The End Game

12

Anxiety-like its cousin, actual physical pain-is a natural occurrence. It’s your brain’s way of reminding you that even if your ancestors didn’t see a saber-toothed tiger lurking in the low underbrush, there was a high probability that the tiger was there, licking its chops, anticipating the rich and nuanced flavors found in your average austra lopithecine.

Where you might find a therapist to talk you through your anxiety, maybe find a way to medicate the fear of the tiger away, when you’re a spy, you learn to calculate your anxiety so that you can compartmentalize it in your mind and make decisions, so that if a house cat crosses your path you don’t scramble an F-16 from an offshore aircraft carrier to take it out.

What are you afraid of?

Is the threat credible?

Can you take it out by yourself?

Unbounded anxiety creates mental isolation. Even a spy can go crazy if he’s not able to exercise his brain. If you’re captured by the enemy, hooded and shoved into a locked room, the first thing you should do is start talking to yourself. Even if you’re speaking gibberish, you want to use the only weapon you have-your intellect-to turn your fear into your asset. Language and thought and reason will focus you, will break down your anxiety into workable parts, until you see your anxiety for what it ultimately is: a desire not to die or suffer terrible pain. Once you recognize the danger and the possible outcomes, it’s easier to fight, even if the fight is all in your head.

If someone really wanted you dead, you’d already be dead.

While I didn’t know precisely what I was facing, I knew that the players on my radar were not much to be afraid of personally, but for Gennaro and his wife and child, however, they were the epitome.

I had to remember that.

I was also aware that positions were aligning in such a way that even if I was able to save Gennaro’s family, I might very well be in the crosshairs of the bad guys, the good guys and probably a few opportunists, too.

That meant the threat was credible.

And that meant I needed help.

The sun was already down, but Bayfront Park, Miami’s own central park, was lit with glittering white bulbs strung tree to tree to highlight a free show given by the Flying Trapeze School housed on the park’s grounds. There were booths selling corn dogs, pork sandwiches, funnel cakes and sweet corn on the cob, others offering hand-churned ice cream, fried plantains and guava marmalade served over pound cake. Young couples and families sat on blankets and watched the spectacle as the trapeze students sailed through the air, catching each other by the ankles and flying back again, flipping, twirling, and even falling occasionally to the mesh net below, to the ooohs and ahhhs of the crowd. There was that whirl of expectation in the air that comes from shared excitement and fear.

The festive kind of fear.

Somewhere, Fiona was watching my back. If real trouble came down, she’d be on top of it. That allowed me to focus my attention on the task at hand, which was locating Barry, Miami’s finest nonviolent lowlife, among the audience of sugar-high kids and their parents.

I eventually found him sitting on a lawn chair under a tree, a plate of food on his lap, a cooler beside him.

Barry was the kind of guy who could get you what you needed, like dummy home loans, millions of dollar in fake wire transfers, new identities, small helicopters, and the occasional piece of advice about the inner workings of the bad people he associated with.

A jack-of-all-criminal-trades, really.

I sat down on the grass next to him, and for a few minutes we watched the trapeze. Four different students were doing a series of tricks that involved midair flips timed perfectly to a classical music arrangement. There was always someone in the air and someone launching into the air.

The precision, timing and dedication looked flawless, but it meant hours of preparation and failure had been embarked on long before this date.

“What I wonder,” Barry said after a while, “is what a professional trapeze artist does on his day off. Sit in a cubicle?”

“Probably the same thing anyone does,” I said.

“What do you do?”

“I plot,” I said. “And wait.”

“See, that’s the thing,” Barry said. “You need to find something more relaxing. I tried collecting wine for a little while. You know, like as a hobby? Started going to tastings and these things where they put out ten different kinds of cheeses and then the wine you’re supposed to drink with each cheese. Turned out to be very stressful. Too many decisions to make.”

“What do you do now?”

“I started getting into chakra cleansing,” he said. “Girl I was dating was a big advocate, but that didn’t do the trick, either. She was very spiritual about it, always telling me to surrender to the release, but I just couldn’t get into that. I feel like my chakra is pretty healthy.”

“That’s what you’re known for,” I said. “That and bad checks.”

“This was supposed to be my day off,” Barry said. “And here I am, sitting next to Mr. Marked for Death.”

“Think how I feel,” I said.

Barry hadn’t actually looked at me yet. Or if he had, I couldn’t tell since he was still wearing his sunglasses. Maybe he was waiting for a break in the action.

