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  James “Jimmy” Sorrentino was in the business of breaking impasses. The go-between, mediator, arbiter, and problem-solver. Real estate, construction, and waste removal were still his bread and butter, measurable businesses that kept him legitimate. They certainly looked better on the tax forms to the IRS than “self-employed problem-solver.”

  Jimmy Sorrentino had been around the block and had the mental and physical scars to prove it. But like Sampson and Superman, he did have a weakness. And for the tough guy from Providence, Rhode Island, the chink in his armor came in the form of a five-foot-five beautiful brunette named Katherine Elizabeth, his only child, and more importantly, his only daughter. Seventy hours ago Kate had once again taken up residence at the Sorrentino house, spending most of the day moping and shedding the occasional tear. Neither of these bothered Jimmy. But the combination of mother and daughter was like a flame and an open gas valve. His daughter’s presence emboldened his wife, turning her from upper-crust housewife into professional nag. He couldn’t reach for a drink, or smoke his thirty-dollar cigars without someone telling him that he was killing himself.

  Mr. Sorrentino gave Kate until the weekend to straighten herself out. She was twenty-six, not a teenager, and he had bought her a condo two years ago in the name of peace and quiet. He would be damned if Kate was going to live at his house again, energizing his wife to run her nails down his psychological chalkboard, and pay thirty-five hundred dollars a month for a condo to boot.

  It wasn’t the money, it was the principle. A man of principle up against two women.

  With his daughter and wife at the kitchen table, Jimmy Sorrentino gave them the rules for living under his roof.

  “Kate, you have until the weekend to mope around this house. Then you are going back to your apartment.”

  “Don’t listen to him honey, you are welcome to stay as long as you like,” Mrs. Sorrentino added with daggers in her eyes.

  “Ignore your mother. This is my house and these are my rules. You come down with an illness, you can stay. You are in an accident, you can stay. You let me sell your condo in the city, you can move back in. But I will be goddamned if I paid a half a million dollars for a condo so you can sit around my house, tag-teaming me.”

  “This is your flesh and blood here,” Mrs. Sorrentino said. “Don’t listen to him, sweetie. He’s full of hot air.”

  “Cynthia, don’t test me,” Jimmy Sorrentino said to his wife with authority.

  “Blowhard,” his wife responded over her shoulder.

  Cynthia Sorrentino grabbed her keys off the kitchen counter and turned toward Kate. “Let’s go shopping, sweetheart. Let him calm down a bit.”

  Jimmy Sorrentino had the last word. “Kate, I told you that kid was no good. Just because he’s Catholic doesn’t mean he’s Italian.”

  James Sorrentino continued talking to himself and cursing for five minutes after the ladies left. He felt better. A man has to posture once in a while. Beat the chest. Show them he was still the boss.

  God, he hoped his daughter would get out of the house soon. ***

  Vincent DiMarco had blown the first professional hit of his life and lived to tell about it. It had been a decade and a half since he stepped off the plane in Miami with nothing but a name, an address, and an order. It would have taken ten minutes to confirm the address, to make sure he was whacking the right guy, but it was ten minutes he didn’t feel like wasting. The hit went down within an hour of his plane touching down, and DiMarco was back in Boston before dinner, treating himself to lobster tail.

  The hit was easy and as an extra bonus, he was able to follow an old DiMarco credo that stated the better you were, the closer you could get to your victim. A young Vincent DiMarco had done just that. He had walked across the back yard to the dark-haired Italian man tending to his garden and had used the cord from the clothesline to finish the job. His wife of forty years found him three hours later, discolored, dangling, and dead.

