Painkiller

41

Cooper figured out what Ronnie’s smart-ass look was all about. The errand boy pulled a bottle of Chardonnay from a nest of ice beside their table, poured Laramie a glass, and replaced Cooper’s melting tumbler of tinted ice with a fresh pour of Maker’s Mark. Then Ronnie stood tall, hands clasped behind his back, and announced he was ready to take their orders, flaunting his smug gleam of pleasurable contempt in a way that made Cooper want to kick him in the shin.

Cooper knew that Ronnie was thinking there had never been a legitimate dinner date hosted by the occupant of bungalow nine, not that he’d seen in his tenure anyway. Ronnie was well aware that Cooper spent plenty of time helping women get drunk and enticing them to sneak up to his bungalow-leave your husband and his Izod shirt at the bar-but now, in the presence of Laramie, Cooper knew Ronnie could smell his vulnerability like a shark on the scent of blood. And the kid thought he was succeeding in delivering his implicit threat: Give me a few minutes with the lass and I’ll have her high-tailing it for the States in no time, mate. Tell her a story or two about her knight in shining armor, few of the things been said to have gone down over the years in good old bungalow number nine. Cooper resisted the tangible urge to grab Ronnie by his ponytail and inform the putz he didn’t give a shit about either Ronnie’s implicit threat, or the woman Ronnie was evidently so impressed with.

Laramie ordered a seafood Caesar salad and asked for the dressing on the side. Cooper told her nobody eats a Caesar salad with the dressing on the side, since that would keep it from being a Caesar salad. Then he ordered a Cabernet to accompany the Maker’s Mark, conch fritters, and the house burger with cheddar.

Once Ronnie had tenderfooted his way back to the kitchen, Cooper looked at Laramie, whose face was growing pinker by the minute from whatever sun she’d got while waiting for him to return. She was staring back at him with a look he couldn’t interpret, something between skepticism, fascination, and determination.

“Shoot,” Cooper said.

“Hm?”

“What’s the favor?”

“Proposition,” she said, and smiled, and Cooper felt a funny twitch in his stomach. Laramie grabbed her glass of Chardonnay and peered around the place-beach, lagoon, stars, garden, bungalows, torches. The warm orange glow of the fire-lit restaurant.

“Your home,” she said.

Ronnie came with Cooper’s glass of Cab. “Everything all right here?”

“Fine, boy. Now leave.” To Laramie, Cooper said, “This, along with a few hundred thousand square miles of ocean I consider the better places to dive and fish, a couple dozen miles of various white sand beaches, sunrise, sunset, an ivory moon, that precision-engineered machine you call a sailboat, the humid heat that burns your skin, plus whatever whiskey, rum, vodka, and women are available, along with the credo of ‘live slow, mon.’ That, and an occasional visit to the handful of casinos within ‘sailing’ distance-yes,” he said, “this is my home.”

He drank a slug of the Cab.

“Now let me guess,” he said. “You want me to take you to Mango Cay.”

“The island, you mean?”

“The island.”

Laramie put her fist under her chin and leaned the weight of her head against her fist. Cooper wondered if she were considering how savvy he’d been in determining her reason for being here, or maybe admiring how sharp his features looked around the eyes.

Laramie said, “Let me ask you a question.”

“Go right ahead.”

“Is there maybe a little friction between you and the esteemed deputy director of our nation’s intelligence operations?”

Cooper raised his eyebrows once he thought about this for a moment, deciding Gates’s goon squad must have determined he’d been the one on the other end of Laramie’s phone calls. The DDCI would not have liked seeing that.

“‘Bad blood,’” he said, “may be the more appropriate term.”

“It probably wouldn’t have been a bad idea,” she said, “to provide at least some indication of the shitstorm I’m sure you knew would hit once Gates figured out it was you I was talking to.”

Again Cooper had the sensation of mild embarrassment, that feeling of foolishness-as though he’d behaved like a five-year-old and been caught at it. Before he could interject in his own defense, Laramie said, “Wouldn’t have mattered anyway. You illegally obtain access to classified SATINT you’re not cleared to review and proceed to leak an even more highly classified analysis of the intel to a senator hostile to the foreign policy platform of the president-which analysis had previously and personally been compartmentalized by the CIA’s chief operating officer-and I suppose it’s inconsequential, relatively speaking, that I’ve befriended the COO’s arch-nemesis in the process.”

Ronnie delivered the conch fritters and Laramie’s salad. Once he’d topped off their wineglasses and departed, Laramie took a bite of her salad, the bite consisting of a morsel of sea bass and one square of romaine lettuce but no dip in the side dish of dressing.

Cooper ate three conch fritters slathered in Thousand Island sauce, took a thick sip of his wine, and said, “Who’s the senator?”

She told him about her notes to Senator Kircher, leaving out the casting couch episode.

“And yes,” she said, “I’d like you to take me to that island.”

Cooper drank some Maker’s Mark.

“I’ll pay you for your time,” Laramie said. “I’ll pay you to take more photographs while we’re there too. I have to warn you that I’m not sure what I’m looking for, or what we’ll accomplish in going there, but I can’t do nothing, and given what I know, nothing is something that shouldn’t be done. Nobody in Langley, or anywhere else that I can tell, is doing anything to connect the dots. The only dots anybody seems intent on connecting are those that would establish beyond a reasonable doubt that I showed classified intelligence and analysis to Senator Alan Kircher-and, above all, that I was secretly talking to you.”

