Public Enemy Read online

  Cooper thought he detected something-it was very faint, but it was there, kind of lingering in the humid interior of the warehouse. Probably not the best environment for paintings and first-edition book collections. Also probably not so good for what he was afraid he smelled.

  He came into a smaller back room, the part of the building that over-hung the water, where he picked up on the heavy buzz of big freezers. In here Cooper saw the first evidence of a legitimate business operation run by El Oso Blanco’s fence: a series of signs, labels, Ziploc bags, and low-slung freezers were all marked with a logo featuring a crab’s claw and a slogan printed in red: Snow Country King Crab Legs, Frozen North of the Border and Brought Fresh to You.

  From one corner to the other, Cooper thought-a nation of consumers on whom the concept of fresh had been lost a long, long time ago.

  He was thinking it could have been the crabs he’d smelled, but knew it wasn’t. He found a switch on the wall and got some more lights on. He opened, then rooted through the first of three big waist-high freezers, cutting his fingers a half dozen times on the frozen crab legs within as he moved them around for a better look.

  It was in the second unit that he found, jammed in beside an otherwise fully stocked selection of plastic-wrapped imported king crab legs, the uncovered but completely frozen body of the man Cooper judged to be the stateside fence used by Ernesto Borrego.

  He couldn’t be sure, given the frosted-over nature of the clothes adorning the body, but it looked to Cooper as though there were at least a double-tap’s worth of bullet holes grouped precisely in the vicinity of the late fence’s ventricles. He brushed off some of the frost from the guy’s face and confirmed his identity based on the couple of pictures he’d seen in the condo.

  Cooper dropped the freezer lid. Medvez was hovering behind him.

  “In case you were wondering,” Cooper said, “I’m not particularly surprised.”

  “No? Well thanks for bringing me along for the ride,” Medvez said. “Something I’ve always wanted to see-fresh-frozen art smugglers. Eleven ninety-nine a pound.”

  Cooper nodded dully.

  Government affiliation or no, Cooper had a pretty good idea whose turn would come next. He flipped off the light.

  “Come on, Mr. Nightly News,” he said in the dark. “We get out of here quick enough, nobody’ll know you did my detective work, and we might just be able to keep you off the list.”

  25

  Laramie answered groggily.

  “Yeah?”

  “Rise and shine,” came the familiar baritone. In her sleep-deprived state she almost slipped right into the routine, that voice feeling like a comfortable old shoe. She could sense his presence beside her, and thought of the sand they’d always felt in the sheets, no matter which resort they’d picked. Laramie stretched lazily in the sheets-

  And snapped out of it.

  “Christ,” she said. “What time is it?”

  She pulled herself up against the headboard.

  “Early,” Cooper said, “or late. Depending.”

  She confirmed this with a glance at the dim green numbers on the alarm clock in her room: 4:42 A.M.

  “Up and at ’em,” Cooper said. “If you don’t get your tail out of bed pronto you’ll be late for your seven A.M. breakfast meeting in Naples.”

  “I’ve got a seven A.M. breakfast meeting in Naples?”

  “The Sunrise Café. Known for its eggs Benedict, though they serve a mean doughnut too.”

  Laramie got her head wrapped around things. She knew better than to say what she wanted to say-So this means you’ve reconsidered our offer?-or, better yet-What are you doing in Naples? Be wiser, she thought, to wait until they were face-to-face to pop her questions.

  Still, she couldn’t resist the temptation of at least one toe-dipping probe.

  “And you think I’d be interested in driving, I don’t know, an hour or so, at this time of the morning, why?”

  “I happen to be in the area. I figured I’d do you and ‘the people you work for’ a favor. Save them some time-you know, in case they’ve started spinning their wheels in a vain hunt for the numbered account my initial extortion dough got siphoned into, or any of the many hundreds of investments my attorneys subsequently made with it, scattered around the globe like little financial Easter eggs. And don’t get your hopes up on your own personal knowledge contributing to the hapless mission of the federal government finding any of my assets-just because we hung out some doesn’t mean you have any more concept than the sea turtles south of Conch Bay as to where that money lives.”

