Public Enemy Read online

  “¡Tengo una bomba para matarnos! You move too fast, I’ll kill this motherfucker!”

  He crossed beneath the threshold of the arch in his slow waddle, picked a direction, and turned immediately out from under the arch, pressing his back against a wall, so that the wall blocked the library goons’ view of him. The clackers appeared around a corner-two soldiers and two suits-and then Cooper saw the tall windows behind them and, beyond, the driveway.

  He swiveled the barrel of the MP5 to point it in the direction of the approaching guards, coming to a sorry realization as he did it. You turned the wrong way-you’ll need to cross the archway again to get to the window.

  Too bad-carpe diem time.

  He let loose with the MP5 on the four newcomers, none of the men more than twenty-five feet from the mouth of his gun. The automatic fire from the rifle sounded oddly silent, Cooper first thinking the gun had jammed, then understanding the silencer at the tip of the barrel was doing its thing, a function he no longer required but seemed to fortify his jump on the guards.

  Releasing his grip on Márquez, he plowed a knee into his back and sent him sprawling across the tile. Regretting he’d never taken the chance to practice such things with video games, Cooper rotated the Browning to a normal trigger hold and put half a dozen rounds into the King of the Sleepers while he kept at the four soldiers with the MP5.

  He couldn’t be sure he’d taken down Márquez with his half-ass pot-shots, but he doubted he’d gone worse than four-for-six. Cooper wasn’t sure it would make a difference anyway. The King of the Sleepers’ memorialized army was already doing its thing.

  Maybe Laramie, the Stooges, and the Poobah would stop them; maybe not.

  He lowered his head and started a sprint for the window, turning as he ran across the open archway to fire blindly into the darker library and the three guards within-guards he knew would now be lighting him up without hesitation.

  A bullet punched into his right leg below the knee and he almost stumbled into a heap when he felt a wrecking ball bury itself in his shoulder, but then he was past the open archway and realized he was in for a hard collision with the window-and with the window coming up on him, he let loose with the MP5, feeling the clip go empty as he drained its shells into the thick pane of glass-

  And then he lowered his good shoulder and smashed headlong into the heavy wall of glass. He felt and heard a dull crunch, experienced an odd, fraction-of-a-second delay, but then the resistance was gone, a crystalline symbol crash enveloped him, and he felt the unforgiving asphalt plant itself across his cheekbone and jaw before it dawned on him he’d broken through.

  He rolled to his feet and started running again, hoping his forward momentum would go to battle against his new crop of injuries. The two-tone peal was blaring across the compound and the lights had flared on again as he hauled his battered body down the driveway; the clatter of automatic weapons fire echoed along the drive.

  He turned sharply and ducked off the road.

  Coming in, I had to do it the back way. But going out…

  Past the trees that lined the drive, across a bed of bark chips and strip of sod-and then he reached the wall.

  They’ll take me back down to the chamber of horrors if I let them catch me. They’ll put me in the fucking chair and strafe my balls-they’ll whip, knife, and pummel me, take me for a ride on the electric roller coaster with their fucking car battery-I’ll be left for dead in my cell, chewing on crusty tortillas-

  Get a hold of yourself-you’ve been here before, and last time, you had fifty miles to go, or farther.

  This time, you’ve only got one steep hill.

  Clear it and vanish. Like a Mayan ducking the conquerors in a subterranean tunnel, like the Vietcong in the jungle. Get yourself over that hill, and you’re free.

  Both of you-the guy you left here twenty years ago and the one who came after.

  He tugged his sleeves out over his naked hands and hit the wall running, leaping from earth to stone and cranking his legs like a cyclist. He used his sleeves like gloves, Cooper grabbing the razor wire to pull his body the rest of the way up the wall, feeling the blades tear through to his skin, and then he’d reached the top of the wall and planted his good leg and pushed off-

  The eight-foot drop hurt, but he managed to land mostly on the cushion of flesh provided by his aging ass, and then he thought-

  I’ll be goddamned if anybody’s catching me now-

  And Cooper, with his twenty-year MIA-POW soul in tow-blistered, cut, broken, bruised, and shot-hauled tail into the woods.

