by Tod Goldberg
The festive kind of fear.
Somewhere, Fiona was watching my back. If real trouble came down, she’d be on top of it. That allowed me to focus my attention on the task at hand, which was locating Barry, Miami’s finest nonviolent lowlife, among the audience of sugar-high kids and their parents.
I eventually found him sitting on a lawn chair under a tree, a plate of food on his lap, a cooler beside him.
Barry was the kind of guy who could get you what you needed, like dummy home loans, millions of dollar in fake wire transfers, new identities, small helicopters, and the occasional piece of advice about the inner workings of the bad people he associated with.
A jack-of-all-criminal-trades, really.
I sat down on the grass next to him, and for a few minutes we watched the trapeze. Four different students were doing a series of tricks that involved midair flips timed perfectly to a classical music arrangement. There was always someone in the air and someone launching into the air.
The precision, timing and dedication looked flawless, but it meant hours of preparation and failure had been embarked on long before this date.
“What I wonder,” Barry said after a while, “is what a professional trapeze artist does on his day off. Sit in a cubicle?”
“Probably the same thing anyone does,” I said.
“What do you do?”
“I plot,” I said. “And wait.”
“See, that’s the thing,” Barry said. “You need to find something more relaxing. I tried collecting wine for a little while. You know, like as a hobby? Started going to tastings and these things where they put out ten different kinds of cheeses and then the wine you’re supposed to drink with each cheese. Turned out to be very stressful. Too many decisions to make.”
“What do you do now?”
“I started getting into chakra cleansing,” he said. “Girl I was dating was a big advocate, but that didn’t do the trick, either. She was very spiritual about it, always telling me to surrender to the release, but I just couldn’t get into that. I feel like my chakra is pretty healthy.”
“That’s what you’re known for,” I said. “That and bad checks.”
“This was supposed to be my day off,” Barry said. “And here I am, sitting next to Mr. Marked for Death.”
“Think how I feel,” I said.
Barry hadn’t actually looked at me yet. Or if he had, I couldn’t tell since he was still wearing his sunglasses. Maybe he was waiting for a break in the action.
“Have to say,” he said, “I was little surprised to hear from you. Today of all days.”
“Yeah?”
“Word is you got a bullet to the dome this afternoon, actually.”
“That was someone else,” I said.
“What happened to your forehead?”
“Christopher Bonaventura punched it,” I said.
“You wake up in the morning and this stuff just happens, or is there an order to it?”
“Depends what morning it is,” I said.
“Maybe you just live in a bad neighborhood.”
“No,” I said, “the guy who was shot in front of my place was probably taken out by a sniper, so they could have been in another neighborhood completely. I suppose they could have been in a high-rise a half a mile away.” I pointed at the towering buildings across the street from the park. “Like one of those.”
“Comforting,” Barry said.
“Any other words being thrown out about me?”
“Only that since you got back into town, the number of professional killers enjoying the sun and beaches has increased tenfold. I’m thinking of starting a side business selling maps to your place.”
“Yeah,” I said, “about that. You got anything on an ex-Marine named Alex Kyle doing business out here?”
“Big guy?”
“Big enough.”
“Rolls with ten guys who look just like him?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Barry pulled off his sunglasses and rubbed them on his shirt. Held them up. Looked through them. Put ’em right back on. “Lot of fake passports in town this week,” Barry said, like I hadn’t asked him about Alex Kyle. “Lots of people asking for private protection. Big money getting tossed around. Heard there was a guy trying to move yellow cake who was staying at a condo, taking meetings on his deck, like it was nothing. Another guy supposedly was trying to move weapons-grade plutonium. FBI picked him up eating sushi next to Bono.”
One of the trapeze artists failed to catch his partner, and the partner-a young Asian woman who looked to weigh less than a hundred pounds-sailed into the netting below, eliciting a collective moan from the crowd. She popped back up quickly, but looked dazed and somewhat unbalanced.
“You think that hurts?” Barry said.
“Any time you fall from the sky onto the ground,” I said, “it hurts.”
“You ever jump out of a plane?”
“A few times,” I said.
“That seems relaxing,” he said.
“Not if the people on the ground are shooting at you,” I said.
“Can’t control that,” Barry said. He reached into his cooler and pulled out a bottle of beer and handed it to me, took another one out for himself. He looked at me then and clanked his bottle into mine in a toast. “To life, then,” he said, and then drank from his bottle slowly, like he was thinking about something particularly vexing.
“Something on your mind, Barry?”
“This Alex Kyle,” Barry said, “he’s not a nice person.”
I thought about it. “No. Probably not.”
“Wasn’t really a question,” Barry said. “Just an observation.” He broke off a piece of fried plantain from his plate and chewed on it carefully. “Anyway,” he said, “now that you’re alive again, I’m just saying you should look into ways to spend your free time that are less hazardous to your health. You never hear about anyone getting gunned down while building model planes in their garage.”
