Public Enemy Page 22

  “You’re a suspect because you shot him.”

  Cooper said, “I need the names of the tomb raiders Borrego bought the gold artifacts from. The Caracas shipment that was headed for Naples. Borrego told me you would give them to me.”

  “Bullshit. And I wouldn’t tell you even if he told me to. You know what? I will kill you myself,” the velociraptor said. There came a muted pfft sound, which Cooper assumed to be the sound of the man spitting. “I’ll kill you with my own hands. I know where you live.”

  Cooper wondered whether Borrego’s thug had spit on the floor, or a desk. He also wondered whether this guy had been reading too many comic books.

  “Been tried before,” he said flatly, and hung up.

  Between the long run on the beach in Naples and the longer boat ride home, Cooper was experiencing a kind of dull ache in what felt to him like every joint in his body. He wondered whether it was really the run and the ride. Maybe it was something else, like the wine. Maybe, he thought, I need to live on a longer beach, where I can take a long run every day, without needing to turn around for another lap every five hundred steps like I do here. Or maybe what I really need is to find another beach, long or short, where the paradise isn’t relative. At least not yet.

  Where I don’t wake up after a rare morning of sleeping in-only to learn I’m next up in the dead pool.

  Maybe there’s a beach like the one I’m thinking of in Tahiti, or Fiji, or Malaysia. Maybe there’s a spot where I can find a different bungalow, make up a new name, and finally accomplish the fucking escape from insanity I tried to pull off nineteen years ago. Maybe I’ll even be able to find, in that place, a total absence of the memory, phone calls, and predicaments of Cap’n Roy, Po Keeler, the Coast Guard, this fucking twelve-inch golden idol on my shelf, that goddamn Polar Bear, the Polar Bear’s stateside fence and his king crabs-even an absence of the other guy with a made-up name, good old Benny Achar, who’d blown himself up, killed a hundred-plus Floridians, and annoyed a government agency or two in the process.

  “Or maybe I wouldn’t find anything different at all,” he said, and shouted out for Ronnie to bring him another bottle of wine.

  28

  When he sold his third paperback, Wally Knowles bought the place in New Hampshire. A rambler with two bedrooms and one small bath, the size of the place topped out around six hundred square feet. Nineteen acres of forest had come with the house, though, and almost four hundred linear feet of the property nosedived straight into Sunapee Lake. Cost him $62,900, which price he paid some eight years prior to the time people started realizing the ski-resort town of Sunapee was as good a place to hang out in the summer as in winter-and began paying ten times what Knowles had paid for his whole property just to snatch up an empty half-acre building site.

  His wife left him two weeks before he bought the lake house. Having come to agree with her view of his unimpressiveness, Knowles, who for his third novel got a $75,000 advance-his first of any kind-decided he’d better figure out how to live as cheaply as possible. He’d have to, if for no other reason than the measure he’d just undertaken to address his escalating midlife crisis: upon signing his divorce papers, Knowles promptly resigned from his $38,400-a-year job as public defender in the Bronx and went ahead with his plan of writing for a living. He put a chunk of his advance down on the house, wrangled a thirty-year fixed rate mortgage to cover the rest, and on the day of his closing found himself observing the view from a lakefront home, in which it would cost him $208.71 per month, escrow included, to write for just about as long as he damn well pleased.

  Had she not been killed before a dose of positive karma struck her ex-husband, Mrs. Knowles might have come to regret saying, in the divorce, that “she didn’t want a red cent” and relinquishing the fifty percent interest she could have taken in her husband’s “pesky little books.” Book number five, it turned out, seized the second slot on the New York Times best-seller list its first week in print, and did not relinquish a place in the top five for nearly three years. Thirteen million copies sold. This led, among other things, to sales of just over six million copies of his first four titles.

  Knowles did not regret for one instant having retreated from life as he’d known it. As the only African-American for miles, a man with a penchant for black suits, black Ray-Bans, black shirts and ties, a black ten-gallon hat, and no interest whatsoever in conversation, Knowles was known, simply, as “the black guy on the lake.” Although he’d heard the descriptions of him change, over time, to something like “the author,” the fact remained that despite his success, people still considered him an odd duck and a half.

