Painkiller

35

They sent a woman. That, she knew, was how they did it: match you up with your physical equal to avoid the intimidation factor, giving the impression you were being summoned for nothing more than a conversation.

Laramie had been through this before, at least a routine variation of it. Anyone working above the intern level in the Directorate of Intelligence was subjected to the “Scuds,” CIA’s routine psychological profile-refresher and lie detector exams. Laramie was long since in on the meaning behind the nickname: they hit you with annoying, hastily launched, generally ineffective missiles, hoping to put you on the defensive and force a mistake in case you might have something to hide. If you didn’t, the semiannual, four-hour sessions were a joke.

Since she’d endured her most recent bout with the Scuds only six weeks back, it was fairly evident to Laramie that the thirtysomething woman whose reflection appeared on a darkened portion of the monitor in her viewing cubicle had not come for another routine inquisition. The purpose of the visit was clear as day: they’d discovered her e-mails to Senator Kircher.

She wondered what it meant that they knew what she’d done. What they had in store for her. Then she wondered what they were doing with the intel they must have known she’d discovered-were they acting on it? Or just punishing her for leaking it? If history were any indication-

The woman asked Laramie to accompany her and led the way up the elevator to the fourth floor, home of the Internal Investigations Unit. The woman took her into an enclosed room equipped with a mirror, encouraged Laramie to take a seat in one of the room’s two chairs, and left, closing the door behind her and locking Laramie in.

Considering that Scud sessions typically began with a lie detector exam, that an investigative officer accompanied you through the entire process, and that the officer, until now, had never failed to offer up a cup of coffee to kick things off, it occurred to Laramie there was a pretty good chance she had one hell of a long day ahead of her.

Cooper found there wasn’t much in the Langley database on the topic of who controlled the real estate on the island called Mango Cay. Abandoning the ostensibly far-superior CIA search engine for plain old Google, he verified from the chair on his porch that real estate falling under the jurisdiction of Martinique could not be owned by foreigners, and, as in the British Virgins, a lease-hold system had been established to circumvent such revenue-killing nationalism. Property secured by foreign interests in both Martinique and the BVIs involved the transfer of what was usually a ninety-nine-year lease, ultimately rented from the federal government of France or the United Kingdom, respectively; it was the lease rights that were purchased or transferred by private property “owners” in the case of a local sale.

Cooper made some calls and ultimately found a clerk in the appropriate records hall in Martinique. The midday sun had begun to bear down on him, the old porch oriented poorly when it came to the blistering afternoon heat. Nonetheless, he managed to score from the clerk the reasonably uninteresting and possibly useless ownership history of Mango Cay. The current leaseholder was a Delaware corporation called Global Exports, whose signa-tory officer was somebody named Spencer H. Gibson. Global Exports had bought the Mango Cay lease just over ten years ago. The prior owner, according to the clerk, was a Liberian firm called Freedom Partners, LLC, which had controlled the land for nine years. Two individuals held it prior to that; Cooper jotted down the names as the clerk rattled them off. Before the clerk’s list of four ownership entities, the land had apparently been classified as uninhabited public property.

By the time he’d hung up on the clerk, Cooper had already clicked back into cyberspace and determined that no particular Agency record existed on anybody named Spencer H. Gibson. He was also unable to find any CIA-originated intelligence on either Global Exports or Freedom Partners, and the earlier owners, two American multimillionaires, were now deceased. Cooper dialed up the phone numbers the clerk had given for both Global Exports and Freedom Partners, reaching a disconnection notice for Global Exports and a loud, repeating bratt-bratt noise when he tried Freedom Partners. He tried the number a few more times and kept getting the same sound.

Annoyed and overheated, Cooper leaned his head back and fell asleep in the chair, the sun stinging hot on his face.

They kept her in the Scuds unit for thirty-eight hours. Sleep was not permitted and no food was provided. The throbbing headache that resulted from Laramie’s inability to quench her caffeine addiction would have made it impossible for her to sleep in any case, but with the added irritation of the headache, enduring the last hours of the interrogation nearly did her in. There were moments-for instance, the utterance of the thousandth repeat of the identical question, queried by the sixth interrogator of the session, with Laramie strapped into the lie detector seat, EKG stickers adorning breasts, belly, hips, wrists-when Laramie was forced to dig her fingernails into the skin of her palm, even to bite a bleeding incision into her tongue, in order to keep from leaping from the chair and bashing the interrogator’s brains in.

Ironically, it was the interrogation simulation they’d given her at The Farm that gave her the chops to survive the thirty-eight hours intact. One of the first lessons they’d conveyed to the fresh batch of recruits back then had been simple enough to remember now: never go belly-up. No matter what they had on you, never admit that you did anything wrong, who you worked for, or whatever it was they were trying to get out of you-or so went the lesson. The principle was intended for use in the unlikely event a DI analyst subjected to torture in a Syrian prison just happened to possess the secrets underpinning America’s national security, but it proved particularly useful as a guide on what to admit, and what to deny, as the Agency’s own investigators sought to pry various confessions from her on the topic of her supposedly treasonous activities.

