Public Enemy Page 39

  There was the slight flash of rage-Laramie reading it as how the hell could anybody know these things, I’ll kill you-but that look too, real or imagined, left the basement as quickly as it came.

  Laramie knew Dalessandro, or the man who called himself that, to be single, thirty-six years of age, living in a rented two-bedroom, two-bath townhouse, working as a site foreman for a major rural housing contractor, up to his ears in debt, and blessed with one hell of a handsome appearance. He’d been putting this appearance to work with a different woman almost every night since they’d been watching him-belying the source of the majority of his methodically built debt. According to his many credit card statements, Tony had spent a great deal of money on dinners, weekend getaways, sports events, private-room cash-outs at numerous strip joints, and virtually every other form of foreplay invented to date.

  Not quite Benjamin Achar, Laramie thought. But in a way, very similar: both seemed to be soaking up the life they preferred to lead with great relish. The problem, as Laramie saw it, was there seemed nothing to threaten him with. Unlike Achar, he had no family, and he’d already bought the fertilizer, so was obviously fully resigned to fulfilling his assigned mission. How do you convince a guy like that to reveal whatever secrets Márquez, Fidel, or anybody else on the public enemy team had vested him with?

  She went straight to the only strategy she’d been able to devise, sorting through the options on the Jet Blue flight from Fort Myers to JFK.

  “I thought I’d skip the part where we beat around the bush,” she said. “We’ve been watching you, Tony. You and your colleagues. We’ve seized the fertilizer and the diesel fuel you bought this morning. We searched your home and found the filovirus vials, so we took that too. We know where you trained. We know who sent you, when, and how. But you know why I’m being blunt and getting right to it?”

  He watched her with lukewarm interest. She’d earned a portion of his attention-as to whether that would get her anywhere was anybody’s guess.

  “The reason I’m skipping the pleasantries is for your own benefit. The organization that has captured you is not the Central Intelligence Agency. This is relevant to your situation because CIA, or any other arm of the American government, frequently has to concern itself with pesky little things like international law. Things like civil rights and trials. At least most of the time.”

  She shrugged.

  “The people I work for-the people who brought you here-don’t have to answer to any of that. Plus, Tony, you don’t really exist to begin with. Therefore I’d say the simple solution to this filovirus-dispersal scheme, at least as far as your involvement with it goes, is pretty simple: after our conversation, you vanish. I think that in the place you come from, it’s probably called ‘disappeared’-you’ll be ‘disappeared.’ No trial, no sentencing. One bullet. Two, if necessary.”

  She stood in the way a person would when she’d said all she’d come to say.

  “If you’re interested,” she said, “I’ll give you an alternate scenario. If not, you’ll die an anonymous failure within the hour. Goodnight.”

  She offered him a courteous smile and turned to go.

  About the time she was halfway up the rickety old stairwell, she heard a phlegmy kind of grunt that might have been Anthony Dalessandro clearing his throat. Then again it might have been something with the plumbing, so she continued to the door and had it open before Dalessandro said, “Just a second, lady.”

  The bounty hunter and a different but also large cohort were seated at the table in the kitchen consuming a couple boxes of pizza and Diet Cokes out of the can.

  “Be another few minutes,” she said, then closed the door again and retreated down the stairs.

  When she’d retaken the chair across from Dalessandro, he shook his head.

  “You’ve got the wrong guy. I don’t have anything to do with what you’re talking about.”

  In Laramie’s experience, anybody who used the phrase “You’ve got the wrong guy” had, in stating it, for all intents and purposes, admitted his guilt. She decided she’d play his game and let him stick with whatever he was trying to convince himself he’d convince her of.

