Public Enemy Read online

  Rothgeb said, “Those routes have mostly dried up, primarily due to the increased aggression of U.S. immigration policy, but that was not the case ten years ago.”

  “Anyway,” Cole said, “they’re ‘probable’ because we haven’t exactly knocked on their doors and looked around for racks of filovirus serum. It could be there’s no connection at all, but in our view that’s unlikely. There are too many matches with our criteria.”

  Christ, Laramie thought, we may just turn out to be qualified for this gig after all.

  She realized as this thought occurred to her that in one significant way, their job was all but over. They had now accumulated enough intel to push things up and out of their reach: she would have to take a closer look at their research, but it was time to offer the whole plate of goods to Lou Ebbers.

  Time to take her “cell’s” findings to her “control”-presuming her guide hadn’t already updated the man top to bottom. Regardless, it seemed to Laramie that Lou Ebbers-and whoever he was working for-was about to have some tough decisions to make.

  She took in a breath and let it out slowly, refocusing on the discussion at hand.

  “Why don’t you show me what you have on these six people,” she said. “I assume you’ve got a working file with the scoop on each.”

  Cole reached over to the bed, lifted the manila folder he’d been keeping there, and gave it a Frisbee toss to the table. It skidded over to Laramie.

  “Scoop enclosed,” he said.

  44

  The spiderphone was in use again.

  Laramie’s guide had deployed the bizarre-looking contraption on the bedside table in her room. As before, its red indicator light was illuminated.

  Laramie sat alone in the room with her guide.

  “So where are we?” came the static-ridden and otherwise distorted voice of Lou Ebbers over the spiderphone.

  Laramie continued to appreciate the no-nonsense approach of her new boss: do your job, give me my answers. Good. She liked it that way.

  “Where we are,” Laramie said, “is we’ve reached a decision point.”

  She’d filled him in earlier on Castro’s theme park, so Laramie launched in with the identities of the six probable sleepers. Then, feeling more or less like a teaching assistant to her former professor, she laid out Rothgeb’s earlier lecture, providing Ebbers with all criteria, factors, and suppositions her team had incorporated into the “public enemy equation,” as they called it afterward, including Cooper’s discoveries of the Guatemala facility and its adjoining village of death.

  She offered up her “counter-cell’s” conclusion that the Salvadoran president and perennial thorn in America’s public relations hide was their man. She made sure to cover Raul Márquez’s background, which she assumed Ebbers already understood-but even if he did, as the “prosecutor” making her case, Laramie wanted to emphasize the point to her boss that Márquez’s genocide-survival story explained the leader’s motive. She’d already presented the circumstantial evidence, based mostly on his relationship with Castro, which had granted him the cooperation he’d needed for the Americanization training and that the refugee-dump demanded, in addition to Márquez’s potential access to the filo. The motive sealed the case: he had a reason behind his actions, not just the rhetoric he was famous for, and his tale of murder-squad survival gave him the best possible recruiting pitch with fellow victims of regional genocide across the Americas.

  “Bottom line, Lou,” she said, briefing complete, “is it’s definitely a theory based on speculation, but it’s educated and informed speculation. When you do the math, he’s the guy.”

  Ebbers took little time digesting.

  “The six probable sleepers,” he said. “They may be only six of ten, or six of fifty-we still have no way of knowing, at least outside of the apparent enormity of the theme park training operation. Correct?”

  “That’s right,” Laramie said.

  “And we’ve got nothing on timing.”

  “You mean, when the other sleepers are set to be activated?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing there,” she said. “Not yet.”

  A click of electronic static echoed from the speaker.

  Then Ebbers spoke up again.

  “As usual, Miss Laramie,” he said, “you’re right-we have, in fact, reached a decision point.”

  Before setting up the call, Laramie had prepared herself for what she assumed would come next. Starting with the first “job interview,” she’d grown familiar with the way Ebbers preferred to work-meaning she had a pretty good idea he’d ask what strategy she recommended they follow.

  “I’ve got my own ideas,” Ebbers said, confirming Laramie’s suspicion, “but you should take me through the response scenarios as you see them-our choices on what to do now that we know what we know. In other words, what would you do, Miss Laramie,” he said, “if Márquez is, in fact, the man?”

  Even though she was ready for this, it didn’t mean Laramie liked being the one suggesting some of the options she was about to lay out. She counted out a couple of Mississippis in her head, and was about to start in on response strategy number one, when Ebbers spoke again.

  “You can assume something else too,” he said. “Assume, in making your recommendations, that the president, or some other decision-making entity of equivalent clout, has asked the question. That I am simply posing it for the decision maker, and that the decision maker can act immediately upon reaching a decision.”

  Laramie hesitated-the way he’d put it, saying “or some other decision-making entity of equivalent clout,” struck her as an odd thing for Ebbers to say considering he was comparing such decision-making clout to the commander-in-chief’s. Whose clout, of course, was supposed to be unequivocal.

