Two sheepish Cal Tech graduates, separated only by a decade in experience and their personal taste in animé shirts, corralled into the 59 degree Fahrenheit den of Alf Zorkybski. 

	“[i]You wanted to see us, sir[/i],” Dave muttered.

Fred, with legs crossed, hatless, was savoring some dilapidated quinine, in the form of a T&T gin and tonic, attempting to prevent the technocratic malaria from accruing higher on his desk. Pivoting, away from the panorama of endless monitors, before the duo, he took a finalizing swig, sucked on the sliced lemon, licked his bitter lips and motioned a leprous, slender sleeve towards the hearth.

“[i]Bruce. Dave. Each of you, please take a seat by the fire.[/i]” 

Both junior accountants plopped upon a recliner, in succession. Bruce took to the closest throne by the exit, whilst the slower Dave, wedged himself between the desk of his novel boss and his ghastly body guard, unfortunately still within the firing range of any saliva darting from the clean shaven fifty year old. The occasional ember offered an eerie glow beneath the lintel as Alfred slithered into position. 

	“[i]What’s this about?[/i]” Bruce hissed, impatiently interrupting Parlay's methodical stride.

Alfred hissed back. “[i]Damn, I miss MIT.[/i]” A scoff followed. “[i]If Riemann was alive today, he would be a fucking hacker, too.[/i]” 

	“[i]What?[/i]” Bruce and David garbled reflexively, as afterthoughts. 

“[i]Well, for as long as I have been able to prosper here at Xerxes, our casino has required to deliver our secrets safely and efficiently. Under lock and key, so to speak. To prevent important, costly information, obviously…[/i]” He rubbed his palms feverishly, blew an exhaled breath on his Reynaud tainted fingertips, and continued his sigh. “[i]…from falling into the wrong hands, our predecessors developed intriguing ways of disguising the classified contents of our propaganda. Not unlike the Spartans. Their army’s leaders, for instance, over two and half thousand years ago, by way of sender and recipient, possessed, each, a cylinder of exactly the same dimensions, called a scytale. To encode a note, a commander would first wrap a narrow strip of parchment around the baton so that it coiled down the tube. He would then write his letter on the papyrus, along the length of the rod. Once the message was unwound, the text looked meaningless. It was only when it was spiraled around another identical canister that the communiqué would reappear. Do you know what I’m hinting at, Bruce?[/i]”

	“[i]I have no clue.[/i]” Bruce’s eyes dilated further to accommodate for the darkness of his superior’s inquisition.

“[i]On the contrary, I think you just might. Before your birth, in 1977, anyone who wanted to transmit a cipher faced an inherent problem. Even with the mass-produced Enigma machine, Nazi Berlin would still have to dispatch agents to deliver to U-boat officers and tank captains alike, the actual ledgers detailing the settings for encoding each day’s communications. Of course, if an enemy got their grubby thumbs on the code book, the jig would be up. What would Master Juba say to that?[/i]” A golden grin widened. “[i]I digress. Imagine the logistics of using such a weak system to do our business!?! But you anticipated that, didn’t you, Dave?”[/i]

	“[i]What do you mean, Mr. Zorkybski?[/i]” The nervous newbie stuttered a retort.

Alfred could not arbitrate the guilty party, just yet. He wanted the reveal to be worth its mettle.      

“[i]Hmm… please, call me Parlay[/i].” The middle aged suit bowed slightly, to his unappreciative audience. "[i]Where was I?[/i]" He suddenly sensed his pushy parables were wasting precious time.

“[i]Ah, yes. RSA is now, to this very moment, what still safeguards most of our dealings here in Regalia. Remarkably, the mathematics that goes into making possible such a universally accepted scheme of cryptography harks back to the anachronistic clock calculators of Gauss. Fucking ancient shit![/i]”

At the dénouement of this explicative, Al angrily swiped his littered desk onto the floor, searching hastily for the Bicycles. The guard remained stoic, unphased. “[i]Encrypting every casino machine transaction is something like the beginning of this card trick. But this is no ordinary deck. The number of cards in this pack would be so huge, I would need over a hundred digits to scribe it; let’s call it [b]N[/b][/i]. Ah, found them!” 

After reuniting with his favorite pile of 52 backs, Alfred lifted the Ace of Spades to each person in the room. “[i]Envision one of our customer’s credit card numbers is one of these playing cards. The Syndicate’s digital protocols places the credit card on the top of the bunch, shuffles the packet so that the location of the customer’s card seems to have been completely lost.[/i]” While spitting his rant, he illustrates the aforementioned chaos with the stage props, ending with a fanned flurry upon the table, catty-corner to Marc’s perspective. “[i]Any hacker is faced with the impossible task of extracting that single card from the scrambled horde. However, one of you has already cracked the solution to this cunning ploy. I’m referring to the artifice of the Faro.[/i]” He seeks out the black Ace once again, chairs it on the pinnacle of the deck, and with mechanical precision, Alfred preserves its foremost position after eight more perfect weaves. “[i]Thanks to a little theorem by Fermat, the credit card can also be forced to resurrect at the crown of the mob after another very specific sequence of shuffles.”[/i]

	[i]“This isn’t new, Mr. Z. Euler showed that the pattern repeats itself ages ago...[/i]” Adopting and drawing on one of the cocktail napkins on the bubble wrapped floor, the much younger Dave tautly crucified the binomial equation, as if holding the chauffeur sign at a baggage claim in a busy airport. "[i]...after [b](p-1) x (q-1) + 1[/b], where [b]p[/b] and [b]q[/b] are the prime factorization of that gigantic [b]N[/b], you mentioned earlier.[/i]”

“[i]Exactly, and acquisition of these two primes therefore becomes the koan to unlocking the secrets to the House,[/i]” applauded Alfred.

	“[i]But you said it yourself, that’s impossible! No supercomputer, let alone any [b]N[/b] group of elite hackers would ever be able to discriminate p and q, that fast.”[/i] Bruce sneered.

“[i]Not unless one controlled which exact N-sized packets were allowed to be transmitted from machine to bank account, reverse engineering the p and q, by selecting the desired N before-hand. Similar to having a confederate in the crowd, you cherry pick the same 'innocent' participant, over and over again, to always go along with the magic show. The computers in our slots and games will blindly keep funneling different N-sized packets with the embedded transactions until a desired [b]N[/b] is finally received and processed by the Millennium Tower, and, of course, an intercepting wolf.[/i]”

An awkward silence fiercely impregnated the room, only to be cock-blocked by a musical chime, à la Gyles, Quinn:

[b][i]The job is on. We have to find the little shits who've been pushing that whiplash throughout the city. We've been ordered to fan out and gather information for the time being, but not to take any rash actions. My best bet would be going through the prostitutes, they mess with some of the most fucked up johns sometimes. I ain't telling you what to do, and you can find information your own way, but I'm gonna hit up the rings. In any case, we'll meet back up in six hours and share anything we've found. We gotta put a lid on this shit quick. [/i][/b]

The golden grin slowly disappeared, as the thunder was stolen. "[i]I guess you're both worth more alive, after all.[/i]"