The End Game

5

When you’re planning a clandestine operation, it’s wise to keep your team small. People tend to notice fifteen men in body armor storming an embassy, so if you need to kill someone, steal something or map out a location for a future action, it’s better to go alone if you can. Someone to watch your back and someone to guard your flank are helpful, but if you want to be sure a job gets done right, it’s best to do it by yourself.

Less margin of error, which means less chance someone goes home in a coffin, and less chance that you’ll be on Al Jazeera with a canvas bag over your head.

No one looks good with his head in a canvas bag.

The same rules apply to fixing a sporting event. There’s nothing easy about fixing a match that involves the complicity of more than one person. Two men in a ring savagely beating each other is easy to control. Find the fighter with the Jell-O-like moral center and make your pitch. Give anyone enough money and it isn’t difficult to convince them to stay on the ground after being hit in the face.

Try convincing nine men to throw a baseball game and you’ll be lucky to get out alive. Same with hockey, basketball or football. You want to avoid angering men with bats or sticks or elbows sharpened on human skulls. As general policy, you also want to avoid situations where you’re outsized by two or more feet and several hundred pounds by men who like to get hurt for fun.

So if you want to fix a team sport, you should try to shave points. This is easier than getting a team to win or lose and it requires only one person who plays a pivotal role to be desperate and stupid, versus an entire squad. So if you’re Joe Quarterback or Jack Point Guard and you’ve found yourself in deep with the Russian Mafia, you might be inclined to throw an interception or brick a free throw or two to preserve the point spread (and your kneecaps) at the end of a game. And if you’re lucky, your team still wins and you can sleep at night with only one Ambien instead of two.

In sports, however, there’s also the inevitable entrance of luck. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, just luck itself. A terrible shot somehow finds its mark. An intercepted football gets fumbled back into the hands of the offensive team. If you’re a spy and have been sent to Azerbaijan to kill an arms dealer and miss when you shoot him, it’s unlikely you’ll be around to tell the story of how luck interceded, particularly if your head is in a canvas bag, with or without the rest of your body.

So if you’re really invested in subterfuge as a profession, you want to find a sport that doesn’t rely on any kind of points or any kind of luck. A sport that exists on an equal playing field, where wins and losses are calculated by human error, machinery and the unpredictable aspect of nature. Like horse racing. Betting on animals is stupid. They’re animals. They don’t know what they’re doing. But at least the playing field is even, since none of the horses is any more sentient than the other. And because they are animals, they can’t rat you out. Or NASCAR. The advent of the restrictor plate means that engine power became uniform in many of the races, or at least the races you’d want to fix, like Daytona and Talladega. Betting on cars is just as stupid as betting on animals, since they tend to break down, crash and then blow up and kill people, which frequently requires investigation. But cars don’t speak, either, which means you can disable one without anyone ever knowing, particularly if you are at least somewhat adept with remote devices. And provided no one is immolated in the process, you might just get away with it, too.

Or boat racing. In a regatta, like the one the Pax Bellicosa was about to run in, all the yachts are precisely the same, Swan 45s, sleek racing yachts with towering sails totaling more than 1,400 feet of mainsail and jib. With the machinery uniform, you fix a race not by tweaking the system, but by altering-or failing to perform-the subtle duties of the people on the boat, none more so than the helmsman.

Gennaro’s job.

Think of a helmsman like a quarterback, but one who not only knows how to throw a tight spiral and read defenses, but also has an intimate relationship with wind currents and retrograde velocity. The helmsman doesn’t simply pilot the boat and direct the other members of the team; he interprets the elements.

The other men on the boat can effect change, too. It can be as simple as reacting a few moments late on an order, carrying more weight on your person than expected, or, if need be, falling overboard.

If you need to make a lot of money fast-and that means illegally-you want to avoid the ponies and cars, since both are bet on regularly without criminal involvement, and both are so deeply regulated that trying to muscle in to affect a race of any significance is simply not worth the time and effort. It would take less time to heist a casino.

