Painkiller Read online

  Five months in, the guest took to snorkeling out along the rim of the bay, staying out for two or three hours at a time, Woolsey once timing him at four hours and thirty-three minutes. He began jogging on the beach, the shortest beach Woolsey had ever seen a man run on, no longer than a quarter mile, but once he’d started the habit, in no time at all the guest was out running the length of the beach fifteen to twenty times each morning around dawn.

  The guest paid for another six months, Woolsey wondering where he’d been keeping the cash all this time. When the man offered Woolsey a thousand-dollar tip, Woolsey waved it off and said the proprietors paid him just fine, but thanks for the thought just the same. The next day Woolsey told him about some good snorkeling he’d done over on Virgin Gorda, in a place called the Baths, Woolsey saying that maybe he would want to come along with the other guests he was taking over there on the skiff. The man went, and on the ride back, passing the bigger island’s marina, asked Woolsey if he knew anybody running a deep-sea fishing charter, maybe one with a captain who knew where the marlin ran. Woolsey told him he knew a guy who could take care of him, and a couple days later-after a morning at sea-the man came back with ten pounds of swordfish filets. Woolsey grilled up a batch of steaks for the guests, and the extras kept the cooler full of sandwiches for a week.

  One afternoon the man was taking up three feet of the six-foot bar and working on the seventh glass of his new favorite drink, Puerto Rican rum and Coke with a lime wedge, Woolsey serving him the Cuba libres, when Woolsey said, “Got some bad news, Guv. Proprietors are looking to sell.”

  Cooper, clearly not wishing to be disturbed, said, “That right.”

  “Figure they can get top dollar for the real estate,” Woolsey said, “all these cruise ships doing so much business down here. Owners don’t come around anymore anyway-bunch of old fogeys. One of ’em even died, I think. Bloody shame, you ask me.”

  Cooper asked why he thought it was such a shame, that people died all the time, and Woolsey shook his head and waved his arm out at the beach, where the bay’s two-inch wavelets were busy lapping at the white sand. “Look at this effin’ place,” he said. “Anybody with half a noggin and five pounds,” he said, “he’d put up a restaurant, throw a thatched roof over the bar, build a bigger dock-in fact, he’d get some old bugger like you to dive down, pour some concrete moorings out in that bay-and there you go.”

  Cooper said, “Where?”

  “What?”

  “You just told me ‘there you go.’ Where?”

  Woolsey looked at him and said, “I’ll tell you where you go. You go to a few travel magazines and invite ’em to visit you free of charge. Spread the word that if you’ve got a sailboat and you’re coming through the BVIs, well, stop by this little island down here, and they’ll serve you conch fritters and mahimahi steaks. If you want, you can fly in through Tortola and they’ll taxi you over free of charge, then put you up for a week for next to nothing. More than we charge now, but still a fair price. Throw up some palm trees, couple of tropical bushes, make it look like a real resort-and make a bloody fortune doing it.”

  Woolsey said, “Place may cost a hundred grand, not a big ticket for a place like this, but you’ve gotta spend another hundred to make it worth your while, otherwise nobody who can afford the higher price is staying here. Marriott or Westin could afford to do it, and therein lies your problem, Guv-they’ll put up a high-rise, replace this whole bleedin’ lagoon with a swimming pool, put in some fake waterfalls with fuckin’ water lilies.”

  Woolsey told Cooper he’d been saving plenty of money, skimming whatever he could off the top, but no way in hell could he drop two hundred grand into this place. Not even the first hundred.

  “So that,” he said, “is why it’s a bloody shame.” He looked out at the bay again and shrugged. “Thought you’d want to be the first to know, Guv. Let me know, you want some help finding another island to hide out on.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” Cooper said, then did his best to ignore Woolsey for the rest of the night. He fell asleep on the beach with his naked feet brushing the edge of the water in the dark.

