Free The Geneva Deception by James Twining

the casino floor and wait there for them to make contact.’
    ‘It’s unlikely they’ll bring the painting with them,’ Jennifer added. ‘So we expect them to either provide us with a location, which we will then check out before handing over the money, or lead us to it so that we can make the exchange there.’
    ‘Either way, we’ll follow them to make sure we grab them, the painting and the money,’ Stokes said confidently.
    ‘Once again, Mr Kezman, the federal government is very grateful for your co-operation in this matter. We’ll do what we can to ensure that your staff and customers…’
    ‘Don’t mention it,’ Kezman waved Jennifer’s thanks away with a sweep of his hand. ‘You just make sure no one gets hurt.’

TWELVE
    Amalfi Casino and Hotel Resort, Las Vegas
    17th March - 11.22 p.m.
    It was funny how people conditioned themselves to only ever see what they wanted to, Foster mused. Ask anyone who wears a watch with Roman numerals how the number four is written on it and they’ll say IV. All those years that they’ve been looking at it, checking the time, the numbers only a few inches from their stupid dumb-ass faces, and they’ve never actually noticed that it’s IIII. That it’s always IIII on a watch, because IV would be too easily confused with VI. That their brains have tricked them into seeing what they expect to, or rather not seeing what they should. It was pathetic really.
    Like tonight. The security detail at the staff entrance had barely glanced at his badly fitting uniform and tampered badge before waving him through. He looked the part, so why see somethingthat you’ve convinced yourself isn’t there? That’s why the beard had had to go in the end; that might have been the one thing that could have triggered a response.
    He, on the other hand, had immediately picked out the FBI agents, uncomfortable in their civilian clothes as they loitered near the entrance, or perched unconvincingly in front of the slot machines. It was the half-hearted way they were feeding the money into the machine that was the killer tell - either you played the slots, or they played you.
    He stopped next to an anonymous-looking red door. How many people had walked past it, he wondered, without ever asking themselves why, out of all the doors that lined this service corridor, this was the only one that warranted two locks. Without ever asking themselves what might possibly lie behind it that demanded the extra security. But then, that’s what he’d noticed in civilians: a lack of basic human curiosity, a slavish, unquestioning acceptance of a life dropped into their lap like a TV dinner.
    Quickly picking the locks, he opened the door on to a dimly lit stairwell that he slipped into, wedging a fire extinguisher between the base of the door and the bottom step of the metal staircase to stop anyone coming in after him. The staircase led up several flights to the observation deck - a series of cramped, interconnectinggantries hidden in the ceiling void that stretched over the entire casino floor.
    Although in theory these were to allow maintenance staff to invisibly service the casino’s complex lighting grid and vast network of A/C ducts, the careful positioning of two-way mirrors and air vents also allowed casino security to spy on people without being seen. Dealers watching the gamblers, boxmen watching the dealers, supervisors watching the boxmen, pit bosses watching the supervisors, shift managers watching the pit bosses…the entire set-up functioned on the assumption that everyone was on the make and on the take.
    Not that the deck was used as often as it used to be - video cameras and advances in biometric technology that could flag-up suspicious changes in body heat and pupil dilation had seen to that. But Kezman was famously old-school and had insisted on having it there anyway, both as a low-tech back-up, and because he knew that sometimes you needed to get up there and sniff the floor to get a