“You’re right, I didn’t,” Jenny replied without bothering to look away from the monitor.
After waiting several seconds for her to continue without her doing so, Tommy cleared his throat. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“How did the two of you find each other?”
“Oh, it’s a long story,” Jenny replied in a singsongy voice that told Tommy she had no intention of answering him. “Now, if you’re ready, what exactly is it we’re looking for?”
Realizing the young woman from Oklahoma wasn’t about to respond to his less-than-subtle inquiries into her boss’s past, Tommy filled her in on what he suspected and what he wanted her to look for.
Installing via a flash drive an open-source pattern-recognition program, which she’d spent several weeks tweaking, onto the system she was using, Jenny spent the rest of the afternoon playing around with various parameters as she hunted for discernible patterns, routines that were repeated in each of the games Tommy had given to her for analysis. Finally, she wandered off to find a coffee and a mosey around the campus, leaving her program chunking through her search strings. When she eventually returned an hour later, Tommy was about ready to bite her head off. Before he even got a word in, however, she plunked herself back down in front of the monitor, unlocked the screen saver, and lurched forward as something of a grin lit up her face. “Ah, there you are, you little sucker.”
“There’s what?”
“The key.”
“To the code?” Tommy asked incredulously.
“Yep! Well, at least one of them,” she corrected herself with scrupulous honesty.
Turning away from the monitor he’d been working from, Tommy slid his chair closer to Jenny’s. “Show me.”
“These people aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box, that’s for sure. They’re recycling their avatar names too often, along with the same crypto keys. By doing so, they’ve handed us a crib that will allow us to crack their code.”
“So what is it they’re up to?”
With furrowed brow, Jenny looked away from her monitor and over at Tommy. “Hold your horses, cowboy,” she chided. “How about giving me some elbow room here and a chance to go in and root around some?”
Pulling away, Tommy threw up his hands, palm out. “Okay. Sorry. I was just curious.”
“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” Jenny muttered distractedly even as she was turning her full attention back toward the screen, sporting a fiendish grin as she took to twirling the trackball with an alacrity that even impressed an old hand like Tommy.
With nothing to contribute at the moment and having no wish to interfere with Jenny as she blitzed through screenshot after screenshot of games that had been recorded and saved by Hughes’s people, he eased away from her, leaned back in his chair, and turned his attention into figuring out how he could wean some useful information concerning Susan G. from the girl. That, he concluded, was obviously going to be a greater challenge than cracking the code and tracking down the people they were being paid to nail.
4
It took Jenny late into the night and most of the next day, but by the time she and Tommy joined Jack Hughes at the Martinique’s own steak house for dinner that evening, she had a firm grasp on what they were dealing with and how the casino’s online game was being used. Over a porterhouse so raw Tommy found he could not help but ask if it was really dead, Jenny laid out her findings, doing so in the same manner she’d been trained to by Susan, who frequently had to remind the girl from Oklahoma that she, Susan, was a dyed-in-the-wool technophobe.
“When you get into the swing of things, it’s all pretty basic,” Jenny pointed out as she sawed off a hunk of red, semi-raw meat Tommy half expected to moo. “The key I used to unlock the system was the names the participants used for their onscreen avatars.” Pausing, she popped a chunk of beef in her mouth and closed her eyes as she savored the taste of fresh, grain-fed beef cooked the way she liked it.
Like Tommy, Hughes couldn’t help but be mesmerized by Jenny’s behavior, which he found to be as appalling as it was alluring in a strange, down-home country way.
“Though the participants in the game regularly changed the names of their screen avatars for each session, they linked the initial session keys to the avatar name sets and then were dumb enough to reuse them.”
“So you know who these people are,” Hughes interjected as Jenny set aside her fork and took up her glass of Coors Light.
With the graceful ease she’d perfected while attending the University of Oklahoma, Jenny was able to shake her head even as she was sipping her beer. “Haven’t a clue,” she blurted as she put down her glass, took up her knife and fork, and went back to sawing away at what was left of the sixteen-ounce hunk of beef in front of her. “I can tell you what they’re up to, though.”
“And that would be…?” Hughes asked, doing his best to keep the exasperation he felt over the tortuous manner with which Jenny was laying things out.
“The people are using the game as a commodities market. The person who opens the game is selling something to the other players.”
Hughes’s exasperation with Jenny’s manner evaporated. “Drugs?”
“That’d be my guess. It’s all rather slick, if you ask me,” she went on without waiting for Hughes to absorb the import of her revelation. “After the seller has managed to bring all the potential buyers to the virtual table, he uses the first game to issue a challenge using a common encryption key. Each buyer is then required to answer using a unique response. By doing so, the seller is able to find out if everyone at the table is legit. If they are, the seller sends a code letting everyone know the game is clean.”
After another break in her narrative in which Jenny took her time to enjoy more of her steak, she explained how the seller went about soliciting bids and, when he was satisfied, arranging for the delivery of the commodity.
“In game two, the seller states both the quantity he has to offer and his price. The other players who are the buyers bid against each other starting in the third game. Those who can’t keep up drop out, just like in a regular poker game. Those who ‘win’ a hand are then provided with the time and location of the delivery using the encryption system Tommy here discovered,” Jenny declared as she waved her steak knife, still slick with blood, in his general direction. “Pretty neat, huh?”
While neither Hughes nor Tommy would have used the word neat to describe how Sean Woodard’s game was being used, both had the same question. After glancing at each other out of the corners of their eyes, they turned their full attention back to Jenny. “Okay, where do we go from here?”
Before answering, she swallowed the last of her steak, set aside her knife and fork, and took a sip of beer, after which she shrugged. “Haven’t a clue. It was my understanding all you wanted us to do was to find out what the little varmints were up to. Unless there’s something else you want, I was planning on heading up to my room and getting changed before heading out to see what kind of trouble I can get into. You gents care to tag along?”
As much as Tommy wanted to say yes, the look he saw in his friend’s eye told him their day was far from over. So he demurred as politely as he could, waiting until Jenny had gathered her things up, thanked Hughes for the dinner, and took off. Turning to Hughes, Tommy sighed. “Well?”
Hughes took a sip of his own beer before answering. “Looks like you and me will be headed back up to see the boss tomorrow morning.”