The dinner bill comes to eight grand. I charge it to my company Amex. The nine suites on the twenty-ninth floor, rows of Cirque du Soleil tickets, and bottles of vintage bubbly all get racked up on this Amex. Peter Brown wants no record of this trip. No credit card bill emblazoned with the name “Gaddafi” leaked to the press by a Bellagio employee. This bacchanal must stay out of the news—a tough ask that requires I do the opposite of the thing at which I’m best.

  I arrived in Vegas this morning with a thousand dollars in cash I’d borrowed from my friend Jon on the way to the airport and an email from the colleague I’m relieving of dictator duty. “Mutassim very well might be the next leader of the country. He’s in Room 29601—only he goes in there,” my colleague wrote. “Recent things that Mutassim has expressed interest in and that you may need to help line up for them: visiting the Harley-Davidson showroom, looking into buying a Cadillac Escalade with limo-style rear seats, buying a telescope, buying jean shorts (seriously), and seeing Cher perform on Saturday night (also seriously).”

  My phone exploded before my cab passed Mandalay Bay. I answered to someone screaming at me in Arabic. I shouted back that I didn’t speak Arabic. “Cleaning persons. They are telling us to leave the rooms. The Doctor still sleeping. Fix problem now.” Click.

  At the Bellagio, I found out the Doctor was threatening a housekeeper for trying to clean his suite. A few months prior, Mutassim’s brother Hannibal was arrested at a Geneva hotel for beating a maid. Muammar Gaddafi retaliated by cutting oil supplies to Switzerland, yanking more than five billion in assets from Swiss banks, expelling Swiss diplomats, and detaining Swiss nationals in Libya. BLJ earned its bones cleaning up a slew of scathing headlines. We can’t have another international scandal in Vegas. If Peter Brown opens the New York Post to the headline “Gaddafi Man-Child Tossed Out of Bellagio, Pisses in Fountain,” I’m out of a job.

  I sprinted to the concierge desk, where I caught the attention of a man in a periwinkle Armani suit. “As you can imagine,” I said. “You and I have a bit of a problem.”

  “Oh, I don’t have to use my imagination,” he said. “It’s quite tangible.”

  “We can all make it out of this alive if you tell Housekeeping to stay away from the following nine suites,” I said.

  I brokered a deal for the staff to clean Mutassim’s suite only while he lounged in his cabana at the pool. I tipped the concierge a hundred bucks.

  “There’s more coming,” I said. “I’m going to need a lot of help.”

  SATURDAY

  A thousand glass flowers shimmer from the ceiling of the Bellagio’s lobby. Harsh casino light bounces off a sculpture of a golden-hooved horse sequined into an equine disco ball. My fingers tap a jittery staccato against the marble concierge desk. The concierge scowls. I’ve just asked him to help me procure a large amount of cocaine. Twenty-four hours into the trip, he’s already weary of the Doctor’s demands. Five poolside cabanas. Front-row tickets to every show on the Strip. And now this.

  The concierge scribbles a phone number on a slip of paper, passes it to me, and stalks away. I dial the drug dealer while walking past a bank of Wheel of Fortune slots.

  “Room number?” a man’s voice asks.

  “Three-one-six-two-eight,” I said, giving him the number for my own room.

  “Leave a thousand dollars under a water glass on your bathroom sink.”

  I hang up, call Ali, and ask for a grand.

  “Take it from my room,” he says. “Closet.”

  I ride the elevator up to the twenty-ninth floor and unlock Suite 29603, Ali’s suite. When I checked in, I found nine keycards fanned across my coffee table. A level of access I never asked for and don’t want. His suite is twice the size of my hotel room. A bowl of fruit rots on a table made of gold-and-white stone. Ali is neat. These are an operative’s quarters, not a party boy crash pad.

  In a closet the size of my bedroom, I find three black snakeskin briefcases. I click one open, revealing a nickel-plated 9mm Beretta and packets of hundred-dollar bills shrink-wrapped in ten-thousand-dollar increments. It’s the most cash I’ve seen in my life, at least a million dollars.

  I use a bundle of cash to scoot the handgun away, trying not to touch it. I rip open one of the bundles and peel off a thousand dollars. I hesitate, tempted. Three million dollars in this closet. Would Ali notice twenty grand missing? My credit card debt could go to zero. Then I look at the Beretta. My credit score won’t mean much if I’m dead.

