Painkiller Read online

  23

  “That Laramie?”

  “Why,” Laramie said, “would we need a public relations officer in the British Virgin Islands?”

  Cooper had a Cuba libre in his left hand and his sat phone in his right, reclined as he was in the chair on the deck of his bungalow. It was dark, the swish of the trades soothing against the palms, a distant stream of voices and music floating over from the restaurant. He could just see the bar through the garden; tourists were telling stories there, Cooper thinking gleefully that Ronnie was getting what he deserved, serving the sunburned drunkards and cleaning off their tables with a wet rag when they were done.

  “Image is everything,” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Mere fact of the call,” Cooper said, “indicates that you already know my name.”

  “I don’t mean your name, which I assume isn’t your real name anyway. I was asking who you are. Meaning why you called, and why you wanted me to solve your little riddle and call you back.”

  “Which you did.”

  Laramie was silent.

  “I,” Cooper said, “would be what the BV Islanders refer to as the ‘spy-ade-island.’ Chief and sole officer of station, British Virgin Islands.”

  “And the ‘college recruiter’ portion of your title?”

  Cooper thought about that for a moment and said, “Not a great number of schools down here, Laramie.”

  “Can I ask how it is that you know my name?”

  Cooper took a sip of his drink. “No,” he said.

  “Then I suppose I also won’t hear how you know I wrote the memo.”

  A mechanical female voice said, “Please deposit one dollar and seventy-five cents to continue your call for two minutes.” Cooper heard the sounds of Laramie inserting the proper change into the slot.

  “This is an expensive call,” she said.

  “Pay phone.” Cooper left it at that.

  “Meaning you’re pleased I’m playing this game of yours?”

  “I’d like to ask you a question,” Cooper said. “That list of materials-those I’m supposed to report on a priority basis. Would that include non-weapons-grade uranium, specifically a U-238/U-235 combination found in older power plants?”

  After considering the question, Laramie said, “Based on my limited understanding of nuclear weaponry, fuel rods can be processed to create bombs, but non-weapons-grade uranium in and of itself cannot be used, practically speaking, as explosive material in a nuke. Not that it shouldn’t be reported if you’ve discovered the illegal transportation of uranium, Mr. Cooper.”

  “So your list would or would not include that substance?” Cooper twirled the ice in his drink. “You did write the memo?”

  “You know that I’m not officially allowed to comment on whether-”

  “It was a rhetorical question, Laramie.”

  Cooper wondered what the analyst was thinking on the other end of the line, Laramie standing in a random phone booth, probably bolted into the corner of a convenience store’s parking lot. The enigma from the Caribbean getting under her skin.

  “Who’s Eddie?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your buck-seventy-five is running low.”

  “An old professor,” Laramie said.

  “Old?”

  “No, not old. Old as in former. A former professor of mine.”

  “Where?”

  “What is this?”

  The hiss of the connection rose in Cooper’s ear.

  “Northwestern,” she said.

  “Good school.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Good professors.”

  Dig around enough, Cooper thought, and you find dirt. Even with this junior analyst and her former college professor. He was thinking-

  “You’re drunk.”

  Cooper heard a click.

  The wind had begun to die down, and there wasn’t as much noise floating over from the bar. Cooper could still see a few people milling about-the sunburned faces, tank tops, Bermuda shorts and flip-flops, one or two of them wearing slacks, probably somebody told them long pants helped fend off the no-see-’ems. Watching all this in silence, Cooper thought that perhaps Julie Laramie the junior analyst wasn’t so junior after all.

  She had just taken him to the cleaners.

  After draining the Cuba libre, Cooper ducked into his bungalow and found the two business cards he’d pilfered from the box on the witch doctor’s desk. Trying the easy way first, he dialed both numbers with his sat phone. The Puerto Rico number was no longer in service, Cooper yanking the phone from his ear when the annoying triple-tone blare jolted him and a woman’s recorded voice told him in Spanish that the number had been disconnected. The second number, which he’d figured for a Kingston, Jamaica, area code, went right through and gave him three short beeps. He punched in his number and the pound sign.

