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  Malloy said, “Disposable labor’s what I called it,” and agreed to meet.

  He had to go out to a rural park in the middle of the night, but he took a gamble and brought his three captives along in the van. This allowed him to close the deal on the spot-no questions asked, hand over the trio of starving drug addicts for two-fifty cash, more money than Malloy could have made working in the quarry for five or six weeks.

  A few months later, about the time his finances were running low again-Malloy thinking about going back out to wait for the day-labor truck-he got another page. It was a new voice, not the foreman and not the people the foreman had brought him to. The voice asked whether he had access to any more of the sort of labor he’d provided to an acquaintance of his. Malloy said that he did and asked how many they were talking here. The voice said two, or maybe three. Malloy thought for a moment before saying, “Going rate’s five hundred a head.”

  The voice told him that wouldn’t be a problem.

  Malloy had some difficulty this time, had to cruise the hard-core party scene for a few days before he found some suitable addicts. He even had to work the Kingston homo scene to get his third man, but his navy days gave him some experience with that, so he got it together and delivered the goods just the same. Five hundred bucks a head, cash, and Malloy was fucking loaded.

  As word got around there was a serial killer preying on homosexual users in the Kingston underground party circuit, it wasn’t long before demand had outstripped his basic supply. A few calls from such sources as the contractors of a South American airport expansion, some shadowy weapons manufacturers, and a pair of rogue strip-mining investors made it clear to Malloy how much fucked-up shit was going down. He had raised his price to fifteen hundred a head by the time his girl taught him more about the voodoo ceremonies, telling him some of the traditions, including the one in which local medicine men drugged up the town retards, rattled off some mumbo jumbo, and turned them into zombies. Fucking real-life zombies, some in Jamaica, a hell of a lot more up in Haiti. Malloy was a businessman, and he saw in this new product source an opportunity to lower his risk, accountability, and cost. The logic was pretty simple: find some people other people thought were already dead, and you had yourself some truly disposable labor.

  Malloy soon had to off the voodoo girl, figuring she’d have too much on him if he didn’t, but once she was out of the picture, Malloy got back into a rotation of dark-skinned hookers, fresh ones, boning ’em all night like he used to-putting some of his ingeniously earned money to use. In fact, he was taking care of a frail one, bony, rocking her from behind in something like his fourth hour, when dawn broke one morning outside the rental house he kept near Belle Acres, one of the rare middle-class neighborhoods in Kingston.

  Parked discreetly on the street in front of Malloy’s house was a green Ford Taurus. Since Malloy couldn’t see the car while balling his girlfriend inside the house, he obviously couldn’t see the man inside the car, either; seated behind the wheel of the Taurus was a gruff, deeply tanned American with bloodshot eyes and a few days’ stubble.

  Bored out of his skull and half asleep, Cooper wondered when the hell he would see something that would indicate what the sexual dynamo inside the house did for a living, and why a witch doctor in the Haitian badlands would have kept this freak’s pager number on a blank business card behind his desk.

  The Verizon account inquiry CIA made through the company’s USVI-based regional headquarters had kicked back a name and billing address. The name on the account was James Beam, which joke Cooper appreciated immediately; the address turned out to be only that, matching a shit-hole local equivalent of a Mail Boxes, Etc. store. Cooper had first parked his Taurus near the store, begrudgingly arriving by way of American Eagle to San Juan and then American, no Eagle, on to Kingston. He had no idea what he was looking for, but hadn’t partaken of the utter boredom of a good old-fashioned stakeout in years. It hadn’t seemed so bad, Cooper sitting on the Conch Bay beach thinking about doing it, but after seventy-two hours of observing box number nineteen through the facility’s dirt-spattered window, chubbing up on a variety of Blimpie sandwiches while planted in the driver’s seat of the Taurus, he began to think that there might be a better way of going about this. Pulling around the corner every four or five hours to take a leak in the alley behind a grocery store, heading downtown to pass out in a room at the Crowne Plaza when the mail center’s closing time came around, only to start the routine from the beginning again.

