Thunder

Chapter Twelve - 2

The main casino room was larger than she had been expecting. More like a dressed-up warehouse or hangar of some kind, it was bathed in a soft green light, and thronged with people from all over the Empire. The room was loaded with tables of blackjack and poker and roulette and crabs and joystick and liars dice, and large screens showing the Hyper-GP with the betting odds at the side, and rows of arenas for fights, and bars all around serving the most expensive and exquisite drinks in Celestria, and through these activities people wormed and snaked, sat and talked and laughed and scowled, throwing all caution to the wind as gung-ho attacks on the chips were sent forth as the circles closed in and the spotlights would fall on one or two still fighting out for the final stakes of the jackpot, whilst more still sat back and calculated, totted up the numbers, played the odds, slowly but surely chasing down the prize. It was a great babble of organised chaos, somehow carried out with the greatest of sophistication.

Z9 wandered to a bar very close to the entrance and leaned onto the counter. Two men were talking nearby, and as she ordered her drink, she could see them eyeing her up. She turned around while her drink was being poured and subtly exaggerated her curves and perfect lines. She was in a casino, and she liked games.

It was a complete maelstrom of bodies across the room, and she was distinctly aware that there were three floors of general mayhem before the specialised floors for specific games rose high, with booths for serious poker games and such. Her heart sank ever so slightly, as the realisation that she would have to sift through an awful lot of people to find who she was looking for began to hit her. She needed a whole team of about two hundred to find a single person in the throngs before her; she might as well be wandering around aimlessly.

'Your drink, madam,' her waitress said behind her, and she turned and collected her flute of crimson. It tasted foul. She supposed that she wasn't used to the top level of luxury. She would have to get used to it.

She took off into the casino's main den of thieves, eyeing the blackjack tables halfway across the room. It was about a five minute walk, but she wandered casually. The green lighting in the room made her feel slightly lethargic somehow, and the drink perhaps wasn't helping. She looked over the glass to see if anything was wrong with it, and instead saw an opportunity.

'Gina One. How good's the security in the toilets?' she asked casually, scratching behind her ear to turn on the Halo-Chip again. 'As in the visuals.'

'Get into a stall and you'll be fine,' was her reply. Z9 walked to a waiter carrying a tray of empty glasses and placed hers on top. She had a perfect new idea.

Z9 made her way into the bathroom, clean to within the range of dazzling anyone that so much lit a match inside. She ducked into a stall and, double checking that there was no obvious security around, took her box out from her clutch-bag.

Opening it up, she extracted a 500Zale chip. Twisting a ring on her finger, a sharp edge slipped out. She took it to the edge of the poker chip and made an incision along it. Being a blade manufactured by C.A.T of course, it did more than just cut the chip. The blade heated the plastic, allowing Z9 to take an almost weightless tracking bug from her bag and, making sure the adhesive side was where it should be, slipped it into the chip. Twisting the ring once again, a small light came on, and upon running it over the cut, the poker chip sealed itself back up again. She tossed it in her palm. Perfect.

She slipped the chip into a concealed pocket on the side of her dress and flushed the toilet. She exited the stall, washed her hands, and left the bathroom.

Heading out of the bathroom she went for the blackjack tables, where Dogra had been noted last. She smiled in all the right ways, moving her hips slightly more than she would usually in order to not appear out of place amongst the trophy-wives and less-serious gamblers in the room. Scanning this way and that, she tried to pick out the back of a perfectly-groomed V of hair halfway down the neck.

She stood by one blackjack table, seemingly admiring the game with several other spectators. The dealer gave a ten and an eight to one lady, followed by an ace after everyone else had bust. She stuck. The dealer revealed the face down card he had, giving him a seven and a four. He dealt himself a king.

'Dealer wins,' he said, gathering up the cards and the chips. The woman cursed her luck, and Z9 cursed the woman's luck internally as well. Dealers always won. She knew, she had been friends with someone whose dad had worked as a dealer in a casino in Region 24. The dealer always won.

Suddenly, looking across and past the dealer, she spied a haircut similar to one she had been shown before leaving. Looking more closely, she confirmed it in her head. It was Dogra.

She left the table and went to a nearby bar, ordering another drink, this time something she had had before and knew was actually drinkable. Upon arrival it turned out that it wasn't drinkable. She grimaced, but ignored the drink. The drink wasn't important, at least in terms of taste. Its colour was, however. Completely black, with a flat bottom to the glass, not a glass with a stem but more of a long cylinder. It was perfect.

She walked back towards the blackjack tables, casually putting her hand by her side and extracting the faux chip. She paused for a second, glancing around her as if in mild curiosity, bringing both hands together to hold the glass. She let her ring finger curl under the bottom of the glass, holding the chip there.

She moved off again, this time with confidence, aiming for Dogra's table. She was hoping that he was still there, the crowd moving off from a recently finished table of Texas Hold 'em blocking her view. After managing to sidle and charm her way through the bodies, she saw Dogra knocking the table. The pot was large, with a large stack of 500Zale chips in there. Z9 wondered if the whole thing had been perfectly orchestrated by a higher power just for her.

She moved into the crowd of spectators observing the game and, after watching Dogra win the round, moved in towards him, a smile on her face.

'Hey,' she said in a lower voice than usual. He was raking in the chips. She casually moved her glass over the chips and then...

'Oh, I'm so sorry sir; I thought you were someone I knew.'

As Dogra was beginning to turn towards her and look away from the chips, she let her bugged chip fall from underneath her glass.

'I'm so sorry,' Z9 apologised, pushing her way back through the spectators before Dogra could get a good enough look at her. She disappeared.

Walking back towards the roulette wheels, she scratched her ear once again.

'You got the chip?' she asked Gina One.

'We got him,' was the reply. Z9 smiled and headed over to a particularly full roulette wheel to have a little play whilst she waited for Dogra to make his move.