"You with me?"

The guy gulped and nodded. "Yes, sir," he whispered.

"The four of us and one tank," Tiny went on, "we're gonna go back to the air room, and n.o.body's gonna get hurt or bothered or not a thing like that. Or, plan two, I hit you with a hammer here, and you lay down in the truck, and my partner drives the truck away with you in it, and the two uniforms and me go to the air room without you. Up to you."

The guy stared at Tiny, fish-eyed. He didn't seem to know what he was supposed to say.

So Tiny helped: "This is called an option situation," he explained. "Option one, you cooperate. Option two, you get hit on the head with a hammer. Up to you."

"Cooperate," the guy whispered.

"Option one. Very good."

It was excellent, in fact, and the option they'd been hoping for, since Dortmunder's research had never managed to show them exactly where the air room was. Certainly, they'd have been able to find it eventually, knowing it couldn't be far from either the kitchens or the loading dock, but it certainly did make life easier to have cooperation from this bird dog, who obediently preceded Tiny and Jim and Gus into the building and along the maze of bas.e.m.e.nt corridors, Tiny wheeling the canister.

The air room looked a lot like a television studio's control room, being a long narrow s.p.a.ce with a lot of equipment along one wall and a few chairs at tables facing the equipment. The four people in the room barely looked up when their fellow worker and the two security guards and the burly guy in the blue coveralls with the canister on the dolly joined them, but then Jim O'Hara said, "Gents, could I have your attention for a second?"

They all turned away from their dials and meters, eyebrows raised, polite.

"Thanks, gents," Jim said. "What I have to tell you is, the hotel is being robbed."

They all reacted. One of them even jumped to his feet. A different one cried, "Robbed! Where? Who?"

Jim showed them his sidearm. "Us," he said.

Gus showed them his sidearm. Calmly, he said, "We are dangerous and desperate criminals here, and almost anything is likely to set us off into a frenzy of bloodletting, so I'd keep a tight a.s.shole if I was you boys."

One by one, the technicians - for that's what they were, technicians, not cops or commandos or kamikaze pilots - raised their hands. One by one, Tiny had them lower their hands to be cuffed behind their backs. Then Tiny helped them into seated positions along the rear wall, and stood over them to say, "I don't see any reason to tie up your ankles or put gags on you or shoot you dead or give you concussions or nothing like that, do you?"

They all shook their heads, and Tiny gave them an approving smile, which they didn't seem to find all that encouraging.

There was an oxygen canister hooked up to the equipment at the far end of the room, but since it was now barely 11:30 at night, that part of the equipment wasn't switched on. So Jim made sure the valve on that canister was screwed down shut and then he unscrewed the connector from the hose to the canister, and he and Gus wrestled the canister out of the way so Tiny could put the new one in its place.

One of the technicians, sounding very scared, said, "What is that? Is that oxygen? What is that?"

Gus looked at him, briefly. "What do you care?"

The technician couldn't think of an answer, so Gus went back to what he was doing, which was putting the old canister on the dolly.

"Be back," Tiny said, and wheeled the old canister out, planning to return with another of the new ones.

Gus looked up at the clock on the wall above the dials and meters; still not 11:30. "What the heck," he said. "Let's give everybody an early treat."

Then, having learned all about this stuff in a heating and air-conditioning course in prison, he turned on the oxygen equipment, adding it to the mix. "A special treat," he said, and turned the regulator all the way up.

Through the system the new mix began to make its way. Through the ducts, the pipes, inside the walls, silently breezing out of the modest registers and inhaling just as silently through the returns, circulating through all the sections of the casino, circulating through the cashier's cage and the counting room behind the cashier's cage and the money room behind the counting room, not circulating through management's offices or security's offices or the kitchens or the lobby or any of the bas.e.m.e.nt areas, but certainly circulating through the rest rooms off the casino, and through the lounge, and even moving upstairs to circulate in the dark room where the spotters sit, hired to look down through the one-way gla.s.s in the casino ceiling, to watch for cheats, for larcenous employees and card counters and all those other misguided individuals who have not grasped the central concept that the casino is supposed to take it all.

