Public Enemy Read online

  “You’re the operative,” she said.

  Cooper disturbed some gravel as he led the way back out onto the road.

  Following the GPS unit’s directions, they turned onto a narrow, paved ribbon of road that cut through a dense stand of trees. After a short ride, Cooper encountered a metal gate set back off the right side of the road. The gate blocked entry to what might once have been a dirt or gravel road but had long since been retaken by nature. He’d expected something like this, and he supposed Laramie had too: grown over and hiding the remnants of John F. Kennedy’s beef with Nikita Khrushchev stood the usual Caribbean blend of indigenous and imported foliage-part pine forest, part palm fronds, but mostly weeds.

  Stenciled in faded, red letters on a yellowing sign secured to the gate by two pieces of wire, there hung a warning against aspiring visitors.

  PROHIBIDO EL PASO-PROPIEDAD DE LA F.A.R.

  Cooper pulled his Mongoose into a shallow ditch at the side of the road, propped it on its kickstand, and was approaching the gate for a look around when he saw the slight shimmer of movement between the trees.

  He ducked low beside the gate and Laramie followed his lead. From his hiding place, Cooper was just able to make out the unmistakable figure of an armed, though distant human being. The guard stood on a hill about half a mile back from the gate, barely visible over the peaks of pine and palm. Perched on the near side of the summit was a dilapidated hut-looking no different, Cooper thought, than the endless stream of fruit stands they’d encountered on the way here, but with the alternate purpose of housing the guard currently strolling about it.

  The sentry walked out of view behind the shack, then reappeared on the other side. He wore fatigues and had a rifle slung over a shoulder. He was doing something with his hand, Cooper having trouble making out the miniscule activity from this distance until he realized the guard was having a smoke. Cooper watched him for a couple of minutes, rapidly becoming satisfied that the guard looked the way a guard looks when he isn’t too concerned about the threat of encroaching trespassers.

  “So we’ve got company,” Laramie said. “As expected.”

  He felt her right breast kind of pillowing against the back of his left shoulder. It bothered him that he noticed which body part had touched him as she leaned in for a look, but he dismissed the increasingly, irritatingly common sensation of helplessness and did his best to train his brain on the situation at hand.

  “We do.”

  “Could mean nothing,” she said. “Could be Castro has kept somebody posted here for forty-four years for no significant reason. At least nothing outside of sentry duty over an abandoned military base.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Or it could mean they’ve got something worth protecting,” Laramie said.

  Cooper backed away from the gate, falling in behind the stand of pines that blocked the sentry’s view of their spot on the road.

  “In the mood for a hike?” he said.

  “Lead the way.”

  They found the perimeter fence about two hundred yards into the woods. It was chain-link fencing with rusting barbed wire trellised along the top. PROHIBIDO EL PASO and PROPIEDAD DE LA F.A.R. signs of the same style as they’d seen on the gate were wired to the fence, alternating at fifty-yard intervals. Cooper tried lifting the fence in a place midway between poles and succeeded: there was plenty of space for them to crawl underneath.

  “Congratulations,” he said as he came through behind her and got to his feet. “You’re now trespassing.”

  “I’ve never been good with boundaries.”

  They’d been prowling for close to three and a half hours when Cooper fell into a hole.

  He felt his ankle roll, attempting and failing to transfer his weight to the other foot before the sprain engaged and a stab of agony rocketed up his leg. He swore at the pain, planted a knee, then had a look around: it seemed he’d fallen into a six-foot-deep depression, which he now observed had been masked by a sea of dead leaves.

  “You all right down there, operative?”

  Laramie was smiling at him, and Cooper was about to devise some wiseass reply when he realized she was pointing at something behind him.

  “I think you may just have found the way in,” she said.