“Have to say,” he said, “I was little surprised to hear from you. Today of all days.”

“Yeah?”

“Word is you got a bullet to the dome this afternoon, actually.”

“That was someone else,” I said.

“What happened to your forehead?”

“Christopher Bonaventura punched it,” I said.

“You wake up in the morning and this stuff just happens, or is there an order to it?”

“Depends what morning it is,” I said.

“Maybe you just live in a bad neighborhood.”

“No,” I said, “the guy who was shot in front of my place was probably taken out by a sniper, so they could have been in another neighborhood completely. I suppose they could have been in a high-rise a half a mile away.” I pointed at the towering buildings across the street from the park. “Like one of those.”

“Comforting,” Barry said.

“Any other words being thrown out about me?”

“Only that since you got back into town, the number of professional killers enjoying the sun and beaches has increased tenfold. I’m thinking of starting a side business selling maps to your place.”

“Yeah,” I said, “about that. You got anything on an ex-Marine named Alex Kyle doing business out here?”

“Big guy?”

“Big enough.”

“Rolls with ten guys who look just like him?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Barry pulled off his sunglasses and rubbed them on his shirt. Held them up. Looked through them. Put ’em right back on. “Lot of fake passports in town this week,” Barry said, like I hadn’t asked him about Alex Kyle. “Lots of people asking for private protection. Big money getting tossed around. Heard there was a guy trying to move yellow cake who was staying at a condo, taking meetings on his deck, like it was nothing. Another guy supposedly was trying to move weapons-grade plutonium. FBI picked him up eating sushi next to Bono.”

One of the trapeze artists failed to catch his partner, and the partner-a young Asian woman who looked to weigh less than a hundred pounds-sailed into the netting below, eliciting a collective moan from the crowd. She popped back up quickly, but looked dazed and somewhat unbalanced.

“You think that hurts?” Barry said.

“Any time you fall from the sky onto the ground,” I said, “it hurts.”

“You ever jump out of a plane?”

“A few times,” I said.

“That seems relaxing,” he said.

“Not if the people on the ground are shooting at you,” I said.

“Can’t control that,” Barry said. He reached into his cooler and pulled out a bottle of beer and handed it to me, took another one out for himself. He looked at me then and clanked his bottle into mine in a toast. “To life, then,” he said, and then drank from his bottle slowly, like he was thinking about something particularly vexing.

“Something on your mind, Barry?”

“This Alex Kyle,” Barry said, “he’s not a nice person.”

I thought about it. “No. Probably not.”

“Wasn’t really a question,” Barry said. “Just an observation.” He broke off a piece of fried plantain from his plate and chewed on it carefully. “Anyway,” he said, “now that you’re alive again, I’m just saying you should look into ways to spend your free time that are less hazardous to your health. You never hear about anyone getting gunned down while building model planes in their garage.”

He had a point, though if I took to building model planes in my garage, I might be inclined to gun myself down.

“I need a favor,” I said.

“Last favor I did for you? The IRS audited my nana the next day. That’s not right.”

“Nana good with keeping receipts?”

“She’s been dead for fifteen years,” Barry said.

“Tell me you’re not cashing your grandmother’s social security checks,” I said.

“You watch the news? It’s important to tighten up where you can. Besides, it helps to have an extra social security number or two for a rainy day, like if some ex-spy puts your business in peril and you need to relocate and start all over.”

“You help me here,” I said, “I’ll owe you.”

“You already owe me,” he said.

I looked around. “Dinner with Fiona,” I said. I paused. Waited for a sign. Like a shank to the neck. When none came, I continued with “My treat.”

“She’s not a nice person, either,” Barry said.

“No,” I said, “she’s not.”

“That’s kind of hot, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

Barry chewed on another bit of plantain. “This one of those ‘or people will die’ things?”

“Yeah,” I said. I showed him the paperwork on the credit transfer to Myanmar. “You ever do any business with this bank?”

Barry visibly recoiled in his chair, enough so that he had to grab his plate before it tipped off his lap. “Myanmar is off-limits,” he said.

“How can an entire country be off-limits?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe I’m just averse to having the government disappear me. Or being called a terrorist and shipped to some torture chamber on a boat. Or having everyone I know murdered in the night by people like yourself. No offense.”

“None taken,” I said.

“Or your friend Mr. Kyle.”

“Have you talked to him, Barry?”

