The End Game

3

One of the benefits of covert ops is that money is never an issue. If you’re having dinner with Chadian Aozou rebel leaders in Southern Libya and you set your Visa down, there’s never any concern that you won’t have enough room on your card to cover the bill. If you must purchase a decommissioned Soviet-era tank to ease tensions among opposing warlords in the Sudan, there’s never a call to your bank to check your credit rating. If you need to get your hands on a million dollars to pay off someone and that someone isn’t going to turn around and bomb U.S. interests, you don’t have to wait five business days for the funds to clear your bank.

When you’ve been burned and you have to worry about the price of detergent and the sudden rise in dairy costs affecting your yogurt consumption, making sure you have a steady cash stream takes on new importance.

Something Sam knows all too well, which is why I wasn’t exactly bamboozled when he told me about the client he’d met with earlier in the day.

“Thing of it is, Mike,” he said, “this is the kind of job I literally could do on my own without a problem, but I’ve been reading the newspapers lately and I’m not afraid to say that, for those working freelance, the outlook is pretty bleak.”

“Funny,” I said, “I didn’t see any stories in the Herald detailing the plight of the out of work spy.”

We’d been sitting on the Carlito’s patio for a little more than twenty minutes, largely making idle chatter, which is how Sam warms up before breaking bad news to me. So we’d already covered my shopping adventure at Target, the exploding ship and my exploding mother, which brought us to the job at hand. There was a thin manila file on the table that Sam hadn’t mentioned yet.

“Well, you gotta read between the lines,” Sam said. “You can’t trust that the media is going to say the exact truth. Little propaganda here, little propaganda there, keeps people on an even keel. Price of gas, for instance. Prime indicator of tough financial times ahead in the industry, my friend. Even your average drug smuggler or arms guy is going to take a long look at the ledger before he decides to make the Atlantic run with a bunch of cargo.”

“I get it, Sam,” I said.

“I’m just saying, you never know where your next dollar might come from.”

This already sounded bad. “But you’re going to tell me, aren’t you?”

Sam plucked an oyster from the bowl in front of him and then took a long sip from a bottle of Stella. “How do you feel about boats?”

“That depends, Sam. Are they blowing up?”

“Of course not,” Sam said.

“Because I saw a really nice yacht turned into slivers today and I don’t have a pressing desire to be involved in that sort of thing.”

“Thing of it is,” Sam said, “a friend referred me to a gentleman in the Italian yacht industry who has a rather significant problem.”

“The Italian yacht industry?”

“Yes,” Sam said.

“Didn’t I tell you that I wasn’t interested in Mob business?”

“This isn’t the Mob,” Sam said, but he said it in such a way that I sensed there was some semantic interpretation at work.

“I have no desire to enter into some squabble with Cosa Nostra,” I said. “The Outfit. Cosca. The Family. Whatever word you want to use. You’re talking about two hundred years of pissed-off people. They are not my problem.”

“It’s not that yacht industry,” Sam said.

“No?”

“Not specifically.”

“What yacht industry do you think I’m speaking of?”

Sam pondered this for a moment. “The one that takes place at the shipyards. Right?”

“Who is the friend?” I asked. This was important. Many of Sam’s friends in the past were actually people who were friends with his former girlfriend Veronica, which meant they had some problem that could only be solved to my near peril. Other friends of his were people who lived in that nebulous territory between smuggler and outright pirate, and who’d found themselves in situations requiring backup. And others still were people who bought him drinks when he was low on cash and learned his long and sordid history and figured he might be able to help them avoid violent exes, shylocks, bookies, unpleasant organized solicitors upon their businesses and other sundry unpleasant societal ills.

No one ever needed a cat rescued from a tree.

No one ever needed someone to give their son a stern talking-to about fireworks.

No one ever needed a guy to water their plants and watch their poodle, even.

“Maybe friend is a bit of a stretch,” Sam said. “A guy I know from a thing I did in Latvia a few years ago-let’s just say it was totally legal within the constructs of common treaties currently in place-has a small business venture whereby certain people come to him looking for help with projects that require sensitivity and care in the retrieval of certain products or persons. A former client of his contacted him today in relation to an event of a dangerous nature.”

