Chapter 21

Natalie edged closer to the ship, her heart beating heavily as she gathered her courage.

"Are you sure about this?" Steve asked.

"This is the big one, isn't it?"

"Players from all over Oceania are converging on this spot. The stakes will be orders of magnitude higher than anything we've dealt with so far."

"You're sure that we can get in?"

"Fifty grand each buys us a seat at the top table. We can take them for a fortune if we believe it can happen."

"I know. I know. I just feel a little guilty about deceiving my friends."

"At the end of this evening we'll both be rich. We can go anywhere in the world, forget about all our problems."

"It sounds almost too good to be true."

"You want to be a slave for the rest of your life?"

"No," Natalie admitted. "Let's get this over with."

The pair held hands and walked up the gangplank of the luxury yacht, home to the richest card game on the planet.

A hundred meters away, looking through electronic field glasses, Elisabeth watched the pair board the boat, shaking her head in despair.

"Natalie, Natalie," she sighed. "What on earth are you playing at?"

The boat was furnished extravagantly. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling in the boat's saloon where the main table was laid out ready for play. Around the periphery, minor tables were already busy but it was the central table that drew their attention. There were eight empty seats and they owned two of them.

"This is going to be difficult," Steve whispered. "They'll be alternating four decks. Nobody can count against four decks."

"It won't be a problem," Natalie assured him.

"If it is then we're going to lose everything."

"Trust me."

"I do. I just hope you know what you're doing."

Over the past two weeks, they'd perfected the ultimate gambling system. Either of them could obtain a winning hand and Natalie could guide them to success. A wireless receiver built into Steve's spectacles was slaved to a transmitter linked directly to her Quantum through which she could pass him instructions. Several pre-agreed verbal code phrases could also be employed in the event of an emergency.

Steve had reacted predictably when she'd revealed her true nature, cowering in fear for his life. Slowly she'd reassured him and avarice had overcome the remainder of his reservations. Bringing Steve into her confidence had been a calculated risk but had been unavoidable if he were to play his part and understand how her abilities would provide them the edge they needed.

With an hour before the game convened, they sat at the bar and ordered drinks.

"Syntel would be mightily pissed off if they knew what I was planning," Natalie sighed.

"With luck, they'll never see you again after tonight."

"I take it you have our transport sorted?"

"There's a small cabin cruiser berthed on the far side of the dock."

"I've got enough meds to keep me healthy for years stacked in the SUV. Once we're finished here, I'll get them aboard and then we can leave. I've already hacked into the coastguard mainframe. When the time comes, I'll activate a trojan and disable their navigation systems."

Steve nodded, confident in his partner's abilities but still anxious about getting safely off the yacht if things went as well as they hoped. He still found it hard to believe that Natalie was a machine but she'd offered him the promise of great riches and that counted for everything. Secretly, he'd grown quite attached to her and when they were finally free, he eagerly anticipated the prospect of inspecting her body more closely. A lot more closely.

The Aquiline hit the back of her throat and Natalie savoured its sharpness. She glanced across the saloon and caught the first sign of their host.

The owner of the boat, the multi-millionaire Hugo Driscoll, stood at the far side of the saloon conferring with his head of security to ensure that the evening went smoothly. To him, this was more about prestige than money but that didn't stop him wanting both. The couple standing by the bar were an unknown quantity. The Governor had warned him about them, explaining how the woman was a clever operator. No matter how good they were, his system was foolproof and not even a card counting genius could counter it.

When the time came, Natalie and Steve took their chairs. An old friend was already seated, his beard neatly groomed for the occasion.

"We meet again," the Governor greeted them. "What a pleasant surprise."

"How are your friends?" Natalie asked. "I hope they weren't too badly hurt."

"I have no idea what you mean my dear," he replied condescendingly.

"That's okay then. Just so long as there are no hard feelings."

Steve growled under his breath, remembering all too well how the man had attempted to rob them of what was rightfully theirs.

The rest of the players slowly took their seats: two dark skinned men from the Arcadian islands, an Oceania City banker, and a swarthy trader that spoke with a heavy Caliban accent. Lastly, their host took his place and the game started in earnest.

Natalie played tentatively for half a dozen hands until all four decks had circulated and two hands had been played with the reused cards. Her predictions had proved accurate so far and she slowly started to make use of them. After the first draw, she held four sevens and the probability of a winning hand was almost assured. Driscoll and the banker folded as did Steve at her request. She now competed against the two Arcadians, the Governor and the Caliban. Thirty thousand rested in the middle of the table and ten minutes later, it was sitting in front of her. Steve grinned across at her but there was still a long way to go.

