Public Enemy Page 28

  He still didn’t see much reason to share his theory with Borrego. What would he do with it anyway? Get mad at Uncle Sam? Or, more likely-get killed by someone sent by Uncle Sam.

  Cooper started out along the river, heading upstream again. Borrego clicked on his own flashlight and fell in behind, following the rhythm they’d maintained throughout the day. Cooper liked that Borrego didn’t press him further. Working with the flashlights in the increasing darkness, they made their way out from the rectangular burn site in the same spoked paths they’d used back in the village. Cooper found himself growing angrier with every spoke. With every passing minute, in fact.

  Almost a dozen spokes had come and gone when Borrego finally said, “You want to tell me what it is we’re looking for?”

  “Any goddamn thing at all,” Cooper said, “that’ll show me who was here.”

  Or confirm it-since I already know who it was.

  Cooper crossed the stream and found the woods didn’t last long in this direction-the rocky crest of the crater stood like a steeply angled wall a hundred yards from the creek. They approached the crater wall and Cooper saw it almost immediately.

  A cave.

  “Should have looked here first,” Borrego said-almost, but not quite, causing Cooper to break the scowl distorting his face.

  Ignoring his knee-jerk fear of lurking predators, Cooper barreled into the cave, descending into a cavity the size of a squash court. It occurred to Cooper that the Indians from the village must have known or found these underground caverns to exist in the crater, and used them to their advantage. The way Indians and other smart people did, he thought-use what nature gave you to its fullest-unlike the way whoever ran this facility worked. Theirs being-literally-the scorched-earth philosophy.

  All the more corroborating evidence on the identity of the snuffer-outers.

  As with the aboveground portion of the former riverfront factory-or prison camp, or movie theater, or whatever the fuck it had been, he thought-there wasn’t much to see in the cave. They’d burned whatever had been left in here too, the blackened, moist, smelly soil that coated the floor of the chamber consistent with the ash and coals he’d been kicking around up top. Neither Cooper nor Borrego could stand up straight except near the middle of the cavity; they shone their flashlights around the room in search of anything besides the evident rock, moss, dirt, and puddles.

  “Maybe they stole from the Indians too,” the Polar Bear said from somewhere behind Cooper. “Kept the loot in here.”

  “Maybe,” Cooper said idly.

  “Whatever it was, though, seems to me it wouldn’t keep.”

  “What do you mean,” Cooper said, peering around.

  “Right now’s dry season. My guess’d be half the year, maybe more, this room’s a pond. Underwater.”

  Cooper, brain dulled from too many days with too little food and too much humidity and exercise, took upward of thirty seconds to hear the coupler engage within the confines of his head. Trying to fend off some of the fatigue and flex his brain, he made the connection his mind was trying to tell him it had already made:

  Underwater.

  Along the back wall of the cavern, the floor was two or three feet deeper than the spot where he stood now. It was there, at the back of the cave, where the puddles stood. He walked to the back wall, moving slowly so as not to stir up too much mud, and shone his flashlight into the water as he worked his way along the wall.

  The puddles reminded him of blackened tide pools. He poked around with his foot, feeling from behind the protective sheath of his steel-toed boot. Some of the puddles were deeper than others-two inches here, six there.

  You’re burning something, and part of that something happens to be underwater, it could be you didn’t burn all of-

  He heard the muted scraping noise first. Cooper and Borrego met each other’s gaze for an instant, and then Cooper pulled his boot out of the puddle, crouched down, and slipped his hand into the muck to find what it was he’d nudged. He came out with a short length of rotting wood.

  Holding it up in the light, he could see it was close to eight or nine inches long, two or three inches wide in one direction, and thinner than his pinkie in the other. Its edges were jagged, blackened, rotten-a piece of it fell off and slopped into the puddle as Cooper rotated it in the beam of his flashlight-but when he got it turned around, Cooper, and Borrego beside him, saw that there was actually something to see.

