Seven-Card Stud

by Ava Drake

  Until now. Until an uptight Brit jumped into the freezing Mediterranean to save him and nearly drowned. Silly, sweet Collin. The spy who was anything but sneaky or violent.

  Oliver rolled out of bed and ran an impatient hand through his hair, which stuck out in every direction from his head. He really ought to clean himself up. Shave. Get some real clothes. He swore at his image in the bathroom mirror. Since when did he give a crap what he looked like? Since a neat, put-together British gentleman blasted into his life. Collin was a mile classier than anyone he could possibly deserve.

  Collin might have called him Shaggy in jest, but he’d always hated that character on the kids’ cartoon. It was too early to find a barber open now. But he picked up a pair of small scissors and painstakingly trimmed his hair as best he could. He followed up with a close shave and donned his best shirt and least-wrinkled khaki pants. Maybe tomorrow he could buy a new suit or something. In the meantime, his lover was waiting for him.

  Collin opened the door for him before his knuckles barely touched it. He slipped inside the room and into Collin’s eagerly waiting arms. Something warm and delighted unfolded in his gut at being wanted like this. Even if it was pure lust and nothing more, he reveled in the fantasy of Collin giving an actual damn about him.

  They didn’t waste any time on preliminaries and got right down to the business of stripping each other’s clothes off and tumbling into bed. They were hot and heavy, kissing and groping, figuring out what was going to go where, when Collin’s laptop beeped suddenly. He lurched like a gunshot had just exploded in the room.

  “What’s up?” Oliver asked.

  “We’re inside the El Rocca mainframe.”

  Collin disentangled himself from his arms and rolled out of bed. Oliver sat up, letting the sheets pool around his hips, swearing silently. The uptight workaholic had won out over the unrestrained lover without even a hint of a fight. He fought off a sense of rejection, telling himself that Collin’s job was important, and choosing it first was no personal insult to him. But the insecure child hiding deep in his gut was hurt anyway.

  Reluctantly, Oliver reached for maturity and told himself to engage with Collin on his own turf. He said, “Explain this to me. Why does a seaside resort have a mainframe computer anyway?”

  Collin sat down naked at the desk. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

  Sighing and telling his hard-on to take a chill pill, Oliver went over to stand behind Collin and kibitz on the hack. “What are you going to target now that you’re in?”

  “I was thinking I’d go for e-mails and the security camera feeds.”

  “Why don’t you pass the security cameras over to my laptop, and I’ll check out those while you sort through e-mails,” Oliver offered.

  In short order, the two of them were seated side-by-side without a stitch of clothing, typing away at their laptops like a couple of total geeks. But then Oliver found security films of the poker tournament, and his attention was arrested by the footage.

  “Somebody using hotel computers is closely monitoring the play of the poker tournament,” he announced.

  “Of course they are.”

  “I’m not talking general surveillance to make sure no one’s cheating or stealing chips. I’m talking, they’re watching hold cards and how people are betting.”

  “How in the hell can they see our hold cards?” Collin blurted.

  “They must have built hidden cameras into the poker tables. The visuals from the feeds are obscured, like they may be filming through fabric.”

  “‘They’ who?”

  That was a damned good question. Oliver answered, “I can’t imagine the El Rocca staff gives a flip about poker, which means the tournament director set up the surveillance.”

  “Why?” Collin responded. “This isn’t ever going to be televised, is it?”

  “No. And enough of the players here are banned from television-based tournament play that I can’t imagine the director plans to sell coverage of this event later, even to a private network or pay-per-view outfit.”

  Oliver frowned at Collin, who frowned back.

  Collin suggested, “Are they feeding betting information to one or more of the players?”

  “Possible. But why call a tournament at all in that case? Everyone has already paid the money to play. It’s not like the tournament director needs a particular individual to win this thing. Spying on the cards makes no sense.”

