The End Game

7

When a spy decides to turn coat and start giving information to the enemy, it’s rarely for the reasons you might expect. Most spies, if they choose to cross the aisle, do so of their own accord and not because they’re being blackmailed. Cold War movies and spy thrillers always suggested that American agents were pushed into corners by grainy photos of illicit affairs, but the fact is that it’s hard to trap a good spy in a blackmail scheme. If spies are worth turning, if they are at the level where they can provide truly useful information, pictures of them having sex with anyone or anything at any time and in any place will have no bearing on the situation.

Most spies that flip do it for one core reason: Money. Aldrich Ames ended up on the Russian payroll after he decided to divorce his wife and marry a Colombian woman with decidedly more expensive taste. So in order to pay off his debts, cover his alimony and lavish his new bride, he needed a quick capital infusion. First it was fifty thousand dollars for the names of several Soviets spying for the U.S.; then it was nearly $1.7 million for even more information once he realized that if you’re going to go all in, you might as well go all in.

And if it’s not money, it’s ego… with some money thrown in to sweeten the deal. Robert Hanssen needed money to pay for his children’s expensive education, but most of all he wanted to feel valued for the work he’d done and wanted to get back at those who hadn’t let him rise to the top echelons of the FBI. He wanted to feel valued. And what better way to feel valued then to have someone else tell you you’re important, even if that someone is your blood enemy? An open checkbook is usually capable of changing long-held beliefs, even existential ones about love of country and patriotism and such, but it’s hard to buy emotional relevance. That comes from a far stranger and more difficult place to locate.

When you cross your family, it’s usually for similar reasons. Money, ego and twisted emotion make people do stupid things.

If you’re essentially decent, maybe you end up hurting your mother’s feelings on Mother’s Day.

If you’re essentially awful, maybe you orchestrate a kidnapping plot. If you’re essentially awful and stupid, and not merely an opportunist, you orchestrate the plot in broad daylight and without concern for getting caught. It helps if you don’t actually love the people you’re screwing.

After hearing about Sam’s morning of activity-and after spending time with my own mother-I was of the opinion that Gennaro Stefania was being manipulated for reasons far beyond simple yacht races and that he wasn’t going to be able to make it all right by cleaning out the freezer.

Still, the perception of impropriety didn’t make it true. It was perfectly reasonable to assume that Nicholas Dinino was going to Christopher Bonaventura’s for reasons other than the planning and execution of nefarious deeds. They were both exceptionally rich men with common interests, which I explained to Sam and Fi as we stood in my kitchen a few hours after assuring Loretta, my mother and the entirety of their neighborhood that they didn’t need to contact the governor’s office to see if FEMA might pay for the emotional stress of Sam’s prowling.

At some point, I had to see about getting my mother moved into a gated community somewhere in the Yucatan.

“Just because you saw Dinino going into Bonaventura’s doesn’t mean he’s involved,” I said. “We are dealing with some eccentric people here, Sam, who work in a lot of the same circles.”

“He has a point,” Fi said to Sam. “Look at the three of us. You might assume if you saw all of us together that we were planning some elaborate plot that would involve any number of crimes and misdemeanors, that would probably end up violating several people’s civil rights, might even involve what I think they call domestic terrorism-right, Michael?”

“The difference is we’re the good guys,” I said. Fi raised her eyebrows. “Sam and I are, at any rate.”

“You can put a killer whale in a tank at a zoo,” Fi said, “can even train it to do adorable tricks and squirt water at people, but it’s still a killer whale that would eat your face.”

“I have a buddy who told me a story about that sort of thing,” Sam said. He was relaxed and sipping on a beer but still had a few stray bits of leaf and grass stuck in his hair from his adventure in suburban surveillance. He had another unopened beer waiting on the counter, I guess to keep the other one company. “He said that if you keep those babies in captivity long enough, they’ll just start feasting on human flesh.”

“I am concerned that you have a buddy who knows that,” I said.

“It’s a vast network, Mikey. I have friends who don’t even know they’re my friends yet.”

“Why do you think you have so many friends, Sam, and Michael has so few?” Fi said.

Sam shrugged. “I have a kinetic personality. People gravitate to me. You might say people like me.”