“He paid me a visit.”

“What was he looking for?”

“You,” he said.

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth,” Barry said. “That the last time we did business my nana got audited. Told him I was out of the Michael Westen business until Nana’s IRS problems disappeared.”

“I appreciate that,” I said.

“Consider it the advantage of working with local businesses,” he said.

“I still need a favor,” I said.

“I still get dinner with Fiona?”

Even though I couldn’t see Fi, her presence, at least mentally, was weighing on me. I tweaked the offer accordingly. “I can guarantee that you will eat in the same room with her,” I said. “Everything else is up to chance.”

“All a man can ask,” he said.

“How much time would you need to get a hold of a couple hundred credit card numbers?”

“How much are you willing to pay?”

“Whatever it takes to get your nana’s legal issues resolved,” I said. “And I’ll pay double if you can get them from Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia-any place with a lot of banks and a lot of regulations.”

“How long would you need them for?”

“About ten minutes,” I said.

“I wasn’t planning on working tonight,” Barry said. “But I guess I could make a couple calls.”

I handed him the bank information again, and this time he took it. “I want you to flood this account with transactions,” I said. “Charges. Cash advances. It doesn’t matter. But max every single card. I want an international banking incident.”

Barry shook his head. “You got maybe fifteen minutes before the banks on both ends freeze all the transactions,” Barry said. “That bank in Myanmar? It doesn’t matter if it’s run by Al Qaeda or the CIA, the computers will still autolock the account, thinking it’s being cracked. You’ll never see a single cent.”

“That’s the idea,” I said. If my hunch was correct, whoever operated the bank account Dinino was transferring money into would be expecting far more money after Gennaro lost. Bonaventura probably wasn’t the only one taking action. But that would be difficult to achieve if their bank account was being investigated by every major credit fraud agency in the world. And if the U.S. government and its allies were monitoring it for money going to terrorists, it would take about thirty seconds for that account to get flagged by the kinds of people who you do not want flagging your accounts. The kinds of people who don’t mind coming across enemy lines to make sure you understand that your banking interests are very, very interesting indeed. By flooding it ten minutes before the race, it ensured me a window of time to confirm Maria and Liz were safe. Once the people who operated it found out Dinino wasn’t going to be able to make due, there was going to be… issues.

“I need to worry about anyone coming after me?”

“Anyone comes near you,” I said, “they’re coming through me first.”

“Really?”

“Really. What are friends for?”

“Is that what we are?”

I had to think about it. “I guess so,” I said.

“Nice to know. And not that I don’t trust you, but soon as they start bouncing back the charges,” Barry said, “Barry bounces out of Miami.”

“I’d recommend that,” I said. “I’ll call you when I want you to start and then lose your phone.”

“And then, what, Fiona catches up to me?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “She’ll be in contact.”

We sat for a few moments longer and watched the trapeze show. The Asian girl who’d fallen earlier was back on the swing now and picking up momentum to perform another trick, her eyes wide open, her face perfectly still, as if she’d completely forgotten that only a few minutes before she fell to earth with a thud.

You spend the majority of your life in the company of spies and you begin to realize certain truths, chief among them that in order to be a good spy, you have to love your job.

Statistically speaking, this is unusual.

Most people hate their jobs.

Most people wish they were doing something more interesting with their lives. So they go home and they watch television shows about people they can never be, or they read books about fantasy worlds they’ll never inhabit, or they get on to the Internet and take on a persona, either on a message board or in a role-playing game, and they while away their free time pretending and then wake up the next day and head back to the cubicle maze.

But when you’re a spy, every day has the potential to be completely unlike the previous day.

That kind of adrenaline is difficult to replace.

I wanted to solve my burn notice and get my job back not merely because I wasn’t overly fond of being manipulated by forces that wanted to use me for their own devices, nor because I found their belief that I’d capitulate to their will-as however many other burned agents had over the years-specifically rude and disrespectful, never mind that it’s never fun being shot at on a regular basis.

No, I wanted to solve my burn notice because I wanted my life back-the life I’d chosen.

Dealing with the mundane was not a job I was uniquely qualified for, nor, I suspected, was it made for Alex Kyle.

Which is why I wasn’t surprised to see him sitting on the hood of my Charger. That Fiona was sitting next to him, eating a Popsicle, was not in the game plan.

They made a rather striking couple, actually.

I’d parked the car in the lot across from the park, the most public spot, so the two of them were sitting beneath the glow of a towering street-light and right next to the cashier’s kiosk.