  “There’s something else,” Dalessandro said, his voice congested. He cleared his throat again, the same sound she’d heard climbing the stairs. “There’s something else I hear they teach you about interrogations in the CIA. Or at least I’ve seen it on CSI and Law & Order. It’s that if the cops haul your ass in, you should tell them what they want to hear. If you do, they’ll let you out of it. Make a plea-bargain deal. Or let you go. So what does that organization of yours want to hear? Tell me and I’ll give it to you, and you can let me go back to fertilizing my lawn.”

  As nonchalant as he was being about this, Laramie continued to believe what she’d thought would be the case before coming here-that he wasn’t going to tell her much, but that he might, nonetheless, show some of the same tendencies as Achar. Maybe, she thought, he likes his “deep cover” life and, if caused to believe he might have a shot at getting back to some form of it-via witness protection or some such route-he’d give them something.

  “You’re a smart cookie, Tony,” she said. “I’ve got some influence with the people I work for, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about: if I put a word in, you’ll be spared immediate execution. So yeah, you tell me what I want to hear-even if you’ve got nothing to do with any of this suicide-bombing business-and maybe it’ll work out for you.”

  He shifted in his chair, waiting.

  “I’m skeptical you can even help me with any of this, Tony. I think you’re a compartmentalized drone, busy with nothing but assimilating until the order comes in for you to wipe your useless self off the face of the planet.”

  …but I’ll bet your fellow San Cristóbal alumni have followed whatever course you were told to take, and I’d like to hear a little more about it…

  “But whatever,” she said. “If you’d like to walk me through how it is you knew to go out and buy the ingredients for your SUV bomb, I’ll consider putting that good word in. What was the signal?”

  Dalessandro grunted, or maybe chuckled, or was just clearing his throat again, Laramie wasn’t sure. Then the noise progressed into a well-defined chuckle, and finally to a level-toned, mean-spirited sort of laugh.

  He kept at it, Dalessandro utterly pleased with himself, until the laugh slowed, then subsided back to the phlegmy throat-clearing noise. At that point Dalessandro lowered his head and glared at her with eyes that looked, set behind his dripping-wet skin as they were, flat, black, and long since dead.

  When his next words came, they streamed forth in an unabashed, thick, odd-sounding accent Laramie couldn’t place and could barely understand.

  “Good luck, bitch,” he said. “Good luck finding any of us. Good luck stopping us. All one hundred and seventeen of us.”

  Laramie felt ice water trickle down her spine.

  “You didn’t know that, did you, bitch? That’s right-you have no fucking idea-no fucking idea what is about to happen. You’ll never find the others. No matter what I tell you. And I won’t be telling you shit. So just get it over with. Kill me, bitch-do it. Do it!”

  He made a game attempt at leaping from his chair to attack her, but only succeeded in stretching the ropes and tipping himself forward an inch or two. Veins popping in his neck, eyes bugged and frantic, Laramie saw in his otherwise useless lunge an undistilled rage-the kind, she supposed, from which terrorist plots are hatched.

  In catching her glimpse of this, Laramie came to two realizations instantaneously: first, they could torture this guy with every technique known to man, and no way in hell would he tell them a thing. Second-though she supposed it should have been obvious-one doesn’t train, hide for more than a decade under an alternate identity, then mobilize to execute a mass killing without being driven by the kind of anger that no threat, law, or preventive strategy has much chance at all of stopping.

  Benjamin Achar and th
e love he’d found in himself for Janine and Carter notwithstanding-true love, she thought, being a one-in-a-million score anyway, or at least far worse odds than one-in-six-Laramie now understood with a concrete certainty that there would be no turning this army.

  For the first time since her meeting with Lou Ebbers in the Library of Congress, it occurred to her she was probably going to die. A lot of people were-however they’d done it, Márquez’s army of sleepers were now immersed in the American fabric, and whatever it was they were pissed off about-genocide, murder squads, whatever-it was painful and sure enough for these people to seek only the destruction of every last one of us.

  And who the hell was going to stop them?

  Me?

  Something on her hip vibrated-the GPS unit her guide had provided her. It doubled as a cell phone and her team had the number. The thing had surprised her because she hadn’t used it yet.

