Public Enemy Read online

  One of the only things they don’t know is that he might well be on their approved list, but he certainly isn’t on mine. Actually, he was on her least-approved, most annoying list-a list that spanned one person.

  Still, his expertise could prove highly valuable, and she had a pretty good idea she could trust the son of a bitch.

  “You can go ahead and place the call,” Ebbers said.

  Laramie didn’t say anything.

  Ebbers too was silent again for a minute, or maybe ten, Laramie couldn’t tell, until his voice crackled through the speakerphone one last time.

  “Nice talkin’ to you, Miss Laramie,” he said. “Break a leg.”

  Then he hung up.

  21

  Planted on oil reserves more bountiful than those beneath most OPEC states, Venezuela had, by the early twenty-first century, failed to lift more than a token percentage of its people from abject poverty. The oil revenues were routed through the government-owned Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., with profits promised to the poor but usually distributed only according to the whim of the nation’s chief politician. So despite the black gold mined from beneath it, for each of its six decades of independence from Spanish territorial status, the Bolívarian Republic of Venezuela remained a nation of high-profile leaders, sleek, modern city centers, and-mostly-shantytown barrios.

  The latest chief politician was Hugo Chávez, a man imprisoned for leading a failed military coup before he went on to win a pair of presidential elections. Along the way, he managed to snuff out the standard South American sort of political challenges-a referendum seeking his ouster, a successful but short-lived coup, a few assassination attempts. Chávez routinely conducted a number of foreign-affairs initiatives geared solely, it seemed, toward alienating U.S. officials, with considerable success. Americans consumed the majority of Venezuela’s oil, and probably always would-but the discord resulting from Chávez’s anti-American bravado was enough to make a visit to Venezuela by any American citizen a tremendous pain in the ass.

  Cooper circumvented the would-be four-hour customs detainment of American tourists by buying his ticket at the Copa Airlines counter in San Juan with a MasterCard under the name of Armando Guttierez-which name the ticket agent also found printed alongside Cooper’s picture on the Colombian passport he was breaking in today.

  He rented a car, and after a stroll through the soupy heat to the vehicle, found his way to the autopista and headed south for Caracas. It took him about an hour in the gridlocked traffic to reach the exit he’d pinned down as the correct choice in an online atlas search from the porch of his bungalow.

  He’d pinned down some other things too with a phone call or three, namely that Ernesto Borrego, aka El Oso Blanco, was, in fact, as Po Keeler had claimed, into a lot of shit. Borrego’s businesses, operating under the Borrego Industries banner, included trucking, intermodal shipping, home electronics and personal computer importing and exporting, wholesale distribution, and order fulfillment. This according to the backgrounder Cooper had ordered up from Langley, which he presumed to be far from comprehensive.

  He’d called some other people and learned that Borrego liked to hunker down in his rat-trap of an office within the confines of the Borrego Industries distribution center south of the city. Apparently Borrego rarely left the place, and instead preferred to all but live out of the facility. It was from the Caracas distribution center that he took his meetings-of which there were few-while logging fourteen or fifteen hours of phone calls a day. He was said to hold frequent video teleconferences, the man’s preferred meeting format.

  It was also well known locally that Borrego consumed massive quantities of takeout. Rarely leaving the windowless office space in his massive warehouse building, he cycled through a set delivery rotation of offerings from local eateries, his favorite being the two-foot hoagies stacked high with meat that a nearby deli ordinarily made for birthday parties and corporate events.

  Once he found the distribution center, Cooper drove around the perimeter of the place for a look around. It was a massive facility that made Cooper think suddenly of New Jersey-a vast, sprawling campus of one-story buildings equipped with loading docks, surrounded by what had to be ten square miles of parking lot. The place appeared to be accessible, from the road anyway, via two secure entrances, each equipped with a guard booth and gate. One was much bigger than the other, the larger serving as the egress point for tractor-trailers, Cooper losing count at 237 rigs being loaded or unloaded behind the sea of buildings. He saw a couple of the semis leave, and a couple others come in. The guards granting this access didn’t seem too diligent, but Cooper didn’t have an eighteen-wheeler on hand.

