Barry Eisler: Rain Storm aka Choke Point

But Belghazi’s security consciousness wasn’t perfect. His behavior suffered from what software types call a “security flaw”-in this case, his compulsion to gamble.

That compulsion was probably part of what had enabled the Agency, and, perhaps, Karate, to track him to Macau to begin with. It was the same compulsion I was now working with to get inside his head. Because, if you’re addicted to high-stakes baccarat and you’re in Macau for a few days, there’s really nowhere but the Lisboa. Everything else feels small-time.

Belghazi would know better, of course. And maybe he’d heed that knowledge and put his chips down someplace less exciting, less glamorous, less predictable. But I didn’t think he would. If he had that kind of self-control, he wouldn’t be playing the tables in the first place. No, he’d gamble, all right, and rationalize by telling himself that there was nothing to worry about, that no one knew he was in Macau anyway, that besides, he always traveled with the bodyguards, just in case.

Keiko and I enjoyed a dinner of Macanese cuisine-an exotic mix of Portuguese, Indian, Malay, and Chinese influences-at the O Porto Interior, a charming but somewhat out-of-the-way restaurant. The location gave me ample opportunity to check our backs on the way to our meal, and also afterward, when we got in a cab and headed to the Lisboa.

I had spent time in all of Macau’s casinos, of course, while reconnoitering the territory, but that had been only part of my preparation for the Belghazi operation. I needed to be comfortable not just with gambling in Macau, but with gambling generally, and I wanted more exposure to the tics and rites of the subculture so that I could better absorb them, reflect them back, achieve the proper level of invisibility as a result. Macau was a start, but I knew that the persona I was inhabiting-moneyed Japanese gaming enthusiast-would lack crucial verisimilitude if the persona in question had never set eyes on Las Vegas.

So I had spent a week there, staying at the Four Seasons on the south end of the strip because it seemed to be the only good hotel that could be accessed without first fording a casino floor, and I knew I would need refuge from the smoke and the noise and the frenzy. I played baccarat at the upscale Bellagio; roulette at the off-strip Rio; craps at the fading Riviera, whose attempts to match the gayness and glitter around her felt forced, artificial, like makeup layered on by a woman who recognizes that she was never beautiful to begin with and has now, in addition, grown colorless and old.

When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I would wander off into the desert west of the strip and walk. The noise faded quickly. The lights took longer to escape, and even after miles they still obscured the stars in the desert sky. But eventually it would all come to seem sufficiently inconsequential in the distance, and I would stop and look back on what I had left behind. Standing silently on those indigenous reefs of sand, breathing the still, desiccated air, I decided that the improbable town I now beheld was a sad and lonely place, the shows and the restaurants and the neon all just a gaudy bandage wrapped around some irrefutable psychic wound, the city itself a bizarre and passing spectacle in the eyes of the reptiles that watched as I did unblinking from afar, who must have understood in their primitive consciousness and from this distant vantage that soon enough it would all be scrub and sand again, as it had always been before.

The reprieve was inevitably brief. I would return to the strip and all would be excess: Hummers purchased on tax breaks for use on flat asphalt, without even a pothole to challenge them; quarter-mile-long buffets vacuumed down by impossibly corpulent diners; pensioners drugged by a lifetime of television and enticed to this place by a craving for more spectacle, more and ever more.

I had thought that 9/11 might have changed some of this, might have been the occasion for reflection, for focus. But if the trauma of attack had produced any such effect, the benefits had been short-lived. Instead, during my mercifully brief time stateside, I saw that nothing had really changed. Sacrifice was the duty only of the few, who were of course hypocritically lauded by the many, the latter barely pausing in their infantile partying to wish the soldiers good luck at war.

But none of it mattered to me. I had seen it all before, when I had first returned from Vietnam. I’d done my bit of soldiering. It was someone else’s problem now.

Keiko and I got out of the cab in front of the Lisboa, and I felt my alertness bump up a notch. I don’t like casinos, in Macau, Las Vegas, or anywhere else. The entrances and exits tend to be too tightly controlled, for one thing. The camera and surveillance networks are the best in the world, for another. Every move you make in a gaming hall is recorded by hundreds of video units and stored on tape for a minimum of two weeks. If there’s a problem-a guy who’s winning too much, a table that’s losing too much-management can review the action and figure out how they were being scammed, then take steps to eliminate the cause.

But it’s not just the operational difficulties. It’s the atmosphere, the scene. For me, gambling when there’s no hope of affecting the odds always carries a whiff of desperation and depression. The industry recognizes the problem, and tries to compensate with an overlay of glitz. I suppose it works, up to a point, the way a deodorizer can mask an underlying smell.

We went in through a set of glass doors and rode a short escalator up to the main gaming hall. There it was, triple-distilled, a circular room of perhaps a thousand square meters, jammed tight with thick crowds shifting and sliding like platelets in a congealing bloodstream; high ceilings almost hidden above clouds of spot-lit, exhaled tobacco smoke; a cacophony of intermingled shouts of delight and cries of despair.

Keiko wanted to play the slot machines, which was fine, freeing me as it did to roam the baccarat rooms in search of Belghazi. I gave her a roll of Hong Kong dollars and told her I’d be back in a few hours. More likely, if things went according to plan, I would go straight to the hotel. In which case, when we hooked up again, I’d tell her that I’d looked for her but couldn’t find her, and had assumed that she’d gone back ahead of me.

I set out for the stairs that would take me out of the low-stakes pit and up to the high rollers’ rooms above. I passed rows of pensioners, each mechanically communing with a slot machine, and I thought of pigeons taught to peck a lever in exchange for a random reward. Next, several interchangeable roulette tables, the troupe hovering around them younger than the slot players they would eventually become, their jaws set, eyes shining in cheap ecstasy, lips moving in silent entreaty to the selfsame gods that even at the utterance of these foolish prayers continued to torment their worshipers with Olympian caprice.

I bought chips with four hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars-about sixty thousand U.S. I’d already squeezed Kanezaki for that much and more in “expenses”-the disbursements of which he had complained earlier. Then I wandered from room to room, never actually going inside, until I found what I was looking for.

Outside the Lisboa’s most exclusive VIP room, on the fifth floor, the highest in the casino, were the two bodyguards, flanking the entrance. Belghazi must have felt sufficiently safe inside not to bother himself arguing about the “no spectators” rule. And sure, the guards could effectively monitor the entrance this way, and deal appropriately with anyone they deemed suspicious.

Unfortunately for them, I’m not a suspicious-looking guy. And their presence told me exactly where to go.

I walked right past them and into the room. Only one of the three baccarat tables was in play. The rest were empty, save for their dealers, of course, who stood with postures as crisp as the starched collars of their white shirts, ready for the players who would surely drift in as the evening deepened into night; and for a few attractive Asian women whom I made as shills, there to attract passing high rollers with their bright smiles and plunging necklines.