  The following morning Vincent grabbed a Miami Herald newspaper from a newsstand on the corner of Harvard Square that carried every major paper in the country. Paper under his arm, he headed for a diner down the street, away from the rich kids. He sipped his black coffee and flipped to the metro news section to read the details of his handiwork with pride. The death of a mistaken, innocent man didn’t haunt him as persistently as those who hired him for the failed hit did. On Mother’s Day in 1995, the payback came as he sat down to have dinner with his mom at a posh restaurant in Back Bay. The blood had spurted from his neck with enough force to cover two walls, the ceiling, and his mother. When he arrived at the hospital, he had lost sixty percent of his blood. But he lived, and he had learned a valuable lesson. A little patience and a little planning could make life simple.

  Vincent DiMarco blended in with the Saipan locals like a white accountant in a rural Louisiana soul-food restaurant. What his harsh Boston accent didn’t give away, his natural brash attitude did. Things were slow on Saipan, and the ruffian-for-hire was anything but. With beach attire, the scar on his neck was less noticeable than the tattoo on his left arm. The skin art had been a spur of the moment impulse, a Christmas day decision that would last the rest of his life. In a dingy tattoo parlor, he had narrowed down the selection to two choices—a detailed picture of St. Nick, or a ghoulish rendition of the Grim Reaper. The sickle that now crowned the top of his arm, just above the red hat with a white ball hanging on the end, showed he wasn’t above compromise.

  The son of an Italian father and South African mother, DiMarco traveled extensively before he could walk. Since his fifth birthday, when his Dad had taken him to see the family in the old country, he hadn’t set foot outside of the continental United States. Until his meeting with the senator, he had never heard of Saipan. Three days after arriving on the sunny island, he found himself not wanting to leave.

  He kept a low profile, eating at the cheap restaurants with tourist crowds and high customer turnover. He tried to avoid going to the same place more than once, but the pretty waitress at the Limbo, a dive with character and the largest shrimp he had ever seen, changed all that.

  Unlike his Chinese counterpart on the other side of the world, DiMarco didn’t have a face to go with his mark. He didn’t have the benefit of a close-up encounter with the people he was coming to kill. No picture, no useful description.

  When the cobwebs of jetlag finally cleared his mind, he drove down to the front of Chang Industries and played the lost tourist routine for all it was worth. A beach hat, sunglasses, a crazy Hawaiian shirt, and an unfolded map hid the scars, the tattoos, the camera, and the knives. He drove past Chang Industries twice in an unsuccessful attempt to circle the property and realized the map that came with the rental car was worthless. The single road leading to Chang Industries, and the guard booth at the gate, meant Vincent DiMarco was going to need an alternate entrance.

  Still in tourist disguise, he pulled into the gravel parking lot of Saipan’s official visitor’s center and studied their wall of pamphlets and tourist attraction discounts. Whale watching and deep-sea fishing excursions. Go-cart racing. Scuba schools. He grabbed a newly published map of the island and smuggled out as many brochures as he could hold, the one-man staff too busy discussing local news and gossip on the phone to offer assistance. DiMarco pushed the door open with his butt and walked out of the wood-shingled building with enough material to teach a college course on the island. He spent the afternoon on the bed in his dingy hotel room, sucking down Marlboros and checking out the maps and brochures through the smoke until his head hurt from reading.

  He couldn’t help but think he should have charged more money for the job. The senator had failed to mention that the targets were locked away behind a fence with razor wire, with at least one guard covering the only entrance. He needed a back way into Chang Industries. The two hundred fifty thousand dollars that was sitting in a safe in an old car garage in Southie bolstered his patience, a virtue he had learned to appreciate. It was as criti
cal to survival as never sitting with your back to the door, not even when you’re having lunch with your own mother.

  Chapter 26

  The cleaning crew bantered back and forth in Spanish with a thick El Salvadorian accent. It was after eleven and on the top floor of the building that housed Winthrop Enterprises, Jake was the only native English speaker. A handful of lawyers burned the midnight oil on the floors below—writing their briefs, imposing their legal opinions on paper. It was good work if you could get it—forming legal policy, protecting the rights of the wrongly accused, or the wrongs of the rightly protected, and charging five hundred dollars an hour.

