A fast-paced explosive thriller about money laundering, mafia and crime The Hundred Million Bet by Atul Koul Randev. is a thriller that is about going against all odds and putting everything on the line to win or lose it all.
10 : Caesar
Paradise City July, 2006
We went through a series of games one after the other. Twelve days of going in and out of rooms, slowly growing our little pile of nothing into something. We patiently factored our cash accounts and grew them little by little.
The key was to not run yourself ragged by the time the moment of truth arrived. We needed to be fresh and unbiased to be able to make those all-important calls that would define what we managed to take home. The best thing to do was to take turns at the tables. We played, we won or occasionally lost, then came back and handed our holdings to the next person.
It needed a certain amount of trust to manage this, trust in the person’s ability to play, and their willingness to not cheat the others. I wonder if it was friendship that kept us going, or was it just a carefully established balance that none of us seemed inclined to break? Nobody had an incentive to cheat as long as we made more money together than we would make alone. This would go on till the day that the pot became big enough to supersede all the pots to come. What would happen when the winnings of one game would be enough to cover everything we’d win over the course of a decade? How much of it would be enough for one of us to be tempted into taking it all away at one go?
We were all brothers, we said occasionally. But we knew this – it wasn’t blood that tied us together, it was money. And it would inevitably split us apart. “We can’t avoid the question any longer, only one of us can play in the tournament tomorrow.” “Do you think you are up for it?” Sumer asked.
I nodded, “It’s not like I can trust you to take all that cash into the game, can I?” A note of honest irony had crept into my words in the guise of sarcasm.
“I wasn’t keeping count, but I’m positive that I multiplied the money the most in these rounds,” Sumer said. “I’d be happy to let you play this. That way I can actually spend some time socialising with some of those beauties around the house while you sweat it out.” “Piece of cake.” Piece of cake. A million to lose. A million to win. A million to steal.
Book Releasing On 10th February , 2023
( Extracted with permission from author , publisher)
