The Thieves of Legend

by Richard Doetsch

  Wang and Jon spoke in Chinese, quick words accented by sharp nods as they headed down the central hall of the four casinos like old friends. Michael and Busch followed them past a bevy of guards, arriving at a large door where two guards stood at attention. Nodding to Wang, they slipped their keys in the doors and opened them.

  The rear section was a staging area where people raced about like bees in a hive, each with a task to be performed quickly and accurately. There were two armed guards standing beside a tall cart filled with chips ready to be deployed into the casino. They accompanied a steward whose sole job was to ensure that there was never a lack of chips to be gambled away by the patrons, gambled right back into the casino’s possession. There were pit bosses and croupiers ready to hit the floor at the staggered shift change, and three security types watched several monitors that scrolled images of the high-end tables—a tertiary security point, it was surely one of many.

  Jon turned to Michael and Busch. “Carl is part of the security detail and will be taking us on our subterranean security tour.”

  THEY RODE DOWN through six sublevels in one of the two freight elevators, each large enough to hold an SUV with room to spare. Glancing up, Michael noted the standard service hatch, but unlike most, this one had a McKellan lock on it.

  After a thirty-second ride, the doors opened to reveal a subterranean anteroom, a small vestibule with a single door, a camera affixed above it, and additional cameras in the uppermost corners.

  “Carl and I decided we’d start at the bottom and work our way up, if that’s all right with you.”

  Michael nodded, as if he had any choice in the matter.

  Without requesting it, they were buzzed through into what could only be described as a vault room, another antechamber. This one was much larger, the ceiling soaring up thirty feet, the room equally deep, designed to accommodate its single feature: a solitary door.

  The twenty-five-foot circular door hung on enormous four-foot hinges. The polished-steel access was open, revealing a vast space that stretched on for two hundred feet, where twenty-five more vaults stood, each one ten feet in circumference. They were equally spaced, architecturally beautiful, like an art deco design from the 1920s.

  There was a central desk where a large, broad-shouldered man with piercing eyes sat at attention. If the main level was staffed by those with beautiful faces sculpted by angels, the lowermost level required appearances that instilled fear. Rama Schavilia’s face had been noticeably broken on more than one occasion: His nose was askew, his right eye socket slightly off, giving him a preternatural appearance. He looked at the four men without a hint of welcome, glaring at them as if they didn’t belong.

  Ignoring the man’s glare, Michael looked around, examining the vault doors, all Crains; he knew them and their impenetrable reputation. Iron frames seated in concrete, three-inch steel rods running crosswise through the door into the frame, traditional interior mechanicals operated by key and combination wheel, no new-age computers or electronics that could be hacked or disabled by a thirteen-year-old runny-nosed genius.

  The overall space was designed in a way that exceeded his usual protocols. Michael’s security firm was known for the belts, suspenders, and parachutes approach, redundant backups to redundant backups. What he saw before him surpassed what he would have recommended for the world’s greatest riches, for the secrets of life, for the gates of hell.

  Michael turned around and looked at the subterranean room—at the floor, noting its metal construct; at the single guard, who was both intelligent and deadly; at the twenty-five-foot vault entrance door—and felt panic rise within him. Beyond that lay the elevators and the security measures above, a setup that left little to no room for compromise.

  Michael’s eyes finally focused on vault door number sixteen. It was Colonel Lucas’s goal, and now it was Michael’s goal. He had no idea what the interior of the vault looked like, no idea what the mysterious box he was to steal contained, but he knew that what lay within the impossible-to-breach space was the only key to KC’s salvation.

  SUBLEVEL FIVE, ONE floor up from the vault space, contained more than two billion dollars’ worth of chips. Sublevel Five’s sole purpose was to warehouse, maintain, distribute, and monitor the token chips, which, in the world of the Venetian, were as good as cash.

  “The Fort Knox of chips,” Busch joked to no one’s amusement as they stepped from the elevator and walked into a small holding area.

  A large cart, five feet high and deep, three feet wide, was escorted into the holding area. A man stood at the door with an electronic wand and waved it over the departing cart, checking the readout: $3,250,000; an exact match to the tag on the front. With a nod, the escort boarded the freight elevator and headed upstairs.

  Each token at the Venetian contained a small, electronic chip called an RFID: Radio Frequency Identification. The pinhead-sized device identified the denomination of the individual gambling coin, its location within the facility, and its age.

  The sophisticated system allowed the casino to know how much money was at a table, on the floor, in the rooms. The system analyzed the patterns of gambling, extrapolated the success rate of the house, and rendered a detailed report at the push of a button. It prevented people from introducing and playing with counterfeit chips. It deterred the staff from slipping chips into their pockets so their friends could cash them in later. While chips would leave the casino as souvenirs, as items forgotten in pockets, they would be deactivated after thirty days. And in the event a large volume of chips left the premises at a single time, security would be called in.

  It was estimated that this system saved the Venetian more than $100 million a year.

