“You’ll be helping,” I said.
Fiona stepped back into the office then and set down a small container of bugs. One for the phone; a tracking device on the computer that would clone all of the work Junior did, as well as send cloned e-mails to a private server; and a small camera that would fit inside the spine of one of the Bibles.
“It’s on you, Fi, to put the cameras inside the books,” Sam said.
“Why, Sam, are you afraid?”
“You ever go to Sunday school, Fiona?”
“I grew up in Ireland,” Fiona said. “Maybe you heard of the place? Years of armed religious conflict?”
“Well, wonderful. Then you shouldn’t have a problem with doing things in the name of a greater good with religious icons. Me, it makes me a little nervous. My family came over on the Mayflower.” Neither Fi nor I bothered to respond to Sam. He wanted us to, so we didn’t. “So,” he said, after it became clear to all involved that we weren’t going to engage him on what had to be a lie, “I’m morally disallowed from bugging Bibles. Miles Standish runs through this blood, sister.”
“But shooting people for the last thirty years has been fine?” Fiona said.
“Hey, sweetheart, those were all in the service of this great country,” Sam said. “Or a lot of them, anyway.”
“Michael, I expect that you’ll speak for us at the pearly gates?” she said.
“I’ll do my very best,” I said.
“See, Sam? Nothing to be concerned about,” Fi said. “Oh, and here.” She handed me a sheet of paper with a bunch of numbers listed on it. “Your dirty work.”
“What’s this?”
“The license plate of the police cruiser, as well as the car number from the roof.”
“Nice.”
“I’m a professional, even when I’m saddled with a sweating Chatty Cathy,” Fiona said. “You know, I actually think Barry really did enjoy me cutting him.”
“Everyone is into something strange.” I handed the numbers to Sam. “You got someone you can check these with?”
“I’ll have to tread delicately here, Mikey. One wrong step, and these guys are on to our operation.”
“I know you’ll find just the right person,” I said. “Maybe you can use your standing as a founding father of the country to sway the right people.”
Fiona handed me a Bible. “Hold this open,” she said, and I did. She took a bottle of nail polish remover from her purse and poured about a teaspoon of the fluid down the interior spine of the book. She then shoved two fingers into the spine and gently pulled the pages from the binding-the nail polish remover had made the fine gold threading far more elastic, which is what you want to do if you’re going to hide something inside of a book instead of, say, cutting a hammer into the pages. Even people being spied on have seen movies, so they have a general idea what an amateur might do and may even look for a few telltale signs.
But what Fiona was doing was essentially the same process an antiquarian book restorer might do. Except that instead of restoring the Bible, she slid a small camera about four inches in length down the spine of the book.
Back in the Cold War-and in the 1990s, too-if you wanted to film someone, you needed to have a camera that was routed into a recorder somewhere, usually not too far from the camera itself. Any decent, paranoid person could discover these things in just a few minutes of frenzied searching. But the camera Fiona had just slipped into the book was no thicker than her thumb and was able to use motion-detection technology to record directly to a chip inside it. While we wouldn’t have remote access, we would have a fine digital recording of all Junior was doing.
Or, since I saw that Fiona had ten of these cameras, several digital movies of the life and times of Junior Gonzalez.
Fiona sealed the book back up, poked several small holes into the spine so that the camera could view the activity and then placed the book back onto the shelf.
“Good work,” I said.
“You should see what I put in your loft last week.”
“You bugged my loft?”
“You’ll never know without checking. Will you, Michael?”
I didn’t know whether to believe her or not, and fortunately I was saved by Barry’s appearance in the doorway. He’d washed his face some, but it was still a light pink color, and his clothes were covered in blood. He looked like a man who’d been strangled with a whip and beaten, essentially.
“Come on, Barry,” I said, “you’re going to help me with a secret mission.”
“I’d like to go home,” he said.
“You are home,” I said, “for now.”
“That wasn’t fake blood, Michael,” he said. “You let her cut me!”
“There is no letting,” Fiona said.
“She’s right,” I said.
“Free country,” Sam said. “It’s what we came here for.”
Barry looked like someone had just hit him in the back of the head, so I made it simple for him. “A little blood for a good cause, Barry. Namely, your life.”
“That makes sense,” Barry said. “And that it makes sense means that I have made some terrible mistakes in my life, doesn’t it?”
“You can always change,” I said. “Look at Father Eduardo.”
Barry considered this. “Where are we going?”
“I need you to get me the best money plate your money can buy,” I said.
“My money?”
“This is your problem we’re solving,” I said.
“I know a guy named Jacques,” he said. “He’s from the old school. He might not deal with you.”
“I’m sure you can be persuasive,” I said.
“I’m only saying I may need to take the lead here.”
“Like you did with Junior?”
“Similar situation, possibly,” he said, which meant to me that no matter what relationship Barry had with this Jacques, by the end of our time together, he’d understand who was really in charge, even if I didn’t make a single move.
“All right,” I said, “we’ll do it your way.”
“I’ll need some new clothes,” he said. “And is there any way we could get some lunch?”
When you’re a spy, sometimes your toughest job is keeping your informants dressed and fed. It’s not always about beautiful women, shiny cars and blowing things up.
Unfortunately.
15
Making money costs money. This is true as both a frothy maxim you might read on a poster and in reality. Each note the U.S. government prints costs four cents in simple materials, but the lead-up process is far more costly. The plates used in the production of money are hand engraved, a meticulous process that takes a substantial amount of time and dedication, but this is done for a very exacting purpose: You can re-create a computer’s etchings very easily, but it’s impossible to precisely emulate the hand of a human being. There will always be subtle differences.
So if you really want to counterfeit money, a printing system like the Latin Emperors had set up at the Ace Hotel would suffice only for the short term. You can print and press money using only computer software and a particularly detailed reproduction of an actual bill. But if you want to make money to make money, you’ll need a hand-engraved plate.
