I’d forgotten all about the cat.
I picked up the bowl with a dishtowel, lest I accidentally make contact with its contents, and from behind me the cat had a fit, screeching and wailing, mad because I’d touched its food. I dropped the bowl to the floor. “Here, cat! Here!”
This was no way to start my day.
Not even five minutes from sleep, I turned back to the coffee pot and the cat was in my face. I let out a yelp. The cat moves at the speed of light. It arched up and tried to slap me with a right hook, followed by an uppercut, claws extended. I danced out of its way, but it continued to howl.
“What, cat? What?”
The food smelled hideous, overpowering the smell of the coffee, and the cat wouldn’t shut up, drowning out my favorite morning sound, that of the coffee brewing.
“What do you want, cat?”
It raced back and forth across the island, alternating between crying and lunging at me. I picked up the nasty food and put it back where I’d found it. The cat sat down on my kitchen counter (where’s the Clorox?), looked down its smashed nose at the food without touching it, hopped off the island, found its former spot on the rug, and was asleep in three seconds. The coffee was almost ready; the cat’s eyes were closed. I inched a hand in the direction of the nasty cat food to move it away from my coffee pot, and the cat, who could see through its closed eyelids, reared up and threatened me.
“Are you kidding me, cat?”
Just to make sure, I inched my hand toward the bowl again, and the cat showed me its teeth. Had it come to this? Feeding a cat on the kitchen countertop? I’d find Holder Darby today. To. Day. It might not be her cat, but she’d know whose it was or could at least resume custody of it.
“You don’t mind if I get myself a cup of coffee, do you, cat? Is that okay with you?”
It swished its tail.
Bradley left a note at the coffee pot. Wife. I’ll be in, around, or about the vault most of the day. First, another inventory with the accountants. Baylor will be with me. I’ll be in the vault again this afternoon for an inspection with Paragon. I need you to check in on the conference this morning, make sure all is well, look into the Holder Darby business, and don’t forget dinner tonight.
I’d like to forget dinner tonight.
* * *
The call came at seven seventeen. I was snapping on my watch.
“Are you the new Holder?”
No. “How can I help you?”
“This is Megan with Special Events. I work the front desk at the conferences. I just checked everyone in for the welcome breakfast, and there might be something going on here.”
“Such as?”
“I think someone’s missing.”
Someone is missing. Holder Darby. She should be taking this call. “Why do you think someone is missing?”
“Because people are standing around waiting on one guy who’s not here.”
“These people standing around,” I asked, “have they asked you about this missing person?”
“No,” she said. “It’s just weird.”
“Weird?”
“Weird. I’ve been doing this for five years, and this is weird.”
According to the conference schedule, it was Monday morning roll call at the conference, including a full-body scan (think airport screening booth) to gain admission to the welcome breakfast (Overdraft Omelet Station and Fiscal Responsibility Fruit Bar) deep in the top-secret banker chambers.
And according to Megan, there was one lone badge left on the registration table. I could hardly see how it was weird or my problem.
“I’m sure whoever it is stayed up all night gambling.” I slipped into my jacket. “He’s probably sleeping it off.”
“I don’t know.” She hit four octaves on the three words. “I can hear them. They’re very upset this man isn’t here.”
(And I’m supposed to get upset too?) (Is this what Holder Darby did all day?) “Has anyone called him?”
“They say he’s not answering.”
“Has anyone knocked on his door?” I stepped into my shoes.
“They say he’s not answering.”
“Who is they?”
“I don’t know their names. It’s the conference techs.”
“Techs? What kind of techs?”
“Slot techs.”
“Our slot techs? Let me talk to one of them.”
“They’re slot techs,” Megan said, “but not ours. These slot techs are with Paragon Protection.”
Slot technicians installed and kept slot machines in working order. We have enough slot techs for a baseball team. Paragon Protection, not in the casino business, shouldn’t have even one. Why would Paragon Protection bring its own slot techs?
“How many techs are there?”
“Three,” Megan said. “And they’re mean.”
“Why do three mean techs need one guest?” Maybe this is weird.
“I really don’t know,” the girl said. “But I thought someone should.”
“I’m on my way,” I said. “I’ll check on the guest.”
She gave me the missing man’s room number, a big fat suite, then asked what she was supposed to do with his badge. I told her (I don’t care) to lock it up. Behind the scenes of the banking industry, much like behind the scenes of the casino industry, is shrouded in secrecy, including, it would seem, a convention. The bankers didn’t want would-be bank robbers sneaking in, drawing maps, jotting notes, and walking off with their playbook, so they brought in a boatload of their own security (along with their own slot technicians) and issued badges, all set up and approved by Holder Darby. Who flew the coop.
The conference center, an escalator ride up from the east corner of the casino, starts with a large reception area, and by large I mean football field, and through the conference doors there are three dining rooms, a concert hall-slash-auditorium, an events hall, and breakout meeting rooms to accommodate up to a thousand conference attendees. This week’s conference, the one Holder Darby dumped on me, required an identification badge to get anywhere past the reception area.
