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She bolted to her feet.
“That elevator only works with a key card. You’re not going anywhere.” He raised his glass to her. “Sure you don’t want a drink?”
“Give me a second . . . ,” she said. “I’m thinking.”
“About what?”
“A way out of this.”
“Um,” he said. “There isn’t a way out. The police will be here in a few minutes.”
“Then I have a few minutes to think.”
“See, there you go, being all smart again. Thinking like a quantum physicist. I tend to think more like a criminal.”
He shrugged. To his credit, he didn’t gloat. He didn’t seem to take pleasure in it at all. He wasn’t about revenge or money. He was about respect.
She furrowed her brow. This was getting somewhere.
His casino was his life. It was his baby. A billionaire like him didn’t need to oversee the day-to-day operations of a company. He could easily hire someone to do it and spend his life gallivanting around European ski slopes or whatever. A man with his means could do anything he wanted. And what he wanted was to run this casino.
And to be respected. No, not quite. It wasn’t about his ego. It was about the casino being respected. Why? Because without that respect, the business suffered. So it was all about the business success. And her scam had put that all at risk.
There it was. The answer.
“I have a proposal,” she said.
“Pardon?”
She sat back down and folded her hands on her lap. “You call off the police and pay me the winnings.”
“And why would I do that?”
“My husband will quit his job at QuanaTech, and the two of us will start a new company—one dedicated to making specialty quantum devices for the gambling industry. It makes perfect sense with his background on the business side and my expertise of the technology.”
“I’m still waiting for why I would do this.”
“It would cost more than our winnings to start a company,” she mused. “So you would have to be an anonymous angel investor.”
He laughed. “My God! Earlier when I said you were bold—that was an understatement. You’re borderline insane.”
She pressed on. “Our new company will make quantum random-number generators. Our product will just be a box that makes a stream of truly random numbers via quantum properties and outputs them at a steady rate. No configuration. No operating system. Just a serial port.”
Rutledge raised his finger and opened his mouth, then stopped. He thought for a moment, then finally spoke. “Every casino would want those boxes. And they’d want hundreds of them. One for every video poker machine, every slot machine, and so on. It’s an excellent business model with a huge addressable market.”
“Thank you.”
“I might fund a start-up with that in mind. But not with you. You’re still going to jail.”
“No, it’ll be with me.” She thought things through as she spoke—time was of the essence. Once the police arrived, it was all over. “With us, I mean. My husband and I.”
“You literally just tried to rob me.”
She nodded slowly. “Yes. So we’ve established I have a certain moral flexibility.”
“Why would I care about—”
She stood and paced. “We sell the boxes at a loss. Whatever it takes to get everyone buying them and beat any competition that crops up.” Her voice sped up. “Yes. That should get all the major casinos on board. And of course the boxes would be tamperproof. No, not just tamperproof. Literally sealed so no one can modify them.”
