Painkiller Read online

  A beanpole of a kid, exceedingly tall and exceedingly skinny, was trekking down the barren face of the hill-the boy maybe seven foot one and a buck-fifty tops, Cooper figuring him for seventeen or eighteen years of age-and, out here, where rain might not have fallen for two years, the kid had a half-dozen fish dangling from a short length of twine draped over one of his arms. Cooper thinking the minute he saw the kid that what he ought to have working for him was the kind of person tourists usually had to beat back with a stick in the Caribbean: a guide.

  And if he were planning on journeying through uncharted Haitian badlands in search of a Bizango medicine man with the aid of a guide, then it might not be a bad idea to do it with a kid who’s been out harvesting his limit of carp in the driest patch of earth in the Western Hemisphere. With people, he thought, starving right and left-hoping to score a quarter cup of rice anytime in the coming year-this kid’s got a fucking sashimi dinner lined up for every night this week.

  When the foreigner in the flowered shirt, the blan, came up the hill to greet him, Alphonse knew he had been wise to listen to the priest and prepare for this day. For weeks now he had exercised vigorously and fished doggedly-staying at the lake until sunset to harvest more protein-even bragged to his peers of the dangerous journey on which he would soon embark. Some of them scoffed, ridiculing his piety, advising him instead to take the journey most of the others took: get the hell off this diseased plain and find something to steal, maybe deal some drugs with the proceeds and live the good life in Port-au-Prince. Most of Alphonse’s crew had already done exactly that, though he’d heard things about the good life they were leading in the urban slums. At least half of them were dead.

  Alphonse was different. He listened to his elders, gave them respect, and had taken enough strength from their words to avoid the blasphemed fate of his peers. Alphonse was pious and committed, an open vessel through which Le Gran Maître could exercise His will. And now, with the blan in the flowered shirt coming up the hill, Alphonse was ready for his trial-he would embrace his journey into manhood and attain spiritual wholeness on the other side. He flung his catch of carp over a shoulder, allowing the fish to dangle behind his back, so he could offer a respectful posture for the stranger’s approach.

  It would be best not to alienate one of His messengers.

  I’m looking for a guide,” Cooper said in his half-assed Creole.

  Standing on the incline, fifteen or twenty yards up the slope, he noticed that the two-dollar hiking boots he’d bought at the bazaar were already digging into his heels.

  “Wi,” Alphonse said. “I am your guide.”

  Cooper nodded. He hadn’t expected much resistance. “Heard of a place called La Vallée des Morts? East of here. Could be over the border.”

  Alphonse stepped forward, and Cooper noted he was barefoot. It didn’t look as though the kid was carrying a pair either.

  “I’ve heard cette place,” Alphonse said, working somewhere between busted English, ghetto French, and Haitian Creole. “My test is to take you there? Si ça, c’est vrai, I will that for you do. M rele Alphonse.”

  They shook hands.

  “Nice meeting you, Alphonse,” Cooper said. He didn’t bother giving his own name. “How much?”

  Alphonse froze, looking shocked that this messenger from Le Gran Maître would offer to pay him. He appeared set to announce his refusal to accept compensation for such a journey when Cooper extended his hand and Alphonse saw in the hand a wrinkled mass of American fifty-dollar bills. Cooper readied to catch the kid’s eyes in case they fell from their sockets.

  “How about two-fifty now,” Cooper said, “two-fifty when you get me there, and a bonus when we make it back-another two-fifty.”

  Succumbing to earthly weakness, Alphonse snatched the bills, feverishly counted them, and shoved the money deep into his pants. Then he stood very tall and smiled a crooked, yellow-toothed grin.

  “I am your guide,” he said.

  “We hurry,” Cooper said, “there may yet be a ’74 Chevy with an empty navigator’s seat you can do your guiding from.”

  Alphonse smiled, nodded, and followed Cooper down the slope, his faith implicit. He knew that along the way, Le Gran Maître would help him to understand the strange things this blan seemed to say.

