The Wheel of Darkness (26 page)

“Let me make sure I’ve gotten this right,” he said. “You’re telling me this Pendergast fellow contrived for the card counters to lose a million pounds at the blackjack tables, in the process raking in almost three hundred thousand for himself.”

Hentoff nodded. “That’s about it, sir.”

“It seems to me that you just got fleeced, Mr. Hentoff.”

“No, sir,” said Hentoff, a frosty note in his voice. “Pendergast had to win in order to make them lose.”

“Explain.”

“Pendergast started off by tracking the shuffle—a technique in which you observe a full shoe of play, memorizing the positions of certain critical cards or groupings, called slugs, and then follow them through the shuffle, visually. He also managed to get a glimpse of the bottom card, and since he was offered the cut, he was able to place that card inside the deck exactly where he wanted it.”

“Doesn’t sound possible.”

“These are well-known, if exceedingly difficult, techniques. This Pendergast seems to have mastered them better than most.”

“That still doesn’t explain why Pendergast needed to win to make them lose.”

“By knowing where certain cards were, and combining that with a counting system, he was able to control the cards going ‘downstream’ to the rest of the players by either jumping into a game or sitting it out—as well as by taking unnecessary hits.”

LeSeur nodded slowly, taking this in.

“He
had
to shortstop the good cards in order to let bad ones go downstream. To make the others lose, he had to win.”

“I get it,” said LeSeur sourly. “And so you want to know what to do about this man’s winnings?”

“That’s right.”

LeSeur thought for a moment. It all came down to how Commodore Cutter would react when he heard about this—which, of course, he would eventually have to. The answer was not good. And when Corporate heard about it, they would be even less sympathetic. One way or another, they had to get the money back.

He sighed. “For the sake of all of our futures with the company, you need to get that money back.”

“How?”

LeSeur turned his weary face away. “Just do it.”

Thirty minutes later, Kemper walked down the plush corridor of Deck 12, Hentoff in tow, feeling a clammy sweat building inside his dark suit. He stopped before the door of the Tudor Suite.

“You sure this is the right time for this?” Hentoff asked. “It’s eleven P.M.”

“I didn’t get the sense LeSeur wanted us to wait,” Kemper replied. “Did you?” Then he turned to the door and knocked.

“Come in,” came a distant voice.

They entered to see Pendergast and the young woman voyaging with him—Constance Greene, his niece or something—in the salon, lights low, sitting around the private dining table with the remains of an elegant repast before them.

“Ah, Mr. Kemper,” said Pendergast, rising and pushing aside his watercress salad. “And Mr. Hentoff. I’ve been expecting you.”

“You have?”

“Naturally. Our business is not complete. Please sit down.”

Kemper arranged himself with some awkwardness on the nearby sofa. Hentoff took a chair, looking from Agent Pendergast to Constance Greene and back again, as if trying to sort out their real relationship.

“May I offer you a glass of port?” Pendergast asked.

“No, thank you,” said Kemper. An awkward silence developed before he continued: “I wanted to thank you again for taking care of those card counters.”

“You’re most welcome. Are you following my advice about how to keep them from re-winning?”

“We are, thank you.”

“Is it working?”

“Absolutely,” said Hentoff. “Whenever a spotter enters the casino, we send over a cocktail waitress to engage him in trivial conversation—always involving numbers. It’s driving them crazy, but there’s nothing they can do about it.”

“Excellent.” Pendergast turned a quizzical eye on Mr. Kemper. “Was there anything else?”

Kemper rubbed his temple. “Well, there’s the question of . . . the money.”

“Are you referring to
that
money?” And Pendergast nodded to the bureau, where Kemper noticed, for the first time, a stack of fat envelopes wrapped in thick rubber bands.

“If those are your casino winnings, yes.”

“And there’s a
question
about the money?”

“You were working for us,” said Kemper, feeling the lameness of his argument even before he had made it. “The winnings rightfully belong to your employer.”

“I’m nobody’s employee,” said Pendergast with an icy smile. “Except, of course, the federal government’s.”

Kemper felt excruciatingly uncomfortable under the silvery stare.

