Page 44 of Cipher: Lethal Algorithm

At 06:10 in the morning, the Strip is running on its overnight skeleton staff—still operational, still lit like a dare, but stripped to the bones by the previous night’s crowd.

The earpiece clicks.

“You’re on the Strip.” Ivy’s voice is low and slightly rough at the edges, which is the sound of someone who hasn’t slept enough and is trying to cover it. I find this deeply unreasonable given that I worked extremely hard for that level of exhaustion.

“Just pulling in.”

A brief pause. “The third camera at the east lobby entrance has a forty-degree blind spot on the left side. I mapped it three days ago.”

Of course she did.

I’m out of the cab before it fully stops, moving across the wide flagstone approach toward the cascade of glass doors. The casino floor extends in every direction, a horizontal landscape of slot machines and green baize running on the artificially permanent noon of interior casino lighting. The morning shift staff move through it with the efficiency of people who learned not to notice the aesthetic.

The men who aren’t moving stand out.

Lobby. North column, south column. The posture is civilian but the stillness isn’t—that variety of careful motionlessness that means someone has an assignment rather than a destination. Eastern elevator bank: a third man, marginally more active, which means he’s been here longest and is the least comfortable.

Forty seconds. Three assets. None of them tracking me yet.

I go left.

The lost-and-found desk is tucked into a service corridor off the main lobby, the kind of institutional afterthought thatevery large casino relegates to a back-of-house passage just sufficiently public to satisfy legal requirements.

A woman in her fifties with the tolerant expression of someone who fielded every possible variety of human misfortune opens the transaction window as I approach.

I set the claim ticket on the counter.

She reads the number. Types it into her system. The silence that follows has the particular quality of a held breath. I’m very aware of the men on the casino floor forty feet behind me and the clock that has been running since the moment I walked through the doors.

The woman disappears into the back room.

She returns with a sealed bag. Thick plastic. Waterproof. About the size of my fist.

I sign for it under the name Ivy built three days ago—a Dutch national she assembled from a legend she’s carried for two years—and slide my ID across the counter. The woman glances at it. Stamps the form. Files it away with the indifference of someone who has seen considerably stranger.

The bag goes inside my jacket.

I walk out of the Venetian at 06:23 with the Consortium’s financial master key in my breast pocket and three surveillance assets who are going to spend all day wondering why nothing happened.

The cab back toward Coloane Island runs south through light traffic, and I give myself the first quiet moment since the house.

The earpiece is live. Ivy has been intermittently present since I left—two confirmations on the Consortium watchers I radioed in, one unsolicited analysis of the elevator bank camera angles—but she’s gone quiet now, which means she’s either working or trying to sleep. I’ll know which when I get back.

I open the bag in the back of the cab.

The seal breaks with a clean pressure-snap. Inside: one hardware device. Matte black, industrial weight, the kind of featureless construction that acts as a form of camouflage. About four inches by two, with a proprietary connector on one end and nothing else. No markings, no branding, no identifying information.

The Consortium’s entire financial network, distilled to the size of a thumb drive on steroids.

I turn it over. There’s a weight to it that exceeds its dimensions, the way physical objects sometimes carry the accumulated mass of what they represent. Eighteen months of Ivy disappearing. Three years of running something she built entirely alone. An entire operation that Hutch constructed over two years.

Then my fingers find the second item.

I almost miss it—it’s folded flat against the bottom of the bag, the same waterproof material they used to line it, which isn’t concealment so much as coincidence. A piece of hotel notepaper, folded twice. Venetian Macao letterhead. The handwriting is precise and slightly left-leaning and immediately, unmistakably Ivy’s.

The date in the top corner stops me.

Three days before I arrived in Macau.