  “Ah,” Laramie said. I knew I shouldn’t have said anything…

  “Anyway,” Cooper said, “since they’re not ever going to find any of it, not in a couple generations’ worth of IRS investigators, I’ll save them the trouble and have a cup of coffee with you-as per your ‘initial recruitment effort.’ As to the driving part-among the reasons you’ll need to be the one logging the miles is the fact that I’m not meeting you anywhere near the people you work for.”

  “Fine.”

  The phone line kind of sat there between them, part noise and part silence.

  “You said you’ll have a cup of coffee,” Laramie said. “You drink coffee now?”

  “Helps with the headaches.”

  “What are the other reasons?” Laramie said.

  “For drinking coffee?”

  “You said ‘among the reasons’-that avoiding coming anywhere near ‘the people I work’ for was ‘among the reasons’ I’m the one who has to do the driving. Why else?”

  She heard some kind of muffled sigh rumble from the receiver.

  “Laramie, after our breakfast rendezvous, I’ll be hopping back aboard my refueled speed machine and heading south. Conditions are expected to worsen as the tropical storm currently dumping six inches of rain on Cancún moves into the Gulf, so if I don’t clear Key West by ten, said speed machine will wind up as fiberglass kindling somewhere near the halfway point of my intended voyage.”

  “What if the storm moves faster than that?”

  “Then you’ll be eating your granola alone.”

  Fair enough, Laramie thought.

  “All right,” she said. “Storm allowing, I’ll see you at seven and brief you there.”

  “You can brief me all you want,” Cooper said, “and I’ll give you my thoughts on whatever it is you’ve got going. But if you were asking me then, and you’re asking me now, and you ask me over coffee, to come work for whichever people it is you’re working for now, I’m not interested.”

  A bonking rattle sounded out, and Laramie knew he’d dropped the phone on its cradle.

  She leaned back against the headboard, allowing some of the fog to clear from her sleep-deprived brain. She sat there with her eyes closed for a minute, or maybe five, then flipped off the covers and rolled her feet off the side of the bed.

  She wondered, as she stood, what the simplest way might be of procuring one of the task force fleet’s black-on-black Suburbans at five in the morning.

  “It’s only a matter of time.”

  After swallowing the sip of black coffee he’d just taken, Cooper attempted and failed to determine what it was Laramie was talking about. He was certain she wasn’t talking about what had slipped into his mind once she’d uttered the words.

  “You want to run that by me again?”

  “The caffeine addiction,” she said. “You didn’t used to drink any coffee. Now you look suspiciously like a two-cups-a-morning guy to me. Addiction can’t be far behind.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But last I checked, there were a few other addictions chewing up most of my real estate. Not sure there’s room for any others.”

  Cooper was feeling irritable-or highly uncomfortable, at any rate. Upon Laramie’s arrival at the table, it seemed there had been a slight quickening of his pulse. It was a familiar sensation-familiarly annoying. He’d thought himself impervious to it, which was what made it so annoying:
he had assumed his year-plus of rage at Laramie’s decision to abandon him and his island way of life, coupled with the so-preposterous-as-to-be-humorous threat Laramie had made in her “initial recruitment effort,” would function as a kind of force field. A moat.

  Here he was, though, a mere three minutes into his breakfast meeting, and the force field had already disintegrated in favor of the same old quickened pulse. He thought of an imaginary wall suddenly detonating into a million digital pixels and the pixels fading to reveal an image behind.

  “You’re an asshole,” Laramie said.

  Cooper blinked.

  “You’re an infantile, inconsiderate, uncontrolled, obnoxious child,” she went on, “in an aging, sunbaked, time-and-fisticuff-abused adult male shell.”

