Public Enemy Read online

  “Here’s what I suggest,” Cooper said. “I suggest you take this back to the people you work for. Inform them that one of the members of your team would, upon further consideration, have ultimately decided to sign on for the sake of national security pro bono-except for the threat they suggested you make in hopes of coaxing me to join up. Since you, and they, went ahead and made that threat, I’m therefore going to charge whatever organization is involved for my services. Homeland Security? NSA? Somebody new? I don’t give a shit who it is. You want my expertise-what little I have-it’ll cost you. It’ll cost you exactly what it cost our late, mutual former boss Peter M. Gates eighteen years ago, plus interest. Though because we know each other so well, I’ll play nice and keep the interest to a nominal, even token rate of, say, four-point-five percent per annum.”

  “Christ,” Laramie said, her look of pity now deteriorating to one of disgust. “What kind of money are we talking here?”

  “Not much. What Pete paid was twenty years of salary beginning at the GS-14 level, including annual merit raises, periodic promotions, and the usual annual hazard bonus. Plus the interest, of course.”

  “You’re kidding. I can’t-”

  “Did they know you knew me before they hired you?”

  “What?” Laramie blinked, then glared. “Why are you assuming somebody else hired me?”

  “You mean, somebody besides CIA?”

  “Yes.”

  “They don’t work this way-they don’t give anybody the kind of authority it sounds as though you’ve been granted. Not anymore. Not unless you extort them into it, anyway.”

  He grinned.

  Laramie sighed. “What does it come to?”

  “Rounding off, we can just call it twenty million.”

  “Come on.”

  “I thought I was necessary?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have put it that way.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have. I’ll need it as a single lump-sum disbursement. I’ll provide you the relevant numbered account into which they’ll need to do the disbursing. And the account will vanish a few seconds after the money is posted to it, so don’t get any ideas.”

  He thought for a moment, then reached over and retrieved the pen from Laramie’s side of the table and wrote four phone numbers, all with the same area code and prefix, on a napkin stained with a splash of Tabasco sauce.

  “You can find me at one of these numbers for the next eight days. Forty-eight hours per number; they expire and switch on a more or less annual cycle.”

  He handed her the napkin, stood, then promptly spun and walked off.

  26

  Cooper spent most of the ride home from Naples thinking through recent history as crafted by, or against, Po Keeler, Cap’n Roy, El Oso Blanco’s stateside fence caught sleeping with the frozen crabs-and the anonymous killers who’d snuffed them out. Cooper thinking of them as snuffer-outers-the snuffer-outers who’d hired the killer Lieutenant Riley had shot on the hill beside Cap’n Roy’s infinity pool.

  He decided he would call Lieutenant Riley to see whether they’d found a ballistics match between the bullets that killed Keeler and the gun the assassin had used on Roy. He’d guess it’d turn out that way-as the body count added up, the game of connect-the-dots was getting easier. This much he knew: everybody who’d been offed to date had been immersed in the shipment, seizure, or resale of the gold artifacts stash. The list of duly immersed parties still among the living wasn’t long-himself, El Oso Blanco, Lieutenant Riley and his staff, and Susannah Grant, whose involvement he estimated couldn’t be traced. Either way, though, unless he found some way of identifying and taking down the snuffer-outers, chances were he and his surviving associates would soon show up in the dead pool.

  He continued to find it odd there hadn’t been an attempt on his life already, and if he could presume El Oso Blanco was continuing to chow down on a daily rotation of bucket-served take-out luncheons-which he should probably no longer assume-it was just as odd that Borrego too had not had the pleasure of an assassination attempt. He wondered whether it had been assumed by the killers that Lieutenant Riley would be scared into silence by his chief minister’s murder, or whether Riley was being crafty about keeping an eye out-or possibly that the snuffer-outers just hadn’t yet dispatched a second contract killer to take aim at the lieutenant. Still, if the snuff-out mandate remained in effect, Cooper figured Riley for third in line.

  He and the Polar Bear would be vying for top honors.

