“I’m sure I could find him,” he said. “Spray a bit of your mother’s perfume into the wind and he’ll poke his head from his shell.”
“Tell him we need a boat,” I said, ignoring Sam.
“What are we looking at? Forty-footer? Cigar lounge with a stripper pole?”
“Something fast,” I said. “It would be helpful if we didn’t need to return it.”
“I’ll put out the word,” he said.
Still, there was an unseen aspect to this all that was troubling me. Alex Kyle’s admission that he knew me wasn’t a move he needed to make.
Which meant it was a move he had to make.
The essence of developing warnings intelligence is the ability to understand that you can’t concentrate solely on the evidence you have in front of you. You have to have the facility to look beyond what’s happening now and decide what’s going to happen next. A good spy makes reasoned predictions based on experience and then reacts accordingly.
This means occasionally you have to go into a small country and assassinate the president before anything outwardly untoward has happened.
It also means that occasionally you need to be aware that the gun is pointed at you.
Which was precisely what I was feeling when my cell rang. It was Fi.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Meeting with Timothy Sherman’s illegal driver,” she said. “Or at least what’s left of him.”
“Fi,” I said.
“He looks to have been a brainy individual.”
“Tell me you didn’t shoot him.”
“I didn’t shoot him.”
“Good. Who did?”
“Judging from the spatter pattern, I’d say someone shooting from about a half mile away with a sniper rifle. Fascinating, really. I wish you were here to see it with me, Michael.”
“Yeah,” I said. Fi is one of those people who isn’t fazed by violence and gore. It’s the sort of thing she finds alluring, which is not the least of her mysteries. “I had my own spatter pattern today, so I’m good.”
“Shame,” she said.
“Fi, do you want to tell me where you are, or are you going to make me guess?”
“That’s the funny thing, Michael,” she said. “I’m standing on the sidewalk in front of your loft.”
11
Fiona Glenanne has a unique worldview: it’s her world and you would be wise not to get in the way. What this means in a practical sense is that she’s pretty good at getting what she wants.
Shoes.
Purses.
The contents of a bank vault.
In the process of acquiring said items, she has no problem punching you in the throat, setting fire to your home or giving you the impression that you are mere moments away from a level of physical pleasure you’ve only read about in the Kama Sutra.
All of which makes her the perfect person to extract information from those who might be unwilling under normal circumstances to give it up.
Male.
Female.
It doesn’t really matter.
So when she walked into the offices of the Star Class Association looking for Timothy Sherman and encountered an armed female security guard at the front desk, she wasn’t concerned in the least.
Women with guns were her comfort zone. Though, Fi couldn’t abide the fact that she looked to be one of those women who clearly took part in weight-lifting competitions. It was the shock of white blond hair, the rub on tan that made her glow orange (and smell a bit like wet cardboard) and the forearms that looked like a freeway interchange with all the raised intersecting veins. Fiona thought that you could be dangerous without sacrificing style and grace and sex appeal. Never mind the horror of a rub on tan, just generally.
“Can I help you?” the guard asked. Her voice was a little on the thick side, too.
“Yes,” Fi said. “I’m from Allied Car Rental and I’m afraid we have a very substantial problem. I need to see Mr. Sherman.”
“Okay,” she said. She looked down at the phone system, which struck Fiona as being a might too confusing for simple use. Didn’t anyone have an intercom anymore? She guessed that people with impressive looking phone exchanges at their front desks wanted to give off the impression that they fielded many, many calls. Odd, really. Power through the impression of vast communication and heavily veined women with guns at the front desk.
The office itself was fairly standard: a rounded off desk up front covered in trade magazines, including one, Fiona noted, that featured a photo of Gennaro Stefania on the cover. He was cute, but from what she’d learned, not much on the manly side of things. Oh, he could pilot a boat, but she doubted he could take a punch.
Men.
The shame of their sex was that so few lived up to billing.
Beyond the desk was a locked glass door-nothing special security-wise, Fiona saw, just a keyed lock. Nothing exciting happened in these offices, she imagined, and very little of value could possibly be inside apart from computers and phones and maybe a little petty cash. She could be in and out of the place in five minutes with everything of worth and no one would probably raise an eye, least of all the woman in front of her, who was now punching buttons almost at random.
Fi saw that a rather pained look was beginning to cast over the poor woman’s face. Maybe she was having some sort of anabolic issue.
“I’m not really the receptionist, so this phone is like Swahili,” the guard said. “I’m just here for extra security and the receptionist is at lunch.”
“Security?” Fi took a chance. “Because of that explosion the other day?”
The guard smiled and Fi saw that her teeth were insanely white. Nice teeth are important but this was absurd. It was like she had a mouth filled with piano keys. “Yes!” she said. “Omigod. Did you hear about that? It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Fi said. This security guard woman was really quite the woman of multitudes. She projected strength and body dysmorphic issues, but also seemed incredibly vapid. Very strange. “This whole boating industry can be very dangerous.”
The guard nodded her head, which was also a strange exercise, since she nodded and blinked excessively hard at the same time while keeping the smile burnished on her face. “This is my only day, but everyone at the agency was like, hey, you might get to break an arm, Gretchen! And so I thought, hey, when else do you get the chance to break an arm in a really nice building like this one? Mobsters and rappers and rich people. I could really meet someone neat, right?”
Fi didn’t really have a response to that. Chiefly because none of it made any sense to her. She had the impression that this was a woman used to people not listening to her closely and thus no one ever corrected her when she said absurd things. A shame, really. A little molding and Fi thought she could probably turn her into a fairly competent knee-breaker. But she’d need to get rid of that tan and that smile. It was all very off putting.
“Anywho,” the guard said. She poked around the phone some more. “I don’t know how to get Mr. Sherman on this thing. Do you know where his office is at?”
“Yes,” Fi said. She had a new opinion. Anyone who ended a sentence with the word “at” and managed to get the term “anywho” into a sentence was unmoldable at any cost. “If you’ll just open the door, of course.”
The security guard got up from behind the desk and made her way to the door to unlock it, which gave Fi a chance to look at the phone system and see that Mr. Sherman was in office 129. It was right on the phone in huge bold letters. It also said he was not to be disturbed until after the race. A very important man, no doubt, in the same way many people think they are very important: that their particular world is more interesting and important than yours.
That didn’t jibe with Fi. Timothy Sherman, she thought, you’re going to be picking flowers.
The interior offices of the Star Class Association resembled something put together by Gilligan and the Skipper: Nautical paintings on the walls, bits of ancient oars and masts and such encased in glass frames and boxes scattered down the long hallways. A cubicle farm painted light blue and with funny signs at their various nexuses that had arrows pointed to Bermuda, Cape Cod, Hawaii, the Tropic of Cancer. The cubicles themselves were largely empty, which made sense since all of the action was happening down in the marina in preparation for the race, but the few people she did see were all young men who looked like they’d been born wearing navy blue diapers.