“I wouldn’t think of it,” I said. I took Reva’s hand in mine and raised it to my lips and kissed it lightly. “It was my pleasure to meet you today. I feel it was fated.”
When I made it back to the Navigator a few minutes later with an envelope filled with paperwork that I would need Barry to forge, Sam had an earplug in and was writing notes furiously on a pad.
“You got something on the bug?” I said.
“Yeah, Mikey, it’s alive in that place right now,” he said. “I now have a complete recipe for what are supposedly the best cream-cheese-and-bacon sandwiches the Red Hat club of Coral Gables has ever had. You fare any better?”
“We’ll have our own parking space,” I said. “And you’re going to get to hand-deliver a huge replica check to Yuri Drubich.”
“I may wear Kevlar tonight,” he said.
“Might be a good idea.”
As we pulled away, I took out my phone and made a call to Monty. “It’s set up for tonight,” I said.
“Excellent,” he said. “And will Mr. Grayson be taking Mr. McGregor up on his offers?”
“Number ten for sure,” I said. “The rest, I can’t tell you.”
There was silence on the line for a moment and then Monty said, “It’s a very generous offer. He would be silly not to take it.”
“He’s not like you and he’s not like me,” I said. “Though I understand he does appreciate a nice hot stone massage.” Not a sound escaped from Monty, so I said, “Do you have an account where Yuri’s money can be safely wired?”
“Yes,” he said after a while. “You will be doing this or will Barry?”
“Barry,” I said.
“Iceland is fine with him?”
“Indeed,” I said and he gave me the information.
“This account will be locked by tomorrow at six a.m.,” Monty said. “And I will be gone shortly thereafter. I need all of Mr. Grayson’s answers well before that time.”
“You’ll have them,” I said.
“And Mr. Westen? Mr. McGregor instructed me that he’d prefer cash for the debts owed by your brother.”
“Tell him to call me, then,” I said and hung up.
I made one last call, this one to Odessa, which I put on speaker. “Mr. Drubich, please,” I said to the woman who answered.
“There is no one by that name here,” she said.
“Tell him it’s Big Lumpy’s people and make it fast, honey,” I said. Instead of hanging up on me, the woman put me on hold and for the next few minutes I was serenaded by Neil Diamond welcoming me to America. Just when I was thinking that the irony of his Muzak system would be forever lost on Yuri, he picked up the line.
“You have two minutes,” he said, so I did the only reasonable thing and hung up.
“Short conversation,” Sam said.
“He’ll call me back,” I said.
“I thought I was Big Lumpy now,” Sam said.
“You are,” I said, “physically.” Sure enough, my phone began to ring. “I just thought I’d cover the intimidationby-phone angle, but if it means that much to you, go right ahead.”
“Nah, Mikey,” he said. “You know I like to hear you outsmart people until they get so frustrated they order out hit squads. It’s one of my small pleasures in life these days.”
I answered the phone by saying, “I’m sorry. We must have had a bad connection. I couldn’t make out what you said before.”
“I know your organization,” Yuri said. “I know your reputation and it means nothing to me. Do you understand that?”
“That’s great,” I said. “I have the technology that you want and I have the boy and I have his father. Do you understand that?”
“I want the boy dead,” he said.
“Well, then, you’re going to be out a bunch of money for nothing, because I won’t let you kill him. What I am happy to do, however, is get you some death certificates for both of them if it would help you with your investors. I’ve got the information you need, all of the specs you’ve asked for and more. You’ll be running bandwidth over the wind in three months. Bedouins will think you’re some kind of god. They’ll probably erect statues of you all over Chad. But you’re not killing a kid. I just won’t let that happen. Now he’ll apologize, and you’ll get to meet his crazy father, too, but I’m not having you chopping off his head just because he’s smarter than you. You want to pretend to kill him, I have the ability to make that happen.”
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.
15
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