But the international regatta world is different. The players-the people who own the yachts-are millionaires and billionaires, which means that most of the fans are of a similar caste. Instead of a league like the NFL, yacht racing is frequently proctored, at least overseas, by the luxury corporations. Makers of watches, fine wines and cars advertise at these events to suggest a way of life. In addition to the races, these corporations run a week of events catering to every desire of the fan base. This means fashion shows, wine tastings, seminars where Warren Buffett comes in and talks about how to fold money properly-things like that.

According to that morning’s Miami Herald, for the next week the inhabitants of South Beach would be worth collectively more than the GNP of Honduras. It wasn’t much of a surprise to me, then, when I picked up Fiona and found her in a more chipper mood than the day previous, particularly after I filled her in on the latest job I’d found myself party to.

“You don’t intend to pretend that you don’t require payment again, do you?” she asked. We were in the Charger heading toward my mother’s house. I thought bringing Fi with me on the drive of shame back to my mother’s house would make it less awful. I didn’t really want to go and fight with my mother, but the longer I waited to drop off her gifts, the more likely I was to take them apart and use them for something else. Ever find yourself imprisoned in your home and need to make an IED? Turning a slow cooker into a bomb takes only a few household cleaning items, a bit of foam from an old ice chest and, if you’re looking to really hurt someone, a handful of paper clips, or, in a pinch, the zipper from your pants.

I also figured that if I had Fiona with me, two things might happen: I’d attempt to be more civil in the face of the now-vivid memories I had of my leg encased in plaster, and I’d be able to use her as an excuse to get out of recaulking the fireplace or cutting a cord of wood for the frigid spring months, or shoving my hand into the disposal again to fish out calcified animal fat.

“Sam was working on the financial end,” I said.

“And to think your government used to trust you,” she said.

“The job came through a contact of Sam’s,” I said.

“So now there’s a finder’s-keepers rule?”

“Whatever you need will be covered, Fi,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean you’re coming out of this with your own catamaran. Just because these people have money doesn’t mean anything.”

I never liked taking money. It made this all feel like a job, like something I was now doing permanently versus doing to keep my skills up, or to bide time, or simply because it was the right thing to do. You’re employed by the people when you’re a spy, even if they aren’t aware of it most of the time, and my feeling was that once I figured out my burn notice, I’d be paid back.

But, just the same, I have to eat. And Fi needs shoes and purses and that lipstick that makes her lips look irresistible, and I’d prefer she made money with me instead of selling guns or picking up jobs for bounty hunters and such.

Even if we weren’t together as in together, life was still fundamentally more interesting with Fiona in the frame.

“I once owned a yacht, I’ll have you know,” Fi said.

“Owned?”

“Possessed might be a better word,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means for about a month I managed to live on one off the coast of Montenegro, fully staffed, even had a girl who came in and fluffed the pillows and a small boy who would come in at night-fall with a plate of cookies and chocolates.”

“What happened?” I said.

“The owners came out of their comas.”

“That happens,” I said.

Fiona had the dossier from Sam’s friend Jimenez and was flipping through it absently. Fi has always been more of a read-and-react kind of girl versus the type to do in-depth critical analysis, which means she’s best on her feet with a gun or an M-19 grenade launcher or just her fists, using her experience as a guide instead of doctrine.

“He’s cute,” Fi said. I looked over and saw the photo of Gennaro with Bonaventura.

“Which one?”

“The gentleman in the fifteen-thousand-dollar suit.”

“That’s Christopher Bonaventura.”

“I know.”

“He’s one of our problems.”

“He doesn’t look like much. He has a manicure in this photo. I’ve never liked a man who cared for his nails.”

“I’m going to guess that he has a staff who digs the graves and dumps the people in them.”

“Gennaro seems below his pay grade.”

