Painkiller Read online

  The M.P. shouted after him a few times but decided he ought to check to see whether the DEA man was telling the truth before giving chase. By the time he looked up from the bound, bloody, unconscious, odd-looking sight of Travis James Malloy, the M.P. couldn’t see Cooper anywhere on the road. Even after he’d summoned additional marines for the search, the M.P. quickly developed the sense, which turned out to be correct, that he’d seen the last of the driver of the Ford Taurus claiming to work for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

  28

  Eleven revolutionary leaders stood behind the resort on Mango Cay in freshly pressed hiking gear.

  Arriving here over the course of two days, the dignitaries had traveled through four different regional hubs-San Juan, Kingston, St. Lucia, and, for some of the higher-profile leaders, Havana. From these hubs, arrangements had been made for clandestine transportation to six different Antilles harbors, where private float planes, free of all customs inspection or other unwelcome review, completed the trip to the resort. Each man’s personal security detail, if any, was disallowed for this last leg of the journey, as had been agreed.

  On the third morning of their visit to the resort, the leaders were told to meet at 8 A.M. sharp in front of the Greathouse. The men were told to wear clothes suitable for a hike in the woods, such clothes having been set out for each man in his private cabana.

  Not accustomed to being made to wait, the men lingered uncomfortably until the sound of thrumming motors approached from the woods. It was then that Spike Gibson and a man the leaders had come to know as the resort’s bartender appeared from a trailhead at the base of the island’s lone hill. Each drove his own stretch golf cart, three rows of seats per cart, outfitted with all-weather tires and raised suspensions. Gibson and the bartender, whose name was Hiram, pulled the carts to either side of the trail.

  Gibson made small talk with some of the men, speaking to several in their native languages. Then, at five past eight, General Deng and Admiral Li arrived on a smaller-though equally equipped-cart. Deng and Li wore hiking gear too, and when they exited the smaller cart, Hiram and Gibson boarded it and drove off, disappearing around a corner on their way up the island’s rainforest hill.

  Deng invited the men to board the limo carts and took the wheel of one; Li took the other. With Li following directly behind, Deng led the two-cart procession along the same route taken by Gibson and Hiram.

  This was the first time the brethren had seen their mentor, and Deng knew one or two of them would still be wondering who he was, while others must have been bursting at the seams with surprise, even awe. China! he figured much of the brethren to be thinking. And not just a midlevel officer, acting alone, but a vice premier, overseeing the entire military of the greatest revolutionary nation on earth!

  He began a disjointed narration as they drove, his speech aided by a wireless translation system, its software rendering his Mandarin into Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, and a pair of African dialects. The system required his guests to wear earpieces and receivers resembling iPods; running on a three-second delay, Deng’s words were delivered into the ears of his guests in their native tongues.

  Deng told the men about the salvage operation. He told them how he had shown patience where the Americans had not. How he had taken one of the C-4 Trident I missiles and shipped it in pieces to a laboratory in Hangzhou, where a team of military scientists created an exact, working replica. How he had shipped the replica to another lab, where a second team of scientists assembled another dozen replicas based on the prototype. The circuit was repeated until, in addition to the full complement of twenty-four missiles he’d ultimately recovered from the USS Chameleon, Deng had another twenty-four replicas on his hands. He told the guests that each of the forty-eight missiles was, in theory, fully functional, with each C-4 ICBM loaded with four 100-kiloton W-76 thermonuclear warheads and Mk-4 MIRV re-entry vehicles. Six of the forty-eight missiles-all six part of the inventory of originals pilfered from the Chameleon-had been partially damaged from the American submarine’s sinking, he reported, and were being repaired in a secondary cave.

  One of four African revolutionary leaders in the procession inquired as to how Deng had kept the work quiet. Deng answered through the translation headsets.

  “We keep the work quiet,” he said, “with something our security director prefers to call ‘disposable labor.’ ”

  He did not explain further, and nobody asked for clarification.

  The gravel path had become a skinny dirt road, then a muddy trail, and in due course they were ducking palm fronds, snapping twigs with the rearview mirrors, and spinning out in muddy sections of the road. They reached another trailhead, and Deng parked, locked the foot brake, and turned to face his passengers. Some of the men appeared bewildered, others suspicious.

  Deng said, “If you continue past this point on the trail, your last payment will be immediately drawn and posted to the operation’s account. The banking information and preauthorization we required from you will be used to execute the wire transfer, and the transaction will be executed within sixty seconds of Admiral Li’s e-mail notification.” Li held aloft a BlackBerry-like device. “You could, of course, turn around and walk back to the resort and the float planes there. If you decide to do so, bear in mind that Mr. Gibson knows how to find you-and always will. Your silence is not only expected, but will be strictly enforced. In a sense, if you withdraw now, you will become as ‘disposable’ as Mr. Gibson’s labor pool.”

  When no leader took the exit option, Deng steered down a brief, steep slope. He worked the buttons of a handheld key-code remote, which, as they drove past a grove of squat palms, opened a hidden, reinforced steel door. He made a sharp turn to the left, and with Li following in the cart behind, the two loads of dignitaries found themselves in Mango Cay’s transport tunnel, an eight-foot-wide passageway with muddy gravel beneath the wheels of the carts. Timbers-not unlike those found in a mine shaft-spanned the ceiling at fifteen-foot intervals. They came shortly to another reinforced steel door. Deng stopped his cart, and Li did the same.

