The House

"I fold." I said, as they looked at me, across the table.
"What are you doing?" The voice said in my ear.
"Saving you about 300 grand." The giant stack of blue chips sat in the middle of the poker table, as I threw my cards down, a bad hand, while others were about to take my earnings. I walked away, wondering where to go next and where to take my money. Or where they wanted to take my money from me.
"We need a different approach to this." The voice said in my ear once more.
"Oh yeah." I said. I walked out of the casino. I looked up at it, it's big neon lights looked me in the eyes. Golden. The biggest casino in Las Vegas. I love to gamble, I love going to casinos. I don't like the people that run the casinos. Their greedy hands sweat money, and they crunch it up with their iron fists, doing whatever they can to make sure we win, but they win more. There's always a catch. I'm here to prevent the catch from happening. I work for the people, no matter who they are. I turned to the street, and got into the big black van that was waiting for me. I got in, and closed the door. The body of this expensive van was soundproof, and more importantly, bulletproof. But, I'm not a VIP anywhere. We drove off.

"How much did we make tonight?" The driver said. I looked in the bag I was holding.
"436,000 dollars." I said in my proudest voice.
"Not bad." He said. This man was the voice in my ear. "And the security didn't get suspicious?"
"No. They were too busy rounding up this moron trying to sell crack in the bathrooms." I said. He laughed.
"Anyways, I have a plan..." He said to me. "Listen, it's complicated."


"This particular casino uses very expensive chips. They're basically fingerprint scanners. Every chip has been loaded with massive amounts of data, on just about every single person in the USA. Every night, when people put in their chips when they leave, and they scan the master fingerprint, from the customer into the chips, they laod the total value of the earnings into an account, made specifically for the gambling. This account can be accessed just like a checking or savings account. The casino Golden has mass amounts of money, they can make this work for everyone in the casino. But they always make money off the poor gamblers. Thats about to end here. Every night when the casino closes up, at 2 AM, and opens up at 10 AM, the chips are put into the 'Hold.' They're put on hold in the room, and cleared of all fingerprints, and the total values are reset. This is where you come in. You'll have 8 hours to slip in undetected, and replace about 25 million of these chips. Don't worry, you'll have 3 other people with you. And they're good. They all are retired and rouge US spys and mercenaries. Which doesn't work out that well, considering that the CIA is probably tailing them. So, you will have to slip in with your team, and replace the real chips with these." He handed me a blue chip, that looked exactly like the ones use din the casino. it read my fingerprint. It was worth 1,000 dollars. "What these chips do, is almost what the others ones do. Except, when people cash these in, it ignores the values, and automatically loads in 155,000 dollars. And, it creates a new account. These accounts are stored in our servers, that we've just bought, stored in a warehouse, way out of the way, in Zurich, Switzerland. So the US government can't track the money. Until it's used in America. But, more importantly, for every chip that stores 155k, it directly gives us 500,000 dollars, in our private bank account. Now, whenever these two chips are touching, no matter where, they start trading off information. Back and forth, like two computers. So you just have to dump these things in the holding room, and they'll know everything between one another. The real chips do the same exact thing. However, do NOT get the real chips, and our chips mixed up. They have a failsafe program. if they touch, it will set off an alert, and load a tracking program into the fake chip wirelessly, and the casino will have instant access to where that chip goes. Make sure that they're seperated constantly. Thats about it."
"Now, what happens if someone rats us out to the casino, and tells them there's a mistake?" I asked.
"I wondered about this, and we can't safely have you changing anything in the casino, without them being notified. So, at exactly 5 AM the day after the chips are used, when they are all finished storing them, they travel through conveyor belts, and are all in the room, they will terminate. Now, because laoding it into every single one would take at least 2 weeks, we have a master chip. when this master chip hits the self destruct trigger, it will transmit the same signal to the other chips within a 50-foot radius, trigger the code within the chips to stop working. Or more specifically, the code inside these chips will start terminating commands faster and faster, and faster. When it terminates code fast enough, it will fry everything inside the chip, rendering it completely useless. the IC's inside the board will fry, the resistors will explode, and every solid-state storage chip within the chip will overload it's capacity so quick, it will crash, delete everything, and make the chip a hunk of useless plastic. When this command goes through all the chips, the last chip to receive it will trigger a 'Kill Code.' what this code will do, is transmit this command, straight to the database inside the casino. The casino database will receive this command. It's basically a virus. It will delete everything on the servers and the database inside the casino, everything EXCEPT the accounts that the customers have. Every single ounce of data on employees, rosters, manifests, and data on everything, will be gone. This will send the casino into major chaos. At this point, you're going to upload this..." He handed me a simple flashdrive. Nothing flashy about it. Actually, it was disguised as a pack of ciggerttes, but when you open it up, the USB connector is revealed, jutting from the end of a cigarette. I chuckled.
"Wow." I said.
"Yeah, laugh right now, but you're going to have to upload this little thing into a certain server. This server will be unaffected, or shaken severely, by the virus, but it holds all their financial information. It's basically a private bank, linked with the government. This is where it'll get heavy, and seriously chaotic inside Golden. There is a code that will execute automatically inside the flash drive, and it will extract every last cent out of the account they have, and deposit it in our account, located in the northern edge of the island of Rakiura, just south of New Zealand. If this works out, we're home free. And rich, too." I looked at him.
"This plan might actually work." I said.