  Unless, of course, you consider Congress, and the rest of the checks and balances, as “equivalent.” But the way he’d said it gave her pause-she knew Ebbers did not let slip a single word, so there was something to what he’d just revealed. And in her independent study paper, Laramie’s recommendation had been for the counter-cell “cubes” to function entirely outside the umbrella of government. She found it hard to believe the structure of Ebbers’s organization would follow every last one of her recommendations-

  There was no more putting it off, so Laramie got to it.

  “The alternatives are simple enough to conceive,” she said, “but to enact-”

  “Get to it, Miss Laramie.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Option one: roll the dice and immediately take out the six deep cover sleeper agents. Remove the pathogen vials from their possession and eradicate the threat they present. Are there ten others? Five? Twenty? Even if there are, we’ve cut down the threat to American lives by a presumably significant percentage.”

  “Next.”

  “Next, possibly executed simultaneously with option one, is to wage war on Márquez’s regime. Immediately. I say this because if the action isn’t immediate, and immediately effective, it could well cause Márquez to sound the alarm and activate the sleepers faster than he would have without the military action.”

  The line hissed and clicked dully, Ebbers keeping mum for a minute. Laramie had a pretty good idea he was thinking this one through in precisely the way she’d thought it through before putting it on her list. He spoke up, once again confirming another suspicion of the human lie detector machine.

  “War cannot exactly be waged with immediacy,” he said, “except, of course, by nuclear strike.”

  “I had considered and was concerned about that version of the war strategy,” Laramie said.

  Ebbers dove in on that one.

  “You don’t think the threat of a virtually unchecked spread of the modern equivalent of the 1918 flu pandemic-and therefore the credible threat to upward of hundreds of thousands of American lives-outweighs the potential damage inflicted on the offending nation by a nuclear strike?”

  “If it is, in fact,” Laramie said, “an ‘offending nati
on,’ and not simply an individual who happens to be the leader of that nation.”

  Laramie counted to two-Mississippi again-mainly to cool herself down.

  “Either way, that’s a call I’m not qualified to make,” she said.

  “Well who is?”

  Laramie felt the heat pop up through her neck and up past her cheekbones.

  “Sir, are you seriously asking my recommendation on whether to authorize a nuclear strike?”

  She counted every beat of the voiceless static that followed. She didn’t exactly want to have to out-and-out refuse to answer one of her boss’s questions, but during the ninety-three seconds of relative silence she confirmed her resolve. Too bad. I’ve been known to toss out an opinion or two where it wasn’t wanted, but there are plenty of reasons the president and each and every member of the Senate and House of Representatives are elected, and I’m not. This being one of the more extreme examples: it is simply not my call, even in the fucking hypothetical. But considering his words from earlier in the conversation, I’m not so sure it’s Ebbers’s call either, or the call of anybody he works for…

  “What is the next option,” Ebbers said.

  “As I’m certain I don’t need to tell you,” Laramie said, jumping in with great relief, “the next option, while less drastic, remains illegal, both domestically and internationally. Nonetheless, particularly considering the complications involved with option two, it must be considered as one of the choices. Option three is to assassinate Márquez. The working theory here is if you cut off the head before the order is sent, the body of sleepers may simply walk away. Assimilate into society, the way it has been theorized the many likely Soviet deep cover sleepers did when the curtain fell. And we do not have evident confirmation that any of the probable sleepers besides Achar have been activated.”

  “Understood,” Ebbers said. “Do you have any additional options?”

  Laramie allowed herself to breathe again. “Other than searching for additional sleepers, which I believe we should continue efforting in any case,” she said, “no.”

  “I choose option three,” Ebbers said, “conducted in synch with a variation on option one and your continuing effort to identify additional sleepers. The variation: put surveillance on the six probable sleepers and see what they’re up to, rather than nabbing them right off the bat.”

  Laramie realized immediately that Ebbers had just ordered-or at least chosen-the assassination of an elected leader of a sovereign nation. An order-or choice, or whatever the hell it had been, she thought-chosen almost entirely as a result of her own analysis, judgment-and suggestion. Could he have ordered up the nuclear-annihilation option? If so, who else was in on this? Who wasn’t?

  Christ.

  Her brain scrambled to sort through the rest of the plan-she’d ask her guide about the logistics, but assumed they’d be provided with private investigators or local law enforcement officers to perform the actual surveillance of the six sleepers. Plus, they’d continue to look for others. Fine.

  Still, she hesitated.

  Did Ebbers have any authority to order an assassination? To order any of what was going down? Even in the unlikely scenario that he did have some newfound authority to order the assassination of a foreign leader, was he saying she, and her cell, should arrange it? More important, if that was what he meant, was she capable of agreeing to it?

  When I signed on, I’m not so sure “execution” was on my list of job duties. Maybe it was. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I knew it was, and didn’t want to think about it. Would we prefer to have taken out Osama bin-Laden in advance, if given the chance?

  Of course we would, she thought. I think.

  Ebbers’s next words answered all her questions at once, though not simply.

  “Send Cooper to pay a visit on Márquez,” he said. “I’ll work with you on the rest.”

  Christ.

