Painkiller Page 21

  “Well, yes,” he replied.

  “We should talk,” the man said.

  The stranger had a baritone voice and cold, vacant eyes. Gates pulled himself together, thinking the guy could be a reporter-that he should be careful what he said, or admitted.

  “What about?” he said. “What do you want to talk about?”

  The stranger jerked his head, said, “Over here,” and walked off past the hood of the Buick and across the street to Dupont Circle, a brief expanse of green packed with concrete benches and a fountain. He waited for Gates to make up his mind. This took about ninety seconds, the stranger just standing at the edge of the park, appearing more interested in the circle’s pivotal fountain than in Gates’s decision-making process.

  Gates dodged a car or two and brought himself even with the stranger as the man strolled along the trail encircling the fountain. After about a quarter-loop on the path, Gates felt compelled to speak.

  “Why might I want to talk?”

  The stranger looked at him. “I didn’t say you’d want to,” he said, “only that we should.”

  They strolled on, the stranger quiet for another quarter-loop. “I’m officially dead,” he said eventually, as casually as though he were discussing the flora. “But it should be obvious to you that I am alive.”

  Gates wasn’t firing on all cylinders. He said, “Right.”

  “‘Eclipse,’” the stranger said.

  Jesus! Gates nearly jumped out of his skin.

  How could he-Christ, how could any man have made it, and why hadn’t he heard from him before now?

  Eclipse.

  It was the term he had used as the internal memo coding for the flubbed Central American assassination effort: Operation Eclipse.

  Gates realized he had clammed up and, in order to say something, said, “You’re being somewhat vague,” and was already thinking about how much it was going to cost him to keep this son of a bitch quiet when the stranger spoke again.

  “Don’t bullshit me.” They were halfway around their second loop of the park. “But don’t panic, either.”

  Gates looked ahead, behind, to the side, seeing no one but the usual derelicts loitering in defiance of the city ordinance, draped across the benches like they owned the place. There were no members of Cleo’s to come to the rescue, so Gates continued walking.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” he said.

  “Because,” the stranger said, “I’ve got a solution.”

  “Oh?”

  “What we’ll do,” the stranger said, “is find a nice posting somewhere. I’m seeing a small place-lots of sun, some sand, water, not much going on, maybe some fishing to pass the day. There’s a spot I’m thinking of that might just work. They call them the British Virgin Islands-the BVIs. Why not? Then let’s tenure me. You can finance it out of, oh, I don’t know, pick a fund. Call me a GS-14 and pay me that plus hazard pay. Any GS-14 in the British Virgins is likely to be chief of station, so let’s go ahead and assign me that title too. This sound all right so far?”

  “It sounds difficult,” Gates said.

  “But not impossible. I’m in the BVIs, hell, there probably isn’t much else to do-I’ll even work for you. Keep a keen eye out for any intel, routine or otherwise, coming out of the strategically significant Antilles region. Even better are the things I won’t say to-”

  “I get it.”

  The stranger stopped and stared at Gates with those vacant eyes.

  “If you get it,” the stranger said, “then I’ll see you in your office tomorrow morning at nine, at which time you’ll provide me all necessary documentation on the numbered account which will already contain the trust. The trust should be of sufficient size to afford my salary for a minimum of forty-five years, including cost-of-living increases, periodic promotions, and hazard pay. I will control the trust, not you. I’ll be using the name Cooper, first initial W., because I like the sound of it, and will expect a pass waiting for me at the gate, along with my Agency ID and a manufactured employee-history file under that name. Do we need to go into the ‘attorney-at-law who’s been instructed to release such-and-such to the Justice Department and news media under the following circumstances’ crap in order to keep you from sending your goons after me?”

  Gates said, “No.”

  The stranger didn’t nod, acknowledge that he was leaving, or otherwise announce the end of the conversation, but, instead, simply walked away.

  Before he reached the fountain in the center of the park, the stranger turned. Gates caught a flash of his hollow eyes.