  Laramie rose, climbed the stairs without another word to Dalessandro, and found a room bereft of bounty hunters in which to talk on the phone.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Laramie.”

  It was Rothgeb.

  “The other sleepers are on the move,” he said. “Not all of them-only two of the other five. But each of them just drove to a home and garden store of one kind or another and bought pretty much the same quantity of fertilizer as your Scarsdale pal.”

  “Crap,” she said. She fought against asking whether they’d seen any activity on the screen that was tracking Cooper’s homing device.

  She knew he’d have told her if they had.

  Laramie asked Rothgeb to put her guide on the phone, and once he’d announced his presence on the line, Laramie said, “Even if you’ve already updated him, call Ebbers immediately.”

  “No problem,” he said.

  “Tell him it’s time,” she said, “to pull the fire alarm. Tell him it’s time-as he put it on his call with me-for the federal government, the media, and everybody and their grandmother to board up the windows and hunker down for the storm.”

  51

  When Cooper came to, he discovered his body to have recovered from its toxic bout with post-traumatic stress, or whatever the fuck, he thought, turned me into a puddle of hyperventilating mush. But maybe that’s what you get when you pay a visit on the worst episode of your past-you wind up throwing it in reverse for real, your body deciding it’s time to curl up and see whether there’re any available wombs interested in taking you back.

  Coming around, the first thing that occurred to him was that he was screwed. Even if the security squad managing the presidential residence believed the intruder to have fled through the woods rather than into the belly of the beast, he held no doubt they’d keep the facility canvassed 24/7 for at least the next few days. And until some slice of evidence turned up proving he was no longer around, they’d be forced to maintain an elevated security presence.

  Cooper knew they’d also need to operate under the assumption this raid was an attempt on Márquez’s life, aborted though it might have been. Point being, he wasn’t going to have much of a shot at getting home, let alone taking down Márquez. At the moment, the fact that he’d escaped capture and torture was satisfaction enough-at least now, having calmed his dysfunctional body toward something approaching normalcy, he had the freedom to mull things over. Could be there’s even a plan C, or a plan D, that could get you in front of the man.

  He sat up in the dank, humid tunnel.

  As much as he enjoyed playing whatever games with Laramie that would irritate her the most, there remained the issue of his mission-which, even as the most obstinate member of Laramie’s team, he had nonetheless come to believe to hold probable significance.

  Having read Laramie’s documents from the terror book, examining the San Cristóbal theme park up close and personal, and seeing that fucking Pentagon memo…hell, even before dropping from the MU-2B, Cooper concluded that the U.S. populace was, in fact, up to its ears in some very deep shit. And were the U.S.-government-employed snuffer-outers who’d taken out the likes of Cap’n Roy also ultimately responsible for putting their own nation’s populace in the deep shit in which it currently found itself? Probably-make that definitively yes.

  But it didn’t matter now-when it came to the suicide-filo threat, too many somewhat innocent lives were at stake. Which Laramie had been trying to point out to you during her huff at Paddy Murphy’s lively Irish pub.

  Possessed of too much firsthand experience staring at the ass end of U.S. foreign policy, Cooper couldn’t discount the danger of the products the Guatemala research lab might well have turned out-meaning that whoever had been culpable to begin with, even if they were trying to silence that culpability now, the fact remained that if Márquez had got his hands on the filo that fucking lab had pumped out, and was now planning on using it in a wholesale bomb-dispersal scheme, then somebody had to stop him.

  And why wouldn’t the bastard stepchild of the government that had empowered Márquez to begin with be the right man for the job?

  Yet here you sit, an emissary of the Great Developer of Weapons and Hate, sent to dispose of public enemy number one-

  And you’ve failed miserably.

  In fact, you failed pathetically: all that you’ve managed to do is kill a couple of twenty-year-old soldiers and suffer a panic attack.

