Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(93)
Jennifer pushed the thought of her friend from her mind. That was a weakness she could not afford to succumb to, at least not right now. She glanced up at the mirror, the sight of her new self startling her momentarily. Her long brown hair was gone, cut boyishly short, dyed black, and spiked up in a mildly Goth look. A lacy black dress, lace-up, knee-high, black boots. Even without any piercings, something she had no intention of inflicting on her body, she couldn’t recognize herself.
Still, it wouldn’t fool the dedicated professionals who might be looking for her, especially if they were studying video. Since her parents had no doubt now made her a milk carton girl, that was a concern. And although Las Vegas, with its millions of visitors, was a great place to lose yourself, closed circuit video was everywhere.
A high-speed wireless Internet connection was available from the hotel, but Jennifer didn’t connect to it, at least not directly. Instead, she brought the subspace transmitter chip online, scanning for computer networks close to her location. It took her three hops to find what she was looking for: a network with links to the hotel security system.
Security system network administrators were notoriously paranoid, and from what Jennifer observed as she hacked her way through the layers, the Bellagio staff took that paranoia to a new level. Every time she thought she had cracked the final level of security, she found another router, firewall, subnet mask, or encryption scheme.
When she finally managed to gain access to the cameras and video playback systems, she pumped her fist in the air. “Gotcha!”
Filling her screen with small windows for video display, Jennifer located the sequence of monitors that covered her path through the hotel, from entrance to lobby desk, all the way up to her room. Scanning back in time until she found her own image, she set to work editing the saved video data, carefully replacing all Jennifer pixels with background data from other frames.
As fast as she was, the task took almost an hour. Not good. She was going to have to write some custom video editing routines if she didn’t want to spend a quarter of every day doing this sort of thing.
Jennifer pressed the combination of keys that locked out her computer screen and stood up, stretching her arms and rolling her neck until she felt a series of small pops. Then, making her way across to the king-sized bed, she plopped down in the middle of it to take in the full reality of the room.
Jennifer let her eyes roam freely. The place practically dripped elegance, from the bathroom tile to the plush carpeting in the bedroom. A penthouse suite all to herself. If only Heather and Mark could see her now.
As she sat upright in the exact center of the bed, Jennifer felt a small drop of water splash on her arm. Glancing down she saw it repeated, then yet again. Realizing that tears had begun rolling down her cheeks, Jennifer wiped her face with the back of each hand.
This was stupid. She wasn’t Tom Hanks, curled up on a flophouse cot in the movie Big. Nobody was yelling and shooting in the next room. This was a friggin’ penthouse in the Bellagio for Christ’s sake. And she was damn sure the one in charge of what was happening.
Feeling a tremor work its way into her breathing, Jennifer grabbed one of the soft pillows and hugged it to her chest. The first sob killed what remained of her resistance, leaving her curled into a fetal ball, her face buried in the dampness of the pillowcase. As wave after wave of weakness shook her, Jennifer surrendered to it, and as she did, the darkness in her soul grew until it matched the gothic facade with which she had cloaked herself.
94
“What you got, Fielding?” Annoyance painted McKinney’s voice almost as red as his hair.
Bobby McKinney had been running cyber-security operations for the MGM Mirage and its owned hotels for so long he could sniff potential trouble, just from the reactions of the system administrators. He was known as a man who was completely incapable of sitting still, constantly making the rounds of every one of the Las Vegas hotels that operated under the MGM umbrella, poking his nose into every aspect of the most sophisticated security system outside of the NSA. Today it was Bellagio’s turn to endure his presence, the tired, nervous movements of the systems administrator showing the stress his twenty-hour workday and probing intellect produced.
The young computer technician glanced up from his workstation and shrugged. “Don’t know yet. Could be nothing.”
“What could be nothing?”
The technician ran a hand through his long blond hair, sweeping it back from his face in a movement that reminded McKinney of a schoolgirl. But, while Larry Fielding might straddle several sexually ambiguous boundaries, he was one of the best young computer geniuses in the entire company.
“Let me show you.” Fielding turned back to the keyboards stacked in front of him, an arrangement reminiscent of something you would see at the pipe organ inside the Mormon Tabernacle. His long, slender fingers touched the keys so rapidly and softly that he seemed to be stroking them.
The flat-panel monitors surrounding him changed to show the blackjack tables. As he stepped the video forward frame by frame, he oriented the view on a single table, and at the young Asian man sliding into a just-vacated seat. The dealer had just finished filling the shoe with the cards she had extracted from the Shuffle Master. With a small smile, the man pushed a stack of black chips onto the betting mark. Fielding froze the display.
“I spotted this guy when I was reviewing the table data. He played at five different tables, always making his big bet just after he sat down, winning all five of those first bets. After that, he reduced his bet and continued to play at that table for twenty or so minutes.”