  The wood on the back side of the board, which had been submerged in the mud-or algae, or whatever else it is you find in a mud puddle in a rain forest cave-was pale. The color on the back side of the board was probably close to the original, natural color of the wood before the fire and rot had got to its other side.

  Along this pale side of the board, stenciled in black, were two complete and legible letters, and half of a third. The three letters, at least by Cooper’s guess, were ICR. Below the letters were the rounded tops of an incomplete sequence of numbers, Cooper thinking it might be a serial number or ID labeling of some kind, but this portion of the markings on the wood seemed impossible to read.

  Cooper looked at Borrego and pointed the wood in his direction.

  “Mean anything to you?” he said. “Appears to be part of a crate, and you’re the biggest shipping magnate in the cave.”

  “‘ICR,’ you mean? Not offhand.”

  Cooper put the rotting piece of wood in his pocket, kicked and felt his way through the remainder of the puddles, found some other boards, splinters, and chunks of wood-all similar to the one in his pocket, but none with any markings.

  Then he stood and took in the sight of the massive, hunched form of Ernesto Borrego.

  “Might mean something to somebody somewhere, though,” he said.

  Borrego nodded. “Otherwise we came all this way for a stick.”

  Cooper almost smiled again.

  Borrego’s bass rumble of a voice came next.

  “Had enough?” he said.

  “Of this place? For a lifetime.”

  Borrego turned, pointed his flashlight beam toward the exit of the cave, and led the way out.

  “Good,” the Polar Bear said. “’Cause I may be dead, but I’ve still got a business to run.”

  36

  Laramie was in her second hour of sleep following forty-eight without when an obnoxiously loud and persistent knocking dredged her from her pool of slumber.

  “I hear you.”

  She got her legs around and found the floor, retrieved a pair of jeans, and pulled them on beneath the oversize Lakers T-shirt she always wore to bed-another detail it seemed Ebbers had instructed his minions to heed. A look through her peephole revealed Wally Knowles, looking as chipper as she’d seen him, the man even showing the presence of mind to put on his hat before coming down to see her. She checked her watch-3:43 A.M.-then unlatched the chain and opened the door.

  “I think we may have found our boy,” Knowles said.

  Laramie perked up. He must have meant they’d got a hit on their custom computer setup-that it had yielded a photograph of Benny Achar taken before he’d adopted his new identity.

  When Laramie asked Knowles if that was what he meant, the author jerked his head sideways and disappeared from the door frame, headed back in the direction of his room.

  “Better to show,” he said, “than tell.”

  They’d imported some serious computer equipment during the past few days, which Knowles had set up on his own in his room. Even to Laramie-who preferred to leave anything with computers to the tech guy who serviced their workstations in Langley-the setup was impressive. A pair of gunmetal gray Power Macintosh towers anchored a system featuring two huge flat-panel monitors, a laser printer, and a box with a strip of green and yellow lights down its front that Laramie figured for the cable modem. As she came in behind Knowles, Laramie saw that Cole was on the phone, using-as instructed-the room’s land line instead of his cell phone. On one of the monitors she could see a grainy, smudged ima
ge of a life raft overflowing with people. The boat looked to be out on the ocean, but was about to make landfall-some of the people on the boat were reaching for a dock Laramie could just barely make out on the right-hand side of the picture.

  Cole continued with his phone call, offering Laramie a lazy salute with his off hand as Knowles took the seat in front of the monitor and motioned for Laramie to join him for a look. He worked the mouse and the image rewound. Laramie noticed it happened digitally, in that way where pixels and squares could be seen as the image shifted backward in time.

  “We got lucky,” Knowles explained, “considering such a measly portion of the actual available pool of images from the past twenty years has been digitized and stored in the consortium’s archives. Most of what has been digitized comes from broadcast and print media, however, which turned out to be useful.”

