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  After a while, gun still drawn, Cooper said, “If it isn’t you, I don’t really see any other way of finding out who the snuffer-outers are, and why they’re taking people out, besides paying a visit on whoever it is who found the artifacts and having a look at whence they came.”

  “‘Snuffer-outers’?” Borrego said.

  “That’s what I’ve come to call them.”

  Borrego considered this.

  “Snuffer-outers it is, then. Incidentally, you should know,” he said, “that we may not find a thing.”

  “Maybe so,” Cooper said.

  He backed up, shuffled one step to his left, and kicked the place on the doorman’s hip where the man had been keeping his gun. As Cooper had suspected from the drape of his jacket, the gun, a fat, black automatic pistol, hadn’t been housed in a holster, so it dislodged from its spot in the waistband, sort of leaped up into the air, and clattered to the floor. Cooper retrieved it and placed both it and his Browning beneath his own waistband.

  In no rush, the Polar Bear disentangled himself from the leather sofa and rose.

  “Jesus and his boys will pack a few things for us,” he said. “We can leave in the morning. You want us to find you a place to sleep, or do you still suspect me of doing the snuffing?”

  Cooper said, “I’ll take that M5 Jesus just parked in the driveway and bring it back in the morning. You an early riser?”

  “See you at six,” Borrego said.

  He inclined his chin in the velociraptor’s direction and Madrid tossed Cooper the keys.

  “Hasta mañana,” Cooper said on his way up the stairs.

  32

  Cooper took the call when he saw the area code on the caller ID readout display the same number he’d used to invite Laramie to breakfast. Ordinarily, there was nothing remarkable about his taking such a call, but since Cooper did so while seated aboard the Borrego Industries Gulfstream G450, winging it over the Caribbean to Belize, he found the clarity of Laramie’s voice mildly surprising.

  “Your proposal has been accepted,” she said, “and the payment wired. You can call whoever it is you need to call to confirm the wire.”

  The pilot hadn’t warned him not to use the phone in the air, and neither Borrego nor Madrid made any motion to stop him now. Cooper knew that the prohibition on the use of standard mobile phones on commercial airliners was horseshit-the weak wireless signal had no effect on an aircraft’s instruments-but he wondered about the signals sent by a portable satellite unit.

  Cooper thought he’d choose his words carefully-no need for the Polar Bear and his lieutenant to learn anything they shouldn’t on the topic of the Emerald Lakes affair.

  “Enjoyed the book you sent,” he said. “A real thriller.”

  It only took a short pause for Laramie to say, “You’re not alone?”

  “Nope. But it doesn’t really matter. Seems to me your boy Benny did one hell of a job leaving his real self in the dust.”

  “That’s your analysis? That our sleeper hid his true identity well? You aren’t exactly giving the federal government its money’s worth.”

  “You getting your money’s worth from Professor Eddie?”

  Another pause, slightly longer this time, then, “He’s working at a slightly lower pay grade. But we do have some ideas, so I’ll be in touch. I was going to recommend you get going on the reading, but it seems you anticipated the government’s response.”

  Cooper said, “I know that you can be very persuasive,” then wondered immediately why he’d have said something like that.

  “Sometime in the next two or three days, I’ll be calling you back with the rest of the team on the line. It may be sooner rather than later if an assignment crops up.”

  Cooper eyed the landscape passing a few miles beneath the Gulfstream jet.

  “I may be a little busy,” he said. Thinking of something, he pulled the phone from his ear and regarded the caller ID numerals. “I can reach you at this number?”

  “Room eighteen.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said, and broke the connection.

  The pilot came on over the intercom and informed his trio of passengers they should buckle up for the descent into Belize City.

  Belize, a tall, skinny nation occupying the western edge of the Caribbean Sea, rests just south of the technical demarcation between the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Cooper had been here a few times, mainly by boat and mainly to dive along the country’s celebrated barrier reef. What he’d seen gave him the impression of a landlocked Caribbean island: dark-skinned locals, colorful paint jobs on weather-ravaged buildings, fishing boats everywhere you turned.