The badges contained microchips. Fourteen different photo IDs, an interview with your third grade teacher, and a brain scan were required to get a badge, and if you lost it, too bad. No mixing and mingling with the other bankers during keynote banquet lunches, no playing in the conference tournament in the evenings, no Dionne Warwick Friday night.
My job, as I understood it (I’ve had this convention job twenty minutes), was to make several appearances a day in the reception area, ask if everyone enjoyed the Collateral Chicken Cordon Bleu, and get upset about inoperable microphones and light bulbs. In other words, once the conference began, Holder’s (my) job was one of hospitality. My plan for today was to be hospitable for ten minutes, then locate Holder Darby and four million dollars in platinum coins. I had no idea where Holder Darby might be, but I knew where to start looking for the four million. That part would be easy.
My morning list just got one chore longer, because apparently I’m expected to wake up conference guests and kick them to the weird conference. I will admit to being mildly curious as to why Paragon Protection had its own slot techs, but that’s it, mild curiosity. I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation, and as soon as I find Holder Darby, I’ll get one. Then all I have to do is find four million in platinum.
One last glance in the mirror to make sure I barely recognized myself, and, success, a total stranger stared back. At this point in my Super Secret Spy career, I’m a master of disguise. I use a product called ColorMash, a temporary hair color spray that (comes in sixteen brilliantly dimensional shades) smells good, washes out easily, and briefly turns my hair a different color. Today my caramel red hair was vibrant chocolate and my caramel brown eyes, via colored contacts, were china
blue. I put myself through this rigmarole because if I spy around looking like myself, I wouldn’t stay super or secret very long.
Today, I dressed in what I thought the rat-fink deserter/missing-in-action Holder Darby might wear to meet and greet conference guests, a power suit: navy blue pants and blazer, no-nonsense white silk shirt, all Diane Von Furstenberg, and on my feet, Kate Spade Yvonne patent pumps. Also new. And several inches of new, because I’m not all that tall and eye contact is a large part of hospitality. I looked like a movie star FBI agent. (Real FBI agents wear no makeup, cargo pants, sports bras, Reebok SWAT boots, and bulletproof vests. Movie FBI agents wear Diane Von Furstenberg power suits.) And I might as well have stayed in my pajamas for this, my first assignment on the first day of what would be a week of dressing up as an FBI movie star and replacing Collateral Chicken Cordon Bleu light bulbs, playing the role of Olivia Abbott, Temporary Special Events Coordinator, because the guest in room twenty-six fifty was, as Megan suspected, missing. In fact, he was gone. There was no guest in room twenty-six fifty.
Weird.
I eyed the closed bathroom door.
It was way too early for this.
I tiptoed over and tapped. “Housekeeping. Is anyone in there?”
From time to time, I think about getting a job at the mall. Or at Sonic, America’s Drive-In. Or taking up golf. I love the clothes.
No way was I going into the bathroom alone. I reached in my spy bag and pulled out my gun, gloves, and phone. I tucked the gun in the waistband of my Olivia Abbott pants, pulled on the gloves, and poked on my phone.
“Hey, are you here yet?”
“I’m in the dungeon,” Fantasy said.
Our offices are three large rooms located in the underbelly of (Mother Earth) the main building. As the crow flies, we’re a tenth of a mile directly beneath Style, a women’s clothing store on the mezzanine, in 3B. B is for Basement.
“Grab a print kit and come to room twenty-six fifty.”
“What’s up?”
“The guest is gone.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s not here.”
“On my way.”
I’m not going in that bathroom alone.
It looked like he’d stepped out for a paper. Twelve hours ago. The bed had been turned down, but not slept in. The dresser had a man pile: car keys, loose change, a small folding knife, wallet, and his room key. The closet held a week’s worth of conference clothes and a rolling suitcase large enough for four weeks’ worth of conference clothes. The television was on. His leather slip-on shoes were beside the door.
The small dining table was set for one with a barely touched meal, highly congealed, the chair pushed back from the table as if he’d just risen. A full glass of pink wine sat to the right of his dinner plate. An acrylic white wine chiller held the rest of the bottle, the ice long melted, everything room temp. His knife and fork were resting neatly on his dinner plate. Something or someone had interrupted this man’s dinner three bites in.
Fantasy knocked. Knuckle, knuckle, pause, knuckle, knuckle, bang—our secret knock. I have a passkey that overrides the programming on every electronic door lock in the building. I have one of the two all-access passkeys, Security has the other one locked in a vault, and I guard mine like it’s a banker badge.
Fantasy doesn’t have a passkey and doesn’t want one. For one, she can get through any door, anytime, anywhere. It’s her Superpower. For another, she says she has enough to keep up with and doesn’t want anything else.