Hugo Driscoll was a tough nut to crack. He piled in his money at the right time and folded when his hand should have told him otherwise. Alarm bells rang in Natalie's mind and she forwarded them to Steve, hoping he could provide some insights when they took a break in an hour's time.

Two hands later, Steve had an excellent opportunity and she indicated remotely which cards he should discard, knowing what awaited him on the top of the pack. She admired his self-control when he picked up a red Senator and President to match the red eight, nine and ten that he already held.

Across the table, Driscoll discarded four sevens face down and Natalie knew they were in serious trouble. The Caliban lost heavily and looked extremely unhappy; he was down the best part of two hundred thousand dollars and they were still only in the first session. Steve soon added a large sum to his own funds but their host was either winning big or folding early. Something was terribly wrong and she suspected that she knew what. The game was rigged.

Only her skills protected them from heavy losses but one of the Arcadians was not so lucky. He piled vast sums into what he believed was a winning hand only to be beaten by Driscoll. Their host's confidence knew no bounds and she wondered what underlying mechanism underpinned it. The Arcadian rose and bowed, walking away from the table in utter defeat. From the look of him, the Caliban would be next as his complexion was turning more pallid with each hand.

"A break perhaps," Driscoll suggested as he rose and walked over to sit at an adjacent table where two voluptuous beauties fawned over him. A waiter deposited a round of cocktails at his table.

Natalie dragged her partner over to the bar to replenish their drinks.

"I can't believe it," Steve gushed. "We're up nearly a hundred grand already."

"It won't last long," Natalie replied quietly. "He'll take it all back and more besides before the evening is over."

"What? I thought you said..."

"Shhh. Keep it down," she whispered. "Let's go outside to get some fresh air."

On the deck overlooking the waterfront, Natalie relayed her fears that their host was employing some form of technology to assist him.

"He's cheating?" Steve asked incredulously.

"You'd better believe it. His predictive skills are even better than mine. During one of those last hands he discarded four of a kind."

"How's he doing it?"

"I don't know. He's definitely got some extra help. The Arcadian won't be the only casualty tonight."

"The Caliban?"

"I'll give him half a dozen hands at the most. He's a good player but he's outclassed here."

"So what can we do?"

"Tread carefully until I can figure out what's happening."

The play continued and apart from one minor win, most of the cash flowed towards Driscoll. As Natalie predicted, the Caliban bowed out after just four hands, cutting his losses before he lost even the shirt on his back. Natalie gazed around the room as he gathered up his belongings and prepared to depart. Nothing seemed out of place until she glanced up at the ceiling and spotted the surveillance cameras. They were not placed to see the faces of the cards but they did provide a panoramic view of the table. She looked at the cards laid face down before her and wondered how she'd design an identification system.

She stared intently at the intricate pattern on a card's reverse side and then at its neighbour. She framed both in her mind in high resolution then superimposed them. They were identical, almost. It took another two hands before her Quantum delivered the answer. The abstract pattern on the back of each card was very subtly different, no doubt uniquely identifying it. The elevated camera could read them and an operator could pass the information to Driscoll in a similar manner that she used to communicate with Steve.

Identifying the mechanism wouldn't help them, although it would assist her own predictions enormously once she'd correlated all the patterns.

Ultimately, to be able to defeat Driscoll, she'd need to either interfere with his communications or corrupt his intelligence. Like her own, she suspected any radio link would be encrypted and frequency hopping, removing the risk of both subversion and jamming. That left the latter option and that would require some decisive action on her part.

By the time that the second break arrived, the banker had succumbed leaving only the final Arcadian, the Governor, and their host pitted against them. The Arcadian had played extremely cagily but was probably still down over a hundred thousand on the night. Their bearded friend was doing well, although nowhere as well as she and Steve combined. Driscoll had the lion's share of the proceeds and she speculated that he would soon be setting them in his sights.

"I need the toilet," Natalie told Steve. "Get the drinks in, I'll be right back."

She walked out of the bar and passed by the toilets without stopping. After emerging onto the deck and ensuring that she was not observed, she clambered onto the handrail and launched herself upwards, spinning gymnastically and grasping the rail of the deck above. She pulled herself upwards just as a steward appeared from a doorway right in front of her. He quickly reached into his jacket as he reacted to her presence. Natalie dropped to the deck and drove her fist into his solar plexus. As he gasped in shock, she slammed his head hard against the outer bulkhead and rendered him unconscious.

