Painkiller

10

Ronnie bent down along the path, dug for a couple stones, and came up throwing.

“Cooper!” he said.

Cooper came sharply out of a deep sleep. He knew immediately who it was, and his first impulse was to ignore the provocation-pretend you’re still asleep, out-wait the punk, and eventually he’ll give up and leave.

The better idea, he thought, might be to lure him onto the porch. A little bit closer to the Louisville Slugger.

“Why don’t you have your friends call on your bloody satellite phone?” Ronnie said. “It’s six o’clock in the effin’ morning!”

After a moment of nothing but the sound of the waves lapping the beach, Cooper rustled inside the bungalow.

“Sat phone,” he said, “doesn’t come with a secretary.”

“Coffee, tea, or me, you fuck.”

“Who is it?”

“Eugene Little, and he’s flipped. Can’t understand a bloody word he’s saying.”

Hearing, to his disappointment, Ronnie retreat down the stairs to the garden, Cooper grunted as he pulled himself out of bed.

All right, Eugene,” Cooper said.

“Cooper, Jesus, where have you been hiding out!”

“What is it?”

“Highly carcinogenic,” Eugene said, “that’s what it is. Uranium. What do you think of that? Christ, I’m sure you knew it already. Knowingly subjecting me to the hazard.”

Standing at the beach club phone, Cooper yawned.

“Uranium?”

“U-238 and U-235, according to this lab report I’m reading, and lethal levels of this particular substance just happen to be spread all over your corpse. Which means all over my lab, my hands, and Jesus, probably in my system already. I’m telling you, I’m expecting incremental bonus pay. It’s always something with you.”

“Right,” Cooper said, starting to listen. “Get back to the, uh, U-238.”

“U-238 and U-235, apparently a mixture commonly found in places like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Ring any bells? This pathetic bastard you mutilated was directly exposed to radioactive fuel rods. No surprise to you, I’m sure.”

“It’s a definite, the exposure came from fuel rods?”

“I sent out tissue samples. Hair follicle sections. Trying to find the cause of those burns. I got a phone call from the technician, and I tell you this guy was going crazy-”

“Like you.”

“There’s a fucking reason for it, Cooper: they checked for radioactivity on the tissue sample and it tested off the scales. They did a second analysis-called me for authorization to do it, there are extra charges involved-and later confirmed massive quantities of uranium, they called it ‘ninety-nine-point-three percent U-238,’ on the torso and neck. ‘Characteristic signature of nuclear fuel rods manufactured prior to 1987,’ ” Eugene said. “I’m reading from the report, obviously.”

“That what killed him? Which came first?”

“You mean the uranium or the gunshots? I can’t answer that. Incidentally, the ballistics report ID’d the bullets as nine-millimeter armor-piercing shells. American manufacture. I’ll tell you, though, there was something odd about the time-of-death results. They were inconsistent-as though broad portions of the victim’s body had deteriorated to an advanced state of necrosis well prior to his time of death.”

Cooper found he didn’t like the sound of advanced state of necrosis. He resisted the temptation to ask Eugene if this meant the kid was already a zombie at the time whoever it was who’d killed him administered the fuel-rod burn and fired the armor-piercing shells into his back. Maybe, he thought, I should ask him to check for traces of puffer fish and bouga toad venom. Or maybe not.

“I checked my textbooks, Cooper, and many of the symptoms displayed by your murder victim were consistent with extreme radiation sickness. The kind you get from direct exposure. You get vomiting of blood, rapid deterioration of internal organs, sores-like getting terminal cancer and dying from it in five minutes. It’s fucking horrible, is what it is.”

Cooper wasn’t listening. “Mail me the lab results,” he said. “I’ll give it a thorough read.”

“That’s after we talk about the additional hazard pay.”

“You’re starting to get annoying, Ignatius. Put the results in the mail.”

He dropped the phone on its cradle.

There were one hundred and ninety-two employees of the Central Intelligence Agency posted in the Caribbean. Since the agency’s primary mission in the West Indies was to gather intelligence on the Castro regime, eighty-four of the one-ninety-two operated under some form of cover within Cuba itself. An additional forty-three worked in the Puerto Rico station, serving the dual purpose of Cuba operational support and Puerto Rico-specific intelligence gathering; a staff of thirty-seven, combined, served in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the Caymans. A small office in Grenada employed eight, and between the nations of Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, Barbados, Aruba, and Trinidad and Tobago, another fifteen held full-time positions with the firm. The U.S. Virgin Islands housed an office of four.

In the British Virgins, where there existed no justification whatsoever for an Agency presence, a single employee was stationed: the CIA’s one hundred and ninety-second man. Classified as a case officer within the Directorate of Operations, the man served no strategic purpose, reported to no one, and virtually no one knew what he did, or that he existed at all. He was never subject to performance review, would never be denied his stipulated, periodic raises, and did not require authorization in order to be reimbursed for his expenses. For the sake of convenience, the man had decided to list himself in the internal company directory under an alias that held no secondary meaning other than the fact that he’d taken part of it from the character of the hero, and part of it from the actor playing the hero in High Noon, one of the only movies he remembered liking.

The name under which he chose to list himself was W. Cooper.