Cooper had polished off the fritters; wordlessly, Ronnie swiped the empty basket and delivered Cooper’s burger and an array of condiments.

“The leaders,” Laramie said, “the ones from your pictures. Are you aware of what has happened?”

“That they’re MIA, you mean?”

“Yes. And the rhetoric from China’s premier-new premier-Deng Jiang-”

Cooper, observing that he’d nearly polished off the burger, said, “Education, tax cuts, and war on terror. Everybody uses the same line of bull the minute they take office.”

“Yes, but he’s specifically identified a ‘well-funded international terrorist organization.’ Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No.”

He noticed Laramie had drunk a reasonable dose of Chardonnay, consumed all the lettuce, but failed to eat even half the seafood or any of the dressing. He considered asking whether she was planning on finishing her dinner and was going to reach over for the strips of swordfish and rings of calamari she’d left untouched, then thought better of it and devoured his fries instead.

“I’m saying,” she said, “that Deng has the same theory I do. Or that I originally did. I call it a ‘rogue faction’; he calls it an international terrorist organization. Same thing.”

“Possibly.”

“Don’t you find it odd that the international terrorist organization Deng has mentioned-assuming it’s run by the people you photographed and who are now missing-played host to an admiral from Deng’s navy?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, well these supposed enemies of China have also been conducting military exercises that coincide precisely with Deng’s Taiwan simulation. You could, if you thought of it this way, interpret the simulations as preparations for attacks best conducted once a change in political climate has taken place. Such as, for instance, the change that just happened with the Beihaide nuclear warhead blast. Did you know that now-premier Deng was one of only three council members who was late to the meeting where the bomb detonated? He happened to have been the first in line for succession were the premier to die, and his political allies happen to have been the other survivors of the blast. Why is nobody talking about these things?”

Knowing his brain to be significantly more sluggish than it once had been-and knowing it hadn’t exactly started out as a fighter jet-Cooper took the time to glance into the sky above Laramie’s head while he put her theory through the motions a few times.

“You’re drawing some pretty brash conclusions,” he said when his mind had finished the workout.

“Thus far,” she said, “every ludicrous conclusion I’ve reached has pretty much proven to be accurate. Or close to it.”

“I didn’t say they were ludicrous. I said they were brash.”

“I’d say it’s pretty ludicrous operating under the theory that a Chinese vice premier detonated a nuclear weapon in his own country to succeed the sitting premier and, further, knows more than he’s letting on, or his lieutenant knows more than he’s letting on, about the leaders of the terrorist league he’s publicly identified-though still anonymously-as the perpetrators behind the detonation.”

“I’ll come back to what I was going to say when you interrupted me on my porch: you do realize there are maybe five thousand people better suited-”

“What do you propose I do,” she said, “besides attempt to get my hands on hard, physical evidence that I’m right?”

Cooper thought about that, then said, “One option would be to retire to a tropical isle and do approximately nothing for the rest of your life.”

Laramie’s neck and cheeks had turned, and held, a ruddy shade of pink. Ronnie came, took away their plates, then returned to solicit their dessert order, that same annoying expression on his face throughout.

“Despite the lack of decent help here,” Cooper said, “I think we should order dessert.”

“I don’t usually order dessert,” Laramie said.

Ronnie took a long step backward but otherwise remained stationed in the vicinity of their table. Cooper glared in Ronnie’s direction, then returned his gaze to Laramie without the glare.

“You should eat up,” he said. “There won’t be time for breakfast if we want to get to the island before dusk, because if we do, we’ll need to leave at dawn.”

“Do we?”

“Do we what?”

“Do we want to get to the island before dusk?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Good.”

Laramie eased back in her chair. She reached for her glass of wine and took a sip.

“How much?” Cooper said.

“What?”

“How much are you offering? You said you’d pay me to take you there.”

“Um, well-how much will you charge?”

“Nothing.”

She looked at him in a way that made Cooper think she was weighing whether she should throw a punch across the table.

He said, “Would you like to know why?”

“Sure, Professor.” She appeared to be amusing herself with a joke he didn’t understand. “Why?”

“The ferry was already headed there.”

Laramie thought about this.

“You were there taking pictures for your own reasons, of course,” she said.

“Correct as usual, Lie Detector. And while there may or may not be a connection between your brash theories, the owners of the Mango Cay lease, or even the second death of a young man named Marcel S., the fact remains I’ve got some unfinished business to handle, and the place it’s looking like I’ll have to handle it is out on that fucking island.”

Laramie smiled a little bit, causing another, somewhat alien twinge in Cooper’s belly.

“Who,” she said, “is Marcel S.?”

“Long story. I’ll fill you in on the ride over.” He twirled the thinning bourbon and melting ice in his glass. “You should know,” he said, “that the thing I’m taking care of, if it turns out that’s the place to take care of it-there’s a pretty good chance it’ll get ugly. Very.”

Laramie didn’t react one way or the other.

“Ronnie,” Cooper said.

Ronnie, who had held his position at the expense of various other tables-ostensibly to await their dessert order, but primarily to eavesdrop-stepped forward and inclined his chin.

“Mud pie. Couple spoons.”

“Aye-aye, Guv.”