The End Game

“No,” Sam said. “But I have a buddy who might be able to find out.” Sam opened up another window on his computer and typed Nicholas Dinino’s name into Google’s Blog Search engine, and five seconds later we were looking at the society blog for Palm Life magazine, a local rag that covered the glamorous life in Miami, which typically meant they took a lot of photos of wealthy people trying to look casual. It didn’t really work, since it’s hard to look casual with an entire diamond mine on your body.

It’s nearly impossible to move about the world undetected if you’re the least bit famous. Anyone with a cell phone is seconds away from telling anyone who is interested-or completely uninterested, for that matter-your precise location. In this case, the Palm Life blog was one of just ten blogs that had photos of Dinino from the previous evening. It helped that he posed with a lot of actors, musicians, models and the professionally famous.

On Palm Life’s page, Dinino was squished between a rap music impresario, his girl-group girlfriend and the host of one of those shows on cable where chefs try to win prizes for being really great chefs. Just off in the back of the frame were two guys who looked rather odd contextually, since they were wearing black suits that clearly covered guns while everyone else was wearing all white. Shoes, shirts, pants, hats, gloves.

“Labor Day can’t come soon enough,” Fiona said.

“Says here it’s an annual party they have,” Sam said.

“Just because it happens every year doesn’t mean it’s a good idea,” Fiona said. “The locusts used to come every year, too.”

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.