Public Enemy Read online

  Keeler shrugged. “Their rules, their problem. Not mine. Anyway, I don’t want to know any more than that. Know what I mean?”

  “Who made the deal with you in Venezuela? The guy who came down the dock.”

  Keeler didn’t say anything for a second or two. Instead, he looked Cooper in the eye. Maybe, Cooper thought, Keeler was acknowledging that Cooper had found his way to the one piece of information he actually had to offer. Keeler was obviously a schemer-kind of guy who could always work his way out of a scrape-and Cooper had the feeling Keeler was sizing him up. Calculating how Cooper might be of use in getting him out of this bind, now that Keeler was about to give up the only worthwhile piece of information he had to give.

  “The guy in Venezuela is somebody I’ve talked to a couple times,” Keeler said. “He made a few of my deals. Makes ’em for another guy-his boss. Bastard isn’t making any more of my deals, though. Motherfucker. But let me ask you something.”

  Cooper waited.

  “That card you flashed me. Your wallet. Said you were FBI.”

  “Yup,” Cooper said.

  “But you aren’t. FBI, I mean.”

  “Nope.”

  Cooper watched the schemer at work.

  “You aren’t part of the local constabulary-that part’s easy. Still,” Keeler said, “he is a buddy of yours. Isn’t he? The police chief, or minister or whatever. Cap’n Rudy.”

  “Everybody pretty much knows everybody else ’round here, Po,” Cooper said. “And it’s Roy.”

  “Okay-buddy, acquaintance, whatever, I don’t give a fuck. Here’s where I do give a fuck: you have any idea whether that bastard’s planning on turning me over? Extraditing me. Giving me up to the Coast Guard, or whoever.”

  Cooper said, “If you’re asking whether I’ve got some inside scoop on the chief minister’s intentions, the answer is no. If he has any intentions at all.”

  “It’s better for me if he doesn’t,” Keeler said. “See, here’s how it works. Local country holds me, right? Then down the road, sets me free. Far as the Coast Guard, the rest of the U.S. law enforcement organizations are concerned, I never even hit the radar. Nobody files shit, so they forget about me, and I’m all set.” He nodded. “Your buddy extradites me, though, and I get brought up on charges. Maybe some bullshit terrorist charge, way you mentioned it could seem like. Besides anything else, you know what that means for me? Means nobody’s insurance pays out. Not mine; not the guy owns the boat. Not a red cent. Means I’m out of business.”

  Cooper watched him.

  “So anyhow,” Keeler said, “I’m thinking I might have a friend or two, might be able to help your buddy out. Maybe even the guy owns the Trinity. Give your buddy a few things he’s looking to get. Maybe slip a few zeroes into his numbered account in, what, the Caymans, maybe?”

  “You met him,” Cooper said, “right?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “He strike you as the kind of guy be opposed to a proposition like that?”

  “No.”

  “There you go.”

  Keeler looked at him, Cooper thinking the man was probably trying to decide precisely what he had meant by There you go.

  “On the other hand,” Cooper said, “the good chief minister tends to listen when I offer advice. And if I don’t hear in the next thirty seconds or so who it was came down that dock in La Guaira, my next stop will be the civic center, where I’ll drop by Roy’s office and recommend he extradite you ASAP.”

  Another involuntary nod came quickly from Keeler.

  “The guy in Venezuela,” he said. “He said he came ‘on behalf of Ernesto Borrego.’”

  Cooper took this in. The name didn’t mean anything to him.

  “Actually he didn’t say ‘Borrego,’” Keeler said. “He called him by his nickname-El Oso Blanco, I think it was. Or maybe El Oso Polar-I can never remember which.”

  Cooper didn’t need Keeler’s translation of what followed.

  “You name the language,” Keeler said, “but anyway, they call him ‘The Polar Bear.’ Good luck reaching the guy who came down to the dock-I’ll give you his pager, but he was a messenger, nothing more. You want to know who arranged this thing, it’s Ernesto Borrego-the Polar Bear, or whatever the fuck. I’ve worked with his people before. He’s into a lot of shit down there.”