  The second gate was your standard corporate-campus security booth, same in any country-swipe your pass card across the black panel on the post astride the guard booth and the gate would open to let you in. While Cooper watched, he saw the guard manning the booth wave to or otherwise greet every driver coming in. That was the nature of the second entrance-it was the administrative parking lot, all cars and no rigs, the autos lined up outside the only building on the lot that lacked loading docks.

  This would be where Borrego kept his office.

  Cooper had some trouble devising a painless way in, but on his ninth loop around the complex, he noticed the trains. There was a switching engine pulling container cars in and out of the facility, five or six at a time. Even Cooper, beach denizen though he was, could admire the intermodal transportation system Borrego had going: rail cars held the shipping containers today, but a truck or ship might hold them tomorrow. The switching locomotive was busy plucking select cars from a pair of mile-long trains parked on a set of spurs, set off to the side of the main rail thoroughfare. The tracks may well have served other facilities in the area, but the main stop appeared to be Borrego Industries.

  Cooper ditched his rental car on a dusty shoulder between a roadside junkyard and a service station. Locking it with the remote, he strolled around the back of the service station as though headed for the restroom, but kept going until he hit the switching track behind. He doubled back a couple hundred yards so that he could hide behind the junkyard, then waited there until the switching engine came rumbling along, the rhythmic bong bong of its klaxon announcing its passage. The engineer had four of the container cars hooked up this time around.

  He stayed hidden behind a stack of punctured tires until the locomotive passed-Cooper making sure the engineer couldn’t clock him-then stepped out and jogged alongside the slow-moving train until he found a good handle and pulled himself aboard. He clung to a ladder beneath two towering twin-stack shipping containers while the train pulled onto the property, waited for the hydraulic hiss of the train’s brakes, jumped off, walked around the side of the building, found his way to the sidewalk lining the administrative building, and strolled through the glass doors and into the main lobby.

  Coming in, he saw it did not appear there was much pomp or circumstance here. Judging from the number of cars in the lot, there couldn’t have been more than twenty-five people working in the business wing to begin with-none of them, apparently, working in particularly luxurious digs.

  He approached a stern-cheeked receptionist. She sat behind a fold-out desk that might have been a card table in another life.

  “Afternoon,” he said, going with English for no particular reason.

  There was little life in the look she shot back at him.

  Cooper added, “I’m here to see the Polar Bear.”

  “Pardona me?” she said, struggling even with the two-word foray into English.

  “El Oso Blanco,” Cooper said, grinning as though he were a salesman here to hawk business-to-business long-distance telephone service. “Good old Ernie.”

  Appearing mildly relieved by his use of Spanish, she returned to the comfort zone of her native tongue. “Security hadn’t told us-”

  “Sí,” Cooper answered, “they were pretty busy up front.”

  “I don’t have
you on Mr. Borrego’s calendar.”

  They were sticking with Spanish now. Cooper noted where her eyes went as she dropped Borrego’s name: the double doors at the end of the hallway to Cooper’s right. Not that he couldn’t have guessed which office belonged to the main man upon entering the otherwise Spartan complex.

  Cooper said, “You mind if I just…” and, keeping the salesman’s smile plastered on his face, headed past the card table and on down the hall.

  Standing, the receptionist pronounced her objections at great volume, then punched a button on her telephone console and began yelling something about “Seguridad!” into the phone. Cooper opened one of the double doors at the back of the short hallway, entered, then closed and locked the door behind him. He turned and encountered exactly what-or at least who-he had expected to find, only on a much larger scale than anticipated.

  Seated before a tropical fish tank that looked about twenty feet long by eight tall-Cooper putting it at fifteen, twenty thousand gallons-was a man with one of the largest heads ever seen on a human being. Adorned with a wireless telephone headset, outfitted in an off-white three-piece suit that made Cooper think of Tom Wolfe, the man Cooper presumed to be Ernesto Borrego was digging in-big-time.