  “There’s something else,” the stranger said. “If I ever need you, I’ll call under a code name. Could be an emergency, something I need taken care of, or maybe just a favor for a friend I’m looking to impress. When I call, you’ll do as I say, no questions asked, and if I’m using the code when I make the call, then you’ll know I’m not calling just to chat.”

  Gates said, “Fine. What’s the name?”

  “Lunar Eclipse,” the stranger said. “I like the sound of that too. You?”

  Back in his seventh-floor office, Starbucks still in hand, Gates listened to the caller.

  “Snorkeling’s great this time of year,” Cooper said. “You ought to come down and visit.”

  “I don’t particularly like the Caribbean.” He pronounced Caribbean with the emphasis on the be.

  “That’s odd,” Cooper said. “Then again you’re an odd one, aren’t you, Pete?”

  “What do you want?”

  “A favor.”

  Gates felt a prickly sensation, his skin starting to sweat underneath the fabric of his suit. He took a sip of the coffee. He wanted to say, You’ve got some nerve, or something like that, but there was nothing like that he could say. Nothing that would get him anywhere.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  Cooper talked for two minutes, providing a detailed set of instructions, then hung up.

  Standing behind his desk, Gates set the phone back on its cradle. After another minute or so, he pulled the lid off the coffee, took one last sip, then dumped the remainder on his telephone. He held the overturned cardboard cup above the receiver until the last dark drop slid from the rim and splashed against the phone.

  Then he picked up the telephone console and threw it against the wall.

  Following a two-minute stare-down with the brown dent he’d made in the white wall, Gates relented, walked around his desk to the guest telephone on the other side of his office, and buzzed Miss Anders.

  When she answered, he told her there was a call he would need her to place for him.

  30

  When Cooper got back to Conch Bay, the satellite shots he’d ordered via the Peter M. Gates delivery service were waiting for him. Ronnie had deposited the fat enclosure from the diplomatic pouch on his front porch.

  Cooper had ordered Gates to send him images captured by various military intelligence satellites during a seventy-two-hour period. The period commenced with the approximate time of departure of the fifty-foot Chris-Craft from the pier outside of Kingston; Cooper knew he could order printouts of another day, week, or more if he needed to.

  Looking over the spread of glossy black-and-white prints on the table in his kitchenette, he saw little more than a strangely uneventful voyage by the mystery boat. Each massive print was folded into an eight-by-ten rectangular stack, an oversize version of a folded glove-compartment map, which, when unfurled, blossomed into some thirty-six square feet of high-definition, mostly featureless ocean. Cooper thinking that if you knew how to examine the photos properly-as Laramie surely did-you could find the boat in there with your naked eye. Cooper had to dig out a magnifying glass to see what he was looking for and verify the relevant speck was in fact the boat he was tracking.

  He’d ordered shots of virtually the entire Caribbean Sea and adjacent Atlantic but was able to narrow his choices, throwing out one map stack after another as he kept his eye on the boat’s progression. There was little for him t
o see outside of the unerring course of the boat: a handful of other ships passed within twenty or thirty miles, none close enough to make contact; the boat did not appear to dock anywhere; the vessel simply steamed east-southeast for some eight hundred miles, hove to in calm seas twenty miles east of the island of Martinique, then retraced its course back toward its apparent home port in Jamaica. The odyssey lasted forty-plus hours on the outbound route, and, following a pause lasting about two hours, the boat headed back along the same course. Cooper ignored the remainder of the prints once it appeared likely the boat was destined to return to Jamaica.

  It didn’t make any sense. One thing for sure-that boat had some fuel tanks to kill for. Maybe the captain of the boat preferred to eat human steak with his morning eggs; maybe the vessel’s crew had some dirty work to handle and needed some form of slave labor on board. If so, he decided that the only way to learn anything, if there was anything to be learned at all, was to take his own boat along the course he’d just tracked. Follow the coordinates he’d scribbled on the edges of the photographs, sail out to where the mystery boat had turned around, fire off a memory card’s worth of digital photos with his Nikon, and see if there was anything he could find offering some explanation.

