“How’s she doing that?”
“By tolerating me.” He pulled Coleman aside a step. “This has never happened before. I know I’m a little exhausting to be around, but I’m also a pretty good student of body language: People usually try to break free by the time I get to the Pavlovian itch-response to curtains.”
“Serge, I don’t find you exhausting. But I self-medicate.”
“And that’s the dynamic of our special friendship. But the receptionist is totally lucid. Not only is she tolerating my high-octane quirks, but she’s actually encouraging them.”
“How is that a problem?”
“Because this is a business negotiation,” said Serge. “And in every hardball negotiation, there’s a point where you shut up, and the next person who talks loses. Except I’ve never gotten to that point before because people always jump in and shut me up. But this woman’s good. I’ve never encountered such a formidable foe who can indulge my verbal incontinence.”
“The temptress.”
“Time to get back to the negotiation,” said Serge. “Be cool.”
“It’s hardball.”
Both stepped back up to the desk and grinned.
The receptionist grinned back.
Serge and Coleman smiled harder.
The woman maintained even pleasantness.
Serge began to perspire.
The woman didn’t.
“Okay! Okay!” said Serge. “You win! I want to see the Tupperware Museum.”
“We used to have a museum, but we updated the displays and it’s now called the Confidence Center.”
“I’m all about positivity.” Serge opened his wallet. “How much?”
“It’s free.” She handed them flowery visitor stickers for their shirts. “Hope you enjoy it.”
A cell phone rang. Serge turned it off.
DOWNTOWN MIAMI
The lunchtime crowd strolled along Biscayne Boulevard. They passed the eternal torch at Bayfront Park, and a bench where someone was eating Cuban rice and beans out of a Styrofoam container.
The person on the bench was alone, wearing a golf shirt and aviator sunglasses on a cloudy day. He had a tightly cropped haircut. Cheekbones jutted like a cross between Nicolas Cage and a competitive bicyclist. Under his shirt was a deceptively powerful, angular frame he’d developed from ocean swimming.
He finished lunch, grabbed his briefcase and headed toward a garbage can on the corner to toss his trash.
So did someone else.
Wham. They ran into each other, and he dropped his briefcase.
The other man also dropped a briefcase. Funny, but the two cases looked striking similar. Actually identical.
“You okay?” said the second man.
“Fine.”
“I’m so sorry. It was all my fault.”
“No, I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“Did you like the movie Collateral?”
“What?”
“This is just like that.”
“Don’t talk anymore.”
They picked up each other’s briefcase and left in opposite directions.
The first man waited for a red light and crossed the boulevard toward an upscale hotel, where he had received an express check-in as a platinum customer. Then he headed for the elevators and hit 10.
Once in his room, the man set his sunglasses atop the TV. He opened the briefcase on the bed, removing a rifle with a folding stock and detachable barrel. Then an Austrian nine-millimeter and silencer. Beneath the weapons was a large tan envelope sealed with red wax.
He pulled out a chair at the desk and broke the seal. Out came the dossier, complete with eight-by-ten black-and-white glossies taken at long range.
His assignment.
There was a calendar of the target’s recent movements and detailed background on confirmed associates. Current status: location unknown, but believed to regularly frequent the Miami area.
He reached in the envelope again and removed a genuine Florida driver’s license with his own photo and new identity for the operation.
Enzo Tweel.
If there was a single word to describe Enzo, it was precision. He had the closest possible shave and rigidly manicured fingernails. Each evening he used a pair of tiny travel scissors and checked his clothes for stray threads.
Right now that focus was on the contents of the briefcase, which he arranged atop the dresser with geometric tyranny. Weapons, ammunition, untraceable cell phone, cyanide capsules, badges from five law enforcement agencies, and tiny rubber fingertip cups with fake prints. Then he went to work at the desk, creating neat rows of dossier documents surrounding a stack of perfectly aligned photos.
When he was satisfied, he walked to the window and pulled open the curtains, revealing the twinkling edge of Miami overlooking Biscayne Bay. To the left, South Beach and all its urgent emptiness. To the right, the Rickenbacker Causeway and the Seaquarium. Straight ahead, cruise ships in the port. And right below, the bench at Bayfront Park where he had just been sitting.
He watched the pavilion’s eternal torch flicker, and he exhaled a rare sigh. The whole vista grew painfully familiar. Had it already been two whole years? What an omni-dimensional fiasco. If only they had hired him as the primary shooter, instead of making him play backup to that incompetent amateur they had stuck in the sniper’s perch. Not only had he been a bad shot, but even worse in the art of concealment. The idiot got discovered and was forced to kill two cops, which meant that Enzo had to silence the sniper and sanitize the nest. That really irked him. Enzo much preferred the solitary tranquillity of adjusting a rifle scope on a distant target than a close-quarters judo fight in a hotel room.
Enzo looked around. Was it this room? Hard to be sure after two years, but it could have been. He stared out the window again at the jetties flanking the Government Cut shipping channel at the end of Miami Beach. His mind drifted back to the added inconvenience from that last nightmare of a visit: creating a dead scapegoat to take the fall for the whole scandal.
Felicia.
A cell phone began vibrating next to the silencer.
He answered. It was the counter-intelligence electronics expert on call if he ever needed anything. And now he did. With the target at large, the best lead was the closest associate identified in the dossier. Recent calls from the associate to the target had already been confirmed. He ordered up a wireless phone tap that would be routed by satellite to a message app in his smartphone.
Then he tossed a few items from the dresser into a small leather satchel and headed out the door.
Chapter Twenty-Two
ORANGE BLOSSOM TRAIL
Serge stuck the coffee tube back in his mouth and hustled Coleman down the hall. There was no specific beginning to the exhibit, but the building gradually changed.
“Freaky,” said Coleman. “There are no straight edges in the room. Everything curves and bends and is shiny.”
“And it’s all covered with retro circles and swirls and starbursts in colors only found on Jefferson Airplane’s tour bus.” Serge marveled as he slowly snaked through the winding displays. “Check out these lighted bubbles in the walls and domed pedestals with the funkiest Tupperware I haven’t seen since I was a kid. It isn’t just an homage to nostalgia. We’re actually in the sixties. This is like the last and greatest parts of the Carousel of Progress from the 1964 World’s Fair that Disney disassembled and rebuilt up the road at the Magic Kingdom. Then at some point they chucked the sixties diorama and ruined everything, but who knew it landed over here.”
“Trippy—” Coleman turned and rotated his head. “I hear God’s voice.”