Public Enemy Page 33

  Cooper grinned and threw it out there.

  “We can take you as far as Cancún,” he said. “My friend here can arrange the rest. Assuming, that is, the final destination you’ve got in mind is north of the Florida Keys.”

  Laramie turned to look at him-wondering exactly how that would work, he assumed. But he knew “the people she worked for” could find a way to pull it off.

  The guy turned to look at Laramie again.

  “Including paying me for my trouble,” he said.

  Laramie glanced back at Cooper again with a look he decided he’d have to call priceless.

  “Sure,” she said. “Including that.”

  The soldier set his rifle on the passenger seat, took one last drag, then tossed the cigarette into the road.

  “Climb in, Yankees,” he said.

  43

  It was ten after midnight in Knowles’s room at the Flamingo Inn. Rothgeb opened the door to let Laramie and her guide inside, at which point Laramie observed that Wally Knowles’s computer system had expanded to seize every available surface in the room. Newspapers and stacks of printed sheets of white paper stood in neatly organized partitions in the few portions of the space the computer system had failed to overtake.

  All business, Laramie shut the door, said her hellos, and got right to briefing them on their discovery of the San Cristóbal theme park. She fed them the working theory-that Castro had rented the place out-then asked them to generate a list. The list, she said, should include whichever of Castro’s allies they believed to be the most likely theme park tenant. She and Cooper had gained little additional info on the theme park-outside of the patrol schedules and the long-term inactivity of the place-from the FAR refugee her guide had arranged to be flown from Cancún to Washington aboard a military transport, where he would be granted asylum after they held on to him for a bit.

  Laramie then spent almost an hour walking her cell through their operative’s discovery of a possible connection between the genetically engineered M-2 filo, some sort of industrial facility in Guatemala that had been burned to the ground, and the lost Indian village that coincided, in place and time period, with the hemorrhagic fever outbreak the CDC had identified at the clinic in “rural Guatemala.” She told them about the letters “ICR” that Cooper had found on the piece of wood near the facility.

  “If the connection is real,” she said, “let’s find it.”

  Once she’d wrapped up, Laramie watched as Knowles, Cole, and Rothgeb looked at each other and came to some unspoken agreement.

  Rothgeb then piped up as the cell’s newly appointed spokesperson.

  “Why don’t you give us till nine A.M.,” he said.

  Laramie did the math. “Eight and a half hours? That’s not much-”

  “We’ve become something of a well-oiled machine,” Professor Eddie said. “And while you’ve been out on your Caribbean vacation, we haven’t exactly been sitting around with our proverbial thumbs up our rear ends. We’ve got some progress to report, but it’s probably better if we brief you all at once. Eight hours should be plenty of time to isolate the top theme park tenant suspects.”

  Knowles nodded; Cole did too.

  Laramie thought that she should have expected it-Rothgeb, assuming the spokesperson duties for her ragtag clan. She wondered idly whether he’d barged in as the pompous professor of diplomacy and foreign affairs he was-spokesperson, self-appointed-but couldn’t detect any animosity from Knowles, or tension from Cole. Strangely enough, she thought, it seems this dysfunctional bunch has in fact become a well-oiled machine.

  She told them nine A.M. would be fine and left the machine to do its work.

  They gathered in Laramie’s room-Laramie watching as her team arrived and its members chose their seats in approximately the same arrangement as the morning Laramie had given her introductory speech. Knowles perched on the edge of the bed; Cole, wearing shades today, took the chair near the door to the adjoining suite, where her guide was sequestered as usual. Laramie had the same chair at the room’s lone table, only this time around, Professor Rothgeb sat beside her at the table. Cooper was listening in on the device Laramie had decided to call the “spiderphone”-the odd-looking contraption her guide had employed for her first report to Lou Ebbers.

  She introduced Cooper as, “Our operative, whose identity will remain classified.”

  Rothgeb got right to it. For Laramie, it was a repeat of Foreign Policy 101-only with a sinister edge.