  13

  Laramie hit the parking lot in Langley around seven-forty-five and made for the commissary, where the federal government had recently done her the favor of installing a Starbucks kiosk. The boondoggle had been struck, she guessed, over a fine meal between Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and somebody like the junior senator from Schultz’s home state of Washington-or, she thought, maybe Schultz had taken a meal with none other than Peter M. Gates himself. Either way, the kiosk managed to save Laramie fifteen minutes twice per day, the time it had formerly taken her to dart into Langley proper to grab a cup from the nearest off-campus Star-bucks.

  Now she only had to walk to the elevator.

  She bought a grande latte and sweetened it with Equal. It was still a few minutes before eight when she settled at the desk in her office; this left plenty of time to rewrite the report, generate the cryptic memorandum, and deliver both to the DDCI’s desk before he returned from his daily power lunch in the car service provided to the Agency’s top brass.

  No way on earth, Laramie thought, is Pete Gates doing bubkes with my report, revised or otherwise. His begrudged acknowledgment of her analytical accuracy, coming in the form of the requested memo, amounted to zero in terms of action. In retrospect, she decided Eddie Rothgeb had got it right after all-this was simply act two of the script, where the CIA chief, having burned the ass of his junior analyst for doing good work, proceeds to do no more than cover his own with a bullshit memorandum circulated to all stations-solely so that he could claim he acted on the intel were any shit to hit the fan. Otherwise, Laramie thought, all Gates had in mind was the tried-and-true asshole-manager’s technique of burying important information the asshole-manager wants to keep handy for when he might someday need to pull the goods from the bottom of the deck. When it could help boost his political climb to-Christ, she thought, you’re a three-term deputy director of central intelligence, what do you aspire to?

  She polished off the revision, cranked out the memo, and slipped both into a priority classified delivery pouch.

  Swallowing the last of her latte, Laramie decided to find out whether she’d been right. Her self-image needed the boost-or at least, she thought, if she did turn out to be right, then somebody needed to be doing something. Unless nobody cared about the independence of Taiwan.

  Maybe nobody did-at least not here.

  Laramie’s badge granted her unrestricted access to routine intelligence from most of the Far East and Pacific Rim: satellite photographs, census figures, even some items from the field. Finding corroborating evidence in support of her theory on the pending invasion of Taiwan would be challenging, even if such evidence existed in the first place, but Laramie at least figured she had a pretty good sense of what to search for. The question was where to look.

  Any general savvy enough to come to oversee the entire military of a semi-superpower, she thought, would-in planning to annex its neighbor-also prepare for resistance. International resistance. And if you had to fight more than one opponent, you’d want to have more than one player on your team. She could look for the same thing-unscheduled military exercises, a calling-up of army reserves, the whole clandestine effort of preparing for war without telling any of your international brethren-and it made sense to take her first look in nations ideologically aligned with the extremist members of China’s State Council.

  She’d start with North Korea.

  Over the course of the day, she made sure to log her standard six or seven hours in the SATINT lab, keeping up with her assignments-the routine monitoring of recently generated satellite imagery, provincial immigration figures, CPI and GNP data for the PRC. Around seven, she got into the compare-and-contrast work, and by midnig
ht had scanned her first swath of North Korea, beginning four months prior to the Shandong exercise. She got home early in the morning, having found nothing out of the ordinary.

  Laramie followed the same routine for two days running, took one night off, then got back at it. At ten after midnight on her third evening of work, she had just completed a tenth fruitless search of the same patch of Korean land when the phone in her viewing cubicle gurgled. She tapped the speaker button.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Laramie.”

  Though Laramie preferred to label the current status of her relationship with Eddie Rothgeb as “professional-discussions-only,” she still felt an odd sensation anytime he called her at work. She couldn’t figure it out. Either something was telling her to oust him from her professional life too-Laramie, make a complete break, you idiot-or, alternately, maybe when they discussed professional topics it stirred memories of-

  It’s getting late, she thought.

  “Hello, Professor.”

  “You weren’t home,” Rothgeb said. “I have your list. The e-mail addresses.”

