The gentlemen had forgotten their own cards, staring in open-mouthed delight.

"The devil you say! How did it operate?"

"The string was attached to a tiny little hook sewed to the inside knee of his other trouser leg. If he wanted to slide the arm of his machine down to his wrist, so he could palm a hidden card into his hand, he squeezed his knees together, which took the tension off the string and lowered the sliding arm with the cards clipped to it. When he wanted to sneak a card up his sleeve, all he had to do was pull his knees apart and presto! Away went the card, slick as a whistle. He practiced with that little contraption until he got so good at it, he could slip three or four cards into that clip during the course of a round of poker and nobody was the wiser."

The gentlemen at their table were gasping, both delighted and scandalized.

"Eventually," Skeeter chuckled, "he got greedy. About two months ago, it must've been, he decided to enter a really high-stakes poker game in San Francisco. And he kept winning. Every single hand. There were a number of very fine card players in that game, professional gamblers, all of them, and several of these professional gentlemen started to get just a little suspicious of Mr. Kiplinger and his phenomenal run of luck at the cards. So at a prearranged signal, they jumped him, dragged off his coat, and found his little machine with three aces and a queen clipped into it."

"Good God! Did they shoot him on the spot?"

"Oh, no." Skeeter grinned. "Not to say that didn't cross their minds, of course. Men have been shot for cheating less seriously than that. No, what they did was tell Mr. Kiplinger he had a choice. He could either die, right then and there, or he could earn his life back."

"How?" That from a heavy-jowled gentleman whose peerage earned him the right to wear a jewelled coronet in the presence of the sovereign. He'd told them so, within five minutes of their having joined the group.

Skeeter sat back, grinning triumphantly. "All he had to do was build one of these machines for each and every one of them. Which he did."

Laughter and exclamations of astonishment greeted the pronouncement.

"But I say, Cartwright, however did you find out about this?"

Skeeter laughed easily. "One of those fellows was my uncle. Black sheep of my family. Hell of a card player." He winked. "One hell of a card player."

Doug Tanglewood joined in the laughter as Skeeter scooted back his chair, gracefully slid off his coat and removed his cuffs, revealing no trace of Mr. Kiplinger's infernal contraption, then replaced cuff and cufflinks and evening coat and resumed his seat.

"All right, gentlemen, let's play poker, shall we?"

Kit was jolted from sleep by the insistent shrill of his telephone. He groped, bleary-eyed, for the receiver. "Mmph?"

"Kit? Are you awake?"

"No." He started to fumble the receiver back onto its cradle.

"Kit! Dammit, don't hang up, it's Bull Morgan. I need you in the aerie."

Kit hadn't slept more than ten hours during the last five days. In fact, he had just spent four of those days combing the station for Jack the Ripper, placating and browbeating by turns panic-stricken, infuriated tourists in the Neo Edo, and working gate control to keep any in-bound tourists from coming back into the station. Tours had backed up not only in New York, where in-bound tourists were refused admittance, but also in every down-time location TT-86 operated, leaving literally hundreds of tourists stranded down time, unable to return until the station neutralized the Ripper threat. Having just fallen into bed after nearly twenty hours of non-stop work, Kit told Bull Morgan exactly what he thought of the station manager's latest request. In graphic and shocking detail.

Unfortunately, Bull didn't speak medieval High German, which was Kit's favorite language for cursing. The moment he wound down, Bull said maddeningly, "Good. I'll see you in ten minutes. Caddrick's on his way with I.T.C.H. They're shutting us down, effective today, unless we can figure a way to stall 'em off."

"Oh, God..." Kit propped his eyelids open. "If I'm not there in ten, send an ambulance."

"Thanks, Kit. I owe you."

"You sure as hell do. I'll collect on this one, too, just see if I don't."

The line went dead and Kit crawled out of bed, feeling a certain kinship with a recently squashed garden slug. He dragged on the first clothes that came to hand, staggered in search of footgear, and finally stumbled out onto Commons, heading at a drunken pace for the aerie. He was halfway there, repeating to himself, I will not fall asleep on my feet every few seconds, before he woke up enough to realize he wore nothing but a loosely belted kimono that covered entirely too little of him and house slippers that had been new when Queen Elizabeth the First had taken the English throne. He'd stolen them, himself, from an Elizabethan house he'd entered under very unhappy circumstances.

"Ah, hell..." He pulled the belt tighter, which at least kept the more private bits of him from showing, and scowled at his hairy shins. No time to go back and change, now... He couldn't even stop somewhere and beg a pair of jeans. Commons remained eerily quiet, shops and restaurants resembling darkened caves behind their steel security-mesh doors. Scattered patrols of security, BATF, and Pest Control officers stood guard over major gates due to open, to be sure no one got into or out of the station. After that dead BATF officer had been found beside the Langskip Cafe, a few days back, not even Commons security forces made the rounds without partners along. A slow, door-to-door search of every hotel room and Residential apartment on station was underway, looking for both Lachley and a handful of Ripper cultists still at large, but the search was taking forever, with no guarantee that the Ripper wasn't simply changing lodgings to a room already cleared.

By the time Kit reached the aerie, he was almost asleep again, leaning against the elevator doors for the ride up from Commons. The elevator doors slid open, dumping Kit unceremoniously into the room. He staggered, recovered, and hitched the kimono around with an irritable twitch, then met the astonished gazes of John Caddrick, three armed bodyguards, and five I.T.C.H. agents impeccably attired—respectively—in six-thousand dollar suits and neatly pressed uniforms. Kit scratched absently at a thick growth of stubble, yawned, and wove his way toward a chair, where he promptly collapsed.

Caddrick glared. "You're drunk!"

"God, I wish," Kit muttered. "I just haven't been to bed in about five days. Thanks for waking me up. Now, what's this bullshit about closing Shangri-La?"

Caddrick glanced at the highest-ranking I.T.C.H. officer. "Agent Kirkegard has agreed to shut down this station. TT-86 is dangerously out of control, thanks to gross incompetence among the managerial staff."

Kit just looked at him. Then switched his attention to the immaculately groomed Kirkegard, her blond hair pulled back into a severe knot at the nape of her neck. "You wouldn't mind, would you, if I toss this jackass through the window?"

"This is not a time to joke!" she snapped.

"I'm not joking," Kit growled. "The only thing wrong with this station is John Caddrick's butt, sitting on it."

Bull Morgan stood up hastily, clearing his throat. "Kit, I know how hard you've been working during this crisis. I asked you to join this meeting to present your case as a station resident and business owner, before I.T.C.H. makes its final determination."

"I see. Tell you what," Kit leaned forward, holding Agent Kirkegard's gaze. "You people have been probing around in our books and our private vaults and auditing our tax returns until you've dug down to Himalayan bedrock. I'd like to issue you a real challenge."