  57

  Laramie came into the Weston Reading Room-vacant, as before, save for the solitary, seated figure of Lou Ebbers. From out in the stacks, she’d caught wind of the same scent as before: it seemed he’d brought along another grande Starbucks and commissary-issue breakfast sandwich.

  She took the seat that coincided with the placement of coffee and food.

  Just like the first time around.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” she said, “but I’m surprised: when we began this process you knew my every routine. A week ago I decided it was high time I broke my addiction. I’m working on shaking my java habit.”

  “Nectar of the gods,” Ebbers said. “Your loss.”

  Eyeing him head-on, Laramie decided Lou Ebbers looked fifteen years older than when she’d seen him at this table only a month ago. His skin appeared jaundiced, the man’s fatigue punctuated by deep, sorrowful bags beneath his eyes. This was probably better than she could say for herself, and much, much better, she considered, than the 11,246 victims, according to the latest Homeland Security press release, of the six filo-dispersal bombings successfully detonated to date.

  Most of the credit, in limiting the casualties, was being given to the relentless, multijurisdictional quarantine efforts. Laramie knew there to have been sixty sleeper arrests; only ten of these had been publicized, the judgment having been made that the real number was too big for America’s public relations palate.

  She knew the other basics too: in addition to issuing a ban on all television commercials, the federal government had temporarily restricted commercial air travel to cases of documented emergencies only. In affected cities, only essential services were being conducted, and numerous anti-infection measures were being carried out under the martial-law-type command of numerous federal and local agencies and law enforcement organizations, including the National Guard and multiple wings of the active military. Trading had been suspended “until further notice” in all major financial markets.

  There had not yet been a documented case of the fever in Virginia or the District of Columbia-nor a detonation-but Laramie hadn’t spotted more than a few dozen people out and about on her drive to the Library of Congress. Life in the U.S. of A. was one big ghost town, but there was the general impression, Laramie thought, that the government had things under control.

  Ebbers busied himself reading a sheet of paper he held between table and waist.

  “Numbers are leveling out,” he said. “As of this morning, it’s crossed twenty-four thousand. We’ll grow the publicly disseminated figures gradually, so that their impact can be mitigated with stories of successful quarantines, arrests, and so forth. We had two additional arrests since you and I spoke last. The total accounted-for sleeper count is therefore eighty-five of the hundred-and-seventeen total: Benjamin Achar, the probables your team identified, the six successful blasters, and the rest, as you know, found through investigations based on the list from the Márquez memorial.”

  Laramie nodded. Both her cell and much of the rest of the federal government had worked around the clock on the names from Cooper’s list, investigating backward from the sleepers’ original names, tracking a family photograph here, a government identification card there-some of which they’d been able to match with photos taken under the sleepers’ new American identities. As Ebbers had just covered in his count, they’d failed to apprehend Márquez’s entire roster.

&nbs
p; “Of the thirty-two remaining names,” Ebbers said, “we think it’s safe to assume ten percent of the total, meaning of the full one-seventeen, fell out-died in training, were eaten by sharks en route from Cuba, failed to establish an identity, maybe ‘went native,’ as you put it, like Achar. That puts us around fifteen active but un-ID’d sleepers, assuming our ten percent ‘churn rate’ is reasonable. As you know, we’ve had no detonations for eleven days now. We believe the threat has been mitigated for the time being.”

  “At this point the remaining sleepers would be better off waiting it out anyway,” Laramie said.

  “If they choose to think for themselves, yes.”

  Ebbers inclined his chin.

  “You heard from your operative?”

