DOUBLE KNOT Page 7

  He nodded.

  “Are we sure Fantasy’s going to make the cruise?”

  “Davis, they filed.”

  My heart hit a wall. We’d been holding our collective breath waiting for Fantasy and her husband Reggie to work it out, and filing for a divorce wasn’t a step in that direction.

  “Who they?” I asked. “He filed? He’s divorcing her? On what grounds?” The last time we’d talked, a good six weeks earlier, Fantasy’s greatest fear wasn’t that Reggie would divorce her—she felt certain he would. Her main concern was that of every mother: the fate of her children. To be determined in a courtroom based largely on how he divorced her: fault or no-fault. I’m a little of a divorce expert, having been through a few. Okay, three. Three divorces (humiliating), two previous marriages (even more humiliating), and in all that only one ex-husband. (Humiliating all the way around.) (But I’m not one to dwell on the past.) (What’s done is done.) (Move on.) Fantasy wasn’t a divorce expert. She’d been married to the same man, the father of her three sons, for fifteen years. She had an accidental affair with a psychotic surgeon and it cracked her marriage wide open. With this news, it looked like there’d be no repairing it.

  “I don’t know the details.” No Hair rubbed his bald head. “She’s not talking. Not that I’ve heard from her for her to talk.”

  “She hasn’t called at all?” I asked.

  “Not only that, she’s not taking my calls.”

  “Mine either.” She returned text messages in the middle of the night. She returned emails days later. Obviously, she didn’t want to talk about it. “I’ll go knock on her door,” I said. “I’ll just show up and make her talk. And I’ll do it as soon as I see my husband for five minutes, check in with Bianca, and bottom line, I need more hours in the day.”

  “Me and you both,” he said. “When we ever get this Probability business out of the way and before you have the babies, I’ll need your help restructuring this team. I can’t do this alone. I haven’t been home in time for dinner in two months. I haven’t had a day off in three. Grace is about to have a fit.”

  I felt my eyes sting. “I’m so sorry, No Hair.”

  He placed a big meaty paw over my hand. “This isn’t on you. But I do need this boat business out of the way so I can have my life back.”

  “Don’t you call it a ship?” Sniff.

  “Does it make any difference?”

  “The difference is a ship can carry a boat but a boat can’t carry a ship.”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “It’s just, you know,” I said, “the right word versus the wrong word.”

  “How long do you want to talk about this, Davis?”

  I picked at my Pea in a Pod sweater. “I’m done.”

  “When we get off the ship, you’ll be on maternity leave, Baylor’s pretty much set with Bradley, and Fantasy’s going to have to decide if she’s coming back to work or not. Thank goodness I still have you for a few weeks.” He tapped a stack of Probability files. “I need you to dig up dirt on these people.”

  “Again?” This was back when the babies had plenty of room to lunge and lurch. One or both did one or both. It was hard to tell. “Whoops!” I sat back and watched.

  “I can’t imagine,” No Hair said.

  “Swallow two squirrels,” I said. “It’s just like that.”

  “No thank you.” He leaned in. “Hello little Jeremys! It’s Uncle Jeremy.”

  My hands hopped all over the babies trying to cover their ears. “No Hair, stop scaring them.”

  Since the day we told No Hair about the babies, he’s worn me out asking me to name them Jeremy. Both of them. Jeremy.

  “What if we have girls, No Hair?”

  “It’s the twenty-first century, Davis. Why don’t you know what you’re having?”

  “We don’t want to know.”

  “Well, Jeremy works both ways. If you have a girl, or two girls, just spell it with an I.”

  “Really, No Hair? Twin girls both named Jeremy with an I? No.”

  “Why not?”

  We’d had this conversation countless times and we had it again today until I picked up a Probability passenger dossier and smacked him with it. Which led us back to work.

  “We’ve got the usual,” he said. “Hedge fund, dot-com, real estate, big money.”

  “I know already. I could recite the list in my sleep. Why do you need me to look at them again?” I’d run them through the wringer ten times already.

  “I don’t,” he said. “I want you to run backgrounds on their guests and their personal security. Let’s see what pops. The fifty suites have two guestrooms and they’re booked out.” He pushed a stack of a hundred blue folders at me. “We need to know as much, if not more, about the entourages as we do the One Percent.” He piled a smaller stack of red folders on the blue ones. “These too.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Ship security,” No Hair said. “I’ve pulled twenty-five from our casino floor, the vault, and hotel security for my team. Our guys. We know them. But Probability has its own security, also twenty-five. They’ll report to me and I want to know who they are.”

  “How will a security staff of fifty cover so much space?”

  “They don’t have to,” he said. “The surveillance on the ship is so severe, Davis, we could probably get by with half the security we’re taking.”

  “Severe?”

  “Let me put it this way,” he said. “Don’t try to hide anything. It can see through your clothes and down your throat. It’s military-grade imaging. Eight thousand cameras with proprietary microelectronic surveillance watching every breath every passenger takes.”

  “Surely not in the suites.”