  And that suited Knowles just fine.

  As “the black guy on the lake,” Knowles, by choice, had a lot of time to himself. He spoke to no one but his editor, but nonetheless spent most of his time assembling computer systems, database subscriptions, satellite and high-speed cable connections, and virtually any other gadget which, for most, normally assisted the process of communication. For Knowles this collection of toys and access served a different purpose: it allowed him to keep clear of everybody and anybody while still remaining abreast of everything. Knowles, for example, was the first individual not affiliated with a university to possess an Internet-2 connection, initially an exclusive, multiple-university-controlled next-generation high-speed Internet. Armed with the roster of research services and corporate intranets to which he belonged or had access, the novelist liked to think he could find out anything, or locate anybody, faster than any other civilian.

  When his wife was killed, Knowles engaged in two main actions. First, suffering from a four-month case of writer’s block, he utilized his equipment to bury himself in research and news. He learned everything there was to learn about those who had wrought their fury on his ex-wife, those who had failed to protect her, and the government’s plans for retaliation. His blood pressure skyrocketing, fury his constant companion, Knowles sequestered himself in a single room in his lake house. Movies ran repeatedly in his mind’s eye-films depicting his ex-wife arriving in her office at eight-thirty as usual, going about her usual morning, maybe having a look out the window of her office with the kind of view of the city you only found from the 103rd floor of One World Trade Center. The films always ended in the same way, of course-white paper, floating everywhere. Gray clouds billowing to earth, roiling outward, then up again. Toward the end of the four months in that one room, Knowles devised the plot of the novel that would become his breakthrough hit, but above all, he realized he still did carry a torch for the woman who’d been his wife.

  The other action Knowles took, he shared with a man named Dennis Cole.

  Cole was a homicide detective for the NYPD, 23rd Precinct. Cole had once liked to keep his day to a little under eight hours, maximum, so he could spend as much time as possible with his new wife. Cole’s junior partner was hungry enough to pick up the slack without saying anything. It wasn’t long, though, before his partner didn’t have to pick up any slack at all-Cole started staying late, coming in nights when there wasn’t any work to do, finding just about any reason to avoid the fact that Cynthia Cole was staying out one hell of a lot later than her duties as a bond trader required. After two long years of made-up expensive dinners, gala events, and-though Cole chose not to face this-a great deal of fucking that did not include her husband, Mrs. Cole demanded a “trial separation.”

  Unlike Knowles, who initially hadn’t minded particularly when his wife left him, Cole pined away for Cynthia like nobody’s business. It was after her separation from him that he started in on the bottle-though this was just the beginning. The fact that Cole was pining away for his wife meant, among other things, that when she failed to call in or make it home from work on that second Tuesday in September-that when she failed to show despite Cole’s descent into the hell that was downtown on that day, and when she failed to emerge, in full or part, following Cole’s statuesque, indefatigable presence irrepressibly visible over the course o
f three full weeks in the triage unit a block from ground zero-it meant that Cole had been able to convince himself that it might still have worked out.

  If, that was, the 767 with its topped-off fuel tanks hadn’t pulled the plug on her supposed desire to reclaim his embrace.

  Literally right after the funeral in Stamford, Cole got back to work-a morose ride on Metro North into Grand Central and he was back at it. Picking up the pieces from the three unsolved murder cases he and his partner had been served before twenty-eight hundred murders happened all at once a few blocks down the street. He broke all three cases with a vengeance, becoming one of the most deadly effective homicide investigators on the force. In the year that followed, he cracked his cases at the rate of one hundred percent-sixteen for sixteen.

  After hours was another story.

