Public Enemy

50

The Three Wise Men-as Laramie preferred to call her team following Cooper’s more insulting nickname-decided to recruit a bounty hunter to capture the sleeper and deliver him to Detective Cole’s childhood home, a dilapidated ranch in Yonkers the cop said he’d inherited when his mother died eight years back. The peeling old house was a forty-minute drive from the sleeper’s home, a drive Laramie understood the bounty hunter, his posse, and bounty to have made in a rented Freightliner Sprinter without incident.

Cole assured them that nobody besides the mailman ever visited the old house. He also claimed to be remodeling it, but Laramie saw no evidence of such as she paid her cab fare in cash and came up the stoop. They had the sleeper, whose current name was Anthony Dalessandro, in the basement. Laramie was greeted in the foyer by a thick-necked member of the bounty hunter’s posse; it seemed the seizure team still wore their gear, this guy coming at her with his heavy handshake and a blue flap-down windbreaker of the sort FBI agents wore for public raids. The only difference being the words on the coat-this guy’s jacket saying BAIL ENFORCEMENT AGENT in favor of a more legitimate declaration of authority.

The “bail enforcement agent” escorted Laramie down a set of creaky wooden stairs to the basement. The cellar’s floor was made of gravel, which looked wet in places, and its walls appeared to be nothing more than sagging piles of stone laden with leak stains.

Dalessandro was zip-tied to a chair on the far side of the space, hands bound behind the rear of the chair, ankles secured separately to the chair’s two front legs. A rectangle of black tape covered his mouth and twin loops of yellow rope secured him around the chest. He was out cold.

A man Laramie knew to be the head bounty hunter-a scrawny, longer-haired version of her escort, standing no taller than Laramie’s five-four-came over and shook her hand without introducing himself or asking her name. She noticed that once he’d let go-as compared to the shake of the guard dog who’d brought her down-her fingers seemed less likely to crumble and break off.

“Afternoon,” the bounty hunter said. She found his voice almost gentle. “Based on the assignment particulars, we’re assuming you’ll prefer total privacy during your ‘conversation’ with the subject. My recommendation, ma’am, is we remove the tape from his mouth so he can speak with you, but otherwise leave him as is. Strapped in. We’ll be standing by upstairs for the duration.”

“That sounds fine,” Laramie said. She thought a little about how unwilling to talk the sleeper might turn out to be while strapped to the chair, but she wasn’t figuring on getting much out of him anyway and wasn’t about to risk her life for zero intel. Better, she decided, to stay on the safe side, particularly if she wouldn’t have one of the guard dogs with her. Which she wouldn’t regardless-the bounty hunter was right. Neither he nor the members of his squad would be permitted to listen to the interrogation.

“If you prefer, we can hang tight in the van,” he said. “But I’m always more comfortable sticking to what I like to call ‘bumrush range.’”

Laramie nodded, needing no explanation.

“Agreed,” she said.

The bounty hunter came around behind her, lifted the folding plastic-top table he’d been keeping there, and placed it in front of the sleeper. He repeated the circuit and brought a second chair over to where Laramie could sit and face Dalessandro from across the table.

Then he nodded and smiled.

“Use the word ‘help’ or just make a lot of noise,” he said. “We’ll be right down.”

“From bumrush range,” Laramie said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh,” the bounty hunter said. “Almost forgot.”

He headed to the storage post against the wall one last time, carried a heavy bucket over to Dalessandro’s side, reared back, then doused the comatose sleeper with a full bucket of what Laramie assumed from the reaction to be very cold water.

Dalessandro came suddenly awake, wide-eyed, sucking frantically for air through his nostrils, searching in a panic around the dim basement for some clue as to his whereabouts and circumstances. The bounty hunter assisted Dalessandro in his effort to breathe, ripping off the rectangle of tape in a quick swipe that looked to Laramie as though it hurt like hell.

Dalessandro heaved in a few breaths of air.

“There you go,” the bounty hunter said to Laramie. He walked upstairs and shut the basement door behind himself.

Laramie waited, standing, until the sleeper got his bearings and settled down. Once she could see he’d realized that a fairly unthreatening woman was all who stood before him, she approached the table, flipped the file she’d brought onto it, took a seat, and pulled her chair nice and close to the table.

“Hi, Tony,” she said.

Dalessandro blew some dripping water off the edge of his nose. He took the opportunity to peer around the basement again. After a while his dark eyes settled on Laramie, where they stayed for a confused couple of minutes.

“Who the hell are you?” he said.

She noticed there wasn’t any particular accent to his speech-maybe a slight East Coast edge as was appropriate to his assumed identity, but otherwise pretty much neutral, like a news anchor.

“More to the point,” Laramie said, “who are you?”

