The Reformed

10

When plotting a counterinsurgency, it’s important to recognize that not all of your decisions can be based on what would be considered, in everyday life, acceptable ethics. Breaking the law for the good of the country is practically a right of passage for American presidents, so imagine how often it happens with spies.

But if you’re leading a counterinsurgency operation, you must gauge the moral well-being of your subordinates after these activities and be prepared to act as a sounding board for them or, if needed, remove them from duty. What this means is that in a war zone, you may need to order a Black Hawk in to medevac a soldier to an appropriate mental facility. But if you’re fighting in close quarters, with a small fighting unit, a good leader may have to serve as the mental health provider.

Which is why when I called Barry-a man with exceptionally questionable ethics and usually very little guilt about it-I could tell that he needed the equivalent of two Xanax and a good nap, but that he was pondering something more along the lines of a guy with two guns showing up at his door and offering him a dirt nap. So I did the one thing I could think of: I invited him to my mother’s house for lunch. Sometimes a guy just needs a sandwich with crusts cut off to feel better about himself.

Plus, my mother’s house was a safe place. If anyone from the Latin Emperors happened down the street, the neighborhood watch commander would scuttle an F-16.

I’d been at my mother’s for only a few minutes when Barry knocked on the door. My mother opened it, saw him looking pitiful there on the front porch and did the one motherly thing she could do in this instance: She gave him hell.

“Did someone kill your dog?” she asked by way of greeting.

“No, Mrs. Westen,” Barry said. “I’ve just had a hard week. Busy time in my line of work.”

“You think you have it any harder than anyone else?”

Barry looked over my mother’s shoulder at me-she hadn’t let him in yet-and I gave him the universal sign of surrender. “No, Mrs. Westen,” Barry said. “I guess I don’t.”

“Well, then wipe off your feet, take off those ludicrous sunglasses and come inside. Michael’s been waiting for you for hours.”

It’s not that my mother had no concept of time-since I’d been there only fifteen minutes on the outside-it’s that she’d been saying the same thing to me and my brother, Nate, for so long that it was just second nature. Someone was always waiting for hours to give us hell.

Barry did as he was told and then sat down across from me at the kitchen table. He had bags under his eyes, and his normally sculpted facial hair had a bit more scruff than usual to it. “You look good,” I said.

“I haven’t been sleeping too well.”

“Conscience bothering you, Barry?”

“Before I make my confession, would it be possible to get something to eat?”

“Ma,” I said, “can you make Barry a sandwich?”

My mother came into the kitchen and gave Barry another once-over, as if she hadn’t seen him just a few seconds earlier. “You look like hell,” she said. “When was your last proper shower?”

“Two days,” Barry said. “I’ve been staying on a boat.”

“The Atlantic Ocean out of water now?” she said.

Barry looked at me for help, but I’d been on the blunt end of this weapon before and knew to stick out. “Could I get a grilled cheese?” he said.

“Could you?” she said.

“May I?”

“That’s better,” my mother said. “I’ve got two types of cheese: American and Velveeta. Which would you like?”

“Velveeta isn’t a kind of cheese,” Barry said. “It’s a brand. Right, Michael?”

“Popular misconception,” I said.

“Then I guess I’ll have both?” Barry said, more than a hint of hesitation in his voice. He’d finally caught the drift of my mother’s tough-love approach… which usually contained a lot more tough than love. “And could I get a glass of milk? You don’t happen to have any strawberry Quik, do you?”

“I think there’s some in the pantry,” she said. I was going to tell her that that strawberry Quik had been in the pantry since 1983, but opted not to. If a dying man wanted strawberry Quik, who was I to withhold his wish? It was just a good thing he didn’t ask for a Sanka, because she had a vacuum-sealed can of that, too, that hadn’t seen the light of day since Carter was in office.

While my mom prepared Barry his schoolboy lunch, I thought it might be prudent to figure out just what the hell he’d done.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” I said.

“That’s a good thing, right? Means both of us have been able to live our lives without need for too much trouble.”

“Sam tells me you’re in the consulting business now.”

“I thought I’d try to diversify my interests. Make sure I’ve always got a good revenue stream. It’s just smart business. Like how sometimes for you, you’re helping little old ladies or sick kids, or other times it’s someone who’s got pimp problems or just escaped a Russian prison. Same kind of thing.”

“Right,” I said. “I see that. Exactly the same thing.” I got distracted for a moment by the smell of burning paper. I turned and looked, and my mother had started a small fire on the counter where she was making Barry’s grilled cheese. She’d gone for the old-fashioned touch and was cooking the sandwich using a clothes iron. The problem was that she had the sandwich on top of a stack of newspapers. And now there were flames.

“Uh, Ma,” I said. “You maybe want to shove that in the sink.”

