by Tod Goldberg
“We’ve invited the local stations and reporters, but I’m afraid what we do here in the consulate is not as exciting as what happens on South Beach.”
“A shame,” I said. “This would be good for Moldova. Particularly in light of your troubled election situation back home, don’t you think?”
Reva considered what I said. “I could make another round of calls, yes?”
“It couldn’t hurt,” I said. “Get your name in the paper back home, perhaps, too.”
“I make my home here now,” she said. “Much warmer than Moldova. I’ve learned that winter isn’t something I need, yes?”
“I agree,” I said. “And the sun suits your skin. And your eyes.”
I let that hang there for a moment.
“I should tell you I’m seeing someone,” she said. She fingered the diamond necklace around her neck.
“That’s good for him. You must make him very happy. Does he let you speak on the phone?”
“No one tells me what I can do,” Reva said.
“I’m happy to hear that. Perhaps then I could call you?” I said. “We could talk about less formal things than money and science.”
Reva didn’t answer right away. Probably because she actually loved the man who gave her that lovely necklace. And probably because she wasn’t used to someone being as direct as I was being. Or maybe she just liked my Hugo Boss suit. “There is nothing wrong with talking, yes?”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing right now?”
Reva took out a pen and wrote her phone number on the back of her business card. Her official title was director of international media affairs. A good job title. One she would probably lose for all of this.
She excused herself for a moment and came back with a stack of papers for me to fill out. The first was just the names of those who’d be attending the event that evening and the rest were more formal documents, namely those the Treasury Department would want to see when their full investigation began.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I should have my CFO handle all of this. I am good with science but lousy with tax ID numbers.”
“That is not a problem,” Reva said. “Bring them back tonight.”
“You should deposit the check, however,” I said. “That would be an expensive piece of paper to lose track of.”
“Oh, we will, certainly,” she said. “I will take it to the bank personally and immediately draw a check for Mr. Drubich’s trust.”
It was certain, then, that she’d lose her job.
“Reva,” I said, “have you ever thought of working somewhere other than the consulate?”
“Are you offering me a position with InterMacron?”
“No, no,” I said. “No business and pleasure. But you should see about other opportunities. You’re better than this job.”
Her hand went up to her throat again, to that necklace, which made me wonder if maybe the man who gave her the diamond also gave her the job.
“Can I tell you a secret?”
“Of course,” I said.
She got up then and closed the door to the conference room and then sat back down and scooted her chair closer to mine, so that she was only inches from me.
“I have always wanted to model,” she said. “Do you think I could model?”
And suddenly Reva Lohr, the director of international media affairs for a foreign government, was just like every other woman in Miami. Every woman who wasn’t Fiona, at least.
“You could be on runways in Milan tomorrow,” I said.
“My boyfriend, he says, ‘You are professional, why do you want to be a walking doll?’ And I say, ‘I want to be admired, just like anyone.’ And clothes, I could make clothes, too. Be a model who designs. And I would also like to be on a reality show. The one with Mr. Trump. I saw him once at a restaurant here. So smart, that man.”
I smiled at Reva. It hurt to do so. It made me wonder how Sam did it on a daily basis just for drinks and chicken wings. I decided to go all in.
“Don is a personal friend. I’ll see what I can do.” I stood then and so did Reva. “One other thing, if you don’t mind,” I said. “Would it be possible to get a private room downstairs to prep our surprise prior to the event?”
“Of course,” she said. “Yes, yes, of course. We have a salon you could use. Just tell the security guards when you arrive and they will show you to it. And I’d be happy to provide any kind of, how do you say, concierge service you might need.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” I said. I took Reva’s hand in mine and raised it to my lips and kissed it lightly. “It was my pleasure to meet you today. I feel it was fated.”
When I made it back to the Navigator a few minutes later with an envelope filled with paperwork that I would need Barry to forge, Sam had an earplug in and was writing notes furiously on a pad.
“You got something on the bug?” I said.
“Yeah, Mikey, it’s alive in that place right now,” he said. “I now have a complete recipe for what are supposedly the best cream-cheese-and-bacon sandwiches the Red Hat club of Coral Gables has ever had. You fare any better?”
“We’ll have our own parking space,” I said. “And you’re going to get to hand-deliver a huge replica check to Yuri Drubich.”
“I may wear Kevlar tonight,” he said.
“Might be a good idea.”
As we pulled away, I took out my phone and made a call to Monty. “It’s set up for tonight,” I said.
“Excellent,” he said. “And will Mr. Grayson be taking Mr. McGregor up on his offers?”
“Number ten for sure,” I said. “The rest, I can’t tell you.”
There was silence on the line for a moment and then Monty said, “It’s a very generous offer. He would be silly not to take it.”
“He’s not like you and he’s not like me,” I said. “Though I understand he does appreciate a nice hot stone massage.” Not a sound escaped from Monty, so I said, “Do you have an account where Yuri’s money can be safely wired?”
“Yes,” he said after a while. “You will be doing this or will Barry?”
“Barry,” I said.
