Public Enemy Page 7

  No one has been allowed in or out past the quarantine demarcations during the past 48 hours, Sheriff Haden said, except approved medical and law enforcement personnel. Since the quarantine, Sheriff Haden said there have been no new documented cases outside of the quarantine zone, making him “cautiously optimistic” that the quarantine is working effectively.

  Authorities have been troubled by the rapid spread of the devastating flu, which is said to be an altogether different strain than the avian, or “H5N1” flu virus experts have predicted could escalate into a global pandemic. Despite its differences from the avian flu, to date, there has yet to be a documented case where a victim afflicted by the LaBelle influenza virus has survived. Officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), now working on-site in LaBelle and at local hospitals, confirmed that the spread of the flu appears to have slowed or even halted.

  (CONTINUED ON PAGE A7)

  Laramie turned to the indicated page and finished reading, finding only one additional interesting fact: an official at the CDC had issued a statement indicating that no evidence had been discovered linking the flu outbreak to the gas main explosion three weeks prior.

  “One more,” Ebbers said. He pointed to the last paper in the pile and told her to turn to page A2.

  In one of what she assumed were many follow-up articles to the prior quarantine piece, the last in Ebbers’s series of exhibits, published yesterday, confirmed the successful quarantine of the localized flu epidemic. Thirty-two additional victims had died, raising the total casualty count to 125, but the more recent victims had already contracted the virus at the time of the quarantine and there had been no further reported infections. The article echoed the concerns expressed by authorities in the prior article, stating that all victims who contracted the virus had in fact died from its rapidly progressing symptoms, which were said to be the same as in other flu cases but far more severe. There was another reference to the LaBelle flu breakout being a unique strain, rather than the mutated form of H5N1 experts were wary might develop soon.

  Concluding she ought to read newspapers more often and shake her addiction to the heroin of cable television news, Laramie deposited the third newspaper on the other two, drank most of the rest of her coffee, set the cup on the table, and folded her hands in front of her. She felt awkward in a specific way she couldn’t place.

  “Be interested,” Ebbers said, “in hearing what you think.”

  It suddenly occurred to Laramie the reason she was feeling uncomfortable: it seemed she had stumbled into a job interview. In realizing this, she found it difficult to determine how she was expected to act-what she was supposed to say. Sure, Ebbers had summoned her by way of Malcolm Rader, and appeared to be interviewing her-but for what position, she had no idea.

  Makes for a tough interview.

  “First of all,” she said, “I suppose I’d hazard a guess there’s a higher likelihood than the Centers for Disease Control admits that the gas main explosion and the flu epidemic were linked.”

  Ebbers watched her but didn’t interject.

  “And if there is, in fact, some kind of connection,” she said, “then it could also follow that the sheriff was slightly premature in dismissing the possibility that the explosion was an act of terrorism. I’d guess, therefore, that’s why he specifically came out and said so. But anybody you show these three articles to-at least anyone in our line of work-would draw the same conclusions, I think.”

  “Possibly,” Ebbers said.

  Laramie shifted in her chair, which still didn’t help her figure out what to do with her hands. After a while, when Ebbers hadn’t said anything further, Laramie locked them together on the surface of the table.

  “If you’d like me to assess potential culpability,” she said, “based on the theory it’s an act of terrorism and the blast and virus are connected, then I’m going to need to ask a lot of questions.”

  “All right.”

  Laramie wasn’t sure whether he’d meant, All right, then go ahead and ask the questions, but considering that for the second time in as many minutes, Ebbers said nothing further, Laramie figured it was safe to conclude he wanted her to proceed.

  She was, after all, in a job interview.

  “Did the explosion actually have anything to do with a burst gas main?” she said. “If not, what was the nature of the explosion? Where did it originate? What were the materials used to cause the blast? Was it a crude car bomb, or sophisticated plastic explosive charge? Remote detonation or suicide bomber? If suicide, who was driving the car? Who owned it?”

  Ebbers remained silent and unexpressive, so Laramie went on.

  “If the flu epidemic was tied to the explosion, what was the connection? Did the bomb release some kind of toxin that results in flu-like symptoms? If it’s actually the flu, what strain of influenza is this? New? Old? If old, where else has this severe an outbreak occurred before? Were studies done on that outbreak and samples of the virus stored at a lab? Who had access to that lab? Or is it really the first true outbreak of mutated H5N1? I suppose I could continue.”

  Ebbers said, “As you know, the independent counsel lauded your efforts in the Mango Cay matter. We agree with the counsel’s assessment.”

  Since it was hard to miss, Laramie noted Ebbers’s use of the word we. She knew better than to ask.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “What we found most compelling,” Ebbers said, “was your allegiance. Even when both your job security and explicit orders from your superiors countermanded that allegiance, you remained impervious to influence from outside or above, and concentrated solely on shutting down what you perceived to be an intended act of deadly force by an enemy of the state. Also it did not appear that you required much in the way of supervision in the course of getting the job done.”

  Laramie wasn’t sure what to say, so she didn’t say anything.

  Ebbers reached into the interior breast pocket of his suit and came out with a stapled document of something in the order of fifty pages. It was creased down the middle from the way he’d stored it in his pocket.

