by Tod Goldberg
He essentially washed out a few years ago, and now, if you were sitting across from Sam Axe, you might think he was a retired surfer: He favors Hawaiian shirts to camouflage, his muscles are covered by a subtle sheen of beer fat and he's let his hair grow out over his ears, where it's now touched with wisps of gray. All of his hard edges have been smoothed over with suntan oil, boat drinks and ocean views. He's technically still on the books with the government, but is mostly just playing out the string, taking the odd investigative job, which has dovetailed into us working together solving other people's problems.
Otherwise, his main job is to drink and sit in the sun… when he's not engaged watching me for the FBI. Watching is maybe a bit of a misnomer: It's more like proctoring, since there's nothing covert about what he's doing (at least not anymore-for the first few weeks, he made a go at being secretive, but then just told me he had to do it or they'd hold up his Navy pension), and his goal isn't so much to forbid me from doing anything as it is to make sure I don't piss off the FBI enough that they have me erased completely. He only gives the FBI what they want, but never volunteers information, which is fine. Having a friend as the conduit to the people who may eventually pull your card isn't so bad-it's not like he's the Stasi.
Plus, everyone needs to eat, and drink, maybe especially drink, which is what Sam was doing when I found him at the News Cafe. I called Sam just after meeting with Fiona to see if he could plug into a few of his sources to find out what the chatter was about the Oro. The thing about anyone with a security clearance is that they're like sixteen-year-old girls when you get down to their core: They all want to talk about the pretty outfit they did or didn't get, assign blame and start pulling hair.
Sam, well, he's got powers of persuasion. He can usually just pick up the phone and ask a question of these people-be they CIA, FBI, NSA or the most clandestine of all agencies, the DMV-and they'll at least tell him whom they're pissed at.
It was three o'clock and Sam sat facing the ocean, his shirt unbuttoned just enough so that passing tourists could see a few tufts of hair climbing up toward his Adam's apple. For a buck, he'd pose and let the savages take digital pictures. He was joined by five empty bottles of Corona, a ramekin filled with spent limes and a plate of congealed fat that might have once been cow based. I sat down across from him and tried to work the angle of the sun so that I wouldn't pick up the glare off of Sam's slimed over plate. I switched seats three times before giving up and putting on my sunglasses.
"You just missed Veronica," Sam said. Veronica was Sam's girlfriend, in the same way any woman has been Sam's girlfriend, which is to say she didn't have a strong opposition to congealed fats and beer, or at least Sam's particular charms outweighed the opposition. What those charms are, I've never been certain, except that I think he must excrete some kind of chemical in his sweat that attracts women with money. The same chemical also tends to attract women with husbands, which has caused problems in the past, though nothing Sam couldn't manage by kicking through a wall or two and running nude through the Everglades. That's one way of applying your specialized training in everyday life.
"A shame," I said. "We always have so much to talk about." The longest conversation I've ever had with Veronica consisted of her saying hello to me and me raising my eyebrows at her. It used to be that the fewer people I got to know personally, the less I might be disappointed by them later, but now it's just about convenience. "I hope she wasn't driving." I picked up one of the bottles of Corona and blew into it, making that humming sound. One of the perks of not constantly being in hiding anymore is that sometimes, just for the hell of it, I can act like a human.
"Oh, those are all mine," Sam said.
"You don't say. How many is that today?"
"Depends when you think today technically begins."
"Sunrise seems like a good starting point." Sam closed his eyes and started counting on his fingers; when he started doing laps around his thumb, I figured stopping him would make the day go easier on both of us. "Round off."
"About half," he concluded, which seemed right, since the day still had nine hours left in it. The difference between Sam Axe and most men is that alcohol doesn't seem to faze him much. No one ever claimed Sam wasn't complex. "Veronica's got a job for us," Sam said. "Friend of hers is in a bit of a jam."
"In a jam? What does that constitute, exactly?"
