean boring and repetitive, I’m with you. This is going to be like working a never-ending line at the supermarket, without all the thrills of ringing up purchases.”

  “That’s one way to look at it. I prefer to pretend I’m searching for illegal replicants by scanning their biochips.”

  “Have you been spending time with Hodges?”

  “We had lunch together. But come on, this is cutting-edge stuff. They’re talking about putting RFIDs in everything from passports to people. Cybernetic ID—how cool would that be?”

  “Depends. Ever seen Logan’s Run?”

  Greg frowned. “Good point.”

  Nick handed one of the scanners to Greg. “All right. The chips are programmed with two numbers: one’s a serial number, the oth
er’s the denomination. The denomination we check visually, the serial number we check against the casino’s database. Either one doesn’t match up, we know these have been tampered with.”

  “Right.” They got to work.

  Working with two scanners, it didn’t take long to process two thousand chips—less time than it had taken to pull them.

  “So far, so good,” said Nick. “Not a single discrepancy.”

  Greg sighed. “I know. It’s disappointing.”

  “You really thought we were going to find something?”

  “I did. I mean, the whole fake bear attack seemed to have been staged to get access to the basement level. I thought for sure it had something to do with the alternate chips.”

  Nick nodded, tapping one of the chips edge-down on the light table. “Yeah, there is that. Maybe we’re not looking hard enough.”

  “Or maybe we’re looking at the wrong thing,” said Greg, gesturing with the scanner in his hand. “The GIGO principle of information analysis.”

  “Your result’s only as good as the quality of the data you collect—Garbage In, Garbage Out. You think the scanners might be what’s been tampered with?”

  “I don’t know—but Archie probably would.”

  “Then let’s get him to take a look at one.” Nick held up the chip in his hand and studied it. “I’m going to take apart a few of the chips themselves, take a look at them under the microscope and see if I can spot anything there.”

  “Reverse engineering and deconstruction. I like it.”

  “This is a very simple device,” said Archie. He had the scanner’s components laid out in front of him on a table in the AV lab. “There are three basic kinds of Radio Frequency Identity Chips: active, passive, and semipassive.”

  “Right,” said Greg. “The casino uses passive chips, which don’t even have their own energy source. They just take the magnetic field generated by the scanner itself and turn it into enough electricity to broadcast a signal back.”

  “Exactly. A passive chip is basically just a glorified mirror, but it also breaks down into three subtypes: read only, read/write, and WORM.”