  She did not appear particularly incensed, or even emotional, Laramie just leaning forward with her forearms crossed on the table, telling him off over coffee. Cooper took a few slow sips, letting time pass, swirling the bitter, chocolately fluid around his mouth with each taste, depositing the cup on its saucer between sips to draw out the time between each sip-to-taste-to-swallow. Knowing there was more on the way from the analyst across the table.

  “An adult human being,” Laramie said, “would respect another adult human being’s decisions and, despite such decisions being difficult and painful, or even hurtful, retain some sense of interpersonal decorum. Even a bratty child, taking a friend’s tormented, thoughtful, deliberate decision to return to work personally, would eventually come to grips with his boorish overreaction and call, maybe apologize, or even, for Christ’s sake-you horse’s ass-take my goddamn call when I show the maturity and patience to dial up that goddamn beach club in search of you, knowing Ronnie’s already been told to screen my fucking call.”

  Her words were delivered in so matter-of-fact a fashion that Cooper felt as though he’d tuned into one of the lower-rated local newscasts that competed with Ricardo Medvez’s nightly displays of knowledgeable warmth.

  Despite being in no mood to explain himself-despite never being in the mood to explain himself-Cooper said, “Hell, I called. Twice now.”

  “Popping your rude head above the surface after ducking me for a year is not the kind of ‘eventually’ I was talking about.”

  “‘Eventually’ is a relative term,” he said. “Subjective, even.”

  She looked at him for a while, still leaning on her forearms, but losing some of the detachment factor. A little color worked its way up the sides of her neck in pinkish splotches against her pale skin. He could feel the crackle in the air as she fought to keep the color beneath the collar of her blouse.

  “Here’s what’s going on,” she said.

  Then Laramie started in on the sordid suicidal exploits of Benny Achar and the ramifications of his act as incurred by a hundred and twenty-five late and former citizens of Hendry County. She covered Achar’s false identity, the reality and likelihood of what could come to pass if Achar were one of many, and the engineered version of the facts as presented in the news media. Then she told him she had been asked to head a counterterrorist unit whose purpose was to identify and possibly destroy Achar’s comrades, if any, and those responsible for compelling Achar to action in the first place.

  “So that’s all,” Cooper said.

  Laramie ignored him and concluded with a brief explanation of her theory that Achar had meant to use his bomb-launched spread of the filovirus as a message-as bread crumbs for them to follow. She didn’t mention the similarity between the counterterror strategy she’d outlined in her independent study paper and the organization she now appeared to be working for. Including Cooper’s interruption, it took Laramie thirty-four minutes to lay out her briefing.

  Since Cooper’s fourth cup of coffee was giving him a headache, he ordered eggs Benedict from the menu. When Laramie attempted to wave off the waitress, Cooper asked the woman to bring Laramie an order of granola served with seasonal fruit.

  “Skim milk, please,” Laramie said before the waitress padded away.

  When they were alone again, Cooper said, “That was interesting how you told the whole story of Benny Achar and your role in matters,” Cooper said, “without mentioning who it was who put you on the case, or whose jurisdiction this ‘counterterrorist unit’ happens to fall under.”

  Laramie didn’t say anything.

  “Also,” Cooper said, “I find it just as interesting when a five-foot-four female satellite intelligence analyst with smooth skin and tremendous legs tells me it has become her job to ‘identify and possibly destroy’ international terrorists. Perhaps,” he said, “instead of offering you advice, I should loan you the gun I’m packing just east of my right hip.”

  Laramie leaned back slightly from the table and folded her arms across her chest.

  “Wow,” she said. “Was that your only-partially-infantile way of offering me an apology? The smooth skin and tremendous legs part?”

  “I’m not sure I’d go that far.”

  “Knowing you as I do, which, I believe, is marginally better than you know yourself, I’ll take it as your apology. I know it’s all I’m going to get.”

  They were silent until the food came. Cooper was halfway through his breakfast, and Laramie one bite in on her first wedge of cantaloupe, when Laramie said, “So what do you think?”

