Public Enemy

46

Laramie handed him the faxed, heavily blacked-out copy of the two-page memorandum with the words PROJECT ICRS on its subject line. He saw immediately there were seven names on the distribution list, and that the memo had come from an entity called RESEARCH GROUP. Cooper took a swallow from his second pint glass of Bass Ale. Their food orders had yet to arrive, and after the seven-mile run, even he-quasi-retired operative with a liver to match Hemingway’s-was already feeling the effects of the brew.

He read the page and a half of text. The document described an amount of funding-blacked out-that had been dedicated to “unconventional counterbioterror research relating to infectious viral pathogens,” with a mention that the pathogens subject to “vaccination research” included viral hemorrhagic fever, “aka filoviral strains.” The research, it was reiterated, would be “conducted for the purpose of the development of suitable vaccinations or immunizations for strategic national defense use.” The author of the memo, speaking on behalf of the “Research Group,” wrote that the group “hereby authorizes the establishment of the proposed ‘Project Icarus’ research facility at which to conduct these operations.” The memo was dated “3 August 1979.” The location and other details of the facility were either not included in the memo or had been redacted.

Though it was fairly straightforward, Cooper read through the memo a second time before setting it facedown on the clear plastic tabletop, thinking, having followed the grainy words on the pages, that his theory on the place the snuffer-outers worked was becoming uncomfortably incontrovertible.

“Interesting memo,” he said.

“Yes. And by the way, I have personally broken six or seven laws in showing that document to you over lunch. But since such egregious security clearance violations seem to be emerging as my specialty, let’s stick to the more important reasons behind our lunch meeting.”

She plucked a celery stick from the veggie plate the waitress had brought with their drinks and snapped off a bite. As she spoke, Cooper felt another twinge of guilt-now that he’d let the human lie detector machine out of her cage, the snuffer-outers may well get handed to him on a silver platter-but he wondered how well he would do at sparing her from their wrath.

“Obviously the memo speaks for itself,” she said. “It is no longer a stretch to connect the dots between an illegal U.S.-funded biological weapons lab, a filovirus outbreak near that lab that managed to erase an entire village of people, a survivor who made it out and paid a visit on a local mission’s health clinic-and, somehow, the subsequent appearance of a similar or identical strain of genetically altered filovirus that is about to be used as a weapon of mass destruction within U.S. borders.”

Cooper nodded. “Agreed-it’s no longer a stretch.”

“The other thing about that memo,” she said, “the part not included on the page, is that Messrs. Knowles, Cole, and Rothgeb determined while I was making my way to your little kingdom on the bay here that every man on that memo’s distribution list is dead.”

Cooper raised his eyebrows.

“All of them were murdered,” Laramie said. “Separately, and, mostly-actually, in all cases but one-by the method of execution-style beheading.”

“They’re all dead?”

“Every name on the page,” she said.

The snuffer-outers, he thought, have been busy.

But as he thought that through, sipping from the pint of Bass, he considered that it didn’t fit. Didn’t mean it wasn’t the case; it just didn’t fit. The names on the distribution list of the memo must, he thought, all be on Uncle Sam’s payroll-and unless he’d been wrong from the beginning, it was his own status as a CIA hack that had spared his life. So far. It just didn’t make sense for the snuffer-outers to have iced the members of the memo’s distribution list sometime back, before they’d elected to try to take him out-and on top of it all, he found it unlikely federal government snuffer-outers would use execution-style beheadings anyway. Not exactly one of the top weapons of choice, as he and Riley had discussed near Cap’n Roy’s pool, of hired contract killers sent at the behest of U.S. government officials.

Last he checked, for example, he didn’t keep a machete under his pillow at Conch Bay.

Cooper decided he would operate under the theory that somebody else had performed the beheadings. This didn’t mean there wasn’t somebody who knew the details, however, just the way that somebody might have known the details had the snuffer-outers done it.

“It occurs to me,” Cooper said, “as I’m sure it does to you, that serial beheadings of people who work at or with the Pentagon probably wouldn’t go uninvestigated.”

“Yes,” she said, “that did occur to me.”

“Also occurs to me,” he said, “as I imagine it did to you, that this would be a good explanation as to how the people you work for were able to get their hands on a copy of the memo on such short notice.”

Laramie nodded absently. “It’s certainly unlikely,” she said, “that it would have been kept in the same file location after the attaché was busted selling his lists. You’re right-it’s more likely it would have been top-of-mind for somebody had there been multiple murder investigations under way.”

Laramie thought again of the CIA man at the task force meeting.

“The way my skeptic’s goggles see it,” Cooper said, “it would then follow that the people you work for knew about the memo you were asking to see. And if they knew about the memo, then they probably know what that memo authorized, and probably even what happened in 1983-or whenever it was that the lab sprang a leak and blew out an entire Indian village.”

“It also follows,” Laramie said, “those same people would have at least a rudimentary understanding of the fact-presuming it’s true-that it was the Pentagon lab that developed the filo the sleepers are about to try to kill us with.”