  “No.” He shook his big bald head. “The public access areas only. The suites are so secure they don’t need it. They’re fortresses,” he said. “They can’t be breached.”

  Is that so.

  “What about the casino?” I asked. “A security staff of fifty can’t patrol the traffic, the gaming, and the cage.”

  “There is no cage.”

  “How can there not be a cage?” Casinos are about money. The money is kept in the cage. No cage means no money. No money means no casino. “I don’t understand.”

  “The boat is electronic, Davis, including the casino. Not a penny of cash will change hands. Everyone will be issued a phone, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and one of its many functions is banking. It also operates as a direct and unlimited line of credit for the players.”

  “The V thing?”

  “Right.”

  “With no cash and unlimited credit, the gambling will be outrageous, No Hair. They’ll have a few drinks, they won’t keep track, the players will swipe themselves stupid.”

  “They can afford it. And someone has to pay for the boat.”

  “Ship.” He shot me a look. “Do I get one of the V phones?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Everyone does. Everyone has to have one. It’s the only way to get on and off the elevators and it’s the only way to gamble. All transactions are electronically deducted from personal Probability accounts. And all wins are paid back into the accounts electronically. It’s the wave of the future.”

  “Where does all this waving happen?”

  “What?”

  No Hair had so much trouble keeping up with conversations.

  “Where does all this electronic exchange of money happen? At kiosks? In the submarine?”

  “Right in the gaming chair. Every seat at the gaming tables has a reader. The player swipes to buy chips and then swipes to cash the chips out.”

  “There you go,” I said. “There is money. Chips are money.”

  “Not Probability chips. They don’t have a long enough s
helf life to be considered money,” he said. “They’re only currency when they’re in play. The second they’re won or lost, they’re done. They’re electronically encoded. They have an imbedded funding chip that can only be activated for gaming once.”

  “The chips have a chip?” Encoded casino chips and tokens aren’t new. RFID tags—radio frequency identification—have been used in casinos worldwide for years, but for the purposes of security and inventory. Not to deposit and deduct wins and losses from individual accounts. I was impressed. “They cash them out then throw them away?”

  “No,” he said. “They give them away. The chips actually have one and a half lives. After the player cashes out the chip to his or her account, they can assign it a one-time value, then use it for a tip.”

  “Who is it they’re tipping?”

  “Casino servers, porters, concierge, the maître d’, anyone. It could be five dollars, it could be five thousand dollars, or fifty thousand dollars. And that’s how the staff is tipped. The chips are swiped to the receiver’s V2, and then it’s a dead chip.”

  “Holy moly.” I drew big circles around the babies. “Who dreamed this up?”

  “It’s proprietary software written by the processing bank.”

  “Which bank?”

  He patted folders on his desk. “It’s in here somewhere. It’s a Hawaiian bank with a branch in the Caymans.”

  “Why?”

  “Why the Caymans?”

  “No,” I said. “Why go to so much trouble?”

  “So there’ll be no currency. I doubt there’ll be a ten-dollar bill on all of Probability. No cash means no converting, exchange rates, or counterfeiting issues. But the main reason, Davis, is security. There’ll be no cash to guard, there’ll be no cash to steal, but the best news is how easy the banking will be. We won’t have to conduct transactions with fifty different banks. Just the one.”

  All the eggs in one basket.

  “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said. “Probability is the middle man for all the money between the players and the bank.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s money in and out?”

  “Correct,” he said.

  “How in the world were fifty billionaires talked into letting Probability do their banking for them?”

  “They love it, Davis. They’re gambling in international waters and their U.S. banks won’t know a thing about it.”

  And there was the brilliance of the plan. Uncle Sam and all.

  “If all the money is on the phone, what happens if a V-thing is stolen?” I asked.

  No Hair shook his head. “The money isn’t on the phone, Davis. Just the balances. The money is in the bank.” He glanced at his watch.

  “What happens if the system goes down and bank transactions aren’t recorded?”

  “That,” No Hair said, “would be a problem, but it won’t happen either.”

  “How do you know?”

  “From what I understand, the computer system is state-of-the-art processing, designed by the greatest nerds around, run by a geek squad in California, and it has four different backup systems.” He checked the time again.

  “Do you have somewhere better to be, No Hair?”

  “Not better,” he said, “but I do need to run. Get back with me as soon as you can on these.” He gave a nod to the stack of folders in front of me I could barely see over. “And you can skip two of them.”

  “Which two?” I began making arrangements to hoist myself and the babies out of the chair.

  “Your guests. We’re sneaking your mother in too late to load her into the system and I’m pretty sure Fantasy is clean.”

  “You never know.”

  “Hey.” Again with the watch. “You might want to come with me. The Knot on Your Life slot machines were delivered this morning. I’m on my way to sign off on them.”

  You never have to ask me to look at a slot machine twice. “Why are they here?”

  “To be programmed with player account numbers.”

  “Who’s programming them? That sounds like a job for me.”

  “It is a job for you.” He pointed at my Pea in the Pod sweater.

