Painkiller Read online

  With a few keystrokes he had on the monitor in front of him the full array of data that the system had already gathered on the topic of the Apache racing boat. Radar and sonar readings, 360-degree infrared photography, 1,200-millimeter zoom lens snapshots, background checks on any registered owners-all automatically conducted by the software while Gibson had worked out. Also there were the Apache’s registration data; numerous close-up photographs of the asshole piloting the vessel, in which photographs Spike Gibson was able to see that the man had been reviewing maps, not simply taking photographs; and the precise location of the boat every five minutes following its departure, made possible by the private satellite aboard which Gibson rented camera space. He saw that the Apache was steaming west-northwest across the Caribbean Sea, on a course, the system speculated, for either the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, or Florida. When the trace on the vessel’s owner popped up on his screen, Gibson saw that the boat was registered to Albert Einstein, listed under an address in Paris, France.

  Funny guy, Gibson thought. Funny fucking guy.

  The stench of trouble wafting from the man behind the wheel of the racing boat was, he thought, nearly overwhelming-but if nothing else, it had become obvious the dumb asshole had nothing to do with General Deng and his fucking games.

  Gibson returned to the balcony and stared out at the Caribbean, across which his new acquaintance Albert Einstein had arrived, and then left.

  Albert, Gibson thought, you’ll soon see that I can be a pretty funny fucking guy too.

  The revolutionary leaders attending Deng’s Mango Cay missile seminar were permitted to carry firearms. The weapons allowance would make the guests more likely to accept Deng’s invitation, and attend, as the invitation stipulated, solo. No security detail was permitted-not for the final segment of the leaders’ voyage, nor for their time on-island-so the firearm policy served as a security blanket.

  This sense of security proved useful when, near the conclusion of a celebratory meal arranged for the men on the final night of their stay, Hiram the bartender flipped the knob on a rather large canister lodged beneath the poolside bar. His introductory remarks concluded, Admiral Li-who, following Deng’s departure the prior day, had assumed the duties of host-excused himself from the dinner. Lana the maid quickly served the hors d’oeuvres, depositing seven platters of food on the long table before moving into the kitchen and out its rear door. This left Hiram alone behind the bar, at least until the point at which he turned the knob on the canister and strode calmly off in the direction of the Greathouse.

  While it appeared to supply the bar’s soft-drink gun, the canister actually housed a batch of the nerve agent VX. The canister was charged with sufficient supply-assuming the gas was administered judiciously-to exterminate most of the inhabitants of any major metropolis.

  The premixed VX took approximately forty-nine seconds to flow from the canister, down its tubes, and out through the heater stands beside the dining table, the stands tripling as the source for illumination, nighttime heat, and the thin, odorless, amber mist of the world’s deadliest airborne nerve toxin. It took fewer than thirty seconds for the concentrated dose to paralyze every leader seated at the table.

  Four of the men managed to draw their personal firearms upon being struck by the initial physical symptoms of the fog-seized lungs, immediate vomiting, defecation, and seizures-but the guns fell from fingers or froze in clutched hands as full paralysis followed. The remaining complement of guests perished within one minute of the initial emission. Only two men remained conscious for longer than fifteen of these sixty seconds.

  Just over an hour later, outfitted in a Gulf War-style chemical warfare suit, Hiram returned to the poolside party. Wheeling in on one of the resort’s golf carts, he removed an industrial-strength, oscillating fan from the vehicle and stood it facing the lagoon behind the dinner table. He stepped behind the bar, shut off the VX canister, and proceeded to crank the fan to its highest setting. He returned after another two hours armed with a hose from the pool house; still wearing the suit, he left the fan running as he hosed down the entire poolside deck, including every body, chair, utensil, and scrap of food that occupied it.

  Another two hours after Hiram’s initial cleansing, Gibson, Li, and Lana arrived aboard the pair of limousine-length carts. An emaciated black man rode in the rear of Lana’s cart, and when Lana braked to a stop, he rose as though she’d ordered him to do so, which she had not. He exited the cart and stood before her on the poolside tile wearing no protective gear. At Lana’s command, the former wino from the pawnshop alcove on East Queen Street then loaded the bodies collapsed around the dinner table aboard the pair of limo carts.