  Cooper turned to see that he hadn’t fallen into a hole at all-more of a dry canal bed. Infested with weeds and stunted pine trees, the depression was shallowest on the end Cooper had fallen into, and graduated to ten or more feet below the surface over the course of the length of a school bus. At the canal’s deepest point, Cooper saw what Laramie meant: a set of 4' x 8' plywood sheets, one nailed to the next, covered some sort of door. Cooper counted four sheets of the wood, not a single one of which was holding up worth a damn, all four boards stained a moldy brown-green and covered in moss and mushroom bursts.

  Laramie was already in the canal and pulling at the plywood wall as Cooper grunted his way up and limped over. He joined in, reaching under one of the sheets of decrepit wood and pulling. A chunk of the board broke off from its host and crumbled from his hands. He did it again, pulling off a larger chunk this time. In a matter of minutes, they had enough room to walk through the opening.

  Cooper deployed the Maglite he’d brought along in the backpack to reveal that beyond the plywood barrier, a short length of tunnel ran away from them, partially interrupted along the way by something resembling chicken wire. Behind the chicken wire there stood the wide, inert blades of a massive fan. The housing for the fan appeared more solid-state than the exterior section of the tunnel. It had wide spaces between the blades-wide enough for them to crawl through.

  The chicken wire moved aside with little resistance, its footings long since rusted out. When Cooper got to the fan, he unstrapped his backpack, got down on all fours, and crawled under one of the blades, pushing the backpack ahead of him on the floor of the tunnel as he went. He had the sensation of crawling into the belly of a submarine, passing the vessel’s propeller as he snuck into the engine room.

  Aided by the beam of the Maglite, Laramie followed him in.

  They could walk upright in the tunnel. They hit a fork and Cooper chose a direction at random. He attempted to keep track of the fastest way out; he heard Laramie’s footsteps shuffling behind him. There was grit, mud, and the occasional puddle at their feet, and a kind of consistent, moldy stench. The walls were made of thin concrete, Cooper aiming the flashlight at the wall while he poked around a few places to find that the substance crumbled apart as easily as the plywood had. He wondered how grave was the risk of a cave-in.

  Then they turned a corner, and Cooper caught a glimpse of blue.

  It hadn’t exactly been a light at the end of the tunnel-when he dropped the beam of his flashlight and waited for his eyes to adjust, there was nothing to be seen. But when he raised the flashlight again, he saw it again-a shimmer of blue, almost the color of the sky on a clear day.

  “You’re seeing it too, then,” Laramie said.

  “I am.”

  In twenty steps, the sky blue glow became more pronounced, and when Cooper raised the beam of the Maglite they could see a louvered panel up ahead-the end of the line, and the source of that sky blue glow.

  He moved the flashlight around some more, trying different angles, but it was always the same: it seemed no light was coming from beyond the louvers, but when he pointed the light in the direction of the panel, a blue glow would hit them. Soft-muted-but definitively sky blue. There were no sounds coming at them through the louvers.

  Cooper brought the light around so they could see each other’s faces.

  “May as well have a look,” Laramie said.

  They hunched down at the base of the panel, listening. But there was nothing to hear.

  Cooper reached up and tilted one of the louvers. He held the flashlight up and pointed the beam through a space between slats, and the two of them raised themselves to their elbows, more or less in unison, and had a look.

  That
was when they found themselves staring at the oddly displaced sight of an American strip mall.

  42

  Facing them was a full-size, brightly painted 7-Eleven sign, below which stood the store, beside which store stood a crop of surrounding businesses built on opposing sides of a main drag. The street came complete with left-turn lanes and accompanying traffic signals.

  The source of the blue glow, she saw, was the color the walls had been painted above the buildings and street-sky blue, to duplicate the sky. Every store along the boulevard appeared to be fully stocked with merchandise; in fact, everything appeared to be picture perfect, at least outside of the fact that it seemed utterly lifeless. The power had been shut down, and not a single person was in sight.

  After what might have been five minutes of silent observation, Laramie got a hold of herself. She turned and looked at Cooper.

  “It’s Disneyland,” she said, “inside out.”

