The End Game

by Tod Goldberg

  “This afternoon Dinino transferred seventeen thousand in cash advance from a credit card to a bank account in Myanmar.” Sam had printed out the screen shot, which showed the account information for the recipient, but no name. “The previous two days he did the same thing. All in, he transferred close to fifty thousand in cash advances from different credit cards.”

  “You ask your friend Darleen about this?”

  Sam either blushed or suddenly had a severe blood flow problem. Whichever was the case, he stopped and took a sip of beer before he answered me and was fully composed by the time the bottle was back on the table. “You get a woman like Darleen on the line,” he said, “and you need to play it smooth. Can’t just start letting her know you’re snooping on people’s e-mails.”

  “I think that’s called ethics,” I said.

  “You ever forget whether or not you had sex with someone?”

  “Not that I recall,” I said.

  “Me either,” Sam said. “But if it were to happen, that would be normal, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “this bank in Myanmar, it’s practically got a flag waving in front of it that says Drug Dealers Welcome.”

  “Then why are you so sure Bonaventura isn’t on the other end?” I said.

  “It’s all Islamic drug money going in there to fund terrorism,” Sam said. “Bonaventura might be a killer, but he’s a good Catholic, and if he tries to transfer money out of there, he’s asking for trouble.”

  Sam was right. After 9/11, the Patriot Act started designating banks across the world as rogue supporters of terrorism, which meant that if you did business with them, there was a good chance you’d wake one morning and find someone like me standing at the foot of your bed.

  Or not wake up.

  And that was if you happened to live in a country that wasn’t an American ally. In an allied nation, there was a fair chance that your entire family would be put on a plane in the middle of the night and flown to a prison in another foreign country where you’d be kept as an enemy combatant.

  And then one day, you might wake up and find a person like me standing at the foot of your bed anyway… and not to read you your Miranda rights.

  Whoever was getting the transfers didn’t care about those possibilities, which made them all the more dangerous.

  “We’re not dealing with a simple shakedown,” I said.

  “I’ll say one thing, Dinino would have been better off getting the money from a loan shark,” Sam said. “The vig to VISA is almost as bad as the vig to some shylock on the street.”

  “I doubt that he didn’t have the cash to send,” I said, “I think he can’t send it. If Dinino is getting blackmailed by these photos to the point that he has to kidnap his own stepdaughter and threaten to kill her so Gennaro will throw the race, then I’m pretty sure his wife isn’t aware of the situation. He’s setting Gennaro up so that whoever this third party is will get a true windfall some other way, not from him. This money is just to keep them quiet until the race.”

  “You think he went to Bonaventura looking for some quiet cash? I mean, what does fifty Gs mean to Bonaventura, right?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “He spent more than that on his daughter’s birthday.”

  “He’s already got protection,” Sam said.

  “Not the kind of protection Bonaventura could offer,” I said. “If he’s getting pressed by some other syndicate from back home, Bonaventura’s a big enough gun to maybe get them to back down. Or force them to.”

  “Or short him some cash to get the problem taken care of without alerting the missus,” Sam said. “It’s not as if he can go to someone legit to help him on this, because in ten minutes it would be on some blog. Bonaventura is probably the only person he knows who is in Miami who could help him and not have it ping back to wifey.”

  “She finds out he’s making time with a sixteen-year-old girl, he loses everything,” I said. “That’s the catalyst here.” Which meant Fiona was right: It all boiled down to a girl being involved. I just wasn’t expecting it to be an actual girl.

  It also meant something a bit more distressing.

  “If Dinino told Bonaventura even half of the truth,” I said, “if he really wanted to convince him to help, then he told him about Maria and Liz on the boat. Didn’t tell him he was behind it, of course, but he must have dangled that out there.”

  “Oh, Mikey,” Sam said. “That’s not good.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s occurring to me.” My play this afternoon to get Bonaventura off Gennaro had probably worked. But now it’s likely he thought Tommy the Ice Pick and his outfit were behind the blackmailing of Dinino, too. Or were at least affiliated with whoever was pulling the strings. It was, disturbingly, a perfect mess.

  We knew Dinino was the one pressing Gennaro.

  We knew why Dinino was pressing Gennaro, but not who was pressing Dinino.

  We knew that if we released the photos to make Dinino fold, there was a good chance Maria and Liz would be dead and, in short order, Gennaro would be killed for ratting Bonaventura out, too.

  “We need to get Maria and Liz off that boat,” Sam said.

  “Or we need to make sure that Bonaventura does it for us,” I said.

  Christopher Bonaventura’s easiest move, provided he thought unemotionally, provided he had someone with a little tactical training in his stable, was to remove the chance Maria and Liz might get killed himself.

  Which meant I needed to speak with my new friend Alex Kyle again sooner rather than later. Convince him that even if I wasn’t Tommy the Ice Pick, I was still the person making this all happen.

  “You know where Virgil is?” I asked.

  “I’m sure I could find him,” he said. “Spray a bit of your mother’s perfume into the wind and he’ll poke his head from his shell.”

  “Tell him we need a boat,” I said, ignoring Sam.