  “Unless,” Collin said slowly, “this actually is an elaborate job interview of some kind. The director could be watching how everyone plays as part of learning all he or she can about us.”

  “To what end?”

  “It’s a good way to find out how much nerve a person has. When they’re bluffing. What their tells are. How reckless or cautious they are overall.”

  “Maybe.” A doubtful pause from Oliver. “Still. Who would go to such lengths just to interview someone? It must be a hell of a job. Any progress on those e-mails?”

  “Whoever’s on that giant yacht in the marina is pirating the hotel’s Wi-Fi.”

  Oliver laughed. “Dude’s sitting in a yacht worth hundreds of millions, and he’s pilfering the Wi-Fi from El Rocca?”

  “Yup.”

  “Can you tell who it is?”

  Collin frowned. “The main user on the yacht goes by a code name. Zephyr. Most of the recipients of Zephyr’s e-mails have Greek names of one kind or another. Some gods, some mythological figures. My guess is that it’s an organization of some kind. Given how circumspect they’re being about revealing their identities, I have to surmise we’re looking at a secret organization.”

  Oliver reviewed the list of players remaining in the tournament. None of them appeared to be Greek tycoons who could have set up this tournament for their own personal entertainment. “Is there anything in the e-mails that might identify the organizers of this tournament or their reasons for doing it?”

  “Not that I’ve found.”

  Perplexed, Oliver kept browsing through the camera feeds around the hotel. Nothing exceptional leaped out at him.

  “Check this out,” Collin said abruptly a little while later.

  Oliver leaned over and read an e-mail that seemed to be setting up some sort of board of directors meeting to conduct a job interview of a new candidate. “What’s the big deal? Somebody’s getting hired.”

  “Look at the date and location.”

  He read, T.R. Two weeks from now. That could be anywhere.

  “T.R. The Rock. El Rocca,” Collin supplied.

  “That’s a rather thin guess. T.R. could be someone’s initials or a reference to a place of business as easily as it could be what you suggest.”

  “How long will the rest of the poker tournament take?” Collin asked.

  “Normally I’d say a few days. But this one’s taking an inordinately long time. Players are being exceptionally cautious, and the minimum bets are very low relative to the amount of money on the tables.”

  “So a couple of weeks?” Collin pressed.

  “Yeah. Probably.”

  Collin scrolled down through several more messages and inhaled sharply. “Zephyr sent this last night. Check it out.”

  Oliver leaned over to read the message.

  “Blood sport among the players proceeding about as expected. The Albanians appear to have been eliminated, although no bodies yet. Too bad. I had high hopes for at least one of them. Our weapon is performing as expected. Should make the final table if another assassination attempt doesn’t take him out.”

  “‘Our weapon’? Who do you suppose that is?”

  Collin looked at him grimly. “These guys seem prone to giving code names to one another. It makes sense they’d give code names to their targets as well. If you’re asking my opinion as an analyst, I’d have to say they’re talking about you. Weapon. Gun. You’re called Gun in the poker community.”

  Oliver stared. “Another assassination attempt? On me?”

  “The Jet Ski
,” Collin replied. “We have our confirmation that was a murder attempt.”

  “By whom?” he blurted.

  “No idea. Have you found any security footage of the beach in the El Rocca feeds?” Collin responded.

  “I don’t have the beach feed, but I do have the feed at the marina.” He saw where Collin was going with his line of questioning. Was there film footage of the attack on him? He scrolled back through the archives of the past week to the afternoon before the tournament when he’d gone swimming. “You said the Jet Ski came from the direction of the marina, right? What time was it, exactly?”

  “It was about three thirty when I stepped out to enjoy the sun,” Collin supplied.

  Using the time stamp on the video feed, he fast forwarded to three twenty-five and hit play. The marina was quiet, with no movement. But then a Jet Ski roared out from behind the massive yacht, Erebus, and zoomed out of the picture frame. Oliver paused the feed and rewound it a few seconds. Using stop frames, he captured a still image of a blurry Jet Ski. He couldn’t make out anything of the driver other than a black blob on the vehicle.

