DOUBLE KNOT Read online

  I patted the table, inviting her back to our inner circle. She stayed right where she was. Fantasy, with an exaggerated sigh, pulled the Hi-Point out and slammed it down. Arlinda reluctantly scooted her chair up a half inch.

  “It’s okay, Arlinda,” I tried to comfort her. “I promise it’s okay. Stay with me for a few more minutes.”

  She swallowed. She tucked her hands under her bare legs. She eyed what was left of her coffee in the martini glass.

  “Want me to warm you up?” Mother asked. “It’s the Starbucks.”

  “Arlinda.” I continued to speak to her in calming tones and if I kept it up much longer, I’d calm myself to sleep. I was tired, so tired. I wanted a martini glass of coffee too, about as much as I wanted out of 704. I had a daughter to meet, twins to deliver, and a husband I loved on the other side of the world. I guess the image of the people I loved was swimming in my eyes when I said, “Please help us.”

  She rolled back to the table.

  Fantasy tucked her gun.

  Mother poured another round of the Starbucks.

  “Arlinda, there’s one more thing I need to talk to you about.”

  She drew a deep breath, squeezed her eyes closed, and nodded.

  “I need to know everything you know about the banking activities in the casino.” I reached for the laptop and woke it up. “I think our detainment has something to do with the casino transactions.”

  Her chocolate-brown eyes popped open. “I don’t know a thing about that either! Seriously, Mrs. Sanders, Mrs. Cole, whoever you are!” She looked around the table for help. “I serve drinks!”

  “You may know more than you think you do,” I said.

  “I don’t. I have one guest.” She held up a single finger. “I know what he drinks. I know what his wife drinks. I know what his bodyguard drinks. That’s truly all I know.”

  She had to know more than that.

  “If you’ll let me see my V2 I can explain.”

  I raised one eyebrow at Fantasy. How much harm could it do?

  She tipped her head. I can shoot it out of her hand if I need to.

  I shrugged one shoulder. True.

  “I get it!” Arlinda said. “If I try to make a call I’ll be in a lot of trouble. I get it!”

  Fantasy stood. “Be right back.” She took off at a jog and was back in a flash. She held it out of Arlinda’s reach. “Don’t get any bright ideas.”

  There was a little tug of war.

  “Fantasy,” I said. “Give it to her.”

  “My guy’s name is Fredrick Blackwell.” Arlinda swiped her thumb across her V2, poked, then flipped it to show me a headshot of Fredrick Blackwell. He was in his mid-fifties, more salt than pepper hair, wide-set green eyes, bushy gray eyebrows, a thick neck, and he was dead serious about having his picture made.

  Jessica leaned in to take a peek. “Space Man.”

  “Why do you only serve drinks to him, his wife, and his bodyguard?” I asked.

  “There are fifty servers and fifty guests,” she said. “We’re each assigned a guest. Fredrick Blackwell is mine.”

  I held my hand out and Arlinda reluctantly surrendered her V2.

  I poked around and found her handy bio of Mr. Blackwell: Fifty-four years old, Houston resident, one wife, two grown daughters, three poodles.

  “He’s in outer-space asset management and regulation,” she said.

  “Come again?” Mother asked.

  “He’s in charge of space,” Arlinda said.

  “Well, I never,” Mother said. “What in the world?”

  “He keeps satellites from crashing into each other,” Arlinda said.

  “Lands alive,” Mother said. “It’s the Twilight Zone.”

  Jess was busy building a V2 house with a flat V2 roof from her stack of dead V2s.

  “What does a gig like that pay?” Fantasy asked.

  I read from Arlinda’s V2, “His net worth is five billion.”

  “Well, bully for him. Is he single?” Mother pointed to Fantasy. “She’s looking.”

  “No,” Fantasy snapped. “I am not.”

  “What’s his game?” I asked.

