Tod Goldberg - The Bad Beat

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.

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…