"You know," Sam said, "someone's in over their head. In a fix. In a bind. Needs a tall, dark stranger to make things right. All that."
"Let me guess," I said. "International terrorists? Peruvian gun cartels? Jehovah's Witnesses?"
"No." Sam squirmed in his chair. I'd come to talk to him about the incident at the Hotel Oro, and now here I was being put on the spot to help a friend of Veronica's, again, which wouldn't be so bad if they weren't the kind of people whose problems tended to start out as one thing and ended up as something else altogether. Rich people say it's all a mix-up with paperwork, and then, a couple days later, someone is trying to slit my throat.
"Well, that's a nice change. I'll guess again."
"Mikey…"
"Now, hold on, let me think. Drug dealers?"
"No," Sam said. "Forget it."
"No?"
"Not really."
"So, they're sort of drug dealers?"
"If you're not interested," Sam said, "I can handle the job myself."
"The last time you handled the job yourself," I said, "what was the final body count? Ten? Fifteen?"
"Which I thanked you for," Sam said.
"I don't like to kill people, Sam," I said. "I've got enough problems."
"They were all very bad," he said.
They were all bad-that was true-but a human life is a human life, and my sense is that I'm not living in a cartoon. Even the worst psychopath is someone's child, brother or sister, husband or wife or parent. If you have to kill someone to save your life, you kill them. But if you kill someone because it's easier than negotiating, you're no better than a dog that bites you just because it doesn't like your smell. It might be in your nature, but it doesn't make it the right thing to do. "Still," I said, "if I'm going to do whatever this is, I'd like to know that no one is going to be firing Scud missiles at my car."
"When did that ever happen?"
"Chechnya," I said. "After you broke up with the goat stew woman."
Sam made a noise that was somewhere in between a grunt and a sigh, which is about as close as Sam gets to true emotional response. "It's an easy job," Sam said, "I promise."
"You have no idea what the job is, do you?"
"I have a general outline," Sam said. "Like I said before: damsel in distress. That sort of thing. Besides, you owe me. I found out about your little party at the Hotel Oro."
"I was having lunch with my mother," I said. "It was Fiona's party."
"Kinky," Sam said, and then he broke down the particulars: An anonymous tip indicated that a courier would be arriving with a cache of assault rifles and ammunition-which was true-to be sold to certain Saudi nationals staying at the hotel. "The thing is, Mikey," he said, taking a swig from each of his five empty bottles, gathering up just enough backwash for a decent mouthful, "the caller had names. Big no-fly names. Fifteen different guys named Mohammed and Abdullah. They were already cleaning out cells at Gitmo. Dick Cheney was going to fly down and interrogate them himself, do a little water boarding…"
I put a hand up. "I get it," I said. "Crazed fundamentalists." I grabbed up the five bottles and put them on the ground, lest my nausea from watching him drinking his own spit get the best of me. "Continue."
"Right," he said. He stared at the bottles a little mournfully until I literally snapped my fingers in front of his face to break the trance. "Well, anyway, they had the hotel scoped for those guys, but had no idea who Fiona was, only that they were looking for a woman carrying a bunch of heat."
"What about the crazed fundamentalists?"
"The block of rooms they'd booked was occupied
by a sect of Elderhostel."
"Elderhostel?" I said. I flipped the name through my mind and nothing came flashing up. I hadn't been out of proper intelligence so long that an entire sect would have risen up without my knowledge, had I?
"Very dangerous group." Sam pulled out his wallet and rummaged through it for a moment, finally coming up with a glossy piece of paper he'd folded too many times. "This is how they recruit," he said, handing it to me. "Sophisticated bastards."
I unfolded the paper and learned that once I turn fifty-five, I'll be eligible to travel the world with 160,000 other active seniors in a continuing quest to educate themselves about the world via extraordinary learning adventures. "Who has access to the hotel's computer system?" I said.