  Just under five weeks later, a short, heavyset man wearing a navy blue business suit arrived at Conch Bay on a water taxi at ten in the morning. When he told Woolsey he’d just flown in from the Caymans and was looking for a man named Chris Woolsey, Woolsey shook hands with the man, who introduced himself as Jacob Bartleby, attorney-at-law. Bartleby said he represented a holding corporation out of Grand Cayman specializing in resort investments, and Woolsey, long since accustomed to such inquiries, told Bartleby to come over to his office, where he would provide the information on how to contact the proprietors.

  When they reached the office-a converted outhouse with a pair of folding metal chairs-Bartleby said, “Mr. Woolsey, my clients have already contacted the proprietors.”

  Bartleby withdrew a cashier’s check from the briefcase he’d brought and handed it to Woolsey. Woolsey read the check, which was made out in the sum of $140,000 to a company called Conch Bay LP.

  “This cashier’s check reflects my clients’ estimate for the costs of renovation, marketing, and maintenance that would be required to keep this resort running, profitably, for the foreseeable future. Do you feel this number is realistic?”

  “Realistic?” Woolsey shook his head. “I don’t know, Guv. Asking price is a hundred K, and that’d leave you with forty. Could be done, you could dress the place up a little, I suppose, but you’ll lose money, probably a lot of it in fact, if that’s all you’re puttin’ into it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bartleby said, “allow me to clarify. My clients have already purchased the resort. Or to be precise, they have had the ninety-nine-year lease from the local government assigned to them. And you’re correct-the price was one hundred thousand U.S. dollars.”

  Bartleby pulled a sheet of paper and a pen from his briefcase and handed both to Woolsey.

  “This is a limited partnership agreement. If you sign it, my clients’ rights to the ninety-nine-year lease will be assigned to the partnership. In exchange for such assignment, and the check I’ve just given you, my clients would like to retain a forty-nine percent stake in the limited partnership, which obviously would entitle them to the equivalent share of any profits generated by the partnership, in perpetuity.”

  Woolsey read the document, where he discovered the odd feature of his name, printed in the text of the agreement. He looked up at Bartleby with a forced, lopsided grin intended to mask his confusion.

  “Look, Guv’nor, I’m not sure your clients understand how-well, bloody hell. Mr.-Bartleby, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You see, well, I’m not sure I understand, mate.”

  Bartleby offered a firm grin.

  “The fifty-one percent share goes to you, Mr. Woolsey, as managing partner. In exchange, of course, you would need to be willing to run the day-today operations of the resort on a continuing basis. My clients,” he said, “intend to be passive partners in this venture.”

  Later that afternoon, Woolsey found Cooper out on the beach, sipping a Cuba libre on a lounge chair. Woolsey pulled up another chair, clicked it back to the same angle as Cooper’s, and sat beside him.

  “Listen, mate,” Woolsey said. “A pesky little man representing a Cayman Islands holding firm came by to see me this morning.”

  “That right,” Cooper said.

  “Seems they’ve bought the resort,” Woolsey said. “Want me to run it, seems.”

  Cooper grunted. Woolsey was silent for a moment.

  Then he said, “You have any ideas about that?”

  Cooper looked out into the bay, reaching up with his right hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun. “Sounds to me,” he said after a long while of looking out at the bay, “that things may just stay the same around here.”

  Woolsey nodded, and the two of them stared out at the bay, sitting in the two lounge chairs, the sun glaring down at them from th
e sky, careening off the water and the sand, keeping the air warm as the wind rustled the trees behind the bungalows.

  “I’ve given this some thought,” Woolsey said.

  Cooper didn’t say anything.

  “I get through putting this place together, I’m thinking it’ll have nine bungalows. I’m thinking the one I’ll build over there, the one with the most privacy, I’m thinking you ought to stay in that one.”

  Cooper kept looking out at the turquoise bay. Soaking up the sun.

  “I’m thinking you ought to stay there free of charge,” Woolsey said, “and I know you like to drink a lot, so once I get the restaurant going, remodel the bar, maybe put up a thatched roof, then you’ll also be able to eat and drink for free. That sound all right to you?”