I explained to Fiona that when you get down to the working level of the yacht-racing business, after Rolex lays out their cash for their race and Ferrari theirs, much of the hard work, the swinging of hammers, the actual running of the show, falls into other hands: the mafia. Not even the America’s Cup could avoid a scandal a few years ago when the race was held in the Sicilian port city of Trapani and lucrative deals were cut with government officials for the Cosa Nostra to gain huge windfalls of cash, both in construction contracts and, just for kicks, the nebulous realm of “entertainment.”

You have two choices if you want to place major action on a yacht race. You can either shout across your bow at the captain of international industry anchored just adjacent to you, or you make a call to someone like Christopher Bonaventura. Bonaventura-or someone like him, since there are a hundred men just like him in Miami alone, never mind Italy-will give odds and take proposition wagers, and will treat you like the king you might very well be. If you’re a billionaire, dealing with someone like Bonaventura isn’t really like getting yourself involved in organized crime, since in your case, it’s truly a victimless crime. You win, he pays. You lose, you pay. No one ends up getting their legs broken. It’s a world of high-stakes betting by people who can afford to lose.

Which made figuring out who was pressuring Gennaro all the more difficult.

Kidnapping an heiress and her daughter in order to ensure a race’s outcome is like setting fire to the Amazon to make s’mores: It would work, but it’s a might excessive.

“I’ve never understood why anyone bothers with kidnappings anymore,” Fiona said. “They so rarely work and then there’s all that care and feeding that must take place so your captive doesn’t die before you’re ready to kill them. Or, worse, they have a heart attack or a stroke and you’re left with some dreadful mess.”

“You’re a tender person, Fi,” I said.

“Seriously, Michael, if you are the type of person to kidnap someone, you’re ill equipped to care for your captive, which is only going to lead to bigger problems. It’s so much easier to just do identity theft these days. You never have to worry about some sweating, crying child making a mess on your sofa or in the trunk of your car.”

“You should film a public service announcement,” I said.

“Would you want to spoon-feed some terrified person? Walk them to the bathroom? Beat them if you have to, which, as I think you can attest, is not as much fun as it seems? No, thank you,” she said.

“Anyway,” I said, “in this case, as of right now, Maria and Liz don’t know any different. They’re somewhere in the Atlantic, eating lobster off Wedgwood.”

“That’s a lot of trouble just to get some money.”

“But that’s the thing. If they wanted money, they could have yanked the diamonds out of Maria’s ears. There’s something else here.”

Fi was still looking at the photo of Bonaventura. “Am I going to get to play with him?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

“That is a lovely suit.”

“Fi.”

“I’m just saying, Michael, that if given the chance and I need to execute him, we might remember to ask him for his tailor’s name before he expires.”

We pulled up in front of my mother’s house. She was standing on the front porch, smoking and talking to a woman who looked vaguely familiar, in the way that many old women in Florida look vaguely familiar: She was wearing a white blouse that had a lovely multicolored pelican stitched over the right breast pocket, her hair was somewhere between blond and the color of an old French horn and was done in such a way that it looked strangely translucent. Even from the car, I could see that her lips had a lacquering of bloodred lipstick. She looked like a person wearing a Halloween costume of an Old Woman from Florida.

“Who is that?” I asked Fiona, since over the course of the last several months she’d gotten to know many of my mother’s friends by virtue of attending Ma’s weekly poker nights, the cooking course they took together and, frighteningly, for a time, a silent movie night at the Luart Theatre.

“That could be Esther,” Fiona said. “But I don’t think Esther would wear a pelican. She’s always struck me as more of a seagull or egret type. So it might also be Doris. Or Cloris. They’re sisters. Neither can bluff. But they play the river like pirates.”

“Why does she look like that?”

“That’s what all women look like after age 70, Michael, to punish men like you for disregarding women like me in our prime,” she said and then got out of the car before I could respond, which was fine, because I didn’t have a response.

I reached into the backseat and grabbed the Crock-Pot and the toaster oven, made a silent vow to myself to be pleasant and then got out of the car and walked up the front lawn toward the house. When I reached them, Fiona was already in the middle of hugs and kisses from my mother and warm handshakes from the woman dressed like a drag queen. I set the boxes down and tried to look dutiful.