  The image started playing, the raft-almost a small barge, she thought-rolling in the waves. There wasn’t any audio, but Laramie could see a buffeting of the surface of the water, as though from a helicopter-the source of the camera shooting the video, she assumed. The men crammed aboard the boat appeared very animated, most of them gesturing toward the right side of the image, where Laramie knew the dock would soon appear on-screen.

  “This is a boat full of Cuban refugees,” Knowles said as the video played, “shot by a local news chopper as the vessel docked somewhere south of Miami.”

  The call letters of the local station appeared above the word NewsFile in the lower-left corner of the screen.

  “It’s file footage from the local station, dated December 1994. We’ll play the whole clip for you, but this is the part that matters, when the videographer zooms in. I believe U.S. policy was the same then as now-‘wet feet, dry feet.’ If a Cuban refugee makes land here, he’s eligible for asylum. If he’s picked up en route before he makes it in, the Coast Guard has to send him back. These guys made it-by the end of the clip they all climb onto the dock and out of frame. There.”

  Knowles pointed to the monitor as the image zoomed in, and six or seven of the men’s faces could be seen more distinctly. In another second or two, a brightened circle of the kind Laramie had seen on police-chase reality shows spotlighted one of the men, and the video image froze.

  Even with the granularity of the station’s old footage, Laramie had no problem recognizing the face.

  “That’s him,” she said.

  Knowles nodded. “Search engine scored the hit about two hours ago. I had an alarm rigged for when the system found a match. Woke up, checked it out, and got Cole in here the minute I saw what you just watched.”

  Laramie heard Cole wrapping up his phone call-something about “Thanks, I owe you one”-then he hung up and came over.

  “If it’s December of ninety-four,” she said, “that’s only a month or two before Achar showed up in the first Florida docs.”

  “Yep.” Knowles eased back in his seat, looking somewhat overwhelmed with self-satisfaction.

  “He was Cuban, then,” she said. Then she thought about this some more. “Or at least he came here from there.”

  “Yep,” Knowles said again.

  Cole had come over to stand silently above them.

  “Castro’s last-ditch effort to take down the capitalist pigs up north,” Laramie said, “seems an unlikely version of this conspiracy at best. No way he cares enough anymore. Or has the resources.”

  “We’re in agreement on that,” Knowles said. “But the guy may still have been Cuban.”

  Laramie said, “Maybe. But somebody could have dumped the raft in the water, or put the people on it, to make it seem that way.”

  Knowles nodded. “Could have,” he said. “Of course that’s not the only clue this image gives us.”

  Laramie had the idea they’d been through all of this before he’d come to get her, and decided she was irritated they hadn’t called her over immediately. Though maybe they’d wanted to do some follow-up first-have some “show rather than tell” ready for her by the time she came down the hall.

  “The other people on the boat,” she said, her brain starting to click.

  “Right.”

  “If we search in the other direction,” she said, “working from the faces on the boat, then maybe we find some other sleepers.”

  Cole nodded.

  “Already under way,” he said. “Been dipping into some of the data banks your friend the guide knows how to get into. Once we got some hits on the faces-meaning matches with photos in the federal or local databases Wally and I plugged into the search engine-we were able to determine that two of Achar’s pals aboard the boat were busted for armed robbery-manslaughter charges were part of it too-and sent to prison in Dade County in 1997. Two others have been in and out of jail for smaller crimes, possession and so on, for most of the eleven years since they came over. We’re shooting for some other angles, but so far it looks like nobody else on the boat can be shown to have stolen the identity of somebody who died. At least not yet. It’s a maze-we need to find each man’s Social Security number from a starting point of his image on that tape, then check whether the Social registers as one belonging to somebody who’s already dead. Like we talked about, almost none of this kind of thing is kept electronically, but we’re starting that way just in case-it’s faster than our other search method if it works.”

  Laramie looked at the image on the monitor and counted-twenty-two men on the boat.

  “We’re checking for other boats from the same time period too?”

