Carlota followed the woman into a large room with a dozen doors leading to smaller rooms. Two were open currently, revealing private card rooms with games adjourned or not yet started. The place ran around the clock, but even the most diehard players eventually succumbed to exhaustion.
At least one presumed. Chemicals and stubbornness could push that deadline off a considerable distance, but sooner or later you started making mistakes.
Scoring goals in your own net.
In her previous line of work—and her current one—such things would quickly prove deadly.
Carlota approached everything with studious deliberation. Including poker.
It was an ancient sport, both of kings and peasants. Only the scale of the stakes really differed. People sitting around a table with cards in front of them and money piled in ever-changing sizes as luck, intuition, and intestinal fortitude held sway.
The gender ratio in here was normal for this sort of situation. Five men for every woman. At least among the players. The reverse held for the staff, with most of the women chosen for bustiness that could be crammed into something uncomfortably tight around the middle, creating a figure visually top and bottom heavy.
She loathed corsets. And the men who decided women needed to wear them to be sexy.
Salonnia had many things that were beyond her power to fix, but gods in hell below, there were days she wanted to try. Bring down far more than just the Bureau. Preferably with fire.
Let the ashes cool and hope something better would arise from the ruins.
It might be difficult to do worse.
Still, these places existed. And money changed hands.
She had stashed away a tremendous number of credits over the years. Operational funds never accounted for at the end of an operation. Free cash confiscated when raiding an enemy agent, or taking one into custody. Or catching someone just as he thought he might defect, with an entire suitcase of various bills from various places.
That suitcase had been marked destroyed in the firefight.
Technically not true. Carlota had destroyed it much later, after emptying it into a different valise.
She didn’t need money right now.
The game in her head required her to travel. To make a splash in various places. While always looking over her shoulder for agents who might finally catch up with her.
Chapters Two and Three were posted, the first slow burn leading up to the really fun disclosures in Chapter Twelve. That was the one that she’d sworn an oath to never disclose on pain of death. The rest were just good for centuries in prison.
Someone would be coming for her. Soon. If they weren’t already on their way. But the galaxy was a big place. Easy enough to vanish if she really wanted. There were false papers and complete identities stashed on a number of planets, along with funds she could draw on.
That broke the rules of the game she had invented, though.
The Bureau had to have a chance to stop her. Had to have everything waved under their nose like a red flag. That would bring Fribourg assassins and Aquitaine spies sniffing, with everyone stumbling over each other and causing more chaos.
Three men in tailored tuxedos checked her up one side and down the other as she approached, as if she might be in one of the pots they won later and could claim her as a prize.
One of them wasn’t half-bad looking. The second was homely. The third reminded her of stories she’d heard as a child of bog trolls clattering at the window sill at night, trying to get in and steal unruly children.
“Here to play?” the middle man asked.
“Looking for a challenge,” she fired back, seeing if he might rise to strike the bait.
Looks weren’t everything. Even with bog trolls.
“Hoping for some game,” the semi-handsome one offered. “Stretch things out and see what there was to see.”
Her thigh was jutted out enoug—uncovered enough—to distract. His eyes caressed her whole body as he spoke.
Poker was a game of focus. Of insight into complete strangers across a green felt table, with pots frequently equal to an office drone’s monthly salary. And occasionally his annual one.
Bog troll grunted and ignored her.
The floor manager approached, his suit better tailored than the man outside.
“Welcome, guests,” he gushed quietly as he took them all in. “Is four sufficient or would you like to wait a bit to see who else might join?”
Carlota turned to one side and studied the room. A dozen other folks sat at tables or in chairs around the outside, relaxing, smoking, or just drinking. Perhaps they’d cashed out, or gone broke.
Or just needed time to decompress.
Carlota could not relax. She would be dead before she knew what hit her if she did.
Two fat merchants in off-the-rack suits came through the outer door as she watchec. The three men around her stirred like wolves smelling sheep. Studying the men, she had to agree. They looked like small-time players that thought they had fast-talked someone into an invite to the private rooms, rather than walking banks accounts needing to be emptied before they were sent home.
She made eye contact with the barely younger of the two, maybe only forty and slightly less squishy.
Slightly.
Carlota extended her smile in his direction and drew the man to them like magic, pulling his companion along with him like a tide going out. The floor manager turned sideways and watched with a knowing smile.