“So,” I said, “a mercenary?”

“Essentially,” Sam said.

“If he’s so good,” I said, “why did he need to come to you with things of a ‘dangerous nature’?”

“This job is a little out of his area of expertise.”

On the beach, people were playing volleyball, tossing Frisbees, applying suntan lotion. A bank of thick gray clouds lined the horizon, making me think that a storm might be coming, or if it were like any other Miami afternoon, they’d just sit out there all day as if to let everyone know that somewhere else people had it just slightly worse.

I sighed. It was better than speaking.

“And my friend isn’t technically allowed in America,” Sam said.

I sighed again. This one was meant to convey a sense of quiet resignation tinged with muddled anger.

“Now, Mikey,” Sam said, “I wouldn’t have agreed to take this job if it didn’t seem like something you could do with your eyes closed. You wouldn’t even need to take off your sunglasses.”

“Where is this client?”

“He’s staying at the Setai,” Sam said.

The Setai is the most expensive hotel in South Beach. It’s the kind of hotel you stay in when you want people to know that money means nothing to you, but not in the frugal sense. Odds are that if you’re staying at the Setai, you don’t have a Crock-Pot and a toaster oven in your trunk, you didn’t have lunch at T.G.I. Friday’s and your problems are not the kind that can be solved with your sunglasses on.

“Who is this person? One of the Medicis?”

Sam cleared his throat, “Gennaro Stefania.” He waited, as if I might suddenly bolt from the table, or pass out, or have any response at all.

“That supposed to mean something to me?”

“At any time in the last ten years did you pick up a magazine with an actress or model on the cover?”

“No.”

“People?”

“No.”

“You are aware such magazines exist?”

“I am aware that I’m about thirty seconds from going home.”

Sam slid the manila file folder toward me. I opened it and saw a photo of a man on the deck of a catamaran cutting through rough seas. There were other men surrounding him, but for reasons unknown their faces were pixelated. The man looked to be about forty, athletic, his arms long and sinewy with muscle, like a runner’s. He was handsome in a regular way, which is to say he didn’t look like a model, just your average alpha male: an angular face, deep-set green eyes, wavy brown hair.

I turned the page and saw a word that immediately made me close the file: Ottone.

The Ottones were a family made for tabloid journalism. They were nineteenth-century money that had migrated from land wealth in the Old World to the currency of luxury: the Lux, a two- seater sports car modeled after their Formula One racecars, which became quickly favored in the 1970s by men on their way to the disco and the women who loved them, in the ’80s by would-be investment bankers and the women who held their cocaine and hair gel, in the ’90s by midlife-crisis humans of all sexes who didn’t realize they weren’t driving Porches. In the twenty-first century, they sold their car line to Ford and began a full-throttle investment into opulence: clothing lines, jewelry, watches, fragrance, casino properties. They added their name to anything that connoted the good life, including Fashion Week in Milan, tennis tournaments and golf opens in Dubai, polo in England, open-wheel racing in Monte Carlo, nightclubs in New York and Los Angeles that attracted people who merely wanted to be near the kind of money they’d never earn. In a few years people would think Ottone was just another word, not a proper name.

And with all of that, of course, comes scandal. Mistresses, drug addictions, deaths-the sorts of things that happen to normal people all the time but that are heightened by a place in world society.

A place I was not interested in being a part of.

A place Gennaro Stefania was connected with by virtue of being married to Maria Ottone, which was a little like being married to the key to Fort Knox.

A place that invariably led to publicity. Not what a burned spy craves, ironically.

“Not interested,” I said, and slid the file back to Sam.

“His family is in peril,” Sam said. His voice was serious, but I could tell that he’d practiced that line. Peril wasn’t a word that rolled off Sam’s tongue.

“Isn’t that the sort of thing that would be on the news by now?”

“It’s complicated,” Sam said.

“This is not something I can do with my sunglasses on, Sam, I can tell you that already.”

