cordless receiver, giving her a traditional Japanese farewell. Putting down the phone, she seemed about to say something, then giving in to protocol, she bowed him out the door.
The white sun was at its zenith in Palm Beach, the full blast of its light spread across the water. The royal palms clattered in the heat. It was just past one in the afternoon, but Vesper Arkham and Lew Croaker had been hard at work since three-thirty the previous morning.
In fact, for Vesper, the work had begun years before. Originally spying clandestinely for the Kaisho, Mikio Okami, Vesper had been inserted into Looking-Glass, the top-secret federal espionage and assassination bureau. While there, she had discovered that someone was stealing ultra-high-tech weaponry from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, and selling it on the worldwide black market. This was very bad news for America as a whole and the Pentagon in particular. The thought of the US’s most highly advanced experimental weaponry in the hands of Saddam Hussein or the Colombian drug cartel was nothing short of terrifying. And it became even more so when Vesper discovered that the leak within DARPA appeared to lead back to someone inside Looking-Glass.
Ever since she had discovered that Leon Waxman, the late head of Looking-Glass, had been Johnny Leonforte, she had been trying to discover whether it had been the Leonfortes who were behind the consistent theft out of DARPA. DARPA was black-budgeted, which meant that Congress did not vote on appropriations for it. In fact, officially DARPA did not exist. And yet, someone had breached its defenses and was selecting plum weapons from its arsenal.
Caesare Leonforte? Vesper suspected as much. It made sense, since Caesare’s father, Johnny Leonforte, had had access to DARPA through Looking-Glass. If the elder Leonforte had been Caesare’s entrée into DARPA, Caesare was smart and clever enough to maintain the pipeline through bribes or extortion or both to keep it going even though Johnny was dead.
In Vesper’s mind, the need to plug the leak in national security, to bring Caesare to justice, had turned into something of an obsession. She had been conned by Johnny Leonforte, just like everyone else at Looking-Glass, and she was determined to make the son pay for the sins of his father, along with those of his own evil making.
To that end, she had gotten herself reassigned within the federal government, into the Anti-Cartel Task Force, and had asked to have Lew Croaker hired as an independent field operative assigned to her. This was not so difficult as outsiders might think. For one thing, the federal agencies were a labyrinth of overworked, under-motivated bureaucrats handling a mare’s nest of paperwork each day. If you knew which routings to use, assignments with the proper signatures could be manipulated without undue strain. Vesper’s old boss, Leon Waxman – Johnny Leonforte – was dead. And Vesper herself had an extensive network of supporters – shadowy people for whom an operative with her abilities was an invaluable asset. These men were so high up in government their word was akin to God’s.
Once outside the ACTF, she had quickly discovered that it had already targeted a company named Volto Enterprises Unlimited. It was a Bahamian shell corporation that the ACTF believed was a conduit for hundreds of millions of dollars annually of IGG, ill-gotten gains. And the man getting filthy rich from the IGG, the man behind Volto itself, Vesper had read with a certain quickening of her pulse, was believed to be Caesare Leonforte, Johnny’s son.
That’s when it all came together for Vesper. She had always wondered how Johnny Leonforte had successfully masqueraded as Leon Waxman. It was true that Johnny had obtained a superbly forged legend – official documents such as a birth certificate, high school and college records, credit history, even Army records, and for verisimilitude, a
The white sun was at its zenith in Palm Beach, the full blast of its light spread across the water. The royal palms clattered in the heat. It was just past one in the afternoon, but Vesper Arkham and Lew Croaker had been hard at work since three-thirty the previous morning.
In fact, for Vesper, the work had begun years before. Originally spying clandestinely for the Kaisho, Mikio Okami, Vesper had been inserted into Looking-Glass, the top-secret federal espionage and assassination bureau. While there, she had discovered that someone was stealing ultra-high-tech weaponry from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, and selling it on the worldwide black market. This was very bad news for America as a whole and the Pentagon in particular. The thought of the US’s most highly advanced experimental weaponry in the hands of Saddam Hussein or the Colombian drug cartel was nothing short of terrifying. And it became even more so when Vesper discovered that the leak within DARPA appeared to lead back to someone inside Looking-Glass.
Ever since she had discovered that Leon Waxman, the late head of Looking-Glass, had been Johnny Leonforte, she had been trying to discover whether it had been the Leonfortes who were behind the consistent theft out of DARPA. DARPA was black-budgeted, which meant that Congress did not vote on appropriations for it. In fact, officially DARPA did not exist. And yet, someone had breached its defenses and was selecting plum weapons from its arsenal.
Caesare Leonforte? Vesper suspected as much. It made sense, since Caesare’s father, Johnny Leonforte, had had access to DARPA through Looking-Glass. If the elder Leonforte had been Caesare’s entrée into DARPA, Caesare was smart and clever enough to maintain the pipeline through bribes or extortion or both to keep it going even though Johnny was dead.
In Vesper’s mind, the need to plug the leak in national security, to bring Caesare to justice, had turned into something of an obsession. She had been conned by Johnny Leonforte, just like everyone else at Looking-Glass, and she was determined to make the son pay for the sins of his father, along with those of his own evil making.
To that end, she had gotten herself reassigned within the federal government, into the Anti-Cartel Task Force, and had asked to have Lew Croaker hired as an independent field operative assigned to her. This was not so difficult as outsiders might think. For one thing, the federal agencies were a labyrinth of overworked, under-motivated bureaucrats handling a mare’s nest of paperwork each day. If you knew which routings to use, assignments with the proper signatures could be manipulated without undue strain. Vesper’s old boss, Leon Waxman – Johnny Leonforte – was dead. And Vesper herself had an extensive network of supporters – shadowy people for whom an operative with her abilities was an invaluable asset. These men were so high up in government their word was akin to God’s.
Once outside the ACTF, she had quickly discovered that it had already targeted a company named Volto Enterprises Unlimited. It was a Bahamian shell corporation that the ACTF believed was a conduit for hundreds of millions of dollars annually of IGG, ill-gotten gains. And the man getting filthy rich from the IGG, the man behind Volto itself, Vesper had read with a certain quickening of her pulse, was believed to be Caesare Leonforte, Johnny’s son.
That’s when it all came together for Vesper. She had always wondered how Johnny Leonforte had successfully masqueraded as Leon Waxman. It was true that Johnny had obtained a superbly forged legend – official documents such as a birth certificate, high school and college records, credit history, even Army records, and for verisimilitude, a
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