  It took about fifteen minutes-not a bad turnaround, he thought, for two o’clock in the morning.

  “Yes,” Cooper said into his phone.

  A muffled male voice mumbled, “Yeah, who this.”

  “It’s me,” Cooper said. “Eddie.”

  A second or two of static. Sounded to Cooper like another pay phone call.

  “You page me, yeah?” the voice asked.

  “I’m calling about the Haiti thing,” Cooper said. “My talking to the right guy?”

  Static ruled. Finally, in its mumble, the voice said, “What you need?”

  Cooper hesitated a beat longer than he’d intended. He was well aware that lies worked better when you were fast on your feet, but Julie Laramie, he thought, stripped me of my bulletproof vest. Took away my edge. Her distracting effect has been to make me consider whether this moron with the pager can see right through the game.

  “I need somebody,” Cooper said. “Another Haitian-know what I mean?” Wincing, he knew he’d blown it the second the words escaped his mouth.

  “Fuck you, pig.”

  Pager-man hung up.

  Cooper shook his head. That was ridiculous-he’d had the guy going, should have been able to set up a meet, and he blows it that fast. Practically a seamless fuck-up, in fact.

  He set the sat phone on the kitchen table, came over to his bed, picked up the Louisville Slugger, and took some practice swings. Thinking things over.

  He’d tried the easy angle first, and if nothing else, he’d found his boy. Pager-man had bitten on the Haiti ask-hadn’t told him to fuck off till he’d blown the improv later in the conversation. Now he’d just have to track the man down-maybe meet up with him wherever he made his phone calls, ask him a few questions about witch doctors. About zombies and business cards, no need to play charades any longer with the Browning pinned to Pager-man’s eyebrow.

  Without even seeing him yet-without asking enough questions to know anything for certain-Cooper had the impulse to hunt down Pager-man and whack him with the baseball bat. Maybe it was the guy’s cocky, mumbling tone, Pager-man sounding stoned out of his gourd, ready to deal some crank, or hell, maybe a recently exhumed Haitian, dial one-eight-hundred, Z-O-M-B-I-E-S-

  Cooper tossed the Louisville Slugger on the bed and migrated to the chair. He fired up his PowerBook, worked through some firewalls, and got himself to the inquiry page of Interpol’s reverse-telephone directory. He pulled the business card and punched in Pager-man’s phone number. It took about five minutes for the system to spit out the phone company-Verizon. Easy enough, he thought. Exiting the Interpol database, he worked his way into an Agency site, filled out the appropriate online form, and e-mailed a request. This one would take two or three days to get an answer, but when the drones working the night shift in the basement in Langley got back to him, they’d deliver on his request and provide the correct billing address of the Verizon account coinciding with the number he’d dialed to get a hold of his new, though somewhat rude, phone pal.

  Laramie knew of a Kinko’s near the turnaround point on her morning run. Since finding the China
intel, she was only running twice a week; while this meant her weekly exercise quota had been halved, she’d nonetheless been able to check her new e-mail account twice while out on the runs. Outside of a canned WELCOME, EASTWEST7! from somebody called Mail Services, the in-box had remained woefully vacant.

  She thought about the odd phone call from W. Cooper on the outbound segment of her morning jog. Maybe she was becoming a mean-spirited person, but she had to admit her most enjoyable moment in weeks had come when she outed the inebriated, so-called college recruiter. She’d easily been able to tell he was hammered, the man working hard enough against slurring his words to give it away, but Laramie had an unfair advantage on reading such mannerisms after spending the first twelve years of her life with a similarly and consistently inebriated father. No matter how frequently W. Cooper tossed ’em back, Laramie thought, it was unlikely he could have hung with Dad in the consumption department.

