Eugene looked back at the people and took off his backpack. “A couple more things. Inside this backpack is a bomb. It’s extremely sensitive. Once I set it, I don’t recommend that you try to move it. Nod if you agree.” Everybody nodded.
Kat stood up and joined us.
John, Kat, and I walked past Eugene out the door. He followed us, turning around once the glass double doors shut. He looped the backpack straps over the door handles.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” John said, and, fighting the urge to run, we walked away, giving no indication that we were in a hurry.
Kat never even had to draw her gun.
Molly, still sporting her Afro, met us in the parking lot in a tan-and-brown Monte Carlo.
Once we were inside, everyone patted Eugene on the back. Even I had to admit he knew what he was doing.
There was a paper sack on the front seat, and Molly reached in as she drove. “Gentlemen, it’s time to be civilized.” Out of the bag came four razors, four towels, and a can of shaving cream. “Let’s go to Reno.”
I only nicked myself twice.
CHAPTER FOUR
I stood in front of the window of a department store, facing the TVs on the other side of the glass. All in the Family was on, but I wasn’t paying attention to it; I was watching a man in a three-piece suit walking down Second Street. He’d left Harrah’s, and John had declared him “the mark.”
It had been four days since the bank robbery, and we were a completely different-looking team. The guys were all clean shaven, with the exception of a few well-trimmed mustaches, and the women all wore makeup and had styled hair. All the clothes that we had worn camping for months had been thrown in a Dumpster behind the Bank Club casino.
We had a lot of cash from the bank robbery, but we hadn’t tried to pawn the jewelry: we were too close to Susanville, and Eugene insisted that the cops had probably reported the thefts to the shops in Reno. We decided to pawn the jewelry in whatever cities our flight layovers would be on the way to deliver the invitations to the Players.
But for now we were in Reno to train in a city setting, to hone a different skill set from what we’d learned in camp. That was all about fighting: shooting, throwing knives, wrestling, and stacking up to enter a house.
We were learning how to shadow and track. I was in a position I hadn’t thought of before: I was leading the mark—walking down the sidewalk about 50 feet ahead of him, only occasionally stopping to make sure I could still see him. There was someone else—Eugene—following him about 100 feet behind. And Kat, the third member of our squad, was on the opposite side of the street about 300 feet behind. Her job was to move up and take over for Eugene if he was worried the mark had noticed him.
I could move pretty casually—it was summer and there were a lot of tourists, so one kid in a baseball cap and T-shirt didn’t stand out in the crowd.
The mark wasn’t in a hurry. It was probably his lunch break. He had to be getting tired, though: it was a scorching August afternoon, and he was in a wool suit.
I moved a little farther down the road to a gift shop, where there was a rack by the door full of postcards. I picked one up and glanced at the mark. He was getting close to me—walking quickly now, as if he might be late to get back to work. I tucked the postcard back and hurried down the road to stay in front of him. I didn’t want to look like I was moving in any relationship to him, but I was new to this and didn’t know what to do if he got in front of me.
I stopped again, this time at a restaurant. A glass case showed the menu. Chinese food—I hadn’t even stopped to notice the name of the place. I had to be standing out in the crowd. Any real mark would have me pegged by now. I knew the signal for Kat to hurry forward and take over, but she’d have to sprint to get in front of this man.
There wasn’t anything I could do. After the Chinese restaurant was a cross street, and I had no idea which way he’d turn. I paused at the corner, looked up and down the street like I was trying to figure out which way to go. The mark was 10 feet from me.
So I did the only thing I could think of. I pretended not to notice him, and then turned quickly, timing the turn perfectly so that I collided with him.
“Excuse me,” the man said, stumbling backward.
“My fault,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Excuse me,” he said again, annoyance in his voice. He patted his pockets, checking for his wallet.
He thought I was a pickpocket!
The light turned green and he began walking away. I didn’t follow. Instead I turned and headed back to Eugene. I could see Kat jogging up to us.
“What was that?” Eugene asked, obviously angry at how it went.
“Hey,” Kat said, catching up. “What happened?”
“I didn’t know what to do. So I stabbed him.”
Kat looked past me at the man continuing down the road. “What?”
“Well, not really,” I said. “But he was going to get away, so I turned and—if this were real—I stabbed him.”
“What if we didn’t want him stabbed?” Eugene asked.
“Sorry,” I said. I didn’t care about his attitude. “He was getting away.”
“No,” Eugene said. “You should have waited at the light and then crossed with him, whichever direction he was going. Then give the signal to me or Kat, and we would have hurried up to take your place.”
Kat spoke. “Or you could have just fallen back, turned the corner. We’re here to relieve you. At least that’s how I understood it. It’s like juggling: there’s always one person up in front of the mark, but the three of us rotate position to position. Stabbing him was smart, though,” she added, “if he was a Player. It was a good move.”
“If he was a Player, he would have recognized me earlier, I bet. And if I stabbed a Player, he’d be fighting back for sure. It feels like we’re the Mod Squad, but a stupider version. And I don’t mean that as an insult. I just bet that this would work better if John and Walter gave more advice.”
