Disclaimer: I don't own the challenge; that belongs to Lee. Buffy and Angel and respective characters belong to Joss Whedon, and Ocean's Eleven belongs to Warner Bros.

Feedback: Please do.

Challenge: Basically, redo the basic plot of Ocean's Eleven with Buffy and Angel characters. Angel should take the place of Danny Ocean, and Connor as Linus Caldwell. The other characters are up to you.


Other Requirements:
Keep the running gag of the Rusty character always eating/drinking something.

All characters should be at the jobs they were in the movie (Frank a dealer in a casino, Basher in the middle of another heist, Rusty teaching movie stars how to play poker, Danny/Angel in jail, Livingston working freelance for the FBI, etc.)

Flaire Delacour with Faith: That's a relief; trust me, it isn't all that easy writing something like this

Imzadi: Well, you've got a chapter or two to wait until the rest of them show up, but the money guy will be appearing here, I promise you that…

kalaong: Good guess, but I can't confirm any of them. I'll just say this; Lorne is NOT appearing here. I'm sorry to all his fans, but I can only ever see him as the green-skinned guy with the little red horns, and if he's not that, well… he's not Lorne, is he?

a2zmom: Believe me, I'll be trying to work in my own little twists as well; I don't like those stories that just give the movies a different cast list any more than you do

Angel's Eleven

"Here it is," Angel said, spreading the plans out in front of them in the small office he and Wesley had managed to get to themselves for the next few hours. "The vault of the Bellagio casino."

Wesley looked at it for a few seconds, and sighed. "You know, if I'm reading this right, this is probably the least accessible vault ever designed," he said.

Then he shook his head. "No, scratch that; it is the most inaccessible vault ever designed."

Then a thought occurred to him and he looked up at Angel. "You said three casinos?" he asked hopefully; evidently, he was guessing the other two were more accessable.

Angel shook his head, tapping a couple of extra doors on the map. "These feed into the Mirage and the MGM Grand," he explained. "Every dime ends up here, but the three casinos operate pretty much independently of each other otherwise."

"Wait a minute…" Wesley said, a thought occurring to him. He looked over at Angel. "The Bellagio, the Mirage, and the MGM Grand? Aren't those…?"

"Yep; Parker Abrams' casinos," Angel replied. He smiled slightly as he looked up at Wesley. "What; you thought I'd just be doing this for the cash?" His expression instantly became professional again. "You know as well as I do that, if he hadn't had the connections he'd had with those guys, he could never have done as well as he has."

He tapped the plan again. "He's the last link in the chain, Wesley; take him down, and we're done."

Wesley sighed as he looked up at his friend. "Angel, this isn't like that time we stole that so-called 'Turin Shroud' of theirs to prevent the situation getting out of hand and people dying to claim it," he said. "Then the Shroud was both a fake and illegally acquired by its current owner. Here, the casino is perfectly legitimate, and we don't have another group planning the same scam that we can infiltrate. You would need at least a dozen people pulling off a dozen different kinds of cons, and that's even before you factor in the money we're going to need!"

Angel smiled. "That's already taken care of, Wes; aren't you forgetting that a certain reclusive billionaire owes us a favour or two?"

Wesley stared in confusion at Angel for a few seconds, and then realisation dawned.

"David Nabbit?" he asked.

Angel nodded. "David Nabbit."

A few minutes later, the two men were standing at the door of the elevator, Angel clutching copies of the casino plans in his right hand. Wesley was shifting slightly, looking uneasily around him as they waited, until, finally, Angel couldn't take any more.

"Is there a problem, Wesley?" he asked, looking over curiously at his friend.

"Well… yes, actually," Wesley replied, looking back at his friend, reaching up at the same time to remove his new half moon spectacles and clean them slightly. "A simple question; why do this?"

"Why not?" Angel shrugged.

Wesley sighed. "Angel, you just got out of prison after five years, in case you've forgotten," he said, turning to face his friend. "We lost enough the last time; are you really prepared to-"

Angel held up one hand to stop Wesley, and regarded him critically.

"Believe me, Wesley, I know what the risks are," he said. "You know me; you know what I've lost to bring me here. But I'm not just doing this for me. I'm doing this because, for all our attempts, they're still active in these three casinos; I'm doing this because we need to show them that, no matter how powerful they are, there's always someone to fight them; but, most of all, I'm doing this because I am not going to have lost… lost them for nothing…"

He glared at Wesley. "Are you?"