  Collin, however, dug around in his suitcase and came up with a magnifying glass with a built-in light of some kind around its edge. He leaned forward, studying the laptop screen intently through it.

  “Why are you using a magnifying glass?”

  “Blowing up an image on screen fuzzes out the edges of it as it starts to pixelate. The magnifying glass enlarges the existing image with less fuzzing.” A pause, then Collin murmured, “Slight figure. Female, if I had to guess. Caucasian.” Another pause. “Advance one more frame.”

  He passed Oliver the magnifying glass. “Have a look at this.” Collin jabbed at the screen as Oliver peered at the figure that leaped into view. Now that Collin mentioned it, that did, indeed look like a woman in the wet suit. He’d seen a whole lot of male and female surfers in neoprene body suits over the years, and those curves were definitely female.

  Collin advanced the video by one frame and muttered, “Look right there. A lock of hair escapes the wet suit hood. We advance a few more frames, and we see the hair get wet and plaster back to her skull. She’s a blonde.”

  “So are half the women at this hotel,” Oliver retorted. “Hell, Desirée Moorhead is a blonde. Maybe she tried to kill me.”

  “Possible,” Collin replied absently.

  Oliver stared. Seriously? Air-whistling-through-her-skull Desirée? His impression of her had been that the girl couldn’t plot her way out of a paper bag, let alone plan and execute a murder. Had his read on her been dead wrong? The idea shook his confidence badly. He’d always prided himself on being an astute observer of people.

  Collin used a small plastic ruler to measure the length of the Jet Skier’s thigh from hip to knee. He did a quick calculation on a piece of scrap paper and then announced, “The skier is five foot six to five foot eight.”

  Wow. Collin was good at photo analysis. Really good. Which jibed with his unspoken job as a spy or someone who worked with spies. Oliver commented, “That’s the height of most of the female blondes at the hotel, including Desirée.”

  “You think homicidal hookers are killing off the players?” Collin asked.

  Oliver snorted. “Have you talked with any of them? They don’t come across as smart enough to organize, execute, and cover up a bunch of murders on their own. If—and that’s a big if—they’re involved, maybe by luring players into traps or something, I’d wager they have someone telling them what to do. Which means we’re looking at a large-scale conspiracy and not just a lone killer.”

  “I have to concur,” Collin conceded.

  Oliver sighed. “And here I was, so sure the Albanian mob was behind the deaths and disappearances.”

  Silence fell between them. At length Collin asked, “Can we check that marina feed to see if anyone recognizable comes and goes from the Erebus? I’d love to know who owns it.”

  Oliver shrugged. “It’ll take a while. We’ve got days’ worth of film to go through.”

  “If we send that to my—” Collin broke off. “—associates, they can help us look through all the film and all the hotel’s e-mails. We need more manpower than just the two of us looking through all this data.”

  “And who might these associates of yours be, exactly?” Oliver asked.

  A pause stretched out while Collin undoubtedly measured the level of trust between them. Oliver could hear the thoughts tumbling around in his lover’s brain. Did Collin trust him enough to reveal his true reasons for being here? Maybe to reveal a true name or an employer?

  Did hot sex equate to trust or not? He knew the answer to that one through bitter experience of his own. Oliver sighed and spoke aloud. “I understand if you don’t trust me enough to tell me the truth.”

  Collin replied, “What I need you to do is leave this tournament before you get hurt or worse.”

  Oliver jolted. He hadn’t seen that one coming. “Why would I leave? I’m on the verge of winning.”

  “Or dying,” Collin retorted.

  “Why should I leave?” Oliver demanded.

  “Can’t you just take me at my word that more players will die before this is over with?”

  “You mean you want me to trust you?” Oliver asked ironically. “Sort of like me asking you to trust me enough to tell me who you work for?”