I reached under the back of my shirt, where my gun was stashed against my back, and clicked off the safety, anyway. My loft might not be in the most public locale, but there is a nightclub beneath it, which makes it sort of an odd place to assassinate someone, but no less odd than a brightly lit parking lot swarming with people.

Better safe than dead.

“So you two have met,” I said. “That’s nice.”

“Alex was just telling me about your performance this afternoon.”

“Vintage work,” Alex said.

“Thank you,” I said. “Fiona? A word?” Fiona slid off the hood of the Charger and I took her by the arm and guided her a few steps away.

I smiled.

It was the only way I could keep from screaming.

“Care to explain?”

“He was trying to break into your car to leave you a message,” she said. “I offered to sit with him instead and we’d wait for you together.”

“That makes perfect sense,” I said.

“He’s off the clock, Michael.”

“A guy like him is never off the clock,” I said.

“Anyway,” Fiona said, “I explained to him that we didn’t appreciate his meddling in our business with Gennaro. It’s not his place, professionally, to get between you and your ability to make a living. I think he respected my honesty. Of course, I had a gun pointed at his midsection at the time.” She licked her Popsicle. “But he was even kind enough to purchase me this lovely frozen treat afterward. He’s been very polite.”

“I’m happy to hear you’ve bonded,” I said.

“He’s very friendly.”

“He threatened to kill Nate today,” I said.

Fiona considered this. “No one is the ideal,” she said. “And anyway, I made him put all of his guns in your trunk. He’s an unarmed man now.”

“How did you manage that?” I said and dangled my keys in front of her.

“I have my own set now,” she said.

“Since when?”

“You have your secrets,” she said, “I have mine.”

We stepped back over to the car, and Fi sat back down on the hood next to Alex.

“Where’s Spock?” Alex said.

“Pardon me?”

“Well,” he said, “you’re the Captain Kirk here, right? And my new friend must be Bones. Where is Spock? Big guy? Drinks a lot? Lost his dog this morning? Because I can only assume that your brother-Slade, is that right? — is not the center of logic in your operation. More like one of those guys in red who beams down and dies first.”

“You’d be surprised,” I said.

Alex shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe. I’m surprised you’re in the extortion business now, so there’s that.”

“You do what you have to do,” I said. “We all have to eat. Luckily, I happen to like what I do, just like you.”

“You like to kill women and children now, too?”

“That’s my job,” Fiona said. “Michael doesn’t have the stomach for it.”

Alex took that in. “Oh, I doubt that,” he said after a time. “There are children in some developing nations who run screaming when they see a pair of sunglasses and a nice smile.”

“What are we doing here?” I said.

“Three adults having a conversation,” Alex said.

“Your boss know you’re here?”

“He’s not my boss,” Alex said. “Just a consulting job. Something to pass the time. Keep my friends employed. Like I said. I found myself in Miami and needed some work.”

“You just found yourself here?”

“Well, no,” he said. “I came here to kill you. Brought my whole team.”

Fiona nodded at me. “See, Michael, I told you he was polite.”

“Who sent you?” I said.

“Who didn’t? There are open contracts on you all across the world. I figured I’d claim them all.”

“And yet here I am.”

“We could have taken you out a dozen times,” he said. “You don’t exactly put yourself in the best company. Cut-rate arms dealers. Bank robbers. Forgers. Russians. That whack job Larry. Not exactly the Dirty Dozen.”

“You know Larry?” I said.

“I did some work with him in Kosovo,” Alex said.

“Was this before or after he was dead?”

“After,” he said. “But he’s one who’s done it right. Sticks by his principles. Makes a good living. You, you’re not even using your skills anymore. Just a petty crook half the time. And this business with the Ottones. The Michael Westen I heard about all these years would have put Dinino down for what he’s doing with that girl, wouldn’t have even bothered to extort from him. It’s disgraceful, if you want my opinion, but like you said, we all have to eat.”

There was a part of me that wanted to pull out my gun and shoot Alex Kyle between the eyes. It was a part of me that I didn’t particularly like, a part of me that I’d kept pretty well in check since getting back to Miami.

“That’s me,” I said. “Big disgrace.”

We stared at each other for a moment, and I could feel him making decisions, figuring out maybe his information was wrong. “Anyway,” he said, “whoever wants you alive has more power than the people who want you dead. And has better technology. Five times in the last year I thought we had you. Five times I had to claim a corpse.”

