Public Enemy Read online

  Ebbers looked at him for another little while, then said, “Yes. Tougher still.”

  Cooper nodded again, appearing marginally more cheery in doing so.

  “So there are two issues for us to tackle here today, Lou.”

  “Two issues.”

  “Right. Issue number one,” Cooper said. “Starting yesterday, if Laramie, myself, or any of the Three Stooges should step into harm’s way-for any reason, you understand, anything outside of expiration from old age, which only I am in danger of experiencing-then on the day of that harm, six prominent journalists will be provided all the documentation we just discussed. Laramie and the Stooges, by the way, are unaware we are having this conversation. In fact I am certain she, at least, would be highly ticked off to learn that I’ve added her to my little self-preservation scheme.”

  Cooper shifted in his seat, wincing at the discomfort of the full slate of injuries from which he was recovering.

  “But Lou, I foresee at least some scenario by which you, or the people you work for, will someday conclude the personnel you recruited to work this suicide-sleeper case know just a little too much about the wrong things. I doubt, however, that you or the people you work for would like to see the Pentagon’s funding of biological-weapons research debated ad nauseum by the likes of Hannity & Colmes. I’m sure you had nothing to do with it in the first place, but you and your gang seem to be charged, if nothing else, with the preservation of this lovely status quo you’ve got going. Wouldn’t want to disturb that, now would you?”

  “Go on to number two,” Ebbers said.

  “Number two is quite simple. A single request.”

  Ebbers did and said nothing.

  “You or the people you work for were highly instrumental in acquiring a copy of the ‘Research Group’ memo authorizing funding for ‘Project Icarus,’ or however else the Pentagon referred to the lab in Guatemala.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Why, thank you,” Cooper said. “However, due to the efficiency with which you obtained the document, I would like you to deploy your ingenuity and wherewithal once more. I’ll say again: it’s a simple task. I’ll just need you to tell me who wrote it.”

  Cooper shifted again in his seat.

  “I want to know who worked for the ‘Research Group’ during the period in question-1979 or thereabouts, or in other words, the time when the lab was funded. Mostly, I’d like to know who made the call. I’m sure it shouldn’t be too difficult-hell, Lou, based on the efficient way most of the findings unearthed by the ‘cell’ that reported to you were kept utterly quiet, I’d guess you’re probably fast friends with some or all of the relevant parties anyway.”

  Cooper tapped the steering wheel a couple times.

  “Once you track down the names, you can leave the list, however long it might be, under my name at the front desk of the Jefferson Hotel. I’ll need it by eight A.M. tomorrow.”

  Ebbers said, “Under your real name, or your assumed one?”

  Cooper chuckled.

  “Not bad, Lou,” he said. “Tell you what-take your pick. And just in case there are one or more names on the list with considerable clout-which I suspect there are-it goes without saying that once I get it, well, I didn’t get the list from you. Not, of course, unless I step into that aforementioned harm’s way.”

  Cooper unlocked his door, opened it, and climbed out. He leaned in and tossed Lou Ebbers the car keys.

  “Your driver’s in the trunk,” he said. “Slap him once or twice and he oughta come around.”

  Cooper grinned.

  “Live slow, mon,” he said.

  Then he shut the door and strolled around the empty corner, Ebbers seeing the awkward fits and starts in his walk as Cooper limped his way out of view.

  59

  The alarm box in the building’s basement had taken some highly technical fiddling, but once he’d disarmed the window sensors, Cooper had been able to climb into the Georgetown brownstone undetected-and now sat in a very expensive leather reading chair in the brownstone’s library.

  Besides the glow from a couple of safety lights in the hall-lights that hadn’t managed to keep the place safe from trespassing beach bums-the room was dark. Alone for the moment, Cooper pondered the concluding act of his “snuffer-outer” theory from his throne of darkness.