"You'd have to get a subpoena for that information." Sam paused, which I took to mean he was going to let me process how clever it was that he knew I'd ask that, then that he expected me to ask him to do me a favor and try to find the information out in whatever way he could, since I clearly thought this was now something larger than Fiona, that it probably involved me and that someone was just using Fiona as a message to me, and then that he'd stun me with a reply on the subject that was abject in its thoroughness and that I would then thank him profusely for thinking of all the possible intangibles before I could even formulate a question.
So, instead, I just stared at him and waited. For a few minutes we actually sat there silently, until Sam finally got the hint that I wasn't going to bite and just opted to give me what I wanted to hear.
"They've got an eight hundred number that routes to a call center in Nebraska," he said. "They've got twenty-five in-house reservation clerks, another twenty-five front desk employees, then there're about fifty bellboys, half of whom have a record of some and-petty stuff, mostly, though there's a guy parking cars who's actually got a pretty nice book running right now, even takes bets on Japanese Premier League soccer, who did a year for running a book I frequented a few years ago, which seems excessive, but that's just me, though it looks like he lied on his employment application and said he spent the last year studying abroad-and then there're the bartenders, cocktail and restaurant staff, too, and then the whole executive branch and probably a few corporate people who, with just a few keystrokes, could find out anything they wanted about anyone staying at the hotel."
"Good customer service," I said. If you ever want to start stealing identities for a living but have an aversion to sifting through trash or aren't especially good at hacking into personal computers, get a job at a hotel. People on vacation are stupid. They trust everyone with a name tag. Walk up to a person sitting poolside and ask them to confirm their room number by giving you the last four digits of their social security number and most likely they'll give you all nine, because everyone recites the entire number in order to get to those four numbers. Barring that, come by the next time and ask for the first five numbers. Ask them for a special PIN number for the hotel voice mail, and you'll likely get their ATM PIN, too. Ask them to surrender their passport, give a vial of blood and a cup of urine and, if you asked nicely and promised them a robe and a mint, you're unlikely to get any sort of resistance whatsoever.
And if you don't want to get an actual job, just get a name tag.
"Three hundred," Sam said.
"Three hundred?"
"That's how many people-give or take-have access to the system," Sam said.
Three hundred people, but only one had a reason to set up Fiona, but not enough reason to actually give out her name or her description. Three hundred people who might have had access to anyone dumb enough to give up their information and change it to the names of known terrorists, but only one who'd actually know those names. Three hundred people and only one who might reasonably want to send me a message by using Fiona without getting her killed in the process, making it all so obvious that only someone completely untrained and unknown would walk into it.
"Who owns the hotel?" I asked.
"Shareholders," he said, but he said it in the same way he told me I'd need to get a subpoena.
"Are we going to do this again," I said, "or are you just going to jump right to the part where I realize who is currently in Miami that might want to kill me?"
"It's owned primarily by an Eastern European conglomerate," Sam said.
"That's not terribly specific," I said. "If I have to boil down who might want to send me a message to half of a continent, I'll be dead before you're able to flag down the waitress again."
"I saw a lot of Russian names," Sam said. "Wouldn't it be nice if they could just forgive and forget? We won, you lost, not too many people died in the process, sit down, have a drink of vodka, put on a pair of Levi's, call it a game."
"Tell that to Putin," I said.
"Putin," Sam said. He spit the Russian president's name out like it hurt. "I ever tell you what a crap shot he was?"
"No less than a hundred times," I said. The fact was the former Soviet Union was one of my main theaters of operation. The other fact is that apart from Cubans, the majority of organized crime in and around Miami belongs to the Russians. A few years ago they made a strategic alliance with the Colombian drug cartels, the result being that the Colombians supply the product, the Russians supply the money and the muscle. Along the way, just like the good little capitalists they've become, they've bought into real estate, gobbling up shopping centers, hotels, nightclubs, entire neighborhoods. You move your money around enough, build legit businesses to shelter and protect it, invest in real estate, line the pockets of county commissioners, make donations to congressional campaigns, maybe drop a grand to the ACLU and the SPCA, too, and people tend to forget that it all started with cocaine, and heroin and all they see is the gentrification your money provides.