  Right.

  “And you’ve been in Pine Apple,” he said.

  Right.

  “And doing your Bianca business.”

  Right.

  “So?” I asked. “Who’s programming the slot machines?”

  “The Cayman bankers.”

  Something stopped me dead in my tracks. “Here?”

  We were at the door of No Hair’s office. “Yes,” he said. “Here. Why?”

  “I don’t know.” And by I don’t know, I meant I had a funny feeling. “It seems crazy to me that they’d do it here. Wouldn’t it be easier for them to program the slot machines at their own facilities? Or on the ship? Why here? How is it a good idea to let Cayman bankers in our house, No Hair?”

  “Davis.” He patted my back. “You worry too much.”

  As it turned out, I didn’t worry nearly enough. Not anywhere near enough.

  For the next week I put portfolios together on Probability’s guest’s guests and the extended security detail. Nothing popped. I peeked in every medicine cabinet, under every bed, and high and low in every closet. Before Probability pulled up anchor and left the Mississippi Sound, I could tell you where everyone on this ship placed in their fifth-grade spelling bee and their mother’s mother’s maiden name. But somewhere along the line, I’d missed something. I knew I had (because No Hair was being held prisoner) and I knew where I missed it. It was when No Hair and I left his office and took a service elevator to the slot machine staging area below the casino. I got a little caught up in how much fun the Knot on Your Life slot machines were—I lined up the anchors three times!—when I should have been paying attention to the Cayman bankers. They were the only people on Probability I didn’t know. But they knew me. And they knew No Hair. Because we’d let them in our house.

  EIGHT

  Anderson Cooper was a thief.

  I woke up Sunday morning on (Probability) the high end of the abject terror scale. I’d spent a restless night in a strange bed with petrifying images of No Hair having dominated the snips of dreams I sneaked in between tossing, turning, and trading places with Fantasy. Between the two of us, we might have pieced together three hours of sleep. Before I could shake the cobwebs, I was hit with bacon and a $5,000 Probability casino chip. A gift from Anderson Cooper. I was familiar with (bacon) casino chips, so it took me a minute to understand how strange, and miraculous, it was to see one in my alternate universe. I was locked in 704 looking at something that belonged outside of 704. My head fell back on the pillows when I remembered the velvet gift bag on a mirrored table in the sitting room. Rumored to have more than $25,000 worth of goodies in it, including a Roberto Coin pave diamond bangle bracelet. A welcome gift. Which probably included the casino coin. “Have you been snooping, Anderson? Did you open my prize?”

  She balanced on the babies and pawed the chip, flipping it on my chest, wanting praise. I tapped her nose twice in thanks. I picked it up. “What did you do with the Roberto Coin bangle, young lady?”

  She’d shown her burglar proclivities way back. It started with a necklace. My older sister and only sibling, Meredith, and my niece Riley, who lived in Pine Apple a block from my parents, came to visit one weekend when Anderson was just a few months old. Meredith busted into our bedroom the first morning at the absolute crack of dawn. “My diamond necklace is gone.”

  “What?” The two-babies news was very new, the reason Meredith had come—we needed something to celebrate—and it all came flying at me too fast that morning. “Is Mother okay?”

  “Dammit, Davis!” She was staring and pointing at my still relatively flat stomac
h.

  Was this about the twins?

  She snatched her necklace from the bedspread I was under. “Do you not have enough jewelry of your own?”

  Anderson stole all kinds of goodies and brought them to me. If she thought it was important to me and if she could carry it, she snatched it. She was forever taking things from Bradley—his socks, his keys, food off his plate when his head was turned, then landing them in my lap. “Be glad,” Bradley said, “she’s a thief and not a hunter. If she were a hunter she’d bring you birds, gophers, and snakes.”

  I’ll take pizza crusts, diamonds, and casino chips over gophers every day of the week.

  I said good morning to the babies, promised them I’d do whatever it took to keep them safe until we were back on dry land, palmed the casino chip, and tried to prioritize what all I wanted to accomplish in the first five minutes of my second day of captivity on a luxury cruise liner. (Get out, bust No Hair out, and go home. All in five minutes.) Swinging my legs off the bed, I made a more reasonable game plan: calm myself down, somehow wrangle into my maternity yoga pants, then find the bacon. I’d figure out how to get out of 704 and rescue No Hair after breakfast. It was, after all, the most important meal of the day. This would be a big day. It would take a big breakfast.

  With a heavy heart, I brushed my teeth, my eyes not leaving the reflection of my cat’s eyes in the mirror. The same mirror that had broken the news of our imprisonment. The questions that had haunted my sleep hit me harder and faster in the light of day: What all could I accomplish without engaging the deadly punishment clause of the letter? What was this about, who was behind it, where was No Hair, and was someone in 704 aiding and abetting? Then there was the biggest question of them all: Could I accomplish anything without my mother catching on? Anderson watched my dark introspection. “Who came in here?” I asked through toothpaste. “Who left us a letter?”