“What are you talking about? What’s going on here? One minute I’m having a beer on my couch, the next thing I know these goons bust in and throw me on the floor and I wake up in this fucking basement.”

“I can answer part of my question for you,” Laramie said. “One person we know for certain you’re not is Anthony Dalessandro. Unless, that is, you died from leukemia at age six and were subsequently resurrected in full health.”

Laramie might have seen the first spark of something besides confusion or anger in his eyes-but if so, the spark lasted about as long as a spark normally does.

“My name is Tony Dalessandro,” he said, “and I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You’re pretty good at this,” Laramie said. “You know the first thing they teach at CIA? ‘Never go belly-up.’ Even when caught red-handed, there’s always the chance they’ll have some doubt you’re good for whatever they’re accusing you of, as long as you never actually admit your guilt. You’re familiar with the Central Intelligence Agency-I’m sure they taught you all about them in your classes under the hill in San Cristóbal.”

There was the slight flash of rage-Laramie reading it as how the hell could anybody know these things, I’ll kill you-but that look too, real or imagined, left the basement as quickly as it came.

Laramie knew Dalessandro, or the man who called himself that, to be single, thirty-six years of age, living in a rented two-bedroom, two-bath townhouse, working as a site foreman for a major rural housing contractor, up to his ears in debt, and blessed with one hell of a handsome appearance. He’d been putting this appearance to work with a different woman almost every night since they’d been watching him-belying the source of the majority of his methodically built debt. According to his many credit card statements, Tony had spent a great deal of money on dinners, weekend getaways, sports events, private-room cash-outs at numerous strip joints, and virtually every other form of foreplay invented to date.

Not quite Benjamin Achar, Laramie thought. But in a way, very similar: both seemed to be soaking up the life they preferred to lead with great relish. The problem, as Laramie saw it, was there seemed nothing to threaten him with. Unlike Achar, he had no family, and he’d already bought the fertilizer, so was obviously fully resigned to fulfilling his assigned mission. How do you convince a guy like that to reveal whatever secrets Márquez, Fidel, or anybody else on the public enemy team had vested him with?

She went straight to the only strategy she’d been able to devise, sorting through the options on the Jet Blue flight from Fort Myers to JFK.

“I thought I’d skip the part where we beat around the bush,” she said. “We’ve been watching you, Tony. You and your colleagues. We’ve seized the fertilizer and the diesel fuel you bought this morning. We searched your home and found the filovirus vials, so we took that too. We know where you trained. We know who sent you, when, and how. But you know why I’m being blunt and getting right to it?”

He watched her with lukewarm interest. She’d earned a portion of his attention-as to whether that would get her anywhere was anybody’s guess.

“The reason I’m skipping the pleasantries is for your own benefit. The organization that has captured you is not the Central Intelligence Agency. This is relevant to your situation because CIA, or any other arm of the American government, frequently has to concern itself with pesky little things like international law. Things like civil rights and trials. At least most of the time.”

She shrugged.

“The people I work for-the people who brought you here-don’t have to answer to any of that. Plus, Tony, you don’t really exist to begin with. Therefore I’d say the simple solution to this filovirus-dispersal scheme, at least as far as your involvement with it goes, is pretty simple: after our conversation, you vanish. I think that in the place you come from, it’s probably called ‘disappeared’-you’ll be ‘disappeared.’ No trial, no sentencing. One bullet. Two, if necessary.”

She stood in the way a person would when she’d said all she’d come to say.

“If you’re interested,” she said, “I’ll give you an alternate scenario. If not, you’ll die an anonymous failure within the hour. Goodnight.”

She offered him a courteous smile and turned to go.

About the time she was halfway up the rickety old stairwell, she heard a phlegmy kind of grunt that might have been Anthony Dalessandro clearing his throat. Then again it might have been something with the plumbing, so she continued to the door and had it open before Dalessandro said, “Just a second, lady.”

The bounty hunter and a different but also large cohort were seated at the table in the kitchen consuming a couple boxes of pizza and Diet Cokes out of the can.

“Be another few minutes,” she said, then closed the door again and retreated down the stairs.

When she’d retaken the chair across from Dalessandro, he shook his head.

“You’ve got the wrong guy. I don’t have anything to do with what you’re talking about.”

In Laramie’s experience, anybody who used the phrase “You’ve got the wrong guy” had, in stating it, for all intents and purposes, admitted his guilt. She decided she’d play his game and let him stick with whatever he was trying to convince himself he’d convince her of.

“There’s something else,” Dalessandro said, his voice congested. He cleared his throat again, the same sound she’d heard climbing the stairs. “There’s something else I hear they teach you about interrogations in the CIA. Or at least I’ve seen it on CSI and Law & Order. It’s that if the cops haul your ass in, you should tell them what they want to hear. If you do, they’ll let you out of it. Make a plea-bargain deal. Or let you go. So what does that organization of yours want to hear? Tell me and I’ll give it to you, and you can let me go back to fertilizing my lawn.”