  When he wasn’t on the job, Cole, a five-foot-eleven-inch, two-hundred-and-ten-pound former athlete of a man, behaved more or less like a bulimic teenager. Starting sometime approximating 5:01 P.M. each day, Cole drank, ate, and then-between the hours of three-thirty and five A.M.-purged. He drank so much at night, so consistently, that his aching liver demanded a postmidnight caloric intake sufficient to nourish an elephant. This, in turn, led to an early morning ritual, of which he partook with savage consistency: just prior to four, he would stumble down the hall in his one-bedroom shithole walkup in Queens, usually rising from odd, ever-new places in the apartment where he’d passed out the night before. Sometimes falling and denting various bones on the hard surfaces in the bathroom that was his destination-sometimes smacking a knee on the floor or a shin on the edge of the tub-every morning, he roamed in there and loudly vomited his guts out.

  It always seemed his traumatized body had failed to digest even an ounce of the food and beverages he’d consumed hours before, all that food and drink just hanging around his belly waiting to be ejected. And eject it he did. Painfully.

  His stomach expanded over time, becoming first soft, then thick, then monstrous, until the weakened muscles around his ribs became little more than a source of stabbing pain as he repeatedly blotched his guts into the 1930s-era American Standard nobody had seen fit to replace because the fucking thing kept working just fine.

  It was in approximately the same manner, at approximately the same time, that Cole and Knowles expressed their common rage in an uncommon way. During the same week in early January-four months to the day on which they’d lost their ex-wives-each man composed his own letter to the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Knowles’s note was more eloquent, but the point in each was the same: Knowles and Cole each expressed, in approximately one and one-half pages of handwritten text, a desire to serve his country. Each told the story of his murdered wife, of his desire to retaliate. Each confessed a suspicion he was too old, that it was too late for him to volunteer as a soldier, at least in the strictest sense. Thus, each man said, the logical choice of service was either the intelligence or, more specifically, antiterror ranks of the federal government.

  In the years that followed 9/11, Cole and Knowles were not alone, and CIA was not the only recipient of such offers. Both CIA and FBI recruiting personnel, obsessed as they were on developing HUMINT assets fluent in Arab languages and cultures, tended to simply keep such letters on file, occasionally offering the names of the volunteers to other inquiring agencies.

  Following repeated interviews, deep background checks, and some in-person monitoring of day-to-day routines, it was precisely because of each man’s rage, and the letters that rage spawned, that Dennis Cole and Wally Knowles came to be included in the pool of names from which Julie Laramie had been instructed to assemble her “counter-cell cell.”

  29

  A former TraveLodge gone private, the single-story motel had been given a fresh coat of paint, a sickly beige that drew a strange contrast with the trademark blue-and-white “sleepy bear” still standing vigil above the lobby entrance. The billboard beside the bear proclaimed the place the Flamingo Inn, though the old TraveLodge insignia could be seen peeking out from beneath the new name, which somebody had painted in pink with a sweeping cursive flourish. The bear, chipped and fading, still wore his blue pajamas and nightcap out front.

  With the help of her guide, Laramie had procured two adjoining rooms as an office, opening the door between to connect them. In one of the rooms they moved all the furniture except one table against a wall, then added some folding seats and the armchair they’d discovered in a closet. Toss in a dry-erase board retrieved from LaBelle’s only office-supplies store, and they had themselves a poor man’s war room.

  Wally Knowles wore a black linen suit, black loafers, and Ray-Bans. He sat on the bed with his legs crossed, his trademark black hat on the bed beside him. Dennis Cole, who’d chosen one of the folding chairs, came in jeans, a green polo shirt, and a seersucker blazer. Laramie’s guide sat just out of sight in the adjoining room doing something on a laptop. She knew he would soon be leaving to retrieve their third recruit of four from the airport-a tenured professor of political science at Northwestern University named Eddie Rothgeb.

  Rothgeb was the professor with whom Laramie had worked on her two independent study projects-as well as a few other things maybe she shouldn’t have. Bringing him to the table wasn’t exactly a move that put her squarely in the comfort zone, but he was the best at what he did and his was an expertise she could use right now.