“Mr. Kemper,” Pendergast continued, “you realize, of course, that I arrived at those winnings legally. Card counting, shuffle-tracking, and the other techniques I used are all legal. Ask Mr. Hentoff here. I didn’t even need to draw on the line of credit you offered me.”

Kemper cast a glance at Hentoff, who nodded unhappily.

Another smile. “Well then: does that answer your question?”

Kemper thought of reporting all this back to Cutter, and that helped stiffen his spine. “No, Mr. Pendergast. We consider those winnings to be house money.”

Pendergast went to the bureau. He picked up one of the envelopes, slid out a thick wad of pound notes, and lazily riffled through them. “Mr. Kemper,” he said, speaking with his back turned, “normally I would never even think of helping a casino recover money against gamblers who are beating the house. My sympathies would lie in the other direction. Do you know why I helped you?”

“To get us to help you.”

“Only partly true. It’s because I believed there was a dangerous killer on board, and for the safety of the ship I needed to identify him—with your assistance—before he could kill again. Unfortunately, he appears to still be one step ahead of me.”

Kemper’s depression deepened. He would never get the money back, the crossing was a disaster on every front, and he would be blamed.

Pendergast turned, riffled the money again. “Cheer up, Mr. Kemper! You two may yet get your money back. I am ready to call in my little favor.”

Somehow, this did not make Kemper cheer up at all.

“I wish to search the stateroom and safe of Mr. Scott Blackburn. To that end, I will need a passcard to the room’s safe and thirty minutes in which to operate.”

A pause. “I think we can manage that.”

“There’s a wrinkle. Blackburn is currently holed up in his room and won’t come out.”

“Why? Is he worried about the murderer?”

Pendergast smiled again: a small, ironic smile. “Hardly, Mr. Kemper. He’s hiding something, and I need to find it. So he will need to be coaxed out.”

“You can’t ask me to manhandle a passenger.”

“Manhandle? How crude. A more elegant way to effect his removal would be to set off the fire alarms for the starboard stern side of Deck 9.”

Kemper frowned. “You want me to set off a false fire alarm? No way.”

“But you must.”

Kemper thought for a moment. “I suppose we could have a fire drill.”

“He won’t leave if it’s just a drill. Only a mandatory evacuation will dislodge him.”

Kemper ran his hands through his damp hair. God, he was sweating. “Maybe I could pull a fire alarm in that corridor.”

This time, it was Constance Greene who spoke. “No, Mr. Kemper,” she said in a strange antique accent. “We’ve researched the matter carefully. You need to trigger a central alert. A broken firebox would be too quickly discovered. We’ll need a full thirty minutes in Blackburn’s suite. And you’ll have to temporarily disable the sprinkler system, which can only be done from the central fire control system.”

Kemper stood up, Hentoff quickly following. “Impossible. This is a crazy thing to ask. Fire is the most dangerous thing that can happen aboard a ship, aside from sinking. A ship’s officer, deliberately triggering a false alert . . . I’d be committing a criminal offense, maybe a felony. Jesus, Mr. Pendergast, you’re an FBI agent, you know I can’t do that! There must be some other way!”

Pendergast smiled, almost sadly this time. “There is no other way.”

“I won’t do it.”

Pendergast riffled the fat packet of notes. Kemper could actually smell the money—it was like rusty iron.

Kemper stared at the money. “I just can’t do it.”

There was a moment of silence. Then Pendergast stood, went over to the bureau, opened the top drawer, placed the wad of notes inside, and then raked the rest of the envelopes off the bureau into the drawer. He shut the drawer with slow deliberation and turned to Hentoff and nodded. “See you in the casino, Mr. Hentoff.”

There was another silence, longer this time.

“You’re going to . . . gamble?” Hentoff asked slowly.

“Why not?” Pendergast spread his hands. “We’re on holiday, after all. And you know how I adore blackjack. I was thinking of teaching it to Constance as well.”

Hentoff looked at Kemper in alarm.

“I’ve been told I’m a quick study,” Constance said.

Kemper ran his hand through his damp hair again. He could feel the wetness creeping down from his armpits. It just got worse and worse.

The atmosphere in the room grew strained. At last, Kemper finally let his breath out with a rush. “It’s going to take some time to prepare.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll aim for a general fire alarm on Deck 9 at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. It’s the best I can do.”