  Flicking on his Maglite, Cooper picked a direction and started carefully down the tunnel. It wasn’t long before he grew comfortable-cozy, even-experiencing that feeling of pulling on an old sock, wrapped around you in a way you’re accustomed to, but not without a hole or two. Like a paroled convict finding solace in the stupidity of returning to the joint.

  Apparently one fort’s maze of passageways weren’t much different from another’s-Cooper occasionally wondering whether he’d turned a corner into the same labyrinth of his imprisonment. Ducking down the short tunnels and into rooms, some featuring prison bars, some with decrepit storage racks, it occurred to him that these passages hadn’t been built entirely by Spanish land barons.

  No historian I, he thought, but some of these are older.

  He decided the more likely scenario would have seen the conquistadors discovering the subterranean tunnel work, razing whatever the natives had put atop it, then constructing palatial forts in which to hunker down while the pillaging continued apace.

  He thought for a moment of Ernesto Borrego, a thought that made him curious how deeply Márquez’s contractors had explored the meandering rabbit runs he was caught in now, and whether there might be any number of buried chambers loaded with some good old-fashioned antiquities the Polar Bear wouldn’t mind snatching.

  If so, maybe a new wave of violence would follow that stash wherever it headed too.

  Márquez’s mansion, it seemed, was positioned at one end of a vast network of passages and rooms. Cooper spent a few hours poking around, and had almost convinced himself he’d seen all there was to see when he encountered something odd.

  He’d made a few mistakes, been through the same tunnels a few times, but the door he now stood before was a new door. Not just a new sight for him on his exploration of the tunnels, but literally new-of recent construction, assembled with materials mimicking the authentic style of the arched, shoulder-high doorways that came with the place, but lacking rot and rust.

  He thought suddenly that he heard a noise, and switched off his flashlight. In a few minutes-when there came no subsequent sound-he wondered how disoriented he’d become, and whether this section of the grid was too close to the main house for comfort. Congratulations-perhaps you’ve discovered Márquez’s wine cellar, including the armed security detail standing at attention beside the Bordeaux.

  He kept the Maglite doused and his eyes soon adjusted somewhat to the darkness. He couldn’t detect any residual light from the tunnel, and it seemed no lights were on behind the door. Satisfied he remained alone, Cooper flipped the flashlight back to life, turned the door handle as silently as he could, and pushe
d open the door.

  It hit him immediately-an oddly familiar, distinctly sour scent.

  He thought immediately of Eugene Little, the malpracticing former plastic surgeon and current medical examiner for the U.S. Virgin Islands. Little always reeked of the scent Cooper had just taken in, mainly because the place the medical examiner worked reeked of it too. Which made sense for Eugene Little and his place of work-but not, Cooper thought, down in these tunnels.

  The bouquet of vinegar and lime he’d just caught was unmistakable: it was the fragrance of formaldehyde.

  He was half expecting some kind of surprise-a bullet or a punch, perhaps-but when he lifted the flashlight to pass its beam across the contents of the room, he found himself caught completely off guard by the unexpected sight before him.

  Cooper had just seen a ghost.

  52

  Her body lay in repose, more or less the way children’s books depicted the fate of Sleeping Beauty, placed on a gilded coffin in the center of the room. Preserved to perfection not ten feet from him, Cooper found himself staring at the real-life version of the priestess depicted by the golden statue from his bungalow-the only clue to her inanimate state the moonlike pallor of her skin, exposed as it was by the beam of the Maglite. Otherwise, the woman looked as though she’d simply nodded off.

  If this wasn’t the real-life person represented by the golden statue-which Cooper gauged to be all but impossible-she presented as close a match as you’d find. Cooper had to assume that Sleeping Beauty here was a descendant of the tribe from the Guatemala rain forest crater, massacred by the Pentagon lab spill.

  But the resemblance seemed even too uncanny for that.