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2
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We arrived at the hotel. It rose so many stories, it was such an unimaginable work of art. It's what drew me to this strip of road, every weekend. However, I was on a 2 month trip here. This was the second week. Today was July 4th, as well. We parked the van, and got out.
"So, where are these 3 guys you told me that I would work with?" I asked curiously, eager to meet them.
"They're behind the hotel, probably watching the fireworks." He said. I heard a boom, from the pyrotechnics display. There was a show going on behind the hotel. This hotel was nice, a real five star place, made for vegas high-rollers. We walked around to the back, a desert-like field, filled with lots of tourists. My chest thumped with every firework that went off, they filled the sky with light. I liked fireworks. One of my favorite festive occurances. Sean, the man who was coordinating this whole thing, led me to five chairs, the fold out kind, with the cupholders built into the arms. Two chairs were empty, and there were bottles of beer already awaiting us in the holders. We sat down.
"Hey guys, whats going on?" One of the three guys asked. He was heavily Australian.
"Not much. Well, actually thats quite a lie." Sean said, and grinned, scratching his chin. The australian guy laughed. "Well, Fletcher," He said. That's me. "This is Tobias." We shook hands. "Thats Rodger." He told me. I looked over, and saw a black haired man, talking to another man. "And thats Nils." Nils was the man Rodger was talking to. Rodger was British, and Nils... Well, I wasn't really too sure. He sounded Norwiegan.
"They already know the plan?" I asked, wondering.
"Yep. They know what to do, and how to do it." Sean said.
"Good. Very good..." I replied.
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3
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"So, how much money do we have? Altogether, for this whole thing." Rodger asked. We were inside our hotel suite. A little bit over the top. The thing was huge. It had two floors. Not to mention a seperate pool, one door over, but easily accessible from the room. A bar, and two huge, plasma screens.
"Lets see... about... 125 million." Sean said.
"Now, this is all what we made gambling for about ten years? All of us?"
"Well, yeah." Sean said. My brain went numb. I hadn't realized we made that much.
"And, none of you told the IRS, right?"
"No, that's why we're here with you guys. If we weren't we'd probably be caught. And I used to work federally. I don't feel like spending anymore time with them." Tobias said.
"Okay, now down to business. Fletcher, tomorrow, you have a big job to do. It's crucial you don't screw this up. Now, you need to get these actual chips from our friend. His name... well, he doesn't really have a name. Just call him 'Gasmask.'" Sean said. I looked at him curiously. "He's basically a recluse. His house I built underground, and he doesn't even step outside without a gasmask on. He's one of those 'Conspiracy Theorists.' In Layman's terms, he's a nut. But, he's got all our rigged chips, and we need you to get them. He wants 500k for this. He's got all of the chips sitting in a truck, and we need you to take all of these, and escort them over to a warehouse. DO NOT let anyone trail you, or we're all equally screwed. Try not to attract any attention. But, you can't actually enter his house. He has a scanner built into his... airlock." The others snickered. "Anyways, if you get scanned, and you touch the chips, you'll screw'em up. So, tonight, at 1 AM, he'll be expecting you to come through his front door. But, you're not coming through his front door. He's dug an escape tunnel. It goes from an abandoned warehouse, into his, uh, fallout shelter. He's very protective of his shelter, so you'll give him an extra 150K to fix the door." I looked at him.
"Wait, fix the door?" I asked. Sean slid over four units of TNT. I looked at them. "Alright. Lets do this."

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4
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I pulled up at the old warehouse. A nice Vauxhall VX220 must look odd sitting in front of an old warehouse. I parked it behind the warehouse, out of sight. I grabbed the suitcase. And a shovel. I walked up to the warehouse, but the door was locked.
"The hell." I muttered. I thought for a second. I kicked the door a couple of times. It didn't budge. I took the shovel, and started whacking away at the old wooden door. I sat on the hood of my car for a second.
"Crap. Crap, crap, crap." I looked at the wood around the door. I got an idea. I took the shovel, and started jamming it into the wood around the door. The wood began to chip off. I spent about 8 minutes doing this, and I had chipped away all the wood, surrounding the door. I could see where the part of the doorknob was. I didn;t knwo how to pick locks, so this would do. I jammed the shovel's blade under the part, and pushed downwards on the handle. It wouldn't budge. I thought or a few more seconds. I got in my car, and pulled up the door a little bit closer. I put it in park, and got out. I climbed up on the hood, cursing myself for getting dirt on the hood. I positioned myself across from the stuck shovel. I jumped high into the air, and came down on the handle. The shovel shot upward, and scraped on metal, and I fell downwards, but backwards too, my head jarred forward, knocking it against the side of my car. I was face down in the dirt, and my head hurt, and I forgot what time it was for a few seconds. I shouted vulgarities at nothing, probably startling the other motorists. I looked at my car. A giant dent marked the side of my fender. The door looked a little bit worse for wear, jammed up inside the doorframe. Oh well. I kicked the door in. The trap door into this tunnel was buried beneath a crate. One crate stood tall in the middle of the warehouse. Subtle. I pushed it out of the way, and started digging.

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5
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Finally, a small door was visible under the dirt. I moved some dirt out of the way, and tugged my hardest on it. It opened, just enough for someone to fit in. I maneuvered my way in, careful not to get my suit dirty. But, I gave up on that. Oh well. I dropped into the tunnel. It was hot, and humid. It was pitch black, and I didn;t have a flashlight. I felt around with the shovel. It clanked on something metal. I felt it with my hand, and felt a switch. I turned it on. The lights turned on, and were incredibly bright. I clamped my eyes shut quickly. When I opened them again, a person with an old military gasmask was the only thing I could see in front of me. I swore, and jumped back.
"You're... you're gasmask, right?" I asked quickly. The figure nodded at me, and motioned for me to follow. I complied. We walked for a few minutes, and we caem to a door. The person twisted a valve on the door, and pushed it open witha giant creek. Inside the room, was a bench,a nd a cabinet full of canned food. We went through anopther door, and suddenly, I was standing in a dimly lit laboratory with flashing lights and desk everywhere.
"Alright." I said. The figure tugged on the mask.
"You;re the person Sean sent, right?"