“Iceland is fine with him?”
“Indeed,” I said and he gave me the information.
“This account will be locked by tomorrow at six a.m.,” Monty said. “And I will be gone shortly thereafter. I need all of Mr. Grayson’s answers well before that time.”
“You’ll have them,” I said.
“And Mr. Westen? Mr. McGregor instructed me that he’d prefer cash for the debts owed by your brother.”
“Tell him to call me, then,” I said and hung up.
I made one last call, this one to Odessa, which I put on speaker. “Mr. Drubich, please,” I said to the woman who answered.
“There is no one by that name here,” she said.
“Tell him it’s Big Lumpy’s people and make it fast, honey,” I said. Instead of hanging up on me, the woman put me on hold and for the next few minutes I was serenaded by Neil Diamond welcoming me to America. Just when I was thinking that the irony of his Muzak system would be forever lost on Yuri, he picked up the line.
“You have two minutes,” he said, so I did the only reasonable thing and hung up.
“Short conversation,” Sam said.
“He’ll call me back,” I said.
“I thought I was Big Lumpy now,” Sam said.
“You are,” I said, “physically.” Sure enough, my phone began to ring. “I just thought I’d cover the intimidationby-phone angle, but if it means that much to you, go right ahead.”
“Nah, Mikey,” he said. “You know I like to hear you outsmart people until they get so frustrated they order out hit squads. It’s one of my small pleasures in life these days.”
I answered the phone by saying, “I’m sorry. We must have had a bad connection. I couldn’t make out what you said before.”
“I know your organization,” Yuri said. “I know your reputation and it m
eans nothing to me. Do you understand that?”
“That’s great,” I said. “I have the technology that you want and I have the boy and I have his father. Do you understand that?”
“I want the boy dead,” he said.
“Well, then, you’re going to be out a bunch of money for nothing, because I won’t let you kill him. What I am happy to do, however, is get you some death certificates for both of them if it would help you with your investors. I’ve got the information you need, all of the specs you’ve asked for and more. You’ll be running bandwidth over the wind in three months. Bedouins will think you’re some kind of god. They’ll probably erect statues of you all over Chad. But you’re not killing a kid. I just won’t let that happen. Now he’ll apologize, and you’ll get to meet his crazy father, too, but I’m not having you chopping off his head just because he’s smarter than you. You want to pretend to kill him, I have the ability to make that happen.”
Sam looked at me like I was nuts, and on the other end of the line, Yuri Drubich must have thought the same.
“What is the price of the technology?” Yuri said finally.
“Six million, American.”
“That is insane without a working model,” he said.
“Mr. Drubich, you’re a smart person, so I’m going to make this simple for you. If there were a working model, you wouldn’t have to pay six million dollars for this information. You’d be able to drive out to some wind farm and see it with your own beady eyes and then the technology would be worthless. You don’t trust my information, I say God bless you and have a great day and I’m sorry a nineteen-year-old boy took you to school. You do trust me, we’ll make this happen tonight.”
“Tonight,” he said, “is no good.”
“Tonight is all you have,” I said. “Tomorrow I could be dead. I’m a sick man. Maybe you heard.”
“Maybe you heard that your errand girl broke my wrist,” he said. “I spend all morning at hospital and tonight I have… it doesn’t matter. Tonight is no good.”
“Seven thirty at the Moldovan Consulate. The salon beside the ballroom. Wear something nice,” I said and then rolled down the window in the Navigator and threw the phone into the street, where it was promptly run over. If Yuri was trying to run a trace so he could activate his hit squad, it would be a bit more difficult with the phone in a million little pieces.
“How you planning on getting those death certificates?” Sam asked.
“I thought we’d call your friend Marci,” I said.
“You ready to drive down that road?” Sam asked.
“I think I can handle her,” I said.
“What about Fiona?”
“It will just be dinner,” I said.
“Mikey, I’ve had dinner with her. It’s a full-contact sport. Tore my meniscus last time.”
“I’ll brace myself,” I said.
Sam shook his head, but made the call. When I heard that high-pitched squeal again, I thought once more about how much easier life was when I was just a spy.
15
You spend your entire life pretending to be someone else and it’s sometimes hard to remember exactly who you are. You take on false identities, change your past, your future, your present, and end up telling a series of lies that compound into other lies, until you’re defined by your ability to keep all of your fictions straight long enough to get out of whatever horrible situation you’re in. It’s both a survival technique and the bread and butter of being a covert operative: Being a spy means being a professional liar with a gun, over and over and over again.
So you put on your costumes.
You get your backstory in order.
You examine your exit strategies, you ponder collateral damage and you wonder: If things go wrong, will anyone actually know who I really am? Will anyone pick up my body. It is a life made of repetition, but it is a life that you choose and that chooses you.
And if one day you pick up a telephone in a foreign country hoping to broker a deal and find out you’ve been burned, that all of your backup is gone, that you’re still a spy, because that’s who you are, but that you don’t have anyone to spy for, and then for the next few years you find out that everything you thought about being a spy might be entirely wrong, that it’s all one elaborate game… what do you do? What do you do with your skills?