Wesley knew he was primarily referring to, of course; the loss of Francis Doyle and Cordelia Chase stayed prominently in his mind even after all these years. Doyle had given his life to save a shipload of innocent Koreans who would have become slave labour if their foes had their way, and Cordelia had been poisoned by those… those things; he could never think of them as human after that… simply to hurt them.

Of course, there were other losses, but Wesley was pretty sure Angel wasn't referring to them…

Wesley looked curiously at Angel. "Have you been practicing that?"

"A little," Angel said. "Did I rush it; it felt like I rushed it-"

"No, that was good; I liked it," Wesley said. "I'm in."

"Good," Angel said, as the two of them stepped into the elevator. "Now, all we need to do is convince David."

"You're OUT of your goddamn MINDS!" Nabbit said, looking at the two of them from across his table. "You can't seriously expect to rob one casino, never mind three!"

"It's never been tried," Wesley said.

"Actually, it has been," Nabbit said, looking over at Wesley critically. "Didn't you know that, Wes? The best three jobs, in reverse order, made it three steps away before being tackled to the ground, actually reached the door before getting their nose whacked in, and got shot in the back in the car park!" He looked back at them from beneath his sunglasses. "You think you can do any better?"

"Times have changed," Angel said simply.

Nabbit smiled, almost seeming to calm down. "You know, you're right, Angel," he said, looking over at the ex-convict. "What am I saying; you guys are the best. You broke into a vault designed to hold what many thought was a holy relic; compared to that, security for mere money is child's play. If you can't do it, nobody can."

Then his face hardened. "Of course, even if you get out of the casino, you're still in the middle of the fucking DESERT!" he yelled.

Angel and Wesley looked at each other, and shrugged.

"David, you're right," Angel said. "Our eyes were bigger than our stomachs."

"That's exactly it; pure ego," Wesley said casually.

"Yeah yeah, blah blah," Nabbit said, waving one hand dismissively.

"Thank you so much for setting us straight," Angel smiled casually. "Sorry we bothered you."

"Look, we all go way back," Nabbit said, as the two men got up and he shook their hands. "I owe you from that thing with the guy in the place, and I'll never forget it."

"It was a blackmail case," Wesley said simply.

"And it was our pleasure," Angel added. "You're a good guy, David; the world could use more millionaires like you."

"Thanks," Nabbit said, taking a sip of his drink as the two ex-detectives began to walk away. "Just out of curiosity, which casinos did you geniuses pick to rob?" he called after them.

"Um… lemme think…" Angel said, before snapping his fingers. "Got it; the Bellagio, Mirage, and the M.G.M. Grand,"

Nabbit blinked in surprise, and, putting his drink back down, looked up at the two men. "Those are Parker Abrams's casinos," he said simply.

"You know, he's right," Wesley said, sounding almost surprised at the point.

"You guys..." David said, looking between the two of them. "Whadda you got against Parker Abrams?"

Angel smiled. "What do you have against him, David? That's the real question here."

Nabbit growled slightly at the thought. "He torpedoed my casino," he said, looking between the two of them. "Then he muscled me out, and now he's gonna blow it up next month to make way for another fuckin' eyesore."

He raised a warning finger. "Don't think I don't see what you're doin'."

"What are we doing, David?" Wesley asked politely.

"You gonna steal from Parker Abrams, you better goddamn know," Nabbit said, looking over at the ex-librarian. "This sort of thing used to be civilized. You'd hit a guy; he'd hit you back; that'd be that. But Abrams..."

Nabbit shuddered, and then continued. "You know his connections, guys. At the end of this he better not know you're involved, not know your names, or think you're dead. Because he'll kill you, and then he'll go to work on you.

"That's why we've got to be very careful if we're going to cripple him like this," Angel explained. "We have to be precise. We have to be well-funded."

"Yeah, but you've gotta be nuts, too," Nabbit said. "And you're gonna need a crew as nuts as you are."

He paused for a few moments, and then spoke again. "Who do you have in mind?"

Angel and Wesley smiled over at each other.

The game was on…