Public Enemy Page 24

  Laramie spun the Styrofoam cup of coffee slowly between her hands, wondering idly how it was everybody seemed to know she wasn’t doing this for CIA.

  “Well,” she said, “instead of tracking down any such specialist, the people you’re referring to decided to recruit…me. Though maybe they called me additionally, and they’re working with some other specialists separately. You never know.”

  “No,” he said, “you don’t, do you?” He ate the broken-off piece of doughnut, which wasn’t much of a mouthful. “But your Benjamin Achar was similar to the Soviet sleepers, at least in the way they were rumored to have been positioned. Assuming he wasn’t some American ex-con running from a shadowy past and looking to emulate Timothy McVeigh, you’ll need to consider that he was trained in all things American. Mannerisms, accent, job skills, and so forth.”

  “But not the inclination to buy a pickup truck,” Laramie said.

  Rothgeb blinked but otherwise ignored her comment. “Point being, there would have to be a facility, or facilities, where Achar was trained. And unless they only had this one agent, it’d be logical for the trainers to need to cycle instructors through, and to put more than one student together for the training sessions.”

  “An Americanization campus,” she said, and took a swallow of the bitter, undiluted coffee. “There was a novel written about that, wasn’t there?”

  Rothgeb nodded. “Nelson DeMille. Maybe a check of satellite intel on terrorist encampments could yield a clue as to its whereabouts, presuming it exists in some visible place.”

  “I think I’ve examined enough SATINT for ten lifetimes, but that isn’t a bad idea,” she said. “Wherever it is they trained is likely to have been abandoned long ago, though, isn’t it?”

  “Because he’s been here for ten years? Still,” he said.

  “Yeah. Still.”

  She took another sip.

  “How have you been,” she said, and thought, Now is when he clams up.

  Rothgeb shrugged. It was an uncomfortable gesture for him to make, in that it was imprecise. Everything else, the man did with precision. The shrug came, she suspected, because he needed something to do while avoiding the question, without being too obvious about it.

  “Just fine, I suppose,” he said. Coming dangerously close to the last of his diversions, he broke off another piece of doughnut, ate it, took a leisurely sip from his coffee, then said, “It’s our weak spot, you know.”

  Laramie looked at him. “Sleepers, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “I would tend to agree we’re vulnerable,” she said, “but what do you mean?”

  He ate his next-to-last bite.

  “We still haven’t learned to adapt. The big bureaucratic machine engineered to battle the Soviets needed to redirect itself and focus on someone else, somebody specific. So once some new group hit the radar, the machinery targeted it: al-Qaeda. Palestinians. Internally, certain Arab-Americans or Arab immigrants, as you say. We mobilize the big, slow machinery, get set up to fight people who look like that, or come from there, and hope the power steering works.”

  Laramie nodded absently.

  “You think about the business of spying, though,” he said, “and it’s all about immersion. So here we are mobilizing to attack, while the smarter enemy is busy immersing themselves in our culture. Assimilating.”

  Laramie watched his eyes and his mouth as he spoke. She remembered soaking up his words, and watching him say them, while she was immersed in her new life in Evansville. Now, listening to him rant on like the self-absorbed academic he was, Laramie wondered whether she’d made the right move in bringing him here. Maybe that was the real reason she’d stopped by the Krispy Kreme before bringing Rothgeb to the Flamingo Inn: maybe she wanted to make sure it wasn’t too stupid an idea. Adding a pompous blowhard to the mix might spur stimulating debate in their “war room,” but she had her doubts he would help them pinpoint strategies and action plans. Which is precisely what it was going to take-if there were anything at all to be done.

  Too late now, Laramie. You brought him here, your guide retrieved him from the airport-you going to send him home already?

  Besides-he’s already hit on something.

  “You still read spy novels as much as you used to?” she said.

  Rothgeb smiled neatly, the motion more compact and precise than the unwieldy shrug in which he’d earlier engaged.

  “Aren’t as many good ones as there used to be,” he said. “But I still partake of the occasional best-seller.”

  Laramie slipped the plastic lid back on her half-drunk cup of coffee.

