He walked to where the grove thinned out a little and followed the old riverbed. There was a concentration of larger boulders in the river there, and he stopped and studied them. There was a space behind a particularly large stone, and he clambered across a couple rocks to look. Detritus was strewn beyond, including discarded wood and some chickenwire, and in the midst of it, he made out a large plate of rusted steel sitting on what appeared to be a concrete platform of some kind. As his brain adjusted to what was important in that welter of refuse, he also saw that there was a shiny black box about two centimetres wide and ten centimetres long, on the concrete, below the plate and protected by a Plexiglas shield. A card reader.

He scrambled down and looked at it. This was what the IDs were for. You checked in at the Eagle, you showed your casino ID to Thurlow, you ran it through this reader. Then you went in. He ran the card.

It didn’t work. He tried it again. Then a male voice came from an unseen speaker. “Not working?”

“Nope.”

“First time?”

“First time,” Wingate said. “Am I supposed to run it through left to right or right to left?”

“I don’t think it matters. Are you facing it the right way?”

“Yeah.”

“Hold on.”

The voice snapped off. Then there was a deep, metallic sound, chunk, and the metal plate popped up an inch. He got his fingers in under it and pulled it open. It was a heavy door on a pair of arcing metal hinges. It drew right up and revealed a set of concrete steps going down at a slant into the darkness. They’d been constructed against bedrock, these steps, and as he descended them, the space above his head got higher until he was standing in what seemed to be an underground cave of some kind. A light came on and Wingate looked up to see a series of lights in little steel baskets hanging from wires that had been tacked to the stone above. The light showed the cave narrowed again almost immediately, becoming a tunnel that led away from the chamber he stood in.

He was walking in a dead riverbed. There was a small channel carved in the stone at his feet in which a rill of water carried along: the remainder and reminder of the old river. This was the continuation of the passage it had carved into the fields and the bedrock over millennia before it was diverted and claimed.

As he went down, the door above him closed on its own, making a soft clicking noise followed by a mechanical sound when it was fully shut. The lights stayed on. The wires stringing them made shallow, drooping arcs between the bulbs. He hadn’t seen a camera on the way down, and couldn’t see any here, so he got the phone out.

“I’m in a riverbed,” he whispered. “Fifteen feet underground. An empty riverbed, like a cave.”

“We’ve got you on the screen here, James,” Hazel answered. “We see you. Leave the phone on, but put it away and focus.” He slipped it into his pants pocket.

The riverbed stretched out for about sixty metres in a meandering southerly direction before turning sharply to the west. Apart from the narrow cut of water in the ground, the walls and floors of the bed were dry. It smelled of the cold and the damp, though, and he was beginning to wonder what kind of casino, no matter how secret, would go to this trouble to hide itself. He needed to keep his mental compass points straight under here so he’d know, approximately, where the empty river was leading in context of the upper world. He came to the turn, made it, walked another thirty metres west, and then the bed began to curve again. It was impossible to know how many degrees off of due west he was turning, as the slow curve delivered him eventually to another door. But now he wasn’t sure if the door opened to the east or the north. It was an elaborate entrance.

Why had they made this operation so vulnerable to detection? A taxi driving into a field to disgorge a passenger under the watchful eye of someone in a Mercedes wasn’t exactly black ops. But he’d slipped in under whatever radar they had, and judging from the interlocking hoops a person had to jump through to get here, they knew if you were a legit customer. If you weren’t, there was probably a hole for people just like you. A chill went through him. He was already adapting Hazel’s methods: jump in the water – or the river – and look for a life preserver afterwards, if you needed one. And now it was too late to shake off her influence: he was in. He’d walked about two hundred metres. In deep. As he reached the door, he turned and looked over his shoulder, and saw the riverbed rising behind him. He’d also gone down. How far though, he wasn’t sure.

The door had no handle. He stood in front of it, and after a wait that felt slightly too long to be safe, another metallic unlocking sound came from within, and the door opened. He went through it. Now he was in a manmade construction, a vestibule with a second door and a thick, Plexiglas window covered on the other side by a grey vinyl blind set in the wall to his right, with a tray like a teller’s underneath. He felt heat at last, and a male voice asked him to put any weapons he was carrying in the tray. He’d get a tag for them, and he could reclaim them when he was leaving.

“Do I buy my chips here?” Wingate asked. They had decided back at the station house that the casino chip spoke authoritatively to what the activity was in here, and it was best, they thought, for him to go in appearing to know what he was doing. The voice behind the Plexiglas told him he could buy at the tables. Good, thought Wingate, one surmise established. “I don’t have anything you need to take,” he said, and the window slid shut. The second door buzzed open, and he went through.

And then he was in another world, a huge stone room with an imperfectly installed wooden floor and the river, now having found a second wind, meandering through the middle of it in a channel almost a metre wide. There were heating elements, like the kinds you found in the stands at amateur hockey games, hanging down and heating the frowsy space. The stream vanished beneath a particleboard wall that was at the back of the “room.” So it was a casino. He was amazed. He’d never seen anything like it.

No one looked up when he walked in to the bright, high-ceilinged room in front of him except for a woman occupying a concierge’s desk just in front of the door, on the other side of a very small, curving tile surface someone had cemented down onto the stonebed. “Hello,” she said, holding her hand out. He shook it. Odd. “So this is your first visit?”

“Yes.”

“Welcome, then. Food and drink is on the house. You can sit down and buy in at any of the tables.”

“Thanks very much,” he said. He handed her a Canadian twenty. She gave him a little, surprised bow.

“Welcome,” said a man, coming toward him and extending his hand. “I’m Ronald Plaskett. I’m the manager.”

“Pete Lupertans,” Wingate said.

“Wonderful. Nice to meet you, Pete. Now, you got your card?”

“Yep.”

“Who tuned you in?”

“I know Feldman from way back.”

“Feldman should be getting a bigger cut, I tell you. So just show that card for chips, for food, for drink. Enjoy yourself. Roulette is tonight at midnight.”

He patted Wingate on the arm and then continued on to talk with the woman at the desk. Mr. Lupertans was going to save some of his more specific queries for the dealers and croupiers.

He walked forward into the cavelike room and he worked against the tide of fear that was beginning to rise in him. He was here now, and anything could happen. He’d not been patted down, as he’d expected to be, but even if he had brought a weapon, there was no saying he wouldn’t be patted down later. Being armed in this position was an open invitation to Murphy’s Law. He had only his wits.

Some of the men here had a day’s worth of stubble. There were tired-looking servers bringing coffee and sandwiches. One of the men – he had a tattoo on his neck of a pair of dice – drank a beer from the bottle. There was only one woman here and she was playing blackjack. She had a large pile of chips in front of her. Her eyes were unnaturally bright.