Painkiller Read online

  TO: SENATOR KIRCHER

  FR: EASTWEST7 (AKA JULIE LARAMIE, CIA)

  RE: CHINA AND OTHER MATTERS

  She had started to write her cell number below the subject line when, deciding the disconnected number would do her, and Senator Kircher for that matter, no particular good, she crossed out the prefix and composed, instead, a three-word note:

  HAPPY CASTING, SENATOR!

  Thinking that once her ordeal ended, if it ever did, she might consider paying a visit on Mrs. Alan Kircher, or perhaps the assignment editor at 60 Minutes, Laramie stood and handed the folded pages of her makeshift essay to the receptionist.

  “Please give that to somebody on the senator’s staff,” she said, and jerked her thumb toward the door Rob Lowe had used. “Preferably somebody besides him.”

  Then Laramie walked out of Kircher’s waiting room and exited the building.

  38

  Admiral Li came down to the poolside lounge and found a stool at the bar. He wore the Bermuda shorts and tropical-print short-sleeved shirt he’d found in one of the revolutionary brotherhood gift bags. Spike Gibson, biceps protruding obscenely from a white tank top, sat three stools from Li, sipping a creatine shake. Hiram stood behind the counter, wiping down the glassware.

  Gibson grinned as Li took his stool.

  “Afternoon, Admiral.” As he always did in the presence of Li or Deng, Gibson spoke in Mandarin.

  Li bowed from the shoulders up. Hiram moved over to draw even with him at the bar.

  “Buy you a drink?” Gibson said.

  Hiram’s long, narrow fingers, exuding the false impression of sluggishness, combined a series of juices and rum over ice, sprinkled the selection with nutmeg and cinnamon, and, on a small white napkin, pushed the glass across the counter into Li’s palm.

  Li took a sip, savored the flavor of the drink, and nodded.

  “Painkiller,” Gibson said.

  “Yours?”

  Gibson shrugged, taking a tremendous gulp of his shake. “Creatine and nonfat milk with pineapple and banana chunks.”

  “Creatine?”

  “Highly refined protein.”

  Li nodded. “Steroids, then.”

  “Not in my temple, Admiral. I prefer all-natural foods.”

  “Such as bananas and pineapples.”

  “Correct.”

  “But this ‘creatine’ is a steroid, no? Certain American baseball players come to mind.”

  “That’s Andro. Or worse.”

  “There is a difference?”

  “Vast.”

  “Mister?”

  Li turned sharply at the bright, light voice and watched, first in delight, then in increasing disgust, as a young American girl in a bikini, not a day older than fourteen, came out of the bright sun into the shade of the bar’s thatched roof. She was so drunk she could barely walk, but she made her way to Spike Gibson’s side nonetheless. The girl wore diamond earrings, a pink iPod Mini, sunglasses, a bracelet on each wrist, and an anklet above one foot. Her bikini top had slipped off one shoulder to expose a nipple; she was slick with a blend of tanning oil and perspiration, her blondish hair held back with a clip.

  Gibson said, “Pardon me, Admiral.”

  At that point the girl leaned in, and Gibson kissed her with a sloppy, tongue-ridden kiss, Gibson fondling the girl’s exposed breast with one hand, cupping her hip and ass with the other. Li stared. The girl removed an earpiece, twirled a loop of hair with her finger, and said something close-in to Gibson. Gibson said something back, turned to Hiram, said, “Rum punch,” waited for Hiram to hand him the drink, gave it to the girl, then squeezed her tiny ass as she turned and stumbled back to the pool. She ducked out of view and into the lounge chair in which she’d been planted before her approach.

  “Spoiled rich girl down from New England,” Gibson said. “Connecticut. Parents think she’s on a boat ride. She likes to party.”

  Gibson polished off his creatine shake and reached above his head, stretching his massive arms.

  “Listen, Admiral,” he said. “I’m scheduled for a forty-minute exercise circuit in my gym. You look like a man who’s in excellent physical condition. You’re welcome to join me for the workout.”

