“Dollars or pounds?” Woodard asked.
Though he’d meant dollars, without batting an eye, Tommy replied. “Pounds, of course.”
After doing some quick calculations in his head, Woodard asked if that included his expenses. Tommy furrowed his brow. “Ordinarily, it would not.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Woodard shot back as he tended to when he believed he had an edge with someone he was negotiating with. “I’ll throw in a free suite of rooms, meals on the house, and use of a company car whenever you need it. Will that cover your personal needs while in town?”
Though this was exactly what he expected, Tommy made something of a show mulling over Woodard’s offer before responding. “Though I expect I’ll be in for a good bollocking when I tell my boss about that part of the deal, I don’t see how I can say no, Mr. Woodard.” Then Tommy frowned. “I will need to fly in my assistant.”
“Another Welshman?” Woodard asked in an effort to lighten the mood now that he’d managed to negotiate a solution to a problem at a cost far below what he’d been expecting to pay.
“Not even close,” Tommy snickered. “This girl is as American as Yorkshire pudding.”
Appreciating the stubby little Welshman was going along with his effort to conclude the business portion of their breakfast with a spot of humor, Woodard shrugged. “Well, in that case, by all means, count her in.”
Never having had an opportunity to go to Las Vegas, although she’d always promised herself a trip, let alone doing so via the private jet sent to pick her up, Jenny Garver was in a spectacularly good mood when she saw Tommy waiting for her at the terminal of Henderson Executive Airport. Flashing him the down-home country smile that he had found to be far more alluring than he expected she’d meant it to be, Jenny made straight to where he and Hughes were waiting.
When Tommy saw the oversized red duffel bag on wheels being pulled by a comely flight attendant in a white shirtdress following her, he cocked an eyebrow. “You do appreciate this isn’t going to take more than a few days,” he muttered as he took the duffel from the flight attendant and adjusted his grip to compensate for the bag’s weight.
Clutching the strap of her laptop’s carrier, a device Jenny never allowed to be out of her control, she tilted her head to one side. “What? Were you expecting me to go about as naked as a jaybird?”
Tommy grinned. “A man can always hope.”
Unfazed by the Welshman’s brashness, Jenny snickered. “Well, now I know part of the reason you asked Susan to send me out here. What’s the other part?”
“Jack here and I will fill you in on the way to the hotel,” he replied as he led the girl from Oklahoma out to the chauffeur-driven limousine he’d been given the use of for the duration of his stay.
Jenny waited until after she’d checked into her room and Hughes had gone to ask Tommy why he’d called on her instead of his own software expert. “In addition to being quite good at finding your way around the Internet, your boss told me your hobby is cryptography and cryptanalysis,” he offered.
Jenny shrugged. “I took a few courses in cryptography since I was thinking about going to work for the company but then chucked that idea out the window when Susan asked if I’d like to work for her.”
Having already concluded from working with him in New York that he was more hardware oriented, Jenny peppered him with a series of questions concerning what it was she would be looking for and what he wanted her to do once they’d found it. One question she didn’t ask, a question both she and Susan had pondered after Susan had agreed to Tommy’s request that she hire Jenny out for this job, was why he hadn’t called in Andy’s own software expert. Jenny couldn’t help but think Tommy, who had never missed an opportunity to engage in playfully suggestive banter with her while he had been in New York, thought he was simply trying to impress her with an over-the-top offer and first-class treatment he currently had access to in the hope he’d get lucky.
Susan thought otherwise. Tommy had struck him as more of a teddy bear than a wolf, though she did warn Jenny to keep her wits about her. What Susan suspected, in part due to a few things Andy had alluded to, was that things were not quite as cozy at Century Consulting as he would have liked. And while Tommy had worked well with Jenny, it did not take long for Susan to appreciate that putting up with his brash, almost brusque manner and personal habits that would have turned a goat’s stomach could get really old really fast. So it was more than the thousand dollars a day or a chance to reward Jenny for her efforts over the past few months that led Susan to agree to send Jenny out to Vegas. If truth be known, it was the opportunity to find out more about Andy’s operation as well as his personal life that she hoped Jenny would be able to weasel out of Tommy that tipped the scales. Had she known Tommy’s request was motivated by much the same line of reasoning, Susan G. probably would have said no.
Tommy’s insistence that he and Jenny work from an off-site location was endorsed by Hughes who, like Tommy, could not discount the possibility there was someone inside his own team who knew the online poker game was being used for purposes other than adding to Sean Woodard’s already considerable fortune. “They don’t necessarily need to be a part of the system,” he explained to Jenny, who had asked him how real such a threat was. “Far too many employees of the Martinique are paid well by all sorts of characters to do nothing more than turn a blind eye to what they’re up to or to be someplace else when they, the miscreants, walk through the doors.”
The room within the computer science department of the Las Vegas campus of the University of Nevada, which had been allocated to them for their use, came as a disappointment to Jenny, for she had been looking forward to working in what she called “the belly of the beast.” Still, the setup was, in her opinion, “not too shabby.”
Had anyone else said this, Tommy would have wondered about his or her sanity, for the room was in fact a lab where members of the computer science department’s faculty conducted research into the online behavior of organizations, government agencies, and, quite naturally, corporations like Woodard’s. “Mr. Hughes has been very generous to the university,” Hughes informed Tommy and Jenny as they were settling in at their respective workstations. “In addition to research on managing databases and data mining, they have generated some algorithms that have proven to be quite useful in maximizing the casino operations.”
“Translated into English, dear girl,” Tommy explained to Jenny without looking away from the computer monitor he was seated before, “Jack’s boss uses the school to come up with more efficient and novel ways of separating the people who visit his casino from their money.”
After tilting her head to one side and giving this response a moment’s thought, Jenny nodded. “Nothing wrong with that,” she chirped cheerily as she returned to logging in to the system. “Isn’t that what we’re doing to him?”
“We’re providing him a service,” Tommy shot back.
“I expect he sees what he does in the same light.”
Tommy was about to ask her how she figured that but decided to use this opportunity to strike off in an entirely different direction. “When I was in New York, you never did tell me how a country girl like you wound up working for someone like Susan G. in the big city.”