“You think I don’t know how to put out a kitchen fire, Michael? You’re not the only one with some training around here.” My mom slid the sandwich and the newspapers and was just about to drop the iron into the sink, but fortunately, the power cord wasn’t long enough and so she opted to leave it on the counter so she could electrocute herself at a later date. Barry and I both stared in stunned silence until she finally realized the near-fatal error of her ways. “What?” she said. “I didn’t do it.”

“Do you have peanut butter?” Barry asked.

“I have a jar of Peter Pan in the pantry,” she said.

“Crunchy or creamy?”

“Barry,” my mother said, “you’ll eat it either way. What does it matter? And once it’s in your mouth, it’s all creamy.” A few moments later, my mother set down a sandwich-minus the crusts-and a glass of strawberry Quik in front of Barry. “Eat,” she said, and Barry did.

When he finished, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Now, this really did feel like therapy. “You ever ask yourself, Mike, what is simpler than just being at home?”

“No,” I said. “Street fighting in Tikrit was simpler than being at home.”

“Simple pleasures,” Barry said, ignoring me. “Peanut butter and jelly. Strawberry-flavored milk. Why’d I ever leave home in the first place?”

“I’m going to guess it was to go into juvenile hall,” I said.

“It even smells like home here, Mike,” Barry said.

I reached across the table and grabbed Barry by his shirt collar and yanked him back to real life. “Welcome home,” I said. “Time to start talking, or my mother will give you a spanking.”

Barry straightened himself out, emptied the remnants of the strawberry Quik and then leaned forward on his elbows. “Truth? I wasn’t made for the consulting business. I’m a hands-on, do-it-yourself kind of guy. Independent contractor.”

“What did you tell Junior Gonzalez?”

“Look, he came to me, said he had some questions, could I give him some advice. And I said, ‘Sure,’ named a price; he came back and offered double, and we were in business.”

“And let me guess-he paid you double by giving you a bag of skank bills up front.”

Barry raised his eyebrows, but he wasn’t really shocked. He couldn’t be. If he was sitting here with me, he knew I probably had a fair idea of what had already happened. I was looking for the more salient details.

“Not just skank bills,” Barry said. “‘Skank’ implies some basic ability. No, this was like Monopoly money.”

“How long ago did he first contact you?”

“Six weeks, maybe.”

“And he just came to ask you about making money?”

“Not exactly,” Barry said. “You know, I’ve diversified my portfolio since you got back into town and began using my services. So I’ve been letting people know that if they have needs regarding certain government rules and regulations, well, I now have a bit more expertise and can negotiate sensitive areas.”

“Barry,” I said.

“So I might have told Junior about how best to avoid wiretaps, a couple of things I’ve picked up regarding the Patriot Act from that credit card thing we did with that terrorist bank in Myanmar, and may have navigated him toward ways he might avoid using his identity. The guy had been in prison practically since disco, so he wasn’t exactly up on a lot of the new technology. And his guys-well, more like henchmen, really-weren’t exactly top of their class at MIT, so, well, I might have intimated to him that I could provide additional services outside the consulting I was providing.”

“Barry,” I said, “there’s no ‘might have’ involved here, is there?”

My mother came by and picked up Barry’s plate, then surveyed the damage and went back into the kitchen to make him another one. That she’d managed not to sit down with us and pound questions into Barry was a sign of major growth on her part. That she was clearly listening to every word, however, and showed herself in time for Barry to come up with a suitable answer was a kind of charity I frankly wasn’t familiar with.

“It’s like this, Mike,” Barry began, but I reached over and grabbed his collar again, which stopped him.

“Barry,” I said, “we’re friends. I like you. I’m happy to help you. I’m happy to get your help. But if you dance around the truth any longer, I might hurt you. So just tell me something definitive.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Yes. There is no ‘might’ here.”

I let go of him and said, “Barry,” again, because sometimes just hearing your name reminds you that you’re a real person and that you’ve disappointed someone. Your name is the one word in the history of language that has the power to mean about five hundred different things depending on inflection and the person speaking. In this case, I wanted “Barry” to mean “you idiot.”

“I know, I know, I’m stupid,” Barry said, getting it. “But, Mike, it’s not like I’m flush with business right now. I’ve grown accustomed to a certain level of comfort and, as such, my station in life requires that I continue to grow my brand.”

“Your brand,” I said, “has worsened a substantial problem.” I told him about Father Eduardo and Junior, about the Latin Emperor compound out in Homestead, what we’d discovered at the Ace Hotel, what Sam had uncovered and about Fiona’s fact-finding mission at Honrado, which I’d learned just prior to Barry’s arrival had yielded us plenty of information and, apparently, another damsel in distress… in addition to Barry, of course.