He had a point, though if I took to building model planes in my garage, I might be inclined to gun myself down.
“I need a favor,” I said.
“Last favor I did for you? The IRS audited my nana the next day. That’s not right.”
“Nana good with keeping receipts?”
“She’s been dead for fifteen years,” Barry said.
“Tell me you’re not cashing your grandmother’s social security checks,” I said.
“You watch the news? It’s important to tighten up where you can. Besides, it helps to have an extra social security number or two for a rainy day, like if some ex-spy puts your business in peril and you need to relocate and start all over.”
“You help me here,” I said, “I’ll owe you.”
“You already owe me,” he said.
I looked around. “Dinner with Fiona,” I said. I paused. Waited for a sign. Like a shank to the neck. When none came, I continued with “My treat.”
“She’s not a nice person, either,” Barry said.
“No,” I said, “she’s not.”
“That’s kind of hot, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
Barry chewed on another bit of plantain. “This one of those ‘or people will die’ things?”
“Yeah,” I said. I showed him the paperwork on the credit transfer to Myanmar. “You ever do any business with this bank?”
Barry visibly recoiled in his chair, enough so that he had to grab his plate before it tipped off his lap. “Myanmar is off-limits,” he said.
“How can an entire country be off-limits?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe I’m just averse to having the government disappear me. Or being called a terrorist and shipped to some torture chamber on a boat. Or having everyone I know murdered in the night by people like yourself. No offense.”
“None taken,” I said.
“Or your friend Mr. Kyle.”
“Have you talked to him, Barry?”
“He paid m
e a visit.”
“What was he looking for?”
“You,” he said.
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth,” Barry said. “That the last time we did business my nana got audited. Told him I was out of the Michael Westen business until Nana’s IRS problems disappeared.”
“I appreciate that,” I said.
“Consider it the advantage of working with local businesses,” he said.
“I still need a favor,” I said.
“I still get dinner with Fiona?”
Even though I couldn’t see Fi, her presence, at least mentally, was weighing on me. I tweaked the offer accordingly. “I can guarantee that you will eat in the same room with her,” I said. “Everything else is up to chance.”
“All a man can ask,” he said.
“How much time would you need to get a hold of a couple hundred credit card numbers?”
“How much are you willing to pay?”
“Whatever it takes to get your nana’s legal issues resolved,” I said. “And I’ll pay double if you can get them from Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia-any place with a lot of banks and a lot of regulations.”
“How long would you need them for?”
“About ten minutes,” I said.
“I wasn’t planning on working tonight,” Barry said. “But I guess I could make a couple calls.”
I handed him the bank information again, and this time he took it. “I want you to flood this account with transactions,” I said. “Charges. Cash advances. It doesn’t matter. But max every single card. I want an international banking incident.”
Barry shook his head. “You got maybe fifteen minutes before the banks on both ends freeze all the transactions,” Barry said. “That bank in Myanmar? It doesn’t matter if it’s run by Al Qaeda or the CIA, the computers will still autolock the account, thinking it’s being cracked. You’ll never see a single cent.”
“That’s the idea,” I said. If my hunch was correct, whoever operated the bank account Dinino was transferring money into would be expecting far more money after Gennaro lost. Bonaventura probably wasn’t the only one taking action. But that would be difficult to achieve if their bank account was being investigated by every major credit fraud agency in the world. And if the U.S. government and its allies were monitoring it for money going to terrorists, it would take about thirty seconds for that account to get flagged by the kinds of people who you do not want flagging your accounts. The kinds of people who don’t mind coming across enemy lines to make sure you understand that your banking interests are very, very interesting indeed. By flooding it ten minutes before the race, it ensured me a window of time to confirm Maria and Liz were safe. Once the people who operated it found out Dinino wasn’t going to be able to make due, there was going to be… issues.
“I need to worry about anyone coming after me?”
“Anyone comes near you,” I said, “they’re coming through me first.”
“Really?”
“Really. What are friends for?”
“Is that what we are?”
I had to think about it. “I guess so,” I said.
“Nice to know. And not that I don’t trust you, but soon as they start bouncing back the charges,” Barry said, “Barry bounces out of Miami.”
“I’d recommend that,” I said. “I’ll call you when I want you to start and then lose your phone.”
“And then, what, Fiona catches up to me?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “She’ll be in contact.”
We sat for a few moments longer and watched the trapeze show. The Asian girl who’d fallen earlier was back on the swing now and picking up momentum to perform another trick, her eyes wide open, her face perfectly still, as if she’d completely forgotten that only a few minutes before she fell to earth with a thud.
You spend the majority of your life in the company of spies and you begin to realize certain truths, chief among them that in order to be a good spy, you have to love your job.
Statistically speaking, this is unusual.
Most people hate their jobs.
Most people wish they were doing something more interesting with their lives. So they go home and they watch television shows about people they can never be, or they read books about fantasy worlds they’ll never inhabit, or they get on to the Internet and take on a persona, either on a message board or in a role-playing game, and they while away their free time pretending and then wake up the next day and head back to the cubicle maze.