“It took you five dead bodies to figure this out?”

Alex shrugged again. “You’re still Michael Westen. I just figured you were hard to kill. I didn’t realize you had guardian angels.”

I looked at Alex sitting there on my Charger. I thought about all the men he’d sent to kill me who had died. Thought about the reasons behind it-pure, unadulterated greed-and felt something surge inside of me.

“Here I am,” I said. “Only person to stop you is Fiona. And you could take her out, I’m sure.”

Alex gave a slight chuckle. “Last guy I sent? Former Army Ranger. Kills on every continent. Damn near had ESP. Whoever is watching you left a note, carved into his back like scrimshaw, letting me know that they were aware of the situation and monitoring it closely and that if anyone was going to kill you, it was going to be them. So you’ll pardon me for not taking you up on your kind offer.”

“Then what are you doing here?” I said.

Alex got off my car and stretched his back, cracked his neck, ran through each knuckle on both of his hands.

“Professional courtesy,” he said. “Mr. Bonaventura decides he wants you dead, there’s nothing I can do about that. You came to him, I didn’t come to you, so the rules are different here. Strictly business, Michael, but not spy business. I want that known.”

“Right,” I said. “You’ll light me the fuck up, as I recall. You’re just not going to be the one to pull the trigger, are you?”

“I’m just a consultant. He kills you, it’s not like I end up any richer. And I don’t claim it. I don’t endorse it. But I will say that you don’t go in and threaten someone like Mr. Bonaventura and not expect recrimination. And while I don’t approve of what you’re doing to Mr. Dinino or Mr. Stefania, that’s your business.”

I could hear some hesitation in Alex’s voice. Gone was the brazen Jarhead of this afternoon and gone, too, was the confident version I found sitting next to Fiona mere minutes previous.

He was pleading for his life.

“Did you endorse killing the guy in front of my house today?”

“That wasn’t me,” he said.

“No?”

“If someone is dead near you, it’s them or it’s because of them. That’s what I’m telling you.”

Them.

“No,” Fiona said, “what you’re telling us is that you’re scared and don’t want to die. So I suggest you scurry back to your hole.”

Alex Kyle looked around himself, figuring, I’m sure, that there was a gun trained on him somewhere. Maybe there was. Maybe there was one on all of us. “Not a lot of places to hide on the open sea between here and Nassau,” he said. “You want to make sure you live another day, I’d leave Maria and Liz Ottone alone. You want to press Nicholas Dinino? Fine. Have at him. Scumbag, in my opinion. But you drag Mr. Bonaventura into this, you drag everyone you’ve met into it. And that’s forever with him.”

“I feel pretty protected,” I said. “Five for five, right?”

“It won’t always be like that,” he said.

“And if that’s the case,” I said, “you can bet that I’ll come looking for you first. And Alex? Ask those kids about the smile and the sunglasses, they’ll tell you some stories.”

“I’ll do that,” he said. He checked his watch. “Boy, it’s late. And I think we’ve both got a long day tomorrow. I don’t suppose you want to give me back my guns?”

“Good guess,” I said.

A smirk ran across Alex Kyle’s face. “Tommy the Ice Pick. The funny thing? You check out. You got wise guys who swear to your veracity. Bonaventura actually believes someone called Tommy the Ice Pick has him cornered on a potential murder rap.” He shook his head once, very slowly, and started backing away from us. A black SUV pulled into the parking lot right on cue and idled next to him. “He killed his own father and brother and didn’t get caught, and you actually have him worried.” He patted the hood of the SUV. “All else fails, you got that going for you.”

Alex Kyle got into the SUV then and pulled away, even offered a brusque wave out the window as he passed us.

“He was nice,” Fi said. “And he donated some very nice guns to our rebel cause.”

“That’s good,” I said. “But I don’t think we’ll need them.”

“Don’t be such a disgrace,” Fiona said. “We could have been killing people and improving your standing among your peers all the while. We should take up that opportunity now that we have it.”

“Next time,” I said. We got in the Charger and headed back toward Fiona’s.

My cell rang. It was Nate. I answered in one ring. Never too late to set a good example.

“You owe me big, bro,” Nate said.

“What do you have?”

“You ever hear of a country called Calabria?”

“It’s not a country,” I said. “It’s a province. In Italy. On the Ionian Sea.” I remembered I was talking to Nate and added, “It’s the part that looks like the toe of the boot.”