  With far less focus on the legal ramifications of what he was doing, Jake stuck the pointy end of the letter opener in the keyhole of Marilyn’s old desk. With one quick turn of the wrist, the drawer popped open, and Jake joined the ranks of petty thieves. With a vacuum humming in the background, Jake fumbled through Marilyn’s old desk, pushing the new receptionist’s personal minefield of cosmetics out of the way until he found the janitor-size key ring. He grabbed the keys and sent the bell attached to the silver ring singing its familiar ding, ding, ding. Two members of the cleaning crew looked up. The younger female in cleaning overalls continued to stare at Jake while wiping the glass wall between the work area and the breakroom.

  Jake grabbed the wad of metal, a mix of stainless steel and brass that opened everything from the bathroom to Peter’s personal liquor cabinet. He weaved his way through the office, over yellow extension cords and past cleaning carts, and stopped near the emergency staircase. He fumbled through his newly found source of power and jammed a key with a small label reading “files” into the lock. He entered the room, flicked the lights, and shut the door behind him.

  The room was a massive cave of information, the walls lined with rows of shelves and stacks of boxes. With real estate leasing for a thousand dollars a square foot, the on-site filing room was costing a mint. Sparkling filing cabinets stood near the closest wall, and Jake started shoving keys into the locks as fast as he could. Each key was marked with a word or initials, clues to an indecipherable code that Marilyn took with her to her grave. He tried the key labeled “f.c.” guessing it was “filing cabinets,” but got nowhere. He tried his trusty letter opener again, but the drawers didn’t budge. He dug through boxes and came up for air forty minutes later with a handful of legitimate looking invoices. “Shit,” he said to himself.

  He emerged from the filing cabinets ten before midnight and went to his office to see if Kate had broken down, forgiven him, and called. As he flipped through the key ring, checking his voicemail with the phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder, the newly printed key label with the initials “J.O.” caught his attention. J.O., Jake said to himself. Jake’s office. He got up, walked across his ridiculously large office, and put the key in his door. The lock opened with a smooth click.

  Jake sat down, put his right leg on the desk, and donned his decryption hat. He shifted through the set of keys reading labels aloud.

  “F.D…” “Front door,” Jake muttered, taking a shot in the dark.

  “L.B…” “Ladies bathroom,” Jake whispered.

  “W.O.T…” “Waste of time”, he chuckled.

  “P.O…” “Peter’s office,” Jake said, catching himself.

  “Peter’s office,” he said again, his feet already in motion.

  At the entrance to his father’s office he glanced at the remnants of the cleaning crew, turned his attention to the knob, and unlocked the door with as much I-have-every-right-to-do-this demeanor as he could.

  He turned the small banker’s light on his father’s desk, and the green-stained-glass shade cast a pleasant hue into the room, the reflection from the bulb shining off the brass stem of the lamp. Jake opened the main drawer of his father’s desk without a key. He yanked the other drawers in order, none of which were locked. Jake didn’t take his father to be paranoid, and the open drawers were evidence that he was right. Paranoia and over-the-top confidence didn’t go well together.

  Jake didn’t know what he was looking for, but knew he would recognize it when he saw it. He walked around his father’s office like a thief casing a job—eyeing the walls, the photos, the shelves. Jake opened the towering custom-made cabinet on the far wall, beyond the leather sofa and table, near the private restroom. A stash of top-shelf alcohol used to replenish the bar on the far side of the room filled the upper cabinet. At the bottom of the bookcase was a smaller cabinet door. Jake took one look at the keyhole in the door, an octagonal shaped ring lock, and started sifting through the key ring in his hand. With another set of dings, Jake tried the only key on the ring that could possibly open the lock, and gave it a twist.

  The key opened the door to intrigue and heartbreak. The front half of the drawer was business, the back half lined with folders of information labeled as personal. He flipped through both sets of files, three dozen in all, and stopped at the file named Chang Industries. There was information on Lee Chang, his father, his brothers. Schools attended. Positions held. Birthdays, favorite foods, vices of choice. Golf handicaps. Names of wives, kids, lovers.