  Keeler gave Cooper the messenger’s pager number, and Cooper stored the digits in the part of his brain the many years of bourbon hadn’t yet destroyed.

  “What about in Naples,” Cooper said. “Anybody there?”

  Keeler shook his head.

  “No,” he said, “only Borrego. That fuck. And you don’t need to pull any Abu Ghraib shit on me, man. That’s all I know.”

  “Catch,” Cooper said, and tossed his boxy little satellite phone over the top of the Plexiglas shield. Keeler caught it, regarded the thing, then looked at him.

  “Your phone call,” Cooper said.

  Keeler didn’t waste any time. He punched out a number, waited for the assistant to get his lawyer, then ran through a half dozen issues without worrying whether Cooper was listening in. Then he broke the connection and threw the phone back over the shield.

  Cooper caught it, stood, and knocked on the hallway door. Within four or five minutes the door chunked open and the guard who had brought him to the room showed up to escort him out.

  He turned to Keeler.

  “Live slow,” he said.

  Just before the door closed behind him, he heard Keeler say, “Whatever,” and then the door was locked down again and Cooper headed back out into the sunshine.

  8

  Forty seconds after Julie Laramie showed up for work, she was asked to leave. This was not an uncommon event, since her boss, the newly appointed deputy director of intelligence, had carefully fostered his reputation as a combination absentminded professor and introvert and, befitting his reputation, routinely “forgot” he’d been asked to participate in certain meetings. Malcolm Rader’s senior staff-of which Laramie was the ranking member-got to do the honors.

  Laramie had booted up her desktop but not yet sat down when Rader shuffled into her brand-new private office and handed her a slip of paper. He offered an apology for the late notice, then asked her to attend a meeting at the address written on the slip:

  101 INDEPENDENCE AVE, WESTON ROOM (3C)

  “Senate-mandated interagency intel session,” he said. Laramie knew there to be plenty of this sort of meeting in the aftermath of the findings of the 9/11 Commission.

  And that brought her to now-grumbling at Rader’s feigned absentmindedness from the confines of her car. By not telling her about the meeting the night before, he’d already made her nearly an hour late.

  From the C Street exit off I-395 she made her way to First, inferring that 101 Independence meant the corner of First. She drove past her destination twice without seeing it, repeatedly scanning the numbers on the block of historical buildings along one side of Independence Avenue until she realized why the address had sounded familiar: because she’d been here before. Turning her glance from one side of the street to the larger building across the way, she observed where Rader had sent her. Staring at Laramie in its full-block glory-While you, she thought, search fruitlessly for some office building that doesn’t exist-stood the massive building with the address of 101 Independence Avenue.

  It was one of three similar structures that, when taken together, were more commonly known as the Library of Congress.

  She felt a swell of disquiet as she found a distant on-street parking spot for her Volvo. Tugging at the parking brake, she saw that it was almost ten-fifteen-seventy-five minutes late. It took her another six minutes to make her way through the entrance of the James Madison Building and exhaust her own resources in the vain search for a sign suggesting the whereabouts of the Weston Room.

  At that point she gave up and approached one of the information desks in the lobby, where a middle-aged male librarian was camped out behind the counter
.

  “Any chance,” Laramie said, “there’s a place called the Weston Room within a couple miles of here?”

  She offered the message slip as a visual aid, and though she smiled as she did it, Laramie had lost all interest in pleasantries. She was more interested in taking some Extra-Strength Tylenol, or perhaps eating some breakfast, which she’d skipped in order to make it to her office at a reasonable time following a longer-than-usual morning run. In the wake of her battle with fellow commuters on I-395, she’d begun to wonder whether somebody at the Starbucks that marked the starting point on her jogs had decided to torture her with decaf.

  Her head was killing her.

  The librarian smiled flatly, his eyes dead and unpleasant behind the lines that creased his face when he smiled. He pointed to the great arching hallway to Laramie’s right.