They had everything-she wasn’t sure how they had it all, but they did-everything she’d said into a pay phone, cell phone, home phone, some things she’d said aloud to herself at home, the text from each of the e-mails she’d let fly to Senator Kircher from Kinko’s and Morpheus. They knew about her relationship with Eddie Rothgeb, they had transcripts of every conversation she’d had with the mysterious W. Cooper, and they had meticulous documentation of her precise whereabouts within the confines of the headquarters building, pretty much minute by minute.

What Laramie decided to do was admit to divulging classified intelligence to Eddie Rothgeb and W. Cooper; she chose not to go belly-up on the Kircher e-mails. She’d devised this strategy on the walk over to the IIU wing from her cubicle, and stuck to it for the duration of the session. She found she had some ground to stand on, since she’d never put her name on anything, had never sent or received anything relating to the senator from home, or the office, or anywhere tied to her real name; she’d been careful with her language in the summary she’d sent, steering clear of names, departments, and specific intel and analysis that could be directly tied to her. She didn’t actually see how it really made any difference that she refused to own up to the cyber communiqués with a U.S. senator who supposedly oversaw the government’s intelligence operations, but stonewalling the interrogators at least gave her something to focus on during the caffeine-deprivation marathon. She also guessed that anybody inside or outside CIA contemplating bringing criminal charges against her would see the Kircher leak as the most egregious of the offenses she’d committed over the past three weeks of her life, and any physical evidence they’d have linking her to Kircher would be dicey at best. She’d passed the lie detector tests with flying colors.

While she chose not to own up to the Kircher notes, she found, oddly enough, that the line of questioning pursued by the roster of interrogators focused almost solely on her correspondence with W. Cooper. Between bolts of pain from the caffeine headache, she found this emphasis disturbing, presuming Cooper was in fact who he purported to be. She had a pretty good hunch he wasn’t anything or anybody different than he claimed, and at least until recently she’d done all right sticking by her instincts. Cooper himself had pegged her as a human lie detector machine. Why, then, the fourth degree on her phone calls with an Agency operative?

At 11 P.M. the day after they’d come for her, the last interrogator in the succession of faces told her she was free to go. She was made to sign a document agreeing to the fact that her employment status had officially been categorized as “suspended without pay pending internal investigation” and that she was now legally required to notify the gentleman listed on the document if she intended to leave the greater Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area for any period of time whatsoever. Laramie knew from the expression on the last interrogator’s face that she wasn’t free to go anywhere-they’d follow her everywhere she went, as had now been bluntly pointed out to have been the case for some time.

On the way home she pulled into the same 7-Eleven where she’d first used a pay phone to call Cooper and bought a vial of Advil, a Diet Pepsi, and a PowerBar. She swallowed eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen between Power Bar chunks and drove home, noting with neither surprise nor concern that one particular set of headlights seemed to find its way into her rearview mirror regardless of where she turned or how fast she drove. The car would drop back, vanish when she made a turn, then reappear, never coming closer than a few hundred yards behind.

As she pulled into her condo complex, she observed the guest parking lot adjoining her unit now featured three black sedans and one minivan, no single one of which she had ever seen parked here.

The garage door opened at the base of her town house and she slid inside.

It wasn’t until she pulled on the emergency brake and killed the engine that Laramie acknowledged how hungry she was. Still behind the wheel, she punched 411 on her cell phone, connected to Domino’s, and ordered a large pepperoni-and-green-pepper pizza. The delivery took a great deal longer than thirty minutes, and Laramie had a pretty good idea why. She didn’t ask the guy delivering the pizza whether he’d been pulled over by the police halfway through his run, or whether, when he was pulled over, the cops searched his Altima bumper to bumper, but figured that was about the size of it. The boy drove off-subject, no doubt, to another stop-and-search, probably for that same ineffective blinker.

She tried to make a phone call and got nothing in the way of a dial tone. She tried her cell phone, and got a message saying her service had been temporarily interrupted. She nodded, assuming they’d realized she could make calls with it once the pizza boy showed. Unfazed, she booted up the Dell desktop she kept in an alcove between the kitchen and living room, took a shot at checking for any e-mails, and failed to get an Internet connection. The Explorer status bar explained itself by saying, CANNOT LOCATE SERVER.

She changed into her nightshirt and looked in vain for a bottle of wine until she stumbled upon the jackpot of an unopened bottle of champagne in the back of the fridge. She shot the cork at the ceiling, kicked the lid off the pizza box, and never quite got around to turning on the television set while she sat on the couch and polished off all the Dom and seven-eighths of the pie.

She was thinking something to the effect that both Cooper and her father, when he’d been around, really had something with that alcoholism bit as she leaned her head back into the cushions and passed out for the night.