  After a brief taxi through Philip S. W. Goldson International Airport, the G450 cooled its jets before a private hangar, where Cooper observed a waiting two-vehicle convoy consisting of a black Cadillac sedan and a dull yellow jeep. Upon closer inspection, Cooper observed the jeep to be a Land Rover Defender, probably worth a hundred and fifty grand outfitted the way it was. If nothing else, Cooper thought, considering the M5, the Land Rover, and the Gulfstream, the top brass of Borrego Industries certainly did travel in style.

  It turned out the Caddy was merely there for the driver of the Defender to hitch a ride home; upon handing the key to the velociraptor, the guy-looking to Cooper like Derek Jeter’s long-lost brother-hopped into the sedan via the passenger-side door and it sped off across the tarmac. Madrid opened the luggage hatch on the side of the plane and set to transferring their bags to the back compartment of the Defender. The man, Cooper thought, seemed endlessly willing and able to accomplish any task, of any type, that Borrego didn’t want to tackle himself. Hell, Cooper thought-pay me as much as Borrego probably pays good old Jesus, and maybe I too would be happy to sign on as a multihyphenate comrade.

  When Cooper came down the stairs and hit the tarmac beside Borrego, the Polar Bear smiled.

  “This is us,” he said, and motioned for Cooper to join him in the Land Rover. As Borrego offered him the passenger seat, Cooper was thinking of shooting for a bout of politeness when he noticed the setup in the rear of the Defender. Beneath the vinyl top, just aft of the jeep’s roll bar, sat a custom-built throne resembling something between a Recaro racing seat and a La-Z-Boy. The seat’s color scheme matched the exterior of the jeep, black and muted yellow, and there were sealed baggage compartments on both sides of the seat, into which Madrid placed the last pieces of luggage. Once the velociraptor locked them, it was hard to tell the compartments were there-they simply appeared to be part of the jeep’s floor, raised as it was to accommodate the special design of the throne. Cooper assumed there were some monster fuel tanks built into the vehicle too.

  The three-hundred-plus-pound Borrego hopped over the side of the jeep without opening the driver’s-side door and climbed nimbly into the back, Cooper thinking of The Dukes of Hazzard. He located a cooler, dug out a bottle of Gatorade, and plunked it into the movie-theater-style cup holder built into an armrest in the throne. The Polar Bear seized and buckled his seat belt, took a long pull on the Gatorade, and-once Cooper had clambered into the passenger seat-popped open the cooler and offered him a beverage.

  “Why not,” Cooper said, and palmed the cold plastic bottle.

  Madrid slid behind the wheel and bounced them out of the airport.

  After a pit stop by the Polar Bear at a quasi-governmental building near Belize City’s sprawling container docks, Madrid piloted the Defender through a series of narrow streets and the kind of colorful, worn-out overcrowdedness Cooper had grown accustomed to seeing in the Caribbean and points south. They made their way out of the waterfront district, Cooper turning for one last look out the rear of the Defender at the cool blue Caribbean, obscured somewhat by a forest of industrial piers but still there, making him feel good. The velociraptor sloped them up a highway ramp and Cooper watched the tall cranes of the container terminal fade into the distance.

  He asked the enthroned Borrego where they were headed.

 
“Kind of a laundromat for cars,” Borrego said. This, between chugs of Gatorade. He bent down between bumps in the road, returned his empty bottle to the cooler, brought a new flavor out, twisted off the top with two fingers, and put away half of it. “Belize City’s maybe the third or fourth most corrupt port in the Americas. Maybe every two months or so, a regular shipment of-how does Lexus put it?-‘pre-owned’ cars comes into the docks, probably a couple hundred vehicles in the hold. Comes in at night. The customs agents policing the docks don’t seem to mind as the shipment is divided and loaded aboard six or seven smaller ships. The smaller boats hit a few ports around the region to unload their abbreviated load of Honda Accords, where people like the people we’ll soon be visiting clean off the VINs and send them on their way.”

  “And this,” Cooper said, “has what exactly to do with the artifact shipment?”

  “The tomb diggers I bought from are all working at the laundromat.”

  Cooper considered this.

  “Day jobs,” he said.