  “Then let’s head over to the Flamingo Inn,” she said. “You’re in for a treat.”

  31

  The velociraptor’s name was Jesus Madrid.

  Madrid was currently functioning as interim business manager of Borrego Industries. As with his late boss, he worked with no pretense, but lived lavishly-there was, it seemed, a great deal of money to be made in the shipping and fulfillment industries.

  At the end of each of the six days since Borrego’s disappearance, Madrid followed approximately the same luxurious routine-one he would follow on this day too. At the conclusion of the workday, Borrego’s driver chauffeured Madrid to the spa he and Borrego frequented, and Madrid did as he always did there: shower, hit the sauna, subject himself to a full-body deep-tissue massage, subject himself to twenty minutes of rapture with the masseuse who’d deeply massaged his tissue, shower again, and return to the car. He listened to a jazz playlist on an iPod nano in the back of the car, waited while the driver pulled into one of Borrego’s take-out joints to retrieve an order of spicy tuna sushi rolls for him before ferrying him home.

  It was closing in on ten-fifteen when the driver, armed with the remote, opened the gate to Madrid’s estate and navigated the quarter-mile driveway that took them up the hill to the mansion. Madrid’s home was a misplaced English Tudor of just over eight thousand square feet featuring numerous amenities-seventeen plasma screens, for instance. As he had the night before, and the night before that, Madrid retreated to the master bedroom to change into his workout gear-black spandex pants; Asics running shoes; a tank top with BI SECURITY stenciled across the chest-then retrieved a bottle of Gatorade from the Sub-Zero fridge in the kitchen and came downstairs to his workout room.

  In size and feel, the room resembled your average suburban health club, outfitted with a circuit of weight machines, barbells, dumbbells, the latest in cardio equipment, and one glaring exception from the norm: a floor and wall design aimed at re-creating, in miniature, the soccer pitch used by Madrid’s favorite team. The field was Old Trafford Stadium, the team Manchester United. The surface of the floor, painted with penalty and goal boxes and a midfield stripe, was covered wall to wall with the latest in artificial turf technology-FieldTurf-its green plastic reeds of imitation grass longer and softer than prior generations. As was well known among football and soccer pros who played on it, though, if you were tackled into FieldTurf, it would still give you nearly as wicked a burn as AstroTurf had.

  This turned out to be unfortunate for Jesus Madrid, since Cooper-having observed the velociraptor’s routine for a couple days running, and stolen in here to nab him-decided from his place behind the water cooler that his best means of subduing the Polar Bear’s bodyguard was to offer up a reciprocal tackle-and-pin maneuver.

  Cooper got his full body weight planted into the small of Madrid’s back, pulled the velociraptor’s arms around behind him, and pile-drove the man chin-first into the turf.

  “¡Hijo de la gran puta!” Madrid spat.

  Cooper pretzeled both of the man’s wrists against opposing shoulder blades and stabbed a knee into the lowest vertebra in Madrid’s spine. With the hand that wasn’t occupied, Cooper snatched his Browning from his waistband and secured the velociraptor’s chin to its spot near the top of Trafford’s penalty box, barrel of gun to rear of neck.

  “Ain’t payback a bitch,” he said. />
  Cooper wore a blue-and-green Tommy Bahama short-sleeved shirt featuring a recurring pattern of parrots and palm fronds, khaki shorts with deep pockets, and his travel sandals. He allowed himself a look around the massive workout room.

  “You built a weight room on a soccer field?” he said.

  “Sí,” the velociraptor said. “Old Trafford Stadium. Man United.”

  “Man United, eh,” Cooper said. It occurred to him that Conch Bay’s staff of soccer-loving Brits, most of all Ronnie, would appreciate this odd expression of untold wealth better than he. “You know, you’re doing pretty well for a bodyguard. Especially for an incompetent one.”

  A kind of grunt came from the tall FieldTurf beneath Cooper’s hand.

