Public Enemy Read online

  “I’ve seen all I need to see,” he said, and nodded in the general direction of the guys leaning against the ATV before heading back down the hill. Riley came uphill past him and threw off a salute on his way by. Cooper knew Riley would get the Marine Base boys to wrap up the body with the tarp; they’d then carry it down the hill and load it aboard his Apache.

  Cooper’s Disposal Service.

  He didn’t return Riley’s salute on his way back down to Hurricane Hole.

  11

  It was closing in on eight-fifteen when Cooper made it back to Conch Bay, the tarp-mummified body of Po Keeler freshly sloughed off to Cooper’s man at the Charlotte Amalie morgue, the Apache’s deck hosed clean of the body’s blood and scent. It had only taken a few grand and the usual unveiled threats to convince the expatriate former plastic surgeon to agree to lighting up a special session in the kiln, but even the mere act of holding a conversation with Eugene Little, M.D., made Cooper want to shower off. Toss a little corpse-incineration into the mix, the possible though unlikely murderous impropriety of Cap’n Roy, plus the afternoon visit to the garbage-strewn bend called the Dump, and Cooper was feeling ripe for a full-body chlorine wipe. Thinking he ought to grab the nearest bleach rag from Ronnie’s arsenal of busboy tools and scrub till he bled-hell, even then, he’d probably still feel the grime clogging his pores.

  Every time-every goddamn time he went along with one of Cap’n Roy’s under-the-radar sewage-treatment schemes, it seemed he came out looking, and feeling, dirtier than the sewage itself.

  He double-parked his dinghy alongside the most ostentatious Zodiac he could find, every tack taken tonight by the capacity dinner crowd. Balling his T-shirt around his Reefs, he hucked the assembly to the dock, dove off his boat into the lagoon, and started in on a crawl headed away from shore. He swam hard for a long while, poking his head above the surface every fifty strokes or so to ensure he wasn’t about to get run over by a cruise ship, but otherwise pushing his head into the ocean and swimming blindly, satisfyingly, in the dark, out to sea. At the point when his chest cavity had become a full-time vacuum, sucking for more oxygen than the atmosphere had to offer, Cooper stopped, treading water, and turned to see where he’d wound up. The fear that always came next, he found exhilarating.

  The current in the Sir Francis Drake Channel was deadly-fast, strong, and deceptive enough so that if you didn’t pay attention, it’d take you all the way around the point and into the open Atlantic. Do it at night and it got worse-it was easy to slip past a rock, or another of the small islands to the east, and lose your angle on the lights that could show you where you were.

  He could see the telltale yellow incandescence of the Conch Bay Beach Club, but only barely, and it wasn’t straight behind him anymore-looked to be a good two miles east of him now. At least he hadn’t passed behind Peter Island, which could have put him out to sea for good. Still, the current was strong tonight, strong enough so he’d be hard-pressed to make it back. Probably, he thought, feeling the rush of fear he’d come out here to feel, if you’re lucky and strong, it’ll be two, maybe three A.M. by the time you drag your ass back to the bay, and the way you’ll be splashing through your last mile, I’d put the odds around fifty-fifty some tiger shark gnaws off a chunk of your thigh before you get there.

  Cooper knew that the worst part of it was the pace: you didn’t swim hard enough for the first two hours, you wound up too discouraged to make it back. You’d look up, nearly dead from the workout, only to find you hadn’t gained an inch relative to the landfall you were trying to make. Twice, out on these swims, he’d been forced to succumb to Mother Nature-give up, drift for a while, keep an eye out for lights and swim toward them like a maniac once he spotted them. The first time, a friendly shift in the current brought him back to a beach on the opposite side of Tortola just after four in the morning; on his second flubbed effort, he was picked up by a deep-sea fishing charter off of St. Thomas around dawn.

  Tonight, it was a hard haul, but he made enough headway early on to fend off the discouragement factor, and no sharks made an evident play for him. Just shy of two-thirty, he looked up from his slow-motion, straight-armed windmill crawl to see that he’d just about run his head up into the Conch Bay ferry they kept moored ten yards from the dock.