  “Right. I stopped by the port authority first because we need to find out where the laundromat is operating today before we can get there. Normally,” he said, “the port authority personnel taking the payola to keep that sort of information quiet don’t exactly part freely with it.”

  Cooper eyed the outskirts of the city as it passed by along the side of the highway.

  “But some of those containers back at the shipping terminal,” he said, “are yours?”

  “Most.”

  Cooper nodded. He didn’t exactly need to whip out a calculator to assess how easily Borrego, as the local shipping kingpin, could glean the whereabouts of the “laundromat” from the “port authority personnel”-each of whom, he supposed, Borrego was probably paying two or three times their salary in cash just to keep them friendly.

  After an hour on an increasingly winding, thinly paved, oft-cracked highway, Borrego dug into his cooler and began distributing triple-decker club sandwiches. He explained that the facility they were visiting lay just outside a seaside village called Dangriga, known for its enormous lobster haul.

  “Be good to stick around for dinner,” he said, wolfing the sandwich as he spoke. “Nothing like a four-pound Belize lobster.”

  Cooper didn’t argue.

  A couple miles past the Dangriga town line, Madrid hauled ass onto an un-paved side road that climbed into the hills. Cooper was about to toss his half-digested turkey club on the velociraptor’s lap when a towering, razor-wire-tipped cyclone fence appeared on the right-hand side of the road-along with some buildings, mounds of squashed cars, and a series of other, less identifiable structures, all lurking behind the coiled edge of protective fence.

  Not your usual used-car lot, Cooper thought, but maybe a hell of a place to blank-slate some late-model American sedans for redistribution around the globe.

  Madrid found the entrance, a gated break in the fence, and pulled the Defender alongside a pole-mounted mesh speaker with a white button on its face. Madrid punched the button with his left hand; Cooper noted the proximity of the velociraptor’s right hand to the holster on his hip.

  “Yeah,” came the static-ridden sound of a man’s voice from the speaker.

  “We’re here to visit some friends,” the velociraptor said in crisp English.

  After a brief silence, the voice said, “Who that?”

  Madrid rattled off four names Cooper hadn’t heard before.

  A longer silence ensued. When Madrid appeared ready to speak up again, the voice from the box said, “Only one of them here today.”

  “Well,” Madrid said, “we’d like to see him.”

  “He agree you friends, I ask him?” came the voice.

  “Sure,” the velociraptor said. “Just tell him it’s the Polar Bear.”

  Another pause. “The Polar Bear.”

  “That’s it,” Madrid said.

  Cooper had long since caught the security camera peering down at them from the top of the gate. He expected the voice wouldn’t need to ask whether they were cops, since the Land Rover couldn’t really be mistaken for a Belize City PD cruiser.

  A click and whine sounded out as the gate swung inward, opening with a jerky but consistent pace, as though it ran on rusty chains. Madrid brought them inside as though he knew where to go, though Cooper suspected he didn’t. A thick-jowled man with deeply brown skin, wearing a pitted-out T-shirt and grubby jeans, emerged from a kind of lean-to not far from the gate. Cooper found it interesting that the man did nothing but stand and observe the Defender’s progress.

  Madrid parked in an open patch of dirt beside the junkyard’s main building, a huge prefab corrugated-aluminum structure Cooper figured a strong wind would knock down. He also figured the building could easily be relocated in half a day if you knew how to take it down and had a flatbed truck handy to do it with. A partially shredded blue tarp dangled like a curtain over its main opening, so you couldn’t see inside but could push your way in with a brush of the hand. Madrid led the way in, having a look around before holding the tarp aside to allow Borrego to pass.

  Cooper ducked in behind the Polar Bear and found his senses immediately assaulted by the sights, smells, and sounds of an auto-body shop. Maybe fifteen men of varying ages worked on different parts of different cars in different stages of repair, the activity taking place in clumps, almost like a virtual cubicle environment-workstations divided by function but not walls. And while the work continued without pause, every man in the place, in his own way, took careful stock of their arrival. Cooper took stock in return-black, white, and brown faces alike, some of them adorned with welding helmets, some in baseball caps, others in overalls, or plastic ponchos splattered with different colors of paint-all of them wore the hang-dog slouch, that edgy angle of repose common to guys on probation or parole.