  He tried to avoid thinking about Marcel S. and Cap’n Roy while he sat in the car, working at different methods of throwing up a mind block when thoughts of them entered his head. One way that worked, he found, was to allow his mind to wander northward. To Langley, or at least to some suburb nearby.

  To wherever it was that Julie Laramie lived.

  He kept thinking about the way she’d spoken to him. She’d carefully and consistently taken a moment to think about anything she said before saying it, Laramie putting the extra time she bought into thinking about what to say or what not to say, maybe into calculating the reason he’d called her with his annoying probe in the first place. She’d handled the first call effectively, considering he’d caught her in the Professor Eddie mistake-well enough to tell him to go fuck himself, at least in her own way. Lot of people, Cooper thought, are coming up with highly creative ways to tell me to fuck off.

  It’s funny, he thought: I spent the whole call trying to get under her skin, and in the end, she’s the one who burrowed under mine.

  Early in the seventy-third hour of his stakeout of the mail joint, Cooper got his first look at Barry the witch doctor’s distributor of the undead. The guy who opened box nineteen was one of the strangest-looking human beings Cooper had ever seen-there was no doubt he was African-American somewhere back in the family tree, but his lunar skin and tiki-torch hair made for a brutal departure from that side of his family. To get a grasp on what he was looking at, Cooper decided he would have to make up a new racial-profiling term and called the man a redheaded albino black.

  Cooper had pulled into traffic behind the guy’s sputtering Mitsubishi minivan and followed him home; a little later he followed him to a bar with an address on a particularly sleazy avenue called the Half Way Tree Road. Later still, Cooper followed ol’ Jim Beam-along with the dark-skinned girl he’d picked up at the bar-back to Jim’s house. The home was a two-bedroom job on a decent street, Jim doing all right for himself renting here-assuming he was renting, which Cooper figured he probably was.

  Camped outside Jim’s place, Cooper’s knees were in danger of catching frostbite, so cold was the air-conditioning flow from the vents beneath the dash. The A/C was uneven, so that while his knees were turning blue, sweat ran in a constant stream down his neck, back, and ass. The subject of his stakeout didn’t emerge from the house for sixteen hours following the time he’d entered it with his dark-skinned date, though two events did occur during that time. Around 6 A.M., immediately following the Caribbean’s rapidly brightening dawn, a taxi crawled up the street, stopped in front of the albino’s house, and parked until the girl came out and got in. The cab drove off. Later, just after four, Cooper burning up the engine in the Taurus to keep the air-conditioning going, a young Jamaican arrived in a beat-up four-door Civic-the car reminding Cooper of Manny’s SJPD-issue detective mobile.

  The visitor wore a shiny Adidas sweat suit, going with the full outfit even in the ninety-degree heat. He cool-walked it to the albino’s front door, and then they were pretty obvious about it: Jim answered the door, came out on the porch, handed the Jamaican some money, and the Jamaican handed Jim a bag of weed. Neither of them looked around or otherwise displayed any cause for concern, just standing out there on the porch doing a drug deal.

  There, Cooper thought-that, in a nutshell, is what the Caribbean is all about.

  The Jamaican cool-walked it back to his Honda and zipped off down the street. After dark, around nine, the albino started the
circuit all over again, Cooper pulling out to follow the Mitsubishi minivan, actually moving some air through the Ford’s radiator for a change, following him to the bar, where the albino came out with the same dark-skinned girl and took her home with him again. Cooper took the opportunity to change clothes, procure more Blimpie sandwiches, relieve himself somewhere besides the tree at the end of the block, and refill the fluids in the Ford. He didn’t have too much faith in the car, its thermometer rising one notch closer to the red zone each day he spent in the afternoon heat.

  For four days running, the albino followed this routine, almost to the minute. The lone deviation was that the dope supplier came every other day, which was still pretty frequent, given the hefty size of the Baggies the albino was buying from him.