  “Yep,” Knowles said. “And the search engine’s still working on the other faces from this boat. Assuming the search comes up dry, all this really means is that our pal, public enemy number one, doesn’t appear to have shipped all of his sleepers over on one boat, all at once. Assuming there’s more than one.”

  Laramie nodded. “Suppose it was too much to expect for ten of them to be caught on tape, all on the same boat.”

  Knowles looked at Cole, who nodded his affirmation of something.

  “It’s late,” Knowles said, “but we’re up. We were thinking we’d give you the other updates now, get back to sleep, then get back on it around nine or ten A.M.”

  Laramie had planned to do a roundtable at eight, to include Rothgeb, and maybe even Cooper by phone. Now she might just have something for Cooper to do. There might be some investigative work to be done in Cuba-work up a notion with Eddie Rothgeb on what sort of “Americanization facility” he should be looking for, then send Cooper on his way.

  Maybe I could even go with him.

  She immediately became infuriated with herself for thinking this final thought, and nodded quickly at Knowles in a vain attempt to expel it from her brain.

  “Go ahead with your update,” she said.

  Cole retreated to his seat by the phone and started in.

  “Been interviewing, interrogating, and otherwise hassling every name that popped up in the terror book,” he said. “Plus a few more that didn’t. If you care, I think my tally is up to fifty-two interviews so far, and I’ve set another fourteen for today. Besides the fact that most of these conversations are basically putting me to sleep, I’m on to something-some kind of pattern, I think-I’m just not sure what. There are some consistent, and unique, pieces of his weekly routine-two events per week, I believe-which may have served as the ‘bread crumbs’ we’ve been speculating he may have left. I’m just not positive my theory makes sense yet.”

  Laramie considered this for a moment but couldn’t grasp how it would work.

  “You’re saying he might have left messages in those places?” she said. “In the bar where he hung out with his buddies on Thursday nights, or-”

  “Yes and no,” Cole said. “Probably not literally. And not that obviously. But what I was thinking is, it might be in the numbers of the get-togethers.”

  Knowles said, “Fourth day of the week at seven, for instance.”

  “Right. I’ll have more today after I wrap up the circuit of in
terviews, but if I’m right-if he’s trying to give us a couple sets of numbers as the clue-then this guy was very, very good. For example, I’ve found no evident ‘confessions’ like we talked about before, and that’s pretty rare. Almost contrary to human nature if you’re talking ten years of undercover work. Even cops love to give themselves away to anybody who’s smart enough to figure it out. I’ll give you an example: I met a guy once who’d done some undercover work, and the name they gave him in his cover job on the docks was ‘Bobby Covert.’”

  “As in covert operations?” Laramie said.

  “One and the same.”

  “You’re telling me nobody figured it out?”

  “Nope-the guy busted a whole tier of New Jersey organized crime chiefs while working undercover at a trucking company under that name the whole time.”

  “You said there were two pieces of his routine,” Laramie said, her mind a few lines back.

  “Yeah,” Cole said. “That’s what I’m thinking. But I’m not positive.”

  “Involving numbers?”

  “I think it’s twice per week that he set regular appointments he never broke, but I haven’t boiled down the consistent, well-I guess you’d say least common denominators of the get-togethers. You know, which pieces, such as time of day, that might give us a code from the weekly arrangements he made.”

  Laramie said, “But maybe the meeting times, if that’s what you’re talking about, are giving us numbers?”

  “Not sure. There’s a hundred possibilities, from address to time to day and date, and so on. But he had two weekly things going-outside of obligatory work stuff, ordinary kid stuff, and dates with his wife. If you look only at the day of the week and the time, there’s a few ways to get either two or three numbers for each get-together. What are you getting at?”

  “Two numbers, each in two or three sets,” Laramie said, “could mean he’s giving us GPS coordinates. Latitude and longitude in, what-‘degrees, minutes, seconds,’ right? Three sets. The third set, the seconds, sometimes being left out.”