  It didn’t compute, though, that the snuffer-outers, in wanting the trail of the gold artifacts stamped out, wouldn’t have thought to kill the Polar Bear first. Maybe they hadn’t known of the big man’s involvement to start with, though Cooper found this unlikely-Borrego had been the one to kick-start the whole goddamn thing. Maybe Borrego was just a tough guy to kill-but that theory didn’t hold water, particularly given the Swiss cheese security configuration at his Venezuela headquarters.

  Could be, he mused, that the Polar Bear is the snuffer-outer-but however snugly the pieces might have fit for this answer, Cooper decided it was hogwash. There was nothing in it for Borrego, same as there’d been nothing in it for Cap’n Roy.

  Despite multiple hours of theorizing, he kept coming back to the same conclusion. The snuffer-outers hadn’t killed him yet because of who he worked for. Now that Cap’n Roy had been taken down, it was clear it wasn’t just a government thing-the snuffer-outers obviously didn’t mind taking down the chief minister of a small, though NATO-allied, island nation. They did, however-at least by his working theory-hesitate before snuffing out an employee of a federal agency of the good ole U.S. of A.

  Meaning the snuffer-outers were probably U.S. of A. types themselves-specifically, U.S. of A. government types. Other hues fit the color scheme of this picture too: the contract killer, for instance, was the kind of man certain federal agencies of the Evil Empire would hire. Cooper thinking that if you threw in a botched assassination coup, the impossible survival of imprisonment and torture, a reverse-extortion scheme, and maybe a couple decades of sun and alcohol, then that contract killer would probably look reasonably similar to someone else.

  Plowing through the crest of a fifteen-foot swell fifty miles east of Cuba, he found himself-following a few hours of brooding-in exactly the same place he’d started.

  Cap’n Roy was dead. Somebody, probably somebody on Uncle Sam’s payroll, didn’t want anybody finding out about the antiquities stash El Oso Blanco had bought, sold, and shipped. Among a set of stupid, greedy people, Cap’n Roy had simply been unlucky enough to emerge as either the stupidest, greediest, or both-and got himself killed for it.

  It struck Cooper that in case he were to find himself in a vengeful mood-And when do I not?-he’d need to find out who the snuffer-outers were. And unless he felt like yanking the stateside fence’s hard drive from the marshfront condominium and spending a few weeks tracking down every single name on the man’s electronic Rolodex, which he already knew wouldn’t tell him a goddamn thing about the snuffer-outers anyway-

  Hell, I’m going to need to go in the other direction.

  The only problem with looking in the other direction was that everyone on that side of the equation was dead-except one: the six-foot-nine behemoth of a pale-skinned intermodal transportation kingpin called the Polar Bear.

  Maybe if he gave El Oso Blanco a ring-test the man’s claim that he actually returns his calls-the big guy could shed a little more light on the source of the artifacts. Something more than the way he’d put it in his office, slobbering across that bucket of pasta: somewhere along the border between Guatemala and Belize. Not a place Cooper preferred to spend his leisure time; not a place Cooper preferred to spend any time.

  It didn’t really seem to Cooper there was any other way of going about it-even if what Borrego had said was true, and they’d need to travel to the source to find the kind of specifics Cooper was looking for. He didn’t have any fucking choice-not now, not after the ghost of t
he twelve-inch priestess statue had been joined in his skull by the wraith that was once Cap’n Roy Gillespie. Cooper hearing the greedy, stupid son of a bitch coming at him in two-part harmony with the equally annoying priestess-’Ey, Cooper, we up here waitin’, wrongly departed, and now you all we got. Oh, yeah, the truth shall set us free, mon, and then maybe we start to thinkin’ ’bout settin’ you free too!

  Looping past Anegeda into the Sir Francis Drake Channel, Cooper concluded there was a pretty good chance Cap’n Roy wouldn’t be resting in peace anytime soon. That the chances were, following one last phone call that wouldn’t yield a goddamn thing, “the spy-a-de-island,” as the late chief minister preferred to call him, would just have to plan on watching his back a little more closely than usual-at least until the curse befalling all who came in contact with the shipment of gold artifacts and their annoying twelve-inch priestess had blown over and gone the hell away.