But when you’re a spy, every day has the potential to be completely unlike the previous day.
That kind of adrenaline is difficult to replace.
I wanted to solve my burn notice and get my job back not merely because I wasn’t overly fond of being manipulated by forces that wanted to use me for their own devices, nor because I found their belief that I’d capitulate to their will-as however many other burned agents had over the years-specifically rude and disrespectful, never mind that it’s never fun being shot at on a regular basis.
No, I wanted to solve my burn notice because I wanted my life back-the life I’d chosen.
Dealing with the mundane was not a job I was uniquely qualified for, nor, I suspected, was it made for Alex Kyle.
Which is why I wasn’t surprised to see him sitting on the hood of my Charger. That Fiona was sitting next to him, eating a Popsicle, was not in the game plan.
They made a rather striking couple, actually.
I’d parked the car in the lot across from the park, the most public spot, so the two of them were sitting beneath the glow of a towering street-light and right next to the cashier’s kiosk.
I reached under the back of my shirt, where my gun was stashed against my back, and clicked off the safety, anyway. My loft might not be in the most public locale, but there is a nightclub beneath it, which makes it sort of an odd place to assassinate someone, but no less odd than a brightly lit parking lot swarming with people.
Better safe than dead.
“So you two have met,” I said. “That’s nice.”
“Alex was just telling me about your performance this afternoon.”
“Vintage work,” Alex said.
“Thank you,” I said. “Fiona? A word?” Fiona slid off the hood of the Charger and I took her by the arm and guided her a few steps away.
I smiled.
It was the only way I could keep from screaming.
“Care to explain?”
“He was trying to break into your car to leave you a message,” she said. “I offered to sit with him instead and we’d wait for you together.”
“That makes perfect sense,” I said.
“He’s off the clock, Michael.”
“A guy like him is never off the clock,” I said.
“Anyway,” Fiona said, “I explained to him that we didn’t appreciate his meddling in our business with Gennaro. It’s not his place, professionally, to get between you and your ability to make a living. I think he respected my honesty. Of course, I had a gun pointed at his midsection at the time.” She licked her Popsicle. “But he was even kind enough to purchase me this lovely frozen treat afterward. He’s been very polite.”
“I’m happy to hear you’ve bonded,” I said.
“He’s very friendly.”
“He threatened to kill Nate today,” I said.
Fiona considered this. “No one is the ideal,” she said. “And anyway, I made him put all of his guns in your trunk. He’s an unarmed man now.”
“How did you manage that?” I said and dangled my keys in front of her.
“I have my own set now,” she said.
“Since when?”
“You have your secrets,” she said, “I have mine.”
We stepped back over to the car, and Fi sat back down on the hood next to Alex.
“Where’s Spock?” Alex said.
“Pardon me?”
“Well,” he said, “you’re the Captain Kirk here, right? And
my new friend must be Bones. Where is Spock? Big guy? Drinks a lot? Lost his dog this morning? Because I can only assume that your brother-Slade, is that right? — is not the center of logic in your operation. More like one of those guys in red who beams down and dies first.”
“You’d be surprised,” I said.
Alex shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe. I’m surprised you’re in the extortion business now, so there’s that.”
“You do what you have to do,” I said. “We all have to eat. Luckily, I happen to like what I do, just like you.”
“You like to kill women and children now, too?”
“That’s my job,” Fiona said. “Michael doesn’t have the stomach for it.”
Alex took that in. “Oh, I doubt that,” he said after a time. “There are children in some developing nations who run screaming when they see a pair of sunglasses and a nice smile.”
“What are we doing here?” I said.
“Three adults having a conversation,” Alex said.
“Your boss know you’re here?”
“He’s not my boss,” Alex said. “Just a consulting job. Something to pass the time. Keep my friends employed. Like I said. I found myself in Miami and needed some work.”
“You just found yourself here?”
“Well, no,” he said. “I came here to kill you. Brought my whole team.”
Fiona nodded at me. “See, Michael, I told you he was polite.”
“Who sent you?” I said.
“Who didn’t? There are open contracts on you all across the world. I figured I’d claim them all.”
“And yet here I am.”
“We could have taken you out a dozen times,” he said. “You don’t exactly put yourself in the best company. Cut-rate arms dealers. Bank robbers. Forgers. Russians. That whack job Larry. Not exactly the Dirty Dozen.”
“You know Larry?” I said.
“I did some work with him in Kosovo,” Alex said.
“Was this before or after he was dead?”
“After,” he said. “But he’s one who’s done it right. Sticks by his principles. Makes a good living. You, you’re not even using your skills anymore. Just a petty crook half the time. And this business with the Ottones. The Michael Westen I heard about all these years would have put Dinino down for what he’s doing with that girl, wouldn’t have even bothered to extort from him. It’s disgraceful, if you want my opinion, but like you said, we all have to eat.”