  “What are we looking at? Forty-footer? Cigar lounge with a stripper pole?”

  “Something fast,” I said. “It would be helpful if we didn’t need to return it.”

  “I’ll put out the word,” he said.

  Still, there was an unseen aspect to this all that was troubling me. Alex Kyle’s admission that he knew me wasn’t a move he needed to make.

  Which meant it was a move he had to make.

  The essence of developing warnings intelligence is the ability to understand that you can’t concentrate solely on the evidence you have in front of you. You have to have the facility to look beyond what’s happening now and decide what’s going to happen next. A good spy makes reasoned predictions based on experience and then reacts accordingly.

  This means occasionally you have to go into a small country and assassinate the president before anything outwardly untoward has happened.

  It also means that occasionally you need to be aware that the gun is pointed at you.

  Which was precisely what I was feeling when my cell rang. It was Fi.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Meeting with Timothy Sherman’s illegal driver,” she said. “Or at least what’s left of him.”

  “Fi,” I said.

  “He looks to have been a brainy individual.”

  “Tell me you didn’t shoot him.”

  “I didn’t shoot him.”

  “Good. Who did?”

  “Judging from the spatter pattern, I’d say someone shooting from about a half mile away with a sniper rifle. Fascinating, really. I wish you were here to see it with me, Michael.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Fi is one of those people who isn’t fazed by violence and gore. It’s the sort of thing she finds alluring, which is not the least of her mysteries. “I had my own spatter pattern today, so I’m good.”

  “Shame,” she said.

  “Fi, do you want to tell me where you are, or are you going to make me guess?”

  “That’s the funny thing, Michael,” she said. “I’m standing on the
sidewalk in front of your loft.”

  11

  Fiona Glenanne has a unique worldview: it’s her world and you would be wise not to get in the way. What this means in a practical sense is that she’s pretty good at getting what she wants.

  Shoes.

  Purses.

  The contents of a bank vault.

  In the process of acquiring said items, she has no problem punching you in the throat, setting fire to your home or giving you the impression that you are mere moments away from a level of physical pleasure you’ve only read about in the Kama Sutra.

  All of which makes her the perfect person to extract information from those who might be unwilling under normal circumstances to give it up.

  Male.

  Female.

  It doesn’t really matter.

  So when she walked into the offices of the Star Class Association looking for Timothy Sherman and encountered an armed female security guard at the front desk, she wasn’t concerned in the least.

  Women with guns were her comfort zone. Though, Fi couldn’t abide the fact that she looked to be one of those women who clearly took part in weight-lifting competitions. It was the shock of white blond hair, the rub on tan that made her glow orange (and smell a bit like wet cardboard) and the forearms that looked like a freeway interchange with all the raised intersecting veins. Fiona thought that you could be dangerous without sacrificing style and grace and sex appeal. Never mind the horror of a rub on tan, just generally.

  “Can I help you?” the guard asked. Her voice was a little on the thick side, too.

  “Yes,” Fi said. “I’m from Allied Car Rental and I’m afraid we have a very substantial problem. I need to see Mr. Sherman.”

  “Okay,” she said. She looked down at the phone system, which struck Fiona as being a might too confusing for simple use. Didn’t anyone have an intercom anymore? She guessed that people with impressive looking phone exchanges at their front desks wanted to give off the impression that they fielded many, many calls. Odd, really. Power through the impression of vast communication and heavily veined women with guns at the front desk.

  The office itself was fairly standard: a rounded off desk up front covered in trade magazines, including one, Fiona noted, that featured a photo of Gennaro Stefania on the cover. He was cute, but from what she’d learned, not much on the manly side of things. Oh, he could pilot a boat, but she doubted he could take a punch.

  Men.

  The shame of their sex was that so few lived up to billing.

  Beyond the desk was a locked glass door-nothing special security-wise, Fiona saw, just a keyed lock. Nothing exciting happened in these offices, she imagined, and very little of value could possibly be inside apart from computers and phones and maybe a little petty cash. She could be in and out of the place in five minutes with everything of worth and no one would probably raise an eye, least of all the woman in front of her, who was now punching buttons almost at random.

  Fi saw that a rather pained look was beginning to cast over the poor woman’s face. Maybe she was having some sort of anabolic issue.

  “I’m not really the receptionist, so this phone is like Swahili,” the guard said. “I’m just here for extra security and the receptionist is at lunch.”

  “Security?” Fi took a chance. “Because of that explosion the other day?”

  The guard smiled and Fi saw that her teeth were insanely white. Nice teeth are important but this was absurd. It was like she had a mouth filled with piano keys. “Yes!” she said. “Omigod. Did you hear about that? It’s crazy, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Fi said. This security guard woman was really quite the woman of multitudes. She projected strength and body dysmorphic issues, but also seemed incredibly vapid. Very strange. “This whole boating industry can be very dangerous.”

  The guard nodded her head, which was also a strange exercise, since she nodded and blinked excessively hard at the same time while keeping the smile burnished on her face. “This is my only day, but everyone at the agency was like, hey, you might get to break an arm, Gretchen! And so I thought, hey, when else do you get the chance to break an arm in a really nice building like this one? Mobsters and rappers and rich people. I could really meet someone neat, right?”

