The brown-haired man stumbled backward in terror. “Oh my God! . . . Not you!”
“That’s right,” said Serge. “Lee Harvey Oswald.”
“Get away from me!”
“We’ve got business. How about a pamphlet? ‘Fair Play for Cuba.’”
The bouquet flew into the air, and JFK took off through the club, crashing into people and knocking over tables.
Serge was right behind him leaping over chairs. “Destiny knocks!”
“Stop following me!”
Serge pulled up short at the front door and cupped hands around his mouth. “Meet you at the grassy knoll.”
Chapter 31
Setting the Table for the Climax
News of yet another lottery rollover spread like only lottery news can, and the greed typhoon whipped from Florida to the rest of the country and Latin America.
It was still the wee hours before dawn, but a group of men in the nation of Costa Gorda were paying particular attention to a big-screen TV. The luggage had remained packed and waiting since their last unsuccessful visit to Miami.
The new jackpot was announced, and all heads in the room turned toward the same person.
He gave a curt nod, which scrambled the others into a military-style operation. The dark of night had begun to dissipate when the men trotted briskly across a mountainside plateau. A Learjet lifted off, climbing into the orange light of the sun still below the horizon. The passenger manifest was in the name of one Ocho Pelota.
The last time around he had been caught off guard by an inability to buy the whole board in one fell swoop. Insufficient time or boots on the ground. And a tidy sum down the drain. He would not make the same mistake twice.
“Pablo, come here,” said Pelota, sipping a mimosa. That’s how it worked. Don’t speak until spoken to.
Pablo took a seat in the jet next to his leader. “What are you reading?”
“This cheap lottery magazine. I bought it in a convenience store on our previous trip.” Pelota flipped back to show him the cover. “It gives advice on how to increase your odds of winning.”
“But mathematically you can’t predict randomness.”
“Usually,” said Pelota. “But one thing that’s not random is the weight of the Ping-Pong balls. This fascinating article explains why there have so many record-breaking jackpots in a row this year, like when they had that unprecedented conga line of hurricanes back in ’05.”
“What’s it say?” asked Pelota.
“That the lottery changes its set of balls from time to time, and they did so again at the beginning of the year. The magazine statistically analyzed the new set and determined that the balls with the most favorable weights were high numbers.”
“How does that cause a bunch of big jackpots?” asked Pablo.
“The lottery numbers are one to fifty-three, but this article says most people like to play birthdays—their own, spouses’, children’s—or anniversaries and other occasions. The months limit the numbers to twelve, and the days of the month to thirty-one. Hence, lots of rollovers.”
“That makes sense,” said Pablo. “We lost last time on a high-number drawing.”
“So we do it in reverse this time.” Pelota stirred his drink. “Start buying combinations of the biggest numbers and work backward. That way if we can’t complete the board in time, we’ll at least be in a better position . . .”
The Lear touched down at Miami International in time for brunch. Pelota and his coterie cleared customs. He had called ahead from the plane, and a luxury motor coach was already full of cheap Latin labor.
After his earlier failure, Pelota had done the math five ways. It was all about the proper design of an organizational pyramid. Each of the men who had flown down with him would supervise ten local associates with their own crews. And each of them was given a specific spread of permutations descending from fifty-three. It worked on paper and, unbeknownst to Pelota, had actually been done before in the nineties by a group of legitimate venture capitalists who, as they say, hit the jackpot.
Pelota’s gang all met in the conference room of an extended-stay business hotel near the airport, and the local bank vice president even accompanied the armored car that delivered the needed currency.
“So happy to see you again in Miami,” said the executive. “With all this cash, will you be needing any protection?”
Pelota gave him the look.
“Oh, right.” The vice president left.
Ocho’s lieutenants fanned out across the city to put their plan in motion. Underlings were dispatched in geometrically precise quadrants. They worked all day and well into night, then the next day, and the next. They cut in line. They sped on the highway. Parked in handicapped spots. Rushed back to the hotel to refill with cash on hand. Then back out again.
Pelota remained in his suite, receiving hourly rounds of phone calls with progress reports. Traffic was thick and the crowds thicker. Ticket machines crashing from the volume.
By the last evening, they were still on schedule, and then they weren’t. It came down to the wire. One way or another they would know by the end of the night . . .
10:40 p.m., sales cut off.
10:46, last piles of Pelota’s tickets collected.
10:51, rental sedans raced back to the extended-stay hotel near the airport.
Crime lieutenants crowded into the elevator for the top-floor suite. Pelota was already sitting at the table when they whipped out notebooks and entered results on the master spreadsheet.
Much, much better than the last time. But . . .
“You didn’t get all the tickets?” Pelota asked the first lieutenant.
“It was impossible . . .”
“I don’t pay you for impossible.” He turned to the next one for an answer.
“The places were crazy . . .”
On down the line, same story.
Pelota had adopted a saying he’d picked up in prison. Don’t get mad until it’s time to get mad. He was roundly feared for his erratic and ruthless temper, but in truth his emotions were a highly polished chest of tools, and he orchestrated erraticism to an advantage. He had known these men going back forever, his most trusted and dependable. If none of them was able to fully complete the task, then maybe he was asking too much, but it was not something to admit. He folded his hands in pregnant thought. He quietly raised his eyes. “How much?”
It was all entered into a calculator, and the equal sign punched. “We were able to buy ninety-two percent of the board.”
Not perfect, but definitely better than last time around. As long as the numbers didn’t fall into the low end. Pelota downed a double of Johnnie Walker Blue to stop the anxious calculus in his head. Nobody spoke during the last five minutes as they waited in front of the television. Pelota was closest to the set, sitting on the front edge of a padded lounger. The rest stood in a semi-circle around the back of his chair.
11:15 p.m.
Hyper-optimistic game-show music came on as a pink flamingo logo swirled to the center of the screen. The Miami skyline lit up the back of the studio as Ping-Pong balls ricocheted around a clear chamber. Vacuum tubes sucked up a half dozen of the balls in succession as the emcee read them off: “Eighteen, twenty-nine, thirty-six, forty-five, forty-eight, fifty-two . . . Thank you and good night from the Florida Lottery!”
Silence.
Everyone in the room knew.
The men standing around the chair began jumping and whooping and hugging. Pelota simply shut his eyes in relief.