“It’ll be a piece of cake,” Sam said, “trust me.” He swallowed the last of his Stella and stood up.

“You going somewhere?”

“We’re already late,” Sam said. “You think you could call your brother and see if he could pick us up? Can’t exactly pull up to the Setai in the Charger, you know? You mind?”

“I do mind,” I said.

“He’s a good kid,” Sam said.

“He’s not a kid, Sam,” I said. “He’s an actual adult. You really want him parked in front of that hotel while we meet with your client?”

Sam thought about that. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“That shouldn’t be the baseline consideration,” I said.

Sam pulled out his phone. “Let me see if I can get a buddy of mine to loan us something appropriate.”

The difference between being wealthy and being rich isn’t so much a question of dollars and cents as it is an understanding of levels. When you’re rich, you might have a vacation house in Sun Valley or the Hamptons, might have a Bentley or two, might have a photo of yourself with the president on the wall of your office. Maybe you’re a lawyer or a doctor, or you invented doubled-sided tape and thus have a net worth in the millions of dollars earned off your own hard work and expertise and invention.

You’re rich.

When you’re wealthy, you don’t have a second home, you have a second island, the president or premier or king or violent despot is probably in your pocket (particularly in certain OPEC nations) and you probably don’t have to worry about punching a clock, since the other key difference is that wealth perpetuates wealth generationally-so that men like petrochemical scions Mukesh and Anil Ambani don’t need to create anything new whatsoever; they just need to wait for their parents to die, and even if they end up feuding and suing each other and breaking apart the companies they inherited, they still both end up being worth more than $40 billion each. Not a bad day’s work, if you can get it.

You’re wealthy.

The other option toward untold wealth, particularly if you don’t want to work terribly hard for it, is age-old and difficult to ever understand completely: love. People have married for much less than a billion dollars, but in the case of Gennaro Stefania, most people figured it was the billions, not love, which led to his romance and eventual marriage to Maria Ottone a little more than a decade ago.

I was in the passenger’s seat of Sam’s buddy’s car-a BMW that smelled like people had been having sex in it, regularly, and in all of the seats-reading through Gennaro’s file again as we made our way to the Setai. I was trying to figure out why someone like him would need someone like me, but, more than that, why he might have needed someone like Sam’s nebulous friend, particularly a nebulous friend who would provide such an extensive dossier, which detailed his life in familiar CIA-speak and description and detail.

“Your friend,” I said. “What did he do for Gennaro before?”

“Security mostly,” Sam said.

“Security like he protected him, or security like he hid bodies for him?”

“Security like he helped him out of a problem with some undesirables. It’s on page six.”

One thing I knew for certain was that marrying into the Ottone clan was no easy bargain, money or not. But especially not for someone like Gennaro, who wasn’t exactly Italian royalty. He was the American-born son of Victor Stefania, who’d raced for the Ottone’s Formula One team in the ’60s and ’70s and died in a fiery crash I remembered watching with my dad on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. I could still hear Jim McKay announcing the race, the slow-motion replays of the car flipping over the grassy midfield of some foreign track before turning supernova. “That’s the agony of defeat,” my dad said then, which says a lot about Dad.

The dossier said Gennaro lived in America through college, moved to Italy after the death of his mother from cancer and married into the Ottone clan a decade ago amid persistent rumors that it was some kind of reparation for his father’s service, but, at least looking at the photos of him with Maria and their young daughter, things seemed bucolic, rumor and gossip aside. He’d inherited his father’s love of speed, but he preferred his work on the water-a lot less chance for fire-balls, that afternoon’s activities notwithstanding-and was now the helmsman for Ottone’s yacht racing team, the Pax Bellicosa, which was in Miami to take part in the Hurricane Cup.

Yacht racing is one of those sports that the average American doesn’t care about because the average American is landlocked. Even still, the idea of taking part in a regatta probably conjures images of men in navy blue sport coats calling each other old chap and sport and chum while skirting around buoys in the pleasant waters of the Atlantic, which certainly isn’t as compelling as anabolic freaks slamming into each other for a hundred yards of contested territory, ten yards at a time.