  Cooper considered what she meant. “A theme park,” he said, “featuring the parts of Anaheim you find outside the park.”

  “Or Orlando,” she said.

  “Or anywhere.”

  They stared through the panel at the odd view for a while longer.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” Cooper said.

  “So will I.”

  Laramie considered the meaning behind what they’d just found. Despite the facility’s being abandoned, the apparent lengths to which the builders had gone in their attention to detail was staggering-or, she thought, disturbing. You’re the leader of a cell, or nation, or faction intending to lay your wrath upon the Great Satan, and you certainly don’t erect an underground suburban-America adventure ride to train one deep-cover sleeper agent.

  “More like an army of them,” she said.

  As Cooper turned and eyed her, she realized she’d spoken her thought.

  “Come again?”

  “Just trying to comprehend this,” she said.

  “Far as I can tell, it means your ‘counter-cell cell,’” Cooper said, “has got its work cut out for it.”

  “It’s your cell too, Mr. Operative.”

  “Suppose you’re right.”

  Laramie watched as Cooper worked his flashlight around the rim of the panel, her operative and onetime island-hopping companion examining the anchors that held the panel in place. He turned to dig through a pocket of his backpack, came out with an ordinary Swiss Army knife, and used the screwdriver tool to unscrew the panel’s fasteners. He managed to detach the panel without dropping it the twenty feet or so down to the street, and with Laramie’s help got it turned sideways so they could pull it inward. Laramie cringed as it scraped loudly, then made a noisy metallic bang on the concrete floor of the tunnel as they brought it in and released the grip they had on the thing a little early.

  No follow-up sounds came.

  Laramie poked her head over the ledge and discovered that a ladder was built into the concrete wall of the interior, rungs painted blue like the wall. She climbed out and started down the ladder.

  After ten minutes of strolling wordlessly around the shops along the street, they came to stand in the middle of the 7-Eleven parking lot.

  “It wouldn’t be too expensive to pull this off,” Laramie said. “I just can’t believe nobody stumbled across it in the ten or fifteen years it’s probably been here. Maybe it’s Fidel who’s behind this after all.”

  “Maybe,” Cooper said.

  He suddenly wondered whether his cash-paying participation in Castro’s invitational Texas Hold ’Em poker challenge hadn’t been the best of ideas. Then his thoughts of regret made him consider why Castro operated the poker tournament-and why Castro did just about everything he did, outside of rant and rave about the capitalist pigs ninety miles to the north:

  For sheer profit.

  “He rented it out,” Cooper said.

  Laramie, who’d been stealing a look at the “sky,” looked down from the ceiling at Cooper.

  “You mean Fidel?”

  “It’s his MO,” Cooper said. “He’ll take cash for anything he’s got access to. Including, for instance, the San Cristóbal underground missile transport caverns. He’ll take other things-oil, for instance-but basically the man will sell or rent anything he’s got if you’ve got U.S. dollars to fork over. You name it-soldiers, prisoners, boats, property, whatever. Gotta keep the war chest funded so he can keep the revolution alive.”

  Laramie considered this.

  “So if you’re right,” she said, “the trick becomes identifying the tenant. Most likely a revolutionary crony of Castro’s-or at least somebody with access to the cronies.”

  “Ten or fifteen years ago, anyway,” Cooper said.

  Neither of them said anything for a while, Laramie considering some names, recalling photographs she’d seen in the international press of Castro’s many labor-movement, socialist, or anticapitalist-themed diplomatic summits-and the guests he’d hosted at those events, or who’d invited him to theirs. Thinking that she’d brought Eddie Rothgeb aboard for a reason, and this was it: he’d be able to pin the list of America bashers down to the top ten, or top five suspects most likely to emerge as public enemy number one-and chief tenant of Fidel’s rental park.

  Cooper rotated the flashlight beam, pointing it down the road that led past the strip mall and turned a corner in the cavern at another traffic light maybe a hundred yards distant.