  Cooper watched as the man called the Polar Bear, unfazed by his entrance, continued working from a tub the size of a deep sea charter’s bait bucket. He used a serving fork to stab a mound of the pasta within, wound it in a tight spiral with the aid of a ladle-size spoon, then lifted the fork-bound coil of semolina and sauce into his monstrous facial cavity.

  Skin the color of the moon on the clearest of Caribbean nights, suit protected from the elements by a gigantic red-checked napkin, Borrego was working on a bottle of red too, a decanter’s worth resting on his big desk alongside the tub.

  Eating the food the way he was, the man not the slightest bit disturbed by his entrance, it struck Cooper that Borrego looked about like…a polar bear.

  Borrego shoveled another mouthful of noodles into his maw. When he’d chewed and swallowed, washing it down with a sip taken directly from the carafe, he wiped his mouth with the bib and said, “Who the fuck are you?”

  As far as Cooper could tell, Borrego hadn’t yet looked up to examine him.

  “May not resemble one,” Cooper said, “but I’m a canary.”

  Borrego chewed a new spool of noodles. He looked to Cooper to be conducting two operations: the sensory function of enjoying the flavors of the pasta, and the intellectual act of solving the half-ass riddle. When he’d finished masticating, Borrego made a clicking sound somewhere in his huge mouth before returning for another backhoe-dig with the serving fork.

  “Canary in a mine shaft, you mean,” he said. His English was clean-middle-America news-anchor clean.

  Muted voices came from beyond the door Cooper had his back against. Somebody tried the knob; Cooper wrapped his hand around it just in case the lock hadn’t done the trick. There came more muted chitchat from the hall.

  “More or less,” Cooper said. “I’m not expecting to pass into bird heaven anytime soon, but the fact remains that the people who’re currently considering offing me will probably come after you next. Or even first.”

  Borrego looked at him while continuing to eat, seemingly observing him for the first time.

  “So am I the canary,” he said, “or you?”

  Cooper shrugged.

  “How’d you get in here?” Borrego said.

  “The guards in your booths don’t concern themselves with the trains.”

  Borrego stopped chewing for a moment then started up again.

  “Have to fix that,” he said.

  The knob spun in Cooper’s hand and he was yanked backward by the opening door as he tried to keep it in his grasp. He’d expected the intrusion but still had to switch his weight from one foot to the other to avoid falling. He soon found his fancy footwork didn’t matter, since as he regained his balance, the well-muscled shoulder of an exceedingly large individual plowed into his spine, a pair of muscle-bound arms wrapped around him, and what Cooper pegged for a three-man private security detail gang-tackled him. As he hit the floor chin first it felt to him as though he were being pig-piled, and once they had him pinned they jammed both his wrists against his respective shoulder blades and crammed his face into the wall-to-wall carpeting Borrego kept in his office. Somebody found and took from him the Agency-issue FN Browning tucked against his back, and it began to occur to Cooper he’d been a little too thrilled with his infiltration game. It became equally apparent these boys didn’t appear to possess handcuffs, since by now they’d have slapped him with a pair.

  A powerful hand was keeping Cooper’s face against the rug, so he couldn’t see Borrego as the Polar Bear said, “Careful there-canaries are known for their delicate constitutions.”

  Cooper felt a little easing of the pressure of the tough spirals of rug against his lips.

  Probably deserve that.

  None of the people who had entered the room said anything. He heard the bong bong of the switching engine, the distant sound of a ringing phone, but that was about it-until there came a low rumble, which Cooper first thought to be coming from the floor. It began as the sort of trembling bass you got from a subwoofer, then clarified and sharpened to a more familiar noise-at which point Cooper realized Borrego had just performed a polar bear’s equivalent of a chuckle. The chuckle soon accelerated into a great, braying belly laugh.