  “He’s a slot player. He’s playing Knot on Your Life.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  Arlinda tucked a thick lock of shiny dark bob behind an ear. “He’s even,” she said. “He spends more time swiping money in and out than playing. He puts a hundred thousand in, loses ninety-nine of it, then wins a hundred and ten. He deposits the win and starts over. And over. Why?”

  Heavy play. Heavy transactions. “How are the other players doing?”

  “Same thing,” Arlinda said. “Everyone playing is dead even. They win, they lose, they win again. Why?”

  “Even Steven,” Mother said.

  “And they swipe, swipe, swipe?” I asked.

  “That’s all they do,” Arlinda said. “They can only deposit a hundred thousand at a time and they go through it in five minutes. Then they’re swiping again.”

  I’d seen the Knot on Your Life slot machines six weeks ago at the Bellissimo with No Hair. I’d played it in demo-mode—buoys danced, ship wheels twirled, and anchors, even one on the payline, paid $50,000. Two paid $250,000. Three anchors hit the jackpot. It was a game built for billionaires with a mouthwatering payout of $2,500,000 for lining up three anchors, and it was a $10,000 per-spin game. Which meant, with a $100,000 deposit limit, the players were indeed swiping themselves stupid.

  Why?

  “Has anyone hit the jackpot?” I asked.

  “No,” Arlinda said. “Noticeably not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just,” Arlinda chose her words carefully, “no one is winning. But no one is losing. They’re constantly checking the balances on their V2s and it’s the same all the way around. Everyone’s even. They’re getting bored.”

  And I was finally getting somewhere. My guess was they weren’t even at all. In fact, the billionaires playing Knot on Your Life may very well be going broke. The money trail started at the individual player’s personal banks feeding the Probability accounts. Wins were supposed to go the opposite direction—through the Probability account back to the personal in Denver. Or Dallas. Or Des Moines. But what if they weren’t? What if the deposits on the Probability end were being diverted? Not going to Des Moines. Someone could be stockpiling the Knot on Your Life deposits and I needed to find that someone fast.

  I knew Poppy was someone, but she wasn’t the someone I was looking for; I knew what her role was and unfortunately for her, I knew exactly where she was. Everything else pointed to Maximillian DeLuna and his pilot Colby. If I was right and this was about diverting Knot on Your Life wins, they were only half of the story. The other half would be at the Cayman bank doing the collecting. If DeLuna was working this end taking the money, who was working the other end receiving it? I needed to know the names of everyone benefitting from the con on the Caribbean.

  Then what? I was locked in 704.

  If I could get to the casino when it opened tonight, I’d track down Fredrick Blackwell and advise him to dig a little deeper. There was no doubt his V2 was pulling the money going into the slot machines from his personal bank, but when he won, V2 might not be giving it back. V2 could be sending the wins somewhere else and lying to him. Showing him a balance that wasn’t really there. But seeing as how I couldn’t get to the casino or Fredrick Blackwell, then talk him into letting me have access to his personal account funding his Probability account, I’d need to sneak a peek the hard way. I pulled the laptop closer and wiggled my fingers over the keyboard. To the collection of ladies around the dining room table trapped in 704 with me, I said, “I’m going to need a minute.”

  Mother poured the Starbucks.

  *
* *

  I couldn’t go straight to the bank. The quickest way to open the door to 704 would be to hack into the bank processing the Knot on Your Life transactions. Within minutes, the door could bust open and we’d all be dead. And I couldn’t go the deep web route—banks were onto the deep web. So I needed a proxy server, a computer application that acts as an intermediary for users like me who need information from protected computer systems. Like banks. A non-judgmental cyber middleman who wouldn’t let anyone know I was asking, didn’t care who I was or what I intended to do with the information, but would help me gather it with no one the wiser.

  “So, what are you doing?”

  I was pretending to be Poppy in Firefox, searching the internet for an open HTTPS transparent proxy so I could bypass filters and censoring, both Probability’s and Fredrick Blackwell’s bank’s, which I wasn’t about to explain to Jess.

