So after all the furious thinking there was no choice. It came down to a given. She had to get back into the Cleopatra and up to the top floor. She then had to get into room 2014 again. Using that resolve as a foundation, she finally hatched a plan from which she hoped at least one person – a child – would come out alive.
Thirty minutes later she was moving through the casino at the Cleopatra with a new wide-brimmed hat on and a determined step in her walk. She carried a matching black gym bag she had also bought at one of the shops at the Flamingo. It contained more cash than was on the entire casino floor at the moment. It also contained the fanny pack with the tools of her trade but no gun. If things worked out as she planned a weapon would not be necessary. If a weapon became necessary she knew she'd already be lost.
She had to assume the stairwells were being watched. It was the only way up without a key. So she ignored them and headed directly to the Euphrates Tower elevator alcove. She pushed the up button.
Before an elevator arrived two couples walked into the alcove, the male half of each pushing the already lit call button. Cassie needed an elevator to herself. When one arrived she stepped back and let the others have it, then pushed the button again. This happened two more times until she started to think she would never get her own elevator. Finally, she decided to take her chances and got on an elevator with a woman carrying a plastic change cup. She waited until the other passenger chose her floor – luckily it was the sixth floor – and then punched the button for the nineteenth floor.
While they rode up Cassie checked her watch. It was ten o'clock. As soon as her fellow passenger stepped off the elevator, Cassie pushed the buttons for the seventeenth and eighteenth floors as well. She then removed her hat and hooked it over the camera in the upper corner. She did it in such a way that the hat was held between her face and the camera until the camera was blocked. Her hope was that when the tampered camera was discovered and investigated it would be written off as a prank.
Cassie slipped her lock picks out of her back pocket and put them in her mouth. She hooked one arm through both straps of the gym bag, then put one foot up on the railing that ran along the side wall of the elevator. She hoisted herself up with her back to the corner and put her other foot on the railing on the rear wall. Braced against the corner she went to work with the picks on the lock on the elevator's overhead door.
The elevator stopped on seventeen and the doors opened. Cassie glanced down and out into the empty alcove and then went back to work on the lock. She was having trouble because of her uncomfortable posture and having to work on tumblers in vertical alignment. The door closed and the elevator made a quick jump to the next floor.
Just as the doors slid open Cassie heard the click of the final tumbler and turned the lock. She pushed the door upward and open, then looked down as she pulled the gym bag off her arm. She saw a man standing in the elevator looking up at her. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt tucked into beltless pants. Cassie didn't know how much he had seen but she knew there was no valid explanation for what she was doing. His eyes moved from Cassie to the black hat hooked over the camera. The doors started closing behind him but he suddenly shot his arm out and hit the bumper with his hand. The doors opened again.
"I think I'll catch the next one," he said.
"Thank you," Cassie said, one of her picks still in her mouth.
She didn't know what else to say. The man stepped out and the doors closed behind him. Cassie shoved the gym bag up through the hatch, which was about two feet square. She then reached her arms up through the opening and braced them on the top of the elevator roof. She pulled herself up and through.
The elevator started moving upward again. Cassie quickly closed the hatch and heard its lock click into place. Dim light came down from the