The Scam Read Online Free PDF

three were playing baccarat. A few women sat drinking at the bar, where backlit multicolored bottles of liquor were arranged by hue on glass shelves.
    Nick and Kate were greeted by a round-bodied, round-faced man wearing a three-piece suit. The way he waddled up to them reminded Kate of the Penguin, from
Batman.
    “Good evening to you both. I am Niles Goodwell, manager of player relations.” Goodwell took a slight bow and whispered to Nick. “Your credit is good here, sir, up to five million.”
    “What’s your table limit for blackjack?” Nick asked.
    “Two hundred and fifty thousand.”
    “What are your chip denominations over ten thousand?”
    “We have twenty-five-thousand, fifty-thousand, and one-hundred-thousand-dollar chips.”
    “We’d like a table to ourselves. We’ll each start with one million to get warmed up,” Nick said. “Half in twenty-five-thousand chips and half in fifty-thousand chips.”
    “Make yourselves comfortable.” Goodwell gestured to a blackjack table where a young woman stood, smiling warmly at them. “I’ll be right back with your chips.”
    They went to the table. Kate sat to the dealer’s left, what blackjack players called “first base,” and Nick took the seat to the right, known as “third base.” A waitress came by to offer them drinks. Nick ordered a martini. Kate settled for a Coke. Goodwell brought them their chips on a gold platter.
    “Good luck,” he said, stepping away, but lingering close enough to keep his eye on the action.
    Nick smiled at the dealer. “Let’s have some fun.”

I f Nick had chosen craps, Kate would have been lost, but she figured she could handle blackjack. The goal, for both the player and the dealer, was to get as close as possible to twenty-one without going over. Simple, right?
    Nick placed fifty thousand dollars on each of the three betting circles on his side of the table. Kate did the same on her two spots and broke into an immediate sweat. There was
a lot
of money on the table. Money for which she was more or less accountable.
    The dealer smiled and patted the table. “Good luck.”
    She dealt the cards from a six-deck shoe. There were two cards dealt face up for each of their five playing positions. The dealer showed a four.
    Kate had a sixteen on one of her hands and a seventeen on the other. She decided to stand.
    Nick had a nineteen, an eighteen, and a twenty.
    The dealer flipped her hole card. It was a six. The dealer dealt herself another card. It was a ten, giving her a total of twenty. The dealer winced politely, and swept up their chips.
    Poof. Their two hundred fifty grand was gone.
    It wasn’t Kate’s own money, but she couldn’t help thinking of all the things that she could have bought with it. A house in Las Vegas. Or a Lamborghini Gallardo. Or fifty-four thousand In-N-Out double-double cheeseburgers. Instead they had bought two mighty expensive drinks.
    “With the way things are going we could be done early and need a couples massage,” Nick said to Kate. “Do you remember the conversation we had in the elevator?”
    “Vividly.”
    “And?”
    “And I think I’ll stick with the game for a while longer.”
    After a half hour of play, Nick and Kate were up $1.5 million, and Kate was into the game, riding on a steady drip of adrenaline and her competitive nature. She put $250,000 down on each of her spots, and at the bar behind them, Goodwell picked up the receiver on a red telephone and made a call.
    —
    One floor below the casino, at the end of a long hallway, behind a door marked “Customer Relations,” a wall-mounted telephone rang. Evan Trace stepped out of the shadows and answered it. His face was meticulously unshaven and the sleeves on his handmade monogrammed white shirt were neatly folded up to the elbows.
    “This is Trace.”
    “We’ve got a couple whales up here,” Goodwell said. “Nick Sweet and Kate Porter. They’ve taken a blackjack table and are betting two hundred and fifty thousand