Regardless of attire, Dinino didn’t look in the least bit concerned, though the security in the back did indicate that he was aware enough to bring his own muscle, if indeed they were his.
“These guys look familiar?” I said to Sam, hoping maybe he’d seen them this morning.
“I dunno, Mikey. The guys guarding Bonaventura’s place looked like they’d done a lot of Green Side-type work,” Sam said. “These men look like bodybuilders.” Green Side operations typically involve locating the enemy, watching the enemy and then figuring out how to kill them without getting noticed. Green Side ops could hide in your yogurt and you wouldn’t know it until you were chewing on their heads.
It helps that Green Side ops are often covered in camouflage while crawling through a bog during the middle of the night.
I’ve always preferred a suit. But jeans are nice. A T-shirt is very functional.
When you wear jeans and a T-shirt, there’s less chance of finishing a job and finding leeches attached to your thighs, because when you’re in the real world, where there aren’t a lot of bogs or a pressing need to crawl, jeans and T-shirts train you to be inconspicuous. If you look like a spy, people are going to notice you.
Sam spotted Bonaventura’s men immediately because they were a visible deterrent with trademark training and weaponry.
Spies don’t wear tuxedos every day. They don’t order the same drinks in every city-shaken, stirred or otherwise-and don’t leave a trail of bodies in their wake.
You’re a spy because you’re good at doing the things no one wants to see, and doing it in such a way that no one notices.
Men like those watching Dinino, and the one at my mother’s house that morning, aren’t smart enough to blend in or avoid the cameras. Which means they aren’t professionals, just people who’ve been hired.
“We’re grasping at straws here,” I said. “Gennaro’s wife and daughter are trapped somewhere in the Atlantic and we need to figure out why. Sam, we need to find out which room at the hotel, other than Gennaro’s, is viewing that Web site.”
“Got it, Mikey.”
“And, Fi, I need you to find out who was driving one of Timothy Sherman’s rentals today.”
Fi exhaled dramatically. “I hope I don’t end up accidentally beating the information out of Mr. Sherman,” she said.
“Try your best,” I said.
“And where are you going to be?” Fiona asked.
When you want to avoid being ambushed, either by forces or information, the best thing to do is engage first. You might not know the level of resistance you’re apt to find, but you’ll have the advantage of nuance since you already know the logic of the enemy: They aren’t bold enough to strike you head-on, so they think they have to surprise you from the side, cloaked in cover.
“I’m going to be controlling the flow of information,” I said.
8
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.
