Public Enemy

  Public Enemy

  Will Staeger

  After a slow start, Staeger's solid second novel to feature semiretired CIA agent W. Cooper (after 2005's Painkiller) turns into a riveting and timely story revolving around a biological weapons threat. While Cooper explores a botched smuggling job involving stolen Mayan gold artifacts in the Virgin Islands that results in many deaths, Benjamin Achar, a package delivery-company driver, deliberately blows himself up in his garage near Fort Myers, Fla. The explosion releases a deadly virus that kills more than 100 people within two weeks. Enter CIA agent Julie Laramie to investigate the explosion and develop a team to track down other possible sleeper cells. Laramie recruits a reluctant Cooper, her former lover and partner, to assist, even as he continues to look into the killings related to the stolen Mayan artifacts. Superior characterization, in particular the relationship between Laramie and Cooper, which never stops the action, and clear, crisp writing make for a well-above-average thriller.

  Will Staeger

  Public Enemy

  The second book in the W. Cooper series, 2006

  for Sophie and Brick

  1

  He pressed the button and the cacophony began. The big door descended, wheels running noisily along the twin metal tracks, and then it was over, and he stood in silence, and darkness. He thought of releasing his grip on the handle of the coffee mug he held; he knew the ceramic mug would shatter, the lukewarm coffee pooling on the concrete floor, never to be swept clean. But he didn’t drop the mug. Instead, he made his way in the semidarkness to the light switch, and in a few seconds the ceiling-mounted rack of fluorescent bulbs bathed the garage in a diffused moon lime glow.

  A black Chevy Blazer occupied one side of the garage. Along the opposite wall were rows of fertilizer bags, stacked nearly to the ceiling. Beside the fertilizer stood bags of grass seed and topsoil; two dozen red, five-gallon fuel canisters were pushed against the bags.

  The man approached the workbench at the back of the garage. He used pliers, a Phillips-head screwdriver, and a soldering gun to secure a series of contents within seven crimped lengths of narrow brass pipe. This took him about twenty minutes. When he finished, he set the seven devices in a neat line on the bench.

  What he did next would have horrified his wife, but not for the reason he supposed it should have. Armed with a fishing knife, he sliced open each of the bags of fertilizer and, one by one, emptied their contents into the cargo space in the rear of the Blazer. He ignored the bags of topsoil and grass seed. When he had filled the back end of the SUV nearly to its ceiling, here moved a stepladder from its hook on the wall, stood it beside the Blazer’s passenger-side door, and proceeded to pour the remaining complement of fertilizer through the sunroof, burying the leather seats his wife had demanded they include as an option in three feet of ammonium nitrate pellets.

  He closed the rear doors and made sure each of the side doors was sealed. Then, mimicking his transfer of the fertilizer bags, he carried each of the five-gallon canisters of fuel from its place against the wall, up the stepladder, and, obscenely, poured each container’s fuel in through the Blazer’s sunroof. The garage soon reeked of diesel fumes.

  He took the lengths of crimped brass pipe, reached in through the sun-roof, and dispersed the devices evenly throughout the vehicle. From his perch on the stepladder, he reached into his pocket and depressed the appropriate button on the Blazer’s car-alarm remote; the sunroof closed and the parking lights flashed once, the doors locking noisily.

  He came into his kitchen, where he noticed a plastic fire engine parked beneath the kitchen table. He took the toy from under the table and returned it to the playroom.

  The kitchen stairwell took him into the basement. Once there, he opened the top door of the aging refrigerator-freezer reserved for soft drinks and beer. From his pocket came the trusty Phillips-head screwdriver, which he used to remove ten screws at the base of the freezer. When he had the screws out, he reached beneath the edge of the panel he’d just unfastened and removed a metal storage container the size of a shoe box. He used a combination to open the container’s lock and opened its lid to reveal fourteen glass vials, each plugged with a wax-sealed cork.

  He pocketed a pair of the vials, resealed the container, and returned it to its hidden compartment.