  W. Cooper’s voice had sounded familiar to her. Not because she had met him before-she knew she hadn’t-but there’d been an ease between them, the kind you shared with a friend you’d been holding daily water-cooler conversations with, bonding in the copy room of some high-stress office environment. It occurred to her now that this was largely due to the fact that W. Cooper actually sounded a lot like her father-though this, she thought, probably stemmed from the fact he’d have tested out at somewhere near the blood-alcohol percentage Dad would have registered the last time she’d seen him.

  Or maybe he was just an asshole, and because of this, she’d enjoyed coming out ahead in their little sparring match.

  She came around a corner and slipped into the Kinko’s. She checked her watch and saw it was almost six-forty-five; as with the two other mornings she’d visited, the store was just opening for the day. It said OPEN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS on the window, but for reasons on which Laramie chose not to speculate, the place usually opened at six-thirty and closed before midnight.

  She bought a computer-hour in cash, logged on, and found senator Kircher’s reply. She read his request a few times and still couldn’t figure out how to answer.

  Did it make any sense to continue the game? After Korea, she’d been unable to find even a shred of additional supporting evidence. Rogue faction, my ass, she thought. Rogue analyst, yes-sitting here like a buffoon in my running bra, digging for trouble where none exists. Still, she thought, at least Kircher might be able to tell me whether this connect-the-dots guesswork of mine has any legitimacy, or whether I’m simply full of shit.

  She composed an adaptation of the pair of reports she’d filed during the prior two weeks. She included all of it-everything she’d written, all the material she’d presented totally against Agency protocol, even the speculative guesswork she’d shared with Malcolm Rader in the commissary.

  When she’d worked up a draft, she reread it four, then five times, editing nearly every word on each pass. She nearly deleted the entire document twice, then ultimately decided the whole thing needed an introductory statement, which she added as the first line of her note:

  It’s better for the both of us if my identity remains confidential. Look at it this way: I’m an informed source, privy to the following intelligence, which you may or may not find useful. Some of this is theory, in fact most of it is theory, but my voice is not being heard in the community you oversee. Thus it occurred to me you might want to hear what I’m about to tell you.

  She inserted a paragraph break between her introductory statement and the body of her document, reread the entire thing a sixth time, and decided to add some closing remarks:

  Since I find it useful to remain gainfully employed, chances are you will not hear from me again. I leave what I am disclosing for you to do with as you see fit. Thank you for your time.

  She resisted the impulse to read the document a seventh time, further resisted the impulse to delete the entire composition, clicked Send, logged off, waved to the clerk at the counter despite the fact that his eyes lingered too long in the vicinity of her sports bra, and set out on the return leg of her run.

  24

  One day a nineteen-year-old named Travis Malloy was a private in the U.S. Navy; the next day he wasn’t. It had been as simple as that.

  With the ship leaving Kingston after his three days of leave, Malloy just didn’t get back on. He didn’t have a choice: get back on and they’d have busted him, Malloy getting word they’d found him out. And who cared? Malloy didn’t need the navy anyway, the whole deal a sausage fest, thousands of homos sleeping side by side in bunks a regular guy like Malloy wouldn’t even share with a woman.

  Now he could share his bed with any woman he pleased.

  Travis Malloy had strange, pale freckled skin and short, shockingly red hair. Technically, Malloy was of African-American descent, but aside from a slightly blunted nose and the thick texture of his hair, Malloy was an albino. He fit no single previously defined ethnic category.

  Light-complected though he happened to be, Malloy preferred women with skin so dark it gleamed. Get a whore like that, and he’d ball her all night. Yeah, he could sure ball ’em all night, Malloy banging away like the girl was lifeless, which made sense, since by the time he had the girl in bed, she usually was. Malloy mostly asphyxiated them, though sometimes broke their necks, generally doing it as he pulled them through the doorway of whatever room he’d procured for the night-paying in cash to keep his identity a secret. Having performed this morbid act in nearly a dozen ports of call, Malloy figured somebody would eventually make him, so when he finally got word they’d caught on it didn’t surprise him at all. Malloy overheard some idle talk from a couple of the navy fags during leave in Jamaica and bolted immediately.