  Li, expressionless, stared into Gibson’s beady, blackish eyes.

  “Perhaps later,” he said.

  Wordlessly, Gibson rose, ducked behind the pool house and, a moment later, emerged on his personal off-road-grade golf cart. The cart’s electric motor thrummed as Gibson sped around the corner of the last poolside cabana and vanished.

  Li drained his painkiller and pushed the glass of remaining ice cubes across the bar to Hiram.

  Deng was in his Mobile War Room, seventh and smallest of the series of custom command centers, housed aboard the most recent generation of People’s Liberation Navy nuclear attack submarines. He’d built this particular suite expressly for the final stages of Operation Blunt Fist, and none of the crew, including the captain, knew what went on inside it. A trio of communications officers sat immediately outside its walls, fulfilling various actions ordered by way of the general’s command buttons inside the suite, but all communications Deng conducted with the outside world were encrypted before the communications officers could access the signal.

  It had been sixteen hours since the Beidaihe detonation, and the Mobile War Room was currently serving in its official capacity as China’s equivalent of Air Force One. For the past six hours, Deng had been holding wall-to-wall video teleconference sessions with his newly appointed vice premier, who, in his absence, was executing various decisions generated by Deng.

  Within two hours of being secreted into his submarine lair, Deng had ordered his vice premier to read his initial statement to the global media. An hour ago he allowed his own face to appear, taping a statement in the War Room and beaming it to Beijing. In the recorded statement, Deng announced that he had “personally confirmed” the intelligence captured by PRC operatives that represented “hard evidence of culpability” for the nuclear strike. His static-ridden, head-and-shoulder videoconferencing image had been retelecast across the world’s news channels:

  “We have determined,” his image said, “that the responsibility for the act of mass murder committed against the People’s Republic of China rests with a highly organized, well-funded international terrorist organization. While we must acknowledge our intelligence failure in allowing this cabal of evil to conduct the first act of nuclear proliferation within China’s very borders, we will not fail again. Our intelligence operatives have made significant progress in isolating those nations responsible for the funding and strategic management of this organization, and once we determine with finality the authenticity of the evidence, vengeance by the People’s Republic of China will be exacted. That vengeance will be harsh. It will be swift, and it will be severe.”

  Deng took note of a flashing indicator light on the main wide-screen monitor, the centerpiece of the War Board. He was afforded the luxury of positioning his submarine anywhere in the world, since no one knew where he was. He ordered the captain of the sub to approach the surface for a better signal, and the vessel’s communications array nipped the swells about eight hundred miles east of Miami and two hundred miles north of Mango Cay. This location happened to position him squarely within the generally accepted confines of the Bermuda Triangle.

  He punched a command on his keyboard and Admiral Li appeared immediately on the monitor. Li bowed deeply. Deng could see that Li, as instructed, wore one of the gift-bag-issue tropical-pattern shirts.

  The admiral began immediately.

  “Preoperational status: all systems go,” he said. “System mainframe and redundant processors active. No security system failures. Primary power cell currently running at ten percent of capacity, backup online generators one through four fueled to capacity. According to all hourly reports from security director, perimeter alarms have remained active and silent, with radar traffic normal, during the past forty-eight hours.” />
  Li’s mouth twitched-not, Deng saw, from the static of the transmission.

  “What is it, Admiral?”

  “Comrade Premier,” Li said, tendering a brief bow of submission, “I recognize the importance of this assignment to the revolution.”

  Deng suppressed a chuckle-he knew this had been coming and was surprised it had taken the career soldier this long.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Thank you, Comrade Premier. It is just that as an admiral in the People’s Navy I am compelled, at this time of national crisis, to serve in, forgive me, but I’m not sure how best to put this-”

  “A more traditional role?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is no more critical mission to the fabric of our nation’s future than the assignment I have entrusted to you. I recognize your more…standard instincts, but we no longer inhabit a standard world. Stay the course, Admiral. I will see you for your next status report.”