  Laramie took a moment to realize he was talking about the list of e-mails for the members of the intelligence committees. When she realized it, though, she decided she didn’t particularly care. The ass-burning ceremony, as well as her subsequent zero-sum evidence hunt, had reduced her ambition somewhat.

  “Just so you know,” she said, “things played out about as you predicted. And I’m not finding any-well, corroborating entities, so to speak.”

  “Meaning you’re looking,” he said. There was a hesitation. “You know, you need to be-heck, I’m not sure I want to hear about it.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I’ll fax it to your home.”

  Neither of them said anything. Laramie’s eyes darted from region to region on her wide-screen workstation monitor, fingers plugging away at the keyboard. The SATINT photos flicked past like a deck-shuffle on a slot-machine poker game.

  The sound of a clearing throat came from the speaker phone. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you,” he said, “but when you send anything-”

  “I know, Professor,” Laramie said.

  “You understand what I’m saying?”

  Thinking that the tapped phones at CIA made for awkward conversations, but come on, Professor, Laramie said, “I know I can’t do what you’re warning me against doing. I’ll have to be inventive. Origination-wise, you might say.”

  “Right,” he said. “I’ll fax you the list.”

  The speaker light went dark on her telephone console.

  Laramie pulled up another week of SATINT, waited for the thumbnails to load, and got back to the visual deck-shuffle. Selecting from the thumb-nails based on date and region, she enlarged the grids she found interesting or inscrutable, flipping past those she judged to be irrelevant. Laramie the globetrotter, she thought, spanning the world with keyboard and mouse. She zipped down with the Zoom command. Examined an endless succession of trees, houses, lakes, military bases, airports, factories, farms, streets. Mostly she didn’t need to push in any closer than a city block; she could see all she needed in images covering a few dozen square miles of real estate. Flipping, clicking, her eyes drooping, Laramie becoming increasingly pessimistic there would be any-

  A small break in the clouds looked vaguely familiar.

  She zoomed in twenty times, then fifty, then a hundred, recentering the image as she went. At three hundred times the standard viewing magnification she was able to make out through the cloud break-where pockets of mist still made the images on the ground difficult to isolate-a column of tanks and army trucks.

  She cautioned herself that this could have been anything. During any given second of the day, for instance, on every day of the year, she knew there to be a U.S. military convoy transporting something somewhere on one American highway or another. Perhaps the same was true for North Korea.

  Except, she thought, this is exactly what I found in Shandong two days before the exercise. In the same exact sort of weather she had found on this particular day in North Korea.

  She checked the log for the photograph she was viewing and saw that she was looking at film from April 3, two months earlier than the Shandong exercise. She bookmarked the photograph and moved ahead a day, then two, then three, checking the same area, about five hundred square miles, Laramie aware that any military organization with even a limited intelligence-gathering wing would know when these satellite passes came and accordingly, if they wanted, could hide what they were doing. That’s how she’d caught the PLA simulation in full swing-by snatching some pictures from a private satellite, shot from a lower angle and on a different schedule. And there it had been: a full-scale imitation of a sea-to-land invasion, staged near the city of Qingdao, on the Yellow Sea. The invasion, of course, perfectly mimicking a PLA takeover of Taiwan.

  Back on her Korea shots, April 7 now, fifty miles north of where she’d spotted the convoy-and look at that, she thought. The same damn thing as Shandong. Another military exercise. Ghostly outlines of tanks in the field. Bright spotting-probably mortar fire or antitank guns-blooming in the fog beneath the thinner sections of cloud cover.

  Laramie zoomed all the way in and still wasn’t able to see much. This was the kind of thing that the North Korea analyst wouldn’t ordinarily spot; with the wider angles the section analysts reviewed in the course of their routine coverage, there would be little to see here, even under intense scrutiny, outside of brighter-than-normal clouds in a remote and otherwise irrelevant part of the country.

  But know what to look for, and you find it in three nights of lab work.