Through all those s.p.a.ces the new richer mix of air circulated, silent and persistent. Richer now, not with the oxygen normally laced into the mix, but with something chemically not that much different, a combination of oxygen and nitrogen called nitrous oxide. Or, to give it its familiar name, laughing gas.

53.

Just around the time the mixture of cooled air and laughing gas began to fill the public areas of the Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino, the last airplane for the day from the east was coming in to a landing out at McCarran International Airport. A pair of Las Vegas policemen, in uniform, had driven out especially to meet that flight, and they stood patiently to one side until they saw their man. They'd never seen him before, and he hadn't waved at them or done anything else to identify himself, and he was dressed in ordinary civilian clothes, and he was in a crowd of two hundred deplaning pa.s.sengers, but there was no doubt in their minds. He was their man, all right. A cop can always tell a cop.

They approached him, where he was walking along with that stiff-legged weariness that follows long plane rides, carrying his battered black soft suitcase, and one of them said, "Detective Klematsky?"

"Bernard Klematsky," he told them. "Nice of you to come out to pick me up."

"Our pleasure," one of the cops said. "I'm Pete Rogers, and this is Fred Bannerman."

There was a round of handshakes, and Bannerman said, "So how's New York?"

"Not much worse," Klematsky said, and they all chuckled.

Rogers said, "You wanna go pick him up?"

"Nah," Klematsky said. "He isn't going anywhere. My flight back isn't till nine thirty in the morning. Let him have a good night's sleep, and let me have a good night's sleep, too. We can go over, oh, I don't know, say about seven in the morning."

"You'll have a different escort, in that case," Rogers said. "Me and Bannerman will be sound asleep in each other's arms at seven in the morning."

Klematsky blinked, but then he nodded and said, "Uh huh."

Bannerman said, "We'll drive you to your hotel."

"Thanks," Klematsky said.

54.

Max prowled his prison. It was a prison, complete with guards, and he didn't like it at all, even though he'd sentenced himself to this plush incarceration, and even though the term of imprisonment was to be very short; by tomorrow evening, he'd be out of here, one way or the other.

Not the other, please. One way, and one way only: With the burglar in custody, in jail, or in the morgue. The fellow had to make his move while Max was still here in Las Vegas, he just had to.

In the meantime, Max prowled, from the large L-shaped living room to the big square bedroom with its big square king-size bed to the slightly smaller second bedroom with its own compact bathroom and with, at the moment, Earl Radburn napping as neatly as a corpse atop the bedspread; and on to the completely furnished gleaming white-and-chrome kitchen with its sink currently full of dirty gla.s.ses and cups, and around to the pleasingly pink large bathroom with all the mirrors and all the little bottles and boxes of sundries: shampoo, hand and body lotion, bath gel, hair conditioner, shoe polish, shower cap, toothpaste.

Irritated, Max slapped the tiny bath gel bottle back onto the bathroom counter, and glowered at himself in the wall-length mirror. In his boredom, he was reading the little bottles' labels again. Again! The business meetings he'd scheduled here had gone well, better than might have been expected under the circ.u.mstances, but now they were done, and he was still here, and there was nothing to do, nothing to do. Fuming, restless, struck livid by ennui, Max paced back out to the living room, where the four uniformed guards continued to sit murmuring together in the conversation area, and the drapes remained resolutely closed against the outside world.

Max hated that, the shut drapes. He'd argued against it, pointing out that the idea here was to let the burglar know he was actually present in this cottage. So why not let him see that Max was present? But Earl Radburn had said, "I've been thinking about this problem, Mr. Fairbanks, and I've been thinking what I might do, if I was the fella we're looking for. It's always a good idea to put yourself in that other fella's place. And it seemed to me, if what I wanted was that ring on your finger there, and if I could see you through a plate-gla.s.s window, I just might decide to fire a high-powered rifle through that window, and put a bullet in your head, and count on stripping that ring off your finger in the subsequent confusion."

While Max had blanched at this idea the bullet in the head was just too graphic an image - Earl had gone on, "Now, I'm not saying this fella's the kind that might do such a thing, or not. I'm Just saying, if I was that fella, that's one of the possibilities I'd consider."