  “Pretty safe guess,” Cooper said, “Borrego was having you handle a few more things than physical-protection services, he paid you like this. But I don’t care what else you are. It occurred to me that your mildly late, but highly effective appearance in Borrego’s office during my visit was a couple notches too casual. Born, the way I saw it, of endless and constant routine.”

  “So what?”

  “Just saying I’m guessing you were always around the man. Everywhere he went. All the time. Including the trip to Central America the two of you took to buy the artifacts Borrego was shipping to Naples.”

  Even though he hadn’t really asked a question, Cooper, upon gaining no response, angrily mashed the barrel of his pistol into the musculature of the velociraptor’s neck and sharpened the prod of his kneecap on his spine.

  “Who’d you buy them from, where’d they get them, and how do I find these people?” Cooper said. “Start answering.”

  He thought he heard Madrid say something, pushed the Browning a little deeper into his captive’s neck, heard another mumble that lost itself in the turf, then, ticked off, Cooper stood all his weight on his knee and said, “Say again, motherfucker!”

  Madrid turned his face from the blades of the turf with a grimace.

  “I said it’s not that simple!”

  “Go on.”

  “Maldita puta, this fucking turf hurts,” Madrid said. Then, turning his head another quarter inch toward Cooper, the velociraptor appeared to Cooper to smirk-or at least a corner of his mouth performed an upward curl, whatever expression was intended. “We had a pretty good idea you’d be paying us another visit. So we’re ready to answer your fucking question. Just not like this.”

  “No? Why not? I kind of like the way this conversation’s arranged.”

  Despite enjoying his reply, Cooper found himself mildly disturbed by the velociraptor’s use of the word we.

  “Because, gringo, there’s somebody else you’d rather talk to about it than me.”

  “Yeah?” Cooper felt a slow sinking sensation in his stomach-he’d been had.

  “Sí,” the velociraptor said. “What’s the expression you Americans use? Better you hear it ‘from the mouth of the horse,’ I think?”

  “Close enough,” Cooper said, already knowing what was coming before the bodyguard said the rest.

  “Then you and your expressions probably agree it’d work out better,” Madrid said, “if you get your answers de la boca del Oso Blanco.”

  Cooper sat there for a minute, planted as he was on the velociraptor’s back. Thinking he was getting pretty good at being taken to the cleaners.

  From the mouth of the Polar Bear.

  Doing it quickly so as not to lose the edge, Cooper stood and stepped back, keeping the Browning pointed at the velociraptor.

  “On your feet, then,” he said, “Mr. Man United.”

  Madrid drove about the way Cooper figured Dale Earnhardt Jr. did, wending around so many bends at speeds registering near 140 kph on the speedometer of his BMW M5 that Cooper began to think he’d need to break down and take a dose of Dramamine for the first time in his life. Despite the speed, the velociraptor wasn’t frantic in the way he drove-listless, Cooper thought, was a good way to put it, Madrid about as enthusiastic about the many gear changes, braking, and acceleration leaps as the driver of an airport rental-car shuttle might have been about his wheel-bound duties.

  It took about twenty-five minutes for the M5 to deliver them to a lower-middle-class neighborhood at the base of a long hill, the place maybe four hundred times wealthier than ninety-eight percent of Venezuela but with tiny homes, built too closely together on narrow, unkempt lots, Cooper tagging it immediately as a place where the police didn’t get much cooperation from the residents.

  A dozen long blocks from the thoroughfare they’d come in on, the velociraptor zipped the M5 around a final series of turns, slowed, then pulled almost daintily into a short driveway beside a slovenly, two-story house with a dilapidated Spanish-tile roof.

  Madrid triple-flashed his high beams as he parked.

  The place, Cooper observed, had “safe house” written all over it. Good pick of locations for it too-nobody in this kind of neighborhood bothered you much, asked you anything, or otherwise got in the way of whatever you felt like doing. Cooper thinking maybe he should consider a spot like this-it’s missing a beach and a few snorkeling holes, and there’s no hammock, porch, or dock, but what the hell: Lieutenant Riley and friends wouldn’t bother him here, would they?