Gambling that the passageway that he'd just emerged from was deserted, she dragged his limp body inside and stashed him within a conveniently located storage locker. She ripped his jacket to shreds and used the strips to bind and gag him securely before placing the confiscated nine millimetre pistol against her thigh and tying it in place.

Natalie sneaked carefully around the upper deck, eventually locating a doorway adjacent to what she suspected was the ship's bridge. This area was the only one off-limits to guests and it made sense that it would be the location of the control room. The only other alternative was on the lower decks but there seemed no reason why they'd make things more complicated than necessary.

As expected, the door was locked but muffled voices could be heard from within, too indistinct to make out clearly. Natalie returned to the store cupboard and smashed a ceiling tile to gain access to a crawl space above. She pulled herself up and crept carefully in the direction of the room at the far end of the gangway. Lifting up the edge of another tile, she peeked into the room below, immediately noticing a long console; sitting at which were three men wearing headsets.

"To your left: red three, green five plus three nines. Next player, two pairs of sevens and Senators. Discard your red nine and green four. Deck will give two Presidents to compliment your own."

It appeared to Natalie that the whole room was rigged, not just her own table. Things had suddenly gone from bad to worse. She slid the tile back into place, thinking quickly about what to do. Her enhanced vision spotted a network cable running along a distant cross-member and she edged over until she could reach it. She snapped the cable in two and using her fingernail, sliced open the insulation on the severed end.

Taking the bare strands, she pushed them against the end of her finger, wincing as blood flowed around the wound. The copper conductors brushed against her internal circuitry and a connection was established. She probed the network, surprised to find only the most rudimentary security policy. The network only traversed the upper deck before passing through Quantum firewalls to systems elsewhere on the yacht. The Quantums in the surveillance room received feeds from a battery of cameras and referenced those to a database containing the card patterns. To corrupt them all would invite disaster, but to amend a random few would probably go undetected and give her enough of an edge.

Making the modifications to just the console covering her own table, she retraced her route and rejoined Steve at the bar.

"You've been gone ages. I was beginning to worry."

"Just tipping the odds a little in our favour," she replied, winking slyly.

They resumed their seats for what would be the final session of the night. Their host surprised them by removing all limits on bets.

He wants to finish us off quickly, Natalie mused as she observed the predatory look in their host's eyes. She played cagily for several hands until an opportunity for a breakthrough emerged. Driscoll held three Presidents but due to the database corruption, he thought that she had three Senators when in fact she had four. The round progressed with only Natalie and Driscoll still in the game, both believing absolutely that they held the winning hand and neither of them willing to admit defeat. Over three million dollars soon sat in the middle of the table including most of what she and Steve had amassed over the past month.

"I call," Driscoll stated smugly, laying his hand flat on the table.

"Sorry Hugo, I'm afraid you've lost," Natalie replied, upending her winning hand. The man eyes looked at her in fury, knowing that he'd been outmanoeuvred but unable to determine how it had been achieved. Steve broke out into a broad grin as Natalie reached over to gather the huge stack of notes and pile them up in front of her.

"I think another break is in order," Driscoll advised, obviously wishing to launch a thorough investigation into how the tables had turned against him.

"Actually, I've got work in the morning and I thought I'd call it a night," Natalie replied. "I wouldn't want to bankrupt you completely Hugo."

Driscoll stared in disbelief as Natalie accepted a large cloth bag from Steve and began to fill it with her winnings. Steve added his own funds, taking the cue from Natalie that now was as good a time as any to make a hasty departure. With close to four million dollars to their name, it was a better outcome than they'd ever dared hope for.

"I think that you should allow us the opportunity to win back our money," Driscoll advised, menace lacing his every word.

"Maybe some other time," she promised sweetly.

With the bag tucked under her arm, Natalie led Steve towards the exit, watching as Hugo conferred urgently with his subordinates. Her senses were aware of the danger they now faced and knew that the longer they remained, the more dire their situation became.

"Keep up with me," she told her partner. "They may not be willing to let us walk out of here with all this."

"There are dozens of witnesses."

"I'll just be happy when we're standing on the dock," she replied as they left the saloon and followed a long passageway towards the outer deck. A door opened in front of them and a number of armed figures appeared, leaving little doubt as to their intentions.

"Back this way," she urged, pulling Steve along with her and searching for an alternative route to the waterfront. Steps descended to a lower deck and she took them two at her time to put distance between them and Hugo's security force. She recovered the pistol from where it was strapped to her leg and held it ready to defend herself if necessary.