  Carl flashed his ID and the four were waved into a large room filled with carts, cages of chips, and a centralized computer station. Two guards stood watch over a staff of fifteen, each employee busy at his workstation, stocking carts and reading monitors.

  “Is Rene here?” Carl asked the lead guard.

  “Gone for the night,” the guard answered, his eyes focused on the room.

  Rene Clauge not only was in charge of chip security but was the designer of the Venetian’s custom RFID. The chip’s built-in encryption was like a Defense Department firewall. It made the technology of the metal strip within the U.S. hundred-dollar bill look like a book of matches in the nuclear age.

  The reader of the RFID was equally complex. Its multifaceted programming not only evaluated location and denomination but could track any of the ten-million-chip inventory for its life from table to table, from croupier to gambler to machine to safe. Through his design, Rene knew precisely how much money was on the casino floor, at the exchange windows, in the vaults on Sublevel Five, even in the pockets of the clientele. Rene’s scanners were not only handheld, like the ones the guards used, but built into the tables and the slot machines, each wirelessly linked to his mainframe. His system protected against counterfeiters who, instead of creating U.S. dollars and euros, had gone into the business of creating gambling chips. It was a battlement against unscrupulous gamblers and thieves: an electronic shield worthy of the NSA, the CIA, the U.S. military—but those agencies could never pay him enough for his brilliance.

  Carl explained that Rene had designed the space on Sublevel Five like a bunker to protect not only the chip warehouse but the system. The entire space was built within a Faraday cage, a system that shielded the mainframe and its ancillary components from outside interference.

  While there were breaches in accounting, guest suite security, and cash management—all of which was never shared beyond the senior staff—his division had yet to know an incident.

  Currently, the system showed $137 million on the floor: $11.5 million within the slot machines, $90 million at the various tables, and $25 million at the windows, with the balance in people’s pockets. On their busiest nights, the number would climb to nearly $250 million. There was close to $900,000 in unaccounted-for chips, but as more than 75 percent
of the denominations were five and ten dollars, this number was attributed to souvenirs taken by guests, nearly pure-profit souvenirs as far as the Venetian was concerned, unless someone came to cash them in.

  “GREAT PLASTIC MONEY—WHERE’S the real money?” Busch asked as they rode the elevator up.

  “Cash is handled on Sublevel Four, but we don’t have a prayer of getting near there; it’s more restricted than Sub-Six,” Carl explained.

  There were only five people who handled the cash. No one knew their process or how much actually flowed through the casino. It was rumored that skimming was anywhere between 10 and 50 percent. Though this was denied, it was suspected it was used to pay off various Triads, officials, and contractors, and to line the pockets of certain VIPs—things that were never spoken of but necessary in a world that had been controlled by organized crime for decades, in a place where the local government was in constant flux as various officials were on constant parade before a judge for corruption.

  The elevator arrived at Sublevel Three, where the lobby was far more welcoming than those on the lower levels.

  The heart of the Venetian’s security lay within a twenty-thousand-square-foot space dedicated to protecting the clientele, the ownership, and the facility, monitoring everything within the walls of the vast structure short of people’s thoughts—though they had experts on staff who some swore could read people’s hearts and minds.

  The security staff was not composed of the off-the-street, minimum-wage, rent-a-guard types that most industries employed to protect their most prized possessions. These men and women were highly trained, highly educated experts in gaming, security, investigation, and criminal procedure, with senses attuned to those looking to take advantage of the Venetian. They could spot the nervous first-time cheats, and the cool and calm con artists who excelled at sleight of hand, card counting, and all of the newfangled ways to tilt the impossible odds of gambling in their favor.

  And while there were no reports of any incidents at the Venetian in the press, that didn’t mean that people weren’t caught. Those suspected of cheating were politely surrounded and escorted to a rear section of Sublevel Three, which contained four interrogation rooms, a crime lab, and twenty-four jail cells.

  The security staff included individual guards, who manned various stations and stood imposingly at strategic locations, and an entirely undercover contingent of personnel who wandered the site with keen eyes and earpieces attuned to both their commanding officers and the security teams who watched from the cameras above.

  Michael walked around the central security room; the volume of personnel was staggering. There were nearly a hundred manned monitoring stations in an enormous corral that surrounded a circular command desk.

  There were monitors for the card tables, the slot machines, roulette, boule, sic bo, fan-tan, keno, and craps. Images of thousands of people gambling away unaware that God was watching; people who wished to remain anonymous, who didn’t want to be seen, were being scrutinized, their manner studied, their behavior evaluated. And not only being watched but recorded, preserved on a server for months and years to come. It was much like Vegas. Society had no idea how on-camera their lives really were. Though no one ever realized it… what happened in Vegas was recorded in Vegas, archived and forever available.

  Not only the gamers were being examined; so, too, were the guests arriving, the guests departing, the staff moving among the tables and the guests. For those checking in, a video image was attached to their account; for those checking out, an assessment was made of their luggage and bags.

  In the center of the room, upon a circular dais elevated two feet above the floor, were three men, headsets on their heads, tablet monitors in their hands. Above them were four huge arena-worthy TVs, where the feed from any camera could be isolated and enlarged to four feet high for all to see.