  “In seeking to isolate who is most likely to have entered into a lease with Castro for the San Cristóbal theme park,” he said, “we took into account the following prerequisites, evidence, and variables. First: relationship. Whether head of state or rogue terror financier, he or she needs to have had some relationship with Castro ten to fifteen years ago. And while we all know Castro would probably take money from anybody interested in paying, he was clearly involved in some way here, and that means ideology’s gonna be key. That’s second on our list-ideology-since Castro wouldn’t have cooperated to such lengths without this guy being left of left. Third, and quite obvious: this person has a beef with America. Fourth: resources. It doesn’t take billions to build a stadium-size theme park, but it does take a few mill. Plus, our guy would need to be capable of recruiting, training, possibly maintaining, and absolutely paying his sleepers. In almost all cases, the families of suicide bombers are handsomely rewarded by the faction for which they make the supreme sacrifice.”

  Rothgeb gestured toward the phone.

  “Fifth is access to the filo. And while we can’t yet point to a specific connection between the facility our operative discovered in Guatemala and the R & D it took to develop this bug, the confluence of factors is too significant to ignore. Bottom line here: any current or former Castro crony who’s got a beef with America, sufficient resources to assemble these sleepers, and who either hails from or maintains ties with Central America generally, or Guatemala specifically, is moving very high on our list. There are a few other factors we’ve plugged in, but we need to work with what we know, and the elements I just described are pretty much what we’re aware of.”

  Despite the serious issues at hand, Laramie was having difficulty suppressing a smile at how familiar Rothgeb’s overly formal semantics sounded to her. She’d sat in too many lectures, among other things, to take him nearly as seriously as he took himself.

  “There’s a list maintained by the federal government, which used to be called the ‘Strongman Ranking’-back in the days when Manuel Noriega and Moammar Khaddafi were our chief enemies of state-and now seems to be referred to more pedantically. I think it’s called ‘Terrorist Most Wanted’ now. Point being, it’s unofficial, so it isn’t shown around, but it exists, and is regularly updated as a joint effort of numerous agencies, based on a number of anti-American activities and other factors conducted by the people on the list. We have a copy of it, and while our guy doesn’t need to be one of the names on the list, if our suspect is one of those guys it’s another notch against reasonable doubt.”

  Knowles passed around copies of the list, which had various headers and passages blacked out. The list was heavy on Middle Eastern names, and Laramie saw at least a few that shouldn’t have been there but for their public opposition to certain American policies.

  “Coming back to Fidel,” Rothgeb said, “the man has held summits with virtually every enemy of the state, of our state at any rate, on a semiregular basis, in some cases annually, in some cases monthly, some for as long a period as the past thirty years. Anyway, in searching out staunch, fellow anti-U.S., anti-imperialist Castro allies, we’re talking about a long list. With our other factors plugged in, the list narrows, of course-and look, there may well be an unknown, undocumented multimillionaire behind this sleeper operation, and if so, then we’re making a mistake. But we’re prepared to stand by our pick, primarily due to the geographical proximity of the ‘filo lab’ vis à vis his background-and largely because of his background itsel
f. We believe public enemy number one is Raul Márquez, or somebody associated with his regime.”

  Laramie’s eyes dropped to Márquez’s name on the most wanted list. She knew who he was, and knew of his loud “beef”-many beefs-with America. On the resources front, she had her doubts, but he was certainly a Castro crony-

  “He was the longtime head of organized labor in El Salvador,” Rothgeb said. “He’s held a position of influence and maintained a friendship with Castro for over fifteen years. His first candidacy for the presidency was a rout, and he hasn’t looked back; plus, he’s played a major role in helping organize labor and socialism-related movements with considerable political clout throughout Central and South America, to the point where you could say he is, in effect, a coalition leader of a number of socialist states, all of whom have a major beef with the U.S. and its ‘imperialism.’ You know his rhetoric-he and Hugo Chávez are the current heads of state who’ve essentially taken the anti-America torch from Fidel. The part of it bin-Laden isn’t already holding.”