The truth was that there was a lot of “old chap” this and “sport” that and “chum” tossed around New England, but on the world stage, yacht racing was big business and big entertainment, which meant, as with all things big, that there was a criminal element. I didn’t think that yacht blowing up beneath the causeway this afternoon was a faulty wiring issue, certainly. There were also million-dollar parties, secondary events like fashion shows and car expos and haute cuisine displays. And gambling, though not of the legal variety. These teams, like Gennaro’s, were owned by people who threw money around like confetti. Where there’s money, there’s desire for more, and desire makes people blind. Blind people stumble into stupid things, like stickups, heists and good old-fashioned extortion, all in the name of sport.

Nevertheless, Gennaro seemed normal enough, which probably meant he was completely corrupt.

I flipped to page six.

“Oh, this is surprising,” I said.

“I’m not convinced it’s going to be a problem,” Sam said, but he might as well have said that he didn’t think he’d ever want to drink another beer. Some lies are well-meaning. Others are just lies.

There was a picture of Gennaro with Christopher Bonaventura, head of one of the largest international crime families. Allegedly. It was taken from a distance of several hundred yards and captured the two of them walking along a rocky jetty. The photo was likely snapped from a dinghy somewhere in the Adriatic. “What is this, Sam?”

“They’re old friends,” Sam said. “There was a question of impropriety that arose from the friendship. My friend smoothed it out.”

“What kind of impropriety?”

“There was some thought Gennaro had debts he wasn’t informing his family about.”

“Gambling?”

“Drugs. Bonaventura moves a lot of H. Seeing the two of them together raised suspicions. Especially since they weren’t exactly meeting in front of Starbucks.”

“Who was tailing him?”

“Don’t know. Probably Bonaventura’s own guys.”

“And your friend smoothed it out how?”

Sam shifted in his seat. It was his one tell. Sometimes he just can’t sit with things. “He convinced Mr. Bonaventura that he was no longer friends with Gennaro.”

“You couldn’t have told me this when we were still at the Carlito?”

“Gennaro doesn’t believe his situation is related to this. Frankly, Mikey, I’m inclined to believe the kid.”

I flipped back through the dossier. “He’s almost forty.”

“He’s very innocent,” Sam said. “You’ll want to protect him when you see him.”

“I’ll probably want to shake him until he passes out.”

Up ahead, the Setai shimmered in the fading sun. The hotel was a strange and entirely appropriate nexus between the past and the present, as if Art Deco had gone on a long, hot date with Asian design aesthetics. Look one way, you were in Miami in 1933. Look the other, and it was Hong Kong fifteen minutes ago. Half of the hotel was the old Dempsey-Vanderbilt, which first entertained the rich and notorious eighty years ago; the other half was a forty-story tower that was a second home to any celebrity with a single name.

“You going to tell me who your friend is?” I asked. It wasn’t important on a personal level, just that Sam’s patented avoidance of the subject made me curious and also indicated to me that our new friend Gennaro probably had issues beyond the dossier.

“A guy named Jimenez. That’s all I can say.”

“CIA?”

“For a time.”

“NSA?”

“Just an old friend, Mikey. He assures me Gennaro is fine and totally on the level. And rich, Mikey. Big money here. The kind where you won’t have to work for months afterward and can just focus on figuring out your burn notice.”

“Just the vacation I’ve been hoping for,” I said.

We pulled up to the hotel and were met by a valet dressed in an all-brown Nehru outfit. He took Sam’s keys without muttering a single word or looking directly at either one of us before speeding off. Indifference was the new politeness.

“Not exactly the Motel 6 here,” Sam said.

“You get what you pay for,” I said.

“But do they leave the lights on for you?”

“I’m going to guess that they do,” I said.

“My money, all you really need in a hotel is a bed, a bar and a pool.”

“Well,” I said, “good thing it’s not your money.”