  “There’s a stairwell past the Madison tablets at the end of the hall,” he said. “Take it to the third floor-that’s the ‘3’ in the ‘3C’ on your note. Then you’re going to follow the signs to the screening room, which you will pass on your way to the stacks on the C Street side of the building-‘C.’ When you get to the back corner of the floor, you’ll need to look around, since there isn’t a sign except right beside the door. The plaque there will tell you you’ve reached the right place. The Weston Reading Room.” He returned the message slip with another courtesy smile.

  “It’s only a little over a mile,” he said.

  Laramie would have appreciated the joke had it not been for her growing hunger problem. She thanked the man with the skin-deep smile, started across the lobby, then thought of something and came back.

  “One more thing,” she said. “Has anyone else asked for directions to the Weston Room today?”

  The librarian thought for a moment before shaking his head no.

  “What about, um, normally? Is it ever booked by outside groups for meetings?”

  “Don’t think so,” he said.

  She thought about his answers on her way down the hall, and after a climb up two flights of stairs and ten minutes of stack wandering, spotted the librarian’s promise of a plaque beside a door. She decided she was literally approaching a mile, or more, from the lobby, but there it was nonetheless-a brass plaque with the words WESTON READING ROOM tacked onto the wall beside the open arch of a doorway. According to her watch, she was now almost ninety minutes late.

  Laramie came over to the doorway and stood out of the line of vision of anyone who might be in the room. She listened for a moment and heard nothing-no voices; no shuffling of papers.

  She decided there was no conceivable way some “Senate-mandated interagency intel session” was currently taking place in the Weston Room. She considered that Malcolm Rader would not willingly, or even unwittingly, send her into some kind of trap; she couldn’t even think what form of trap would be set in the Weston Room anyway, outside of the evident sex-crime potential found in the quiet corners of any huge library. And Laramie-along with the pepper spray buried in her purse, anyway-could handle herself.

  No-Laramie decided Rader had known exactly where, and for what purpose, he was sending her, and this meant a couple of things. First, it meant there was somebody in the Weston Room waiting for her-provided the person, whoever it was, had been willing to stick around for upward of two hours beyond the designated meeting time. Second, she thought, whoever’s in there is somebody Rader-your boss-answers to.

  Meaning she should probably go ahead and take the meeting.

  She stepped through the arch to see that the Weston Reading Room was a collection of hardwood reading tables enveloped by Italian Renaissance decor, approximately the size of a squash court and dominated by the presence of four immensely tall stained-glass windows that lined one of its walls. About half of the room’s lamps, all standing on the reading tables-of which Laramie counted twelve-were lit. The room looked to her like an inspiring, if stiff, place to engage in study. But more than anything, it looked to her like the perfect place to hold a quiet meeting nobody would know was taking place.

  She figured this for the reason a man she recognized was seated at one of the tables at the far end of the room. He was facing the stained-glass windows, but Laramie had a good angle on his profile, and if you happened to work for the Central Intelligence Agency, which Laramie did, it was particularly easy to recognize a man like the one seated at the table in the Weston Reading Room. Among other reasons, the walls of the Agency’s headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, were lined with portraits of the men who’d held the job this man had only recently been compelled to vacate. Laramie had also met with him once or twice.

  It had been about a year since the man had left his portrait-related post, a forced resignation attributable equally to the corrupt practices of his late deputy director and the fatal dose of satellite intelligence Laramie herself had stumbled across and then proceeded to ram up the hierarchy’s tail end.

  Laramie detected the scents of coffee-and food. She saw that the man she’d been sent to meet with was chewing a bite of the sandwich he held in his hand; as Laramie watched, he set the sandwich down and took a sip from the unmistakable white cardboard cup, the single green word that may as well, for Laramie, have said oasis instead of Starbucks. On the table across from the man sat an unopened bag, along with a second cardboard cup of coffee.

  Deciding things were looking up, Laramie approached the table beside the stained-glass windows for her breakfast meeting with Lou Ebbers, the former head of the CIA.