  The snuffer-outers, which Cooper now believed to be a snuffer-outer, singular, had sought to eliminate all traces of the shipment of gold artifacts seized by the late Cap’n Roy. The snuffer-outer had caught wind of the artifacts’ existence upon the Coast Guard’s discovery of Po Keeler’s cargo in the hold of the Seahawk. The snuffer-outer had applied the muzzle to the tale of the pillaged artifacts because he knew where the artifacts had come from, and what had happened there: the snuffing out of an entire indigenous civilization. Said genocide occurring due to an accident, leak, or spill from the Pentagon-funded biological weapons laboratory operating, until then, under a shroud of secrecy a couple miles east of the village in the same rain forest crater.

  And while the snuffer-outer had, until now, kept Cooper-CIA employee that he technically remained-out of the dead pool, Cooper figured the exclusion would now be rescinded. Particularly since Cooper, and the “cell” for which he worked, had found enough to connect the dots between the late Raul Márquez, his army of bio-bombers, their genetically engineered strain of filovirus, and the lab that had developed the strain.

  The crayon that connected the dots, oddly enough, coming in the form of the sole survivor of the accidental genocide-a woman immortalized, at least temporarily, in a mausoleum beneath some very fine wine. And she’d had her revenge-she’d taken more American lives than the American filo lab had taken from her brethren. Including a sequential beheading of the full roster of names from the “Research Group” memo.

  But in the end, she and Raul had been a little off target: they’d missed the actual author of the memo-the one to authorize the funding of the lab in the first place.

  In the sealed envelope delivered to the Jefferson Hotel came a list of four names. The envelope had been addressed to Cooper’s real name, rather than his current, made-up identity. Though already fully aware of how Ebbers knew, Cooper still enjoyed the joke.

  Four men had run the “Research Group” from 1976 to 1979, or so the new document retrieved by Ebbers revealed. Following a Langley database check of the three names he didn’t recognize, Cooper confirmed what he’d assumed to be true on his first read: only one of the four former Pentagon staffers on Ebbers’s list now held the kind of position that would have allowed him to learn of the Coast Guard’s seizure of the good ship Seahawk-and only one of the former staffers, the same man, possessed the power to engineer the snuff-out whose wrath Cooper had thus far managed to avoid.

  He now sat in the man’s library-the personal study of the Snuffer-Outer-in-Chief.

  When he came, Cooper knew the man would be arriving in a Lincoln Town Car, same as Lou Ebbers always did.

  Henry Curlwood removed his coat and came into his brownstone.

  “Hennie,” as he was called, had been Lieutenant Curlwood during his days at the helm of the Pentagon’s Research Group, but was now known-by Cooper and just about everyone else who read a newspaper-as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Curlwood.

  Curlwood wore a holier-than-thou expression everywhere he went, including in the privacy of his own home-a fact to which Cooper was able to attest as the safety light in the vestibule illuminated the man’s face from the angle Cooper had on him from the library.

  Cooper knew there would be a Secret Service detail accompanying Curlwood, but he didn’t much care. He was betting on a reaction from Curlwood, the Snuffer-Outer-in-Chief, that would preclude the need for the bodyguard to come to his rescue. Cooper assumed the deputy chief of staff’s famously brilliant mind would quickly estimate the meaning and ramifications of Cooper’s presence in his study.

  Presuming, of course, Curlwood was the snuffer-outer.

&nb
sp; “Hennie, my boy!” Cooper said. “How about a fire?”

  He’d considered lighting up the fireplace earlier but reconsidered-might have brought the Secret Service man in the door first.

  Curlwood poked his irritable face into the opening that connected the hall and library as Cooper flicked on the light beside the leather chair-Cooper’s peeling hull of a tan popping to life in the splash of the lamp. The expression on Curlwood’s face popped to life too, as it registered first confusion and surprise, but next, a calming sort of recognition-Curlwood giving Cooper all the confirmation he needed in that one look.

  There’s no reason he would recognize me except as the man he decided not to snuff out.

  The Secret Service man was good. In one swift motion, he shouldered Curlwood behind the wall, drew his gun, took one and one-half steps across the study, and smothered Cooper with a diving tackle, the barrel of his pistol digging into Cooper’s rib cage as Cooper toppled backward in the chair and let the bodyguard spin him to the floor and cuff him, knee-to-head and gun-to-back, with relatively little resistance.