  Deng killed the connection. He sipped from a cup of tea he’d had delivered through the room’s food-dispensing window, savoring its flavor, prolonging the tingling sensation he felt in his belly. In fact he felt it even in his soul, though Deng didn’t believe particularly in souls.

  This was a moment for which he had been waiting a very long time.

  In the upper left-hand corner of Deng’s control board was a hinged Plexiglas cube. He flipped it open, revealing a keyhole. Removing from around his neck a thin chain resembling the kind affixed to dog tags, he seized the lone key affixed to the chain. He inserted the key in the hole the open cube had exposed and twisted.

  A red light began flashing beside the lock. On two of the monitors on the War Board, a set of numbers blinked to life. For the first second of their display on the monitors, the numbers read:

  72:00:00.

  Then the numbers changed immediately to 71:59:59, 71:59:58, and so on.

  A smug grin creasing the hard lines of his face, it was somewhere around T-minus 71:56:22 when a thought crystallized in General Deng’s mind-the rallying cry he’d instructed Li and Gibson to use in the recruitment of Operation Blunt Fist’s pool of Marxist-Leninist investors:

  Long live the Revolution!

  Then he gave the order for the PLN captain to retreat.

  The submarine dipped beneath the swells.

  39

  Stabbing the fish with a barbed hook, the boy held it aloft and watched the tortured fish wriggle. Satisfied, he heaved the whole assembly over the side of the boat and paid out the line. Once the line was out where he wanted it, he used rubber bands to clip the filament to an outrigger.

  Cooper hadn’t got the kid’s name and didn’t care. He squinted into the glare of the sun, its blinding rays banging off the sea as the boat rolled with the swells. The kid had three lines in the water for him, one a long way out, maybe a hundred yards behind the boat; one with no outrigger, forty, fifty yards out; and now this third line, which he’d positioned about one-fifty back. That also made three live bait fish. It had taken them an hour to hook that many, Cooper pulling them in while the boat made for the narrow band of sea where the captain knew the big game fish were biting this week.

  The captain of the charter was a man so dark from the abuse of years of ocean sunshine he looked like a splash of high-gloss black enamel against the white fiberglass boat. He sat under a canopy in the crow’s nest, allowing the boat to drive itself while he smoked a Cuban cigar in the breezy ocean heat.

  His name was Abe Worel.

  Worel had once owned a single boat. Unable to afford any advertising outside of word-of-mouth, he scraped by on the inconsistent deep-sea bookings he got from the more adventuresome visitors who happened down the pier where he moored his boat. He knew the waters and could find the game fish better than anyone, but the chief problem Worel encountered was that right when he had begun to build some steady referral business, hurricane Hugo took his boat and turned it into kindling. Worel hadn’t even contemplated the notion of securing insurance, meaning he was left, following the unleashing of Hugo’s wrath, with nothing but a two-thousand-dollar debt on the loan he’d taken out to buy the boat.

  A few months later, Worel had been ready to disconnect his phone and return to work as a first mate, humping for tips at forty-six years of age, when a baritone-voiced guy tracked him down on the phone and asked if he was available to head out and scare up some marlin. The man indicated he’d chartered from Worel once before.

  Worel remembered him, a gruff son of a bitch, nothing like the usual tourist. The man hadn’t said a word in the eight hours they’d spent on the water when he’d chartered the now-defunct boat that first time out.

  “Been running that boat for twenty goddamn years,” Worel said to him over the phone.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, mon,” Worel said. “Too bad some bastard name of Hugo take it away. There ain’t a single plank o’ wood remainin’.”

  The man told Worel thanks anyway and that he was sorry about the boat. A moment of silence played out, neither of them hanging up. Then Cooper said, “You make a living, running a deep-sea charter?”

  “Sure you do, mon. Way that happen is, you buy four, five boats, give the fat cats what they really want for the bulk of your business-cushion under their big ass, cooler full of rum and beer. Take ’em out on tours, catch a couple tuna for kicks, and save the deep-sea game for the fellas come down here to do it for real. Keep the boats in different places-that way there ain’t no goddamn storm-ain’t nobody-gonna take all them boats from you. And there somethin’ else too, mon: make sure when you buy them boats, you get yourself an insurance policy. Do that, or do nothin’ at all.”