  “Behold,” Deng said, “the supreme weapon of the Revolution. Though I, of course, prefer to use its code name: ‘Operation Blunt Fist.’ ”

  He punched another code on the remote keypad and the door slid open to admit the procession into a vast cavern, its wide expanse carved by the hand of God but outfitted with man-made artifacts including at least two hundred ceiling-mounted floodlights and, most notably, forty-two white-and-black pillars of steel. Uniformed mercenaries, roving the facility in pairs, appeared from time to time behind one missile or another.

  Each missile had its own freestanding silo, resembling scaffolding, reaching halfway to the cavern’s domed ceiling. There was a series of what looked like storm drains in the ceiling immediately above each silo, and numbers were painted on the cavern floor, the numbers climbing in sequence across each row of missiles from 1 to 42.

  “All forty-two missiles in this cavern,” Deng said over the translation headsets, “will be operational within the week. The replica C-4s will-even upon detonation-be indistinguishable from authentic U.S. Navy-issue C-4 Trident I ICBMs. We have purchased metals from the supplier for Lockheed, stolen and duplicated guidance system components from Martin Marietta, constructed the warheads using uranium and plutonium with a signature matching that produced in Los Alamos. We have even used the same brand of paint for the exterior markings. There will be no accountability.”

  The dignitaries followed Deng through the maze of silos, most of them dumbfounded that, at least by all appearances, he had actually succeeded with his plan.

  Deng described the targeting strategy in general terms, naming a number of American military installations, and finished by saying, “The American military-industrial complex will be rendered impotent for at least months, and possibly years. As though struck,” he said, “by a blunt fist.” Deng liked this part, so he repeated it, trusting that in some fo
rm the translation would take:

  “As though struck,” he said, “by a blunt fist.”

  Deep in the cavern, near the back, stood a guest who had for-gone the walking tour. He leaned against a wide opening in the wall of the cave where, behind him, there stood the calm waters of an underwater docking bay. The conning tower of a medium-size submarine bereft of national insignia protruded from the water in the bay.

  This man, like the others, wore a headset. He had been following the tour on audio, but had only come as far from his submarine as the position he occupied now.

  In the world of the communist brotherhood Deng had recruited, there were few VIPs, and even fewer men-including those found throughout history-who qualified to function as royalty. The man leaning against the cavern wall, however, was to these men, as Deng well knew, quite literally a symbol of revolution itself.

  An aging fossil of defiance in the face of capitalism, friend to all Marxist-Leninist regimes, the man had now, thanks to Vice Premier General Deng Jiang, inherited the role of royal mascot for the next phase of the revolution. As Deng’s tour came around the forty-second silo, the man stepped forward and raised a hand to his brethren. One by one, the faces of the other dignitaries in the procession registered precisely the look Deng had sought: a combination of shock, awe, and self-satisfaction. The man’s beard was thick and gray-even unruly-but he didn’t look nearly as old as most of the dignitaries had pegged him for.

  At that point the mascot from Cuba grinned through teeth yellowed from too many years of gluttonous cigar consumption and joined his comrades for the conclusion of the tour.

  29

  Pete, you stay for a bit?”

  The remainder of CIA’s senior staff departed the conference room adjoining Lou Ebbers’s executive suite, leaving Peter M. Gates alone with the DCI. Gates replaced his ass in the seat he’d held for the past two hours as Ebbers stood at the head of the table and waited for the last deputy director to leave.

  When the door had closed, Ebbers slid a photocopy of a letter across the table.

  “Inquiry from Senator Kircher,” Ebbers said. “Came to me.”

  Ebbers was a man who looked more virile at sixty than he had at twenty-five. He had a stripe of gray stretching back from each temple but was otherwise bald. A pair of wire rims rested high on his nose.

  “Copied the president,” Ebbers said, “and most of the NSC. It’s a request, as you can see, for a ‘comprehensive summary of all CIA intelligence related to China’s readiness and/or intention to annex Taiwan.’ Wants it in a week, report to remain classified, his eyes only. No committee review. He’ll accept a blacked-out version.”

  Gates immediately understood the letter to be a warning shot intended for the president. When requests like this were made, it usually meant the congressman in question already had the goods, and sought either verification of what he already knew or, more likely, to make a point. Kircher, in copying the administration, was telling the nation’s chief executive he knew something the president didn’t, or that he knew something the president hadn’t wanted him to find out about. Either way, Kircher was going back-channel to fight a skirmish the senator was confident he would win, Gates hearing it in the trademark accent of the ubiquitous guest star of prime-time cable debate shows: Just puttin’ it out there, Mr. President-lettin’ you know a conversation’s comin’.

  The way Kircher was playing it, Gates guessed the senator intended to pressure the president into backing out of his proposed U.S.-China corporate-partner initiative, which Kircher opposed, though the senator could have been shooting for any of a number of benefits serving the citizens of the great state of North Carolina.