Barry took in all of this information without saying much. At first he just calmly ate the second sandwich my mother dropped off; then he attempted to drink a second glass of strawberry Quik, wisely gave that up midway through and asked for a beer and, finally, began to knead his hands together.

“Just to clarify,” Barry said when I’d finished, “I didn’t know that Pistell girl was some college kid. I had good intel that she was a very wealthy Connecticut business woman.”

“She’s not,” I said. That Barry was using the word “intel” was not a good sign. Apparently he’d decided his consulting business should include military words.

“Well, I can fix that one. Now that she’s got such good credit, it won’t be a problem.”

“Is that a joke, Barry?”

“Yes. Just attempting to find some levity here.”

“Tell me what Junior wanted to know,” I said.

“First, just to be clear, I told him that I couldn’t get involved with a criminal organization,” Barry said. “I didn’t come right out and say it, but I intimated to him that the snitch factor was too high for my liking, and he seemed agreeable to that. Some kid off the street gets pinched, and all of sudden I’m doing fifty years.”

“Probably only ten,” I said.

“I couldn’t do ten minutes,” Barry said. “You know you’re not allowed any kind of skin lotions in some prisons? I’ve got an eczema thing on my knees that, untreated, could be a real problem.”

“Barry,” I said.

“Right. So he asked me about the best way to launder his money so that he could still invest it, so that he could make his money work for him. He actually said that. I told him the only positive illegal marketplace right now was in religious groups and faith-based non-profits. The FBI and IRS are so busy chasing all the shady mortgage lenders and refinancers and sham banks that they just don’t care about the little guys when there are billions of bad dollars floating around in the banks and the automakers and the insurance companies. You don’t see any churches asking for bailouts. So I told him, kind of joking-you know, levity, like I said before-that he should start a church. How much could it cost to start a church?”

“It could cost eternity,” I said.

“Hey, I don’t play the morality card with these people. They want to defraud God, have at it,” Barry said. “I’m just offering opinions. Good, solid, fact-based opinions.”

The sad truth was that Barry was correct. Running an illegal operation through a church is one of the safest routes an enterprising businessperson can take. Cash donations are difficult to track, but they are the stock and trade of many small churches and one of the easiest ways to clean dirty money. It’s also one of the easiest ways to defraud people. If you want to get someone’s personal information, tell them you’re working for God and that you need their help. Offer to pay someone a small amount of money for a task, and they’ll give you the keys to their entire life in return, all in the form of the W-2 and I-9 forms they’ll need to fill out to get paid. It’s a small investment for the possibility of a wide return.

It also made his shakedown of Father Eduardo all the more clear-cut: He didn’t just have a church; he had an entire faith-based organization of small businesses and had the ear of important people

… which meant the mere idea that the FBI, IRS or any other organization might decide to investigate it without probable cause seemed remote.

Of course, working the money through a church had a side benefit: It’s nearly impossible to get a warrant to bug a church. It’s not that the idea of sanctuary still exists from medieval times, but what someone says to his clergy is privileged, just as if he were speaking to his lawyer. Even the nice relic from the Bush administration-the warrantless wiretap-would be pretty far out-of-bounds inside a church, but particularly since this was a church that was actively helping people with the aid, probably, of government subsidy.

Junior was smart, but he wasn’t smart enough to know all of this from his perch inside a prison. But Barry, well… Barry knew his industry better than anyone in Miami, so everything I knew, Barry had imparted to Junior, too. Junior was wise enough to go to him; Barry wasn’t wise enough to run the other direction, which I told him, with more than just a little regret.

“Mike,” Barry said, “it’s not like the Girl Scouts show up at my house with questions about how to move their cookie money around. Good people don’t need me, present company excluded.”

“Did you tell Junior all of this before or after he paid you?” I asked.

“He’d already made a down payment,” Barry said, though he seemed a bit unsure about that answer. “I let him put the rest on a layaway plan.”

“You’ve become the Kmart of money launderers.”

“We actually had a trade agreement at first,” Barry said. “He had some credit cards he needed to get rid of; I had a guy who would buy them. I don’t like to work in trade usually, because it’s a dirty business. People always end up thinking that they can get more out of you than if you pay cash, which is sort of what happened with Junior. He came back with more questions, and I told him I needed to be paid this time, which is when things got dicey.”

“So you received stolen property from the Latin Emperors and then sold it?”

“If you want to look at it that way,” Barry said.

“Is there another way of looking at it?”

“I guess not,” Barry said. “I guess it’s pretty much 3-D as it is.”

“4-D,” I said.

“I’m not familiar with that,” Barry said.

“It’s called reality,” I said.

“I’m just trying to find some middle ground with you, Michael. I came hear willingly to talk to you, Mike. You don’t have to interrogate me.”

“No, you didn’t,” I said. “If Sam hadn’t found your number on Junior’s phone records, you’d still be in the same place you were: hiding.”