Kat took a deep breath. “I don’t think that they know what they’re doing either. I mean, they gave us instructions and all that, but I think they’re making them up. My brother’s a vet, just like them—and the Marines didn’t teach this kind of spy stuff in basic training.”
Eugene nodded his head. “Right, but they were Special Forces. The problem is we don’t have anyone in our entire group who really knows how to do this or has done it before. I mean, I’ve robbed people, but it was stores and banks. I’m not a mugger.”
“The guy—the mark—thought I was pickpocketing him when I bumped into him. We don’t even have a pickpocket on our team.”
“That’s not true,” Kat said. “I bet Molly could give us some tips.”
Eugene let out a long breath. “Well, we’ll have to ask her tonight. For now let’s pick a new mark. Kat, you want to take the lead?”
“Sure.”
“Mike, you take my spot in the middle, and I’ll go to the back.”
We worked for the rest of the afternoon, choosing targets of every demographic. We ended up following a real pickpocket around five thirty p.m. and watched him steal from at least three people. Finally he noticed that I was following him, and we suddenly had a real mark. He didn’t run—he was too smart for that—but he went into Red’s Casino and stripped off his blue shirt, revealing another, white T-shirt underneath that one. I would have missed it if I’d been 10 seconds slower. As he threw the shirt away, our eyes met for a moment.
If he’d been a Player, he would have killed me right then and there, but he was just a street crook, and he headed into the chaotic maze of slot machines to ditch me. I followed closer—now that it was real—and tried to catch him while both of us tried not to get noticed by casino security. I stayed on his tail until he left the slots and made a speed-walking break for the doors. When I got outside, Eugene had the pickpocket in his hands, and Kat was playing the role of undercover cop.
“Cough it up,” she said as Eugen
e pushed the crook against the brick-walled exterior of Red’s.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Bullshit,” Eugene said. He looked at me. “How much did he lift?”
“I saw three people.”
Eugene grabbed him by the collar and turned him around, face against the wall. There were wallets in both his back pockets. Eugene grabbed one and opened it. “So, you’re Daphne Shelton, age fifty-three?”
“It’s my mother,” the man said.
“Then who is Rachel Johnson, age forty-six? That you?”
“Your mother.”
“Oh, and I was going to let you go. You lose, princess.” He pulled the guy over to the casino doors. There was a very tall, very large man in a suit standing just inside.
I took the wallets from Eugene and held them out to the security guard. “This guy tried to pick my friend’s pocket while he was in your casino. It looks like he’s already stolen from a few people.”
“No problem,” the guard said, taking the wallets and looking at the IDs inside. After a moment he stepped to a phone on the wall and muttered something into it. He hung up and then came back, taking the thief’s arm and slapping a handcuff onto his wrist. The guard looked at me. “I’m sorry you had a bad experience in our casino. Here, on the house.”
He reached out to me and dropped a twenty-dollar chip in my hand.
Kat, Eugene, and I spent the next hour playing blackjack. I was too young to even be on the casino floor, but my fake driver’s license showed that I was 22. I played conservatively, sometimes winning a few dollars and sometimes losing several dollars, while Eugene and Kat each used their own money (well, the group’s money, but I wasn’t going to throw a fit about it) and made big bets. Eugene lost 35 dollars before giving up. Kat quit while she was ahead, and had turned her 20 into 60. I bet and bet, trying to get back the money I was losing, until I had spent my final chip.
Kat bought drinks, a luxury they had gone without on the ranch. I just had a club soda—I still didn’t drink—while Eugene did shots and Kat sipped wine.
After tracking the pickpocket and catching him, we all felt pretty good.
We toasted Istanbul. If all went according to plan, we would be on the plane in two days.
CHAPTER FIVE
“If even one of us Plays, then I lose,” John said, cutting a piece of steak and dabbing it in the broken yolk of an over-easy egg. “And you know what losing means. My entire line—all my family, everyone I know—will die. Do you even comprehend that?”
“And if no one Plays, the Makers will lose,” I said. “That’s what we want. That’s what we need to have happen.”
“They don’t lose. They have all the power. Don’t you get that they are insanely powerful? They’re talking about wiping out eleven-twelfths of the planet’s population when one Player wins. What are they going to do to us if we refuse to Play?” John stabbed his steak again. It was rare—red in the middle. I’d already eaten mine.
“But,” I said, searching for words. Some Zero line members in the otherwise-empty casino restaurant were listening to us, but most were practicing their own arguments. We had the place to ourselves as we waited and watched out the huge northwest-facing windows. “But think about the last time the Makers were here. We were cavemen, essentially. We were hunter-gatherers. What if we—the world—can fight them off now? The last time they came, we had rocks and spears. This time we have nukes.”
“They have interstellar space travel,” John said, smiling.
We’d been practicing these dialogues all summer, and now we had all the debates planned out, argument by argument. We didn’t want to fight 11 Players—that was tantamount to suicide. We wanted to convince them not to Play, to follow the counsel of the ancient writings from the Brotherhood of the Snake:
To Play the game is to lose the game; success, survival, freedom can only come from refusing to Play.
Prove to the Annunaki that you are not mindless animals, that you can think for yourselves. That we, all of us, deserve the chance to live.