  Knowles adjusted his own sunglasses from his seat on the bed and jumped in, apparently on cue, since Rothgeb leaned back just as Knowles got started.

  “We could make the case against Chávez, and a number of other figures, pretty effectively,” he said. “But for a variety of reasons, we’ve eliminated each of the others. Chávez, for instance, remains in dire need of the economic health of the United States-we buy most of his oil, among other reasons, and it’s his oil money that keeps him in power. His beef isn’t with U.S. citizens, but U.S. regimes. Finally, though, there’s one specific reason we believe we’re right to pin it on Márquez. He’s of native Central American descent-of Mayan ancestry. It’s said that if you’ll listen, he will tell-though only privately-where it is his hatred of all things American originated, and the accounts we’ve found of this tale are pretty consistent.”

  Knowles the storyteller grew a little more animated.

  “During the Reagan era,” he said, “the U.S. funneled big sums of foreign aid to the right-wing Salvadoran government as part of our ‘containment’ strategy against Soviet-allied socialist movements. Around the time Márquez would have been a teenager, there were ‘murder squads’ in operation-the government, which was more or less funded by us, would send out raping-pillaging units to eradicate rural settlements said to be harboring the leftist rebels, which in turn were said to be funded by the Soviets. There was more at work domestically than was understood initially, though-it seemed the ‘murder squads’ were focused more on the genocide of the native population than on eradication of the rebels.”

  Laramie was familiar with most of this history. “So the way he tells it,” she said, “he survived an attack from one of the U.S.-financed murder squads?”

  “You got it,” Knowles said. “Apparently he was the only one to make it out of his village.”

  Laramie nodded. “So, if true,” she said, “Márquez’s story means he witnessed the wholesale slaughter of his entire village-family, friends, whatever-and blames America for the genocide from which he managed to escape.”

  Rothgeb leaned in over the table again.

  “Yep,” he said. “And a recent history of genocidal acts against native encampments is certainly not restricted, in the Americas, to El Salvador-we think there is a high likelihood he used his own experience to recruit similarly disenfranchised indigenous-culture survivors on a pan-American basis. He’d have quite a pool to pull from-even if he was operating solely on the basis of regional genocidal acts perpetrated by regimes kept afloat in part by U.S. foreign aid.”

  Knowles made a “who knows” gesture with his palms and took the baton again.

  “Did he discover the biological weapons lab in Guatemala? Did a scientist who worked there steal some engineered filo and bring it to Márquez? Any number of scenarios would make a great deal of sense on top of what we’ve already laid out. It would explain a lot of the variables here.”

  “He’s your guy,” Rothgeb said.

  Cole spoke up too.

  “Hard to go any other way with it,” he said.

  Laramie digested what her “cell” had just presented. Well-oiled machine, indeed-even being the foreign affairs junkie she was, Laramie was finding difficulty poking a single hole in their theory.

  “I’ll need a minute or two to soak this up,” she said. “Also, we’ll need to get as much intel on him as possible. Can-”

  She had been about to summon the man, but watched as her guide leaned into the doorway as though delivered by synaptic remote control.

  “-we get everything CIA and its brethren have on him and his regime?” she asked.

  “Already in process,” her guide said, and retreated behind the wall.

  Laramie decided she ought to arrange to have the man accompany her everywhere she went.

  Knowles said, “On the topic of the letters ‘ICR’ and the facility in Guatemala, Eddie and I had an idea.” Laramie kind of turned toward Rothgeb as Knowles spoke, thinking, Eddie? “In the course of doing some research for one of my books, I came across the story of a senior Defense Intelligence Agency attaché who was arrested and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for treason. Only thing was, they didn’t nab him for being a double agent for China, or Russia, or whoever else specifically-instead, he was found to have been in business for himself, a kind of freelance provisioner of all manner of U.S. intelligence committee secrets.”