  “Of the Achar predicament, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  Cooper considered the query.

  “Who do you have on your team,” he said. “Your ‘counterterrorist unit.’”

  “I’ve been interviewing from a pool of candidates. Volunteers from various walks of life who’ve been background-checked to the hilt. Plus,” she said, talking faster, “I’ve contacted a former professor of mine, who we’ll probably bring on board.”

  Cooper looked up from his eggs Benedict with a look of moderate disgust. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He thought of something else to say, then decided his growing irritation with matters wouldn’t be helped much by the nasty comment he had in mind, shelved it, and said, “And how is Professor Eddie doing?”

  “He’s doing fine.”

  Laramie left it at that.

  “To give you answers,” Cooper said, “or advice, I’d need to know more than what you included in your half-hour speech. Probably need to dig into whatever documents you’ve got-I don’t know, transcripts of interviews, maybe whatever paper trail you’ve got on the guy back to whenever it was he first turned up under his false identity. I do have some experience in crafting a new identity, of course. But other than my own background, I’m not sure-”

  “Wait a minute-unless you’re skipping the boat trip, there’s no way-”

  “I thought you wanted my advice?”

  “But I can’t just send you off on your boat with a copy of classified files-”

  “Sure you can.”

  “Look. You know I want-we want-need-your help, but it won’t work if you’re providing it from Conch Bay, or San Juan, or wherever it is you’re heading on your boat.”

  “No? Well thanks for the breakfast, anyway. Always prefer to set sail on a full belly.”

  He waved for the waitress to bring the check.

  “You can’t just say no, or dictate how this is going to work,” Laramie said, and Cooper could see the pink coming up her neck again. “You do understand that if Achar was one of a dozen sleepers, each targeting a vast water table or some other vital area, that thousands-even hundreds of thousands, or more-could die.” She leaned in again, full of emotion for a change. “And you’re just going to go back and lie out on the beach?”

  “Actually,” Cooper said, “yes.”

  She stared at him.

  “Perhaps,” Cooper said, “you and Professor Eddie can continue to work with your team of Salvation Army volunteers and solve your little riddle on your own.”

  The check came and Cooper deposited a couple of twenties on the tray without checking the total. He thought of a story he’d once heard about Fra
nk Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.-outside a Vegas casino, Sinatra asks Sammy if he’s got change for a twenty, and Sammy says, “Twenties are change, baby.” Cooper couldn’t remember who’d told him the story, or whether Sammy had been the one asking for the change, but he’d heard it a long time ago and it had stuck with him since.

  “Listen-wait, you goddamn pain in the ass,” Laramie said. She had reached her hand across the table but didn’t quite touch his arm with her fingers. He felt their warmth, though, resting an inch from his wrist on the cool glass surface of the tabletop. “I can get you some of the documents in a diplomatic pouch. They’ll be encrypted and I’ll work out a way for you to get the code. But it won’t be everything, and you’ll need to weigh in quickly-if Achar’s suicide bombing wasn’t ordered by his employers, they may have discovered what he’s done by now. Rung the alarm, I mean-and that could mean the other sleepers may be activated. We might have a month, a week-a day.”

  Cooper smiled without putting any heart in it and got to the business of setting the hook.

  “I’ll take a look at whatever you send me,” he said, “and whatever you call to brief me on later. But I’ll only do it if the people you work for are willing to make it worth my while.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve got a deal structure in mind.”

  “Wait a minute, you did hear the part about the others volunteering to work on the team-are you actually saying you’re looking to profit from a terrorist-”

  “Yes.”

  She stared at him, silent, Cooper seeing in her look a hostile kind of pity, Laramie clearly upset with him for displaying such a lowlife’s priority scheme. He found himself to be both thrilled and disappointed by the reaction. It was the way she’d made him feel from the beginning-like he was constantly getting in trouble for his rambunctious behavior.