  The velociraptor took them to the side door, which was answered by a pair of men who looked vaguely like Madrid-at least the way Madrid looked while on duty, each of these guys sporting a suit and tie and exuding a quiet sort of menace. They did look a bit stupider than the Polar Bear’s A-number-one man, which quality they quickly exposed when both men failed to mask their surprise at the somewhat effeminate workout gear their boss had shown up in.

  The twin looks of mild shock were quickly concealed and the men parted. The velociraptor came into the house between them; he didn’t give his men any evident signal to take down Cooper, so Cooper followed him in. In the kitchen, the lights were bright and the shades drawn. In here, another four armed bodyguards were playing a card game at a folding table that looked as though they’d brought it solely for the purpose of the game. The four guys watched Madrid, Cooper, and one of the doormen swing through the kitchen and down into the basement through a door beside the fridge.

  While oddly misplaced, the bottom floor of the dilapidated row house was supremely outfitted. A widescreen plasma set looking somewhere north of a hundred inches wide played, in silence, an action movie featuring a submarine and a series of torpedoes chasing it. Within and beside the TV cabinet were multiple decks-DVD, stereo, and otherwise-along with a tower full of CDs and a case of face-out DVD boxes. Cooper recognized most of the titles.

  The television was playing silently, since the sounds of the film were being monitored by Ernesto Borrego by way of a fat set of earphones. The headset’s coiling connecting wire stretched, limply and partially airborne, to a plug on the face of one of the many decks in the TV cabinet.

  The Polar Bear ignored the presence of Cooper and his security men until the climactic moment of the scene he’d been watching played to fruition. When the submarine had avoided the torpedoes, Borrego depressed a button on the remote control he’d been holding, removed the headphones, and turned to Cooper.

  “Wondered how long it would take,” he said with a flash of those sharp yellow-brown teeth. “Not long, turns out.”

  Since none of the Polar Bear’s crack security staff had seen fit to take away his gun, Cooper racked a bullet into its chamber and pointed it at the couch-bound Borrego.

  “I’ve got a few questions,” he said.

  “Ask away.” As usual, there wasn’t any discernible tension in the Polar Bear’s tone.

  “I was thinking of taking you up on your spelunking offer,” Cooper said, “when it turned out you were dead. So I thought I’d come see your guy here, and see if I might compel him to tell me the things you wouldn’t before.”

  “You mean the answer,” Borrego said, “to your question of who I bought the artifacts from.”

  “And t
he additional question,” Cooper said, “of exactly where the sellers found these things. Plus how any of this might explain why somebody’s killing everybody who had anything to do with the loot.”

  “I think we’ve got the same questions,” Borrego said. Cooper was enjoying the Polar Bear’s no-nonsense manner. “And I do know a little more than I told you-but not a lot. We’ll still need to go find them-the sellers, I mean-in order to find out the rest.”

  Cooper surveyed the behavior of the velociraptor and the doorman. They hadn’t noticeably moved and didn’t seem particularly on edge.

  “What made you think I’d show up?” Cooper said.

  Borrego shrugged.

  “You struck me as a sharp cookie.”

  “No doubt,” Cooper said. “Why else?”

  “I believe I told you I found it odd I hadn’t received a call when the shipment didn’t show in Naples. After you left, I tried to reach my fence. Couldn’t. I had a vague idea as to his preferred list of buyers-always a good thing not to rely too heavily on a middleman-so I called three or four of them. Also not reachable. Missing-dead, I expect. Like my fence. Caught the story online in the Fort Myers papers.”

  “A story broken first on the nightly news,” Cooper said, “by one Ricardo Medvez.”

  Borrego thought for a moment, digesting this.

  “You went there, then,” he said.

  Cooper nodded. “Found his body. Frozen in an icebox beneath a couple hundred pounds of Alaskan king crabs.”

  “In Florida?”

  “Fresh frozen,” Cooper said.

  “This Medvez a friend of yours?”

  “Wouldn’t really call him that.”

  “You gave him the story, though.”

  “Maybe you’re doing the killing,” Cooper said.

  The Polar Bear didn’t shift, fidget, or change expression. He didn’t say anything either.