  When the wino was finished, Gibson pulled a second hose from a cabana and began working its spray across the deck for a follow-up wash-down. Hiram and Lana climbed behind the steering wheels of the two carts; the wino slinked aboard, draping himself across the feet of the last body he’d transferred.

  “Any chunks wind up as floaters,” Gibson said, “pull them out and try again.”

  Hiram and Lana steered the limo carts up the hill. Gibson knew their destination to be the underwater lagoon in a secondary cavern he referred to as the cargo cave, which Deng preferred to call the Lab. It was in the waters beneath the cargo cave where a local gang of sharks had learned to feast upon Gibson’s disposable labor pool.

  When the carts vanished behind the Greathouse, Gibson noticed Admiral Li standing on the main trail some distance back from the pool, looking like a misplaced astronaut in his beige-and-green chemical suit.

  Gibson switched hands, flipping the hose to his left, and saluted the admiral with his right. Since Gibson too was wearing one of the haz-mat suits, he figured Li might not have seen the grin Gibson was hiding behind the mask, but Li didn’t respond to his salute, either, so the security director left it at that and continued his work with the hose. Per its manufacturer, the VX would take about two more hours to break down once he had soaked whatever remained of it.

  32

  Dottie, the blonde waitress, was taking dinner orders from the yachting contingent at the Conch Bay Bar & Grill with a mildly haggard look of exhaustion and a satisfied kind of glow. Cooper had spent some time with her-they’d shared a drink at the bar two or three times, Cooper feeling he had a pretty good read on her, but he figured he didn’t need to have spent any time with her at all to understand the look on Dottie’s face tonight. He peered around the restaurant over the lip of his Cuba libre, trying to get a sense of who might have landed her. He saw nobody giving her rather ample bosom the fond eye of remembrance, or of regret, Cooper first thinking he’d got it wrong, and then thinking finally of one word:

  Ronnie.

  Apart from their difference in age and station in life-which hadn’t ever stopped him before-Cooper thought about why he hadn’t pursued Dottie himself. The girl’s hulking schnoz didn’t bother him; there were equally hulking breasts that came along for the ride. She was nice enough, and reasonably intelligent. No, Cooper decided, he’d ignored the occasional open door simply because he still preferred to dine from a menu of the betrothed. Working from a pool of brides got him a little more space in which to operate-whoever she was, whenever he did whatever he did with her, a married woman was more likely to leave him alone afterward. Stay out of his personal real estate-read the KEEP OUT sign he had chipped into his shoulder.

  Keep out, he thought, sipping the last of his drink: as good a two-word phrase as has ever been coined.

  Dottie slid him his appetizer order of conch fritters and a tall, fresh glass of rum and Coke. He stared across Sir Francis Drake Channel, where, a mile away, the steep, sparsely populated hills of Tortola revealed themselves only by the occasional dot of artificial light beneath a sky of stars. When he was through staring out there thinking of nothing, he opened his PowerBook. Cooper was sort of celebrating tonight: he’d decided this would be it, that he’d review the photographs he’d taken, and-presuming the yield would
be the usual dead end-call this case closed. There simply remained no other worthy leads; besides, what was so bad about having some new neighbors in the world of his dreams? He and the ghost of Marcel S. could hang out on the trip down the Río Sulaco, for the torture sessions, for his blood-spattered escape from the chamber of horrors. Hell-he could use the company.

  He clicked on the Photoshop icon and opened the folder of pictures he’d downloaded from the Nikon.

  He knew he could always nose around for the title deed on the island he’d photographed-referred to as “Mango Cay” on his navigation charts-or maybe order some follow-up SATINT and pin down the mystery boat’s home dock, but this was getting ridiculous. That fucking witch doctor had killed the boy, and Cooper had dealt with him; Albino Jim had bought the resurrected kid for a few bucks and probably sold him at a healthy profit to somebody else, but Cooper had dealt with good ol’ Jim Beam too. And the bastards pumping Marcel’s back full of armor-piercing shells? Sons of bitches would just have to remain anonymous, and so the fuck what. His learning their identities wouldn’t do squat for Marcel anyway.

