“Oh, right, right,” Sam said. He sat up. Rubbed at his eyes a little. Took a puff. Took a swallow. Like he didn’t realize the high likelihood of a Coast Guard gunship waiting for me if I strayed too far from Miami. Or just the gun. “Well, if it turns out we can’t solve Gene’s problem before the race, I’ll make the trip, Mikey.” He looked at Gennaro, who, I could tell, didn’t really like being called Gene in the least. “It’s going to be no problem, Genie. Mike and I will solve this intricate riddle.”
The riddle was a significant one. Whoever had set up the surveillance on Maria and Liz knew they could ask for a million dollars, or five million dollars, or a bag of diamonds, and the Ottone family would have no problem supplying the demand. Money would mean nothing to them. When Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped by Barry Keenan and his hapless pals, it wasn’t because Keenan loved “My Way.” He was broke and needed money to live on. In Colombia, where kidnapping is the lone growth industry in a sagging economy, where they could practically put up Chamber of Commerce billboards that say MORE THAN THREE THOUSAND RANSOM KIDNAPPINGS THIS YEAR! and no one would blush, since it’s the best investment opportunity in the country.
Most people don’t just stumble into an abduction. If you kidnap someone, you usually have to be willing to kill that person, and if you’re willing to kill someone-in this case, a woman and a child-that means you’re desperate. Barry Keenan wasn’t desperate, he was stupid, and when you’re stupid, you involve more stupid people in your employ and eventually someone breaks, their morality gets the better of them, and the plot all falls apart, as it did with Sinatra Jr. The Colombians and Mexicans are desperate and engaged; a dangerous combination, but one that takes savvy. The Colombian model involves in-depth knowledge of the people you’re pressuring, which made Gennaro’s issue all the more curious. Whoever was on the boat, whoever had contacted Gennaro, whoever needed him to lose, knew he couldn’t go to the authorities, knew somewhere, somehow, that Gennaro had dirt on him that could get his wife and child and himself killed without any secondary exertion at all.
Intimate.
Elegant.
Flawless.
“This is going to be a costly mission,” Sam said, as if he’d been listening in to my thought process, though more likely he was just thinking about how much he was enjoying the fruits of the mission thus far and wouldn’t mind daily update meetings in the suite. “With the kind of intel we’ll be reconning, this will require an absolute DEF-CON Level X-Ray Attachment, right, Mikey?”
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that Sam used to be an actual Navy