  In the kitchen, he ran warm water over the vials in the sink until the cold fluid became less viscous. Vials repocketed, he returned to the garage; at the workbench, he broke the seal of the first of the vials and removed its cork, revealing the gelatinous, deeply blue contents within. He stood, nearly motionless, observing the reflection made by the fluorescent lighting on the surface of the fluid. He had thought through this part upward of ten thousand times, inevitably drawing the same conclusion he drew again now.

  He had no choice.

  Seizing the vial in his right hand, he lifted the tiny container to his lips, threw his head back, and consumed the flavorless fluid in a single swallow. He set the vial back on the workbench and stood still for nearly five minutes while his stomach grumbled noisily, objecting to the offensive drink it was forced to digest. He left the second vial in his pocket.

  From an open cardboard box on the workbench he removed the last of the day’s devices: a tiny black box with a green flip switch. While approximately the same size as the car-alarm remote, it was nonetheless simpler in both design and purpose.

  Using the stepladder, he climbed onto the Blazer’s roof and stretched out, facedown, on the cool surface of the vehicle’s skin. In his right hand was the black-box remote. He looked at it, then readied his thumb beside the flip switch.

  Electing not to engage in further doubt or debate, he pushed the switch against its housing and closed his eyes.

  He thought to himself in the instant before his death that he would be the first martyr of his kind. Perhaps nobody would know it; perhaps nobody would open, or understand, his message-in-a-bottle. Perhaps when the truth emerged, if it ever did, his wife and son would come to understand; perhaps not. No matter. He knew he was acting piously, and that his actions were just, and necessary.

  At that point his thoughts ended abruptly as, along with the Blazer and the majority of the house enveloping it, the man’s body was dispersed in a sudden, crude, foul-smelling eruption of fire, black soot, and enflamed fragments which, in their violent fury, flattened nearly two square blocks of the suburban housing development in which the man and his family had once owned their home.

  2

  Powell Keeler III, Po to his friends, was following the sloping curvature of the Lesser Antilles in the 150' Trinity motor yacht that was not his own. Po had taken his time since setting out from the Caracas Yacht Club four days prior; he’d been clear enough with his client, an old high school acquaintance and owner of the Trinity. They’d come to an agreement, Po taking the gig on one condition:

  There wasn’t any rush.

  His client needed somebody to sail the Trinity back home to Florida, a return leg on which the client, following his family’s six-week cruise through the Caribbean, did not care to use the boat. Having caught wind of this predicament, Po, bonded yacht transporter as he happened to be, offered his services as a favor-such favor being predicated upon his old buddy’s fronting him fuel money, a token fee, and sufficient cash to cover one month’s premium on the bond Po held as a condition of his transport license.

  Once his old pal acquiesced, Po headed down to Venezuela posthaste.

  Standing now at the helm, Po eased the yacht along its northwesterly course from a point some ten miles due east of Virgin Gorda. It was early, with the first orange crescent of sun an angry harelip on the black horizon. Seas were calm. Po had elected to navigate around the British Virgins, looking to avoid its endless supply of re
efs and shallows on his way to the evening rendezvous he hoped to share with the bikini-clad babes known to cluster at the main swimming pool of the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island in the Bahamas.

  The Trinity was loaded with dual Furuno FR2115/6 radar units, which Po had taught himself how to use a few jobs back. This meant, among other things, that Po understood perfectly well what the instruments were now telling him.

  Four vessels, one of them significantly bigger than the Trinity, loomed directly in his path. The fleet was camped out five miles to the north, with the two smallest boats on his screen closer than the others. The yacht’s radar had also detected an airborne object that wasn’t flying particularly fast, located halfway between the Trinity and the fleet.

  A helicopter.

  It had been five minutes since Po had spied another high-altitude speck in the brightening sky. Based on what he’d been able to see, Po had a pretty good idea what kind of plane it was, and this, in turn, gave him a pretty good idea what the fleet of boats and their helicopter escort were all about.