Pendergast nodded curtly. “In that case, we’ll just have to wait until then. Let us hope things are still, ah, under control by that time.”

“Under control? What do you mean by that?”

But Pendergast simply bowed to each of them in turn, then sat down once again and returned to his dinner.

I
T WAS MIDNIGHT WHEN
M
ADDIE
E
DMONDSON SLOUCHED DOWN
the central corridor of Deck 3, bored out of her mind. Her grandparents had brought her on the voyage as a present for her sixteenth birthday, and it had seemed like a good idea at the time. But nobody had told her what to expect—that the ship would be a floating hell. All the really fun places—the discotheques and the clubs where the twentysomethings hung out, the casinos—were off-limits to a girl her age. And the shows she could get into seemed to appeal to those over the age of a hundred. Antonio’s Magic Revue, the Blue Man Group, and Michael Bublé doing Frank Sinatra—it was like a joke. She’d seen all the movies, the swimming pools had been closed due to rough weather. The food in the restaurants was too fancy, and she felt too seasick to enjoy the pizza parlors or hamburger spots. There was nothing for her to do besides sit through lounge acts, surrounded by octogenarians fiddling with their hearing aids.

The only interesting thing that had happened was that weird hanging in the Belgravia Theatre. Now
that
had been something: all the old biddies leaning on their canes and squawking, the grandpas harrumphing and contracting their bushy eyebrows, the officers and deckhands running around like headless chickens. She didn’t care what anybody said, it
had
to be a gag, a stage prop, some publicity stunt for the new movie. People just didn’t die like that in real life, only in movies.

She passed the gold-lamé-and-green-glass entrance to Trafalgar’s, the ship’s hottest club. Loud, thumping house music droned from its dark interior. She paused to look in. Slender figures—college types and young professionals—were gyrating in a miasma of smoke and flickering light. Outside the door stood the requisite bouncer: thin and handsome and wearing a tux, but a bouncer no less, eager to keep underage people like Maddie from going inside to enjoy herself.

She continued morosely down the corridor. Although the clubs and casinos were hopping, some of the blue-rinse crowd that normally thronged the passageways and shops had disappeared. They were probably in their cabins, hiding under their beds. What a joke. She hoped to hell they weren’t really going to institute the curfew she had heard rumored about. That would be the end. After all, it had been just a gag—hadn’t it?

She rode an escalator down one level, wandered past the shops of Regent Street, the upscale shopping arcade, climbed some stairs. Her grandparents had already gone to bed but she wasn’t the slightest bit tired. She’d been wandering aimlessly around the ship like this for the past hour, dragging her feet on the carpet. With a sigh, she slipped a pair of earbuds out of her pocket, stuffed them into place, and dialed up Justin Timberlake on her iPod.

She came to an elevator, stepped in, and—closing her eyes—punched a button at random. The elevator descended briefly, stopped, and she got out—another of the ship’s endless corridors, this one a little more cramped than she was used to. Turning up the volume on her music player, she dragged her way down the hall, took a turn, kicked open a door bearing a sign she didn’t bother to read, skipped down a set of stairs, and wandered on. The corridor took another turn, and as she went around it, she had the sudden feeling she was being followed.

She paused, turning to see who it was, but the corridor was empty. She took a few steps back and looked around the corner. Nothing.

Must have been some random ship noise: down here, the damn thing thrummed and vibrated like some monster treadmill.

She wandered on, letting herself slide along one wall, pushing away with her elbow, then tacking over to the other side to slide again. Four more days to New York City. She couldn’t wait to get home and see her friends.

There it was again: that feeling she was being followed.

She stopped abruptly, this time pulling out the earbuds. She looked around but, once again, there was nobody. Where was she, anyway? It was just one more carpeted corridor with what looked like private meeting rooms or something on either side. It was unusually deserted.

She tossed back her hair with an impatient gesture: jeez, now she was getting as spooked as the old-timers. She glanced through an interior window into one of the rooms and saw a long table lined with computers—an Internet room. She considered stepping inside and going online, but decided against it—all the good sites would certainly be blocked.