RainStorm Read Online Free PDF Page B

Karate, to track him to Macau to begin with.
    It was the same compulsion that I was now working with to get in
    of the few, who were of course hypocritically lauded by the many,
    the latter barely pausing in their infantile partying to wish the soldiers
    good luck at war.
    But none of it mattered to me. I had seen it all before, when I
    had first returned from Vietnam. I'd done my bit of soldiering. It
    was someone else's problem now.
    Keiko and I got out of the cab in front of the Lisboa, and I felt
    my alertness bump up a notch. I don't like casinos, in Macau, Las
    Vegas, or anywhere else. The entrances and exits tend to be too
    tightly controlled, for one thing. The camera and surveillance networks
    are the best in the world, for another. Every move you make
    in a gaming hall is recorded by hundreds of video units and stored on
    tape for a minimum of two weeks. If there's a problem--a guy who's
    winning too much, a table that's losing too much--management
    can review the action and figure out how they were being scammed,
    then take steps to eliminate the cause.
    But it's not just the operational difficulties. It's the atmosphere,
    the scene. For me, gambling when there's no hope of affecting the
    odds always carries a whiff of desperation and depression. The industry
    recognizes the problem, and tries to compensate with an
    overlay of glitz. I suppose it works, up to a point, the way a deodorizer
    can mask an underlying smell.
    We went in through a set of glass doors and rode a short escalator
    up to the main gaming hall. There it was, triple-distilled, a circular
    room of perhaps a thousand square meters, jammed tight
    with thick crowds shifting and sliding like platelets in a congealing
    bloodstream; high ceilings almost hidden above clouds of spot-lit,
    exhaled tobacco smoke; a cacophony of intermingled shouts of
    delight and cries of despair.
    Keiko wanted to play the slot machines, which was fine, freeing
    me as it did to roam the baccarat rooms in search of Belghazi. I
    gave her a roll of Hong Kong dollars and told her I'd be back in a
    few hours. More likely, if things went according to plan, I would
    go straight to the hotel. In which case, when we hooked up again,
    I'd tell her that I'd looked for her but couldn't find her, and had assumed
    that she'd gone back ahead of me.
    I set out for the stairs that would take me out of the low-stakes
    pit and up to the high rollers' rooms above. I passed rows of pensioners,
    each mechanically communing with a slot machine, and I
    thought of pigeons taught to peck a lever in exchange for a random
    reward. Next, several interchangeable roulette tables, the troupe
    hovering around them younger than the slot players they would
    eventually become, their jaws set, eyes shining in cheap ecstasy, lips
    moving in silent entreaty to the selfsame gods that even at the utterance
    of these foolish prayers continued to torment their worshipers
    with Olympian caprice.
    I bought chips with four hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars-- about sixty thousand U.S. I'd already squeezed Kanezaki for that
    much and more in "expenses"--the disbursements of which he had
    complained earlier. Then I wandered from room to room, never
    actually going inside, until I found what I was looking for.
    Outside the Lisboa's most exclusive VIP room, on the fifth
    floor, the highest in the casino, were the two bodyguards, flanking
    the entrance. Belghazi must have felt sufficiently safe inside not to
    bother himself arguing about the "no spectators" rule. And sure,
    the guards could effectively monitor the entrance this way, and deal
    appropriately with anyone they deemed suspicious.
    Unfortunately for them, I'm not a suspicious-looking guy. And
    their presence told me exactly where to go.
    I walked right past them and into the room. Only one of the
    three baccarat tables was in play. The rest were empty, save for their
    dealers, of course, who stood with postures as crisp as the starched
    collars of their white