It used to be that the only way you could get reliable information on someone was by tapping his phone. Get a wire on someone’s line and you could find out the most intimate details of his life. But now everyone uses e-mail. From a legal standpoint, it’s more difficult to tap into someone’s e-mail account than it is to get a wiretap on his phone.
From an illegal standpoint, it’s also harder.
If you want to tap a phone, there are stores in the mall that will sell you everything you need. What used to be the most clandestine technology is now sold as a way of watching your children. For less than two hundred dollars, you can get the RDRX-99, a line-activated digital recorder that will monitor up to five different phone lines at once for thirty-four hours at a time, and will e-mail you reports on the time and date of phone calls. If you don’t want to break into someone’s home to install the device in his wall jack, you can always access his outdoor box and place your device there. It requires the same technical precision required to set up a DVD player. Plug A into B and listen.
But if you want to intercept someone’s e-mail or track his movements online, it’s usually far more complicated.
In a high-level break-in, you’d want to redirect the line of information by locating transmission points-from delivery to reception-and constantly adapt the signal. This means you’d need a very large antenna, expert digital technology that could adjust radio waves and diagnose algorithms, and finally an expert who could decipher it all into a dummy location before letting it through to the actual delivery point, so that the person being tracked wouldn’t know anything ill was happening.
If you have an office in Langley or Qatar or even in the Green Zone in Baghdad, you can accomplish this in about an hour’s time at a tax-payer cost of about three hundred thousand-dollar staplers.
Or, if you happen to be one wall away from your target, and that target isn’t exactly a technical wizard, you can just jam the prevalent Wi-Fi signal using a modified 5.8 GHz cordless telephone, a length of speaker wire and your index finger, and then divert the person you’re interested in to your network, which in this case was a powerful Wi-Fi router Sam purchased for the grand total of $77.25 at Staples.
And the result?
“Mikey, the perversion of some people is astounding,” Sam said. We were sitting in the Aground Bar at the Southern Cross Yacht Club in Coconut Grove, from where the race would launch in the morning. I’d brought Gennaro over in the Charger after Nate dropped us off, and spent the majority of the ride telling him everything would be fine, that half of his problems were solved.
Not that I actually believed everything was going to be fine just yet, but the odds had improved and I’m an optimist.
Out the window I could see Gennaro and his team working on their yacht. They were due to launch in the bay within the hour to test out the conditions and dry run out into the open sea for several hours in preparation for the race.
Sam had a file open in front of him and was leafing through several sheets of paper.
“What did Dinino have?” I said.
“Well, I’m not specifically talking about Dinino. I had to wait around quite a while until he came back to his room, so I did recon on other folks that seemed suspect, according to, uh, some of their in-room habits.”
“I’m shocked,” I said.
“I’m just saying,” Sam said, “that there’s no good reason to ever be searching for a blow-up doll of Alaska’s governor. I’m all for privacy, but there have to be limits.”
He handed a page over to me. There, in fact, was a blow-up doll of Alaska’s governor. It was very lifelike.
“Clearly.”
A group of men wearing white slacks and navy blue sport coats with gold buttons and lovely anchors stitched over their breast pockets came and sat at the table beside ours. They regarded Sam and me like we’d just crawled out of a gutter.
“How you fellas doing?” Sam raised his beer at the men, but they didn’t respond. “Here for the big race, or do you just love the maritime?”
Nothing.
“Well, nice joint you have here. Any of you guys got any pull with the jukebox? Maybe replace Artie Shaw with something from the last 100 years?”
Nothing.
“All right, then,” Sam said, and tipped his beer their direction again. “Avast and Ahoy!”
The Aground normally catered to a clientele of South Florida’s richest men, as the Southern Cross Yacht Club didn’t admit women into the building, much less the bar, until 1957, and tradition still lingered. They were still largely sexually segregated, though with much charm and aplomb and contemptible politeness, naturally, as the women had a tearoom downstairs where skirts were always required, as if it were still 1957.
And they were certainly socially and economically segregated, too, which was clear when the men got up and moved to another table as one, never once bothering to speak. Maybe it was because the center of my forehead looked like a blood-filled Easter egg. Or maybe it was because we were both in strict violation of the dress code posted above the front door that instructed all patrons in the bar to be in slacks and a coat after four p.m.
“That was subtle,” I said.
“Blue bloods have a low tolerance for me.” Sam again raised his beer toward the men once they settled at another table. “What can I say? I guess not everyone likes me.” He slid the rest of the file my way. “Anyway,” he said, “Dinino is our guy. He got back to the hotel and within five minutes he was up viewing the site. He sent three e-mails off to the same dummy g-mail address that my buddy Walt routed to Corsica, which is where the person uploading the video is located. How’s your Italian?”
“Not bad,” I said. I read the e-mails. One was asking when the next video would be uploaded, the second asked for confirmation that proper payment had been received and the third was informing the person in Corsica that their services would no longer be needed after tomorrow. “You get any more of his e-mails?”
“I got in and pulled out everything he’s received and sent in the last two weeks,” Sam said. “It’s all there. You might want to skip to the pictures I printed out. Worth a couple million words, probably several million dollars.”
The first photo was of Dinino with a girl of about sixteen. Maybe seventeen. But not any older. They were picking fruit from an open-air market. Looked like Florence.
“Illegitimate daughter?” I said. It was really more of a hope than a true estimation.
“Keep looking,” Sam said.
The next series of photos was of Dinino and the girl walking the grounds of the Palazzo Pitti’s Boboli Gardens. I flipped through them like the frames of an old cartoon. His hand was in the center of her back and then lower and lower and lower as the photos progressed. The last photo was of them kissing near the entrance to the garden’s amphitheater.
“That’s not how you kiss your daughter,” I said. I tucked the photos back into the file. “Who is she?”
“Jimenez says she’s a summer intern in the Ottone offices in Florence,” Sam said. “There’s a good chance she’s a plant.”
“This Jimenez fellow is full of great news,” I said. “Who planted her?”
“I can tell you who didn’t,” Sam said.
“Please don’t say Bonaventura.”
“Okay.”
Sam took a sip from his beer.
I looked outside. I could make out Gennaro motioning to his crew, stalking along the edge of his boat, giving directions. For whatever it was worth, it looked like he had his mind somewhere else for the first time. I’d removed the fix behind him, as best as I could tell, but his wife and daughter were still out on the sea with nothing stopping their imminent demise.
The blue bloods did their blue-blood thing, which as far as I could tell was to drink Macallan 30 year, neat.
I pondered the bull’s-eye on my back from my day’s activities with Christopher Bonaventura. Regardless of Dinino’s involvement, it was a needed step.
It just never got easier.
“All right,” I said. “Tell me.”
“It isn’t Bonaventura,” he said.
“Stunned,” I said.
“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.”