The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [72]
Wayne pointed at a programmer, thin and athletic, in a designer T-shirt and long, baggy shorts. The man waved and then ducked behind his monitor. Wayne circumnavigated the wall of screens. “Hassan.”
Hassan pushed himself away from a homemade turkey sandwich. He had long wavy hair tied back loosely behind his head and a vintage Pixies sticker on a skateboard under his desk. Most of these guys preferred to eat in a hurry and spend the rest of their break skating in one of the huge unused sections of the underground parking garage.
Wayne held his phone out. “How does this work?”
Hassan smiled. “You mean computers or telephones?” Hassan was a child of both Iran and Beverly Hills, and he observed everyone and everything with a friendly detachment, as if to say that he might have been born in this country and he might love American music and American movies and date American girls and live and work in the most aggressively American of all cities, but the culture did not own him the way it owned everyone around him. Hassan understood more about surfing and rap music and Tarantino films than anyone Wayne knew, but if tomorrow he found out Hassan had packed up his things and moved to Costa Rica or Bangkok or Dublin or Dubai, it wouldn’t surprise Wayne a bit.
“I mean this software,” Wayne said. “This program we use to track chips.”
“You’ve been using it for two years,” Hassan said with a chuckle. Wayne pushed it forward a few inches. Hassan was a hard guy to be pissed at, mostly because he was smart enough to back up his talk and because he was the only guy who worked in IT whom Wayne could regularly understand.
Hassan took the phone and with his mayo-tipped pinkie pointed to a stationary green dot representing some high roller currently sitting at the baccarat tables. Type at the top of the screen identified him as MITCHELL CRANE. “Radio-frequency identification. It’s like a tiny antenna we put in each chip. The dealer can scan a handful of them when he pays out a big player and the pit boss can assign the guy’s name to that ID number—in this case, Mr. Crane here. Then you can see what games he’s playing, where he’s eating, what time he retires to his room with a hooker and a bottle of Cristal. Basically, you can follow him around until he cashes out at the end of the weekend.”
“So the chips are transmitters, then?”
“It’s a passive tag. There’s no power source. We have readers all over the casino—in all the gaming tables and poker machines and slots and sports-book tables and security cameras and elevators—and they transmit a signal and the antenna in the chip just bounces it back.”
“Could I locate someone outside the casino with this?”
Hassan poked curiously into Wayne’s eyes with his own. “You could, I guess.” He held up Wayne’s phone. “This thingamajob is a reader, as well. It can detect a chip at maybe fifteen meters. Between the fixed readers at the tables and the employees walking all over with these suckers in their coat pockets, we have almost every public area in the hotel covered. Eighty-five percent maybe.”
“But if I activated the program outside the hotel?”
Hassan frowned, as if the question had never come up. “We have the Colossus floor plan mapped to a GPS system. On the street, you wouldn’t have the same precision. There’s no map of Nevada programmed in there. But the tags never die, so if someone walked out of here with his chips and you passed him on the sidewalk, it would vibrate and beep at you, yeah.” Hassan asked, “Why? Did you lose