  Laramie held his gaze for a moment. A story had run in the midst of the suicide-bomb crisis covering the assassination of the president of El Salvador by “rebel insurgents.” Laramie had assumed from this news that the “headlock” Cooper mentioned he’d held on Márquez when they’d last spoken had graduated to his assigned eradication. As to whether Cooper had made it out alive-that was another question.

  “No,” she said. “No word.”

  “Overall,” he said, “how you holding up?”

  “Me? Better than most. We didn’t exactly save the day.”

  “No?”

  “Far from it.”

  “I say we did,” Ebbers said. “I say you did.”

  “Twenty-four thousand casualties? That’s a lot of people.”

  “The task force,” he said, “was in the process of dismantling itself-a total failure-when we assigned you the case. There were one hundred and seventeen sleepers. Not ten, or twelve, or whatever was suspected by the eighteen-some-odd agencies examining the antics of Benny Achar. Twenty-four K is a boatload of people, I will agree with you, but what you did was save the other three hundred million. That is a larger boatload.”

  Laramie examined the grain on the tabletop.

  “We’ve arranged for your return to work,” Ebbers said.

  Laramie looked at him.

  “Malcolm Rader is expecting you back on Monday. Nobody there knows what you and your team have been doing. In fact, nobody anywhere does. Besides me, of course, your cell, and your guide.”

  “Along with the people you work for,” Laramie said.

  Ebbers looked at her-into me more than at me, she thought. She didn’t like the look one bit.

  “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “Either way, we will need to maintain radio silence on the issues we covered by phone after your interrogation of the Scarsdale sleeper. The radio silence will need to extend further: any and everything you and your team did, thought, or spoke about during this matter shall never surface. We don’t want anyone in the federal government to know about it. We don’t want anyone in the media to know about it; we don’t want Congress to know about it. This includes whether you are someday subpoenaed to testify on these topics under oath.”

  There it was again-the we. The we that she assumed would never be fully revealed or explained.

  “As far as anyone involved with the task force is concerned,” he said, “the White House sent a special investigator. You were never named. As the unidentified special investigator, you generated some intel for the task force, and the task force and other federal and local agencies and law enforcement organizations reacted as effectively as possible to the gravest of threats to our nation’s security. The real you, meanwhile, has been gainfully and separately employed by the Central Intelligence Agency throughout this ordeal.”

  As much as it bothered her, Laramie had to admit that the pieces of the suicide-sleeper puzzle that involved the Pentagon, its biological weapons research, and the origin of the Marburg-2 filo were better dealt with later. The only problem was that with this form of acquiescence, the chance these facts would ever see the light of day would decline in an accelerated manner as time progressed. Documents would be shredded; people would be bought; all that would remain in a few months’ time was hearsay from the likes of her, Detective Cole, Wally Knowles, Eddie Rothgeb, and Cooper. And numerous measures were probably already teed up that would discredit any such accounts.

  Laramie had a pretty good idea how it had worked. Whatever authority Ebbers possessed-if any-waging a battle against another wing of the federal government wasn’t a part of that mandate. A judgment call had been made-and while she might well be capable of raising a stink in the media, or elsewhere, she decided to agree with the call. For the moment.

  There wasn’t much choice.

  “On a going-forward basis,” Ebbers said, “the people I work for will retain the right to utilize the services of you and your team. This right will be exercised in a case-by-case manner.”

  Laramie noted the form of Ebbers’s comment. Since it had not been a request, she saw no need to provide an answer.

  “In keeping these services available to us, however,” he said, “there will, and must necessarily, involve a single, logical, and, frankly, ruthless caveat. The caveat, of course, is that every member of your team must remain utterly silent on the matters of which he or she has recently partaken. Any violation of this caveat…well, Miss Laramie, don’t allow anyone on your team to violate the caveat.”

  Ebbers said this with a dark twinkle in his eye, Laramie struggling to return the gesture with a comparable expression, considering she’d just been told that if she or any member of her hastily assembled squad were to say a word about the operation they’d just conducted, the indiscretion would be punishable by death-or something close to it.

