I had two options here: pretend to be really hurt or be the tough guy.
“That all you got?” I slurred. I staggered up and then fell back into the sofa.
Bonaventura stood next to Jarhead and glared at me. It was about all he could muster, since his hand had already started to balloon grotesquely. Also, I was shaking my head back and forth, spreading blood onto as many surfaces as possible. He was going to have quite the cleaning bill, though something told me he could afford it. His daughter might only get an alpaca for her next birthday, however.
“Get this trash out of my home,” he said to Jarhead.
“Does that mean we have a deal?” I said. “Because Maria has about ten minutes left on her clock.” I tapped my watch. “Tick, tick, tick, Chrissy.”
He glared at me some more. The he turned and glared at Gennaro. He took some time doing that glaring thing to everyone in the room, even his own guys. I got the impression that he thought this was a good way of communicating rage and indignation, generally, but at that moment I think it was also a way to keep him from crying out in pain again. “I hope you know what you’ve done,” he said to Gennaro.
“All I know is that I don’t want my wife to die,” he said. “If I am in this maniac’s pocket or yours, I can’t see the difference.”
Bonaventura walked out of the room without another word, which I took to mean I’d solved one of our problems. I took one of the throw pillows from the sofa and pressed it against my forehead and then stood up, which got the blood flow to stop.
“How many minutes was that?” I said to Jarhead.
“Nine,” he said.
“Think I can get a ride on the elephant?”
“Not this time,” he said. He motioned to one of his guys, who gave me and Nate back our guns. Jarhead then handed me a card. All it had on it was his name: ALEX KYLE. No number. “Call me,” he said. “We should talk.”
10
It used to be that the only way you could get reliable information on someone was by tapping his phone. Get a wire on someone’s line and you could find out the most intimate details of his life. But now everyone uses e-mail. From a legal standpoint, it’s more difficult to tap into someone’s e-mail account than it is to get a wiretap on his phone.
From an illegal standpoint, it’s also harder.
If you want to tap a phone, there are stores in the mall that will sell you everything you need. What used to be the most clandestine technology is now sold as a way of watching your children. For less than two hundred dollars, you can get the RDRX-99, a line-activated digital recorder that will monitor up to five different phone lines at once for thirty-four hours at a time, and will e-mail you reports on the time and date of phone calls. If you don’t want to break into someone’s home to install the device in his wall jack, you can always access his outdoor box and place your device there. It requires the same technical precision required to set up a DVD player. Plug A into B and listen.
But if you want to intercept someone’s e-mail or track his movements online, it’s usually far more complicated.
In a high-level break-in, you’d want to redirect the line of information by locating transmission points-from delivery to reception-and constantly adapt the signal. This means you’d need a very large antenna, expert digital technology that could adjust radio waves and diagnose algorithms, and finally an expert who could decipher it all into a dummy location before letting it through to the actual delivery point, so that the person being tracked wouldn’t know anything ill was happening.
If you have an office in Langley or Qatar or even in the Green Zone in Baghdad, you can accomplish this in about an hour’s time at a tax-payer cost of about three hundred thousand-dollar staplers.
Or, if you happen to be one wall away from your target, and that target isn’t exactly a technical wizard, you can just jam the prevalent Wi-Fi signal using a modified 5.8 GHz cordless telephone, a length of speaker wire and your index finger, and then divert the person you’re interested in to your network, which in this case was a powerful Wi-Fi router Sam purchased for the grand total of $77.25 at Staples.
And the result?
“Mikey, the perversion of some people is astounding,” Sam said. We were sitting in the Aground Bar at the Southern Cross Yacht Club in Coconut Grove, from where the race would launch in the morning. I’d brought Gennaro over in the Charger after Nate dropped us off, and spent the majority of the ride telling him everything would be fine, that half of his problems were solved.
Not that I actually believed everything was going to be fine just yet, but the odds had improved and I’m an optimist.
Out the window I could see Gennaro and his team working on their yacht. They were due to launch in the bay within the hour to test out the conditions and dry run out into the open sea for several hours in preparation for the race.
Sam had a file open in front of him and was leafing through several sheets of paper.
“What did Dinino have?” I said.
“Well, I’m not specifically talking about Dinino. I had to wait around quite a while until he came back to his room, so I did recon on other folks that seemed suspect, according to, uh, some of their in-room habits.”
“I’m shocked,” I said.
“I’m just saying,” Sam said, “that there’s no good reason to ever be searching for a blow-up doll of Alaska’s governor. I’m all for privacy, but there have to be limits.”
He handed a page over to me. There, in fact, was a blow-up doll of Alaska’s governor. It was very lifelike.
“Clearly.”
A group of men wearing white slacks and navy blue sport coats with gold buttons and lovely anchors stitched over their breast pockets came and sat at the table beside ours. They regarded Sam and me like we’d just crawled out of a gutter.
“How you fellas doing?” Sam raised his beer at the men, but they didn’t respond. “Here for the big race, or do you just love the maritime?”
Nothing.
“Well, nice joint you have here. Any of you guys got any pull with the jukebox? Maybe replace Artie Shaw with something from the last 100 years?”
Nothing.
“All right, then,” Sam said, and tipped his beer their direction again. “Avast and Ahoy!”
The Aground normally catered to a clientele of South Florida’s richest men, as the Southern Cross Yacht Club didn’t admit women into the building, much less the bar, until 1957, and tradition still lingered. They were still largely sexually segregated, though with much charm and aplomb and contemptible politeness, naturally, as the women had a tearoom downstairs where skirts were always required, as if it were still 1957.
And they were certainly socially and economically segregated, too, which was clear when the men got up and moved to another table as one, never once bothering to speak. Maybe it was because the center of my forehead looked like a blood-filled Easter egg. Or maybe it was because we were both in strict violation of the dress code posted above the front door that instructed all patrons in the bar to be in slacks and a coat after four p.m.
“That was subtle,” I said.
“Blue bloods have a low tolerance for me.” Sam again raised his beer toward the men once they settled at another table. “What can I say? I guess not everyone likes me.” He slid the rest of the file my way. “Anyway,” he said, “Dinino is our guy. He got back to the hotel and within five minutes he was up viewing the site. He sent three e-mails off to the same dummy g-mail address that my buddy Walt routed to Corsica, which is where the person uploading the video is located. How’s your Italian?”
“Not bad,” I said. I read the e-mails. One was asking when the next video would be uploaded, the second asked for confirmation that proper payment had been received and the third was informing the person in Corsica that their services would no longer be needed after tomorrow. “You get any more of his e-mails?”