In time, only after she’d gotten a measure of this particular wheel and run the odds in her head did she begin to bet big. And though she lost more than a few times, she was doing well enough to draw the attention of the pit boss, who, accompanied by a pair of uniformed security guards, came up to her and asked her to leave the table.
“I really don’t think you want to bother the girl,” Tommy enjoined as he stepped up next to Jenny and drew himself up. “Not unless you want to take a little trip up the mountain to Sean Woodard’s place and explain why you’re harassing his niece.”
Caught off guard, the pit boss took a moment to look back and forth between Tommy and Jenny, trying to decide if what he was saying was true. He still hadn’t come to a conclusion when one of the security guards’ radios crackled to life. After canting his head off to one side to listen to it, the guard frowned and then eased forward and whispered something in the pit boss’s ear.
In the twinkling of an eye, the demeanor of pit boss changed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tyler. I wasn’t aware who you or Ms. Garver were.”
“Well, now you know, mate,” Tommy snipped. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, I believe Jack Hughes is expecting us to join him for dinner.”
Stepping aside, the pit boss said nothing as he watched Tommy and Jenny gather up their chips and leave the gaming area.
“Is Jack really waiting for us?” Jenny asked when she was sure they were out of earshot from the pit boss.
“No,” Tommy grunted. “He’s busy keeping an eye out for people like you.”
“Oh,” was all Jenny could say as they headed back to the same steak house where Jenny, using her best Oklahoma drawl, told the waiter to rustle up a fat steer, knock the horns off, pass it over a fire, and serve it up.
As they were waiting for their meals, Tommy went back to peppering Jenny with questions about her boss he thought were innocent sounding. Having grown tired of his ham-handed efforts to pry information out of her, Jenny leaned over the table and glared.
“Look, cowboy, I expect you already know just about all there is to know about Susan, so save your breath, ’cos you’re not going to get anything more out of me.”
The young woman’s tone of voice and an expression that would have caused a lesser man to quiver were enough to cause Tommy to cease and desist. Besides, he concluded, she was right. Other than finding out if Susan G. and Andy had ever been romantically involved, something he expected even the grand inquisitor of Spain would have been unable to discover, he did know all he needed to about Jenny’s boss.
With that issue behind them, the two settled into enjoying a companionable meal together before signing the check over to their hotel account and heading off into the cool, desert night in search of a new venue where each of them could apply their own unique skills and talents to beat the house.
VIVA LAS VEGAS: THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
According to a recent New York Times news article (9 December 2013), the NSA and British intelligence were monitoring World of Warcraft and other online games in an effort to see if they were being used by terrorists to communicate with each other. The piece was published after we had started this story, and Jenny came up with the idea for this plot. Given that this is the second story line she suggested involving poker, I’ve come to the conclusion it would be unwise to play cards with her, at least when there was money on the line.
The ability of the NSA to monitor all forms of electronic communications has caused those engaging in criminal activities or waging war on the United States, the UK, and anyone who does not agree with them to explore new and ingenious methods of passing important operational information back and forth between themselves. Whether anyone has ever used this technique is a good question. Is it possible? Sure. Would it work? Probably. Is it something our cyberguardians need to keep an eye open for? I think so. I just hope they — the NSA and others — use their discretion when doing so.
HAROLD COYLE
VIVA LAS VEGAS: THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND THE STORY
The fact that criminals, malefactors, and others go to great lengths to both encrypt and hide their communications is as old as human civilization. Mary, Queen of Scots, whilst imprisoned at Chartley during the Babington Plot, used a substitution cipher to communicate with her supporters, hiding the messages in the bungs of outgoing empty beer barrels. Disastrously for Mary, Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, had already compromised both her secret communications channel and the cipher.
Most security-aware people are nowadays familiar with the concept of public key or asymmetric cryptography, however symmetric cryptographic techniques (in which both sender and recipient share a common key) are still very much alive and well.
For those who are interested in the basis for the WWII Japanese JN-25 code used in the story and also some of the tools used to defeat it, I would recommend visiting the Bletchley Park website, the WWII home of British code-breaking efforts.
Jenny used a series of open-source tools to help her first identify the criminals’ behavior patterns and then break the code. There are a wide variety of tools available for anyone interested, but for the story, we were particularly impressed by both the OpenPR project for pattern recognition and CrypTool. Her job was made significantly easier by the criminals themselves when they made the fundamental mistake of reusing their encryption key. This sort of clue or “crib” is something cryptanalysts pray for and gives cryptographers nightmares.
JENNIFER ELLIS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
After graduating in 1974 with a B.A. in history and a commission as an officer in the U.S. Army, HAROLD COYLE served on active duty for seventeen years in Germany during the height of the Cold War, in Korea on the staff of the Combined Field Army (ROK/U.S.), as an instructor at both the U.S. Army’s Armor School and the Command and General Staff College, and as an adviser to the Army National Guard. He also served in the Gulf during Desert Storm. In 1991 Coyle left the service and took up writing full time, penning works that include Team Yankee, a New York Times bestselling novel about modern armored warfare, and historical fiction such as Look Away. You can sign up for email updates here.
JENNIFER ELLIS started writing four years ago, before anyone told her that it was dangerously addictive. By the time she found that out, it was too late. She graduated from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst more years ago than she cares to remember, before embarking on what she laughingly calls a “diverse and eclectic career path,” a path that took her from the jungles of Central America through the bogs and hedgerows of Northern Ireland to the mountains of Bosnia and Kosovo, then onwards to the sandbox of Iraq (fleetingly) and, most recently, to the dusty plains of Afghanistan. Along the way she has also transitioned from being a regular army officer to becoming a civilian consultant and army reservist specializing in cybersecurity. Jennifer currently works for a global security corporation, has contributed to various government advisory bodies, occasionally deploys to hot dusty countries and, in her spare time, she writes.