  Back in my own room, I arrange the money under a water glass on the bathroom sink. It’s a tight fit. I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror set in front of an arrangement of white orchids. I’ve got raccoon circles under my eyes, I need a shave, and my suit begs almost audibly for a dry cleaner. A drug peddler for a dictator’s entourage.

  A Las Vegas area code calls my cell. Each member of the Libyan delegation has a burner phone. I’ve saved none of their numbers. I tell the voice on the other end where he can find the package, grab my laptop, and prop the door to my room open with the bolt lock.

  At the private pool called the Cypress, I spot the Libyans lying out in the cabanas I reserved this morning at six. I collapse onto a chaise longue. The metal rods in my hip are on fire. I picture the three screws inside, the throbbing flesh around them. My hip aches when I’m tired, and I didn’t sleep last night. After dinner, our entourage took a four-car motorcade to see the Cirque du Soleil. Best seats in the house. We left halfway through because the Doctor got bored and wanted to hit the casino. He spun the roulette wheel until past midnight while I fielded angry emails from BLJ’s accountant.

  At the pool bar, I buy a screwdriver to anesthetize the fire ants in my hip and call Preston. For the rest of the trip, I’ll have a drink in my hand whenever I am standing still. A screwdriver in the morning hours, wine with lunch, vodka sodas after dinner, and bourbon to close out the evening. I’m glad we have a fleet of drivers.

  “I’m babysitting the Gaddafi kid in Vegas,” I tell Preston. “I’m freaking out. They have guns. And a few eight balls of cocaine. Well, in a few minutes they will.”

  “What kind of guns?” Preston asks, genuinely interested.

  “A nine-millimeter.”

  “Never let anyone tell you Americans don’t use the metric system. We measure our bullets in millimeters and our drugs in grams. Was the barrel threaded?” he asks.

  “I have no fucking idea,” I yell, trying to drink the ice in my empty highball glass. “I’m more worried they’ll decide to shoot me with it.”

  “You need to get the hell out of Dodge,” Preston says.

  “I can’t leave,” I say. “They’re giant children. They can’t be left unsupervised.”

  “I’m serious, Phil. Just take off. A Gaddafi could shoot you in a hotel room, and the whole thing would be covered up.”

  “I know,” I say. “I’m one of the people who’d help cover it up.”

  * * *

  An hour later, someone has taken the cash, and the cocaine I hope was left in its place, from my room. I lie down on the linen bedspread, elevating my throbbing thigh onto a pillow. But there’s no rest for those who help the wicked. I’m needed at the high-roller lounge. The Libyans arrived straight from the pool wearing robes and sandals and are being denied entry.

  “We have a dress code,” the pit boss explains to me when I arrive downstairs.

  The Doctor screams in Arabic. He gives Ali a look that asks, Is this a person we can hit?

  Ali shakes his head.

  “Please,” I plead. “Could you just put some shoes on?”

  “No,” the Doctor says.

  I realize it’s the first time he has spoken to me. I’m the help, and the help should be neither seen nor heard.

  The Doctor reaches into the pocket of his robe and yanks out a package of stiff bills. It’s enough to buy a Toyota Camry—and the magic number to make the pit boss stand down. In the high-roller lounge, I watch the Doctor lose the equivalent of my monthly income on one hand of blackjack. After a few more bad bets, he’s down ninety-five grand, my annual salary at BLJ. Ali lights a Marlboro for him and beckons me with his index finger.

  “The Doctor wants you to arrange a private jet for tomorrow,” he says. “To take Natasha back to L.A.”

  I duck out to the sportsbook and call BLJ’s preferred charter jet service. The charter company sends an invoice for six thousand dollars to my BlackBerry. I forward it to BLJ for approval. In response, I receive back the invoice I sent yesterday for the motorcade. A new quote has been attached. I’m instructed to print it out for the Libyans in black and white, to account for any color damage that took place during its printing and scanning back at BLJ. “Color damage” is lazy code for “doctoring.” Sure enough, the firm has upped the original cost by twenty thousand. Markups are a common practice at PR firms. They are written into contracts. The standard is 17.5 percent on top of any expenses incurred on behalf of the client. I’m no mathematician, but this blows several miles past 17.5 percent.

