The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

Surveillance cameras scan every inch of a casino floor, often from several angles, and the angles can be changed. The people watching these monitors know what to look for. If some dummy is seen stealing quarters from Grandma’s bucket on a slot machine row, or some near-genius is engaged with three or more equally intelligent co-conspirators in a complex scheme to cheat the casino at a twenty-one table, they are seen. Se

curity officers are sent to the slot machine or the twenty-one table. The would-be thieves and cheats are taken to an area where they are photographed, fingerprinted, counseled regarding the punishments involved for cheating a casino, and then shown the door.

The problem then becomes that stupid and near-genius alike tend to believe that if at first you don’t succeed, one should try, try again. They come back, now disguised with a phony mustache or a wig and a change of clothing.

Specially trained security officers, who regularly review the photographs of caught crooks, stand at casino doors and roam the floors looking for familiar, if unwelcome, faces.

When Casey had first moved to Las Vegas, he had been very discreetly approached—the day he was welcomed into the Las Vegas Chamber of Gaming, Hospitality and Other Commerce—by a man who then owned three—and now owned five—of the more glitzy hotel/casinos in Sin City.

The man approached Casey at the urinal in the men’s room of the Via Veneto Restaurant in Caligula’s Palace Resort and Casino and said he wanted to thank him for what he was doing for the “boys in the stockade in Bragg.”

“I don’t know who or what the hell you’re talking about,” Casey had replied immediately.

But Casey of course knew full well who the boys in the stockade in Fort Bragg were—Delta Force; their base had once been the post stockade—and what he was doing for them—providing them with whatever they asked for, absolutely free of charge, or didn’t ask for but got anyway because Casey thought it might be useful.

“Sure you do,” the man had said. “The commo gear. It was very useful last week in Tunisia.”

“How the hell did you find out about that?” Casey had blurted.

“We have sources all over.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Like you, people who happen to be in positions where we can help the good guys, and try quietly—very quietly—to do so. I’d like to talk to you about our group some time.”

“These people have names?”

They were furnished.

“Give me a day or two to check these people out,” Casey said, “then come to see me.”

The first person Casey had tried to call was then-Major General Bruce J. McNab, who at the time commanded the Special Forces Center at Fort Bragg. He got instead then-Major Charley Castillo on the phone. Castillo did odd jobs for McNab—both had told Casey that—and he’d become one of Casey’s favorite people since they’d first met.

And when Casey had asked, Castillo had flatly—almost indignantly—denied telling anyone about the Tunisian radios mentioned in the casino pisser and of ever even hearing of the man who claimed to own the glitzy Las Vegas hotels.

General McNab, however, when he came on the line, was so obfuscatory about both questions—even aware that the line was encrypted—that Casey promptly decided (a) McNab knew the guy who owned the three glitzy casinos; (b) had told the guy where the radios used in Tunisia had come from; (c) had more than likely suggested he could probably wheedle some out of Casey, which meant he knew and approved of what the guy was up to; and, thus, (d) didn’t want Castillo to know about (a) through (c).

That had been surprising. For years, from the time during the First Desert War, when then-Second Lieutenant Castillo had gone to work for then-Colonel McNab, Casey had thought—In fact I was told—that Castillo was always privy to all of McNab’s secrets.

Casey prided himself on his few friends, and on having no secrets from them. He had quickly solved the problem here by concluding that having no secrets did not mean you had to tell your friends everything you knew, but rather, if asked, to be wholly forthcoming.

If Castillo asked about these people in Las Vegas, he would tell him. If he didn’t ask, he would not.

And, as quickly, he had decided if these people were okay in General McNab’s book, they were okay—period.

Unless of course something happened that changed that.

Casey had called the man who owned the three glitzy hotels—and was in business discussions leading to the construction of the largest hotel in the world (7,550 rooms)—and told him he was in.

“What do these people need?” Casey asked.

He was told: secure telephones to connect them all.

While AFC had such devices sitting in his warehouse, these were not what he delivered to the people in Las Vegas. The secure telephones they used thereafter had encryption circuitry that could not be decrypted by even the legendary National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. Casey knew this because the NSA’s equipment had come from AFC Corporation.

And after that, and after writing several very substantial checks to pay his share of what it had cost those people to do something that had to be done—but for one reason or another couldn’t be done by the various intelligence agencies—Casey realized that he had become one of the group.

No one said anything to him. He didn’t get a membership card.