“And I’m an acquired taste?” I said. Fi and Sam shared a look. It used to be that they never stood on the same side of any argument. Now they were practically Siamese twins. I decided to change the subject, permanently if possible. “Who was the guy outside my mother’s house?”

“Weird thing,” Sam said. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper that looked vaguely like the tag you might find on the back of a pillow. “The car is a rental, paid for with a corporate Visa by the Star Class Association.”

“What’s that? Some new CIA shell?” I said.

“I thought the same thing,” Sam said. “But it checks out.” He flipped the paper over and examined it closely. “It’s one of the official sanctioning bodies for these yacht races Gennaro is in.”

“What were they doing watching me?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. “Maybe they have a security detail that was on you?”

“If they had a security detail,” I said, “I would have spotted it. And they wouldn’t have peeled out like that at the first sign of trouble.” I thought about it for a moment. “You get a name on the rental?”

Sam flipped the paper over again. I could now make out the existing text. In bold letters across the top it said, DO NOT REMOVE. “The license they had on file is for Timothy Sherman.”

“Any flags?”

“Only that it looks like he declined the extra insurance coverage he was offered and that he’s letting people not on the rental agreement drive the car, since he’s the license on ten different cars the group rented for the week. That’s a pretty serious offense in the car rental business.”

“Worse than ripping a warning tag from a mattress?” I said, pointing at the paper in Sam’s hand.

“Technically,” Sam said, “I got this off a duvet cover hanging on a line in Loretta’s backyard, but I believe that’s a state law. Lying on your rental agreement violates your own car insurance, so it’s probably worse in the long run.”

“We should execute him,” Fiona said.

“We don’t even know who he is,” I said.

“Next of kin will show up to claim the body, and all of your questions will be answered.” She picked up Sam’s unopened beer and examined it closely, as if she wanted to make sure it didn’t have cooties on it, and then opened it up and took a sip.

“That wasn’t a twist top,” Sam said.

“I have exceptionally strong wrists,” she said.

“Instead of killing Mr. Sherman, maybe you could pay him a visit for me, Fi? Let him know he’s violated his rental agreement? Tell him we need the proper names of who is operating the cars?”

Fi took another sip of beer and swallowed it with exaggerated brio. “Love to,” she said. “But I have plans.”

“Really?” I said.

“My friend who is visiting.”

“The plutonium salesman?”

“He’s not a salesman,” she said. “More like a broker. And anyway, he said he didn’t end up bringing it with him into the country. He said he’d rather just relax with a good friend and not be concerned about such trivial things.”

“Like world security?”

“Like commerce,” she said.

“Fi,” I said. “I need your help here, and let’s be honest, you haven’t heard from the guy, have you?”

“Even if I haven’t,” she said, “there is the potential that I might.” Fi took a long pull from her beer and then set it down. “Fine, but I demand handsome payment for this job.”

“That’s the other thing,” Sam said. He went into what might graciously be called my bedroom, but which is just a mattress on the floor about three feet from my kitchen, and retrieved his laptop. Earlier, when I got back to the loft with Fi, Sam was napping beside the laptop and snoring like he had a trademark on sleep apnea. He explained to me then that he just wasn’t physically constituted for early morning work and that I needed more lumbar support in my mattress.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Gennaro is broke.”

“Good guess,” Sam said. “But not entirely accurate.” Sam explained that he’d had his buddy Jimenez-the guy who got us involved in this in the first place-get some information about the Ottone family fortunes after he saw Dinino roll up and learned that while Gennaro certainly had money, much of it was tied to his wife. They had a prenuptial that paid him handsomely in the event of their divorce-a million dollars for every year of marriage-but Gennaro’s personal wealth was marginal in comparison and mostly generated from racing.

“Alone, he’s worth maybe two million dollars,” Sam said. “He owns the house he grew up in as a kid in California. That’s worth seven hundred fifty K. He’s got a few cars in his own name. A cabin in Tuscany. Keeps a small personal checking account. Everything else comes from the family. But he’s on the books as the half owner of his team, but it’s a paper ownership. He puts none of his own money in it, and when his team wins, which wasn’t very often before this year, he cuts his share of the purse to his teammates. The largest part of the purse goes to the team owner, which, of course, is all in the family pot.”