  The “speck” was a P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft. Having detected his early morning departure from Anguilla, the plane’s occupants had tracked his subsequent route and, extrapolating, assumed the worst-as might be expected from the Coast Guard’s regional antidrug task force fleet. The fleet’s assigned duty was to intercept, impound, or destroy the seemingly endless supply of “go-fast” racing boats bound for Florida or alternate points north. On a typical day, upward of three go-fasts-super-high-speed racing machines with their cargo bays retrofitted to haul upward of two tons of coke-took their shot at the continental United States from the general vicinity of the Greater and Lesser Antilles.

  On average, the Coast Guard was going two-for-three, season-to-date.

  Po was well versed on how to deal with such drug-interdiction efforts, misguided though they were in coming after him. The problem-over and above the secret cargo he had agreed to cart up to Naples in the hold of the Trinity-was if you let the Coast Guard snatch you in international waters, you were pretty much doomed, since the Department of Homeland Security claimed to possess the right to impound and destroy any “suspicious” boat in such waters, whether or not such boat was shown to be holding contraband. The preference, upon seizure, was to immediately destroy the boat. By taking out vessels, the task force reduced the pool of drug-running ships it had to battle; plus, scuttling ships relieved the task force of the time it took to cart the impounded vessels to San Juan or Miami, where seized boats were broken into their base parts and prepped for federal auction.

  Po toggled the radar display and the zoomed-in perspective on the monitor revealed that one of the smaller boats had kicked into gear and was now approaching the Trinity at speed.

  He saw that the helicopter too had set its sights on him.

  Gunning the yacht’s throttle, Po gave the wheel a quarter-turn to port, making a steep turn out of the open waters of the Atlantic into the territorial reign of the British Virgin Islands. Without probable cause, drug-interdiction etiquette dictated that in NATO-ally territorial waters-the BVIs, Martinique, or Montserrat, for example-Coast Guard officers could only board and inspect a vessel with its captain’s permission. Even then it was mostly a waste of time, since the Coast Guard held no official power of arrest in the sovereign territory of another nation. In NATO-ally territorial waters, the task force simply preferred to pin down the offending vessel and summon the local authorities for arrest and impound.

  Sporting the benefit of a two-mile cushion between the Trinity and the chase boat, Po zipped down the middle of the Sir Francis Drake Channel, aiming for the friendly confines of Road Harbor-the bay abutting Road Town, Tortola, capital city of the British Virgins.

  It seemed to Po that the early-to-rise local populace and overwhelming presence of tourists on the most populous island in the BVIs would at least lessen the likelihood that the Coast Guard task force would fuck with him.

  When the first of a pair of 22' Coast Guard “OTH” chase boats, accompanied by the aerial support of its teammate, an MH-68A “Stingray” helicopter, met up with Po Keeler and his client’s yacht, it happened just inside the rocky spit that shielded Road Harbor from the rolling swells of the channel. The encounter that followed might have proceeded in a perfectly civil manner were it not for the condition a second client of Po’s had imposed upon him as part of the shipment of the eight large cargo crates currently stacked in the hold of the Trinity.

  The cargo was to be accompanied on the journey from Caracas to the yacht’s home port in Naples, Florida, by two men, whom Po’s secondary client referred to as “security personnel.” The security personnel possessed, according to the secondary client, all required documentation and approvals-in other words, while they were Venezuelan, and spoke no English, their passports were ostensibly stamped with a U.S. Department of State authorization number that would clear them through customs. The client assured Po the “security personnel” would stay out of his way on the trip, and in fact were instructed to leave him entirely alone. They brought their own provisions, promised to remain in the vicinity of their cabins, and agreed never to leave the boat.

  Po frequently accepted money in exchange for hauling illicit shipments during his licensed transport gigs, and in so doing stood by a strict set of rules: no drugs, no guns, and no explosives. And while he had never before agreed to cart “security personnel” along for the ride, the Venezuelan who became his secondary client was paying big money-and his cargo, whatever it was, otherwise complied with Po’s rules. Thus, despite his misgivings, and largely influenced by the hefty cash advance, Po agreed to the deal, watching as the eight crates and two accompanying “security personnel” were loaded into the Trinity’s hold from the pier at the Caracas Yacht Club. The two men skulked aboard without so much as looking at him, and hadn’t made a peep since.