Inside, the Setai was oddly quiet. I’d grown so accustomed to every hotel in South Beach being an excuse for a nightclub to have a roof that I’d forgotten elegance still existed. The lobby began as a narrow expanse that widened out across the back of the hotel, so that you got the sense you were looking into the hotel through a Panavision camera, your eyes taking in each new design detail as you moved across the brushed travertine floor. Throughout the space were vases of white roses atop nested tables beside matte bronze sofas that looked comfortable enough to sleep on, but which not a soul was sitting on. The muted glow of candles created fanciful shadows on the walls, which were also an understated bronze highlighted by long black draping and grand pieces of oval-shaped marble.

At the far end of the lobby was a single stomach-high reception desk made of brushed steel and inlaid squares of marble and wood. A man and a woman stood behind the counter. Both wore those odd Nehru outfits, and as we neared them en route to the elevators their faces turned downcast.

“You know what I miss?” Sam said.

“I dunno, Sam. The Cold War?”

“Used to be you walked into a hotel, it didn’t feel like you were somehow annoying the employees. This place, it’s pretty, but it’s not Howard Johnson’s.”

The last time the two of us spent a substantial amount of time in a high-rise hotel in the service of the superrich, Sam ended up taking out most of the fifth floor of the Hotel Oro. I had the sense that doing the same here would not be met with indifference. The Hotel Oro was owned by Russians of dubious intent. The Setai was owned by the GHM chain, the difference being the hotel chain would be more likely to chase you to the ends of the planet with a passel of lawyers. I’ll take Russians of dubious intent any day over lawyers. So, I made it a point to give the dour humans behind the reservations desk a nice smile as we passed.

Nothing. Not even a wave.

We took the elevators up to the fortieth floor, where they opened to the penthouse level. I expected to be greeted by some tough guys in suits, because that’s normally what you find at the entrance to a penthouse suite, but the hallway was empty save for the marble floor and the impressionist paintings on the wall alongside archival photos of the hotel in its Prohibition past.

“How much you suppose a room up here costs?” Sam said.

“Twenty grand,” I said.

“You think that includes breakfast?”

“I’m going to say no,” I said.

“Howard Johnson’s, you get a buffet breakfast and a room for a C-note.”

“It’s a cruel world.” I knocked on the door. I thought maybe when it opened I’d finally get to see my tough guys in suits, but instead Gennaro Stefania himself opened the door. He wore tan shorts, a polo shirt with the Ottone logo on the breast and no shoes. He was tanned and healthy-looking from a distance, but up close you could see that his eyes were red and puffy. I didn’t think it was from lack of sleep.

“You must be Michael Westen,” he said.

“We all must be someone,” I said. We shook hands, but there wasn’t much there. It was like shaking a straw man. You could tell he was a fine-tuned athlete, but there was a lot being sapped out of him.

“Come in,” he said, and stepped out of the way for Sam and me to pass. “Let me give you the tour, for what it’s worth.”

We stepped into the penthouse and Gennaro took us through room by room, and only then did I realize what being part of the Ottone family meant: there were two living rooms in the penthouse, a separate music room that featured a Steinway piano, and at least 10,000 square feet, which was needed since there were four bedrooms, four baths replete with Jacuzzis, even quarters for a butler. There was also a full bar with flat screen televisions and a stocked cigar humidor.

“You mind?” Sam said to Gennaro. Surprisingly, he was pointing to the humidor and not the five bottles of Macallan 30 year or the two dozen Samuel Adams Utopia blend beers.

“Help yourself,” Gennaro said. “It’s all paid for.”

That’s the wrong thing to say to Sam, who took one Cuban to smoke and grabbed a few more for a rainy day. Another couple for the sunny days, too.

“Just like Howard Johnsons,” I said.

The penthouse was surrounded by a wrap-around terrace that featured an eternity pool and another hot tub, as if the four inside weren’t enough.

But the curious thing was that Gennaro was all alone.

“Nice place,” I said.

“It’s too much,” Gennaro said. “It’s all too much.”

“You could rent the bathrooms out by the hour,” Sam said. He was trying to be funny, maybe make Gennaro crack at least the smallest smile, but I could tell he was in no mood.

