“Serge, the flashing red light now has a bell going off with it.” Coleman popped one of the beers.
“What do we do now?” said Coleman.
“Rage against the machine . . .”
The replacement clerk finished a smoke break and approached the store entrance as two men sprinted past her into the parking lot. She reached the service stand and stopped. A bunch of employees were standing around a pole with a now un-lighted number eight jammed down through the shattered glass of the product scanner.
Chapter Thirty-One
MEANWHILE . . .
The curtains were drawn tight on an upper-floor suite in a Biscayne Boulevard resort.
Enzo Tweel set a room-service tray down in the hall and returned to his suite’s writing desk. He picked up an eight-by-ten zoom photo from the dossier, studying it while imagining permutations of how the target might appear with a beard and change of hair color.
Then he grabbed several pages of background workup. With the demise of Felicia, everyone thought a neat little bow had been tied on a quite messy mission at the hemispheric summit. It had been designed to take out an incorruptible undercover American agent who was getting too close to an arms pipeline from Miami to Latin America. And it worked. The agent was neutralized. But in the process, way too much collateral damage and an avalanche of unwanted media attention. Then it quieted down. Two years had passed without any blowback, and all the mistakes were considered ancient history.
Then a loose end.
Enzo had been hired by a South American junta from the tiny nation of Costa Gorda. Actually a secret junta within the junta, who made their fortunes by allowing wholesale money laundering and letting all manner of contraband find safe harbor on the way to somewhere else. Oh, and open arms to any rogue CIA operation.
The junta’s clandestine service had its own version of Big Dipper Data Management, but one that was far more effective. And the correlation of their data had just reached a tipping point beyond coincidence. They’d recently noticed a new spate of Web hits on the sites of several U.S. senators and congressmen, all with corresponding Freedom of Information Act requests. They came from a cluster of IP addresses in South Florida, and all the politicians had cozy, clandestine ties to the junta. They knew the secrets. Not big stuff like the assassinations of the agent and Felicia. They didn’t want to know that. But they knew.
There could be only one conclusion: Someone, somehow, had begun snooping around about that two-year-old debacle in Miami. The junta’s intelligence service dug some more . . .
Enzo set down the eight-by-ten photo of Serge. The target was far too mobile, but there was one known associate with a static address on the Miami River, and the wiretap on Mahoney’s phone had yielded a mother lode. Enzo knew about all the clients, and about Serge picking off members of the gang, as well as the recently verified address of a fake DEA agent, and even about Sasha and South Philly Sal.
The junta never told Enzo how to accomplish his missions. Just get results. And Enzo now had sufficient information to rough out his plan on a legal pad. He picked up an untraceable cell phone and dialed.
“Hello? Is this Mahoney and Associates? . . . My name isn’t important. This involves the safety of one of your employees named Serge Storms . . . Well, I’ll tell you . . . I was discreetly working with him two years ago. Remember that sordid affair at the summit? Turns out they’ve sent someone back to Miami to tie up loose ends . . . Yes, I know who. His name is Enzo Tweel, but he’s using the cover of a local scam artist named South Philly Sal.” Enzo abruptly hung up.
Then he listened to the tap on Mahoney’s phone and the outgoing call that he knew would be placed immediately to the consulate of Costa Gorda. The late Felicia still had friends there sympathetic to Serge’s cause. They told Mahoney they would call him back, and when they did, they confirmed a bogus Bolivian passport issued in the name of Enzo Tweel and believed to be in the possession of an unknown gun for hire.
Enzo had heard enough. He packed a small leather satchel and tore a page off the legal pad with the address of the ersatz DEA agent.
Down on the hotel’s ground floor, Enzo exited the elevator and walked with purpose past the open door of the Flamingo conference room, where a lively debate was in progress.
“But we need guns.”
“No, absolutely no weapons.”
“Why not?”
“Because we want to get our money back, not go to jail.”
“We don’t have to use them. Just scare him.”
“We’ll scare him instead with the power of our rhetoric.”
“What if he tries something?”
“There’s twenty of us. We’ll hit him and stuff and then lay on top of him in several layers.”