So the drapes would stay closed. Every once in a while, a battle would take place out there on the Battle-Lake, unseeable beyond the drapes, and during the period of explosions, and the roaring of the crowd, Max and his guards would pace more restlessly than ever inside this prison, the guards with hunted looks, their hands hovering over their sidearms as the cannonades sounded all around them. But other than during those battles, there was no way to tell for sure that there was anything at all in the entire world outside this apartment. They might as well be on an asteroid in the asteroid belt, the last human beings in existence.

A knock on the door. Max at once removed himself to the kitchen doorway, feeling ashamed of his caution, but knowing nonetheless that caution was his only friend at this moment. One of the guards crossed the room to cautiously - caution was everybody's friend in this cottage - open the door.

A murmur of voices. The guard stepped back, and a dapper black fellow in a tux came in, with a clipboard in his hand and a gold nametag reading JONES on his left lapel. "Evening, sir," he said, with a broad toothy smile and a slight bow of the head in Max's direction.

Max grimaced in return. Evening? It was after midnight, and nothing had happened yet. He could almost wish this was the burglar himself, or at least one of his friends.

"Housekeeping," the guard explained to Max, unnecessarily.

"Just checking," the fellow from Housekeeping said, still with that broad smile, "to be sure everything's all right."

"Everything's," Max said savagely, "hunky-dory."

"Well, we'll just look around," the fellow from Housekeeping said. "With your permission, sir?"

"Go ahead," Max told him, and moved out of the kitchen doorway, so the fellow could go in.

The guard had already returned to his conversation in the conversation area, and now Max went over there to say, "You recognized him, did you?"

The guard had just resumed his seat on one of the sofas, but now he stood and said, "Sir?"

"The fellow from Housekeeping," Max said. "You recognized him."

"No, sir," the guard said. "Why would I recognize him?"

Max only now looked at the shoulder patch on the guard's uniform, and realized it did not say Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino, it said Markus Plaza, which happened to be a shopping mall owned by TUI outside Phoenix, Arizona. So he was part of the extra security force brought in for the occasion.

Max now looked more carefully at the other guards' uniforms and shoulder patches. He said, "None of you work here at the Gaiety?"

"No, sir," they said. "No, sir."

"So you won't recognize bona fide employees of the Gaiety," Max said.

"Well," the first guard said, "they have to show us ID."

"Did that fellow show you ID?"

"His nametag, sir."

The guard, who was himself black, cleared his throat and said, "Uh, the guy you're waiting on, he's white, isn't he?"

"Well... yes."

"So," the guard said, and shrugged.

"But why," Max demanded, "aren't there people from the Gaiety in here, who know what the other employees look like?"

The guards looked at one another. One of them said, "Mr. Fairbanks, sir, we couldn't take over for them. We wouldn't know their jobs. We're extra security on account of you, so we're a.s.signed to you."

"The people outside as well? Around the perimeter?"

"Yes, sir," they said. "Yes, sir."

Max frowned deeply, thinking about this. He wanted to blame Brandon Camberbridge, accuse the man of keeping the most knowledgeable guards for his hotel instead of using them to protect the boss, but he did understand the orders would have come from Earl, and it did make sense to keep the hotel staff at its normal duties. "If a white person tries to get in here," he said, "check his ID."

"Yes, sir," they said. "Yes, sir."

Max walked back over to the kitchen doorway, and looked in. The fellow from Housekeeping was washing the dirty dishes in the sink. Looking over toward Max, his inevitable smile now apologetic, he said, "Won't take a minute, sir. This should have been taken care of."

"Very good," Max said. He was pleased to see someone who took an interest in his work.

"I'll be back a little later with the supplies you need," the fellow said. "For now, I'11 just finish up in here, check the bedrooms and baths, and be out of your way."

"There's someone asleep in the second bedroom."

"I'll be as quiet as a mouse," the fellow promised, and flashed that big smile again as he stood over the sinkful of soapy water. "I'll be in and out of there, he'll never even know I'm around."

55.

It was such a temptation to make off with the sleeping guard's handgun, but Herman resisted the impulse. He was here on reconnaissance only, and would be coming back later, so pilfering pistols would not be a good idea.