As nonchalant as he was being about this, Laramie continued to believe what she’d thought would be the case before coming here-that he wasn’t going to tell her much, but that he might, nonetheless, show some of the same tendencies as Achar. Maybe, she thought, he likes his “deep cover” life and, if caused to believe he might have a shot at getting back to some form of it-via witness protection or some such route-he’d give them something.

“You’re a smart cookie, Tony,” she said. “I’ve got some influence with the people I work for, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about: if I put a word in, you’ll be spared immediate execution. So yeah, you tell me what I want to hear-even if you’ve got nothing to do with any of this suicide-bombing business-and maybe it’ll work out for you.”

He shifted in his chair, waiting.

“I’m skeptical you can even help me with any of this, Tony. I think you’re a compartmentalized drone, busy with nothing but assimilating until the order comes in for you to wipe your useless self off the face of the planet.”

…but I’ll bet your fellow San Cristóbal alumni have followed whatever course you were told to take, and I’d like to hear a little more about it…

“But whatever,” she said. “If you’d like to walk me through how it is you knew to go out and buy the ingredients for your SUV bomb, I’ll consider putting that good word in. What was the signal?”

Dalessandro grunted, or maybe chuckled, or was just clearing his throat again, Laramie wasn’t sure. Then the noise progressed into a well-defined chuckle, and finally to a level-toned, mean-spirited sort of laugh.

He kept at it, Dalessandro utterly pleased with himself, until the laugh slowed, then subsided back to the phlegmy throat-clearing noise. At that point Dalessandro lowered his head and glared at her with eyes that looked, set behind his dripping-wet skin as they were, flat, black, and long since dead.

When his next words came, they streamed forth in an unabashed, thick, odd-sounding accent Laramie couldn’t place and could barely understand.

“Good luck, bitch,” he said. “Good luck finding any of us. Good luck stopping us. All one hundred and seventeen of us.”

Laramie felt ice water trickle down her spine.

“You didn’t know that, did you, bitch? That’s right-you have no fucking idea-no fucking idea what is about to happen. You’ll never find the others. No matter what I tell you. And I won’t be telling you shit. So just get it over with. Kill me, bitch-do it. Do it!”

He made a game attempt at leaping from his chair to attack her, but only succeeded in stretching the ropes and tipping himself forward an inch or two. Veins popping in his neck, eyes bugged and frantic, Laramie saw in his otherwise useless lunge an undistilled rage-the kind, she supposed, from which terrorist plots are hatched.

In catching her glimpse of this, Laramie came to two realizations instantaneously: first, they could torture this guy with every technique known to man, and no way in hell would he tell them a thing. Second-though she supposed it should have been obvious-one doesn’t train, hide for more than a decade under an alternate identity, then mobilize to execute a mass killing without being driven by the kind of anger that no threat, law, or preventive strategy has much chance at all of stopping.

Benjamin Achar and the love he’d found in himself for Janine and Carter notwithstanding-true love, she thought, being a one-in-a-million score anyway, or at least far worse odds than one-in-six-Laramie now understood with a concrete certainty that there would be no turning this army.

For the first time since her meeting with Lou Ebbers in the Library of Congress, it occurred to her she was probably going to die. A lot of people were-however they’d done it, Márquez’s army of sleepers were now immersed in the American fabric, and whatever it was they were pissed off about-genocide, murder squads, whatever-it was painful and sure enough for these people to seek only the destruction of every last one of us.

And who the hell was going to stop them?

Me?

Something on her hip vibrated-the GPS unit her guide had provided her. It doubled as a cell phone and her team had the number. The thing had surprised her because she hadn’t used it yet.

Laramie rose, climbed the stairs without another word to Dalessandro, and found a room bereft of bounty hunters in which to talk on the phone.

“Yes,” she said.

“Laramie.”

It was Rothgeb.

“The other sleepers are on the move,” he said. “Not all of them-only two of the other five. But each of them just drove to a home and garden store of one kind or another and bought pretty much the same quantity of fertilizer as your Scarsdale pal.”

“Crap,” she said. She fought against asking whether they’d seen any activity on the screen that was tracking Cooper’s homing device.

She knew he’d have told her if they had.

Laramie asked Rothgeb to put her guide on the phone, and once he’d announced his presence on the line, Laramie said, “Even if you’ve already updated him, call Ebbers immediately.”

“No problem,” he said.

“Tell him it’s time,” she said, “to pull the fire alarm. Tell him it’s time-as he put it on his call with me-for the federal government, the media, and everybody and their grandmother to board up the windows and hunker down for the storm.”