  “One of your classes at Northwestern was an independent study project,” he said.

  Laramie had to think about this for a moment, mainly since she’d taken two such courses. In each, she’d been required to generate a limited version of a thesis but, other than regular meetings with the designated professor, you didn’t have to attend class to get credits for the courses. Some chose the electives out of laziness. Laramie had taken hers for two reasons: first, she’d wanted to explore a pair of topics that no available courses covered; and, mostly, she’d seen it as an opportunity to spend a little more time with a professor named Eddie Rothgeb. Which in retrospect had been a very bad idea.

  “Actually I took two,” she said. “Junior and senior years.”

  Ebbers flattened the photocopied document on the table before him and Laramie could plainly see the cover page she’d printed for her senior independent study paper. The former DCI turned the cover and flipped through the first few pages of the report, which she recalled being fifty-seven pages in length. At the time, her longest report of any kind.

  As Ebbers began leafing through some of the pages, Laramie could see that the copy Ebbers had brought with him had various sections underlined, highlighted, even boxed. Handwritten and typed notes bled from the margins across the original text, and at the top of each page was a stamp. The only word she could make out on the stamp was CRYPTOCLEARANCE. There was a hyphen followed by a number at the tail end of the word, but from across the table she couldn’t make out the number. The number, she knew, would indicate the level of clearance required to gain access to the document, and while she might not have been able to see the number, the odd fact remained that Laramie’s fifty-seven-page undergraduate independent study paper appeared to have been classified at one of the nine highest levels of secrecy in the American government.

  The higher the number that followed, the fewer t
he number of people who were allowed to see it: while CRYPTOCLEARANCE-1 might have meant that every member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the president’s cabinet, and three or four tiers of CIA, NSA, and FBI senior staff had access, CRYPTOCLEARANCE-9 was supposed to mean that maybe eight to ten people on earth made the cut.

  Laramie felt the twirl of butterflies in her stomach as she thought she caught the numeral 6 on one of the stamp marks. This seemed impossible, or at the very least disturbingly strange. Then Ebbers turned the page and she realized it was not a 6 at all-because, as was rather obvious, she was reading upside down.

  What?

  Laramie attempted to freeze her brain for a moment. Stop it from reacting and point it, instead, in the direction of her paper. She preferred to do this by a method recommended to her by her father; he’d told her about it during one of his drunken fits, if she recalled correctly, but it had stuck. He’d recommended she count to three in the famous childhood manner-by then, he told her, you’d better be able to figure out what to do.

  One-Mississippi.

  She thought of the topic she had written about. She thought about the case she had made, how and what she’d spelled out in the paper.

  Two-Mississippi.

  As she considered what was in the report, and what it could mean that it was highly classified and in the hands of a senior intelligence bureaucrat with a mysterious and forgettable job title, the butterflies in her stomach condensed to a heavy, concentrated mass that sank toward her legs.

  Three.

  She decided to wait to hear what Ebbers had to say about the paper before jumping to any conclusions. She felt the sinking mass ease, and lift-after all, it was almost impossible, even ludicrous, to think what she was considering might be the case-

  “What’s most interesting,” Ebbers said, glancing through her report, “is that you wrote this five months prior to 9/11.”

  The way he looked at the pages, Laramie could tell he wasn’t reading. That he’d seen it before and knew it well.

  “Terrorism,” Laramie said, mainly to buy some time, “wasn’t, um, exactly a new phenomenon, even then, of course.” She immediately felt foolish for saying this. “There are obviously more than a few mistakes in there, sir, as-well, as I’m sure you know.”

  Ebbers smiled a tight-lipped smile.

  “Fewer than you might think,” he said.

  He refolded the document along its crease and put it back in his pocket.

  “A car service will pick you up from your hotel room tomorrow after an early wake-up call. You will be taking a morning flight out of Dulles. A bag has been packed for you and will be delivered to you at your destination in Florida. Your own car will be returned to your condominium and the keys will be waiting for you on the kitchen counter-right where you always leave them-upon your return.”

  Laramie said, “Is this an open-ended trip?”

  “I’ll get to that,” he said. “It’s important no one from your professional or personal life knows where you’re going. We’ll watch the hotel and your condo during the next forty-eight hours and monitor the activities of some of the people you encounter as a matter of routine. Some will understand you to have called in sick.”

  Laramie stared, not ready to appreciate the irony of calling in sick in order to investigate a strange flu epidemic.

  “A tour guide will greet you on arrival and transport you to the operations center. During this investigation, your guide will arrange for all necessary logistics. You will meet with the principals heading the investigation to date. There is, as you might expect, a multijurisdictional pig fuck of special agents-in-charge, case officers, Homeland Security officials, CDC scientists, doctors, local authorities, even diplomats and politicians waist-deep in the mud puddle. Talk to any and all such personnel as you see fit. You will have access to all the documents these people have seen or generated; have a look at these too. Do whatever it is you prefer to do in the course of your assignment, Miss Laramie, but one way or the other, I’ll need you to recommend to me how we should go about finding the culprits and shutting them down. I’ll need a report from you on this topic seventy-two hours from the time you arrive in Florida.”

