Chapter 95

"Bestia..."

"David..."

Fikser nodded at me and decided to get straight to the point, actually, as she always did in our interactions.

"There's an order..."

"I'm listening."

There is a guy, Dan, he has a gambling problem and not so long ago he lost his sports car. As they say, he lost it and fuck it, he has a lot of cars, although he has never earned a buck in his life...

I raised an eyebrow questioningly at such meaningless details and Bestia understood me perfectly.

"But you don't give a shit about those details. The problem is that inside the car was an old disk with a rare recording of Samurai. And this disk you need to find and return, and if you can also return the car, the client will be happy."

"Details in the letter?"

"Uh-huh. and you're not interested at all?

"Hmm?"

"Well, isn't it interesting who could afford to carry a rare record in their car?"

"Nah..."

I shook my head.

"I don't care at all. Let him be the son of someone from the band, or Silverhand himself, who came back from the other side of the world, though..."

I grinned.

"...this one didn't give a shit about his band, so he wouldn't do anything here, either by himself or by commissioning a solo job. So my money's on either a crazy collector or the son of someone in the band."

"You're right, it's Nancy's son..."

"I don't give a shit. Where do I start looking?"

"I'll drop the details in an e-mail... and you better hurry up. The car's no big deal, but the recording...

I shrugged.

"Okay, give more details in the post and we'll get started."

"Roger that."

She threw me an e-mail and I opened it immediately.

"Seriously?"

"What?"

"Entering through the sewer?"

"What do you want? Sixth Street underground casino. If you make it official, you'd have to pay hefty gambling taxes, and here, you pay a kickback to the cops that's three times less than the tax..."

"Okay, uh. let's move out. Over and out."

"Yeah, if all of a sudden this casino goes bankrupt, I don't think anyone in this case would go broke..."

I grinned understandingly.

"Okay, over and out."

Bestia cut the connection, and I threw the letter to my girls and went to get dressed myself. We'll have to go to the city, or rather to the city itself we will get quickly, but to get to the destination point... Of course it would be possible to use Delamain again, but it is not specified in the order, so no one will compensate for its use, as in the work with Regina. So it would be foolish to spend money out of your own pocket.

And the fact that we'll cover the cost by robbing this underground casino doesn't change the fact that it's a very expensive endeavor. And we're kind of in no rush.

We got into our car, which Panam had recently called Tortik2, so that her nickname Cherry would become not just cute, but also very relevant again. After all, the nickname was given to her exactly as Cherry, which on Tortik...

"So, ladies, I hope no one needs to be told how careful you have to be when working with underground casino systems?"

"Don't... we will be careful and will run all the withdrawals through dozens of afshores, a much longer way than we usually do, but we will do it in such a way that these funds become untraceable."

"Great..."

During the drive we discussed the case, to the quiet muttering of Becky, who could not accept that the case required quiet work again.

"And by the way, I've almost mastered the covert ops database! And Panam's almost finished her operative training, so she'll be able to take over the security duties for the Raners."

"And you're offering to take you with you?"

"Uh-huh...

She showed the bracelet on her arm.

"And what's that?"

"Stealth technology for silent operations. Makes the wearer invisible to others. In the clan, I tested it..."

"Uh..."

I scratched the back of my head in embarrassment.

"Is that when you were running around the clan in a bathing suit making faces?"

"А?!"

She stared at me dumbfounded.

"Did you see that?!"

"Well... sort of... yeah. I'm not the only one."

The girls nodded their heads.

"But, uh. I ordered it from a trusted source."

She looked at the bracelet resentfully.

"...and why didn't you tell me?!"

"Didn't say what? The fact that you're running around camp in a bathing suit and everyone's so used to some of your antics that they just choose to ignore you?"

"But I, uh."

"Becca..."

Panam intervened in the conversation.

"...you're part of our family, but even so, we know what you're capable of when you're bored. Like when half the camp woke up with stupid drawings on their faces? No, that was fun, just like when you slipped Saul and a few other idiots laxatives and they spent the whole day in the bathroom... But let's be honest. this kind of thing gets old."

"But I was running around in a bathing suit. Didn't you feel bad about your girlfriend being stared at?"

"Becca, you were so modest. you've seen some people in Knight City, do you really think a bathing suit would embarrass me after that? Besides. there's an expression, a girl in underwear is naked, a girl in a bathing suit is clothed."

"Fuck..."

"Well, don't feel bad, I'll have to get you a sandi and a costume, and then I'll start taking you on missions."

"Honestly?"

"Yeah, honestly."

"That's great!"

Becca rejoiced.

"What about access to the casino systems?"

I looked at the girls and they shook their heads.

"Nah. outside is out of the question. You put splinters in their computers, then yeah."

I left the car with a sigh and swung over the fence and slid down the sloping part of the stone embankment after which I activated the sandi and in two steps I changed my direction of movement and found myself on a small horizontal section on which I walked along this narrow path to the collector.