“Loretta,” Ma said to the woman, all pretense of joy gone, “this is my son Michael. He’s the one who works in shipping and receiving.”

Passive.

Aggressive.

My mother.

“A pleasure,” I said, and shook Loretta’s hand, which was like shaking a leather bag filled with chicken bones.

Loretta looked me over with what could only be called disappointment. “My son works in Tallahassee,” Loretta said.

“That’s great to hear,” I said.

“For the governor,” she said.

“Even better.”

“Michael, Loretta just moved in across the way. I’ve been telling her all about you.”

“I see that,” I said.

“Your mother says you help people,” Loretta said.

I smiled. I envisioned helping Loretta’s son out of a life of public service by virtue of the wholesale carpet bombing of Tallahassee, which, as far as capital cities goes, is about as aesthetically pleasing as a bleeding cyst. I smiled some more. I pushed my sunglasses up the bridge of my nose. And then I spoke, as calmly as possible.

“My mother overestimates my abilities,” I said.

“I have a package that needs to get to Milton-Freewater overnight,” Loretta said.

“Pardon me?”

“Your mother said you worked for-who was it, Madeline?”

My mother took a puff on her cigarette and really pondered the question. “Well, he doesn’t like to talk about it. Do you, Michael?”

“No,” I said. I looked at Fiona, tried to curry a little sympathy for the torture, but she was enjoying this far too much. There’s not a lot of sympathy that exists in Fiona.

“Was it FedEx?” Loretta said. “Or those brown people?”

“That’s them,” my mother said. She jabbed her cigarette at me in affirmation. “UPS, right, Michael?”

My mother would have made an excellent counterterrorism operative. You want to stop a terrorist cell from pouring polonium into the water supply? Need to stifle an assassination plot? Have to secure a booby-trapped bridge? Just drop my mother into the center of activity and by day’s end she’d have guilted every single person into passivity.

“That’s right, Ma,” I said. “If you have a package I can deliver, why, Loretta, you just leave it on the trunk of my car and I’ll make sure it gets where it needs to go in twenty-four hours or less, or I’ll refund your money.”

“I’ll do that,” Loretta said. She looked over at the Charger, back at me, briefly at Fiona, and then paused with a finger to her upper lip, seemingly confounded by something just out of her mental reach, which, if pressed, I’d say was the majority of human knowledge. “Would you like me to see if there are any openings in the mailroom where my son works?”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I love my job.”

“That car is a hazard. And the gas prices you’re paying, well, you’re leaving quite the carbon footprint.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“My son, he’s an accountant. He could look at your finances.”

“Is he single?” Fiona asked.

“Oh, no,” she said. “He likes women with some meat on their bones, not you South Beach types.” Loretta reached over and gave Fiona’s waist a pinch, causing Fi to emit a high-pitched squeal. People have lost the ability to walk for less. “If you turn to the side, no one can see you. No offense.”

“None taken,” Fi said, but it was in a tone of voice that indicated to me that we were all about ten seconds away from being party to a homicide.

I gave my mother a look meant to alert her of that very thing, but she was already in motion. “Loretta was just leaving,” Ma said, and gave her new neighbor a slight push on the small of her back, like you would a puppy who wasn’t getting outside fast enough.

“I thought we were going to play canasta,” Loretta said.

“Can’t you see my son is here? We’ll play some other time.”

We stood on the porch and watched Loretta walk across the street, which was a long and arduous process.

“She seems nice,” I said.

“She’s a pill,” my mother said with absolutely no emotion at all. She reached down and picked up one of the boxes. “Is this the act of contrition or is it the other one?”

“I bought both of them prior to lunch,” I said.

“Well, bring them in and I’ll make some coffee while you apologize to me.”