  Laramie had also been given the green light to pay Cooper-recruit number four, as her guide had called him upon relaying the message from Ebbers, or whoever it was who made such decisions. There had been no questions asked and no negotiating: twenty million bucks, approved with little or no red tape, for a single man. She decided she’d have to ponder the meaning of that later, but one thing it meant was that somebody-CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, DEA-whoever-was taking the antics of Benjamin Achar very seriously.

  Meaning that the guests of my little convention here at the Flamingo Inn aren’t exactly gathered to suck down piña coladas by the pool.

  Overnight, each had been given an abridged version of the terror book, inclusive of some of Laramie’s conclusions, which Knowles and Cole had read in the privacy of their respective rooms at the inn. Rothgeb, she mused, should be listening to his version right now.

  Laramie stopped fiddling with the dry-erase marker she’d been holding.

  “So,” she said.

  Cole raised his eyebrows and dropped them. Laramie thought of the way she remembered Tom Selleck doing this on reruns of Magnum, P.I., except that she remembered Magnum being a lot better-looking than Cole.

  “You might have wondered initially why you were summoned here,” Laramie said. “Or why you were asked to read the package of documents with no explanation or preamble. That was intentional. The document you read last night is this incident’s version of a ‘terror book,’ aka murder book, as it is usually known in domestic homicide cases. We didn’t explain it in advance because we wanted you to form your own impressions. To give weight where you chose to give weight, to consider circumstances the way you naturally would upon reading the document.”

  She grabbed hold of the dry-erase marker again, popped off the top and tacked it back on again with her forefinger and thumb. She’d rehearsed parts of this speech but had ultimately decided to more or less go with the flow.

  “You’ve each volunteered your services in defense of the country. You’ve been screened for suitability and liability and, for now at least, you’ve passed. Congratulations. You now work for me. I work for someone else. The man in the other room keeps an eye on all of us; he also gets us what we need. There will be another member of the team arriving here shortly.”

  To the extent the $20 million fee would buy his time, Laramie had decided to use Cooper in the way you were supposed to use field operatives-secretly. She wasn’t yet sure how they’d be putting him to use, and until she’d figured that part out, she wasn’t planning on telling the other members of the team about his involvement.
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  “Operating alone, in whatever degree of secrecy one finds at the Flamingo Inn, here is what you will now be asked to do,” she said. “Despite the indirect references to the contrary in the terror book, we are operating under the assumption Benjamin Achar was not acting alone. We are assuming that five, or ten, or twenty or more fellow deep cover operatives are living within our borders under assumed identities, armed with an equivalent stash of Marburg-2 filovirus and the wherewithal to disperse it over a much wider zone than Achar succeeded in reaching.”

  There came no expression from Knowles, whose sunglasses remained planted on the bridge of his nose, the man a poker player.

  “I’ll anticipate some of your questions because we don’t have time for process particulars. We’ll work out of this motel for now. Food and laundry services will be provided. There are rules, but we’ll get into that later. You are now, but only temporarily, members of a miniscule, clandestine counterterror unit. That oversimplifies it, but it’s the closest and best explanation. We have support personnel who will perform back-room investigative work-research, fingerprint matching, forensics and other technical analysis, if needed. There is an operative available to us for investigative work, surveillance, or certain preemptive acts as needed. You could also look at it this way: you have just joined a counterterrorism video game already in progress-or board game, if that helps the translation for any of you as old-fashioned as me-except that it is real. Our combined role in the ‘game’ is simple: we use the clues, tools, and ingenuity available to us to identify and stop Benjamin Achar’s fellow sleepers and the individual or organization who sent them.”

  Knowles cleared his throat and Laramie inclined her chin in his direction.

  “The difference between the definition of ‘counterterror,’” he said, “and ‘antiterror’ centers around proactive measures designed to preemptively combat the terrorist threat-you’re proactive in ‘counterterror,’ reactive in ‘antiterror.’ I assume your choice of words reflects and considers this fact. Do we have a commando team in this tool kit of ours?”