Public Enemy Read online

  “Just don’t shrug,” Cooper said, “Ms. Atlas.”

  Laramie turned, aiming, he surmised, to eye him sharply, but even in the encroaching darkness he saw a softness hit her eyes when she caught his. She turned away, looking out at the vanishing horizon again, the direction she’d been facing for the majority of their conversation. Fending off the seasickness, he thought. She’d soon lose that battle. Once the horizon disappeared, so too would her equilibrium.

  Laramie kept at it.

  “I thought if I got my nose out of the terror book,” she said, “and saw something live and in person, then maybe something, anything, would occur to me. Maybe nothing that would explain why I was chosen for the job, and why there isn’t somebody else, or thousands of somebody elses, possibly including the U.S. Marines, more qualified than I to be out there searching for Benjamin Achar’s true identity-and the identity and whereabouts of his fellow sleepers. But I thought I might see something that’d make the four or five puzzle pieces out of a thousand we’ve found thus far orient themselves on the jigsaw board. Christ,” she said, waving her hand, “whatever. We’ve found virtually nothing besides these GPS numbers, so maybe I just want to see what we’ve found.”

  Cooper looked at her, and couldn’t see it in the dark, but thought suddenly of the tiny mole he knew existed just above her right ear, which he remembered having noticed the second time they made love. It had been an awkward session-each of them recovering from fairly morbid gunshot wounds but still finding the places each needed to find.

  Another thought I need to purge.

  “Of course, even if you found nothing,” he said, “you figured you might just be able to use this Havana vacation of ours to talk things through with your operative. Maybe catch a little R & R, even, before returning to strategy central and good old Professor Eddie.”

  “Stop it,” she said. “This may surprise you, but I’m not necessarily interested in taking any R & R. Don’t you realize the stakes here? What’s wrong with you?”

  Cooper almost grinned, thinking he’d finally struck paydirt.

  “I’m trying to figure out who these assholes are, and you’re goofing off?” she said. “No, I take that back: you’re flirting.”

  “Me?”

  “Stop it.”

  She was staring at him again, maybe shooting him an evil eye, but Cooper couldn’t really see her in the failing light. He locked the steering wheel, stood, balanced his way forward, found the onboard fridge he’d loaded up before they left, withdrew a Budweiser longneck for himself and the bottle of Chardonnay he’d brought for her. Might not last long in that landlubber’s stomach of hers on the ocean in the dark-but Laramie, he thought, needs a goddamn drink.

  He came back to their spot near the helm, opened the bottle, poured and handed her a paper cupful of the wine, popped his Bud, then did his best to clink his beer against the paper cup for a toast.

  “Relax, lie detector,” he said.

  After a while, Laramie said, “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He slid back into his place behind the wheel, discovering, as he settled in, that he was feeling something close to what he’d felt during those times when he’d been away from Conch Bay for a week, or month, and took his swimming goggles and headed out to poke around the reef. Familiar territory, warming his cold soul like ninety-proof bourbon going down the hatch.

  “You know what we’re going to find?” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “We’re going to find what we’re going to find,” he said.

  Laramie didn’t say anything for a while. He assumed she was drinking some of the wine.

  “That’s very Zen of you,” she finally said from the darkness.

  “Live slow, mon,” Cooper said, and put away some of his beer.

  Two hours later, nursing his fourth Budweiser, Cooper found to his amazement that Laramie had not yet fallen victim to a bout of seasickness. During those two hours, while they rode in relative silence, Cooper considered, then made his decision, reflecting, as he went in circles, that he didn’t have a choice. Any way he looked at it, he was going to have to tell her what he’d found. As she’d put it herself, too much was at stake.

  He was just going to have to do a better job of keeping the snuffer-outers away from Laramie than he’d done for Cap’n Roy.

  Plus, there was the selfish angle. He wasn’t quite willing to accept himself as a good soldier, obligated to perform good deeds in service of the safety of American citizens. These citizens were part of a nation that had fucked him over, up, and down-with little remorse-more than once. And according to the theory he was following as to the identity of the snuffer-outers, somebody with considerable power, working for the government of that nation, had arranged the killing not only of Cap’n Roy and a few other relatively innocent souls-but, by intention or utter, careless negligence, of an entire Indian civilization.

  And by invoking Laramie, the human lie detector machine, he might just be able to turn her against the people she worked for in service of his own case-and the vengeance those voices in his head were asking him to seek.

  The people Laramie works for, he thought, are bound to know some-thing-or maybe everything-about that fucking factory, the people who burned it to the ground, and the chief snuffer-outer I’m looking to put at the top of my dead pool.

  And considering they’ve made the mistake of hiring the human lie detector machine, maybe I can put this to my advantage and squeeze some info out of the equation.

  Cooper peered into the shadows where Laramie was seated and tried to determine whether she was awake. He couldn’t, so he said, “You actually took the Dramamine?”

  She had never abided by his suggestion before.

  “I did,” she said from the darkness.

  “We’ve got a few hours to kill,” Cooper said.

