Stephen Cannell - King Con

Joe Rina pulled up to the front entrance of the white alabaster Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Stockton Street. He got out of his chartered limousine and walked on the balls of his feet into the lobby where Reo Wells was waiting for him. They moved without talking into the bar and sat at a table in the back. It was five-thirty in the evening, and the bar was beginning to fill up. The sounds of clinking glasses and laughter masked their hushed conversation.

"What've you got?" Joe said softly.

"I don't know what the hell's going on here, Mr. Rina, but something sure is."

"Lay it out."

"Tommy is definitely hanging with the guy whose picture you faxed to me. They been all over the place. Right now he's upstairs with the guy and some overweight woman named Laura Luna. He's also got two of your people from Las Vegas, Keith and Wade Summer-land."

Joe flinched slightly. He had fired the Summerlands for doing a chip skim in the Bahamas two months ago. He had told Tommy to take care of them; now he was hanging with them instead. He pulled his emotions back. 'What about my five million?"

"Never saw it, Mr. Rina. But that doesn't mean it's not in his briefcase or in his luggage."

"Right. How many people do you have here?" Joe asked; his anger was burning, the ash from that emotional fire making his eyes black, his voice brittle.

"Five guys, including me. All graduates of John Wayne High. Event-trained, ex-Delta Force incursion specialists."

"Okay, let's go find out what my big brother is up to." They got up and walked out of the bar right past Theodore X. Bates, who picked up the house phone and dialed Tommy's suite, letting the phone ring once and hanging up before Tommy could answer. The call would signal Beano and Victoria that Joe was on his way up.

Joe and Reo Wells took the elevator to Tommy's floor and met up with two specialists in gray suits, with eyes like licked stones. They were standing in the fire stairs. Reo referred to them only by their mission names, Doughboy and Reefer.

"Okay, you know the S.I.O.P. Get the whole unit on standby," he told them.

Doughboy, who was the unit XO, started to whisper into his walkie-talkie. After a minute, a door opened down the hall and another man in a gray suit, with an earpiece, stepped out and waved Reo over. They walked down to the door where the man was standing and entered the room without talking.

Joe found himself looking at two men and a lot of sophisticated equipment. Three tubes attached to a junction box and computer were sticking through the wall into the adjoining suite.

"What the hell is all this?" Joe demanded.

"Anti-terrorist wall scope," Reo said. "Your brother is next door in that room." He pointed to the wall with the cables through it.

Joe looked at him flatly, his expression demanding an explanation.

"If you want, we can take out his back-up right through the wall."

"How? You can't see them," Joe asked, amazed at all of the equipment that was stashed around. It had come out of four large suitcases, which lay open and mostly empty on the floor. There were two large helmets with full-face-plate visors lying on the bed. Each helmet was hooked up to an assault rifle by flexible metal cable that ran from the huge sophisticated gunsight into the left side of the helmet. Another cable ran out of the other side of the helmet and was connected to the computer, which was attached to cables stuck into the wall.

"All this stuff was developed to use against terrorists in hostage situations. That wand over there reads and catalogues exactly where all of the metal or concrete support beams are in the wall. Then, with high-speed drills, we go through the wall and insert three miniature video cameras. We then computer-key each person in the room by color and bulk. The 'hits' are green, the 'no-hits' will be on the face-plate visor screen in red. The computer over there references all of the input and blends all the components together. The result is you can see right through the wall, including all the structural elements, so when you fire, you won't deflect off an interior wall support. Put on the helmet there and look through the gunsight."

Joe went over and put on one of the helmets, snapped the visor down, and picked up the gun.

"Gotta stand on one of the X's we drew on the floor. That's so the computer won't get screwed up on the sight lines."

Joe stood on one of the X's they had put on the carpet with adhesive tape, then pulled the gun up and looked through the sight. "Don't see anything but the wall," he said.

"Turn on the power," Reo said; one of the team flipped a switch and instantly Joe was looking down the sight of the assault rifle right into the room next door. It was green-tinted magic. The five people in the room were all color-keyed. Three of them were red; the two wide-bodies were green. As he moved the gun from right to left, he could actually pan through the building wall supports, seeing the concrete pillars and metal cross structures inside the wall.

"The soft green targets are Tommy's gun-bunnies, the two linebackers, Wade and Keith. They're cut-downs. Your brother, the woman, and this guy who hit your casino, we marked in red. They're no-hits on the S.I.O.P."

"What the hell's S.I.O.P.?" Joe asked, as he watched the fat woman move out of the suite's living room and into the bathroom. Since they didn't have a camera on the bathroom, she walked out of frame.

"S.I.O.P. is Single Integrated Operation Plan," he explained. "Wanna hear what they're saying?" and he flipped another switch and Joe could hear Tommy's drunken voice:

"… like he's the only one knows shit about anything. Like if it weren't for fuckin' Joe, we wouldn't even have a fucking pot to piss in."

It took all Joe's self-control to keep from squeezing off a shot right then. He'd never talked bad to anybody about Tommy. Their relationship was the Sicilian bond of brotherhood, and here Tommy was putting him down to a roomful of strangers. He wanted his five million back or he would have pulled the trigger and ended Tommy's life on the spot. He lowered the gun and took off the helmet, unable to listen to any more.

"You gonna hit the Summerland brothers?" Joe asked.

"This is all quiet ordnance." Reo nodded. "Nobody will hear anything. Those two are packing, and they're main line resistance. If we take them out first, it eliminates any possibility they'll bring smoke during the action."

"Okay, let's go. Let's do it," Joe said impatiently.

And the two sharpshooters put on their helmets while Joe and Reo went out in the hall to meet Doughboy and Reefer. Doughboy was carrying a room service coat and an empty champagne bottle he had removed from a cart outside one of the rooms. He shrugged off his jacket and put on the white coat with epaulets on the shoulders, then knocked on the door.

It opened a crack and Tommy stuck his face out. "Yeah?" he said.

"Complimentary champagne from the Manager," Doughboy said, holding up the dark glass bottle.

When Tommy unlatched the door, Reo and Reefer hit it hard, knocking Tommy backwards into the room. He stumbled and fell. "Take this fuck," Tommy yelled as he was going down.

Wade and Keith pulled their guns and, simultaneously, two holes appeared in the wall. Both of the linebackers went down from the kill-fire, like head-shot buffalo. Immediately blood started to stain their white shirt collars.

Joe walked in and looked disdainfully down at his brother, a black mixture of anger, betrayal, and disappointment filling his eyes. "Yeah, without Joe we sure wouldn't have a pot to piss in. You sure got that right, Tom."

Tommy was up on his elbows, astonished by the presence of his brother. "What are you doing here? I thought you were in Jersey."

"I thought you were in Sabre Bay till I found out you were robbing my bank in Nassau."