The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

He just knew.

He became friendly with the man who owned the glitzy hotels, and not only because one of his hotels had a restaurant to which lobsters and clams were flown in daily from Maine. The man who owned the hotels was from New Jersey. Politicians and high taxes, not the cuisine, had driven him from the Garden State. They took to taking together what they thought of as One of God’s Better Meals—a dozen steamed clams and a pair of three-pound lobsters washed down with a couple of pitchers of beer—once or twice a week.

One day, en route to the restaurant, Casey had witnessed one of the gambling cops intently studying the face of the man who happened to be walking ahead of Casey.

“What’s that all about?” Casey had asked his new friend the casino owner between their first pitcher of beer and the clams, and their lobsters and the second pitcher.

The problem of controlling undesirable incoming gamblers was explained.

“There has to be a better way to do that than having your gambling cops in everybody’s face,” Casey said. “Let me think about it.”

The AFC prototype was delivered in three weeks, and operational a week after that. All the photographs of miscreants in the files were digitalized. Additional digital cameras were discreetly installed at the entrances in such positions that the only way to avoid having one’s face captured by the system would be to arrive by parachute on the roof.

The computer software quickly and constantly attempted to cross-match images of casino patrons with the database of miscreants on the security servers. When a “hit” was made, the gambling cops could immediately take corrective action to protect the casino.

The owner was delighted, and ordered installation of the system in all his properties as quickly as this could be accomplished.

But Casey was just getting started. The first major improvement was to provide the gambling cops with a small communications device that looked like a telephone. When a “hit” was made, every security officer in the establishment was immediately furnished with both the digital image of Mr. Unwelcome—or Grandma Unwelcome; there were a surprising number of the latter—and the last known location of said miscreant.

It hadn’t been hard for Casey to improve on that. Soon the miscreant’s name, aliases, and other personal data, including why he or she was unwelcome, was flashed to the gambling cops as soon as there was a hit.

The next large—and expensive—step had required the replacement of the system computers with ones of much greater capacity and speed. The owner complained not a word when he got the bill. He thought of himself, after all, as a leader in the hospitality and gaming industry, and there was a price that had to be paid for that.

The system now made a hit when a good customer returned to the premises, presumably bringing more funds to pass into the casino’s coffers through the croupier’s slots. He was greeted as quickly and as warmly as possible, and depending on how bad his luck had been the last time, provided with complimentary accommodations, victuals, and spirits. Often, the gambling cops assigned to keep them happy were attractive members of the opposite gender.

Good Grandmother customers, interestingly enough, seemed to appreciate this courtesy more than most of the men.

The new system soon covered all of the hotels owned by the proprietor. And the database grew as guests’ pertinent details—bank balances, credit reports, domestic problems, known associates, carnal preferences, that sort of thing—were added.

For a while, as he had been working on the system, Casey had thought it would have a sure market in other areas where management wanted to keep a close eye on people within its walls. Prisons, for example.

AFC’s legal counsel had quickly disabused him of this pleasant notion. The ACLU would go ballistic, his lawyers warned, at what they would perceive as an outrageous violation of a felon’s right to privacy while incarcerated. He would be the accused in a class action lawsuit that would probably cost him millions.

What Casey was doing when his cellular buzzed in the lab deep beneath Hangar III was conducting a sort of graduation ceremony for a pair of students who had just completed How This Works 101. He had just presented the graduates with what looked like fairly ordinary BlackBerrys or similar so-called smart-phones.

Actually, by comparison, the capabilities of the CaseyBerry devices that Casey had given the two students made the BlackBerry look as state-of-the-art as the wood fire from which an Apache brave informs his squaw that he’ll be a little late for supper by allowing puffs of smoke to rise.

The students were First Lieutenant Edmund “Peg-Leg” Lorimer, MI, USA (Retired), and former Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley, USMC.

When the Office of Organizational Analysis had been disbanded and its men and women ordered to vanish from the face of the earth, Casey had had a private word with Castillo about them.

Neither Bradley nor Lorimer had a family—perhaps more accurately: a family into whose arms they would be welcomed with joy—and neither had skills readily convertible to earning a decent livi

ng as a civilian. There was not much of a market for a one-legged Spanish/English/Portuguese interpreter, or for a five-foot-two, hundred-thirty-pound twenty-year-old who could give marksmanship instruction to Annie Oakley. Further, there was the problem that they, too, were expected to fall off the face of the earth and never be seen again.

Both men, Casey had told Castillo, had become skilled in the use of the state-of-the-art communications equipment that OOA had been using. Casey intended to keep providing similar equipment to Delta Force, and with some additional training, Bradley and Lorimer could assume responsibility for training Delta troopers to operate and maintain it.

So far as their falling off the face of the earth, Casey said, they would be hard to find in Las Vegas and next to impossible to find if they moved in with him at the home Charley Who had built for the Caseys on a very expensive piece of mountainside real estate that overlooked Las Vegas. Now that Mrs. Casey had finally succumbed to an especially nasty and painful carcinoma, there was nobody in the place but the Mexican couple who took care of Casey.

And to keep them busy when they weren’t dealing with the equipment for Delta Force, or keeping an eye on the communications network used by those people, they would be welcomed—and well paid—by the gaming industry as experts in the digital photo recognition and data system.

Not thirty seconds after Casey had handed Lorimer and Bradley their new cell phones, vibration announced an incoming message on the peoples’ circuit, and Casey thought he had inadvertently pressed the CHECK FUNCTIONING key.

But he checked the screen and saw that there was indeed an incoming message.

It’s from Colonel Hamilton.

I wonder what the hell he wants.