Two hours, a fixed halogen lamp first purchased when men in Miami were wearing pink T-shirts and white blazers, the systematic removal of spoiled food from the refrigerator (my mother had a veritable museum devoted to discontinued Swan-son chicken TV dinners deep in the permafrost of her freezer) and two bags of leaves raked from the backyard later, and I had served my penance.

All while Fi and my mother sat on the sofa, reading magazines and watching Gary Coleman’s E! True Hollywood Story.

“He hated his mother, too,” my mother said, pointing at the television.

“I don’t hate you, Ma,” I said. Though I was now covered in sweat and smelled vaguely like a mixture of freezer burn and mulch, which didn’t exactly turn on the warm part of my heart. It was a little too much like when Nate and I were kids and we’d wake up to find a to-do list on the kitchen counter that consisted of the sort of chores perhaps best done by a crew of adult men.

You’ve not lived until you’ve fallen from a palm tree with a saw in your hand.

Even then, I didn’t actually break my leg.

“I feel… frustrated… occasionally by you, but that’s not hate, Ma.”

“I wanted to talk about that,” she said.

This was about to be bad news.

“Ma,” I said, “I’ve got a busy week ahead of me. Right, Fi?”

“I’m not privy to your intimate plans, Michael,” Fiona said.

My mother ignored us both. “I’ve made us an appointment.”

“I’m not going to any more therapy appointments,” I said.

“This isn’t therapy,” she said. “Loretta said she and her son really connected after seeing this woman.”

I looked at Fiona for support, but she wasn’t giving any indication that she cared. She was back to being riveted by Gary Coleman. “What a strange little man,” she said. You grow up in Ireland, the easiest things capture you.

“You said yourself that woman is a pill.”

“But she and her son have a wonderful relationship.”

“So do you and Nate,” I said.

My mom frowned.

I know how to speak more languages than a translator at the UN. I can shoot someone between the eyes from half a mile away. If I’m shackled to an anchor and dropped overboard in the Caspian Sea, provided the currents are light and I’ve got a paper clip, I can be free and swimming the backstroke in thirty seconds.

But I don’t know how to diffuse my mother’s frown. Didn’t at ten. Don’t now.

“I thought we were done with this stuff,” I said. “You kicked the last therapist out of the house.”

“I think your recovery has hit a bump. They said it would happen.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“Well, on television. There’s a reality program about just this sort of thing and they say that people frequently return to their problems. They call it backsliding.”

“There’s a reality show about a spy whose mother makes him go to therapy?”

“Michael, the point is you have to deal with your addiction.”

“I’m not addicted to anything, Ma. What is this show?”

“It follows drunks around and such. But the parallels are very clear to me and would be to you, too. Anyway, this isn’t about healing; it’s about bonding. We don’t ever bond, Michael. We just fight over the past and I’m tired of it. We need to make new memories.”

“How do you make a new memory? By definition, a memory has already happened.”

“For someone so worldly, you’re awfully naive about the way real people think,” she said.

I exhaled, which was good because I’d been holding my breath without even knowing it. Sometimes, it’s just easier not to breathe around my mother. It reminds me that things could be worse. I could be buried alive, for instance.

“When?” I said.

“End of the week.”

“What time?”

“One. We’ll get lunch first. There’s a charming diner just across the street where Loretta says you can get soy smoothies.”

“You don’t even like soy,” I said. I had doubts she knew what it was, but I decided to keep that to myself.

“Michael, I’m making the effort,” she said.

“If I’m busy,” I said, “I’ll call you.”

“What could you possibly be doing?”

Just as I was about to explain to my mother the entirety of the possibilities, I was saved by the ringing of my cell phone. It was Sam.

“Mikey,” he said, “there’s been a slight change of plans.” His voice sounded a touch on the anxious side. If there’s one thing to know about Sam Axe, he doesn’t get overly anxious.

“We didn’t have any plans, Sam.”

“Right. That’s the change.”

“Where are you?”

“Incognito.”

“A little more specific, Sam?”

“About a hundred meters from your mother’s house, watching the person watching you.”