  27

  Laramie’s diplomatic pouch beat Cooper home. As was generally the case when these things came, somebody-presumably Ronnie-had already brought it up and left it on his porch. Cooper presumed further that a courier had brought it to Conch Bay in the first place and been instructed to deliver the pouch only to him, but that Ronnie, or somebody on the staff, had convinced the courier to chill out at the bar, got him hammered, and sent him packing on whatever boat or pontoon plane he’d come in on.

  Initially, Cooper ignored the pouch’s presence on his darkened porch, ambling into his bungalow after seventeen hours on the high seas and plunging directly into his pillow for however long a snooze the goat-of-the-day would let him enjoy.

  He awoke to the sounds of people and music, shocked by the midday illumination creeping through the jalousie panes, his first thought that the snuffer-outers might have succeeded in taking out the goddamn goat.

  He checked his watch to find it was lunch, not breakfast, underway down at the Bar & Grill.

  The restaurant’s music selection always included the same rotation of Caribbean-themed songs, but he never failed to find them pleasing to the ear anyway. The lifestyle many planned for a whole year or more just to ingest for seven nights-the sounds, the rum, the sun, the sand, the lapping waves, the fish, the reefs, the SCUBA and snorkel gear-Cooper took in every day of the year, and never grew tired of it. Never. It got a little more crowded every year-there seemed one less layer to the sheen every time you took a close enough look-but in his view, the British Virgin Islands could have trademarked the elixir bubbling up from every lagoon in the chain. It was the essence of the Caribbean-at least the essence of the part you could enjoy if you had enough money, or had decided along the way that money didn’t matter all that much.

  Maybe he’d call Lieutenant Riley and recommend the RVIPF apply for a patent-with Cap’n Roy gone they’d be needing a new revenue source.

  Unaccustomed to his good mood but writing it off as the fruit of his long sleep, Cooper moseyed onto his porch, cooler today than usual, and eyed the diplomatic pouch. Can’t hurt to be prepared-just in case my preposterous $20 million request gets the thumbs-up from “the people she works for.”

  “Ronnie!”

  Cooper screamed this at considerable volume. It didn’t take long for the ponytailed errand boy to wander over through the garden and approach the base of his stairs.

  “Ham sandwich, conch fritters, bottle of Cabernet.”

  Appearing no more annoyed by the embarrassing form of summons as usual, Ronnie started off wordlessly, taking a couple steps down the garden path, then stopped, turned, and laid a quizzical, narrow-eyed look on the grizzled permanent resident of bungalow nine.

  “Cabernet?” he said.

  “Just get it.”

  Cooper took a seat, unzipped the bag, and withdrew the short stack of files from within. He set them on the floor, plucked the first manila folder from the stack, and started in on the recent and tumultuous history of Hendry County, Florida, and the opinions of the small army of people who’d examined that history since. Laramie had left a message on his sat phone with the decryption code.

  When Ronnie came with his food and the open bottle of wine, Cooper poured himself a glass, took the first sip, remembered as he always did how much he didn’t like the taste of wine as it first hit the tongue, then got himself through the predicament with a second sip and a few more in succession.

  He ate, read, and drank. When he’d finished the last of Laramie’s files, Cooper set it on the stack he’d already read and settled a creak deeper in the chair.

  “Well, Benny Achar,” he said aloud. “How do we find the old you?”

  He thought a little of his own disappearance-an unwilling, unwitting one-and his subsequent reappearance as a man of his own crafting. A man with a made-up name, one with a new home, new habits, new neighbors-everything different. With no contact from the people or world of his past. Not that he’d had much of anybody around from before anyway, not by the time the ties with that old life had been severed, against his will or no.

