Peter James - Dead Tomorrow

The croupier gave the wheel a gentle spin and flicked the ball into play.

Down on the floor below, the report from the CCTV room operator was brief and clear in Campbell Macaulay’s earpiece.

‘Clint is here.’

‘Usual place?’ the casino director murmured, his lips barely moving.

‘Table Four.’

Casinos had been Campbell Macaulay’s world all his working life. He had risen up through the ranks, from croupier to pit boss to manager, eventually running them. He loved the hours, the atmosphere, the calm and the energy that coexisted inside all casinos, and he also liked the whole business side of it. Punters might have the occasional big win, just as they had the occasional big loss, but in the long term the business model was remarkably steady.

There were really only two things he disliked about his job. The first was having to deal with the compulsive gamblers who financially ruined themselves in his – and other – casinos. Ultimately, they did the industry no good. And equally he disliked the phone calls waking him in the middle of the night in his time off to tell him that a regular small-time player, or a complete stranger, had just put a huge bet – maybe £60,000 – on a table, because that was the kind of thing that occurred when you were becoming the victim of a gaming scam. Which was why anyone suspicious was carefully watched.

If you were a good gambler, and you understood everything about the game you were playing, you could greatly reduce the amounts you lost. In blackjack and in craps, gamblers who knew what they were doing could make it close to a level playing field between themselves and the casino. But most people did not have the knowledge, or the patience, which had the result of pushing the casino’s profit margin from just the few percentage points of its advantage on most of the gaming tables, to an average 20 per cent of the amount a punter played with.

Immaculately coiffed, and dressed as he was every day and night in a quiet, dark suit, perfectly laundered shirt, elegant silk tie and gleaming black Oxfords, Macaulay glided almost unseen through the downstairs poker room of the Rendezvous Casino. This space was busy tonight, with one of the regular tournaments they held. Five tables, occupied by ten players each, just off the main room. The players were a shabby, slovenly bunch, wearing everything from jumpers and jeans to baseball caps and trainers. But they were all local people of substance and paid good entrance money.

When he had started his career, twenty-seven years earlier, most casinos had a smart dress code and he regretted the lack of elegance he saw today. But, in order to attract the punters, he understood the necessity of moving with the times. If the Rendezvous did not want these high-rollers, plenty of other casinos in the city would welcome them.

He took a brief walk through the busy, gleaming kitchen, nodding at the head chef and some of his underlings, watching a tray of prawn cocktail and smoked salmon platters heading out to the dining room, then went through into the main downstairs gambling room.

It was filling up. He cast his eye across the slots and it looked as if about two-thirds of them were busy. All the blackjack tables, the three-card poker tables, the roulette wheels and the craps table were in use. Good. There was often a lull in this pre-Christmas period, but business was building up nicely, with yesterday’s takings up almost 10 per cent on the previous week.

He walked across the room, passing all the tables in turn, making sure that each croupier and pit boss saw him, then took the escalator up to the high-value room. As he alighted at the top, he saw Clint straight away, standing like a sentinel at his regular table.

Clint was here at least three nights a week, arriving around ten and leaving somewhere between two and four in the morning. They had given him that sobriquet because Macaulay’s assistant, Jacqueline, once said he reminded her of the actor Clint Eastwood.

In the days before the smoking ban, like the actor in his early Westerns, Clint always had a slim cigar wedged between his lips. Now he chewed gum. Sometimes he came alone, sometimes he was accompanied by a woman – rarely the same woman, but they all seemed from the same mould. He was alone tonight. There had been one with him two nights ago, a tall, young, raven-haired beauty in a miniskirt and thigh-high leather boots, dripping with bling. She looked, as they all did, as if she was being rented by the hour.

Clint always drove himself here in a black Mercedes SL55 AMG sports car, gave the valet-parking attendant a £10 tip when he arrived and the same when he left, regardless of whether he had won or lost. And he gave the same amount to the coat-check girl on arrival and on departure.

He never uttered more than a grunt or a monosyllabic word to anyone, and he always turned up with exactly the same amount of money, in cash. He bought his chips at the table, then at the end of the night handed them in at the downstairs cashier.

Although he bought £10,000 worth of chips, he bet only with £2,000 worth of them – but that was still ten times the amount of the average punter here. He understood the game and always bet big, but cautiously, on permutations that would give him small gains, but, equally, only small losses. Some nights he walked away up, some nights down. According to the casino’s computer, he lost an average each month of 10 per cent of his initial stake. So, £600 a week, £30,000 a year.

Which made him a very good customer indeed.

But Campbell Macaulay was curious. When time permitted, he liked to watch Clint from the CCTV room. The man was up to something and he could not figure it out. He did not seem out to scam the casino – if that was his intention, Macaulay reckoned, he would have done it a long time ago. And most scamming tended to be at the blackjack tables, which, throughout his career, had been most vulnerable to fraud from card counters and bent croupiers. Money laundering was Macaulay’s best guess about Clint. And if that was his game, it was not Macaulay’s problem. Nor did he want to risk losing a good customer.

Traditionally, casinos had long been about cash. And casino operators did not like to grill their customers about the provenance of their money.

All the same, he did once, dutifully, mention his name to the head of the local police licensing team, Sergeant Wauchope. It was more to protect his own back, in case Clint was up to something illicit that he had failed to spot, than out of civic duty. His first loyalty was, and always had been, to the casino company, Harrahs, the Las Vegas giant, which had always looked after him.

The name that Clint used on the guest register here was Joe Baker, so it had come as a surprise when the Licensing Officer, returning the favour, had given him the privileged information that the Mercedes was registered to one Vlad Cosmescu.

That name meant nothing to Campbell Macaulay. But it had, for some considerable time, been on Interpol’s radar. There was no warrant out for his arrest at this stage. He was merely listed on the files of several police forces as a person of interest.

Outside Bucharest’s Gara de Nord, the chauffeur closed the door of the Mercedes with a solid thud . And for a moment, cocooned in the sudden silence of the interior of the car, on the big, soft seat, breathing in the rich smells of leather, Simona felt safe. The man who had rescued her entered on the far side and closed his door with the same thud.

Her heart thudded too.

The chauffeur climbed in the front and started the engine. The interior lights dimmed, then went off completely. As the car rolled forward, there was a sharp clunk beside her, like a door lock clicking, and she wondered what it was. Then she felt a sudden panic. Who was this man?