Fantasy, who is six feet tall, my best friend, my wingman and wheelman, looks like Tyra Banks with blue eyes. And she has three boys, two dogs, and one husband who lose all their stuff all the time. They count on her to keep up with everything. Her boys are constantly calling to ask where their this and that are, and she always knows. “You cut that shirt up to make a slingshot last week. It’s gone.” And, “Your hamster has not been ratnapped. You took his cage to the laundry room Tuesday because you said he needed a time out.” And, “No one is wearing your shoes. No one wants to be in the same room with your shoes. You left them in the treehouse.” I guess keeping up with a passkey would push her over the edge. So she learned how to get around without one.
“Hey.” Her t-shirt said Bring It On. She took in the scene. “Yow. Where’d he go?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Have you looked in the bathroom?”
“I was waiting on you.”
“Davis,” she said. “You big chicken.”
“If he’s in there, Fantasy,” I don’t know why I was whispering, “he’s dead. Like Elvis.”
She pulled her gun from where she keeps it at the small of her back, marched over, turned the knob, then announced herself. “Coming in! Cover it up!” She kicked the door wide open.
This is why I called her. Honestly, she’s not afraid of anything. Not one single thing. Not spiders, the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, or men who may be naked and dead on the bathroom floor.
She poked her head in, then right back out. She stepped away, then swept out an arm. “Take a look.”
“Is he in there?” I don’t know why I had my gun drawn. If he was in there he was dead, and it’s not like I could kill him again. “Just tell me, Fantasy.”
“You’ve got to see this for yourself.”
The bathroom vanity was covered in stacks of cold hard cash. And hot off the press cash too. It was new car smell but better, because this was new money.
“How much, do you think?”
“I don’t know.” I ran a finger down a five-inch stack of one-hundred dollar bills. “Several hundred thousand, at least.”
“Good Lord, Davis, look. There’s money in the bathtub.”
We stood over the bathtub in admiration. “There’s a million dollars here,” I said.
“Why would someone walk off and leave this money?”
“They wouldn’t.”
“Look at this.” She fanned out a stack. “It’s uncirculated.”
Where did this money come from?
We threw the deadbolt on the guest room door and got to work. It was just us; neither Bradley nor Baylor answered their phones, so they were still in the vault. I snooped in the man’s wallet while Fantasy rolled his suitcase into the bathroom to pack. The wallet was a brown leather trifold. In it, a neat stack of hundreds so freshly printed I didn’t even try to peel them apart, but having worked around money for as long as I have, I eyeballed it at two thousand dollars. And nothing else. No driver’s license, no ID, no picture of the wife, no Capital One card. I dusted and got partial prints from the wallet, the dinner knife, and the room keycard, and a set of perfect prints from the wine glass.
“Hey, Davis.” Fantasy stood in the bathroom doorway. She used the back of one gloved hand to push her hair from her face and in the other gloved hand, she held thirty thousand or so dollars.
“Yeah?”
“This might be funny money.”
Casino Employee Lesson Number One: Counterfeit Money.
Fantasy and I probably know more about fake currency than the five hundred bankers here for the conference put together. You could wake either of us from a dead sleep, pass us phonies, we’d identify them by touch, sight, or print quality, then go right back to sleep. Technological advances have made counterfeiting so easy, and casinos are such an easy target for counterfeiters that, at this point, we’re experts. We could leave here and get jobs at the Treasury in a snap. We’re that good.
Fantasy passed me a banded stack of hundreds. I peeled off my gloves and fingered through the money. It felt right, weight and mass. It looked right, embedded red and blue fibers, embossed images. The printing was excellent with clear and unbroken borders, the saw-tooth points on the Federal Reserve and Treasury Seals distinc
t and sharp, and the portrait was lifelike, standing out from the background. The problem was in the serial numbers. Specifically the stars. Every bill in the stack was a star bill.
“What about the rest?” I asked.
“The whole tub.”
Every note in circulation has a unique serial number. It consists of three letters and eight digits. The first and last letters denote the series, and can be any letter but O or Z. O too closely resembles the number zero and Z is reserved for test runs. The second letter identifies the Federal Reserve Bank issuing the bill, and it’s always A through L. The numbers run the range between 00000001 and 99999999, and every thousand dollars or so, you run across currency with a star.
If a defective note, damaged or misprinted, is found after the serial numbers have been applied, it has to be replaced so the final count will be accurate. It’s replaced from a stash of bills printed before the production run in which the last letter of the serial number is a star, and the rest of the serial numbers don’t trace back to anything or anyone. Star bills’ serial numbers are completely random. There’s no way to track a star bill back to production, and therefore, when trying to identify counterfeit currency by serial number, star bills get a pass. The bills would have to have other tells, and these didn’t. It was a genius method of counterfeiting, one I’d never heard of. We had a bathtub full of perfect money, every bit of it with green hollow stars.
It was funny money. Very good funny money, the best I’d ever seen. At the same time it was useless unless spent one bill at a time. You could never deposit this money in a financial institution, take it to a currency trader, or even buy in for $500 at a blackjack table and not wind up in prison. Whoever passed this money off would never be caught. Whoever tried to spend it would be. And fast.
“Fantasy, this is a trap.”
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