As the sole case officer in his territory, he was also, by default, chief of station. This had little import other than to place him on various distribution lists for memoranda, and to give him the ability, for any reason at all, to order research on virtually any topic from the army of analysts housed in Langley. Cooper took advantage of this from time to time, using the Directorate of Intelligence as a sort of public library. He’d always preferred to read nonfiction anyway.

Following Eugene’s call, Cooper got an analyst on the phone in Langley and ordered a research packet on the subject of uranium-specifically, U-238 and U-235. The Agency functioned like a transoceanic vending machine, his request yielding a classified ninety-seven-page presentation, delivered via diplomatic pouch two days following his request.

When it arrived, he read the analyst’s report on the beach near the Conch Bay Beach Club bar, accompanied by a steady flow of painkillers, claimed on local menus as an indigenous BVI concoction-rum, cream of coconut, pineapple and orange juices over ice, topped off with a dash of nutmeg. Reclined in a chaise lounge, he alternated reading and sleeping, based on the excitement level of the various sections of the report.

The type of uranium detected on Roy’s body from the beach, 99.3 percent U-238 and 0.7 percent U-235, was non-weapons-grade uranium, obtained from naturally occurring ore and, as Eugene had indicated, most commonly used as the fuel source in older nuclear reactors. Reactors built during the past twenty years, the report said, generally utilized U-238/U-235 with the U-235 “enriched” to four or five percent. The analyst authoring the report added that while it was theoretically possible to build a bomb using enough 99.3/0.7 percent U-238/U-235, the weapon would be so crude, unstable, and of such low yield that, even if successfully engineered, it wouldn’t release greater quantities of energy than an ordinary space heater.

Atomic or nuclear bombs, Cooper read, utilized more highly enriched uranium-either 90 percent U-235 or plutonium-239, a by-product of processed U-238. The report spelled out some specifics that put Cooper to sleep within minutes:

Unregistered non-weapons-grade uranium, when detected, is not considered a violation of nuclear nonproliferation policies. Modern thermonuclear warheads obtain their explosive power from entirely different substances, namely a scientifically controlled fission of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, triggered by a contained conventional explosion and boosted by the secondary fusion of deuterium and tritium.

When he woke up, Cooper thought about that. He had always wondered how nuclear bombs were set off. Whether somebody working on a military base in Kansas could somehow make a mistake with a cigarette and wipe out half the country in the process. He called for and downed another painkiller, then read that exposure to non-weapons-grade U-238/U-235 had been documented to cause “extreme radiation sickness associated with direct and/or invasive contact, occurring during industrial accidents at nuclear power plants and, in fewer cases, reactor meltdowns aboard nuclear-powered submarines.” The intel on personnel exposed to submarine reactor melt-downs was difficult to come by, the report said, since most such meltdowns resulted in an imploded submarine and an all-hands-lost scenario. Still, the report contained photos of a pair of bodies recovered from just such an incident. The victims pictured displayed burn wounds similar to those on the body from the beach.

Cooper tossed the DI report on the white sand of the Conch Bay beach and sat upright in the chair. He thought about what it might feel like, eating bouga toad and puffer venom, being buried alive, winding up sometime later in a nuclear power plant or submarine and surviving an otherwise fatal meltdown long enough to be shot multiple times in the back while leaping from a tall building and breaking every bone in your legs-while loaded up on heroin. Go for a swim, wash up on a jetty, get pawned off on a spiritually bankrupt alcoholic with a gambling problem, only to be examined by a murderous, fugitive breast-implant surgeon. Cooper figuring by now that Eugene had probably ordered the body incinerated, that poor bastard’s journey concluding in a furnace one story beneath the streets of Charlotte Amalie-radiation going up the chimney and into the breeze. At least this time, he thought, no voudoun bokor’s going to pull the guy from the grave and put him back on the Haitian black-magic hamster wheel.

He thought that it wasn’t too much of a stretch to put himself into this kid’s head. His Central American friends might not have fed him any coup poudre potions, but he’d known a state of being about as close to hell as he figured life allowed, and didn’t find being passed off as dead to the general public an entirely alien concept.

He and I share something, Cooper thought: not a fucking soul seems to have given two shits about either of us.

My problem, he thought, is that I’ve exiled myself to this island, where I’ve got nothing better to do, or too much better to do, or too much fucking time on my hands to do all the things that are better to do, since I know I’ll get around to doing them all sooner or later. He couldn’t think of any other reason a rational human being would do anything more in the case of the twice-dead zombie from Roy’s beach-nothing besides tossing the ninety-seven-page DI report in the sack of garbage Ronnie collected daily from the club’s wastebaskets, and going for a swim. Problem with doing that, he thought, is that the fucking ghost that Roy pawned off on me will wind up sticking around. He’ll keep me from wreck-diving, bodysurfing, tanning, eating, boozing, and toking my way through the pain from this festering wound of mine, a pain I’ll never kill-best I can do is medicate it, so the goddamn medication had better work.

And thanks to Roy Gillespie and his voodoo handoff, I’m getting no relief.

“Fuck,” he said, pulled off his tank top, kicked away the Tevas, and went for a swim.