  Maybe that’s what Benny Achar had faced. Back home, wherever home had been-maybe he didn’t have anybody there. Maybe whoever he’d had in his life was gone. Dead, or killed. He must have had something, though-if only hatred, or anger, or misery-considering what he signed up to do. If Laramie was right about Achar’s intentions-and Cooper knew Laramie usually turned out to be right-then Achar, as his new self, had possibly discovered the opposite: satisfaction, happiness, or better. And because of these new companions-maybe found by way of his wife and son-Benny decided to abort the mission. To send the warning; to lay the bread crumbs.

  Cooper could relate to the satisfaction Achar may have found in his new life-there was a measure of that for him here in Conch Bay, at least during the hours following a good night’s rest. And he’d had another measure of satifaction too-at least until the woman serving up the dose of contentedness of a sort he’d rarely known decided to cut off his supply and head back to the civilized world.

  Ah, the civilized world, he thought, his musings made palpably clear by the effects of the Cabernet, home to such nifty things as “counterterror units.”

  He considered for a moment how somebody might go about unearthing his former identity. It wouldn’t be too much of a challenge-the information wasn’t exactly buried, covered up, or otherwise classified. He knew himself to be listed as buried-dead-killed, supposedly, in a plane crash that’d had nothing to do with the way he’d actually vanished. He supposed that somewhere, buried in some compartmentalized file cabinet, there would be documentation on the mission that actually got his fellow special-ops goons killed. The trip that had erased the old version of himself.

  Maybe there was something to that-the part about his being officially dead. Maybe the real version of Benjamin Achar was dead too. In the same way he’d assumed the identity of someone who’d died, maybe he’d abandoned a similarly, if only officially dead identity he’d once worn around.

  Or maybe there wasn’t anything to it at all, and it wouldn’t matter anyway.

  Cooper observed that he’d polished off the sandwich, fritters, and all but a quarter inch of the last glass of Cabernet. He also observed that with the whole bottle of vino inside him, he was feeling pretty good.

  Not quite all the way to satisfied, but still pretty good.

  He swallowed the last swish of wine, found the fax Susannah Grant had sent him, and punched in her number on his sat phone.

  She answered on the third ring, prompting Cooper to decide this was all the confirmation he needed. He clicked off-no need to heat up any of the bad blood from their aborted rapture session in Austin. She was doing fine, and even if her phone had its caller ID feature intact, she wouldn’t know anybody besides RESTRICTED NUMBER had just called. The snuffer-outers would have got her by now if they knew about her.

  Cooper punched in a second set of digits-the Caracas number for Borrego Industries. When he asked the receptionist to connect him to the Polar Bear, the woman shot back a terse r
eply, struggling as she had in person with her English.

  “Who is this?”

  Cooper felt a pit form in his stomach on hearing her tone.

  “Tell him it’s Cooper,” he said.

  “What does this regarding?”

  “Just tell him it’s Cooper.”

  She put the call on hold and Cooper waited. After about a minute, the call was answered by a man whose voice Cooper didn’t immediately recognize, except that he recognized it wasn’t Ernesto Borrego.

  “Why are you calling here,” the man said. He had a deep voice, almost as deep as Cooper’s, with English as heavily accented as the receptionist’s-along with a kind of masterfully projected audio scowl discernible to Cooper even across many thousands of miles of sky.

  “Well, I called to speak with Borrego,” Cooper said. “That would be why I asked for him.”

  “He is not available.”

  “I thought he was proficient at returning calls?”

  “Proficient?”

  “Expert. Good. Skilled-”

  “I’m aware of the meaning of the word. Proficiency is difficult to achieve, however, when you are dead.”

  Crap.

  “When?” Cooper said.

  “Please. We have already notified the policia you have called.”

  “Well give them my regards-”

  “You are the chief suspect in his killing. I suggest you turn yourself in to the authorities in Tortola, where you live.”

  Not quite, Cooper thought, but close.

  “Yeah,” Cooper said, “I’ll do that first thing. Who is this?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “I bet you’re the friendly neighborhood bodyguard who took my gun,” Cooper said.

  The velociraptor paused at the other end of the line.

  “Sí,” he said. “And I will take it again if you show yourself here. Only I will use it on you-not give it back.”

  “Good luck. I’m a suspect because I came by for my visit last week?”