  He could also ambush the Chris-Craft, check it over, and interrogate the two guys he’d seen on it-but he had a pretty good idea the wino would be nowhere near that boat by now, and as for the guys piloting it, he knew the type. They were hired hands, guys who’ve been told nothing by nobody.

  He set out at dawn on his second day back from Jamaica.

  It took him three hours, going south, to intersect the course the boat had taken to Martinique. From there it took him another four hours-Cooper’s Apache over three times faster than the mystery boat, even when he was taking it easy. He saw little of interest along the way-nice weather, a few birds, some flotsam. He planed over the rolling swells and crashed down into the ocean on the other side of them. Every two or three hours he would ease up and consult the charts to confirm his course, have a sandwich, or nod off for fifteen minutes.

  When he got to where the Chris-Craft had turned around, there was nothing but open sea. Cooper flipped off the MerCruisers and let his Apache drift while he took a look at his charts. He checked his GPS-11, marking his position precisely, examined the relevant blown-up satellite photograph, and cross-referenced the GPS numbers with the notes he’d taken. When he was through with all this there was no question about it: he was exactly where the spy satellite had registered the Chris-Craft at its journey’s farthest point from Jamaica.

  Cooper’s depth finder told him the water here was 210 fathoms deep. He cruised around for the better part of two hours, continuing to read the depth finder; the numbers fluctuated between 190 and 220 fathoms, about 1,100 to 1,300 feet deep. There was no shoal or sandbar, no way anyone was out here diving on a reef, Cooper beginning to think he was wasting his time, that he should have shot dead the captain of that goddamn boat and pulled the wino back up the ladder when he’d had the chance.

  Since he’d already come all the way out here, he decided to take another look at the navigation charts he kept aboard and see whether it made any sense to nose around. The nearest land was just under four miles to the east, where a small island chain, geopolitically part of Martinique, occupied a ten-mile crescent of sea. The main island lay at the northwest end of the chain, closest to where he now drifted on the open water.

  Cooper rode over to the archipelago. It was conceivable, he thought, that the mystery boat had zipped over to one of the islands, then quickly returned between successive satellite photographs, but the positions of the boat in the two shots, taken one hour apart, were virtually identical, and the boat hadn’t shown it could move fast enough to make it there and back in much less than an hour, no matter which neighboring island it went to visit.

  He found the chain’s main island to be a steep chunk of land rimmed by cliffs and similarly steep terrain, with dense vegetation spilling from the lip of the cliffs. When he reached it, he was facing the eastern side of the island; there was a fine mist, even in the hot afternoon sun, covering somewhere around two-thirds of the land mass. To Cooper the place looked to contain five or six square miles of forest, maybe more. There was a small dock at the base of one of the cliffs that faced him, but no visible structures above. He made a wide swing around the island, keeping an eye on the depth finder-you weren’t wary of reefs in these parts, your boat would wind up as another underwater home for prowling barracuda and maniacal free-divers seeking to hold their breath like the kids of the South Pacific. As he reached the leeward coast, the depth finder started to bleep-five fathoms, three, two, one. The sand was coming up on him through the clear blue water, and Cooper could see rocks poking at the surface a few meters away.

  On this, the western side of the island, there lay, some six hundred yards from his boat, a protected lagoon. Cabanas, a white sand beach, an artificial preponderance of coconut palms amid the indigenous Caribbean forest, a few tourists in the sun. He saw a pair of float planes moored in the lagoon, but no boats, Cooper thinking the planes provided the only access to the shallow lagoon-that no fifty-foot Chris-Craft would be pulling in there. But then again, he thought, there were other ways of getting a mummified wino off a boat and onto an island.