  Panicking, I call my colleague. “The only person I know of who has stolen from the Libyans was Doc Brown in Back to the Future, and that ended very badly for him,” I tell him.

  “Get it in cash,” I’m instructed.

  I print out the invoice at the concierge desk, in black and white. Glancing at it, you can barely tell BLJ has fudged the numbers. But when I look hard enough, I spot the Wite-Out at the edges of the numerals. Back at the high-roller lounge, I hand Ali the invoice.

  “We’d prefer you paid in cash,” I say.

  “We’ll take care of it tomorrow,” he says. “Now the Doctor wants to go shopping.”

  * * *

  The Doctor really does want jean shorts. And a Harley-Davidson. And to see Cher. We take our four-vehicle motorcade to the Venetian, where I shepherd the Libyans through the Grand Canal Shoppes. The Libyans are dressed in multicolored Adidas tracksuits. The Muhammad twins try to smoke in the Burberry store. I find the Doctor a pair of jorts at the Gap. On the floor of the Harley showroom, the Doctor berates a clerk after issues arise with shipping a pair of chrome choppers to Libya.

  That night at the Colosseum, Cher commands the stage wearing a headdress made of golden feathers crowned by a snake. I’m sitting next to Ali, behind the Doctor and Natasha. The Doctor remains stone-faced through Cher’s lung-busting rendition of “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves.” For twenty years, Libya was a terrorist pariah state. You’d think the Doctor’s first trip to Las Vegas would be exciting, but nothing impresses him. I guess because people aren’t getting shot on the stage. He is incapable of joy.

  Halfway through the show, I turn to Ali. He’s conked out. His chest rises and falls, his exhalations fluttering his nose hairs. Staring at his drained, gray face, I feel something approaching empathy. I’ve been babysitting the Doctor for less than forty-eight hours, and I’ve already had enough. This is Ali’s life day in and day out. He must be terrified all the time.

  We leave before the curtain falls and head for the MGM Grand. The Strip is thick with Saturday night traffic. This, too, draws the Doctor’s ire. He doesn’t understand why the motorcade can’t go lights and sirens through Vegas.

  Another casino, another roulette table. No clocks. Two days of fluorescent lights, buffet advertisements, Marlboro smoke, and slot machine noise have merged into one nightmare memory, like a moving hellscape by Hieronymus Bosch. Natasha pouts, bored by watching the Doctor lose more money.

  “Can we go to TAO now?” she whines. “You said we could go to TAO.”

  The words are hardly out of her mouth when the Doctor beelines for the exit. I limp after him, dialing our drivers. The motorcade must be waiting to ferry him from whim to whim. My cell doesn’t connect in the casino. As I follow the Doctor past the MGM Grand’s Garden Arena, a wash of humans hits the casino floor. The final bell has rung at the Mayweather vs. Márquez fight. Thirteen thousand people head for the exits. The crush separates the Doctor and me from the rest of the group. I chase him, my hip a ball of pain.

  Outside, taxis clog the valet stand. Our motorcade is not among them. The Doctor releases a wail. He throws his hands up in the air and jumps up and down like a toddler who’s been told it’s his bedtime. Then he pauses, sucking air.

  Please let it be over.

  No, he’s just lighting another Marlboro before resuming his tirade, smoke pouring out of his mouth. A man wearing a T-shirt reading “Kiss My Ace” gawks at this madman in a tracksuit. So do two women wearing nothing but thongs and American flag body paint.

  I dial the driver over and over. Finally, he pulls up, and I get the Doctor into the SUV. The rest of the entourage appears and piles in.

  At TAO, we cut the line. A bouncer stops Natasha at the VIP entrance. She’s doesn’t have ID. The Doctor rears back a fist, snarling. I jump in front of the bouncer, the headlines running through my brain.

  “If you’re going to hit anyone, hit me,” I plead.

  The Doctor cracks his first smile of the trip, as if that would give him a joy Vegas can’t provide. Ali convinces him to return to the roulette wheel at the Bellagio. There, he pisses his country’s money away on ten-thousand-dollar bets. As his stack of chips shrinks, the Doctor curses in Arabic.