  Ebbers stood. He wasn’t smiling, but on the other hand he wasn’t frowning either. He offered a hand and Laramie shook it. She was starting in on an apology when she thought better of it-hadn’t the meeting she’d been told to show up for never really existed in the first place?

  “Morning, Lou,” she said.

  “Afternoon,” Ebbers said in his trademark North Carolina lilt. “Took the liberty of picking out a sandwich for you. Coffee’s got skim milk and Equal, way I’m told you like it.”

  Forgoing the chance to reply to his jab at her tardiness, Laramie came around the table, set her bag on the floor, and took the seat across from him, which she figured was what he wanted her to do. She took two long gulps of coffee; as Ebbers sat back down, she opened the brown paper sack and withdrew the sandwich within. It was turkey, lettuce, and tomato on a croissant, the same selection she always had them make for her in the CIA commissary.

  Once she’d eaten half of the sandwich, Laramie said, “This does not appear to be a ‘Senate-mandated interagency intel session.’”

  Ebbers sipped his coffee.

  “Doesn’t, does it,” he said. Laramie smelled caramel and wondered whether Ebbers, like Rader, preferred the sissy drinks from the Starbucks menu.

  Ebbers said, “You familiar with the post I took when the president accepted my resignation?”

  Laramie thought for a moment.

  “You’re at the Pentagon, I think,” she said. “But I can’t recall anything more specific than that.”

  “Deputy secretary for Domestic Law Enforcement Agency Interface, Defense Intelligence Agency,” he said. “I also hold the concurrent post of special assistant to the national security advisor.”

  Laramie nodded. She knew that positions like the former DCI’s involved such unintelligible titles for a reason: nobody could ever remember them, therefore no one had any idea what persons with such titles did. She assumed the “special assistant” part of his job reflected more accurately his stature and role. Lou Ebbers, it seemed, was an unaccountable sort of person.

  Ebbers eyed a set of three newspapers stacked on the corner of their table.

  “Startin’ with the paper at the top,” he said, “take a look. Page D1. Column six.”

  Laramie pulled the first of the papers over. It was the Southwest Florida News-Press, D being the Local & State section. The paper was dated just over five weeks ago. She saw the headline of the story Ebbers had pointed out. It said, BURST GAS MAIN KILLS 12.
>
  Ebbers sipped at his coffee again; since it appeared he was waiting for her to do so, Laramie read the article. It was a pretty basic story, a longer version of the headline: an explosion had destroyed a block of homes in a rural housing development located near the center of the state, forty miles east of Fort Myers and about two hours from Miami. The development community, called Emerald Lakes, had been built in an unincorporated portion of Hendry County near a town called LaBelle; it was mentioned in the story that the development had gone bankrupt five years prior, after fewer than five of the two hundred housing units had been sold. A real estate firm called Superior Home Manufacturing Ltd. had acquired Emerald Lakes out of bankruptcy and subsequently managed to find buyers for approximately half the homes in the community. The article reported forty injuries as a result of the blast, none serious, in addition to the twelve deaths. A local sheriff was quoted as stating unequivocally that the incident “was in no way terrorism related.” He also said that the management company, Superior Home Manufacturing, did not appear to be at fault.

  “Next paper in the stack,” Ebbers said when he could see she’d finished. “Feature headline.”

  Laramie plucked newspaper number two from the pile, also the News-Press, dated three weeks after the first. It was a longer piece:

  DEADLY FLU LEADS TO QUARANTINE

  LaBelle (Wednesday)-The death toll from the influenza epidemic that has plagued LaBelle, in Hendry County, has risen to 93, leading authorities to quarantine a portion of the county. Residents of LaBelle had already been stricken recently by a gas main explosion that claimed 12 lives and injured 40 in a housing development in nearby unincorporated Hendry County. In a prepared statement, Hendry County Sheriff Morris Haden said, “All surviving residents of LaBelle have now been admitted to two local hospitals. The grounds of the hospitals and large portions of the town itself have been quarantined so as to halt the spread of this highly contagious and deadly flu virus.”