  Fi didn’t really have a response to that. Chiefly because none of it made any sense to her. She had the impression that this was a woman used to people not listening to her closely and thus no one ever corrected her when she said absurd things. A shame, really. A little molding and Fi thought she could probably turn her into a fairly competent knee-breaker. But she’d need to get rid of that tan and that smile. It was all very off putting.

  “Anywho,” the guard said. She poked around the phone some more. “I don’t know how to get Mr. Sherman on this thing. Do you know where his office is at?”

  “Yes,” Fi said. She had a new opinion. Anyone who ended a sentence with the word “at” and managed to get the term “anywho” into a sentence was unmoldable at any cost. “If you’ll just open the door, of course.”

  The security guard got up from behind the desk and made her way to the door to unlock it, which gave Fi a chance to look at the phone system and see that Mr. Sherman was in office 129. It was right on the phone in huge bold letters. It also said he was not to be disturbed until after the race. A very important man, no doubt, in the same way many people think they are very important: that their particular world is more interesting and important than yours.

  That didn’t jibe with Fi. Timothy Sherman, she thought, you’re going to be picking flowers.

  The interior offices of the Star Class Association resembled something put together by Gilligan and the Skipper: Nautical paintings on the walls, bits of ancient oars and masts and such encased in glass frames and boxes scattered down the long hallways. A cubicle farm painted light blue and with funny signs at their various nexuses that had arrows pointed to Bermuda, Cape Cod, Hawaii, the Tropic of Cancer. The cubicles themselves were largely empty, which made sense since all of the action was happening down in the marina in preparation for the race, but the few people she did see were all young men who looked like they’d been born wearing navy blue diapers.

  Timothy Sherman’s office was at the back of the floor and looked out over the cubicles in one direction and out towards the sea in the other. His door was open, presumably so the drones working away could periodically stand up and see out to the water and marvel at how lucky their boss was.

  She already didn’t like Timothy Sherman, which was nice since she hoped she’d get the chance to hurt him.

  Just a little.

  Maybe a pinch.

  A tight squeeze.

  A pistol whip to the eyebrow. Something worth the trouble she went to putting on the silly conservative suit she had to wear in order to look like a young car rental executive, never mind the tacky DayRunner she was using to hold documents.

  When she reached Sherman’s office door, she found him sitting with his back to the door, staring intently at his computer, which was filled with what looked to Fiona like weather reports and information on the tides. Very important stuff, no doubt.

  “Timothy Sherman?” she said loudly, making him jump a bit in his seat. He turned and faced her and Fi saw that he was angry. He still had at least another few days before he could be disturbed, of course.

  “Who are you?”

  “Pitney Bowes from Allied Car Rental,” she said and extended her hand for Sherman to shake, which he did. He was one of those guys who shook women’s hands like he thought his strength might overpower them, so he intentionally went light, so Fi gave him all she had until he actually winced and pulled back. “Sir, we have a big problem.”

  She reached into the DayRunner and slid out a copy of the police report Loretta had made earlier involving a certain Peeping Tom. Fi had done a little work on the report, adding the plate of the rental to it, and Sherman’s name, too.

  Sherman read the report silently, apart from the gr
owing sound of his labored breathing, and then set it down.

  “This is a big misunderstanding,” he said.

  “Mr. Sherman, you understand that it’s bad public relations when our cars are used in the commission of a sex crime, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” he said. “But that wasn’t what was happening. I wasn’t even there. I’ve been right here all day.”

  “So the car drove itself?”

  “No, no,” he said. “I’m afraid the car was in use for official Cup business, but I certainly wasn’t the driver and I can assure you that the person driving the car was not engaged in any crime.”

  It was really too bad Sherman wasn’t the ultimate criminal here, Fi thought, because there was just something about him that annoyed her. It was probably that he used the term “official Cup business” as if it meant something she should be impressed with.

  “Mr. Sherman, there are no other drivers listed on your rental contract,” Fi said. “I’m going to have to contact your insurance agency and, I’m not afraid to say, you are civilly liable if poor Ms. Loretta, who I must say sounded terribly distraught, chooses to litigate.”

  Ah, the word that makes men of a certain ilk quake: litigate.

  “We don’t need to go in that direction, do we?” Sherman said. He was smiling now, confident, like he’d been in this position before. He reached into his desk and pulled out an envelope, flipped through the contents and then came out with a ticket. “I would love for you to be my special guest on our hospitality yacht to watch the first half of the Cup.”

  “That’s very generous,” Fi said and returned Sherman’s smile, even gave an extra flourish with her eyes, licked her lips twice, let him really think that a ticket on a yacht was just the sort of thing a girl like her would really want. She kept that look of honest rapture and joy on her face as she said, “But I still need the driver’s name, or else I’m afraid the police will be showing up here in about an hour to arrest you, and so I can stop my assistant from calling your insurance carrier to let them know of the malfeasance your organization has been party to.”