“Awesome,” Nate said. “We ever get on a game show together, you’ll handle world geography questions and I’ll be the guy saving lives.”

Nate with confidence was a scary thing. It presupposed a level of involvement in my affairs that usually promised bad things.

But maybe this time was different.

The idea of a game show involving geography and death did, admittedly, have some allure.

“Slade Switchblade came in handy tonight,” Nate said. “I called in all the favors I had-and that reminds me, next week, no rush, but a friend of mine is going to need some help with an ex-girlfriend who is stalking him. I waived your normal fee, but said you’d take care of whatever problems existed in an expedient and spyish fashion that would be totally badass to witness. He wants her car to blow up, but I said, ‘Hey, no promises.’ ”

“Nate,” I said. “Get to it.”

“Right, right.” He explained that a friend of his was picking up some “businessmen” at the airport and bringing them to a race party at South Beach and that in the past, he’d gotten the impression they were in the Mafia. “The real Mafia,” Nate clarified. “So I tell him, ‘Hey, this isn’t something to trifle with; let me and my big bro take care of it.’ ”

“Tell me you didn’t threaten these guys,” I said. The last thing I needed on my plate now was even more angry crime bosses, which reminded me I was still angry with Sam for getting me in their business again. Next job he offered I was going to demand that he first provide expert witness testimony that whatever bad guys we were about to engage had more petty concerns than perpetuating a myth of toughness and respect based on a bullshit code from the last century.

“I’m not stupid,” Nate said. “I just recorded them. But here’s the thing. One guy wasn’t even Italian. He was Iranian. Or Iraqi. One of those places where they don’t use the alphabet.”

When you’re xenophobic, not knowing the difference between Iranian, Iraqi or any other Middle Eastern point of origin makes you dangerous. When you’re a common person who can’t pinpoint the 50 states on a map, much less imagine explaining Puerto Rico’s role, it just makes you ignorant, but not uncommon. In Nate’s case, this was the latter. What was notable about Calabria was not that it was in Italy, but that it’s also home to traditionally the largest concentration of Mus lims in the country-in Italy, over one-third of the country is Muslim-and normally that only means good things.

In Calabria, however, the international crime trade and terrorism network often finds a nexus. It’s the home of the most brutal and notorious wing of the mafia now, their stock and trade being drugs, importing and exporting heroin and opium and cocaine, and, worse, human trafficking. Women. Young girls.

Their drug connections stretch all the way to Afghanistan, which makes their bedfellows people like the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Washing drug money through Al Qaeda isn’t just stupid, it’s potentially fatal. But in Calabria, where the government often looks the other way and the large Muslim community protects its own, it has proven to be lucrative.

That doesn’t mean local banks will take the money. But Myanmar? That’s a different story.

“What did they say?” I asked.

“They were speaking Italian and that other language,” Nate said.

“Farsi?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “so I had to call in another favor to get the recording translated. Well, the Italian. I don’t know anyone who speaks that other stuff.”

“I do,” I said, meaning, I do.

“Anyway, again, no rush, but if you could look into a problem this cute waitress I know from Mario’s Bit of Italy is having with her landlord, we’d have access to a translator whenever we needed it.”

We. This was the peril involved. We.

“I speak Italian, too,” I said.

“You do?”

“I do,” I said. “But I’ll take care of her problem. Just tell me what these businessmen said.”

“The part in Italian was something about Dinino. They said basically that if everything went well, they’d do it again the following month, too. And then they started going back and forth between the languages and all my friend could get was something about money, something about caviar and something about coming back in town for the Super Bowl.”

“These guys,” I said. “You get a name for either of them?”

“Better,” Nate said. “They paid me with a credit card.”

That was better. And worse, shortly, for them.

Nate gave me the name: Domenic Strabo. He may as well have said John Gotti.

“Good work,” I said.

“And one more thing,” Nate said. “The big money was on the Pax Bellicosa to win, up until about two hours ago. Now even people who put huge coin on that are putting even more money on the Pax Bellicosa to lose.”

“They’re betting both ways?”

“That’s what my guy says.”

If you want to be sure that a game is fixed, watch the bets. A smart fixer will bet on both sides of the ticket so that if there’s any investigation, he can show he was just betting for the sake of betting, that he’d even out on either side.

It’s called proportional betting.