  Kingston was his favorite city in the world anyway, a town overflowing with dark-skinned prostitutes, Malloy finding they were a dime a dozen here, about all Malloy was looking to pay, anyway. He could get all he wanted, pick hookers up everywhere he went-lost souls, wanderers, enough of them here that Malloy had to be careful not to kill too many, since he found he wanted to stay. He met one girl, just the kind he wanted, her mind blown to kingdom come from so much weed Malloy got high just sucking on her lips. She was into some sort of freaked-out religion, a form of voodoo. Initially, the only reason this mattered to Malloy was that she and her religious practices represented an easy way for him to score weed-some good shit in fact. He found the dope was a part of the religion. They smoked it during the ceremonies.

  During the time he was balling the voodoo girl, Malloy did pick-up day labor to pay the bills, using a fake name so the navy wouldn’t send the marines after his AWOL ass. He found plenty of jobs, Malloy discovering that labor laws weren’t quite as stringent in Jamaica as in the States; he was, however, getting a little tired of the day-to-day grind, waiting around before the crack of dawn, hoping the labor truck would cruise by with enough empty seats for him to squeeze in. Get work, and you had enough money for drugs and parties; get passed over, and you starved.

  From this desperation was born in Travis Malloy an idea, an entrepreneurial scheme that occurred to him mainly because he misunderstood something at work.

  Malloy overheard his foreman saying something about the good old days of slavery, a time when you could buy your labor and the labor wouldn’t talk back. The foreman had been telling a joke, his way of complaining about some local hooligans who were trying to form a labor syndicate, but to Malloy the man’s comment contained a different and deeper meaning.

  That night his voodoo girl took him to one of her parties. It was a wild one this time, crazy, the whole deal taking place in a vacant warehouse. The thing Malloy noticed was a group of guys, skin dark as asphalt like his girl-maybe six or seven of them, guys so doped up they were comatose the whole time he was there. They stood in corners, sometimes swaying to the music but never doing anything more than that.

  It gave him one hell of an idea.

  Malloy suckered three of them, one by one, into coming outside. He gave each a line-som
ething about the sweet pussy he could arrange for them in the joint next door-and once outside, he bound, gagged, and shoved each of them into the back of his van. He stopped at three-any more than that, and even the stoners at the party would have noticed these losers missing. Plus, three bodies were all he could fit into his van without stacking them. He figured three would be plenty anyway.

  The next morning he drove up to the quarry where he’d been working and found the foreman he’d overheard the day before. He pulled the foreman aside.

  “I heard you talking about slavery yesterday,” he said.

  The foreman, a thick-limbed West Indian with a gut like Santa Claus, looked Travis Malloy up and down.

  “What about it?” he said.

  Malloy asked, “Ain’t you the man does all the hiring here?”

  “Most of it.”

  “What about some shit needs doing, nobody needs to know about it? Anybody ever want you to find people can do that kind of work?”

  After a moment, the foreman said, “Maybe.”

  Malloy said, “Probably something you might need, you got a job like that you need to fill, is disposable labor. The kind you can use up and throw out when you’re finished.”

  The foreman stared at this strange-looking, light-skinned, vaguely African-American freak with the short-cropped red hair.

  Malloy said, “If you’re interested, I got some contacts could hook you up with somebody provides that kind of labor pretty cheap.”

  After another short while the foreman said, “I’ll think about it.”

  Malloy told the fat-ass foreman to have somebody call him. Scribbling his beeper number on a brown paper lunch sack and handing it to the man.

  The acquisition of the three stoners presented a small problem: it kept Malloy apart from his voodoo girl while he waited it out. He had to keep the three guys tied up in his house, couldn’t risk bringing the girl by and having her find out. Lucky for Malloy, who couldn’t afford to feed his captives, the wait only lasted a day and a half. The page came directly from the foreman, who asked whether Malloy would be able to come and meet with the foreman’s associates, so they could discuss that concept of his, what did he call it?