  When Laramie didn’t say anything, Cooper realized what it sounded as though he was implying-or proposing. He enjoyed the moment of crackling tension, imagined or real, before explaining himself after a while.

  “Reason I mention that,” he said, “is there’s a story you should probably hear.”

  “A story,” Laramie said after her own measured delay. “What about?”

  Cooper grunted. “Among other things,” he said, “a twelve-inch priestess, a murdered chief minister, and a guy who calls himself the Polar Bear.”

  The sound of waves, and a mild rush of breeze, came at them for a moment.

  “Sounds like one hell of a story,” Laramie said.

  “You’ve got no idea,” Cooper said, and commenced to killing time with his tale, careful to clarify how he thought it may well connect to the intended wrath of the suicide sleepers she hoped to thwart.

  40

  Cuba’s Revolutionary Navy, Cooper knew, wasn’t particularly adept at protecting its own coast, with the notable exception of a few ruthless attacks on Cuban citizens, conducted during the citizens’ attempts to flee the regime. Castro’s army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, was nearly as ill-equipped, essentially operating on a zero-budget basis since the COMECON money train-the Soviet Union’s foreign-aid package for communist partners-derailed in the early nineties. The FAR, as it was known, had succeeded in shooting down the occasional Cessna, and its army managed to keep Fidel alive-but such expensive tools of modern warfare as effective coastal radar installations were, for the Republic of Cuba, the stuff of nostalgia.

  San Cristóbal was part of the Pinar del Rio province, on the southern side of the island, just over a hundred and twenty miles from the western tip. They made good time on the flat seas, coming in around two-thirty A.M. to a beach Cooper had used before. He’d navigated tonight strictly by compass, thinking, as he flicked on his flashlight and aimed it toward the beach, that the old Cuban fisherman in Hemingway’s famous book couldn’t have worked his way to San Cristóbal any better. He killed the engine as they hit shallow water and drifted in; after a few seconds the twin hulls made a dull scraping nois
e. Cooper secured the outboard and slipped over the side into the shallow water. He’d left his Reefs in the boat and felt the grainy sand noodle up between his toes as he touched bottom. He pulled the boat onto the beach and told Laramie she could jump out.

  They unloaded their gear-two Mongoose touring bikes and a pair of tall backpacks, the backpacks outfitted with a variety of equipment, food, and drink. Then Cooper pushed the boat back into the water and guided the catamaran to the eastern end of the beach where he dragged it behind a mound of driftwood. Laramie watched as Cooper vanished into a thicket of bushes, broke off some branches, and came out again to lay them across the boat. He came over and pulled the bikes and backpacks up the beach, tucked them too behind some driftwood then came back down to Laramie, who’d stayed firmly planted in the sand in order to shake off the last of the effects of the sea.

  “Made good time,” he said, peeking at his watch. “Sun’ll be up in three hours. May as well catch some zzzs while we’re here at the Mambo Beach Resort. Road’s right past those trees, but it won’t do us any good heading out on our little Tour de Cuba before we get some light.”

  Cooper got busy doing some things behind the driftwood. When he was done, he poked his head over one of the upended stumps and saw that Laramie was seated in exactly the same place as before. Wordlessly, he came out from behind the logs, strolled down the beach, extended a hand and, when Laramie took it, pulled her to her feet.

  He turned and let go of her hand once she was up, but Cooper thought he caught a glimpse of a hard-edged kind of stare as the pale moonlight glinted off the whites of her eyes. He wondered whether it might only have been the angle of the light. But if it hadn’t, and the glare had been real, it struck Cooper that he had seen that look before.

  Laramie crawled out of her sleeping bag and found the backpack he said was hers. She dug through two compartments before finding the place he’d stored her toiletries. She withdrew a tube of toothpaste and her toothbrush and took them east along the beach with her, over where Cooper had hidden the boat. Still wearing the khaki shorts and sweatshirt she’d used for the voyage over, she stuffed the toothpaste and toothbrush in her pockets, made her way carefully into the brush, and pulled down her khakis to take a leak.

  Then she came back down the beach and brushed her teeth. She brushed for a while. She thought about the things Cooper had told her he’d found, but she’d been thinking about those things, and what they might have meant, for most of the trip. Scraping the brush against her teeth, looking out at the Caribbean-or listening, at least, in the darkness-she thought about some other things. They were there during the darkest moment you found in the West Indies, the sky in that predawn, moonless state of blackness beneath the blanket of the morning cloud cover, and Laramie couldn’t see too far beyond her wrist. But she could hear the waves lapping and breaking in their relentless approach and retreat, and there was another sound out there too, a distant sound that resembled a gently clanging bell. Might, she thought, be nothing more than a piece of metal banging somewhere in the wind-maybe on a dock fallen into disrepair a mile or two down the coast.

  As far as Laramie was able to tell, Cooper remained asleep in his sleeping bag.