  They warned me about this during my training at The Farm. That in taking a position in the intelligence ranks, your successes may never be trumpeted-and your failures, almost certainly exposed.

  Not that I appear to be working for the Central Intelligence Agency any longer. At least not solely…

  Resigning herself to matters, she thought of her moment with Cooper on the boat, motoring over to Cuba on the flat, dark sea.

  Live slow, mon, he’d said, and she let those words roll around her brain now.

  “Report to your office on Monday,” Ebbers said. “Malcolm Rader knows one thing only-and he is the only one who knows. He knows it is not true that you fell ill and required surgery, plus a one-month recovery at a specialized facility, as the rest of the personnel in your department, as well as those in your private life, have been told. You were not permitted to take any visitors, of course,” he said, “due to your condition.”

  “Fine,” Laramie said, her first word of the last few minutes sounding loud and annoying to her as she spoke it.

  “And look,” Ebbers said, standing, “you’ve made a full recovery. Congratulations and here’s to your health. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  On autopilot, Laramie took his cue and stood. She shook his hand as he extended it.

  “Though it may seem difficult to grasp at the moment,” he said, “your performance in this investigation has been exemplary.”

  Handshake concluded, Laramie nodded her thanks, started to say something, then decided to leave it. She also decided to leave her untouched coffee and sandwich on the table, Laramie simply adjusting the strap of her shoulder bag until it hung comfortably as she steered her way out.

  58

  When Ebbers reached the street and his waiting Lincoln Town Car, the engine was already running, its rear door unlocked, per the routine. The car featured heavily tinted windows, which normally kept people from seeing Ebbers within-but today, kept Ebbers from noticing that the deeply tanned individual behind the wheel of the car was not the man who usually did his driving. As Ebbers closed his door, the locks did a four-door stereophonic chunk-prompting Ebbers to examine the man behind the wheel. Realizing he’d made a mistake, Ebbers discovered, upon attempting to exit the vehicle, that the door handle didn’t do him any good.

  Cooper turned and had a look at the initially nervous but gradually calming former head of the Central Intellig
ence Agency. Having discovered the Lincoln to include a handy child’s lock on each of the rear doors, he’d activated the feature shortly after offering the driver a brief nap.

  Ebbers spoke first.

  “Appears our operative has made it out alive,” he said.

  Cooper smiled with little to no cheer.

  “So it does,” he said.

  Ebbers looked around the interior of the car, then out its windows onto the virtually abandoned street.

  “What’d you do with my driver?” he said.

  “He’ll be fine,” Cooper said. “So Lou?”

  Ebbers crossed his arms.

  “Yes,” he said, shooting for indifferent impatience.

  “I’ve been watching the media onslaught documenting every facet of this terrifying crisis for two and a half weeks now,” Cooper said.

  “Have you,” Ebbers said.

  “Yep. And you know, it’s interesting-there’s been nothing, anywhere, on how, where, and by whom this M-2 filo was created.”

  After a digestive moment, Ebbers said, “Now that you mention it, I don’t recall seeing any such coverage, either.”

  Cooper nodded.

  “Probably,” he said, “if a story were run a few months from now, mentioning that the biological weapons of mass destruction deployed by the sleepers had been created in a lab funded by the Pentagon-that would be, well, bad for the image of the good ol’ U.S. of A.”

  Ebbers looked at him for a while.

  “Probably,” he said, “but then again I’m sure the administration would discover and then point out the lack of double-sourcing by the reporter breaking the story, or expose some other questionable ways the reporter generally goes about doing his business, and the way he investigated this story in particular.” Ebbers held Cooper’s eyes. “Even so-yes, such a report would potentially do some damage.”

  “Be tougher,” Cooper said, “for the government’s spin to take effect if, say, the reporter had documentation, double-eyewitness testimony, artifacts, and other hard evidence backing his piece. Come to think of it, it’d be even tougher if more than one reporter broke the same story on the same day.”