There were no guards, but there was a camera, but it was not dangerous for me now, because the suit's cloaking system was on, and the sandi was working at a minimum, but still allowed me to slip by.

I walked down the manifold and reached a large metal door that had no electronic locks on it for a couple of minutes.

"Quiet?"

"Suddenly there's a bunch of retrogrades."

"What do you mean?"

"Literally, it's just a regular metal door. No electronic locks or anything like that..."

"What are you gonna do?"

"Well. I did make energy blades on my tonfa for a reason, didn't I?"

"Hmm?"

"I'll just melt through the lock and the hinge points. You could of course just try to tear the door off, the muscle strength should be enough for that..."

"You wait, visit a couple of neighboring manifolds before you do, there might be another entrance..."

I shrugged.

"Okay, let's check it out..."

And I checked, except there was no other way out. So I had to go back to the door, except this time I got lucky and it opened, letting out a totally washed-up man dressed like a corporate man. And he looked like a completely lost mind.

Sandi's activation is at fifty percent and I manage to slip inside the casino before the corporat leaves and the door closes behind him.

"I'm inside..."

Once again I lower the level of sandi work and walk quietly through the casino, looking around and slipping slivers into the sockets of the local Sixth Street guards, who are scurrying around the casino keeping an eye on the players. Of course, if I only had a cloaking system, it would have been a lot harder, because with all the lights flashing around, it would have had a hard time keeping up with my disguise. Oh, and with just a single sandi, I'd have to work at a higher level of acceleration...

So... I speed through the rows and stop in places where the cloaking system will easily hide me...

When I found a passage to the VIP part of the casino, I quietly bypassed the guard in a suit who stood at the entrance, not forgetting to put a chip in his hand, and then I looked around in this room as well. Here were clearly not the lower level corporates, but someone of the middle class... Kind of like Vee before she got kicked out of the corporation.

Naturally, I didn't do anything outrageous here either, though my hands were itching to put a few splinters in those low-powered reasonable people by zeroing their accounts and destroying their lives. Why did I have that urge?

It's just that their faces were too arrogant...

But I restrained myself and made my way to the part of the casino where the employees and security guards were located. So to speak, the staff-only part of the casino.

And here I went wild, putting splinters in everything. And when I went around these rooms and made sure that there were only two entrances, I started knocking out the people around me, and only after cleaning everything up did I fall out of acceleration again.

"Work ladies, just a heads up if anyone decides to enter the staff quarters."

"Okay..."

I spent about twenty minutes in the rooms while the girls plundered the casino and searched for the car and the disk with the Samurai's rare recording. And they found out that nobody knew about the record at all, at least while the car was in the care of the local part of Sixth Street, and after it was transferred to a special garage...

The girls also got the address of the garage, and then I went through the casino again, taking chips and waiting for the next loser to lose, I left the casino with him. I wish I could say that.

But it wasn't that easy, when I was about to leave the casino, having collected all the chips except those responsible for the girls' work in the casino's systems, the girls warned me that several guards were heading for the staff rooms. I had to use sandi to the fullest to get to those guards and knock them out by dragging them inside the rooms, and then at the same speed to get to the exit of the casino, through which some rich looking intelligent man was entering.

It wasn't until I got up to the waterfront that I was able to relax.

"Ladies?"

"We got it all figured out. and yeah, they don't just set up a casino, nobody wins there. There's not a single machine that's set up to win. So we're asking for permission to delete all the data. So that they can't rebuild their casino for as long as possible."

"Do it."

It was at this point that Tortic2 pulled up to where I was standing and I ducked inside activating the sandi, precisely through the open front seat window.

"So we're going to the garage?"

"Yeah..."

Panam nodded and pressed the gas pedal to the floor increasing the speed of the car, though when I jumped in it was already going immediately.

"In a hurry to get somewhere?"

"Yeah, they want to get the car ready for resale quickly. It's already been in the garage for 24 hours, the CD could have been found, so we need to get there as soon as possible."

"Come on..."

I shrugged.

"...if anything, we'll go to a third location and steal it from the buyer. But I'd really like to get it all sorted out quickly and not make any unnecessary moves. By the way, how much did we make off that casino?"

"We can pay for a trip to the moon and still have money left over."

It was Kiwi who answered me.

"What about me?"

"And you're not on the payroll, or have you forgotten about it already?"

Lucy joined the conversation.

"I was just hoping that you'd cool down a bit by now and let me at least bargain with you to pay for this flight."

An extremely suspicious look was thrown at me.

"A consortium?"

Becca also decided to participate in the conversation.

"Yeah. (chuckles)"

"With us?"

Becca didn't calm down, and the suspicion in her voice grew even more.

"Yeah. (chuckles)"

"And you weren't planning on taking the bulk of the payment?"

This question was asked by Panam.

"Well..."

I looked away.

"I see..."

Judy grinned.

"...if you want to, you can share with us, but only on equal terms."

"Okay..."

I sighed... It wasn't the smartest thing to push them right now, but later I could try to push their payment a little further, leaving the bulk of the flight payment to me.