  He activated the software’s slideshow feature, which he played intentionally in reverse order. As suspected, the scenics he’d snapped of the smaller islands east of the resort isle were useless. One or two of the houses he saw looked all right, but he still wouldn’t think anybody but a terrorist on the lam, or maybe a California crook fleeing the ramifications of his third strike, would want to live there. No beach, no running water, the structures rickety, perched high up on steep, rocky slopes, Cooper guessing they’d be floating toothpicks by the end of hurricane season.

  Moving over to the resort island, the rest of the shots featured an all-male cast of uncomfortable-looking beach bums. He let the slides play uninterrupted, fading in and out on their three-second-per-picture cycle, Cooper eyeing the multicultural beach bums as they came and went.

  Then the slideshow ended and the folder of thumbnails retook the screen.

  “Christ,” he said.

  He double clicked on five of the pictures in the same order in which they’d appeared in the slide show, carefully studying each. When he opened the fifth, he outlined a section of the photo, blew it up, and leaned in for the closest possible view.

  There was no mistaking the two male guests reclining on the lounge chairs in the shot. One was East Asian, terribly out of shape, sporting a potbelly and an odd pair of sunglasses; the other, a dark, bearded man, possessed an unnaturally large head, broad shoulders, and thick knees. The broad-shouldered man had a distinctive enough appearance, in fact, for Cooper to grasp why the international news media had christened him the Arabian Bulldog.

  There was a third man in the shot, standing behind the other two, his image grainy and mostly out of focus, given the short depth of field of the long lens. Cooper couldn’t summon the man’s name immediately, but he recognized him, a prominent senior lieutenant, he thought, in the Chinese military. Lean and fit, his skin dark for his ethnicity, the man had the unmistakable look of a career soldier despite the casual shorts and tropical-print shirt he was modeling in the photo.

  An old habit that died hard among spies was the constant review of news related to foreign affairs. As much as he’d made a game effort at checking out, once he’d settled on a permanent residence in the form of Conch Bay, Cooper had fallen back into the routine of keeping up. He routinely peeked through most major periodicals, and was, at the time he was enjoying the slide show, more or less current on international affairs. So while there seemed no apparent relation between the pictures and the plight of the late Marcel S., Cooper was nonetheless easily able to discern a rather stark connection between the three men in the photograph and the three countries Julie Laramie was investigating:

  Two of the men on the lounge chairs ran them, and the third had a pretty good chunk of the military of Laramie’s primary SATINT assignment reporting up through him.

  Laramie jumped when the phone rang. She’d already put on her nightshirt and was sipping the evening glass of Chardonnay, a rare night where she’d actually settled in prior to the stroke of midnight. But she was getting this way lately-jumpy.

  The annoying words RESTRICTED NUMBER blinked rhythmically on the caller ID screen. Laramie decided to roll the dice.

  “Yes?”

  “I need your e-mail address.”

  Laramie felt the stiffness in her shoulders ease but she didn’t respond until she’d returned to her seat on the couch.

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see when I send these pictures. Could be nothing, random coincidence, but coincidence is overrated, if you ask me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “After China, you found the same sort of exercises in North Korea. Your other lead was in Yemen, where the rebels take their orders from quite an odd-looking man, correct?”

  Laramie hesitated. Given how little credence she now gave her theories, any discussion of classified topics from her home phone no longer seemed worthwhile.

  “I still have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “Ah,” he said. “Disciplined.”

  Cooper broke the connection, punched Laramie’s cell number into his sat phone, hit Send, and waited for Laramie to find and answer the mobile phone.

  “Is this really going to make any difference?” she said.

  “You’re being smart-if they even care about you at all, it’s likely they’re only into your hard line. Now give me your e-mail address.”