  Giving the impression of lazy indifference but ready to bolt on a dime.

  One of the laborers stood off to the side, welding torch idle in his hand, helmet tilted back. To Cooper the guy looked Guatemalan, but he wasn’t sure whether his idea of Guatemalan was accurate.

  Borrego waved to the man with a kind of cocksure effusiveness that immediately dispelled the air of skeptic tension from the army of ex-cons. By the time he shook hands with the Guatemalan, everybody seemed comfortable in his own skin again, and the pace and noise had kicked up a notch. Cooper and Madrid followed Borrego over but held back, close enough to listen but not to participate.

  As Borrego shook with him, the Guatemalan covered his face with his off hand and sneezed. He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist, which caused Cooper to notice the red chafing around his nostrils.

  “Mierda,” the Guatemalan said. The conversation, which Cooper understood perfectly well, continued in Spanish. “Sorry-been sick as a dog.”

  “Yeah? We’ll get you some vitamins, you want,” Borrego said. “I’ve got a guy in the city’ll take care of you, vitamin pouches that’ll turn you around in a day.”

  “No gracias,” the Guatemalan said. He held up his hand. “I’m getting better. Can’t say the same for the others.”

  “No?” Cooper appreciated the way Borrego held a conversation, speaking as though he got what the man was saying when he clearly had no idea what the guy was talking about.

  The Guatemalan lowered his voice and Cooper pretty much had to read his lips to understand his next words.

  “It’s the curse,” he said. “The goddamn curse.”

  Borrego laughed. “Come on,” he said.

  The Guatemalan wasn’t quite shaking, but he definitely had the look of a cornered mouse. Seemed to Cooper Borrego wasn’t the cat he was scared of-Borrego was everybody’s buddy, including the Guatemalan’s.

  “That where your pals are-out sick?” Borrego said.

  “Sick?” The Guatemalan chirped out a nervous laugh. “Shit, Oso-they’re dead.”

  Cooper felt a gut-twinge as his concentration locked in. He assumed Borrego was experiencing a similar pin
ch.

  “How?”

  “I’m telling you, Oso, it’s the curse. You know-the kind they tell you about in museums? Strange shit taking out anybody fool enough to raid an ancient king’s tomb. That’s what we got, getting those artifacts we sold to you. Fuck! I’ve been in bed for a week. And I’m the lucky one.”

  Cooper heard Borrego say, “So they were sick, like you.”

  “They were sick all right. And they caught it from that fucking town. The caves. That isn’t how they died, though. Not all three.”

  “No?”

  “It was bad luck. Kind of bad luck you get from a tomb-robber’s curse. Radame was shot, got killed by a stray bullet in Dangriga. Eduardo too. They were together. Caught in the middle of some gang shit-”

  “I get it,” Borrego said, and turned his body slightly to look over at Cooper. Cooper raised his eyebrows and shook his head half a shake.

  “All right,” the Guatemalan said, “but you wanna know how Chávez bit it? Got hit by a fucking bus, that’s how. Fucking school bus, and there weren’t even any kids in the thing. Dumb luck. Bad luck. The fucking curse. I’m lucky I survived so far.”

  “Could be just that,” Borrego said. “Dumb luck.”

  “Could be, but lemme tell you-I don’t care. I’m out. Retired.” He motioned with his left hand to the welding torch in his right. “You see this? This is what I do, and this is what I’m going to keep on doing. This or something like it. Nothing like the other shit. Not anymore.”

  Borrego clamped a paw on the Guatemalan’s shoulder. The guy flinched but didn’t bolt, Cooper thinking maybe because he couldn’t with Borrego’s grip planting him in place.

  “I can understand how you’d feel that way,” Borrego said. “And since you’re now out of the business, I’d like to ask you something I don’t normally ask.”

  “Hey,” the guy said, “whatever you want.”

  “I want you to tell me where you got it,” Borrego said.

  “You mean the shit that came with the curse?”