state, and then they’d be gone.
The goats were different—card counters and con men and shortchange artists and call girls and pickpockets—always trying to fade in among the sheep, but restless. He knew half of them by sight, but he didn’t need to. He could detect it in their eyes the first time he saw them. They were hungry. He had sensed something too eager in Pete Hatcher’s eyes early on, but he had misinterpreted it. His mistake was in accepting the bosses’ assurances that all Hatcher was after was pussy.
He glanced at his watch and moved on down the hallway. Seaver was probably the only one who could see this part of the complex clearly when he looked at it. The elevators and the long, narrow hallway gave his people plenty of time and means to isolate anyone who had some business that wasn’t on the board’s agenda. The double panes of one-way glass kept anyone from amplifying the vibrations to pick up a conversation or using any sort of photography. Being next to the water slide ensured that nobody who wasn’t wearing a bathing suit could get close, and anybody scanning with a directional microphone from a distance would pick up the waterfall and eighty customers talking about nothing.
It wasn’t the sort of security that an underground room would have, but it had worked well enough so far. What he was worried about these days was some kind of futuristic emergency—some loser driving a car bomb through the front entrance, or some Japanese cult releasing nerve gas in the climate-control system. He had consultants working on countermeasures, but so far nothing they had brought him was good enough to bring to the big guys. All the plans involved lots of rebuilding to make space for some strategy they could not guarantee would work.
The big guys were never reluctant to spend money on remodeling. What they hated was having to shut anything down while they did it. But Seaver believed in outside consultants, and he was confident that they would solve these problems, one by one. Security was a matter of batting down specific threats. Nothing worked all of the time for all purposes.
He opened the door to the boardroom, stepped inside onto the thick carpet, and quietly took a seat at the enormous rosewood table. The door closed silently behind him. The automatic closer had been Seaver’s idea too. The time when people were going in and out was a gaping breach in the room’s integrity. Anyone who managed to defeat the other obstacles could learn a lot by picking up a few seconds here and there and studying what he had heard.
This time there was no meeting of the Management Team. The only ones in the room were the big guys themselves, Bobby Salateri, Max Foley, and Peter Buckley. They met this way more often than people would think, to talk without the twenty upper-level functionaries who ran housekeeping or finance or public relations or security.
Peter Buckley first deigned to notice Seaver. “Morning, Cal.”
“Peter,” said Seaver. Then he added, “Bobby, Max,” as the others saw him. Then he waited. They took their time, and it was a compliment to him.
“Having water misters all over the place is okay this year. It’s okay next year,” said Salateri. “How does it look ten years from now? I mean politically?”
“It’s not exactly all over the place,” said Foley. “It’s just on the golf courses. The sun shelters are already plumbed. It’s just a matter of installing these little fixtures around the roof. That’s thirty-six misters. They’ll make the players feel cool and comfortable.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Salateri. “It’s nothing, really. But every single time some TV station does a report on wasting water I see footage of misters over some hot dog stand.”
“The estimate says the trees around the shelters will catch some of the water and the shade will keep the mist from evaporating as fast. If there’s ever rationing, it’s just that much more water grandfathered in.”
“That’s a point I hadn’t thought of,” said Salateri. “I can buy it on that basis. How about you, Peter?”
“Sure,” said Buckley. “If things really get stupid, we’ve got something we can give away: Pleasure Island shuts down misters to save water.”
“I’ll have them go ahead,” said Foley. He turned to Seaver. “Little problem last night, huh, Cal?”
“Yes,” said Seaver. “I wish I had some excuse. I don’t.”
“So where does that leave us now?” asked Buckley.
“Hatcher wasn’t on any flight leaving McCarran, or a train. A bus is too haphazard for him. He undoubtedly drove out. If he had the sense to keep driving, he could be in Chicago by now.” He reached into his breast pocket. “My resignation is ready, if you want it.”
“Stick it in your ear,” said Salateri. “This isn’t the fucking army, where you get to resign your commission and hand in your sword and go write your memoirs. We’ve got a parasite that could eat us alive. We need you more than we did yesterday.”
“Thank you,” said Seaver. It was the only thing Salateri had ever said to him that could have been a compliment.
“How did he lose your people?” asked Foley. “Maybe that’s the place to start.”
“He met a woman at the Inside Straight for the midnight lounge show. The Miraculous Miranda picked him out of the audience, made him disappear a couple of times, and brought him back. The last time, she didn’t. He probably slipped out the stage door. My men got suckered. They followed the woman and a decoy out of the show, then lost the decoy too. The woman was a pro. She got them to watch her for an hour, then split them up and cornered one of them in the elevator. She left him with a broken leg, a broken nose, and some damage to his eye.”
“A professional what?” asked Salateri. “Boxer?”
“I don’t know what term she uses on her business cards,” said Seaver. “But I don’t think Hatcher could have set this up for himself. I don’t know what part in this Miranda played—maybe just picking him out of the crowd was enough, and magicians will sometimes do that as a favor if you send a waiter backstage and ask. Maybe—”
“It doesn’t matter,” interrupted Buckley. “I’m not about to start grilling Miranda, and I hope you’re not.”
“Only if you asked me to,” said Seaver. “If she knows anything, there’s no reason for her to tell me, and no way I can make her. If the woman is a pro, then Miranda probably doesn’t know much.”
Salateri shrugged and made a face of distaste. “I’ll see if I can talk to Vincent.” He sat quietly for a moment, then noticed the others staring at him. “Why not? You think if Vincent Bogliarese wanted to do us harm he’d do it this way—have his girlfriend sneak the guy off in a puff of smoke? Get real. He’d send eight hundred guys in shiny suits to pull our guts out and set fire to them.” He added, to no one in particular, “I say that, of course, with the greatest respect, and in confidence. The man is a friend of mine. I’m not saying he’ll find out anything for us, but it won’t hurt to ask.”
Max Foley looked at Seaver. “It looks to me as though we really have to handle this ourselves, Cal. This screw-up is yours, but the underlying problem isn’t. It’s ours, the three of us. We picked out Hatcher, we misjudged him, and we trusted him with a lot of things we shouldn’t have.”
“That’s right,” said Buckley.
Salateri nodded sadly. “He was smart, easy to be around, he behaved like a man. Now we’re in trouble, and we don’t even know what kind.”
“We can guess,” said Foley. “No matter what he thinks he’s going to do now, at some point he’s going to end up in the hands of the F.B.I.” He added, “Unless he doesn’t.”
Buckley leaned back in his big chair. “Do we have anybody on our payroll who can take care of this kind of problem?”
“No,” said Seaver. “We’ve been very careful not to hire anyone like that full-time. They’re not the sort of people you want to have around year in and year out. Other employees figure out what they’re there for, and so on.”
The three men sat in a row and looked at him. “You’ve been in the security business for a long time,” said Foley.
“And a cop before that,” added Salateri.
Foley continued. “Yes. You must know someone who would be able to do it. I mean a full-service specialist, who can find him and handle the rest.”
“There’s someone I can probably get,” said Seaver. This was going to be the delicate part. He wasn’t sure they knew what this involved. “I’ll need a lot of cash. Maybe a hundred thousand to start, and more later.”
“Cash?” said Buckley. “Well, hell, Cal. Cash is what we do. Go downstairs and give this to Eddie.” He rapidly