Cooper smiled with his lips sealed shut. What he thought, as he offered Laramie the smile, was that it also follows I’ll soon learn who it was who applied the muzzle to the potentially revealing artifact shipment by acing Cap’n Roy, Po Keeler, and a few other relatively undeserving souls. And since it’s likely to be the same person or group of people who saw to the slaughter of an entire Indian civilization, I’ll soon be in a place where I can seek a little payback for my second-ever client as detective-to-the-dead-that twelve-inch priestess statue and the murdered Indian village she came from.

“How do you manage to pull this shit off?”

Cooper took a few moments but couldn’t figure what it was he might have missed in the conversation that would lead Laramie to ask her question.

“What shit is that?”

“In the ordinary course of events,” Laramie said, “leading the life of leisure you prefer to lead, you’ve managed to uncover the key scrap of evidence indicating the U.S. government’s probable culpability in what may be the greatest threat to the country’s existence.”

“Oh,” he said, “that.”

The food arrived-for Laramie, tuna and salad; for Cooper, a bacon cheeseburger. Since he had finished his second Bass, he ordered a third. Laramie waved off the waiter’s suggestion she select a cocktail from the drinks menu and held tight with her ice water, which they’d refilled three or four times already. This despite Laramie’s taking, at most, a pair of quarter-inch sips from her glass between refills.

Cooper took a hefty bite out of the burger. When his beer arrived, Laramie set her fork on the table, crossed her hands together, and rested the weight of her chin on her hands, elbows propped on the table.

“Let’s talk about the here and now,” Laramie said.

Here it comes, Cooper thought.

“Do you think he’s the one?”

“Do I think who,” Cooper said, “is the one.”

“Márquez.”

Cooper nodded.

“Hard to see how it’s anyone else,” he said. “But you never know.”

“I can’t believe we’ve chosen a lively Irish pub,” she said, “and are simply sitting out here on the sidewalk for lunch, considering the plan I’m here to tell you about.”

He let her get to it at her own pace. He took another bite of his burger.

“We need you to go in and ‘eradicate’ him,” she said after a while-and a little more quietly than she’d been speaking till now.

Cooper chewed his mouthful of bacon, cheese, sirloin, roll, and barbecue sauce, then sipped from the pint glass to wash it all down.

“Márquez, I mean,” Laramie said, “of course.”

Cooper nodded dully but still didn’t say anything.

“I take it this doesn’t come as much of a surprise,” she said.

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

Laramie told him the options she had presented to the people she worked for and the choices that had been made.

Cooper nodded again, about as dully as before.

“More or less the only choices,” he said.

Laramie cleared her throat.

“I was told to tell you a number of things about what happens if you’re capt-”

Cooper held up a hand and Laramie stopped midword.

“Nobody knows me, nobody’s heard of me, nobody is affiliated with me. Hell, he’s not even American, that Cooper character,” he said, then gave her another emotionless grin. “Comes with the territory.”

They were silent for a bit. Nobody ate anything.

“So are you saying you’ll do it?”

Cooper saw the splotchy redness flooding its way up Laramie’s neck into her cheeks. He decided he would read the embarrassment as Laramie failing to grasp how to do two things at once-first, to get his confirmation-the ol’ “Yes, ma’am”-and second, to express whatever fear or empathy she was feeling about the fact he was about to head into Central America with a ninety-nine percent chance of failing to come out alive. So she came at it from the all-business side, the skin language telling him the rest.

“I’m assuming the people you work for,” he said, “can load me up with some intel on our friend with the, ah, possibly short life expectancy.”

Laramie reached below the table and touched the shoulder bag she’d brought with her.

“I have a great deal of it here,” she said. “But yes. We will get you all that we can. The support issues will of course be handled for you.”

“A plane,” he said, “not of government affiliation. Et cetera.”

Laramie nodded, thinking of the conversation she’d held with her guide just prior to hitting the road.

“There’s a man who handles these things for us,” she said. “And you’re correct, of course-there will be no affiliation or documentation of any kind.”

“Famous last words,” Cooper said, and held up the memo.

Laramie shook her head. Cooper thought her gesture looked like the kind of action in which somebody would engage to rid herself of an aggravating flying insect.

“So you’ll do it,” she said.

Cooper ate some more of his burger without looking at her. Then he polished off most of his beer, looked at then elected to take Laramie’s water, and drank some of that too.

“I didn’t say I agreed to do it yet,” he said.

“I know you didn’t say-”

“No doubt the Three Stooges believe their theory to be correct, but let me ask you this: are you positive he’s the guy? Is he definitely, positively, beyond a reasonable doubt, absolutely good for it?”

Laramie didn’t move much or say anything for a minute. Then she said, “The Three Stooges, huh?”

“Your cell.”

“No kidding. Look,” she said, “I wouldn’t put it beyond some doubt. But I will say I find it likely enough for us to take a calculated gamble and make this call.”

Cooper nodded. “Not that it matters, but you’ll be ‘making this call’ and taking that calculated gamble on more than one life.”

“You mean you? In addition to him? Of course I know-”

“Yeah, me too, but that’s not what I mean. I mean others also. Along the way.”

“We recognize that too.”

“You and your Grand Poobah, you mean,” Cooper said.