  After a while, Cooper nodded, said, “I don’t see why not,” and fell asleep.

  After a while Woolsey stood, but didn’t leave. Cooper woke up, feeling Woolsey’s annoying presence behind him as he attempted to relax. Woolsey shifted his weight from one foot to another in the sand. Finally, Cooper shaded his eyes from the sun with a hand again, craned his neck to look up at Woolsey, and said, “What do you want?”

  “What I told you that day,” Woolsey said, “that part about skimming off the top. I just wanted to let you know I won’t be doing that any longer.”

  Through with what he had to say, the gangly young man walked away and left Cooper alone with the sun.

  20

  For his first exercise since the long haul up the hill, Cooper took one of those twenty-lap runs on Conch Bay’s quarter-mile beach and swam across the lagoon a dozen times. Afterward, he collapsed into a chaise lounge under the shade of a palm tree. After almost a week of zilch, his legs and back still ached. The salt water and sand had stung the healing blisters on his feet, but he could feel the water’s purifying effect on his wounds, the exercise clearing his arteries. Opening his lungs.

  Trudging up the hill, he’d dropped Alphonse only five times. Upon reaching the summit, he found that nobody had stolen the pickup, so he put the vehicle to use and got Alphonse to a hospital in Port-au-Prince. The journey had taken maybe eighteen hours, cemetery-to-door. In the end, they hadn’t been able to save Alphonse’s arm, but when the docs said it looked like the kid would make it, Cooper had a specialist flown in from the U.C.L.A. Medical Center, assembled a wire transfer covering the treatment, and arranged to have the kid outfitted with the latest version of a prosthetic arm. He wired enough to cover a few months of recovery in the hospital room, food included, Cooper thinking it meant better living than Alphonse had ever known, but still came up short of the boy’s natural-born right arm. At least the kid would get three squares for a while, and maybe even get laid, thanks to the conversation piece they’d be hooking up to his shoulder.

  It was easier, Cooper thought, to help somebody when the person was actually alive. Somebody’s dead, you can bust a few caps in the witch doctor who offed him and still wind up with the kid’s ghost banging around your head. Ce n’est pas fini, mon ami, Marcel’s ghost saying to him, Cooper hearing him more clearly in his mind’s ear now, knowing the accent he’d have after listening to Simone-Non, mon ami, you not finished. Not yet. You still all I got, Cooper. Et wi, c’est vrai-I still got more for you, too.

  He’d left a bag beside the chaise lounge before embarking on his morning workout. The beige canvas sack was stenciled with the words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT BUSINESS.

  The regularly scheduled diplomatic pouch that Cooper received as chief of station for the British Virgin Islands came every three weeks. International law specified that customs officials weren’t allowed to examine diplomatic pouches, and some countries actually observed this rule. BVI customs officers rarely even opened personal luggage at Terrance B. Lettsome International, let alone a U.S. government pouch; Cooper figured he could probably run dope with the bag if he ever ran low on funds.

  Usually the contents of these shipments meant nothing to him. On days when the pouch arrived on the launch, typically accompanied by food supplies and a handful of guests, Cooper had a tradition going: he would sit on a lounge chair, smoke a cigar, and burn each of the papers as he withdrew them, reading a line here, a paragraph there, brushing the end of the cigar against the page, blowing to get the flame going, then flipping the burning page into the sand. Nobody bothered him when he sat out here lighting fires. Not even Ronnie. He figured he looked dangerous, or possibly even insane. It gave him some space.

  Today, he fired up a cigar, opened the sack, purged it of its contents, and lit up a half-dozen documents without reading anything past the heading of the cover page. Toward the bottom of the pouch, Cooper came across a DI memorandum which, as with the others, he nearly burned without reading. It was a standard memo, sent to all stations, not much different from the documents he’d already torched. Cigar butt held beside the corner of the page, Cooper took a closer look, almost out of coincidence, and saw that after a few meaningless introductory sentences, the memo said:

  Unauthorized international or extranational transport of substantial military weaponry, including but not limited to large handgun shipments, antiaircraft guns, armored vehicles, missiles, warheads, or lethal substances with possible military use, even by nation-states, may have special significance. Please report on a priority basis.