“We were just about to start a game,” Carlota offered to the men with the same breathlessness that seemed to work on most of them. “Were you here to play?”
The eyes on the older of the two nearly bugged out as he stared at her outfit. She wondered if they were from some quaint, agricultural world that didn’t have anything remotely like this casino.
Along with whatever other evils you could get into in a place without windows looking in or clocks nagging you.
“Gosh, that’d be swell,” the younger man said earnestly.
Something was off in his accent, but she couldn’t immediately place it. It didn’t fit the suit somehow, and she’d spent three decades mentally peeling away façades to find the spies underneath.
Briefly, Carlota wondered if some bureau stringer had thought to look in a high-stakes poker suite and gotten lucky to see someone that might be his quarry.
Not that she looked at all like the woman she’d been a year ago.
Or the stranger she’d assembled to replace her personnel file in those few hours between realizing that she was done and turning in her badge for the last time.
Paper had actually worked in her favor, there at the end. Electronic files could be accessed remotely and tampered with, sometimes without anyone realizing it, or at least not until it was too late to do anything about it. So everything was paper and long-term storage on film that would last for centuries.
Until someone swapped a roll when checking it in. And then accidentally put in a blank cartridge somewhere else, after thirty-seven such mistakes had been returned to salt-mine storage off sight.
The only records they had of her now were mental. People who had known her personally, or at least on sight.
Carlota figured that it would give all the other players an edge if Salonnia started off so badly handicapped. Fribourg might have images of her from as recent as twelve or fifteen years ago, depending. They might be able to age them up and get close.
At least until the Bureau told them that part of putting her back together after the…incident…had involved rebuilding her face. Subtle, to be sure, but her jawline was different. Her cheekbones had been enhanced just a little in an effort to balance out the broken bones for healing. The chin was softer.
And she’d let her hair go completely gray while recovering and as she spent time punching a stupid clock at a worthless desk.
Tonight, she presented as a thirty-eight-year-old social widow who had watched her foolish husband run off with a waitress, before cleaning him out in the divorce and starting to play the field.
In more ways than one.
It was a role she had played a few times when she’d been younger, when an overt honeypot had been more effective. The Vamp Years, as she recalled them mentally; the idiots in charge ordered her to present as a bubbly teenager too dumb to be a threat to big, bad, enemy agents.
At least until she got them asleep afterwards and could either kill them or inject a quick soporific that kept them entirely docile until pickup teams came to retrieve them.
Too many men led entirely astray by the divining rod between their legs.
Still, the two men didn’t strike her as spies. Not directly. Observers, maybe.
Bog troll had already entered the game room, so she gestured her two new marks in and let the two other men in tuxedos have a view of her bottom as they followed her.
The room was large but cozy, done in muted greens and blues that left it feeling larger than it was, while still keeping everything calm and pleasant. Octagonal table, limiting play nicely to eight, though she supposed that there might be larger tables in some of the other rooms. Comfortable chairs.
An uncomfortable waitress in a leather sausage casing accompanied them in and got drink orders. The floor manager delivered two decks of brand new cards, still in the wrapping.
The players took the stage.
Bog troll had ended up in the farthest corner from the door, with the two other tuxedos flanking him on either side. Carlota had gone right instead of left, putting her flash of thigh side next to the prettiest of the three sharks, rather than the two salesmen.
They were about to be bled dry. She saw no reason to pile on by distracting them any more than she needed to.
Plus, this way she could use that view on the one shark who held himself like an expert player.
She might need him thinking about getting her naked instead of calculating odds and counting cards.
The ancient game had been focused on odd numbers, using four suits of thirteen cards each. In the old times, you got two cards dealt, one up and one hidden, then bet. After that, a third card. Then a fourth. Then a fifth.
There was a variant with seven cards dealt, but you ended up burning most of the deck each hand when you had eight players. Six here was less complicated.
Still, the bog troll spoke.
“Six hand stud?” he asked, in a voice remarkably clear and crisp on such an ugly man.
Truly, a face for radio.
Carlota had played almost every variant of stud poker in the galaxy. Six was a rarer one. It caused the math to be far more obscure than five or seven.
She wondered if that was a comment on the other two wolves in the room with him, as the man hadn’t yet identified her as a serious player.
He would learn soon enough.
Everyone assented and began to pull cash to buy chips.
She wondered how interesting things would get.