  Laramie thought she was familiar with the case, though she didn’t remember the spy’s name offhand.

  “Among what he was caught selling in the Pentagon-FBI sting that snared him,” Knowles said, “were certain lists. He generally sold his findings nonexclusively-sometimes selling copies of the same document to six or seven different countries-and the most damaging of the lists he sold revealed hundreds of undercover operatives’ true identities. The document I thought might apply to your ‘ICR’ question, though, was a handwritten list of secret Pentagon file names. Not the files themselves, but their titles and whereabouts.”

  Rothgeb jumped in.

  “Once Wally mentioned the case,” the professor said, “I remembered a prosecutor with the Justice Department I’d sat on a panel with, who told me he’d been a part of the investigative team assembled by the prosecution. With some assistance from our friend in the room next door-”-Rothgeb jerked a thumb toward her guide-“I was able to reach him around three this morning and get the necessary approvals to have a look at the document Wally’s talking about. Anyway, here it is. One page of it, at least.”

  Rothgeb turned over the piece of paper he’d been keeping under an elbow on the table and pushed it over to Laramie.

  She saw on the page-which appeared to have been faxed-a carefully handwritten, page-long list of what she presumed to be file names, running alphabetically from the last of the Hs through about twenty I listings. A sequence of dates followed most of the file names, with a final entry on each line denoting, from what Rothgeb was telling her, the file’s location in the Pentagon.

  Nine lines down from the top of the page was the file name ICRS, PROJECT, which Laramie took to be the alphabetical listing for something called “Project ICRS.”

  When Cooper’s baritone voice charged into the room through the speakerphone, everyone jumped before remembering he had been listening in.

  “Reading aloud,” he said, voice distorted by the encryption, “would be helpful.”

  Laramie explained what Rothgeb had just given her.

  When Cooper didn’t say anything else, Rothgeb said, “‘ICRS’ could stand for just about anything, but we did some brainstorming, and if you consider the notion of R & D relating to the first airborne iteration of a filovirus-in other words, one with wings-it might not be a bad guess to translate ‘ICRS’ as ‘Icarus.’ I’m sure you’re familiar with the story of Icarus-and if this was a Pentagon-funded lab doing the research, the irony of our military flying too close to the sun for its own good is palpable. Either way, th
is document specifies the location of a file in the Pentagon-at least the location of the file at the time this attaché was giving away national security secrets-and it looks like a pretty tight match with our operative’s three-letter discovery near the lab in Guatemala.”

  “Might take some juice to dig up the actual file,” Knowles said, “but so far, it does seem as though our squad has some serious cider at its disposal.”

  Laramie looked up from the document.

  “We done for now?” she said.

  Knowles and Rothgeb said nothing for once-but each man swiveled his head to look over at Cole. Cole, meanwhile, sort of reanimated-Laramie thinking that was the only word for it as, with a slight movement of his jaw, the cop came alive from his place in the chair by the door and said, “We’ve identified six probable sleepers.”

  Laramie stared.

  “Jesus,” she said after a while. “When you guys bury the lead, you really bury it. You’ve been holding out on me since last night?”

  “Yep,” Cole said.

  “Good news, huh?” Knowles said.

  “Great news-I think,” Laramie said. “You said ‘probable’-that you’ve ID’d six ‘probable’ sleepers. What do you mean by ‘probable’?”

  “The six probables,” Cole said, “are six cases of identity theft. In each case, the assumed identity is that of a person who died young, approximately thirty years ago. In each case, the identity assumed by the sleeper has been in evidence-in other words, there’s been documentation of the current version of the identity, for about a decade, give or take. Same as with Achar.”

  “We also have images of each of them,” Knowles said, apparently unable to contain his excitement, “in some cases stills, in some cases video, taken at a time that approximates or precedes the assumption of the new identity. Each of the images was captured while its subject was located right at or very near the straight-shot entry points refugees typically take when they’re able to make it here by boat from Cuba.”