  He kept his stroke on autopilot until he felt the sandy bottom rub up against his knees, stood shakily, headed back out on the dock, retrieved his T-shirt and flip-flops, and made directly for the sack. There was nobody around, and only the dim yellow safety lights were lit, as he shuffled through the kitchen and garden to bungalow nine. Lacking the energy to peel off his wet swim trunks, he simply left them on and toppled into bed.

  Sometime shortly thereafter, as Cooper began to feel the creeping pull of sleep, his ears were pierced by the single most aggravating noise he remembered hearing. Lost in the initial moments of unconsciousness, he must have missed the short chortle that signaled an incoming fax on the HP all-in-one he kept hooked to his mobile sat phone console, but he didn’t miss the rest of it: the ink-jet housing grinding along its plastic strip, the creaking rollers contorting the paper through its designated route, the cartridge whining and whirring as it shot the page with thousands of pinpricks of black ink. Worse still-at least for Cooper in his fatigued post-swim state-was the length of the document ink-jetting itself to fruition. He kept thinking the racket would end with each succeeding page, but then the goddamned machine would suck another sheet into its maw and grind out another round of noise. Cooper counted fourteen pages before the racket ceased.

  Thinking, after ten minutes of staring at the fan attached to his ceiling, that he could always sleep in-at least so long as the goat-of-the-day wasn’t going nuts-he flopped his legs out of bed, took the two steps into the middle of his room, and snagged the document from the printer. He flipped on the light and sat in his reading chair, loudly pushing the wires and other paraphernalia out of the way as he kicked his ankles up on the ottoman and sat back to read.

  The cover page, otherwise blank, contained the ink-jet-transmitted version of five words written in Professor Susannah Grant’s looping cursive script. It said:

  To: Island Man

  From: Me

  Cooper tossed the cover page on the floor and started in on the other thirteen, where he found Susannah to be true to her word: she’d promised her analysis of the artifacts within forty-eight hours of their lab session, even delivered eight hours early. Cooper hadn’t necessarily expected a three A.M. transmission, but all the better. His swim had just about cleansed him, and the sooner he found a buyer and unloaded the merchandise, the sooner he’d be free and clear of Cap’n Roy’s filth. Cooper thinking if Susannah’s fax gave him enough to go on, he might just be able to place a call in the morning, set up an exchange, and be done with it. Done with the artifacts, done with the incinerated body of Po Keeler, and done with Cap’n Roy.

  It occurred to him there was the issue of who had killed Keeler-Cooper assuming, begrudgingly, that Roy hadn’t. He decided he would cross that bridge when he came to it. If ever.

  He read that Susannah had concluded the artifacts belonged to some Central American native tradition, likely Mayan from what she called the Decadent period-date of origin, mid-nineteenth or early twentieth century, which sounded odd to him. She deemed them authentic, with a total value she called “difficult to estimate,” though she referenced a similar, smaller collection that had been auctioned through Christie’s in 1998 for an average winning bid of $1.24 million per piece. Assuming full authentication, a comparable perceived value, and a few years of appreciation, Susannah estimated that the auction-house value of Cap’n Roy’s stash would fall between sixty and eighty million bucks.

  She spelled out the likelihood of the potential geographic origin of the gold used in the artifacts-somewhere along the continental spine connecting North and South America. She bolstered the gold-origin data with a cultural analysis of the images depicted in the collection. Most of what was
depicted on the pieces, she said, fit the cultural, religious, and societal norms of “original” Mayan civilizations-in other words, those whose artifacts might have dated a millennium earlier than 150 years ago. Nonetheless she insisted the artifact-dating results were reliable, and speculated as to one possible explanation: the creators of Cap’n Roy’s stash of artifacts currently lived, or, some 150 years ago had lived in some remote locale, comprising one of what was generally estimated to be at least a few hundred “isolated remnant civilizations” found in mountainous, jungle, or otherwise treacherous or inaccessible regions of Central America.

  Susannah wrote that she suspected this “remnant civilization” was “in all likelihood now lost,” since she had been unable to find anything relating to the existence of a contemporary tribe or cultural group currently practicing the sort of lifestyle depicted in the carvings and sculptures in the collection. Also, she wrote, such a group would be “unlikely to part amicably” with such burial artifacts as these. They were too sacred.