Sometimes you help people with their problems.
Sometimes you unwind the conspiracies surrounding your life, only to find out that the more you unwind, the darker and more complex the forces at work in your life are, that your burn notice isn’t just an unkind way of saying you’re fired, but a way of saying you now work for a new master altogether.
And then sometimes, well, you find out that you’re going to get to put on a tuxedo and play James Bond.
In this case, you and four other people.
And Sugar.
“I don’t see why I don’t get to rock the penguin,” Sugar said. We were all in my loft getting dressed for the evening, and since Sugar would be waiting in the car, Fiona, who was in charge of acquiring the black-tie attire for our job, apparently didn’t think he needed to be dressed as nicely as the rest of us, since she provided him with only a chauffeur’s hat.
“Because I couldn’t find a tuxedo made of nylon,” Fiona said. “I didn’t want you to be uncomfortable.”
“You won’t be seen, Sugar,” I said. “But if you were to be, if things go so wrong that you need to escape, you don’t want to be wearing something easily identifiable. You just want to look like you.”
Sugar tried to make sense of that. “So what you’re saying is, you want me to look like I’m maybe a guy who stole a Navigator, not a guy taking part in some high-intrigue espionage shit?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Cool,” Sugar said. “I’m like undercover by being exactly who I am.”
“Right,” I said.
Sugar gave me a fist bump. “I’m with it.”
On the other side of the room, Sam was attempting to tie Brent’s bow tie and was failing mightily, so Fiona went over to help. It looked positively domestic… apart from the fact that Barry was only a few feet away, busily forging the documents we’d need to give back to my girlfriend Reva.
“How’s it coming, Barry?”
“Anytime I get to use information stolen from Halliburton, I view that as a win,” he said.
“Are you ready to be Henry?”
Barry looked over at Brent and then back at me. “He’s a nice kid, Mike,” Barry said. “He told me about his dad. It’s a sad story.” He lowered his voice. “But he really doesn’t want the money?”
“Nope,” I said. “Just wants his father’s debts paid and he’ll take the education. Everything else is off the table for him. So we’ll move the money to his account and there it will stay.”
“So… ”
“The government will get the money,” I said. “That would be my guess. They’ll seize it eventually if this all goes as planned.”
“Seems like a waste.”
“He made his choice,” I said. “He wants to earn it himself. He’ll get the chance.”
“Just so we’re clear,” Barry said, “if some of that money were to be diverted to, say, accounts of a third party, would you have any issues?”
“I’d be discreet.”
“I’m always discreet.”
“And then I’d fortify your home against shoulder-launched rockets,” I said. “Get some Cipro, too, in case you accidentally ingest anthrax. You know how the Russians love to poison people.”
There was a knock at my front door then. I wasn’t expecting anyone, what with Big Lumpy dead, and solicitors generally avoided my neighborhood.
“You expecting someone, Mikey?” Sam said.
“No,” I said.
There was another knock, this time harder. I looked out the window and could only see that there were two men dressed all in black on the landing holding something long and white. I couldn’t tell what
it was from the angle of the window and from the darkness. Usually, ninjas tend to dress just like normal people, but maybe these two didn’t get the memo about the modernization. Or maybe they were mimes. Either way, I wasn’t going to take any risks.
“Brent,” I said, “get upstairs. Fiona, go with him.”
I went beneath my sink and pulled out three guns, for me, Sam, and Barry, who handled his gun like it was made of kryptonite and he had recently begun wearing red capes.
“What about me, boss?” Sugar said.
“If they get past us,” I said, “I want you to act as a human shield.”
There was another pound on the door, and before the person was even finished knocking, I’d yanked the door open and pushed the muzzle of my gun into the forehead of…
“Is that a vampire?” Sam asked.
… Brent’s Goth pal King Thomas, who, after he realized there was a gun pressed to his head, began screaming, as did his friend, but his friend managed to scream and run at the same time, dropping his end of a very large fake check in his wake.
“Calm down,” I said to Thomas. “I’m not going to shoot you.”
“Then why do you have a gun pointed at my head?” It was a good question. I put my gun down and picked up the other side of the check so it wouldn’t get dirty on the ground.
“I take it Brent asked you to make this?”
Thomas nodded. “Is he okay?”
“He’s not here,” I said.
“But he said he was going to be here,” Thomas said.
I stepped out on the landing and gazed down toward the street. Thomas’ friend was nowhere to be found. That or he’d already turned back into a bat. “Thomas,” I said, “it’s not safe here. Brent will get in contact with you tomorrow. Until then, you don’t know where he is and you haven’t seen him in days. Do you understand?”
Thomas nodded.
“And tell your friend the same thing, okay?” I took a look at the check. It was very well done. “Nice work here, Thomas,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
“I could have done more if I had more time,” he said. “It folds so that you can put it in a briefcase. That was my idea. I’m good with thinking ahead about how someone might, you know, carry things in such a way as to conceal them.”