“Nice pot,” Fi said.

“Where’s the vast conspiracy, Sam?” I said.

“I was just getting to that,” Sam said. He turned his laptop around. “That’s Maria Ottone’s will.”

Fi scrolled through the pages. “It’s a hundred pages long,” she said. “I didn’t know you could read that many pages at one time, Sam.”

“I skimmed to the good parts,” he said, and then told us what those were. If Maria died, her daughter stood as the chief beneficiary of her estate and Gennaro would be subject to the terms of the prenuptial, plus costs to take care of their daughter through age eighteen, when her full inheritance would be available. And if the daughter were to die, too? The money stayed in the family.

“And what if Gennaro dies?” I said.

“Mr. Dinino ends up with full ownership of the team and is married to a woman without an heir or anyone who might reasonably make a claim to her fortune.”

“So,” I said, “everyone dies and Dinino stands to make money he doesn’t really need. Doesn’t add up.”

“That’s why you’re the spy,” Sam said.

“There must be a girl involved,” Fi said.

“Why?” I said.

“Because if there wasn’t,” she said, “no one would be acting this stupid.”

It is always slightly frightening when Fiona is the voice of reason.

“What do we know about Dinino?” I said.

“Not a lot outside the public image,” Sam said. “Married Maria’s mother five years ago. Dated supermodels prior to that. Family was in the cement business before selling out a few years before Dinino married Mrs. Ottone. One ex-wife, still living. No children. No scandals apart from a class-action lawsuit over poor cement composition in 1988.”

“No criminal involvement?”

“Nothing confirmed,” Sam said. “But being in the cement business in Italy is a little bit like being in the trash business in Las Vegas. Even if you’re not dirty, there’s a good chance you’re paying off someone to keep yourself clean.”

“Might make sense for him to have some contacts like Bonaventura, then,” I said. “Any reason to think he might be having money problems?”

“Apart from the wholesale crash of the world’s financial markets last year?”

“Apart from that, yes.”

“Seems solid.”

“Trust me,” Fi said. “At the end of this all, there will be a crying woman to blame.”

“When was the last time you cried?” Sam asked.

Fiona thought for a moment. “It had to do with a pony. Do the math yourself.”

“What did you get from the names of the people staying at the hotel?” I asked. “Anyone who might reasonably be going after Gennaro or the Ottones?”

Sam clicked open a new file on his computer. “Well, first thing, there’s an insane amount of shrimp consumed by the guests of the Setai.”

“If the crustaceans attack, we’ll know why,” I said. “What else?”

“No obvious red flags,” he said, “except for the movies Carson Daly rented.”

Sam went down the list of names and noted that in addition to half a dozen celebrities in for the week, there were also a good thirty private security personnel staying, too, including the body-guards that normally travel with Nicholas Dinino.

“Why didn’t we see any of them last night?” I said.

“Maybe they were hiding,” Fi said. She dusted off Sam’s second beer and was now poking around my cabinets for food. Something about this sort of talk always seemed to make Fiona hungry, which was funny since violence tended to make her aroused in an entirely different way. Figuring out Fiona’s wiring would require a forensic neu ropsychologist who also knew how to fight.

“I would have seen them,” I said.

“You didn’t see the man this morning,” she said. She found a box of saltines and was now back in the fridge. “Do you keep any kind of spreads, Michael? Butter? Jam? Nutella?”

“No.”

“What do you put on these crackers?”

“Nothing,” I said. “They were here when I moved in.” Fiona tossed the box in the trash and opted for my last serving of blueberry yogurt. “And I would have seen the man on my mother’s street if I hadn’t been busy chipping through the arctic circle of my mother’s freezer to remove Tater Tots that expired twenty years ago.”

Fi swallowed a spoonful of yogurt and made a dismayed face. “You need to diversify your palate,” she said, and handed me my own yogurt. “That man today, if he was any real trouble, would have done something when you were inside. The element of surprise is gone, so now they-whoever they are-must know you’re looking for them.”

“Or they don’t think anything at all,” I said.