  “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

  Laramie came out of her Castro-comrade daydream. She knew they shouldn’t spend any more time down here than necessary, but she would need to see everything while they had the chance.

  She dug into her backpack and came out with the digital camera her guide had procured for her before she’d boarded the plane in Florida.

  “I’ll do the tourist thing,” she said. “Lead the way.”

  They started down the street.

  Cooper was riding too fast to turn them into the woods in time.

  They came around a bend in the road, about half a mile toward the highway from the gate, and had to control their skids to avoid crashing into the side of the FAR jeep that had parked sideways across the road.

  Blocking the way out.

  Cooper had his hand on his Browning before the bike had completed its skidding halt, but the young man in fatigues seated behind the wheel of the jeep had his AK-47 trained on Cooper’s chest.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” the man said.

  Laramie swore as she skidded along the dusty road behind him, turned sharply and crashed, mostly to avoid plowing into Cooper’s rear tire. She stood slowly, uninjured, and the Cuban’s gun rotated to point somewhere between the two of them. The man was smoking a cigarette, the white stick dangling, ash-heavy, from his lips. The setting sun hung over the trees behind the guy, so it was hard to see through the glare and get any definition on his face.

  Either way, the guy looked to Cooper as though he’d seen a couple too many James Dean or John Wayne films.

  Cooper suspected this was the guard they’d seen manning the shack at the top of the hill. The cigarette, the way he held the gun-it had been a long-range view, but if he was right, and this was the only MP around, Cooper figured they had a pretty good chance of shooting their way out of here.

  Making it all the way back to the boat was another matter.

  “American, eh? Both of you,” the soldier said. His accent was there, but his English was strong-practiced, Cooper thought. Almost formal.

  “Yes!” He regretted reaching for his gun so early-Rust comes in many forms, and this form might just get me killed. “This is our honeymoon. Backpacking trip.”

  “Yes, yes,” the soldier said. “But this is military base. Prohibido el paso.”

  They were almost a mile from the highway, which wasn’t visible ahead on the winding road. Unless they bolted for the woods, there wasn’t much to do but try to talk their way out of this.

  “Is that right? We didn’t realize. Did we, honey?”

&n
bsp; “No,” Laramie said. “Sorry, sir.”

  “You like what you find? Strange, no?”

  Cooper and Laramie avoided looking at each other.

  “I will need your passports. You are under arrest.”

  Cooper observed that despite the caustic tone of the soldier’s statement, the guy didn’t make move one to reach for their passports.

  “No problem,” Cooper said, but remained still.

  “How did you travel here?”

  Cooper couldn’t find a good reason to make something up.

  “Sailboat,” he said.

  “Which is where,” the soldier asked.

  Cooper motioned in the direction of the beach where they’d made landfall, trying out a measure of honesty to see whether it would get him anywhere. “A couple hours that way by bike. Not sure what the town is called.”

  Laramie said, “Can we pay you for your trouble?”

  Cooper raised his eyebrows-brash, but maybe it’d work. The soldier swiveled his head to her, then back over to train his eyes on Cooper again.

  “It is almost dark,” he said. “When were you planning to leave?”

  Cooper narrowed his eyelids at the direction the line of questioning seemed to be taking.

  “Tonight,” he said.

  “Are you CIA?”

  “No, we were just married,” Laramie said, “and-”

  “Yes,” Cooper interrupted. “Both of us.”

  She turned to look at him as though he’d lost it. The soldier nodded.

  “Where are you going on your boat?” he said.

  “Southwest,” Cooper said. “Mexico.”

  The soldier nodded again, and that was when the sun lost some of its power, a cloud, or the tip of a tree, obscuring enough of its declining rays so that Cooper could read the soldier’s face a little better.

  Well enough, in fact, for him to see a couple things. First, how young this guy was-maybe twenty-five at most. He could also see the soldier’s scheming eyes-not much different from the look Cooper had seen from Po Keeler during their conversation across the half-ass Plexiglas shield.