Agent 9-D sat awkwardly in a small town dive in Upstate New York, waiting for their dead drop as was agreed in the coded message. Dressed to the nines and expecting a business clientele of the Hughes and Boeing variety, things for the deeply undercover KGB wolf had gone less than stellar. The sign said Four Seasons in English, but with a mild conjugation and more importantly, his usual choice of navigational talent had not failed him before. He ordered a New York Strip steak at 4pm on a Wednesday, thinking the fancier dish would befit his abrupt cover story of an eccentric Millionaire on the hunt for the best Steak in the State.
Behind the counter, Special Agents Conrad and Denise planned their moves. The Mob-Boss looking man matched the description of the target. SWAT teams converged, and if the wire tapping operation in Chico had gone to plan, there was enough paper trail and RICO related recordings to make the charges stick. The "Butcher of the Boroughs" was about to be a poster child for the FBI's capability to accurately and precisely arrange for an arrest without letting the perp even know they were in the crosshairs. Three years of planning, and it was coming down to this moment. On cue for the 4pm festivities, in walked Paulie Rossetti and his Russian Friend, a strange fellow named Dimitri.
Dimitri stared at D-9, a quiet sensation of disbelief and shock as the two men, who'd only met directly in person one time before three years ago suddenly were standing in the same space. That meant the Cossack son of a bitch was a CIA dog, no wonder he smelled something off on last visit. Quietly in Italian, Dimitri whispered to Mr. Rossetti that a set-up by the Russian Mafia was afoot, and that they should play along and do exactly as he instructed. Avoiding making a scene in Paulie's Italian-Irish Cousin's small family chain restaurant was top priority, neither the KGB, CIA, nor the Italian Mob needed a bloodbath. Dimitri introduced Mr. Rossetti to D-9 as "Doctor Boeyhughes". It did help that Mr. Rossetti had a suspended medical license, he could easily feign the part and D-9's English was never all that good.
At the Four Seasons in New York City, New York, the President along with several designers and executives discussed the exciting work of the STARWARS project, none the wiser about the abrupt tone shift they were in for when in walked the "Butcher of the Boroughs" Martin Donatelli-O'Malley. Just a few years ago, Regan had given a State of the Union address about him and his affairs across the East Coast. The Secret Service ushered President Regan directly out the back door to the Motorcade as CIA counter-intelligence scrambled to get the FBI on the line. Someone, somewhere in the chain of command and cross-service intelligence sharing bridge had fucked up royally and now the Chief of Police of New York City and the Butcher himself were having a shouting match.
At the Four Seasoning's Albany, New York location the FBI was white-knuckling as their wires picked up a plain-English, not Italian nor Russian, conversation between the three men. It shook out roughly to a series of accusations, calm at first and escalating as the two Russians accused each other of being CIA, Kremlin-assigned assassins, and a whole host of presumably Russian-Ethnic slurs which somehow had dragged Paulie Rossetti into the exchanges. What started as a two-way argument quickly spiraled out of control, and before Agents Conrad and Denise could even blink, the three men drew handguns and after a brief exchange of gunfire later, all three of them were slumped dead on the floor around the table. The entire exchange captured on CCTV lasted less than 180 seconds. Then, before either Agent could think, the phone rang, and the DIRECTOR of the FBI suddenly wanted to know what the situation was in the diner.
As President Reagan's motorcade took off back towards the Airport so-as to extract the president from the situation, several members of the Honeywell-provided security team began shouting in Russian as the Italian-Irish Mafioso began shouting in a fluid blend of English, Italian, and Irish related slang. Guns came out, many of them TEC-9's or old Grease Guns, and as engineers and business people from multiple sectors of the Military Industrial Complex dived for cover, the CIA's Quick Reaction Force shot flash and smoke grenades through the front windows of the massive executive conference hall of the Four Seasons. US Army Rangers and other special-forces trained soldiers began hosing the two belligerent parties in fully automatic fire from their M-16's. The exchange lasted less than 5 minutes.
Two weeks later, a desk clerk by the name of Thomas Mattias was reviewing the brand new IBM database system they'd just adopted for the multiple regional distributions for the Yellow Pages of New York State. He and his boss had shared an awkward cup of coffee at a Waffle House next to the interstate with two gentlemen who claimed to be diplomats with no particular background representing the international community in regards to a major incident caused by an error in the previous month's published update of the Yellow Pages. Over 100,000 copies had already shipped, errors the likes of which these men seemed to be fixated on must have already cost quite a lot of tax payer dollars. Perhaps a crate of Bazookas went to some starving children in Africa, it wasn't Thomas' business to care. What made it stick out to him as abnormal though was how two major Mob shootings, one that almost involved the President, were directly linked to the errors in the database.
Thomas rubbed his eyebrows. Some jackdaw intern must've gotten sloppy and transfixed the addresses to the two locations. How they fucked up so royally that Albany and New York, New York got confused was enough by itself, but worse, there wasn't a team of lawyers large enough to save the company from the utterly inept mistake of confusing the internationally renowned "Four Seasons Hotel" with "The Four Seasonings Steakhouse and Bar". Thankfully, that wasn't Thomas' responsibility to take the blame for, the CEO had already been sacked and several managers had been let go without so much as a notice they'd fucked up. Around 18 people were dead because of this mistake, and two fellas in suits (one with a foreign accent that sounded like it belonged on the other side of the Berlin Wall) handed him and his boss $10,000 each to make it go away.
Just another day in the life of an editor.