  Obviously she couldn’t receive the photographs at her office; nonetheless, she’d made an effort to avoid using the fabricated Yahoo! account. The whistle-blower swallowing the whistle, returning to obscurity while she still had the chance.

  “Fine,” she said, and gave him the EastWest7 address. “But I’m not sure how soon I’ll be able to access it. Also, this probably isn’t the best-”

  “I took some pictures,” Cooper said, “of some people you’re familiar with. Together.”

  Laramie wasn’t precisely sure what he meant, but if he was talking about the countries she’d been surveying, then she really didn’t know what he was talking about. What could he be talking about? Pictures? It didn’t seem possible.

  “Who,” she said, “and where?”

  “Have a look and call me back.”

  Laramie knew he was about to hang up, W. Cooper playing the mystery man game, so she jumped in before he could do it.

  “Um,” she said.

  Silence-make that static. But she knew she hadn’t lost him.

  “What do you do,” she said, stopped, put the phone in her lap, thought for a moment, lifted the phone again, and said, “how do you know when you’re being followed? Technically, I mean. How would you go about finding out, if you thought you were?”

  More static. Laramie felt the mild warmth of frustration rise into her cheeks. She didn’t like the feeling it gave her, asking her odd new phone pal for serious advice. But who else could she ask? Eddie Rothgeb came loaded with a formidable knowledge base, but one thing he certainly didn’t bring to the table was operations experience.

  “The first rule,” Cooper said, “is when you bust them, don’t let them know you’ve done it.”

  “Fine, but maybe you could offer a couple, you know, technical-”

  “Second rule: if you think somebody’s on you, then somebody is. Easiest thing to do, if you want to make them, is chop up your routine. Not the whole thing, just parts of it.”

  Laramie thought about that for a moment. “All right,” she said.

  “Where did you have dinner tonight?”

  Laramie didn’t answer right away, which bothered her-and which also explained why she didn’t like asking W. Cooper questions like this. It put her at a disadvantage, Laramie knowing he’d somehow seize the opportunity to ask more personal questions than she cared to answer.

  “Koo Koo Roo,” she said.

  “Chicken?”

  “Chicken.�
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  “Skinless?”

  “I’m not finding the humor here, so if you-”

  “Regular stop, maybe you get it to go, coming home, a couple nights a week? When you aren’t knee-deep in SATINT till two A.M.”

  Laramie eyed the plastic bag with the restaurant’s logo on the kitchen counter near the phone.

  Cooper said, “Keep the restaurant in the routine, but change it up. Dine in-house instead. Read a book for an hour while you eat. Visit the restroom five or six times-and keep an eye peeled while you do it. Do the same thing for every segment of your routine, and you may see the same face a couple times. You run, right?”

  Laramie resisted the urge to sigh. “Yes, I run.”

  “Head out the same way you always do, then change the loops. Log an extra mile or two. You get it by now.”

  “I do.”

  “Call me when you’ve looked at the pictures,” he said, and clicked off.

  Laramie tossed the phone on the other side of the couch, lifted her wineglass, sipped, and noticed the blinds covering her living room window weren’t entirely shut. She closed them, came back to the couch, and tucked her bare legs beneath her. She pulled a blanket from the armrest, covered her legs with it, found the remote control, and punched up Headline News. She’d make her way through the gamut of 24-hour cable news networks, and maybe a few minutes of E! or Style before she crashed, but she usually chose to start things off with the twenty-two minutes as peddled by the Headline News marketing campaign.

  W. Cooper, Laramie thought, is a fucking smart-ass-but I suppose I picked the right guy to ask.

  33

  When Cooper’s eyes opened in his bungalow, he did not feel as though one of his dreams had awakened him. Ordinarily he felt that way-he would burst awake sucking wind, soaked in sweat, gasping for oxygen after drowning in the river, or grasping at the locked dungeon door. Tonight, though, there was no such desperation. One moment he had been lost in the void of drunken slumber; in the next, he was awake, silent, and sober.