  “I’ll read your silence as a form of shock,” Ebbers said, “and offer you some information with which to treat it. In case you didn’t know this, your operative has done this before. A different Central American country, and it was a long time ago, but he’s done it, and done it well. Despite his subsequent capture, in fact, and the passage of considerable time, one might still call this type of assignment the man’s specialty.”

  Laramie once again experienced the sinking sensation she’d felt in her initial conversations with Ebbers. Not only did it seem Ebbers had picked her partially or solely because of her relationship with Cooper, but now it appeared he may well have been planning all along to give an assassination order, and for Cooper to execute it. And Cooper’s long experience in Central America didn’t seem like pure happenstance anymore.

  All that had been expected of me was to identify the target.

  Once an analyst, always an analyst.

  Her thoughts of Cooper brought Laramie to the last item she’d wanted to cover with Ebbers.

  “Speaking of our operative,” she said, “my team would like your help in tracking down a classified document we believe to exist in the Pentagon. As I covered in my briefing, we have reason to believe the discoveries Cooper made in Guatemala point to a connection between the facility that was burned to the ground in that country and the Marburg-2 filo Achar dispersed-and which, of course, we believe Márquez’s other sleepers also have in their possession.”

  Ebbers broke in, speaking flatly.

  “The Pentagon,” he said, “figures in how.”

  Laramie chose her next words carefully, and sparingly.

  “‘Project ICRS,’ possibly a reference to ‘Project Icarus,’ is the name of a file in the Pentagon. ‘ICR’ were the three letters Cooper discovered on a charred portion of a crate at the site of the facility that was burned to the ground in Guatemala.”

  After a short pause, Ebbers said, “Not exactly a precise fit.”

  He’s choosing his words carefully too, Laramie thought. She held no doubt her guide had prepped him on this in advance, but they both understood the stakes, and Laramie wasn’t going to back down and give him a way out if Ebbers planned to bury the possible connection because of the stakes.

  “We know the file location,” she said. “At least the location we understand, once, to have been accurate. If there is a connection, sir, we need to understand it. At least you and I do.”

  She’d planned on using her last phrase from the beginning: it was designed to help him perceive an opportunity to progress and investigate without risk-it was something she, her guide, and Ebbers could bury if they’d need to.

  Not that she intended to bury anything. Which he probably understood. But he might nonetheless believe he could impel her to keep quiet-and he might also want to find out the answer for himself.

  If he didn’t already know it.

  Laramie thought back to the CIA man who’d posed the question in the initial task force meeting-the man she’d figured, on sight, to be a Langley spook. His question had sought clarification on how the CDC had obtained documentation of the Guatemala health clinic filo outbreak.

  That CIA man knew about the connection, and maybe Ebbers did too.

  Maybe she was the only one who hadn’t known. Goddammit-had the whole purpose of the task force, and the subsequent transition to her “cell,” been to confirm where the organism had come from? Or simply to stomp out the sleepers as quietly as possible, ensuring that the origin of the filo would be kept a secret?

  “This isn’t going to be easy to get,” came Ebbers’s voice from the spider-phone. “Presuming it even exists any longer.”

  Laramie understood Ebbers to have just given himself an out.

  He was saying he’d look into it, but she would have to wait and see. Even if he got it, and read it, he could still keep it close to the vest and claim he’d had no luck in the archives.

  Either way, she knew this was as far as she could take it.

  “I have the file location here,” she said, unfolded the page of alphabetical listings
of Pentagon files, and read him the details.

  “That it?” came Ebbers’s electronically distorted voice.

  Laramie nodded at the speakerphone.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s it.”

  “All right, then,” he said, and she heard the line go dead as the red indicator light doused.

  45

  Following his eavesdropping session by way of a sat phone connection to the Flamingo Inn, Cooper snatched an extra towel from a housekeeping cart in the Naples Beach Hotel and headed, shoeless, for the beach. He’d chosen to hunker down in his preferred four-star digs in Naples while Laramie and her Three Stooges, as he’d begun to think of them, hashed things out at the Flamingo Inn. He’d expected at least some sort of shit to hit the fan following their discovery of the theme-park-for-rent; Cooper, being the dedicated employee that he was-and, mostly, seeing little choice-elected to stay stateside while the shit-fan contact proceeded.

  He decided to go easy on his bones today, halving his usual fourteen-mile Naples beach run. He finished in just over an hour-not bad, he thought, for a conch fritter addict.

  By the time he trudged back to his towel and sat phone, Cooper found himself to be a heaving ball of sweat, not quite able to find his wind. Running anything faster than fourteen-minute miles now seemed to cause him nothing but physical grief. Used to be he’d log two miles in the same stretch on the clock.

  So be it.

  He strolled off the exhaustion before returning to discover just what he expected: somebody had left a message for him. After confirming the call had come from the Flamingo Inn, Cooper called Laramie back.

  “Where have you been?” she said before he said a thing.

  Cooper considered the question.

  “I’ve been where I please.”

  Laramie waited a moment or two, and when she spoke again Cooper thought he detected a notch less tension in her voice.

  “We’ll need to talk in person,” she said.

  This didn’t surprise him. He checked his watch-12:45.