Herman Jones, formerly Herman Makanene Stulu'mbnick, formerly Herman X, finished stage one of his reconnaissance, thanked Max Fairbanks for his patience, and was ushered out of the cottage by the same brother who'd admitted him. Two more guards, one a brother and one not, escorted him from the cottage to the main path, where he thanked them for their courtesy, a.s.sured them they'd see him later, and moved jauntily away, toward the main building of the hotel.

For Herman Jones, subterfuge at this level was child's play, was barely deception at all. Back in the old days when he'd been actively an activist, when he'd been X and most of his jobs had been selfless heists to raise money for the Movement, so that he barely had time left to steal enough to keep his own body and soul together, he'd constructed an entirely false cover life to live within, full of nice middle-cla.s.s friends of all races who believed he was something important and well-paid in "communications," a word that, when he used it, sometimes seemed to suggest book publishing, sometimes the movies or television, and sometimes possibly government work.

Later, when he'd been in politics in central Africa, vice president of Talabwo, a nation where your Swiss bank account was almost as important as your Mercedes-Benz and where the only even half-educated person within five hundred miles who was not trying to overthrow the president was the president, and where if the president went down the vice president could expect to share with him the same shallow unmarked grave, Herman had learned a level of guile and misdirection that Americans, had they been able to observe it, could only have envied.

So now that he was home, no longer devoted to turning over the proceeds of all his better heists to the Movement (mainly because the Movement seemed to have evaporated while he was away), and no longer having to deal with politicians and army men (most of them certifiably insane) day and night, Herman was ready to turn his hard-earned expertise to for-profit crime.

Which was why he was here. He'd only worked with John Dortmunder twice before, but he'd enjoyed both jobs. The first time, he'd been brought into the scheme by Andy Kelp, whom he'd met in the course of various non-Movement enterprises, and the scheme was an interesting one, in which they'd stolen an entire bank, which had given him plenty of leisure time to work on the vault. The job hadn't wound up to be an absolutely perfect success, but the group had been nicely professional and the experience basically a good one. The second time he'd been included into a Dortmunder job, it had been a scam, a little favor like this current one, but with less potential return.

Pilots say that any landing you walk away from is a good landing, and Herman's variant on that was, any crime you walk away from unhandcuffed is a good crime. With that criterion, all of Herman's experiences with John Dortmunder had been good ones.

So now he was back in the States, and he wanted people in the profession to know he was here, he was available, and that's why he'd phoned Andy Kelp. Then, when Andy'd told him what was going down here, and why, he could see it was a caper he had to be part of. However large or small the profit on this one, it would get him noticed in the right places. "Herman is back," people would say to each other after tonight. "As good as ever."

No no no. They would say, "Herman is back. Better than ever."

The night outside the cottages was dark, and very lightly populated. The children among the hotel guests were presumably all tucked into their beds at this point, watching television, while their parents and the other adult customers of the Gaiety roamed the casino or sat around in groups in the coffee shop, telling each other how much fun they were having. Outside, the dry desert air was cooler at night, almost pleas ant, but the only human beings to be seen, here and there on the paths and walkways, were hotel employees and extra security personnel. And, of course, a number of robbers.

Striding away from cottage one in the shadowed darkness, exuding the confidence of a supervisory employee on official business, clipboard prominent, Herman made his way to cottage three, diagonally to the right rear of cottage one, and at the moment - as at most moments since the high rollers left unoccupied. (Cottages five, six, and seven, even farther back from the BattleLake, currently housed the imported extra guards.) So many hotels and other such places no longer have actual keys for their many doors. They have electronic locks instead, that respond only to a specific magnetic impulse. All the old skills of the lockman, with picks and slugs and routers and skeleton keys, have gone by the board. But technology is there to be mastered, and mastered it shall be. The card Herman now inserted into the slot of the front door of cottage three had not been supplied by a hotel checkin clerk, but had come from the criminal workshops of New York City. This card was an alien, a wily seducer, a cuckoo in another bird's nest, and the instant Herman slid it into the slot that little green light went on, and the door fell open before him.