kill someone to save your life, you kill them. But if you kill someone because it's easier than negotiating, you're no better than a dog that bites you just because it doesn't like your smell. It might be in your nature, but it doesn't make it the right thing to do. 'Still,' I said, 'if I'm going to do whatever this is, I'd like to know that no one is going to be firing Scud missiles at my car.'
'When did that ever happen?'
'Chechnya,' I said. 'After you broke up with the goat stew woman.'
Sam made a noise that was somewhere in between a grunt and a sigh, which is about as close as Sam gets to true emotional response. 'It's an easy job,' Sam said, 'I promise.'
'You have no idea what the job is, do you?'
'I have a general outline,' Sam said. 'Like I said before: damsel in distress. That sort of thing. Besides, you owe me. I found out about your little party at the Hotel Oro.'
'I was having lunch with my mother,' I said. 'It was Fiona's party.'
'Kinky,' Sam said, and then he broke down the particulars: An anonymous tip indicated that a courier would be arriving with a cache of assault rifles and ammunition-which was true-to be sold to certain Saudi nationals staying at the hotel. 'The thing is, Mikey,' he said, taking a swig from each of his five empty bottles, gathering up just enough backwash for a decent mouthful, 'the caller had names. Big no-fly names. Fifteen different guys named Mohammed and Abdullah. They were already cleaning out cells at Gitmo. Dick Cheney was going to fly down and interrogate them himself, do a little water boarding…'
I put a hand up. 'I get it,' I said. 'Crazed fundamentalists.' I grabbed up the five bottles and put them on the ground, lest my nausea from watching him drinking his own spit get the best of me. 'Continue.'
'Right,' he said. He stared at the bottles a little mournfully until I literally snapped my fingers in front of his face to break the trance. 'Well, anyway, they had the hotel scoped for those guys, but had no idea who Fiona was, only that they were looking for a woman carrying a bunch of heat.'
'What about the crazed fundamentalists?'
'The block of rooms they'd booked was occupied by a sect of Elderhostel.'
'Elderhostel?' I said. I flipped the name through my mind and nothing came flashing up. I hadn't been out of proper intelligence so long that an entire sect would have risen up without my knowledge, had I?
'Very dangerous group.' Sam pulled out his wallet and rummaged through it for a moment, finally coming up with a glossy piece of paper he'd folded too many times. 'This is how they recruit,' he said, handing it to me. 'Sophisticated bastards.'
I unfolded the paper and learned that once I turn fifty-five, I'll be eligible to travel the world with 160,000 other active seniors in a continuing quest to educate themselves about the world via extraordinary learning adventures. 'Who has access to the hotel's computer system?' I said.
'You'd have to get a subpoena for that information.' Sam paused, which I took to mean he was going to let me process how clever it was that he knew I'd ask that, then that he expected me to ask him to do me a favor and try to find the information out in whatever way he could, since I clearly thought this was now something larger than Fiona, that it probably involved me and that someone was just using Fiona as a message to me, and then that he'd stun me with a reply on the subject that was abject in its thoroughness and that I would then thank him profusely for thinking of all the possible intangibles before I could even formulate a question.
So, instead, I just stared at him and waited. For a few minutes we actually sat there silently, until Sam finally got the hint that I wasn't going to bite and just opted to give me what I wanted to hear.
'They've got an eight hundred number that routes to a call center in Nebraska,' he said. 'They've got twenty- five in-house reservation clerks, another twenty-five front desk employees, then there're about fifty bellboys, half of whom have a record of some and-petty stuff, mostly, though there's a guy parking cars who's actually got a pretty nice book running right now, even takes bets on Japanese Premier League soccer, who did a year for running a book I frequented a few years ago, which seems excessive, but that's just me, though it looks like he lied on his employment application and said he spent the last year studying abroad-and then there're the bartenders, cocktail and restaurant staff, too, and then the whole executive branch and probably a few corporate people who, with just a few keystrokes, could find out anything they wanted about anyone staying at the hotel.'
'Good customer service,' I said. If you ever want to start stealing identities for a living but have an aversion to sifting through trash or aren't especially good at hacking into personal computers, get a job at a hotel. People on vacation are stupid. They trust everyone with a name tag. Walk up to a person sitting poolside and ask them to confirm their room number by giving you the last four digits of their social security number and most likely they'll give you all nine, because everyone recites the entire number in order to get to those four numbers. Barring that, come by the next time and ask for the first five numbers. Ask them for a special PIN number for the hotel voice mail, and you'll likely get their ATM PIN, too. Ask them to surrender their passport, give a vial of blood and a cup of urine and, if you asked nicely and promised them a robe and a mint, you're unlikely to get any sort of resistance whatsoever.
And if you don't want to get an actual job, just get a name tag.
'Three hundred,' Sam said.
'Three hundred?'
'That's how many people-give or take-have access to the system,' Sam said.
Three hundred people, but only one had a reason to set up Fiona, but not enough reason to actually give out her name or her description. Three hundred people who might have had access to anyone dumb enough to give up their information and change it to the names of known terrorists, but only one who'd actually know those names. Three hundred people and only one who might reasonably want to send me a message by using Fiona without getting her killed in the process, making it all so obvious that only someone completely untrained and unknown would walk into it.
'Who owns the hotel?' I asked.
'Shareholders,' he said, but he said it in the same way he told me I'd need to get a subpoena.
'Are we going to do this again,' I said, 'or are you just going to jump right to the part where I realize who is currently in Miami that might want to kill me?'
'It's owned primarily by an Eastern European conglomerate,' Sam said.
'That's not terribly specific,' I said. 'If I have to boil down who might want to send me a message to half of a continent, I'll be dead before you're able to flag down the waitress again.'
'I saw a lot of Russian names,' Sam said. 'Wouldn't it be nice if they could just forgive and forget? We won, you lost, not too many people died in the process, sit down, have a drink of vodka, put on a pair of Levi's, call it a game.'
'Tell that to Putin,' I said.
'Putin,' Sam said. He spit the Russian president's name out like it hurt. 'I ever tell you what a crap shot he was?'
'No less than a hundred times,' I said. The fact was the former Soviet Union was one of my main theaters of operation. The other fact is that apart from Cubans, the majority of organized crime in and around Miami belongs to the Russians. A few years ago they made a strategic alliance with the Colombian drug cartels, the result being that the Colombians supply the product, the Russians supply the money and the muscle. Along the way, just like the good little capitalists they've become, they've bought into real estate, gobbling up shopping centers, hotels, nightclubs, entire neighborhoods. You move your money around enough, build legit businesses to shelter and protect it, invest in real estate, line the pockets of county commissioners, make donations to congressional campaigns, maybe drop a grand to the ACLU and the SPCA, too, and people tend to forget that it all started with cocaine, and heroin and all they see is the gentrification your money provides.
'I don't know the veracity of this,' Sam said, 'because you understand the boys were a little embarrassed that they kicked in a bunch of doors and pistol-whipped a few seniors, but no one in the hotel's management put up any stink. Repaired the doors, fixed things right back up and that was that. Even gave a few of the agents vouchers for free massages.'
'This doesn't scan,' I said. Fiona gets contacted for a gun buy and it turns out it's a sting, but no one gets stung? Hundred different people they could have gone through, big-timers, and they pick Fi? And just let her walk. And then the specific names of terrorists.
One of the first things you learn about being a spy is that there is no chaos. Everything that appears random and disorganized but ultimately disastrous is likely to have a deep and intricate network of connective lines holding
