Show Time at Luxor

93.

In the series of rushed and encapsulated messages that followed we had what we needed. Almost as soon as the initial communications paused to allow the parties to catch their respective breaths, we were heading to the airstrip. TOM and I have decided earlier in the day to split the team into two not quite equal parts, with Davis and Calahan staying behind, and Myself, Satriano and her Black Jack shadow Drysdale, and Saunders and Bromden taking the hair-on-fire first response flight out. Destination: Las Vegas. 

Satriano, playing a magnificent hand, sold Cyrus on her criminal intent and he in turn got the thumbs up from Mr. Big. There was to be a three-way face-to-face at 0930 in the morning. It, was, as Mr. Fosse was fond of saying, Show Time. 

On other bit of intel we gleaned from the exchange between Maria and Cyrus indicated that, as forwarded by TOM, the operation was active, very much so. We connected a few dots and recognized a pattern in the Axis MO: They liked to work in pairs, a central war-room base camp directing operations and a remote cabal of thugs rolling up sleeves and soling fingernails carrying out orders on the street. We had seen this tendency in their last operation in San Diego. In that fiasco, one we foiled at the last minute with as much luck as skill, it took two teams under single, coordinated command to narrowly avert disaster. Using that game-day experience we were confident that the gambit of Davis and Calahan on the ground and ready for deployment the moment we discovered the location of the strike, gave us a tactical advantage. One of several we would need as this high-stakes poker game progressed. 

Airborne, we gathered to outline the plan. Her Majesty, fully loaded with micro-technology and bad counter-espionage intentions, would take the waiting rental car to the Luxor and meet up with Cyrus. Drysdale and myself would follow in the shadows as backup. Saunders and Bromden would stay with the Gulfstream and direct radio and data operations between TOM and the two teams. 

We felt ready as the short ninety-minute hop between Colorado Springs and Vegas seemed, for once, too quick. We would have almost four hours before the meeting at the luxury hotel and casino that had enough skeletons in closets to mass produce a million laughing bones, as well as the morbid rumor that the ghosts of heavy-construction workers killed during initial construction still haunted the premises, causing a lot more than just bad luck at the crap table and indigestion from over-cooked steaks. 

Her Majesty and I went over several scenarios and their best-choice options should the deal, or deals, go south. I gave her the code red, hell in a bucket signal for immediate response. If, for any reason she felt that her safety, up to and including her sensing a game-over, get me the fuck outta here pronto distress SOS she was to press the implant bug three millimeters beneath the Queens eye on her shoulder tat twice in rapid succession. Should you need it, make it look like a scratch, simply find the bump, called braille, and double-click it.

“We be there in a heartbeat spitting fire,” I finished.

She seemed satisfied as I watched her reach subconsciously with her right hand and find the braille bump on the eye of the Queen of Hearts.