“Grand-” Laramie shook her head. “Right. Okay-I, then. I recognize that. But yes, him too. The Grand Poobah as well as the Three Stooges. It should go without saying I don’t like risking-”

“Doesn’t matter,” Cooper said, holding up a hand. “It’s just conversation.”

“What do you mean?” Laramie said.

He took his time chewing another bite of his burger and swallowing a sip of the beer.

“Since none of you has the luxury of doing the deed,” he said, “the decision, of course, rests elsewhere.”

“Well certainly, if you’re the one pulling the trigger-”

“You may want to keep it down, Laramie, here in this lively Irish pub. Volume aside, what I’m telling you is I’m not going to do it unless I know he’s the guy.”

Laramie’s cheeks popped pink.

Cooper said, “You can feel free to tell the people you work for-if you even know who they are, that is-that these are the only terms under which I’ll conduct this mission. Of course, if you, or they, would like to find somebody who takes orders with a bit more verve, then go right ahea-”

“This is the way these things are done, do you understand that?” Laramie said. “There is no way we have of knowing any better that he’s the one. This is how it works-you assess the intel, analyze it, determine the probabilities, and make a goddamn decision, whether you like that decision or not. Hundreds of thousands of American lives could be at stake, Mr. Twenty Million Dollar Man. You can’t just elect to cancel the decisions Lou’s mak-”

Cooper interrupted her but didn’t miss the slip.

“You can stop with the campaign speech. You’d make a great CIA spy-master. Like our old friend Peter M. Gates, and our other old friend Lou Ebbers. Hell,” he said, watching Laramie for a reaction but getting none, “if I were the president, I’d appoint your cute little ass to director of national intelligence in a Caribbean minute. But down here at my lowly level, this here foot soldier-duly assigned the icing of a president of an entire, if annoying, country-has decided he will go ahead and find out for himself from the horse’s mouth whether it’s the right horse we’re talking about. If I’m satisfied he’s the ‘doer,’ then I’ll happily do the deed. If not, not. Accordingly, you, the Poobah, and the Stooges can blow this whole thing out your ass, or you can proceed with sending me on my way. Your call.”

Laramie didn’t say anything, or change expression for a time that felt to Cooper like ten minutes. He decided to keep eating while this inactivity took place. He ordered and began nursing yet another beer while he was at it.

When she finally spoke, Laramie said, “You’re not doing this for us. Are you?”

“Ah,” Cooper said after swallowing his last morsel of beef. “The return of the lie detector.”

“It’s not about the threat to American citizens for you at all,” she said.

Cooper shook his head in utter nonchalance.

“No,” he said.

“It’s about you. You’re doing this because of your own need to go back. Or,” she said, “at least something related to that. To you.”

“Why, yes,” he said, sounding as though he were about to fall asleep. Which, thanks to the beers, the run on the beach, and the talk of foreign policy decision making, he was.

Laramie’s eyes locked on his. She held the stare, and Cooper saw the red splotching creep up past her jawbone before she spoke her next words, so he knew he’d be getting something good. Still, he didn’t expect quite what he got.

“In coming here to see you,” she said, “I was fully intending, as the commanding officer of this unit, to order you to take me to your hotel room and have your way with me. Because you know what? I don’t know whether you’re going to make it in, make it out-or make it, period, taking this assignment. But in your inimitable way,” she said, “you have managed to infuriate and frustrate me to the point where I almost, but not quite, fail to give a holy shit-”

“And that’s because I’m skeptical as to the intentions of the government that put the filo in the hands of Márquez to begin with?”

Laramie kept it zipped, still red in the neck but cooling off a few degrees as she considered his statement. Cooper drained his beer and signaled for the check.

Laramie leaned across the table, almost to where her nose was touching his.

“Maybe that happened,” she said. “And maybe Ollie North or one of his pals paid some bills for the genocidal maniacs who killed Márquez’s friends and family when he was a twelve-year-old kid. Maybe we’ve murdered our share of Native Americans directly, in fact, and even used atomic weapons. I’m not disputing those facts.”

Cooper stared back at her hard look, but felt himself falling apart again-Laramie the lie detector causing him to feel embarrassment about his rambunctious behavior, logical though it always seemed from the confines of solitude.

“Nonetheless, Mr. Twenty Million Dollar Operative,” Laramie said. “This likely victim of our flawed foreign policy intends, it seems, to take more than an eye for an eye. So exactly how much sympathy for the devil do you intend to show?”

Cooper unrolled four twenties on the table, snatched the turned-over memo, and gave Laramie the third version of his unpleasant smile.

“I’ll let you know when I reach my limit.”

Slowly, Laramie stood, lifted the bag she’d brought, and plopped it on the table.

“Here’s the intel on your target. The man I told you about will be in touch to handle your logistics, so be available through the number at your hotel. I’ll be in touch also, since, among other reasons, we’ll need to sort out the way we communicate during your trip.”

Cooper offered his commanding officer a salute from his seat at the table.

Laramie threw back her own unenthusiastic smile.

“Break a leg,” she said.

Then Laramie crossed the street to her car and started in on the drive back to the Flamingo Inn.