Burn Notice - 02 - The End Game by Tod Goldberg

Author:Tod Goldberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Thriller
ISBN: 9781101049853
Publisher: Nal Obsidian Mystery
Published: 2010-05-26T22:00:00+00:00

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.

That means you need to know how to find intelligence that doesn’t actually exist, which Sam was doing. And sometimes you need to create intelligence, which is what I was doing going with Gennaro to Christopher Bonaventura’s vacation home.

And why? First, I called and asked my brother Nate to come, too.

“What’s my take on this?” Nate asked.

“Karma,” I said.

“You can’t eat karma,” Nate said. “I can’t tell the power company that the karma is in the mail.”

I was pretty sure Nate was actually stealing his electricity, but decided to let that fact go. “I’m just asking you to go somewhere and stand silently by my side,” I said. I’d tell him later that somewhere meant “a mafioso’s compound.” If I told him ahead of time, he’d be far too willing to help.

“Do I get to carry?”

“Yes,” I said. The truth was that he had to be carrying a gun. If he wasn’t, it just wouldn’t look right for what I was planning.

“Loaded?”

“Loaded. Safety off. You can even use one of my silencers if you like. All I ask is that you put on a suit, that you do what I tell you and that you don’t speak. Not a single word.”

“Do you have a color preference on the suit, Mr. Westen?”

The nice thing about Nate, in situations like this, is that he’s actually pretty handy with a gun and can help out if things get really difficult. He can punch. He can bite. He can kick people in the groin. He has all the moves, if not any of the actual skill or precision. And I can trust him. The bad thing about Nate, in situations like this, is that he’s still Nate.

“Whatever you want, Nate,” I said, but then thought better of it, lest he actually wear whatever he wanted. “Anything but white. And wear a tie.” I told him to pick us up from the Setai in two hours.

“I think you’re forgetting something.”

It was true. I was forgetting lots of things. Forgetting the time when we were kids and he thought it would be funny to set the fire station on fire. Forgetting the time he threw a phone book at my head. Forgetting the times I’ve done jobs for him that invariably involved me nearly getting killed by Russian crime syndicates.

“Why don’t you enlighten me,” I said.

“A thank-you would be nice,” he said.

Ma.

“Oh, right, sorry, Nate,” I said. “I owe you for yesterday.”

“And the last decade or so.”

“I appreciate it,” I said.

“Good. Your half of the flowers was fifty dollars.

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