  The pause was longer this time, colored by frustration. Oliver knew the feeling.

  Eventually, Collin glanced up at him candidly. “I work for a company called Wild Cards, Incorporated. And no, we’re not a bunch of card players. We’re a private security firm.”

  “Who are you here to provide security for?” Oliver blurted.

  “We’re not at liberty to reveal information about our clients. Sorry.”

  Oliver frowned. “No offense, but you don’t act like much of a bodyguard. How does your playing in the tournament protect someone?”

  Collin shrugged. “It doesn’t. Security firms do more than just provide bodyguards. I’ve been hired to find out who’s running this event and what the winner’s prize will be.”

  “Okay, so let’s send your company all this information and then get some sleep. You and I have poker to play tonight. And it’s not getting any easier to stay afloat at the gaming tables.”

  Collin glanced at the camera feeds on Oliver’s laptop. “I know how it could get easier for us. We have access to all the play so far. We can study the other players.”

  “That’s cheating!” Oliver exclaimed.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, other players are being murdered. That e-mail called this tournament a blood sport, for God’s sake. I don’t think a little garden-variety cheating is out of line in this particular venue.”

  “How far are you willing to go in the name of winning, Collin?”

  Collin shrugged, refusing to answer. Except dodging the question wouldn’t change the fact that their lives might depend on how prepared they were to get down and dirty. Particularly if George Elliot was behind this whole tournament. Like it or not, he had no choice but to play this his father’s way. They had to join the blood sport if he and Collin planned to survive.

  Chapter Eight

  COLLIN woke slowly, disoriented. Something was strange about where he was. Gibraltar. Poker tournament. And then it hit him. He was not alone in bed. An arm was thrown across his stomach and a leg trapped one of his. Oliver.

  Smiling lazily, he reveled in waking up with his lover. He’d dreamed of a day like this for literally years. He felt more than mere triumph, though. Something felt wholly right about waking up with Oliver. He felt settled, way down in his gut where he hid his deepest feelings.

  Oliver stirred beside him, smiling lazily. And it melted his damned heart.

  “We’ve got a while before play begins,” Collin murmured. “Any ideas how we should spend the afternoon?”

  “I’m going to teach you how to play poker.”

  “I know how.”

  “No.
How to really play.”

  “Why?”

  “I need you to be here with me until the end,” Oliver answered.

  “You need to leave. We both know this tournament isn’t what it seems, and players are being allowed to kill each other in the name of winning.”

  “Which makes it all the more important that one of us stick around till the end of this madness and find out exactly what’s going on,” Oliver retorted.

  “I am not willing to risk your life just to get answers,” Collin declared.

  “I’m okay with dying.”

  Collin sat up sharply. “Why do you value your life so little? You have a great deal to offer the world. Minds like yours don’t grow on trees.”

  “Surfers like me do. And that’s all I am now.”

  “You’re in the top five of what’s reported to be the best group of poker players ever assembled. That’s pretty rarified air, my friend.”

  Oliver shrugged. “Soon, computers will learn to read body language and outplay every human on earth.”

  “Yeah, and you’ll be the guy programming and teaching that computer.”

  Oliver shook his head in the negative. “Artificial intelligence is not my gig. Makes me feel hinky, thinking about computers who can replace humans. I like my flesh and blood real, warm, and horny.” And with that pronouncement, Oliver fell on top of him, and they wrestled, laughing, until the bedclothes were everywhere, and they were out of breath.

  “The maid’s going to think we had a hell of a good time in here.”

  “Let’s not disappoint her, then,” Oliver murmured.

  An element of frustration underlay their lovemaking this morning. He still wanted Oliver to leave the tournament, and Oliver was adamant that he wanted to stay, regardless of the risk. Collin was the intelligence professional, dammit. He knew an unacceptable risk when he saw one, and the amateur surfer dude did not.

  “Earth to Collin, come in.”