  There was no sense of complacency in the personnel, no tired eyes or room for fatigue; a single loss of focus could prove financially disastrous. No individual ever sat at a monitor for more than forty-five minutes without a minimum fifteen-minute break. The personnel in here were some of the most highly paid staff on-site. And those who caught someone, who provided information that captured an individual who was trying to take advantage of the casino, received a million-dollar bonus. As a result, it created the most diligent crew of workers the industry had known, and a quiet reputation for being an impossible mark for those who had even the smallest plan to steal from the casino.

  A deep sense of dread filled Michael; until now he had not fully grasped the scope of what he would be attempting. If he was to have any chance of success, he would have to literally blind every person in this room.

  Carl led them to the server room. The enormous space was nearly a thousand square feet. Banks of computer servers and communication interfaces filled aisle upon aisle of racks, all of it kept at a chilly forty-two degrees Fahrenheit for optimum performance and protection. The wires entered the room via large bundles within steel conduits that were embedded within the concrete slabs. Without asking for clarification, Michael spotted the video server, a five-foot-tall self-contained computer system; the wires feeding into it came from a video junction box where hundreds upon hundreds of video cables terminated. Michael didn’t need to examine the server. He knew it well—he had installed two himself.

  He saw circuit breakers and fail-safe switches; there were massive surge protectors in place to guard against power surges, lightning strikes, and electrical mishaps, whose jolt could render the system useless. There were two backup generators in their own rooms to supply power for a week before requiring a refuel; an additional central station room filled with hundreds of static monitors in the event of a sectional failure in the other room. Every potential obstacle, failure, and disaster had been taken into account and protected against.

  “In the event of a failure down here,” Michael said quietly to Carl. “Standard protocols?”

  “The entire sublevel, all six floors, lock up tighter than a nun’s legs. Interior doors seal, the elevators are recalled to the main floor, even the fire stairs seal up. Everything is locked down and contained until the all-clear is given and the system is up and functional.”

  Michael nodded, hiding his fear, for the task he had to accomplish was truly impossible.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE FORBIDDEN CITY

  KC stood in the middle of Tiananmen Square, staring up at the sweeping thirty-foot red walls on the far side of a moat that encased the royal compound known as the Forbidden City, a palace-city frozen in time, a world from antiquity in the middle of modern-day Beijing.

  The red fortress was nearly a half-mile wide, dwarfing everything around it. On each corner were large, deep-red guard towers that looked like palaces in their own right. They were like nothing KC had seen standing in front of any European palace. Not clunky and utilitarian-looking, these three-story buildings that sat atop the high wall were elegant, with stacked, multitiered roofs capped with golden yellow tiles, their corners crowned with dragons.

  A cold wind whipped through the open area, the crowds pulling their jackets tight as they moved en masse toward the entrance on this cold morning.

  “She’s late,” Annie said. She stood beside KC, dressed in a long black coat and dark Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses.

  “What are you going to do, shoot her?” KC said with a false smile. “We take the public tour instead—”

  “Not a chance. We are on a timetable. You have no idea of the number of lives that are depending on our success.”

  “If you’re so concerned about saving lives instead of taking them, then we only get one chance at this. I need to know what lies within those walls. Or maybe you can just let Michael and me go and find someone else to help you.”

  Annie glared at KC as they joined a group of tourists, European and American, an overly friendly guide before them. He was Chinese but spoke perfect unaccented English. Dressed in blue jeans and a North Face jacket,
he looked no older than fifteen, but he spoke like the grad student of Chinese history that he was.

  “In a dark time, the Forbidden City was a world of richness and opulence, a beacon in the center of a war-torn country. Rectangular in shape, the Forbidden City is the world’s largest palace complex: Measuring 961 meters from north to south and 753 meters from east to west, it covers an area of 720,000 square meters, or 178 acres. It is the largest ancient palatial structure in the world and is recognized as one of the five great palaces, in the company of Versailles, Buckingham, the White House, and the Kremlin in Russia.

  “Surrounding the enormous perimeter is a 150-foot-wide moat, the first of many fortifications to ward off attack from ancient enemies. Within the embrace of the moat, the red outer wall stands over thirty feet high, twenty-five feet wide at the base, nineteen wide at the top. It was specifically designed to withstand attack by cannon, marauder, and anything else hurled against it in ancient times. The twelve million bricks of the outer wall are made of white lime and rice, while the cement is glutinous rice and egg whites—materials some may laugh at, but they are of extraordinary strength. And to protect against those that might attempt to tunnel into the city, the paving is fifteen feet deep.

  “Each of the four sides is pierced by a gate: the Meridian Gate before us, the Gate of Divine Prowess to the north, and the Eastern and Western Prosperity gates. On the four corners, the intricately structured watchtowers provided a sentinel view over both the palace and the world outside in feudal times.”

  “This kid is going to make me crazy,” Annie said. “He’s an actor regurgitating a script.”