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Garcia chuckled. “Maybe they should change both of their titles to simply ‘foreign affairs adviser.’”
“This was an official trip?” Antonov said, his tone humorless.
“Absolutely,” Garcia said.
“Who paid?”
“Who else? OneWorld did.”
“And this is legal?”
“Excuse me?” Garcia said, mock-indignant. “As corporate counsel of OneWorld, Mr. Antonov, sir, I can assure you that absolutely every act of this company is conducted to the letter of the law.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Nick, for your edification,” Garcia then said, “I’ll recite from memory from the ‘United States Senate Ethics Manual’—said title being, I might add as a sidebar,
a classic oxymoron. In chapter four, I believe on page one-twelve, it states quote For expenses other than those enumerated in Section 311(d) as amended by the Act . . . yada, yada, yada . . . if an expense is deemed by a Senator to be related to official duties then the expense may be paid with either (or a mixture of) Senate funds, the Senator’s personal funds, or—”
“Can you get to it?” Antonov interrupted.
“I’m getting there, Nick,” Garcia shot back. “Sounds like you’re not having a good day.”
Garcia had exchanged a glance with Santos, who smiled and nodded, appreciating that Garcia was sending Antonov the less than subtle message that he wasn’t easily pushed around.
“Patience is a virtue,” Garcia went on, in a lighter tone. “You should write that down. I was just getting to ‘it’ here: Quote paid with the Senator’s personal funds, or in the case of ‘fact finding,’ funds provided by a third party otherwise consistent with applicable requirements governing such activities. Unquote. OneWorld would be that third party.”
“And the purpose of this fact-finding trip was for what?”
“The Cayman Islands have no casinos, as I’m sure you know, being in the business,” Santos said. “No gambling, outside the financial industry, that is. Ironic, no, what with all that investment money flowing through there? I envision building a Caymans’ version of GoldenEye. But bigger and of course with gaming.”
“What is this GoldenEye?”
“It’s in Jamaica, which has the closest casinos, a dozen of them. But Kingston’s a forty-five-minute flight.”
“And GoldenEye is . . . ?”
“The resort that used to be James Bond’s home. Or at least where Ian Fleming wrote double-oh-seven spy novels, including GoldenEye. Considering your boss’s background, I really thought you would have known all about that.” He paused, and when it was clear Antonov was not going to respond, he went on: “Okay, so the senator sent his two top advisers—or perhaps it was Palumbo who had the senator send him and Tony—to George Town to open a dialogue on gaming with His Excellency the governor. I understand a follow-up with the senator has been scheduled there.”
Santos grunted as the slideshow continued.
“And the other purpose, I suppose,” he said, “being to determine if Palumbo can maintain his tiny hard-on longer with one, two, or three partners. . . .”
“Or maybe one underage?” Antonov said.
“Nick,” Santos then said evenly, “it’s not if she is or isn’t. It’s the appearance thereof.”
Garcia chuckled.
“What?” Antonov snapped.
“Hell, even Palumbo said it this weekend,” Garcia explained. “He was feeling no-pain drunk at the time.”
“And what did he say, Bobby?” Antonov pressed.
“Navarra, on his pious high horse, was babbling on about all the good they do in Washington ‘for the people.’ Then Palumbo said, ‘But, you know, as an individual you can do millions of things right. Mess up once, that’s what you’re remembered for.’”
“Fact is,” Santos said, “a married forty-year-old snorting a small mountain of coke off the ass of a seventeen-year-old Russian hooker ain’t exactly ‘messing up once.’”
