“Thank you, Mr. Rutledge,” she said. “What are we now to do?”
He pressed the elevator button. “First you’ll have to speak to a representative from the IRS. They’ll want their share right now. We’ll pay them their portion directly and issue you a cashier’s check for the rest. Or, if you prefer, we can give you cash.”
She laughed. “Oh no. Not cash. I cannot walk under so much cash.”
The doors opened and the pair entered. He swiped his key card on the reader. Various floor buttons that had been illuminated all shut off, and the highest button lit up. They rode to the top of the building without interruption.
He led her from the elevator bank through an empty mahogany office. “Sorry, my secretary is home right now,” he explained. “It’s almost one a.m., after all.”
“Of course,” she said.
He opened one of the ornate double doors to his office, and the lights turned on automatically. He beelined to the wet bar. “Can I offer you a drink?”
She followed him in. “I do not drink, thank you.”
“What a pity.”
“Where is IRS man?” she asked.
He gestured for her to sit on the plush leather couch. “Oh, he’s not here.” He poured himself two fingers of scotch.
“Why not? Does the government not want their money?”
“There won’t be any money.” He sipped his drink and picked up a folder from his desk. “I have very thorough security people. Did you know we do a full background check on anyone who wins more than one hundred thousand dollars?”
She pursed her lips. “I didn’t know that.”
“Your accent seems to have disappeared.” He opened the folder. “Do you have any idea how many Sumi Singhs there are in the world? A lot, believe me. But only one of them was a child genius who went on to earn PhDs in physics, mathematics, and quantum theory. Hell of a coincidence, don’t you think? A talented quantum physicist winning my nine-spot keno progressive four days after we install a quantum computer. Oh, and side note, you’re married to the guy who installed it.”
She looked away.
He sat at his desk. “Vegas gets a lot of smart people trying to cheat. Very smart people. Geniuses, scientists, electrical engineers, you name it. They come from all over the world to try their schemes. And they always have some angle we never thought of. Because they’re smart. Like you.”
He leaned forward. “You’re more intelligent than I could ever hope to be. I feel no shame in admitting it. But there’s no substitute for experience. You know all there is to know about quantum physics, but I have twenty years of running this casino. And Vegas has a hundred years of catching extremely smart cheaters.”
“You can’t prove anything,” she said. “And if you don’t pay me the money I won, I’ll take you to court.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Wow. You’re bold, I’ll grant you that.”
“This is a trivial sum of money compared to your casino’s profits,” she said. “It is not worth your time to pursue this.”
He raised his voice. “If someone stole a nickel from me, I’d spend a hundred thousand dollars tracking him down! It’s not about profit; it’s about protecting this establishment. There are a hundred other casinos out there, ready to take my customers. Any whiff of fraud or mismanagement here will blot our name and make us look second-rate. And there’s no room for second-rate on the Strip. People don’t come here for so-so casinos. They want the best.”
He took a breath and returned to his normal voice. “According to my IT manager—who is very upset right now, by the way—there’s something called entanglement that might be to blame? I can’t begin to comprehend what that’s all about, but he said our computer’s long-term storage unit must have been hooked up to the same computer as someone else’s. I’m guessing your hubby brought it to you before he brought it to us.”
“Theoretically, if that were to have happened,” she said, “the qbits on both drives would no longer be entangled, and there would be no way to see that they ever were.”
“See, there you go, being all smart again. Thinking like a quantum physicist.” Rutledge sloshed the scotch around in his glass. “I tend to think more like a criminal. Our long-term storage unit is in our vault. You’ve never been in our vault. But I bet there’s some skin cells of yours on it from when you handled it before.”
She widened her eyes.
“Yeah, the clever ones get tripped up by the simplest things. Anyway, the police are on their way.”
“What?”
“I could have security detain you, of course. But then tomorrow’s news would say ‘Vegas Billionaire Has Goons Bully a Confused Foreign Woman.’ Much better to lure
you here and have the police pick you up.”