Most people that get hired to intimidate other people aren’t exactly deep thinkers. If they were, they’d find another line of work. People who are hired to watch other people and get spotted immediately are even worse off-if you’re not proficient at sitting and staring, it likely means you have no training. Spies learn to watch not from a hiding place, but from a place where others aren’t likely to actually be looking. Sitting in a hundred-thousand-dollar car across the street from someone’s house isn’t exactly Langley training.

“When did Dinino check in?” I asked.

“Same day as Gennaro,” Sam said.

“Any idea where he was when we were in the hotel?”

“No,” Sam said. “But I have a buddy who might be able to find out.” Sam opened up another window on his computer and typed Nicholas Dinino’s name into Google’s Blog Search engine, and five seconds later we were looking at the society blog for Palm Life magazine, a local rag that covered the glamorous life in Miami, which typically meant they took a lot of photos of wealthy people trying to look casual. It didn’t really work, since it’s hard to look casual with an entire diamond mine on your body.

It’s nearly impossible to move about the world undetected if you’re the least bit famous. Anyone with a cell phone is seconds away from telling anyone who is interested-or completely uninterested, for that matter-your precise location. In this case, the Palm Life blog was one of just ten blogs that had photos of Dinino from the previous evening. It helped that he posed with a lot of actors, musicians, models and the professionally famous.

On Palm Life’s page, Dinino was squished between a rap music impresario, his girl-group girlfriend and the host of one of those shows on cable where chefs try to win prizes for being really great chefs. Just off in the back of the frame were two guys who looked rather odd contextually, since they were wearing black suits that clearly covered guns while everyone else was wearing all white. Shoes, shirts, pants, hats, gloves.

“Labor Day can’t come soon enough,” Fiona said.

“Says here it’s an annual party they have,” Sam said.

“Just because it happens every year doesn’t mean it’s a good idea,” Fiona said. “The locusts used to come every year, too.”

Regardless of attire, Dinino didn’t look in the least bit concerned, though the security in the back did indicate that he was aware enough to bring his own muscle, if indeed they were his.

“These guys look familiar?” I said to Sam, hoping maybe he’d seen them this morning.

“I dunno, Mikey. The guys guarding Bonaventura’s place looked like they’d done a lot of Green Side-type work,” Sam said. “These men look like bodybuilders.” Green Side operations typically involve locating the enemy, watching the enemy and then figuring out how to kill them without getting noticed. Green Side ops could hide in your yogurt and you wouldn’t know it until you were chewing on their heads.

It helps that Green Side ops are often covered in camouflage while crawling through a bog during the middle of the night.

I’ve always preferred a suit. But jeans are nice. A T-shirt is very functional.

When you wear jeans and a T-shirt, there’s less chance of finishing a job and finding leeches attached to your thighs, because when you’re in the real world, where there aren’t a lot of bogs or a pressing need to crawl, jeans and T-shirts train you to be inconspicuous. If you look like a spy, people are going to notice you.

Sam spotted Bonaventura’s men immediately because they were a visible deterrent with trademark training and weaponry.

Spies don’t wear tuxedos every day. They don’t order the same drinks in every city-shaken, stirred or otherwise-and don’t leave a trail of bodies in their wake.

You’re a spy because you’re good at doing the things no one wants to see, and doing it in such a way that no one notices.

Men like those watching Dinino, and the one at my mother’s house that morning, aren’t smart enough to blend in or avoid the cameras. Which means they aren’t professionals, just people who’ve been hired.

“We’re grasping at straws here,” I said. “Gennaro’s wife and daughter are trapped somewhere in the Atlantic and we need to figure out why. Sam, we need to find out which room at the hotel, other than Gennaro’s, is viewing that Web site.”

“Got it, Mikey.”

“And, Fi, I need you to find out who was driving one of Timothy Sherman’s rentals today.”

Fi exhaled dramatically. “I hope I don’t end up accidentally beating the information out of Mr. Sherman,” she said.

“Try your best,” I said.

“And where are you going to be?” Fiona asked.

When you want to avoid being ambushed, either by forces or information, the best thing to do is engage first. You might not know the level of resistance you’re apt to find, but you’ll have the advantage of nuance since you already know the logic of the enemy: They aren’t bold enough to strike you head-on, so they think they have to surprise you from the side, cloaked in cover.

“I’m going to be controlling the flow of information,” I said.