  Cooper noted with an internal twinge that Susannah had narrowed her estimate on the whereabouts of the artifacts’ origin to a region encompassing the lower midsection of Central America. She’d boxed out an area on a map, including within her marked box parts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Staring at the rectangle of black ink Susannah had marked on the map, Cooper felt a vague, echoing thump, as though a muscle in his heart had decided to expunge its contents prematurely.

  Cooper didn’t exactly keep this part of the world on his list of favorite places to visit.

  Sitting there in his reading chair, the one light in his bungalow shining down from its nook in the ceiling fan, he gave some thought to Professor Susannah Grant. He thought about her mostly to stop himself from thinking about some other things he didn’t want to think about-but thinking about her didn’t offer much help.

  After their afternoon in the lab, she’d taken him for a ride in her coupe and shown him one of Austin’s claims to fame-North America’s largest colony of Mexican free-tailed bats, all residing beneath a single bridge called the Congress Avenue Bridge. The bats headed out for the night’s insect hunt, in a dizzyingly endless stream, from beneath the bridge, beginning around dusk. Cooper found it odd but impressive. Afterward, she’d insisted on visiting him in his room at the Hyatt, but after a mere ninety minutes of remembrance, he’d sent her home early, Cooper regretting the whole trip upon the first brush of skin. Thinking that sometimes you just knew you’d made a wrong turn-time to head back.

  She didn’t take the early dismissal particularly well, but despite her dour mood at last glimpse, Professor Grant had delivered.

  Cooper didn’t like what the analysis was telling him about the people who belonged to the artifacts-or had, once. He didn’t like what it meant about the plea for help he was now certain he’d heard the golden-idol priestess on the shelf demand of him. And he didn’t like something else about all of this-particularly if Cap’n Roy hadn’t been the one to ace the belonger-to-the-rich.

  Cooper tossed the fax onto the cement floor of his bungalow. It made a loud slapping sound-to Cooper, a perfect noise, an exclamation point on this episode of his life. He stood, shrugged his shoulders, rolled his head around to loosen the kinks in his neck, reached over to flip off the light, took the two blind steps he’d taken a few million times before-usually drunk-and fell back into bed. Thinking, as he imagined the muck and grime slipping from his body, that Susannah’s map, and what existed within it, didn’t matter for shit. Thinking that he’d heard all he needed to hear, and that the end was therefore near.

  Cap’n Roy’s stash was worth as much as Roy had hoped, maybe considerably more-one large shitload of dollars. With one, or maybe two phone calls tops, Cooper held no doubt he’d be able to find somebody to take the goods off Cap’n Roy’s pesky little hands-a fence-and be done with it.

  Done with the artifacts-and done with Cap’n Roy.

  For good.

  12

  Laramie arrived in the freshly built Southwest Florida International Airport terminal and followed the signs to the exit. Hoofing it past the baggage claim, she wondered whether they’d had somebody on the flight, or sent somebody to keep an eye on the gate. Somebody who’d tell the guide, whoever the guide was, that she was here.

  Less than a minute after she stepped out into the humid heat, a Jeep Grand Cherokee nosed into the crosswalk stripes nearest her. The Jeep’s passenger-side window zipped down, and when nobody else on the sidewalk made a rush for the car, Laramie stepped to the curb and leaned down for a look inside. She saw behind the wheel a man in a corduroy baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. The color of the hat was a muted pastel falling somewhere between pink and orange. He wore a clean white T-shirt and worn blue jeans, his skin a sunbaked version of what looked to Laramie like Mexican heritage. There was a subtle athleticism and wear and tear to the man-he looked, Laramie thought, like a migrant farm worker who’d come to own the farm.

  “Welcome to Fort Myers,” he said, speaking across the seat through the open passenger-side window.

  Laramie nodded, bag still strapped over her shoulder.

  “Ever been here before?”

  Laramie looked around. “Florida? Yes. Fort Myers? No.”

  “Old people, golf courses, a few beaches, one hell of a lot of oranges, and a lot less swamp than there used to be. Hop in.”

  Laramie decided not to be a nervous Nellie-there was no reason to think the farm-owner sitting behind the wheel was anyone but the “tour guide” sent by Ebbers. She opened the door, tossed in her bag, and climbed in.

