Doubling Down: Athenaeum Inc, Volume Two by Dan Kemp

Author:Dan Kemp [Kemp, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cannon Publishing, LLC
Published: 2024-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

“What happens 84 miles northwest of Las Vegas stays 84 miles northwest of Las Vegas.”

~Alleged Groom Lake / Area 51 morale patch

Two mornings later, I was grinding away at my desk again when there was a knock at the office’s open door. It was Morgan. I waved him in as I hung up the phone. He sat down, sinking into the couch. Dave was in the side chair since it was faster for us to fix this Ukraine War material together than pass it back and forth from his office to mine. Then we’d needed Troy’s eyes on something specific regarding the sniper tactics we were watching, so he’d dragged a chair in as well. It was grim and bloody stuff, and the diversion was welcome. “What’s up, Morgan? Any good news for once?”

Morgan thought about it before answering. “Okay, this one could go either way. There’s a rumor on the dark side of the web that there’s a new codebreaker setup going for sale by auction. Hardware and software as a package. Meeting is supposedly going to be in Vegas right during the SHOT Show. I guess they figure there’s a lot of overlap in interested parties.”

I shrugged. “AVN is there that same week too. Everyone likes half-naked porn chicks.”

The Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade show had gone from being the redneck center of the recreational world to a more American version of the Moscow or Dubai arms shows over the twenty years of the GWOT, partly because so much of America’s domestic consumption weapons industry and wilderness outfitters had gotten a piece of the trillions of dollars spent on the war. Not so much for heavy weapons, that you had to go to AUSA in DC or SOFEX down in Florida, but a lot of the small arms, optics, and the dizzying array of soft goods like packs, sleeping bags, and jackets. Patagonia and The North Face like Pentagon money as much as anyone, even if they shut up about it as not to offend their mostly Give Peace A Chance environmentally minded customer base of outdoors enthusiasts. Plus, it was in Las Vegas. Who didn’t like going to Vegas? Restaurants, topless shows, and sometimes a Chinese college girl in the hotel bar on their first pro-am spying job…no shit, true story. Ask an acquaintance of mine about the bar at SHOT some years back. Never mind the Adult Video News convention and show. That had blatant attractions all its own.

Dave shrugged. “But it’s still Vegas. Fuck, why would anyone sane do this thing on American soil at all and make it easier for the Feds to come shit up the party?”

As some of you may remember from the first book, Troy used to live there before his wife changed jobs and he’d come back East, so he had the answer. “Because stupid people who watch too much reality TV think it is some sort of anarcho-capitalist paradise where the usual laws and morals of American society don’t apply.

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