  Ebbers scratched his chin.

  “Meaning,” he said, “I want you to get in there and figure out what the fuck is going on, and once you’re there, you’ve got three days to do it.”

  Laramie looked around the table but could find only the uneaten half of the sandwich, the empty cups, the sandwich bags, the newspapers, and the reading lamp, but no apparent hint as to what was going on here. She knew this much: Ebbers had shown her the copy of her independent study paper only so she could see that he had it-perhaps see the stamps on it. This meant he was telling her something; she knew that too. But he certainly couldn’t have been telling her what she thought he was telling her.

  Except that he just had-hadn’t he?

  Laramie tried to get a grip and think through the circumstances from a practical point of view. In a few seconds, she’d thought of some things.

  “Um,” she said, “taking the part I believe I understand from this, I should say that I find it unlikely the-well, let’s say the special agent-in-charge working this thing for the Bureau gets a call. From me. ‘I’d like to talk to you about the case. Everything you know. What you think happened here, and why.’ Let’s be honest, he won’t exactly be forthcoming-”

  “He’ll talk to you. And so will everybody else.”

  Laramie blinked.

  “In its way, the investigation is now ours,” Ebbers said. “You are now working for us. Your guide will give you the rest.”

  There it was again-ours. Us. She looked at him, and he looked back at her in silence. She wasn’t going to ask the questions she wanted to ask. She could tell that if she asked, at least directly, he wouldn’t answer. At least not directly. Maybe she didn’t need to ask; maybe she already knew.

  “One more question,” Laramie said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I recognize that you wouldn’t tell me anyway, but if I don’t ask the question I’ll wonder whether I should have. I can’t not ask the question.”

  Ebbers inclined his head.

  “Is this an exercise?” Laramie said.

  Ebbers thought for a moment.

  “A fair question,” he said. “You ask, I presume, because you haven’t heard of any organization of the sort that has just ‘borrowed’ you. Also because you hadn’t previously studied, and so are only vaguely familiar with, the news coverage of the Florida incidents. And so on.”

  “Yes.”

  Lou Ebbers smiled.

  “I would like you to treat this as though it is not,” he said.

  Ebbers stood, drained his coffee, gathered the newspapers, tucked them under an arm, crumpled his sandwich bag, removed the plastic lid from the coffee, stuffed the crumpled bag in the coffee cup, closed it, and proffered a two-finger salute.

  “Good luck,” he said, and walked out, leaving Laramie alone with the remaining half of her turkey sandwich and the empty Starbucks cup.

  9

  Because Cooper refused to fly American Eagle, he rode his Apache to St. Thomas, where he’d discovered by way of a few clicks that a direct flight ran to Dallas twice a day-American Airlines, no Eagle. He connected to Austin and was picked up outside the baggage claim by a stork-legged, humongous-breasted woman who was already giggling when Cooper saw her leap out of her Mercedes. She was already giggling, he supposed, because she was always giggling. She had bee-stung lips, long black hair lopped off into bangs, and big, round eyes with creases in the wings that made her look as if she were smiling even when she wasn’t, which, from Cooper’s three-day, hands-on experiential episode, wasn’t often. She was a tenured professor of archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin, though this wasn’t how Cooper knew her: he knew her as one of three women chartering a trimaran out of Tortola during a “ladies’ week out,” a six-day trip bopping around the snork
eling and watering holes of the Virgin Islands.

  The Conch Bay Beach Club Bar & Grill had been a natural stop on the tour, but after the planned one-night stay, Susannah had convinced her two friends to leave her at the club for the last few days of her trip, while they caroused about the rest of the Virgins and retrieved her on their return to Road Town.

  It seemed Cooper had triggered the release of a hormone from a long-dormant gland; despite Susannah’s admitting, over their first drink, to going without sexual activity for six years running, Cooper seemed to remember nineteen as the number of times they had managed to copulate in the succeeding seventy-two hours. Susannah had handed him her card on her exit walk out the dock-flipping it over, tapping him on the ass, kissing him on the cheek, and waving so-long as Cooper read the inscription she’d written on the back of the card: If you ever want to try that again, you call me right away, Island Man!

  Seeing as how the federal government had already handed Minister Roy his share of expense and inconvenience by way of the Coast Guard’s antics, Cooper decided he’d charge the first class airfare for the trip to Austin on his Agency expense account. Take a pound of flesh out of Uncle Sam’s hide: a $1,600 penalty for causing a temporary disruption of paradise.

  Cooper came to the States twice a year at most. When he came, he tried to limit the extent of his travels to somewhere around a thousand-mile radius from Conch Bay. This pretty much meant Florida, though he was occasionally willing to stretch and hit a spot along the Gulf of Mexico or, on the rare occasion when it became necessary, Washington. Normally he stayed away from points in between. Normally, he stayed away, period.

  He’d called Susannah and asked whether she would be the right person to speak with about sourcing and dating a collection of apparent Central or South American native artifacts. Susannah had squealed with glee and answered in the affirmative. Cooper thinking that it wasn’t a bad thing, getting that kind of response, particularly with him calling for the first time since their three-day tryst eleven months back.