  Who else, she thought, had signed on here? If, she cautioned herself again, it was anything at all. Which it probably wasn’t. It was likely she’d stumbled across a pair of military exercises with no real-world meaning, occurring in the same time period only coincidentally. But spend two weeks instead of three nights, and who else would she find-

  She looked at the time stamp on her monitor: 2:39 A.M.

  Time, she thought, to leave. As long as she was pulling images that fell within the jurisdiction of her clearances, she knew she was on solid ground-under the inspirational leadership of Peter M. Gates, long hours were increasingly common in what she understood to have been, before his reign, a clock-punching culture-but it was always a variation in one’s pattern that tripped the alarms, and she didn’t exactly pull all-nighters as a matter of course.

  She logged off.

  Shuffling across the parking lot-which, as always, remained half-full-it occurred to Laramie that perhaps, for once, she might consider following Agency protocol. Perhaps, having found this second military exercise, she should now discuss the discovery with her immediate supervisor and, with his permission, craft a properly formatted summary utterly lacking in editorial comment and leave it at that.

  If she did, Eddie Rothgeb would be pleased.

  Before she found her pillow, she found Eddie’s fax. Handwritten, and scrawled in a rudimentary code on a single sheet with no cover page, the document contained three names-or at least three sets of initials Laramie took to represent names-and matching phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Alongside each set of initials, Rothgeb had scrawled a pair of parentheticals:

  A.K. (NC) (S)

  Given her sleep deprivation, it took Laramie a few minutes to translate, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to crack the code. (S) indicated a senator; (NC) was the state designation. As was the case with the majority of her Beltway bureaucrat colleagues, Laramie maintained a loose familiarity with the names of the more prominent politicians on the Hill, so it was fairly clear to her the initials A.K. stood for Alan Kircher, the Republican senator from North Carolina.

  She took a moment and identified the other names on the list, but for Laramie there was no contest: if she decided to go for broke and try, by means of a Deep Throat e-mail, to compel Pete Gates & Co. to take her findings onward and upward, then Alan Kircher was
her man. She’d seen him, seen too much of him, on Hardball, On the Record, Hannity and Colmes, and maybe sixteen or seventeen other prime-time cable opinion shows. She did not exactly share his political ideology, presuming he had one outside of his evident pursuit of under-the-table handouts from the military-industrial complex, but if you want somebody who’ll take a different view of your findings-different from the administration’s party line as strode by PeterM. Gates and his staff-well, she thought, I suppose Eddie knew what he was doing, didn’t he, putting him on the list.

  It occurred to her, collapsing in bed, that she was being idiotic even entertaining the notion of popping the esteemed Senator Kircher a note. Her newfound inclination to follow protocol was the way to go. Even if she and her theories of “rogue factions” were right, what business was it of hers how and which decisions were made by the leaders of the country? Peter M. Gates’s appointment had been approved by a majority vote of the U.S. Senate nearly a decade and a half ago, while she, meanwhile, had gleefully secured her junior analyst position just under four years back by successfully filling out a copy of the CIA summer internship form posted on the bulletin board outside of Eddie Rothgeb’s office.

  Lemme give you some career advice, Pete, she thought: Why don’t you stick your neck out, roll the dice, and risk your twenty-year career on the speculative whim of a junior analyst armed with an undergraduate political science degree!

  She managed to set the alarm for eight-thirty before plunging into the bliss of unconscious stupor.

  14

  The ’74 Chevy got them up the mountain in eight hours, Cooper getting a workout cranking the wheel, the pickup climbing the roadless slope fifty times faster than Alphonse could have taken them on foot, but still doing no better than an hour or two per mile. Cooper tacked the Chevy back and forth, thinking if he tried for a more direct course straight uphill, the smallest bump would send them into a backward tumble. From time to time Alphonse would point and mutter a few words; Cooper used his gestures like a compass, always heading, as the looping tacks progressed, toward Alphonse’s magnetic north. The needle on the truck’s temperature gauge pegged the red zone for the last four hours of the ride, but the truck held out.