  “Nice work,” Cooper said.

  “Shut up,” the Secret Service man said with a thrust of the gun, hard, into the space between two of Cooper’s ribs.

  He’d begun to radio for backup-by way of the usual communication device secured to his wrist-when Curlwood reemerged in the hall.

  “Let him up,” he said to his bodyguard. “I know him.”

  “You sure about this?” the Secret Service man said, shifting all his weight to the knee planted on Cooper’s head. Cooper thinking the guy must have wanted to add, He seems like a fucking wiseass-I wouldn’t trust him if I were you, but knowing as well as the bodyguard did that these guys didn’t get paid to offer their opinions to the people they guarded.

  “Let him up.”

  When he had, and the Browning had been carefully removed from its spot in the small of Cooper’s back, the Secret Service man said, “Cuffs on or off?”

  “Off,” Curlwood said. “Leave us alone here for a minute, please.”

  “I’ll be in the next room if you need me,” the bodyguard said. He picked up the fallen chair and lamp and set them in their original places. Then the cuffs came off, and the Secret Service man canceled his call for backup and began explaining to his wrist what had happened as he turned down the hall. Cooper noticed the man didn’t holster either firearm-Secret Service-issue Sig Sauer nor CIA-issue Browning.

  The deputy chief of staff hadn’t suggested he return to his place in the chair, but Cooper did so anyway. Curlwood remained standing despite the available clone of a chair two steps behind him.

  When the guard had passed out of earshot, Curlwood spoke.

  “What do you want?”

  Grinning like a kid in a candy store for the duration, Cooper dictated arrangements to Curlwood as he saw them proceeding, giving the deputy chief the same basic fuck-with-me-and-Project-Icarus-goes-public threat he’d used with Ebbers. This time, he mentioned Ernesto Borrego and Lieutenant Riley of the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force as the other individuals who, were they to step into harm, would also trigger the release of the documentation on the lab and the various and sundry roles its genetically engineered “filo” had played.

  “Including,” Cooper said, “the name of the lieutenant who allocated the funding for the lab in the first place.”

  “Fine,” Curlwood said.

  He didn’t ask for explanation or clarification.

  Cooper hunkered down in the chair, staring up at Curlwood for a long, silent while. Curlwood didn’t say anything to fill the void. He didn’t particularly hold Cooper’s gaze either.

  “You’ve got some kind of faith, Hennie,” he said. “Misplaced though it is.”

  Curlwood the crackerjack advisor digested and interpreted in two seconds flat.

  “I suppose,” the deputy chief of staff said, “I could say something like, ‘I spared you, and therefore assumed you’d spare me,’ but in actuality I had you checked out. Quite early in the process. Top to bottom.”

  “That so,” Cooper said.

  “You’re known for your extortion schemes. You show up in my library-logic completes the equation.”

  “You ought to exercise a little more caution with your profiling, there, Hennie,” Cooper said. “Normally, your assessment might prove correct, but Cap’n Roy Gillespie was a good man. And though I didn’t know them, the Mayans in the fucking rain forest crater probably weren’t bad folks either.”

  “Perhaps he was. And perhaps they were. Are we through?”

  Cooper breathed in a long, slow volume of air and let it out the way a slow leak might result in the deflation of an inner tube. He’d given this a lot of thought-short of establishing a scholarship fund for other, as-yet-alive Mayan Indian villagers, what the hell was left to be done? Sleeping Beauty’s fellow villagers were dead and gone. Lying in a hospital bed in Sáo Paulo for the few weeks of recovery his wounds had required, Cooper had ultimately decided that unless he decided to make his appearance at the snuffer-outer’s home armed with a machete-prepared to behead the final target on Sleeping Beauty’s vengeance list-there existed few options beyond the usual self-preservation extortion scheme, albeit loaded with a shot at protecting a few others in the process.