  When it became apparent her eyes would never quite adjust to the darkness, she closed them and let the sounds of the water, and the tradewinds, and the tapping piece of broken metal sing to her. It wasn’t, she decided, much different from the sounds of the trains she used to watch in San Fernando, back home, where she’d sneak up to a bluff and close her eyes while the freight trains rumbled by in a wash of hot wind.

  Laramie supposed she should have expected what was occurring to her, sitting on this beach. She even supposed she’d brought it on herself by coming on this trip at all. She thought through some more things, then got sick of thinking through all the possible scenarios.

  “Goddammit,” she said, and opened her eyes.

  She stood and kicked off her khaki shorts. She was already in bare feet, and kicked off her panties next. Pulled her T-shirt over her head and flipped it onto the sand behind her. Standing there in the darkness and breeze, she first walked, then jogged into the water, feeling the sand squish beneath her feet with every step, and then, when the water had reached her waist, she pushed off and dove into the warm blanket of the Caribbean.

  She swam around in the shallow water, mostly balancing on her knees or floating around on her back, the water feeling like a hot bath in the cool night. She might have swum for fifteen minutes, or half an hour, Laramie losing track by intention as, after a while, she stood erect, leaned forward against the drag of the water, and walked out of the sea and up the gentle slope of the beach. She flicked her fingers through her hair to shed most of the water from her head, but otherwise didn’t bother to dry off. The warm wind was already doing it for her anyway.

  She passed by her rumpled mound of clothes, turned the corner past the driftwood, and, mostly without grace, located her empty sleeping bag by dropping down and feeling around on all fours. Once she found the soft mat of her own sleeping bag, she aimed left and kept crawling along until she encountered the bulky form of Cooper, hidden beneath the folds of his own bag. She found his zipper, opened the bag until she had enough room, then slipped in beside him and zipped the bag back closed behind her.

  She knew from the way their skin touched that he had never actually fallen asleep.

  In the tight quarters of the bag, she managed to get her arms around his chest. She rolled him over on his back, lay her body on his, and found his lips with a long, heavy, salty kiss.

  41

  It took them two and a half hours to reach San Cristóbal on the mountain bikes, the sun rising, then beating down and heating up the roadway beneath their wheels. Cooper thinking as he pedaled that if you wanted to see Cuba-the real Cuba-the trip was best made by bike. Spend your time in what was left of the old tourist havens, or the bustle of Havana, and you saw the propaganda, the illusion that the communist nation’s economy and overall health of its citizens were on the up-and-up. Put your ass on a bicycle seat, though, and head out on a country road, and you’d catch the real deal. The jovial but understated people who lived here, desperate for a few bucks from any and every wayward tourist, long since accustomed to the disaster that was the Cuban economy but still doing fine.

  Keeping the Caribbean attitude alive, he thought: governments, conquerors, hurricanes, wealth, and poverty came and went, but the sun was always hot and the sand and sea and earth were always there. Live slow, mon-though they didn’t say it quite that way in Fidel’s homeland.

  He pointed to the sign as they rode past-part makeshift billboard, part poster, the wooden placard set back from the road announcing to them in a cursive scrawl that they’d arrived in San Cristóbal. Palm fronds and a batch of weeds had grown to partially obscure the sign. Cooper had been here before; he had expected then, and found himself expecting now, to see some symbol of the past-a communist propaganda billboard, perhaps-advertising what the town had become world famous for: in aerial photographs taken in 1962 and 1963, an American spy plane had identified it as one of the main construction sites which Cuba and the USSR had been gearing up for the installation of Soviet ICBMs. Ground zero, as it were, of the Cuban missile crisis.

  But this morning, same as during his first visit, Cooper found there existed no local clue that any such thing had taken place. The town seemed as ordinary as you got-another busy village at the junction of a few country roads, home to the usual farm-oriented bustle found in just about every such town south of Texas.

  They steered off the road into a gravel flat, flipped down the kickstands, and looked directly at each other for the first time since they’d got themselves untangled from Cooper’s sleeping bag. Laramie handed Cooper her portable GPS unit.

  “Here are Achar’s numbers,” she said, and pointed to the color screen. “And here’s where we are now.”

  Cooper saw from the graphics on the screen that they were approximately
four miles from the place Benjamin Achar had supposedly told them to go. Their destination was on this side of town, but judging from the GPS unit’s directional arrow, it would take finding a side road or two to get them there.

  Cooper handed the device back.

  “You want to review our story, or are you all right with it,” he said.

  They were bohemian newlyweds out seeing the world on an extended honeymoon. Cooper had their fake passports-they’d used these identities before, during their aborted resort-hopping trip.

  Laramie shook her head. “I’m good.”

  Cooper secured his backpack and swung himself onto the Mongoose.

  “I’m assuming if there’s anything worth seeing,” he said, “somebody’s going to be there keeping undesirables out.”

  “Like us,” Laramie said.

  “Correct. What I’m getting at,” he said, “is if the shit hits the fan, I shoot, and you run.”

  Something twitched slightly at the corner of Laramie’s mouth, but Cooper didn’t exactly feel comfortable calling the expression a smirk.