"I don't know the veracity of this," Sam said, "because you understand the boys were a little embarrassed that they kicked in a bunch of doors and pistol-whipped a few seniors, but no one in the hotel's management put up any stink. Repaired the doors, fixed things right back up and that was that. Even gave a few of the agents vouchers for free massages."
"This doesn't scan," I said. Fiona gets contacted for a gun buy and it turns out it's a sting, but no one gets stung? Hundred different people they could have gone through, big-timers, and they pick Fi? And just let her walk. And then the specific names of terrorists.
One of the first things you learn about being a spy is that there is no chaos. Everything that appears random and disorganized but ultimately disastrous is likely to have a deep and intricate network of connective lines holding it all together. People walking down the street see a man in a suit running, and they think he's late for a meeting. On the next block, they see a woman screaming into a cell phone, and they thing she's having a bad day. And when they get to their office and it's been cordoned off with crime taps, they think maybe someone killed themselves and took out a few coworkers in the process.
I see possibility, connection, locus points.
I stood up and dropped a twenty on the table, which would cover at least another round or two.
"Maybe it's not about you," Sam said.
"Maybe," I said.
"Maybe it's all a big coincidence," Sam said.
"Maybe," I said.
"Maybe you're going to go over there and find out anyway?"
"Definitely," I said. I looked down at the table and saw that the twenty was already gone. Sam's like a cat.
"You want me to go with you?"
"No," I said. "If it's nothing, it's nothing. If it's something, it's probably something you don't need to be a part of."
Sam nodded. I knew if I needed Sam, he'd be there, but at this point it seemed prudent to find out for myself what was waiting for me. If it had to do with my burn notice, bringing along Sam wouldn't help things.
"Listen, Mikey, this thing with Veronica's friend…"
"What time, Sam?"
"I told her we'd be at her place tomorrow morning at nine."
I checked m
y watch. It was just short of three thirty. The sun was still full in the sky. "You going to stay up all night?"
Sam considered that idea for a moment, giving it more credence than I thought possible. "I guess maybe I'll try to turn in early," he said. "You want your twenty back?"
"Keep it," I said, walking out, "in case I need to make bail later."
2
There are four basic kinds of surveillance: static, foot, mobile and technical. If you're just a regular person, these are also the four basic ways you can stalk someone. The difference between the two classifications is semantic: No matter if you're a spy, or if you're insane and think reruns of Magnum P.I. are telling you to follow Tom Selleck, the goal of surveillance is to learn as much about your target as possible while not revealing your position until you have sufficient information on how to proceed.
Static surveillance requires planning and takes monastic patience. You want to find a place with concealed points of entry and exit, preferably one in a rectangular shape so you can place yourself against one wall and see everything around you without impediment. You want visual access to your target. Unless you like wearing adult diapers, you want a toilet nearby. Access to food is nice, since it's unlikely you'll be ordering up pizzas or cooking your favorite pot roast.
I've always been partial to static surveillance since it allows you to process repeated action, opening windows into how a particular person or group operates when they think no one is watching them. Under ideal conditions, that's how I would have approached identifying the mystery target inside the Hotel Oro.
But I figured they already knew I was coming, so why worry about finding the perfect-fitting adult diaper?
The entrance of the Hotel Oro is cut out of black-and-gold marble accented by a team of valets and bellboys wearing black Armani suite. I guess the outfits are supposed to engender confidence in those leaving cars and luggage in the care of these men, since if the valets and bellboys wear Armani, what must the rest of the place be like? Then there's the common presumption that well-dressed people aren't criminals, though of course if you're any good at crime, you can probably afford a decent pair of shoes and a nice pair of slacks. Outlet stores have really evened the playing field-even your garden-variety asshole can get an off-season Armani suit, or, in the case of paroled felons, hotels in Miami are kind enough to provide them gratis.