“Why don’t we sit down,” I said and Gennaro just nodded, but didn’t really move. It was as if he was in a trance and needed someone to give him even the most rudimentary cues so he’d know what to do with himself. So I said, “Why don’t we sit down on one of the nine sofas?”

Gennaro nodded again and made his way toward an L-shaped taupe sofa that was positioned so that it faced out toward the sea. He dropped into the corner of the L, like he was being punished, and just stared out the window. I pulled a chair up and sat across from him and motioned for Sam to join me, which meant he had to pull himself away from the Utopias, which he’d just discovered.

“So,” I said, once Sam was beside me, “tell me your problem.”

Gennaro reached into his pocket, pulled out an iPhone and handed it to me. “Two days ago,” Gennaro said, “I received that message in my e-mail.”

The e-mail contained a link to a Web site, which when opened began running a surveillance video of Maria Ottone and her young daughter, Liz. For about twenty seconds, it just watched them sleeping in what looked to be a stateroom on a boat. It then cut to a shot of them eating lunch, another of them sunning themselves on the deck, their daughter playing with a Barbie, and again it cut to a shot of Maria showering, the focus getting closer and closer on Maria’s face until you could see the small freckles along her jawline, the fine skin on her cheekbones, the flick of her tongue when a long piece of her hair found the corner of her mouth. It then began running other clips, just a few seconds of the mundane, enough to let whom-ever was watching know that they were observing Maria and Liz at every single moment.

“Where is your wife?” I said. The images were still flitting past. There was no sound on the video. Just the images in silence, which somehow made them all the more disturbing.

“She’s on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic,” he said.

“Whose boat?”

“Her boat. Our boat. One of the family’s boats. She’s on her way from Italy to here. She hates to fly.”

“When was the last time you spoke to her?”

“Thirty minutes ago.”

“And she’s fine?”

“Of course,” he said. “I’ve done everything they’ve asked.” His eyes were getting red again.

Crying women make me uncomfortable. Crying children make me feel self-conscious. Crying men make me want to shower with my clothes on.

“How did they contact you?”

“Two, three minutes after I logged onto the Web site, the phone began ringing. I didn’t pick it up right away, because I didn’t know what I was looking at. I mean, that’s my wife. That’s my daughter. I couldn’t put it together.”

“I understand,” I said.

“So it could have been five, ten minutes later that I finally picked up. I don’t know how many times they called.”

“Was it a man or a woman on the phone?”

“I couldn’t tell,” he said. “The voice sounded strange. Like that guy in the wheelchair.”

“Ironside?” Sam said.

“The scientist. The smart guy.”

“Stephen Hawking?” I said.

“Like that. Like it was coming through a computer.”

It used to be that only the most sophisticated governments had access to spy technology, but today anyone with a decent laptop and access to an Office Max can employ entry-level spy craft. The entire Cuban Missile Crisis could have been averted today using Google. Any twelve-year-old can download voice-changing software for free on the Internet. The difference now is not the technology, but about how savvy you are in using it.

“Hold that thought,” I said to Gennaro. I turned to Sam. “You trace this Web site?”

“It’s a pro job,” Sam said. “Registered through a company in Qatar to Neil Diamond.”

“He’ll be easy to find.”

“His Web site says he’s doing ten sold-out nights in Las Vegas. I could be there in five hours, grab him during ‘Sweet Caroline.’ ”

“He might be a patsy. What else?”

“They used open-source software on the design, so there’s no technology fingerprint on it. It’s a secure site, so only following the embedded link here will get you to it. The video is on a continuous loop. Gene here says they’ve been adding new stuff to it every day.”

“Any way to hack into the code and see who else is viewing it? Get an IP number or a country code? Anything?”

“I already poked around, but the encryption is first-rate,” Sam said. “We’re working with experts here.”

“You have someone you could show it to?” I asked. Sam always has someone he can show things to. He collects people and favors like lint.

“I’ll talk to a buddy of mine.”

I turned back to Gennaro. “Okay,” I said. “How much do they want?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“They said if I didn’t lose the Hurricane Cup, they’d kill Maria and Liz.”