  A squat, rubber-hulled speedboat featuring a deck-mounted turret gun and little else, the OTH, named for how fast it could get itself “over the horizon,” had four soldiers aboard for its approach. One manned the deck gun, aiming it in the general direction of Po Keeler; two stood on the yacht’s side of the OTH, hands held near their firearms like a pair of cowboys set for a Wild West draw. The fourth spoke into a handheld microphone that broadcast his voice over a set of loudspeakers Po observed to be mounted on bow and stern.

  “This is the U.S. Coast Guard District Seven task force!” the agent said. The sharp treble tone of the agent’s voice over the OTH’s loudspeakers pierced Po’s ears, audible despite the roar from the Stingray helicopter hovering behind the yacht. “Request permission to board your vessel!”

  The Stingray banked slightly against a gust of wind.

  Po descended the steps that led from the cabin to the deck of the yacht. Keeping his arms stretched away from his body, he brought his right hand to his forehead in a salute, made a two-fisted thumbs-up gesture, and waved the task force agents aboard.

  As two soldiers from the OTH prepared to board the Trinity, Po turned slightly to the side. This allowed him to see something the soldiers could not. When Po saw it, an ulcerous burn that had been coagulating in the vicinity of his heart-establishing itself the minute the “security personnel” had skulked aboard his boat-sank suddenly into his gut and exploded.

  With only their jet black hair visible to begin with, the head of first one, then both of the Venezuelan skulkers emerged from the hatch Po knew to access the engine room. As the men rose from their hiding places, Po observed each to be armed with weapons appearing both bulky and slim-bulky enough to be of military grade, slim enough to have been stowed in the suitcases the fucks had toted aboard the boat.

  Po made the instantaneous decision to abandon ship.

  In two leaping bounds, he reached the polished chrome railing at the bow of the Trinity, planted a foot on its gleaming edge, and propelled himself outward and down.

  And while he intended it only as a survival measure, Po’s dash-and-splash
maneuver also served to distract both the Coast Guard gunners-the soldier manning the OTH’s deck gun and a second in the helicopter-in a way that gave the Venezuelan gunmen all that they would need to accomplish their intentions.

  With the Uzis they’d stowed in disassembled form in their suitcases, the men took aim at the deck of the OTH and threw down, strafing much of the chase boat’s rubber hull with their poor aim but nonetheless managing to dispatch all four of its crew before a single bullet was fired upon them in return.

  The pointless nature of this proactive salvo was illustrated in abrupt fashion as the machine gunner aboard the Stingray helicopter, only momentarily distracted by Po’s dive, let loose on the Venezuelans with his. 50-caliber gun. In guilt-ridden overcompensation for his failure to properly defend the agents aboard the OTH, the machine gunner continued to pummel the bodies of his targets with round upon round of shells long after both men had died, riddling the rear, then the midsection, then the whole length of the Trinity, shouting obscenities at the offending gunmen as he went. Sparks flew, then smoke spewed, and finally the entire stern of the Trinity erupted in a blast wave of orange flames. Roiling black clouds followed the explosion into the Caribbean sky as flames licked skyward, reaching twenty or thirty yards above the deck of the yacht.

  It wasn’t until this pyrotechnics display had been all but consummated that the machine gunner remembered and took aim on the man who’d dived overboard.

  By then, however, the pilot of the helicopter had begun screaming at the machine gunner through his radio headset to cease fire. When the gunner did not comply with his order, the pilot pulled the Stingray out of the fray. By the time the machine gunner finally relented, both he and the pilot could plainly see that Po Keeler’s outstretched arms were raised skyward in hapless surrender. He was treading water almost directly beneath the helicopter, head mostly submerged, sputtering and gasping as he sought to reach his hands as high in the air as possible to indicate his innocence.