  When Cooper didn’t say anything in response, Worel said, “Yeah, shit, mon, that fucking Hugo,” and hung up the phone.

  Two days later, Worel was stepping off the boat of a friend who’d given him a day of first-mate work when he found himself confronted by a short man wearing a navy blue business suit.

  “Pardon me,” the man asked, “but would you be Mr. Worel?”

  Worel asked him who wanted to know.

  “Jacob Bartleby,” said the man.

  “Can’t say the name mean anything to me, mon.”

  Bartleby nodded his understanding. “Mr. Worel, I’m an attorney representing a Cayman Islands investment firm specializing in resort and recreational properties.”

  He handed Worel a slip of paper, which Worel took, examined, and discovered to be a cashier’s check, made out to cash, in the sum of $250,000. Bartleby asked Worel if he would be able to procure four boats for that amount, assuming the inventory of four vessels included both pleasure yachts and deep-sea fishing vessels.

  “What the hell you talkin’ ’bout, mon?”

  Bartleby said, “Well, I ask because if so, my clients are looking to take a forty-nine percent interest in the boats.”

  Worel narrowed his eyes and reached out to return the cashier’s check.

  “Seem to me,” he said, “that if them clients can afford to buy ’em, they’d be best served takin’ a hundred percent stake. Also, for that price you probably get five, you know who to call.”

  Bartleby explained to Worel that in exchange for the check he’d handed him, his clients would receive a forty-nine percent stake in the fleet of charter boats Worel would procure and manage with the investment capital represented by the amount of the check. He told Worel that he would remain the controlling partner, retaining a fifty-one percent ownership interest in the fleet. Without another word, Worel walked directly across the street to the local savings and loan. Upon hearing that the bank had cleared the check, he hired the best boat builder in the Caribbean to make him five thirty-four-foot boats for $200,000 cash. He used the rest to set up an office with a fax machine, two phone lines, and a voice mail service, and to outfit the pleasure yachts with all the amenities and a killer insurance policy. He even got himself a sonar unit, a fish-finding secret weapon, for the boat he’d use purely as the dee
p-sea fishing charter.

  Six months later, the man with the baritone voice called again and asked Worel whether he had ever been able to replace that smashed-up boat of his.

  Worel said, “Just so happen I’ve been able to procure a few of them boats, mon. You looking to do some fishing?”

  “I am.”

  “Reason I ask,” Worel said, “is if you looking to do some fishin’, we goin’ to do some fishin’. Matter of fact that be the case anytime you call. Anytime you want, we go out. Refreshments on the house. Matter of fact,” Worel told him, “you ever get any idea ’bout payin’ for any of these trips, then you should call somebody else. Seein’ as I’m sure anybody else out there probably be happy to take your money. But not me, mon, no sir. Not me.”

  Cooper said that was all right by him and booked an all-day fishing trip for the following week.

  There was a tug on the shorter line. Worel spotted it from the bridge, upward of twenty feet away, and eased off on the throttle. Silence flooded the boat with the drone of the engine off a few decibels.

  “Look like he coming in again,” Worel said up top, when bang, the tip of the pole shot down toward the water.

  Cooper clambered to the chair. The kid took the pole, adjusted the drag, and set the rod in the cup between Cooper’s legs, Cooper now buckled into the chair that always reminded him of the kind they used in prisons to execute convicts. Only this chair was the opposite kind of chair: one built for redemption. A seat in which he could rediscover some of the broken-off pieces of his soul.

  He waited for Worel to set the hook, the old man gunning the boat to lock the barb in the fish’s mouth. Then the fish took off, the reel screaming in Cooper’s hands. Cooper knew what was coming, and only a few seconds passed before it did-about a hundred yards away, back behind the boat on the starboard side, there she went. Worel was looking back at her too, the old captain’s outstretched arm pointing out to sea.