I walked across the living room, out the front door and onto the porch. On the trunk of my car was Loretta’s package, which was wrapped with so much tape that I could actually see my reflection in it. I looked down both sides of the street. Nothing. “I don’t see you,” I said.

“That’s because I’m a highly trained operative, Mike,” he said. “Do you see the Lexus parked on the other side of the stop sign to your southeast?”

I turned and casually gazed down the street behind me, gave a hearty belly laugh and patted the top of my head like a trained monkey, all while staring at a car in the wrong neighborhood. The last time someone pulled down this street in a silver Lexus IS and parked under a shady tree for the afternoon… well, they were probably looking for me, too. This is a Dodge and Honda street, and Honda had to muscle its way in.

Inside the car was a man trying to look inconspicuous, which is difficult when the burned spy you’re watching is looking right at you and could, if he wanted, pull you from the car by your eyebrows.

“Who is he?” I asked, still in full laugh. Just having a nice day on the front lawn. Inhaling the humidity. Enjoying the clouds in the sky. Having a pleasant conversation with my buddy the ex- Navy SEAL about the meathead in a Lexus and relishing the start of hurricane season.

“I’m not sure,” Sam said. “I’ve got a buddy running the plates now. But he isn’t one of ours. Not a Fed boy.”

“No,” I said, “the Lexus gives that away. When did you pick him up?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I came here to give you the news on what I’d found out about Gennaro’s problem and saw him. You want me to bring the wrath of Neighborhood Watch Commander Chuck Finley upon him?”

I looked around again to see if I could locate Sam. He was really hiding quite well, though his tendency to wear floral prints was probably helping the situation here in the land of palm trees and birds of paradise.

“Give me a minute to get back inside,” I said.

“Got it,” Sam said.

Just as I started to walk back toward the house, Loretta came sprinting-well, comparatively speaking-from across the street, her pelican shirt buttoned haphazardly, her hair in a set of rollers, a single word bursting from her in a fracture of frenzied repetition: “PERVERT! PERVERT! PERVERT!”

“Sam?”

“CALL NINE-ONE-ONE. CALL NINE-ONE-ONE. CALL NINE-ONE-ONE…”

“I’m Oscar Mike,” Sam said, slipping into the military parlance for, essentially, “on the move,” which was fine since the Lexus was officially Oscar Mike, too.

“Great,” I said. “Tell me she didn’t see your face.”

“Impossible,” he said. He didn’t sound terribly convincing, which might have been because he was sprinting away from his previous location, which I suspect was somewhere near Loretta’s bathroom, judging by the way she was screaming, the status of her hair and her difficultly in putting her clothing back on correctly.

“Let me diffuse this before my mother calls in an airstrike,” I said.

“PERVERT! IN MY BACKYARD! PERVERT! CALL NINE-ONE-ONE!”

“I’ll meet you back at the loft,” he said. “We’ve got a few, uh, problems I need to fill you in on.”

“Of course you do,” I said.

“Oh, and Mikey? Maybe stay away from anyone who looks like they might be, you know, gang affiliated between now and when we meet up.”

“PERVERT! DO YOU HEAR ME? PERVERT!”

Loretta was only a few feet away from me and gaining as quickly as a snail might gain on a cheetah. “Tell me you didn’t tweak Bonaventura,” I said.

“Ah, Mikey, it was just one of those things that happens unexpectedly in the course of gathering information,” Sam said.

“Like peeping on someone’s grandmother, Sam?”

“I didn’t see a thing,” Sam said, “and I’ll take that to the grave.”

“ARE YOU CALLING NINE-ONE-ONE?”

“You might have to,” I said.

“I’ll fill you in,” he said, “but right now I’ve gotta jump over a fence guarded by a pair of vicious-looking poodles.” Working with Sam was like working with a meat grinder: The end result tended to be palatable, but getting there occasionally involved a bit more blood and guts than you might expect. “And hey, Mikey? I need you to remind me never to get dentures, okay?”