  None of this was out of the ordinary-routine Beltway activity. What disturbed Gates was the topic of the inquiry.

  Could he possibly have so grossly underestimated her?

  Following his reprimand, had Julie Laramie gone off-rez and handed classified intel to a senator known to be the president’s arch-rival? If so, he’d slap a treason investigation on her ass so fast her head-and career-would spin.

  When Gates looked up from reading the letter he found Ebbers looking at him.

  “If the gentleman from North Carolina is doin’ some fishin’,” Ebbers said, “my guess’d be he knows where they’re bitin’. We have any idea what he’s got?”

  Gates shook his head, giving the impression he was trying to think of anything he might have heard about.

  “Think I’ll need to check, Lou,” he said.

  “You got anybody sitting on anything, now’s the time.”

  Gates didn’t think he hesitated, but it felt that way to him. Ebbers wasn’t always so direct. “I’ll dig,” Gates said, “and whatever he’s got, if it’s anything at all, we’ll find it.”

  “I want whatever you have in three days. We clear?”

  “As ice. This will not be a problem, Lou.”

  “All right, then.” Gates knew this to be Ebbers’s standard end-of-meeting remark. “Lemme know.”

  Gates procured a tall coffee from the Starbucks kiosk and returned immediately to his office. On his way through the executive waiting room, he fired an order at Miss Anders without looking at her.

  “Get Rhone up here,” he said, then stopped before charging through the door to his office. Miss Anders, he realized, had not reacted to his order with her usual fervor. In fact, she hadn’t reacted at all.

  The typically stone-faced assistant was flush with either embarrassment or anger, the color of her face approaching the shade of her candy-apple-red blazer.

  “What is it,” Gates said.

  “There’s a caller holding.”

  She didn’t say anything more.

  “Well?” Gates said. “Who?”

  “He says his name is ‘Lunar Eclipse.’ He doesn’t seem to accept that I’m not able-”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ve told him you’re not-”

  “I’ll take the damn call, Miss Anders.”

  For Gates it hadn’t been the worst day of his life, but it sure as hell wasn’t his best.

  During his third year in the Directorate of Operations, he’d been trying to install a leader his staff had told him would be the right man for a certain Central American nation. The problem was that there was no election in that particular nation for another four years, and the nation’s current prime minister, who had no interest in America’s views, was in perfect health. For Gates the solution was simple: remove the misguided leader and install the correct one in his place.

  It was a complicated operation, but in Gates’s view he orchestrated it brilliantly, even in failure. At least this was what he had come to believe once he’d consumed the gushing round of compliments fed him by his men’s club comrades after the fact.

  In one of the few successful covert CIA assassinations in history, his team had succeeded in taking out the errant leader, doing it, in fact, under the cover of night at the very palace where he slept. Unfortunately, Gates had overlooked the leader’s very powerful minister of defense who, upon getting wind of the assassination attempt, allowed the American agents to waltz into the leader’s palace and take him out with no resistance whatsoever. The only resistance that occurred came after the minister of defense confirmed the prime minister was muerto, at which point he sealed the palace perimeter and captured or killed the entire American team.

  Rather than leave anything to chance or election returns, the minister of defense decried this terrible tragedy, declared himself prime minister for the length of the former leader’s term, and promptly imprisoned the opposition leader and all the top members of his party. The opposition leader, of course, was Gates’s man.

  Gates quickly moved to reduce CIA’s presence in the region and bagged any further plans to install a new leader, switching instead to a grassroots strategy of antigovernment propaganda. He had cargo planes dump leaflets on the country’s bigger cities, blasted the regional airwaves with powerful radio broadcasts, and coordi
nated with anyone willing to participate in a domestic disinformation campaign documenting whatever fictional atrocities he felt were appropriate to sully the reputation of the former minister of defense.

  Encouraged by his men’s club comrades to do so, Gates shelved his concerns for the twelve-man team he’d sent down to engineer the coup. They were an extreme liability, especially as Gates had undertaken the operation on his own initiative, but in time he felt safe concluding that all twelve had died. A month after the botched raid, Gates had notified the media that a DC-3, sent on a relief mission to Zimbabwe, had crashed in a treacherous African mountain range, killing all twelve passengers. The names on the manifest mysteriously matched those Gates had sent to assassinate the Central American prime minister.

  Gates was promoted shortly thereafter to deputy director of operations.

  That put him at sixteen years ago, coming out of Cleo’s on a Thursday afternoon, having just finished a lunch with a particularly well-connected undersecretary of state.

  Gates hadn’t met anyone on the team he’d sent to Central America, so there wasn’t any reason for him to recognize the tall, deeply tanned man who bumped him while Gates was making for his car outside the club. The man apologized, then followed him the block and a half to his car, Gates driving a big Buick that year.

  That’s when the man, back then, said, “So you’re Gates.”

  The man had short black hair. He wore a suit and overcoat. Despite the wardrobe selection, he failed to come off as one of the men’s club set.

  Gates recognized him as the same man who had bumped into him outside of Cleo’s. He felt a surge of fear, wondering whether he should duck into the driver’s seat and speed off while he still had the Buick between them.