  “Jessica,” Fantasy said, “leave her alone. She’s working.”

  “I’m waiting,” I said.

  “On what?”

  “I’m waiting on a socket, Jess. And I think I found one.”

  Arlinda was eyeing her Starbucks martini. “Are there coffee cups?”

  “There were,” Fantasy said. “We ran out.”

  “Where are all the dishes?” Mother slapped the table.

  “Listen up.” I looked around. “I found a socket.” Garbled code flashed on the screen. “Now I have to build a script to get in. This will take a minute.”

  “So cool you know how to do this,” Jess said.

  “She can find recipes on the interweb too,” Mother told Jess. “Ask Davis for a pumpkin loaf recipe and she will give you ten.”

  “Pumpkins? Ten pumpkins?”

  I imported the socket, then the thread module, because I needed the proxy’s functions. I declared settings, adding a listening port, buffers, maximum connections, translators, and a connection function so I could shut it down fast if there was any indication someone out there didn’t think Poppy should be such good friends with a proxy server.

  “When you finish, will we be out?”

  “No, Jess.” I didn’t look up. “But I think we’ll know who locked us in here. Which will help get us out.”

  I asked the proxy server to find Fredrick Blackwell’s bank. It came back with six hits, Mr. Blackwell spreading the love around central Texas with five different financial institutions, but the last on the list was what I wanted. LTWI Trust Company. In Grand Cayman. I clicked, asking Proxy to sneak me in the bank’s back door, then plugged in the eighteen digit Probability number from his bio.

  “What are you going to do when you find them?”

  “Jess,” Fantasy said. “When she’s on the computer, you have to leave her alone. The answer is when she finds them we’re going to kill them.”

  Arlinda screamed a little.

  “I’m just kidding,” Fantasy said.

  “She’s kidding,” Mother chimed in. “I think she’s kidding.”

  “So, I think you should kill them.”

  Paydirt. I was in Fredrick Blackwell’s Probability account. I found the withdrawals Arlinda told us about, a long list of $100,000 debits totaling almost $2,000,000, and that after only one day of playing the Knot on Your Life slot machines. There were no corresponding deposits. Not a one. Not a penny of winnings going back into Fredrick’s personal account. I was right and the deposits were going somewhere else. And that was why we were locked in 704.

  I took a breather and sat back. I rubbed my eyes. “No one’s killing anyone.”

  Jess’s latest V2 house design imploded.

  Arlinda was getting edgier by the minute. “Let me ask you something.”

  “Sure.” I sat up and went back to the laptop.

  “There are four of you.”

  I nodded.

  “But she has five V2s.”

  Tap tap on the keyboard. “Uh-huh?” I asked Proxy to follow Fredrick’s money. Where were the deposits going? Who was ultimately behind this? Who was DeLuna working with or for? Who was stealing from the billionaires? Boom. Fredrick Blackwell’s deposits weren’t going into his Probability account because they were being diverted to an account at the Banco de la Elima, also in the Caymans. The account was a new one, opened forty-eight hours ago, with a current balance of $120,000,000. In just one day, the players lost that much money off Knot on Your Life. If left unchecked, DeLuna & Co. were looking at a billion-dollar paycheck by the end of the cruise. Give me a name, Proxy. Tell me who (to kill) locked us in here.

  “Mrs. Cole.” Arlinda Smith gently tapped the table beside the laptop with an open palm, finally getting my attention. “You have five V2s but only four people. Where is your fifth person?”

  My fingers slid off the keyboard.

  It was as if someone slapped me and Fantasy.

  It happens.

  “It’s not where the fifth person is—” I started the thought.

  “—it’s where the sixth V2 is,” Fantasy finished.

  And that’s how Super Secret Spies do it.

  “There are six people in this suite?” Arlinda’s head bobbed as she took roll around the table just to make sure. “Where are the other two people?”

  Proxy found the account. It flashed green on the screen and I had a target.

  I had two targets.

  There were two people on the receiving end of the Knot on Your Life scam.