  For the hell of it, he snapped a few pictures. He used his Nikon’s big zoom lens but still couldn’t see much through the viewfinder, not from this far out. He didn’t really care about getting close-ups of sunburned fatties lying around like beached whales anyway. What he could see looked no different from any of the usual Caribbean corporate retreats: guests lounged around the bar and the beach, drinking, eating, a couple of them knee-deep in the water of the lagoon.

  Cooper poked around the rest of the chain, made up of three smaller islands, two of which were small and barren enough to be uninhabitable, though Cooper had seen beachfront bed-and-breakfasts built on worse. The bigger of the three displayed a handful of private homes, some rickety docks, but little else besides trees and rock.

  He popped off enough shots to fill out the remainder of the memory card and powered back to the mystery boat’s holding spot. Seeing nothing further that convinced him to stick around, he whacked the Apache’s twin throttles all ahead full with his elbow and shot a rooster tail of whitewater out behind the boat as he hauled some westward ass on a course for the Virgins.

  31

  Spike Gibson peered through a set of Xenon binoculars from his suite in the Greathouse. His massive biceps twitching lazily, he watched the Apache speed away until the racing boat was a speck appearing above one swell, then another, and then could no longer be seen.

  He wondered whether this was another round in General Deng’s charade. In the past five days there had been four other passing boats and one private plane, meaning that in the span of less than a week, Mango Cay had seen a three hundred percent increase in casual passersby as compared to the entire last two and a half years. Gibson knew this had nothing to do with coincidence: while the increased traffic flow, arriving at the worst possible time for the project, might have been the result of a leak from one of the general’s guests, or even a freak occurrence of chance, the more likely scenario was that Deng had planned it. Either the general was conducting a test or, Gibson thought, worse.

  This latest drive-by felt different, though. It wasn’t Deng’s style. This one felt to Gibson like a visit from some dumb, oblivious asshole in a noisy speedboat snapping random shots of a beautiful tropical isle, or better yet, the opposite: a visit from somebody who knew exactly what he was doing and just happened to be acting like a dumb, oblivious asshole.

  Gibson deposited the binoculars on the bar between the lounge and the kitchen in his suite and fired up a Black & Decker blender. The blender was racked full of sliced fruit, which the maid, whose name was Lana, knew to leave for him three times a day. He shoveled six ounces of creatine powder into the blender along with ice, nonfat milk, and the f
ruit, downed the protein shake in three tremendous gulps, stretched his massive arms above his head, and flipped off the kitchen’s ceiling fan on his way out of the room.

  It was time for a workout.

  In a meticulously designed circuit, iPod blasting N.W.A. in his ears, Gibson pumped iron for ninety straight minutes. He worked with massive stacks of weight in endless sets. While he pumped, he cleansed his mind of impurities and focused solely on the dumb asshole in the Apache racing boat.

  While he was fully capable of detecting and tracking such passing boats anywhere within miles of Mango Cay, he was generally forced to allow these visitors to take their look and move on. It was only when he suspected something sensitive had been revealed-say, for instance, the dozen fucking commie pinkos funding the whole project being photographed frolicking together in the water of the lagoon-that Gibson was forced to take additional measures. He always made sure the additional measures took place back on the visitors’ home turf-as far away from the island as possible.

  The pilot of the Apache, whoever he was, had taken photographs of people who could never be photographed together, and that meant that Gibson would now have to deal with the man.

  He hit the climax of his workout with a series of lat pull-downs, veins nearly popping from his arms as he mimicked pull-ups in a seated position with over two times his body weight. He polished off the last rep with ease, stretched on the aerobics mat he kept in the corner of the room against a mirror, then made his way through a set of double doors at the back of the weight room. It was necessary for him to punch in an entry code to pass through the doorway.

  It was here-and in the daisy-chained series of dual-G5 processor-based desktops functioning as the system’s central processing unit-where the software was housed for Gibson’s $168 million surveillance system, the cost of which he knew to the nickel, since he’d been the one to commission its installation.