  Jake ran his finger along the top of the folders and his head spun when he read the tag labeled “Jake Patrick.”

  “What the hell?” he said to himself, as he opened the file and read his dossier. ***

  The security guard’s fluttering eyelids touched intermittently, flirting with sleep. The sound of the floor buffers were just loud enough to ward off a full onslaught of REM. Reina, the Spanish queen, wiped the last window on the revolving door with a final sweep of her hand. She stepped back to admire her handiwork and jumped at the face staring back at her through the window. She quickly moved aside and Peter Winthrop walked in the front door.

  “Good evening Mr. Winthrop,” the security guard said, trying to snap out of his daze. “Late evening tonight, sir?”

  “Yes, I just flew in from Rio. Been back and forth three times in two weeks.”

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Rio. Big celebrations in the street with beautiful girls in little bikinis.”

  “You know, some of them even wear clothes,” Peter said, busting the security guard’s chops.

  “I believe your son is working late, too. I didn’t see him leave yet. Nice kid, likes to talk.”

  “He’s still here, you say?”

  “Haven’t seen him leave.”

  “Not sure that means too much,” Peter responded, stabbing at the guard’s propensity to nap. The security guard looked nervous.

  “Thanks,” Peter said, ending his goodwill break at the security guard’s counter.

  “Goodnight, Mr. Winthrop.” ***

  Reina hightailed it to the bank of elevators as soon as she realized Peter Winthrop was the face on the other side of her just-cleaned window. She stopped at the passenger elevators and pushed the buttons to send them to the top floor. Then she boarded the service elevator and headed up.

  Reina, cousin to Peter Winthrop’s domestic help, flew out of the service elevator on the top floor as the CEO pressed the button for the passenger elevator from the first-floor lobby. He waited for a minute before cursing the cleaning crew. He turned toward the guard, now fully awake, and yelled. “How many times do I have to tell you to keep the cleaning crew in the service elevator?”

  “Yes, Mr. Winthrop, I will remind them. It isn’t like they forget. They just ignore the rules.”

  On the top floor, Reina stretched her short gait and jogged to the office on the far side of the floor. She knocked, grabbed the knob to Peter Winthrop’s office, and pushed the door open. Jake jumped, and his pulse skyrocketed.

  “Jake, your father just arrived in the building. He’s on his way up. I thought you should know.”

  Jake looked up, completely confused, and calmly thanked the cleaning woman whom he had never spoken to. Then tried not to wet himself.

  He grabbed two folders of interest, threw the rest back into the filing cabinet,
gave the scene a one second look-over, and ran back to the safety of his office. ***

  Jake held his head down at his desk, the haphazard spread of papers and folders under his nose evidence of someone hard at work. Peter finished cursing halfway through the ride up and calmed as he entered his domain. He headed straight for Jake’s corner office.

  “You’re here late.”

  “Hey,” Jake answered. “How was the trip to South America?”

  “Good. Looks like I may be able to work out a deal with a Brazilian chemical company to import some Japanese cosmetics. Should be painless and profitable.”

  Jake put on airs of naivety. It was easy. His father barely took the time to get to know anyone but himself, unless there was money in it.

  “The Japanese and Brazilians?”

  “Sure. Brazil has the largest Japanese immigrant community in the world. They have close ties.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Jake said treading water while trying to avoid the riptide he had created. “On the topic of world trade, I have been working with the International Group on getting the night vision goggles for Hasad. I had a few questions that I didn’t feel comfortable asking them and wanted to ask you directly.”

  “Sure,” Peter said, finding the corner of the desk with his butt.

  “Isn’t the exportation of night vision goggles illegal?”

  “Didn’t you hear me tell Hasad that Winthrop Enterprises wouldn’t be involved in illegal exporting?”