Choose to question what you have been taught.
Choose to be free, that we might all be free.
Choose not to Play.
“Your own book says,” John said, “and I quote: ‘we, the human race, are nothing but tools.’ Do you think our atom bombs are going to beat them?”
“We,” I said, “are going to beat them. The book says we should refuse to Play the game. And at the time this book was written, they were far more advanced, but they aren’t anymore. Look, I’m not talking about you and me fighting them off. I’m talking about a spaceship coming to Earth, and the American military juggernaut goes after them. The Russians would fight too. Everyone would come together to save the human race.”
“Is that the same military juggernaut that hasn’t gained any ground in Vietnam in the last ten years?”
I leaned forward, elbows on the table. “We would be united against a common enemy. That’s what I’m asking you to do: unite with the other Players against a common enemy.”
“Has anyone else agreed yet?”
“We have people at their hotels right now. We’re talking to all of you at the same time.”
“So what guarantee do I have that I’ll quit the game, become a pacifist, and some crazy kid from the Olmec line won’t stab me in the back?” John said, and took a sip of coffee.
I stammered, not knowing what to say. “You’ve read the pages.”
“What’s the provenance of that book, anyway? You say you got it from the La Tène—but what if the La Tène gave it to you just so you could do all their dirty work? Take out some of the competition, help the La Tène win.”
“An excerpt of those same pages came from the Cahokian line. Two witnesses.”
“Except that, for all I know, you’ve made this whole thing up.”
“There are some things you’ll have to take on faith.”
“You can’t tell me where it came from, or who wrote it, or how they knew what they were talking about. That’s just more faith than I’ve got.”
“I . . .” I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Now if you will excuse me,” John said. “I have a game to go win.” He held up a hand, shaped like a gun, and said “B—”
“We kill them,” I interrupted. “If someone won’t join us in peace, then we take them out of the picture.”
“So you’ll kill me if I don’t agree?” He snapped his thumb down on his index finger. “Bang.”
“Damn it.”
“Remember the ground rules,” John said, stretching his arms out.
“I wrote the ground rules,” I said. “I taught you guys how to do this.” I was the only one in the group who’d ever worked in sales—at my family’s furniture store. I’d helped write the dialogues, and I’d taught them over the summer at the ranch.
Then again, I’d never been good at sales. I’d hated it.
“Come on,” John said with a grin. “You always beat the rest of us at this. But you went for the book as evidence. Weren’t you the one who told us not to use the book?”
“Yes,” I said, and took a long drink of my orange juice.
“What are the keys of selling the story?”
I hated repeating it back to him. “I wrote this stuff.”
“Show empathy. Build a relationship of trust. Customers care about themselves, not you,” John said.
“And don’t cite facts you can’t back up.”
“The book is out,” he said.
“I know it.”
“Good news,” John said, pointing at my keno ticket. “I think you’ve just hit the big time. You put five dollars on that?”
I picked up the ticket and turned to look at the big board of numbers on the restaurant wall. “Ha! Seven!” It was a 10-pick game, and I’d guessed seven correctly.
“We have a winner!” Mary said, motioning to the waitress.
I’d been putting five dollars on the ken
o game all day, as we’d been sitting in this restaurant for hours. I’d already blown 50 or 60 dollars.
A casino employee—not the waitress—came over to our table. Light was pouring in from the north and west windows, illuminating the burgundy décor: the carpets, the booth seats, the paint on the walls. He was holding the Keno card I’d given the waitress.
“Seven correct guesses in a ten spot,” he said with a gleaming smile, reviewing my card. “With a five-dollar bet, and fifty dollars per dollar, is two hundred and fifty. May I please see your identification?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, sure.”
I reached into my back pocket. “Does my passport work?”
“That will be perfect.”
The passport was forged, and this was the first time that I’d ever had to use it. Technically I wasn’t old enough to be gambling. But I shouldn’t have shot a sheriff, either. Lying about my age to gamble, in comparison, didn’t feel like something to worry about anymore.
“Frank Finn,” he read. “Congratulations.” He handed me an envelope with the money and my passport.
“Nice job,” Mary said. She’d been sitting next to me through my practice with John.
“Yeah, if I have one skill, it’s guessing random numbers.”
She held up a stack of 10 or 12 keno cards I’d lost with. “I don’t think this counts as a skill,” she said with a smile.
“I made back all my money and some extra,” I said, handing her the envelope.
Suddenly we heard a loud rumble, and the tables shook like a plane was flying overhead.
“Damn,” Jim said, standing up and running to the window. “Guys, this is it!”
All of us—all twenty of us—got up and crossed the lounge.
The windows were large, looking down on the parking lot of the Tombstone Casino and out into the desert northeast of Reno. But we weren’t looking at anything on the ground. In the sky, to our east, was the meteor, a shining fireball leaving a trail of smoke. The meteor Agatha had told us about, the meteor that we were going to adopt as our own and use to convince Players about a supposed Calling at the Munich Olympics. Agatha, a former La Tène Player who had been expelled from her line, had told us it was coming—she had contacts at NASA. But I wasn’t prepared for something so spectacular.