  “Ah, shit,” El Oso Blanco said, the laughs crashing from his larynx like southern California surf. “Ah, puta mierda…!”

  Finally the laughing surf retreated. As it did, so too did the pressure from the hand on Cooper’s head. The hands that had been holding his arms against his back released too, and soon he was lying unrestrained on the carpet. Realizing that Borrego must have given his security team some kind of gesture ordering his release, Cooper turned on his side to get a look at the security men and saw, to his consternation and embarrassment, the nature of the army that had just subdued him: there stood looking down at him only one man, a behemoth with a wafer-thin waist who looked more velociraptor than human despite his half-decent suit and not-inexpensive wingtips.

  Cued by another unseen gesture, the velociraptor stepped away from Cooper and retreated to a place against the wall beside the double doors. He clasped his hands in front of his groin.

  “That was funny,” Borrego said. “Funny.” As Cooper worked his legs around and sat upright on the floor, he could see Borrego smiling over the tub at him. “So again,” he said, “who the hell are you, what the fuck do you want, and what or who is it that’s poisoning the mine?”

  Cooper checked his lips for blood but they were dry-rug-burn dry. He started slowly, mainly because his numb lips had some trouble mouthing the words.

  “A trail of bodies has begun to turn up in the wake of a shipment of gold artifacts,” he said. “The artifact shipment would be the same load of boxes you checked aboard the good ship Seahawk in La Guaira. One note you may find equally discouraging is that the artifacts themselves were destroyed too. Or at least sunk to the bottom of the Caribbean.”

  Borrego, who had begun eating again, shrugged.

  “That’d be one of the reasons they call it the black market,” he said. “Involves some risk.”

  “I’m assuming you’d be one of the bodies now too-especially considering how easy it is to get past your security detail-”-Cooper flipped a look in the direction of the velociraptor-bodyguard as he said this, hoping for a reaction but earning none-“except, by my best guess, whoever’s leaving the trail of bodies doesn’t know you’re the one holding the luggage tags.”

  The Polar Bear made a humph sound. “They’d be right,” he said. “I’m not. At least not anymore.”

  Cooper stood, sort of bending at the hip in hopes of readjusting his spine as he did it. No such luck-there remained a sharp pain in one of the meaty muscles in his lower back. He pulled himself into one of the chairs that faced B
orrego’s big desk while he thought aloud through what Borrego had meant.

  “You’re not holding…you didn’t check the bags, you mean.”

  “Right. I sold ’em.”

  “Funny,” Cooper said, “so did I.”

  “No surprise there-so did somebody else before me. That’s how it works,” Borrego said. “I don’t even get the prime cut. And while antiquities are a passion of mine, I’m into them as a margin guy. You know-buy very low, sell not quite so low. Little or no risk-get in, get out.”

  Borrego stopped eating just long enough to grin, and Cooper saw that the Polar Bear had sharp teeth that looked almost brown against his white skin and whiter suit.

  “Except for the fact that I usually pluck a few of ’em for myself before getting all the way out,” he said.

  “Well, that’s something else we’ve got in common. What about the two idiot gunslingers you required the shipper to take along for the ride to Naples? If you didn’t check the bags for a colleague of yours to retrieve on the other side, what do you care about protecting the merchandise?”

  “Idiots is right. But while our conversation thus far is chippy and neat, I’d like you to answer my other questions now,” Borrego said.

  Cooper considered this.

  “You mean, ‘Who the fuck am I,’ and, ‘What the hell do I want?’”

  Borrego thrust him a thumbs-up over the top of the bucket.

  “I’ve got a few made-up names I can pick from,” Cooper said, “but the one most people use is Cooper. And I’m not one hundred percent positive what the hell I want, but if you are the middleman you claim to be, there are two questions I’ve got for you. I’d like to know the names of the people you sold the shipment to, and the names of the people you bought it from.”

  “You know what I’d like to know?” Borrego said. “I’d like to know why you didn’t just give me a call. Slip past my secretary that way. I usually even call back.”