  The guide eased off the brake and the Grand Cherokee slipped out into the traffic loop.

  “Drive’s about an hour,” he said, eyes on the road. “More than enough to bring you up to speed. Not that there’s much to talk about yet. Not that’s been figured out, anyway.”

  Laramie watched the airport’s landscaped palm beds switch over to pines and ponds as they moved off airport property and climbed a ramp to I-75 North.

  “So what exactly are we talking about, then?” she said.

  Her guide looked over at her.

  “We’re talking about a ‘flight school clue,’” he said.

  Laramie thought she understood but asked him to clarify anyway.

  “Somebody made a mistake,” he said. “Blew himself up a little ahead of schedule with the ammonium nitrate car bomb he’d put together in his garage. Blew up his house while he was at it, and dispersed, in the process, a miniscule percentage of the airborne filovirus serum he’d been storing in his basement freezer. When we say ‘flight school clue,’ we’re saying what you think we’re saying. We feel we have in our suicide bomber today’s equivalent of the clue left by the 9/11 hijackers, which was fumbled, when they enrolled in various flight schools to learn how to fly a 767 into a skyscraper.”

  Laramie noticed his use of the term we, her “tour guide” deploying the word in the same way Ebbers had. Except, that was, when he’d referenced the 9/11 flight school clue being missed.

  “Key difference being,” he said, “is if our bomber had succeeded in dispersing the whole batch of the pathogen he was keeping, a lot more thousands of people than took the hit in 2001 would be dead already. With more on the way.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Name was Benjamin Achar.” The guide pronounced the ch as though it were a k. “However, based on his Social Security number, Mr. Achar appears to have resurrected himself from a case of SIDS he came down with thirty-six years ago.”

  “As in sudden infant death syndrome?”

  “One and the same.”

  The guide flipped on his blinker, changed lanes to pass a semi, turned off the blinker, and slid past the rig.

  Laramie looked out the front windshield as they exited the turnpike at State Road 80. Once they left Fort Myers behind, SR-80 became somewhat more barren, the strip malls and golf communities on either side of the highway switching over to pine barrens and d
riving ranges, then orange groves-lots of them.

  “You’re saying he was a sleeper, then,” Laramie said. “A deep cover terrorist.”

  “That’s the theory.”

  “Working for who?”

  The guide smiled a compact, tight-lipped grin.

  “Believe that’s why I was told to pick you up at the airport.”

  “We don’t know,” Laramie said.

  “Nope.”

  The highway lost its extra lanes and narrowed to one lane in each direction. Laramie thought about the things he was telling her. She considered thirty or forty questions she could ask, then thought that it would probably be a busy seventy-two hours between now and the time she’d need to give her findings to Ebbers, and that maybe the better idea would be to play it by ear.

  They passed through the city of LaBelle, followed by an endless residential development called Port LaBelle-each looking utterly bereft of activity-and then Laramie saw a sign indicating he’d turned them onto State Road 833 South. Orange groves and a patchwork of other farms gave way to some very small homes in terrible disrepair, followed by a roadside trinket shop, gas station, and short bridge. The bridge took them over a narrow stripe of water, the skinny waterway straight as a canal, stretching to the horizon in both directions. Over the bridge a stretch of swamp came, then more pine trees.

  A berm blocked the swamp water from the pines; the trees looked emaciated, bereft of green outside of the occasional branch or needle. The stretch of trees didn’t last long. At its back end, rapidly approaching, Laramie could see the identical roofs of a number of houses.

  The guide slowed the Jeep. Ahead of them stood a set of orange pylons and two Florida Highway Patrol cruisers parked lengthwise across the road. The guide lowered his window as the state trooper standing against the hood of the nearest cruiser approached, hand resting lazily on his firearm. Her guide pulled what looked to Laramie like a pair of credentials from a pocket on the door-the kind of credentials VIPs wore at sports events, clipped to a lanyard you could keep around your neck. The trooper took the credentials, peered inside the Jeep for a look at Laramie, then, wordlessly, retreated to his cruiser, withdrew a clipboard, copied some information to the sheet on the clipboard, replaced the clipboard in his cruiser, and returned the guide’s credentials.