In blackjack, it’s what’s known as the d’Alembert method. Increase your bet after each loss, decrease it after each victory. Played out over a long period, and the odds are you’ll end up slightly ahead.

Played out on a single race, like the Hurricane Cup, and it’s mostly just to cover your ass.

Which meant Christopher Bonaventura put out the word, at least to the people he didn’t want to anger. Or was putting out his own money as insurance.

Either way, I’d done my job.

“Good work,” I said.

“That bit of information came steep,” Nate said. “My guy, he’s got a brother in prison. Trumped-up charge.”

“I’m not busting someone out of prison,” I said. “And neither is Slade Switchblade.”

“Right,” Nate said. “Is Fiona around?”

“Nate,” I said.

“Right,” Nate said. “I’ll talk to Fiona later. Whatever. We’ll work it out.”

“I appreciate all of this,” I said.

“Happy to help,” Nate said. And it sounded like he really meant it.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Tonight. Leave me a tape of the recording you made at my place and then get out of town. See if you can take everyone you talked to out of town, too.”

“Bro, I can handle myself.”

“Domenic Strabo isn’t just a foot soldier. You drove one of the heads of the Calabria mafia tonight and, probably, someone linked to Al Qaeda. If either are smart enough to piece together anything before they wind up in a cell, you’re likely to wake up from a dirt nap.”

“Oh,” Nate said.

“There’s a couple thousand dollars cut into my mattress. Take it and have a lovely vacation with all of your friends. You need more money, call me. But don’t come back until I tell you you’re safe.”

It wasn’t exactly that I was afraid the Mafia might come after Nate; more that I wasn’t sure what Alex Kyle might do if this all blew up and he remained standing.

Not that that was something I thought was in the cards for our new friend.

“Okay,” Nate said. “But remember to call me this time. Last time you sent me out of town you left me in Fort Lauderdale for weeks.”

“That was miscommunication,” I said.

“That was no communication,” Nate said.

“I’m working on that,” I said. “Now go.”

I hung up with Nate, filled Fi in on the salient points-except for the part about the prison break, which I knew she’d gladly take part in and would happily begin planning like she was Martha Stew-art with bomb-making skills-and called Sam. “Mikey,” he said, “glad you called. We need to talk.”

I could barely hear Sam over the sound of gushing wind. “Where are you?”

“Just coming in off the Pax,” he said. “Listen, change of plans.”

“You don’t know the plan,” I said.

“I know my plan,” he said. “One of Gennaro’s guys is in the hospital.”

“What happened?”

“I had to break his arm.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And he’s probably going to have a bit of a speech impediment thing for a while,” Sam said. “Nothing major. You ever bite the tip of your tongue off?”

“No.”

“Heals right back. Like a lizard’s tail. Anyway, we’re heading back in now from another run. Looks like I’m on the team tomorrow. For safety reasons.”

“Okay,” I said. His voice sounded slightly thick, like he was battling the flu. “You all right?”

“These Swan boats? They’re not much for smoothness. Not exactly like being out on the QE Two.”

“Dramamine didn’t help?”

“Turns out Dramamine and beer aren’t the best combination before going out for a spin with Gennaro and his crew.” He gave a wet cough and then continued. “You were right about the bugs. I swept the place and found ten of them. And not cheap ones, either. Dinino had that place covered. He knew Gennaro would turn to someone. I left them where they were, told Gennaro to just stay cool, keep doing what he was doing, that we were in control of the situation.”

“We are,” I said.

“We are?”

I filled him in. “What did you hear from Jimenez?”

“A lot of bitching.”

“Anything else?”

“What Nate says jibes. Jimenez says rumor is Dinino is in big. Gambling debts from betting on his own team,” Sam said.

“Gennaro was winning,” I said.

“That’s the thing,” Sam said. “Jimenez thinks he’s been betting on them to lose.”

“And the pictures?”

“They want their money. These guys will bring the pain one way or the other. And that’s what they traffic in, you know. Sweet guys.”

“Well,” I said, “they’re gonna get their money.” I explained to Sam what Barry was going to do tomorrow. And now that I had Strabo’s credit card, I knew there’d be at least one high limit charge going through.

“That’s the sort of thing that ends up on the news,” Sam said.

“All the better,” I said. I looked at my watch. It was already late. “What happened on the water?”

“Yeah,” Sam said, “about that. Anyone asks, my name is Viv Finley.”

“Chuck isn’t available?”

Sam cleared his throat. “That’s what we need to talk about.”