Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [72]
Beckett Brown dispatched Tim Ward, a former officer in the Maryland state police, and Mike Mika, a former Secret Service officer, along with a few other agents, to the hotel. The Saint Michaels Harbour Inn is a classic resort hotel: situated on a picturesque finger of the Chesapeake Bay, it features dozens of sailboat slips in its own marina, and balcony views of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum just across the water. February, though, was off-season, when barren trees and chilly breezes keep tourists away. The influx of Mars executives and corporate spies from Beckett Brown would provide a noticeable boost to the hotel’s monthly revenue.
Ward and Mika were among the best men Beckett Brown had to offer. Ward was one of the founding members of the firm, and Mika was a veteran of the Secret Service’s Counter Assault Team, with which he traveled the world in the course of missions to protect presidents and vice presidents. For a veteran agent like Mika, it was a simple matter of checking into the hotel, dropping his belongings in Room 209, and stepping downstairs to the restaurant, Windows on the Water, for dinner.
The Beckett Brown team knew that the Mars executives would unwind after their meetings each day at the small hotel bar and then adjourn to the restaurant. Each day the spies positioned team members inside the bar, sitting two to a table and trying to look as if they were attending some other business conference. They positioned themselves in the room so that wherever the Mars executives sat, they’d be within earshot of the Beckett Brown men. From their years in the Secret Service, the men were skilled in the difficult art of maintaining a quiet, meaningless conversation while straining to overhear every word said at the next table. It worked. The Mars executives didn’t notice they were being observed. From their perspective, they had walked into an already half-filled bar. They barely cast a glance at the spies.
As the Mars team adjourned to the restaurant for dinner, the Beckett Brown men pre-positioned themselves at tables, again spreading out to cover as much territory as possible. But the dining room was too big for their small group to eavesdrop on every possible table, so they kept a two-man team waiting in the hallway. If the Mars people sat at a table not covered by a Beckett Brown listening team, the backups would walk in and claim the next table. Each night, they rotated the positions of their team members, with some in the bar, some in the restaurant, and some playing the backup role in the hallway. They didn’t worry too much about being recognized. Since the Eastern Shore plays host to so many corporate retreats, Mars executives would expect to see the same faces among their fellow guests over the course of a weekend. Nothing at all would appear out of the ordinary. On his first night in residence, the expense report shows, Mike Mika spent $184.24 on his meal at the hotel’s restaurant. But it was in every sense a working dinner.
In a report to the client, Beckett Brown noted that its operatives had overheard some important conversations during dinner at the restaurant that evening. Mars executives, while choosing from the menu’s pan-seared rockfish, lump crab cakes, and veal sweetbreads, didn’t notice the spies at the nearby table. And they talked frankly about how the sales of Mars’s Milky Way bars in Europe had been “adversely affected” by Nestlé Magic. The executives worried that the small plastic toy included inside the Nestlé Magic candies could become a collector’s item. It could have turned into a fad like “Tickle Me Elmo,” they grumbled, becoming the must-have children’s gift of the year.
The Mars executives were exulting in their victory over Nestlé, unaware that a team of eavesdropping spies surrounded them at that very moment.