  Without some indication as to how the redheaded albino black worked, if at all, with Barry the Haitian witch doctor, Cooper didn’t know how long he could sit out on this fucking street watching some freak get off and get high. On the fifth day of his surveillance of Jim Beam’s home-presented with no sign of a break in the routine-Cooper gave up on his current angle and decided to try out one of the two leads he’d ingeniously unearthed from the seat of his rental car.

  25

  In the far eastern reaches of the Lesser Antilles lay one of the more exclusive resorts on earth. Built into a sloping hill on the leeward side of an island called Mango Cay, the resort grounds included the most luxurious rooms, a secluded private beach, and adjoining world-class coral reefs. For any traveler affluent enough to stay here during the high season, the nightly room rate might have run in excess of five thousand dollars-except for the fact that no rooms were ever rented to anyone.

  There were poolside cabanas, all near the beach, all with sweeping ocean views. The furniture was imported from Europe, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the beach had been formed of the purest white sand, the water in the lagoon the clearest blue. Mango Cay was densely wooded and mountainous, a particularly lush volcanic isle. Many of the islands in the neighboring Antilles were volcanic in origin; many were lush.

  But not like Mango Cay.

  Fully half its land mass seemed eternally shrouded in mist, a thin, lingering fog that hung low over the steep, jagged cliffs of the windward side of the isle. A single, thick rain forest, painting the hills emerald green, squatted beneath the eternal mist. On the leeward side of the island was the horseshoe-shaped bay that held in its clutches the exclusive resort and its glassy lagoon, untouched by the mist.

  There was an unwritten law in the Caribbean: if you were rich enough to buy one of these islands, you wouldn’t be bothered. Not by the local citizenry, not by the authorities. And so, as mysterious as this particular island happened to be, nobody paid any mind to Mango Cay. Outside of their receipt of the chunky quarterly property tax deposit from the isle’s proprietors, officials of the island’s governing territory-Martinique, controlled ultimately by France-simply ignored the place, unobtrusively providing Mango Cay with the privacy its clandestine proprietor sought.

  Local rumor had it that the reclusive proprietor was a famous multibillionaire, a quiet captain of industry so rich he could afford to have the island meticulously kept year-round simply for the one or two weekends a year he and his family came to visit.

  This, however, was not the case at all.

  Once he had found the Chameleon, Deng positioned two teams of frogmen in the vicinity of the wreck on an indefinite basis. He was able to do this by building the small but exorbitantly expensive underwater equivalent of a space station, and by outfitting the frogmen with custom-designed deep-sea dive equipment capable of withstanding pressure in excess of 9,000 p.s.i.-depths of nearly four miles. He had the station built in dry dock and submarined in modules to its home south of the Bermuda Triangle; Deng designed it with underwater stealth technology, stolen, as usual, from a U.S. defense contractor.

  Operating a set of limited-range salvage pods out of the underwater docking station, Deng’s teams took almost three years to penetrate the Chameleon’s skin, isolate its missile bays, and move, piecemeal, each of the submarine’s full inventory of twenty-four C-4 Trident I intercontinental ballistic missiles from the submarine to the station. The frogmen worked six-month shifts, Deng having them picked up or dropped off by a PLN submarine pass a few miles off. By September 1997, at the annual break his team was forced to take during hurricane season, Deng had disassembled and transferred to a nearby uninhabited island twelve complete Trident missiles, and-of equal importance in Deng’s long-range scheme-the Chameleon’s nuclear power cell.

  To maintain secrecy over the life of his project, Deng was presented with various concerns, the first being where and how to secure, and then conceal, his astronomical budget. Had Deng used Chinese military or intelligence allocations to fund the operation, fellow State Council members would have found out about it. Deng knew that as surely as Mikhail Gorbachev had assassinated the Soviet Union, it was only a matter of time before some fellow council member coined his own term for glasnost, or, worse, perestroika-and were any one of the cowards now thinking up such words to stumble across Deng’s modest clandestine scheme, he wouldn’t be around to enjoy any weekly polo match: he’d be holed up in solitary in Inner Mongolia, freezing his ass off. And that was only if he were able to convince enough of his political allies to keep him away from the firing squad.