“What would I need to hide from?”

“I don’t know, Barry. Why don’t you tell me?”

“You went to his place, right?”

“Right.”

“Pretty sweet setup, wasn’t it? That was my consulting work right there. Pretty proud of that.”

“You told him to buy that house?”

“No,” Barry said. “But I told him to quit-claim it to Julia Pistell. And I told him about, you know, a lot of secret criminals-only stuff.”

“You mean the rental houses, the security cameras someone stole from RadioShack and the cars with the dealer plates?”

Barry looked fairly astounded. “How’d you know?”

“I’m a spy,” I said. “And the work is shoddy.”

“I just told him what to do,” Barry said. “I didn’t go in there with a hammer and chisel.”

“It’s good enough to fool a fool,” I said, “which means he’s probably very safe there from the local police and anyone not trained at Quantico.”

“Well, anyway, he was happy with that work, and that’s when he gave me the money, and that’s when I called him on it being crap. He didn’t like that.”

“So you told him how to make good money?”

“I might have given him some hints, yes.”

“And what did you get for that?”

“He said he’d give me a hundred K from the fine cut,” Barry said, “plus ten grand of real money if I served as, you know, a quality-control expert. So I went down to the hotel-and yes, before you ask, I told him to do this at the hotel, okay? — and saw what they were making and it was surprisingly good for a bunch of amateurs. But I told him that I wasn’t going to take any of that pre-’96 money. That’s like waving a huge red flag. Who has that much money all from one year, you know? You gotta get a mix from the last ten years to make it look right, but they didn’t have that technology, which I told them. So I said I wanted my money all in cash, that I wasn’t taking their rags.”

“Did you add ‘or else’ when you made this demand?” I said.

“Well, I implied it.”

That’s what I was afraid of.

“How did you do that?”

“I said I had guys who, uh, worked for me who, uh, were, uh, ex-, uh, military and CIA and uh, other, uh, agencies of the, uh, spy variety and who, uh, might have been involved with some large-scale terrorist actions in, uh, the greater, uh, Ireland area. And, uh, that, uh, if I didn’t get my money, well, he’d be hearing from him.”

“Him?”

“Him. Them. You know.”

“And that’s when he threatened to kill you?”

“No, worse,” Barry said. “The cops showed up at my mother’s house. Guess that’s my last known.”

“That’s worse?”

“I told you,” Barry said, “I’ve got eczema on my knees. My mom was out of town, so the cops put a pretty big scare into my aunt Lois, who’s down from Ocala to watch the cats, water the plants and such, so she called me and I figured it was time to lie low for a piece. So I’ve been sort of waiting it all out at sea. Hopped on a friend’s houseboat and have been just sort of chilling in international waters for a couple days. Until Sam called. If I’d known the Latin Emperors had cops on the payroll, I’d have just kept sailing until I hit Australia. But it makes a lot of sense now, since they told my aunt that they were just coming by to see if I was still alive, which, at the time, didn’t sound like what cops normally go around saying.”

“Why didn’t you call me?” I said.

“I didn’t know what to do, Michael, on account of-well, the, uh, fact that I may have misrepresented our working relationship to Junior.”

It was then that my mother finally broke and stopped eavesdropping from the sink area-where she’d been washing the same dish for the previous ten minutes-and sat down at the table next to me. She lit up a cigarette and exhaled the smoke directly into Barry’s face.

“Ma,” I said.

“Shut up, Michael,” she said.

Barry smiled. “Wow, that was pretty cool. That’s your mom. I guess I never really understood that she’s your mom, so she can tell you to shut up. Wow.”

“Shut up, Barry,” my mother said, and he did. “Do you mind, Michael?”

“Have at it, Ma,” I said.

“You know what your problem is, Barry?”

“Uh, no, Mrs. Westen,” he said.

“You consort with assholes. I’m sorry for my language, Barry, but that’s the truth. Did I hear you say the police came to your mother’s house?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Barry said.

“Do you know what that would have been like if she’d been home? You would have ruined her whole week. Maybe her whole year. Do you have any skills, Barry, other than whatever criminal things you do with Michael?”

“No,” Barry said, “that’s all I’ve got.”

“Well, then, you’d better be a bit more selective with the people you work with so that Michael doesn’t need to come in and save your ass like he does with everyone else. Do you understand?”

“Uh, yes, Mrs. Westen.”

That made my mother happy. She stubbed out her cigarette. “Now, can I get you some pot roast, Barry?”

“Sure, that would be great, Mrs. Westen,” Barry said.

She stood up, reached across the table and mussed up Barry’s hair. “That was a good chat. We should do that again.” She turned to me. “Michael, help this idiot out before he gets his mother killed.”

And suddenly I had another unpaid client. That made three.