"Viktor."
He stops. Turns. His face is exactly what it always is.
"I'm not working for anyone," I say. "I know you don't believe me. But I'll prove it."
He looks at me for a moment, then turns and walks away without answering. The door closes behind me and then I hear the key turn in the lock.
I go into the office. It's small. Desk, chair, monitor, keyboard. No window. The password is on a Post-it stuck to the screen:Changeme123!.
I sit down. I change the password. I open the loss reports and start reading.
6. Dom
I watch him on the feeds for forty minutes before I admit what I'm doing.
The camera in his office is positioned above the door, angled down. It gives me the top of his head, the line of his shoulders, his hands on the keyboard.
He hasn't moved since Viktor left him there. No stretching, no restless shifting, no checking the room for cameras or exits. He sat down, changed the password, opened the loss reports, and started reading.
He's been reading for forty minutes. He hasn't taken a single note.
I pull up the system log. He's accessed six months of table-by-table loss data, the dealer rotation schedule for Q3, and the pit boss incident reports going back to January. He opened them in that order, spent roughly seven minutes on each, and hasn't gone back to any of them.
Either he's skimming, or he's retaining it on a single pass.
I think about the surveillance footage from last night and the way his bet sizes shifted with the count. That was not a man who needs to take notes.
The door opens behind me. Viktor.
"The motel room is clean," he says. "Some clothes. Toiletries. Couple of paperbacks. Thirty-eight dollars in cash. Three fakeIDs in different names, plus his real one. No phone besides the one we took, no laptop, no contact information for anyone."
"That's it?"
"That's it. The car is a ten-year-old Honda Civic registered under one of the aliases. Nothing in the glove box, other than some suppressants. Nothing in the trunk. The man lives like he expects to leave in the middle of the night."
Or there's another alias that we haven't found yet. The one where he keeps his real life.
I close the surveillance feed. "If it's all clean, send his things to his suite. Not the suppressants. Not the phone."
Viktor doesn't sit down. He stands where he always stands and looks at the blank monitor.
"You're watching him."
I don't answer. There's no point lying to Viktor.
"The ankle monitor is fitted," he says. "He didn't react. Just held out his leg and let the tech do it."
"Good. What about the Castellanos?"
"Luca's people reached out an hour ago. They suggested Cipriani's."
"How many?"
"Luca plus two. They're proposing lunch, which means he wants it civilized. He wouldn't pick a restaurant if he was planning to make a move."
"Or he would, because he knows we'd think exactly that."
Viktor grunts. "Your call."