  “Get more cash from his room,” Ali whispers to me. “He’ll be angry if he runs out. It’s in the closet.”

  “How much?”

  “A bagful.”

  So, we’re measuring money in bags now.

  The Doctor’s suite goes on forever and smells like mall cologne and chain-smoked Marlboros. The room is trashed. The housekeepers are as terrified of Mutassim as I am. I grab the plastic liner from the empty garbage can and enter the closet. I open a snakeskin briefcase and chuck money into the bag until it feels heavy. PR people are often disdainfully called bagmen. Tonight, the moniker is well earned.

  Back down in the casino, the Doctor is screaming at the dealer. He’s out of chips. Bundles from the garbage bag refill his stack. He sparks a Marlboro, pacified for the moment.

  A cocktail waitress taps me on the shoulder, demanding that I pay eight dollars for my vodka soda. I do a double take. My group is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hotel, and I must reach into my pocket for a comped drink.

  SUNDAY

  I wake to an email from BLJ’s accountant. “What are you doing?” she writes. “This is madness!” Amex has been calling hourly, saying we’ve hit our credit limit. Peter Brown’s Black Card doesn’t have a limit. I don’t want to imagine the bill we’ve racked up. And I haven’t even paid the Bellagio for the flight of suites.

  Another email sits in my inbox. Attached is an approved invoice for Natasha’s private flight. I notice that the original $6,000 has been changed to $16,597.45. I read through the chain of emails.

  BLJ Agent 1: Do your thing:)

  BLJ Agent 2: Just confirming—$16,597.45, right?

  BLJ Agent 1: Yes. Can you play w the fees to make them add up to that?

  I print out the doctored invoice at the concierge desk.

  “Checking out today, sir?” the concierge asks.

  “Yes, thank God.”

  “Indeed.”

  At the casino, I hand the invoice to Ali. He glances at it.

  “That’s sixty thousand total now,” I tell him. “We’d like to be paid before you leave.”

  “Get the money from my room.”

  Up in his suite, I open the black snakeskin briefcase one more time. The cash is there. The handgun isn’t. I wonder if Ali will shoot me with it if he discovers my theft. Or maybe the Doctor will put his degree in torture to good use. I remove six packages of ten-thousand-dollar bills. Just yesterday, I was worried about stealing twenty grand. BLJ has no such concerns.

  I stash the sixty grand in my room safe. Guns stay on my mind. One day, I’ll inherit a Smith and Wesson .38—a gun that comes come with a free lesson in public relations. It was the 1930s, and a man named George walked down the street of a small town in the Midwest. George heard the town drunk beating his wife, a woman named Mary. George rang their doorbell, the drunk answered the door, and George shot him dead with his Smith and Wesson .38 and then turned himself in to the police. But this particular midwestern town was occupied by a thousand souls. They looked after one another. There was no murder trial. George married Mary, and they remained happily married for sixty years. In the late 1960s, George gave the murder weapon to my grandfather, who willed it to my mother.

  During media training, PR operatives learn that every story has three parts: a villain, a victim, and a vindicator. In this story, Mary was the victim, and when he murdered the drunk, George became the villain. In the PR business, we try to convert a villain into a vindicator or a victim as fast as possible. And that’s exactly what the town did when they found George “not guilty” sans trial. They made him the hero, a vindicator of battered women. The deceased drunk was switched from a murder victim to a wife beater who deserved to die. A villain. Every story needs a villain. Show me a good story without one.

  But these are just stories. Midwestern tales. Ink in newspapers. I’ve got a real villain blowing smoke in my face. And I’d really like to avoid becoming the victim. The Gaddafis have enough money to make the Doctor the vindicator, even if he kills me. BLJ did it for the Doctor’s brother Hannibal after he tortured that poor housekeeper. Come to think of it, we’ve also done it for Mutassim. After a rough few months of press, a photo op was set up with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

  I turn all this over in my mind as I drink another screwdriver. But what I’m really wishing is that I had George’s Smith and Wesson .38 tucked into my belt.

  * * *

  The motorcade ferries us toward Vegas’s private airstrip. I’m in the lead car, up front with the driver. We’re two miles away. Natasha’s plane needs to be there. We’ve triple charged them for it.