Tod Goldberg - The End Game

“I’m going to be controlling the flow of information,” I said.

Most of the time, spy work isn’t about uncovering what’s hidden, but interpreting what is in plain sight. The majority of intelligence information isn’t gleaned from men in frogman suits breaking into underwater lairs, but from men in suits reading blogs, newspapers, open-source documents like financial reports, and missives from the men and women stationed in embassies around the world. What might be useless data to you becomes intelligence by virtue of the person reading it.

Expertise creates usable intelligence.

That means you need to know how to find intelligence that doesn’t actually exist, which Sam was doing. And sometimes you need to create intelligence, which is what I was doing going with Gennaro to Christopher Bonaventura’s vacation home.

And why? First, I called and asked my brother Nate to come, too.

“What’s my take on this?” Nate asked.

“Karma,” I said.

“You can’t eat karma,” Nate said. “I can’t tell the power company that the karma is in the mail.”

I was pretty sure Nate was actually stealing his electricity, but decided to let that fact go. “I’m just asking you to go somewhere and stand silently by my side,” I said. I’d tell him later that somewhere meant “a mafioso’s compound.” If I told him ahead of time, he’d be far too willing to help.

“Do I get to carry?”

“Yes,” I said. The truth was that he had to be carrying a gun. If he wasn’t, it just wouldn’t look right for what I was planning.

“Loaded?”

“Loaded. Safety off. You can even use one of my silencers if you like. All I ask is that you put on a suit, that you do what I tell you and that you don’t speak. Not a single word.”

“Do you have a color preference on the suit, Mr. Westen?”

The nice thing about Nate, in situations like this, is that he’s actually pretty handy with a gun and can help out if things get really difficult. He can punch. He can bite. He can kick people in the groin. He has all the moves, if not any of the actual skill or precision. And I can trust him. The bad thing about Nate, in situations like this, is that he’s still Nate.

“Whatever you want, Nate,” I said, but then thought better of it, lest he actually wear whatever he wanted. “Anything but white. And wear a tie.” I told him to pick us up from the Setai in two hours.

“I think you’re forgetting something.”

It was true. I was forgetting lots of things. Forgetting the time when we were kids and he thought it would be funny to set the fire station on fire. Forgetting the time he threw a phone book at my head. Forgetting the times I’ve done jobs for him that invariably involved me nearly getting killed by Russian crime syndicates.

“Why don’t you enlighten me,” I said.

“A thank-you would be nice,” he said.

Ma.

“Oh, right, sorry, Nate,” I said. “I owe you for yesterday.”

“And the last decade or so.”

“I appreciate it,” I said.

“Good. Your half of the flowers was fifty dollars. Times that by ten years and I’ll call it even for standing around silently for you today,” he said, and hung up.

I apprised Nate of the situation at hand while he drove his limo from the hotel to Key Biscayne. I was going to let Christopher Bonaventura know that Gennaro was working with us and that his sporting interests were now over.

“What’s my name?” Nate asked.

“How about Nate?” I said.

“That’s not working. If I’m going to be some henchman, I need a henchman name. Three-Finger Frank or something.”

“You understand that Mafia guys get their names from their actions or physical descriptions, right? It’s not some arbitrary name to scare people.”

“Yeah?”

“So if you want me to call yourself Three-Finger Frank,” I said, “you’re going to need to lose some fingers.”

Nate went silent. I looked in the rearview mirror to see how Gennaro was handling this. He looked stricken.

“This is going to work out fine, Gennaro,” I said. “Just do what I say and we’ll have one problem eliminated.”

“You don’t know Christopher,” Gennaro said.

“I know people much worse than him,” I said. Gennaro shook his head slightly, like he was trying to move things around in it until they made sense again.

My plan was simple, which was perhaps why Gennaro seemed so grave: tell Bonaventura that Gennaro was now in my pocket and that if he had any side business with him, aware or otherwise, it would have to come through me, too. Three things could come from this:

1. Bonaventura would agree and then try to have me killed.

2. Bonaventura would disagree and then try to have me killed.

3. Bonaventura would ask to go into business with me, I’d agree, and then he’d probably try to have me killed.

What I knew without a doubt, however, was that he wouldn’t kill me right where I stood, particularly not with Gennaro standing beside me. And by the time he did decide to kill me, we’d have figured out the root system here, which likely would mean that Christopher Bonaventura would have larger problems.

“When I was in school,” Gennaro said, “Christopher protected me. Someone came at me, he dealt with them. Maybe he just feels like he’s still helping me, even if I don’t want the help.”

“This isn’t high school,” I said. “And I have to think that if Christopher is now all about the altruism, he wouldn’t have blown up that yacht yesterday.”

We were already on Key Biscayne at this point and the cars surrounding us in traffic were filled with people driving back home from work, kids getting picked up from day care, families heading off to dinner.

When you see Miami on television, it’s always bikinis and diamonds and flashy cars. It’s cops and crooks and bags of cocaine. But in real life, people actually live in Miami, raise families, work nine to five, and try to give normal life a go.

Regular people.

Regular cars.

Regular problems.

It seemed like a long time since my problems-and the problems of the people I encountered-weren’t literally life-and-death.

It was also a million miles away from Gennaro Stefania’s situation. Here was a man whose wife and child we’re kidnapped and no one knew, not even the wife and child.

“I just don’t understand any of this,” Gennaro said.

“You have any idea why your stepfather would want to see Maria dead?” I asked.

“Maria? No. No. He adores her. He adores Liz. He wants for nothing.”

“What do you think he was doing meeting with Christopher?”

Gennaro shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “They are familiar with each other, but if we were in Italy he wouldn’t be seen within a hundred miles of him. The paparazzi would devour him for it.”

There was something else. Something Gennaro didn’t know. Something, hopefully, we’d find out after Sam got done at the hotel, where he was busy putting eyes and ears on Dinino’s Internet activities.

“Maybe it’s nothing,” I said. I was trying to sound hopeful, and for a few seconds of silence, maybe it worked.

And then Nate said, “How about Slade?” as if we were still talking about the slate of imaginary names he was considering. Which, apparently, to him, we were.

“You want me to call you Slade?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“What’s right with that?”

“Look,” Nate said, “if I’m going into this, I gotta know who I am. Strong, silent, cool, I’m with that. But if I need to flex, I should have a name at the ready. What if I get captured? You want me to just blurt out my name and address and social security number?”