  Seated before him now, however, Cooper found he had to physically tamp down the temptation to throw his Sáo Paulo thinking to the wind, reach up, and strangle Curlwood with his bare hands.

  Hennie, it’s your lucky goddamn day: after two trips down the hatch, my murderous streak seems to have been replaced by a stronger than normal desire for self-preservation-as though for the first time in twenty years I’ve got something to live for, and somehow it turns out that an institutionalized, murderous powermonger like you gets the honor of being the first to be spared.

  Cooper stood. He stepped up to the shorter Curlwood, leaned his face down until their noses nearly touched, and grabbed hold of Curlwood’s head, feeling the man’s fleshy ears and cheeks against his palms. Then he slapped the deputy chief of staff on his left cheek-twice, extremely hard.

  “For now,” he said. “We’re through for now.”

  He released Curlwood from his grip.

  Curlwood didn’t do anything but stand in place as Cooper limped into the hall and said, “My gun,” speaking in the direction he’d seen the Secret Service man go.

  When no reply came, Curlwood yelled, “Give it to him!”

  The Secret Service man came into the hall and flipped Cooper his Browning, which Cooper noticed, upon snatching the weapon, felt considerably lighter than before.

  He returned the bulletless gun to the waistband at the small of his back and headed for the hills.

  60

  Laramie hadn’t told anybody but her supervisor that she was back in town, so the knock at the door concerned her. There hadn’t been word of any new bombings-not that she had heard, at any rate. But once the filo was found to spread into fresh territory-it was happening in small pockets throughout most regions of the country-Laramie understood part of the quarantine process to involve door-to-door visits by the National Guard.

  This city is now under lockdown, she expected her visitor to announce. You are not to leave your home; not even to stand in your yard. Violators are subject to immediate arrest.

  The visitor she spied through the peekhole in the front door of her condo was not, however, a member of the National Guard. She watched as Cooper lifted a thermos and two full-figured cocktail glasses so she could see them through the peephole.

  It occurred to Laramie she was wearing only her panties and Lakers nightshirt. She considered ducking into her bedroom to pull on a pair of jeans, then thought what the hell and opened the door.

  Cooper slid in and Laramie noticed he was wearing an oddly conformist selection of clothes-a sweater with a beefy collar-and-button arrangement, khaki slacks that actually reached below the knee, and even shoes. Laramie couldn’t remember the last time she’d
seen Cooper out of uniform. Taking it in reverse order, it was always-always-flip-flops or sandals, almost always shorts, and usually a tropical-pattern short-sleeved silk shirt.

  Cooper raised the thermos and cocktail glasses.

  “Would have preferred to hold this little reunion on the beach near San Cristóbal,” he said, “but with air travel restrictions being what they are, I’m figuring genuine Cuban mojitos will serve as the next best thing.”

  Laramie shut the door and stood facing him with hands on hips.

  “You look different,” she said.

  “You don’t,” he said.

  Laramie hadn’t moved from her place near the door, and Cooper noted that Laramie, in keeping with the manners of other government employees, hadn’t suggested he make himself comfortable on one of the available surfaces that surrounded them.

  Therefore he, too, stood his ground.

  “Was that a compliment?” Laramie said.

  “Probably,” Cooper said.

  Laramie nodded this time.

  “What are you doing here,” she said.

  “Saying hello,” Cooper said, “and, while I’m at it, congratulating my commanding officer on her relative success in defusing the ‘bioterror’ crisis-”

  “Probably there was some other business you were here to attend to,” Laramie said, “but as the human lie detector machine, I’m going to posit the theory that you’re also here in an effort to impress me.”

  “What gives you that idea?”

  “When was the last time you swung by my actual home?”

  Cooper said, “That would be never.”

  “When did you last wear clothes a normal person would wear?” Laramie said.

  “Tough question,” he said.

  “These almost appear as gestures of the sort that would lead one to conclude there’s no longer an ultimatum in effect,” Laramie said, “requiring that I return to the islands to hop from resort to beach to spa and back again-or incur the wrath of zero phone calls.”