  It was a joint account, registered to Bradley W. Cole and Jessica E. DeLuna. The Cayman account holding one hundred and twenty million dollars of skimmed Probability casino cash was Bradley’s. And Jessica’s. Who we never should have let sit in an armless chair on wheels.

  She must have been counting V2s, which must have the same effect on her as counting sheep. She went nighty-night, tipped over, and the rolling chair shot out from under her. Jess hit the floor and the chair hit the wall, both with a boom. Arlinda Smith clapped her hand over her mouth and screamed into it. Fantasy and I made a run for the sundeck. We’d buried Poppy in a Louis Vuitton trunk with a V2 somewhere on her person. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind Poppy’s V2 worked just fine. And with her V2, we could waltz right out the door.

  EIGHTEEN

  It’s not like we could waltz right out the door.

  It was the same problem we’d have faced if Arlinda’s V2 had opened the door: We didn’t know what was waiting on the other side. We knew for a fact the cameras would catch us, which might set the deadly consequences clause into motion, so we had to get out the door without the cameras seeing us. The only way we could come up with, over Poppy’s dead body, was the lifeboat in the closet behind the closet in Burnsworth’s room.

  Neither of us was in a very big hurry to revisit Burnsworth’s room.

  It’s not every day you search a dead body. We’d passed exhausted hours earlier, and stripping a corpse to look for electronics had done us in. The dark, cool, absolute quiet of the deck combined with the hypnotic lull of the sea would have been unnerving if either of us had a nerve left. We hid, shoulder to shoulder, sharing a blanket, on the side of a sun chair. Catching our breath. Thinking our next move. Wondering if we even had a next move. Acting too quickly, as in running out the front door, might mean winding up dead. Or in the submarine with No Hair. At least we were relatively safe inside 704. With beds. And a pool. And a computer. But not acting quickly, as in running out the front door so I could, at the very least, talk to my husband, left us in jeopardy. And we were sick to death of jeopardy.

  I honestly couldn’t believe Knot on Your Life deposits were going into an account in Bradley’s name. I couldn’t believe Max DeLuna and his pilot were that smart.

  “They set Bradley and Jessica up to take the fall for this,” I said. “They have slot players believing the balance on their V2s, knowing full wel
l that at some point, one of the players will dig a little deeper, past what the V2 says, all the way to their home bank, at which point the jig will be up.”

  “Probably why the pilot is in on it,” Fantasy said. “Quick getaway.”

  “While Bradley and Jessica take the fall.”

  “In the time it takes to clear Bradley and Jess, even if it’s only an hour, they’ll be long gone with the money.”

  “And they don’t know it yet, but they got a raise,” I said.

  “They don’t have to split anything with Poppy.”

  If we had it to do over, we wouldn’t necessarily put bodies in trunks, then put the trunks in direct sunlight. It didn’t feel hot, tropical breeze and all, but we weren’t dead and stuffed into Louis Vuitton trunks with the afternoon sun beating down on us for hours. As it turned out, the walk-in refrigerator would have been the better body storage choice. We found Poppy’s V2 strapped to her ribcage. And it was disgusting.

  “Do you think this is warping my babies?”

  “Your baby boys?” she asked.

  I’d have laughed at that if I had a laugh left in me.

  “Your babies have no idea what’s going on.”

  “Neither do yours,” I said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You need to come clean with them, Fantasy. Tell them the truth. You can’t let them think the divorce is Reggie’s choice or even a mutual decision.”

  “Maybe I’ll worry about that later.”

  (Later.)

  “It’s hard to believe I can’t call my husband. Just turn on this V2 and dial his number.”

  “Poppy would never call Bradley,” Fantasy said. “We’ll get out the door and use Arlinda’s phone to call Bradley. I doubt anyone cares who Arlinda calls.”

  “Right.”

  “We have to tackle Burnsworth’s room first.”

  “Right.”

  Neither of us jumped up to tackle Burnsworth’s room.