  Cooper wondered about a couple of things. First, he wondered whether “lethal substances with possible military use” could include U-238/U-235 uranium. Second, while an oceanic voyage of uranium molecules aboard a supposed menial laborer’s body didn’t necessarily qualify as “transport of substantial military weaponry,” there was something that Cooper understood about memorandums like this. What you had to ask yourself was the reason some deputy director or other, most of whom were highly educated, would authorize the distribution of such a ludicrous letter. Come across an inane memo like this and it was a safe bet something serious was afoot. You just had to translate, maybe ask around-make a couple phone calls, for instance.

  Cooper figured he’d be able to discover who’d written the memo with no more than a single call.

  Once he’d identified the author, he could ask a question or two of him, or her, in hopes of finding additional reasons to ignore the plea for help from the ghost of Marcel S. Maybe he could even bolster his case against digging out those business cards he’d lifted from the witch doctor’s desk. He knew Barry the fucking bokor had killed Marcel the first time around, that much was obvious-but once that fat fuck had resurrected the boy, the odds were he’d passed the kid onto someone else. Someone who’d gone on to kill the kid again.

  Wi, Cooper-mon, ce n’est pas fini.

  He also knew the longer he put off avenging the second murder of Marcel S., the greater the chance his natural laziness would overcome him. That laziness would tend to keep him sequestered along the quarter mile of white sand, in the snorkeling holes, among the reefs, at the bar, in his bungalow, or on the chaise lounge under the palm tree.

  And calling around Langley to unearth the nasty little secret behind the plain vanilla memo, he thought, was as good a form of procrastination as any.

  You know something, Marcel, he thought-wondering whether he was talking aloud as he thought it-if I’m all you got, then you, mon ami, are fucked.

  21

  Peter M. Gates hadn’t joined the Agency to fool around. His first exposure to CIA had come from political science textbooks as an undergrad, when he was bitten by the bug-the feeling, reading about the great spy-masters, that he’d found his calling. Dulles. McCone. Schlesinger-men who’d hashed out deep-cover operations, pondered war strategy, run intelligence webs over fine tobacco and brandy. Gates could see it happening to him, knowing it was his destiny to become a spymaster, a strategy guru, a sophisticated gentleman spending his evenings in the richly furnished surroundings of a men’s club-Gates thinking, even then, that Cleo’s, the club in Dupont Circle, might just do.

  The moment he obtained a po
sition in government-a low-level slot at State-Gates sought out people at other agencies, and on the Hill. He made these people his friends, and he did it by finding what they aspired to and helping them get there. In a few years he had his loyal set, and he was soon able to persuade those who could afford it to join him at Cleo’s. They developed a rhythm-play a few sets of squash, shower up, get together in the lounge for dinner, smoke a cigar, maybe a pipe, sip an after-dinner drink. Probe issues of foreign policy-define foreign policy. Make some quiet vows to run it.

  When an acquaintance and casual member of his power network received a political appointment as director of central intelligence, Gates spent a cool four hundred dollars on a steak dinner with the man and gleaned a deputy directorship in CIA’s Directorate of Operations. Because of his influence he was given two Central American countries, and just like that-fewer than five years in-Gates was running operatives from the shadowy corners of a men’s club, just as he’d envisioned it.

  He took pains to ensure that the job security, and, where appropriate, physical well-being of the people reporting to him were directly tied to his own supremacy within the Agency. All significant information originating from his unit reached the top of the food chain only through his office; he controlled every management decision down to the secretary and intern level with a maniacal, vengeful supervision. Slash, burn, and rule: make the eagles feel rewarded yet never allow them to take more than forty percent of the credit for any particular accomplishment, while you punted the turkeys, or, as was necessary in government, buried them with a transfer or lateral promotion. Final maxim: exert total control over the release of all information so as always to apply the appropriate spin.