  Accordingly, Deng decided to reach out to a few supposed ideological comrades around the Orient. He never took a meeting directly; he used Li and, later, a Caucasian associate as his front men. Once the operation was moving forward and the Trident missiles were found intact, he extended his recruiting effort beyond the Pacific Rim. If there weren’t such a stark prerequisite of secrecy, he would have welcomed every would-be revolutionary into his gala scheme, but instead settled on a dozen organizations, most of them nation-states, all with declared communist or socialist intentions, all totalitarian in their management style. He instructed his middlemen to speak grandly of the New World Order, a revolutionary brotherhood that would return the leadership of the world to its people. The working people. To each according to his needs.

  Sending his front men to hold secret, face-to-face meetings, he would have them pose a single question. Imagine, his script went, if we could guarantee you that the military superpower now standing guard against your imperialist intentions would be rendered impotent, immobile, and blind. That, say, if you were to march your army straight down into South Korea and annex that country into yours, and in the process receive no resistance whatever from that superpower-what, Deng’s men asked, would that be worth?

  Early on, Deng asked for comparatively minuscule membership fees-sixty million a pop, divided into semiannual payments-and provided comparatively vague promises. He also discovered a flaw in his scheme and scrambled to correct the error: anybody who heard this question and happened to decline to enroll in the brotherhood presented an immediate problem, even with the buffer of the middlemen. Fortunately for Deng, though, the three leaders who rejected his vision died soon after the rejection: one in an airline crash, one in a hit-and-run automobile accident, and another who’d managed to drown while swimming alone in a private pool that lacked a deep end.

  Finally, just under four years ago-or about the time Julie Laramie was signing the requisite thirty-month commitment letter making her a trainee of the Central Intelligence Agency-Deng asked Admiral Li and the Caucasian to convene his revolutionary brethren inside of a bank vault in Zurich, where they were told that the yet-to-be-identified visionary behind the operation would, in fact, make good on his promise.

  They were told they could now take the final preparatory steps to prepare for their military operations. They were told that their investment would now, imminently, yield the sought-after freedom from the evil capitalist superpower they despised-the freedom promised in those very first meetings. Deng also had his middlemen tell the brethren they should gather a few hundred million dollars so that they could af
ford the final installment of their membership dues.

  After an additional year of delays brought on by a Caribbean hurricane-and about the time Laramie spotted the first invasion simulation-Deng sent the official invoice for one final, whopping payment from each member of the revolutionary brotherhood, graciously extending an invitation along with the invoice. What Deng offered as bait to warrant delivery of the final payment was an opportunity for each investor to witness history in the making: the members of the revolutionary brotherhood would be invited to observe, firsthand, the facility the investments had enabled their mentor to construct.

  Upon deposit of their invoiced payment, Deng would bring his league of revolutionary leaders to see the launch headquarters for the project he had not yet named in correspondence with the brotherhood, but had privately come to call Operation Blunt Fist.

  The customary flourish of an appearance by General Deng Jiang was dampened by the logistics of Mango Cay’s lagoon: to get from the pontoon of the seaplane to the dry sand of the beach required a calf-deep, three-step wade through the Caribbean. Deng, who had been here before, had come prepared: he’d removed his shoes and socks and rolled up his khakis to the knee while still inside the float plane. Ill-prepared by comparison, PLN Rear Admiral Li Zhu strode into the water in his tennis shoes and jeans. Li, at least, unlike Deng, had dressed in the assigned disguise-Levi’s jeans, Nike T-shirt, Reebok sneakers. He looked as American as a man like Li was capable of looking.

  Deng and Li were met on the beach by the island’s security director, a grotesquely muscle-bound man with oily black hair and perhaps the thinnest neck ever seen on a man of his bulk. With dark bags under his eyes, whitehead zits spread across his forehead, and an upper body befitting a winner of the World’s Strongest Man competition, he represented a rare dichotomy of both sickly, blemished weakness, and near-ideal physical health. There was no one on earth who resembled this man.