Will Staeger - Painkiller

Gates paid homage to Rosen’s words with a solemn nod. “Following the revisions Mr. Rosen here has so eloquently spelled out,” he said, “I would like you to draft a memo, which I will forward to all stations. One paragraph, please.” He looked at her, and kept looking at her, and Laramie was beginning to feel self-conscious enough to consider objecting to his stare when she realized what it was he was waiting for.

She pulled a pen from her folder to take notes.

“The memo,” Gates said, “should order an operational emphasis on the reporting of intelligence related to the international or extranational transport of military hardware and/or lethal substances with probable military use.”

Gates stood. The others followed suit. Laramie finished her transcription, noting, as she wrote the text, that while it contained approximately zero substance, the memorandum he was requesting nonetheless redeemed her analysis. Eddie Rothgeb hadn’t scripted that part of today’s scene.

“I’ll need both by noon on Wednesday,” Gates said. “Good day, gentlemen. Laramie.”

Laramie slid past Miss Anders, moral victory in arm. Take that, Eddie, she thought. He may well have burned my ass in front of my superiors, but at least the son of a bitch knows I’m right. She tucked the folder beneath an arm and strode from the Agency’s senior executive suite, merging into the usual foot traffic populating the seventh floor’s main hall.

Ronnie bent down along the path, dug for a couple stones, and came up throwing.

“Cooper!” he said.

Cooper came sharply out of a deep sleep. He knew immediately who it was, and his first impulse was to ignore the provocation-pretend you’re still asleep, out-wait the punk, and eventually he’ll give up and leave.

The better idea, he thought, might be to lure him onto the porch. A little bit closer to the Louisville Slugger.

“Why don’t you have your friends call on your bloody satellite phone?” Ronnie said. “It’s six o’clock in the effin’ morning!”

After a moment of nothing but the sound of the waves lapping the beach, Cooper rustled inside the bungalow.

“Sat phone,” he said, “doesn’t come with a secretary.”

“Coffee, tea, or me, you fuck.”

“Who is it?”

“Eugene Little, and he’s flipped. Can’t understand a bloody word he’s saying.”

Hearing, to his disappointment, Ronnie retreat down the stairs to the garden, Cooper grunted as he pulled himself out of bed.

All right, Eugene,” Cooper said.

“Cooper, Jesus, where have you been hiding out!”

“What is it?”

“Highly carcinogenic,” Eugene said, “that’s what it is. Uranium. What do you think of that? Christ, I’m sure you knew it already. Knowingly subjecting me to the hazard.”

Standing at the beach club phone, Cooper yawned.

“Uranium?”

“U-238 and U-235, according to this lab report I’m reading, and lethal levels of this particular substance just happen to be spread all over your corpse. Which means all over my lab, my hands, and Jesus, probably in my system already. I’m telling you, I’m expecting incremental bonus pay. It’s always something with you.”

“Right,” Cooper said, starting to listen. “Get back to the, uh, U-238.”

“U-238 and U-235, apparently a mixture commonly found in places like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Ring any bells? This pathetic bastard you mutilated was directly exposed to radioactive fuel rods. No surprise to you, I’m sure.”

“It’s a definite, the exposure came from fuel rods?”

“I sent out tissue samples. Hair follicle sections. Trying to find the cause of those burns. I got a phone call from the technician, and I tell you this guy was going crazy-”

“Like you.”

“There’s a fucking reason for it, Cooper: they checked for radioactivity on the tissue sample and it tested off the scales. They did a second analysis-called me for authorization to do it, there are extra charges involved-and later confirmed massive quantities of uranium, they called it ‘ninety-nine-point-three percent U-238,’ on the torso and neck. ‘Characteristic signature of nuclear fuel rods manufactured prior to 1987,’ ” Eugene said. “I’m reading from the report, obviously.”

“That what killed him? Which came first?”

“You mean the uranium or the gunshots? I can’t answer that. Incidentally, the ballistics report ID’d the bullets as nine-millimeter armor-piercing shells. American manufacture. I’ll tell you, though, there was something odd about the time-of-death results. They were inconsistent-as though broad portions of the victim’s body had deteriorated to an advanced state of necrosis well prior to his time of death.”

Cooper found he didn’t like the sound of advanced state of necrosis. He resisted the temptation to ask Eugene if this meant the kid was already a zombie at the time whoever it was who’d killed him administered the fuel-rod burn and fired the armor-piercing shells into his back. Maybe, he thought, I should ask him to check for traces of puffer fish and bouga toad venom. Or maybe not.

“I checked my textbooks, Cooper, and many of the symptoms displayed by your murder victim were consistent with extreme radiation sickness. The kind you get from direct exposure. You get vomiting of blood, rapid deterioration of internal organs, sores-like getting terminal cancer and dying from it in five minutes. It’s fucking horrible, is what it is.”

Cooper wasn’t listening. “Mail me the lab results,” he said. “I’ll give it a thorough read.”

“That’s after we talk about the additional hazard pay.”

“You’re starting to get annoying, Ignatius. Put the results in the mail.”

He dropped the phone on its cradle.

There were one hundred and ninety-two employees of the Central Intelligence Agency posted in the Caribbean. Since the agency’s primary mission in the West Indies was to gather intelligence on the Castro regime, eighty-four of the one-ninety-two operated under some form of cover within Cuba itself. An additional forty-three worked in the Puerto Rico station, serving the dual purpose of Cuba operational support and Puerto Rico-specific intelligence gathering; a staff of thirty-seven, combined, served in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the Caymans. A small office in Grenada employed eight, and between the nations of Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, Barbados, Aruba, and Trinidad and Tobago, another fifteen held full-time positions with the firm. The U.S. Virgin Islands housed an office of four.

In the British Virgins, where there existed no justification whatsoever for an Agency presence, a single employee was stationed: the CIA’s one hundred and ninety-second man. Classified as a case officer within the Directorate of Operations, the man served no strategic purpose, reported to no one, and virtually no one knew what he did, or that he existed at all. He was never subject to performance review, would never be denied his stipulated, periodic raises, and did not require authorization in order to be reimbursed for his expenses. For the sake of convenience, the man had decided to list himself in the internal company directory under an alias that held no secondary meaning other than the fact that he’d taken part of it from the character of the hero, and part of it from the actor playing the hero in High Noon, one of the only movies he remembered liking.

The name under which he chose to list himself was W. Cooper.

As the sole case officer in his territory, he was also, by default, chief of station. This had little import other than to place him on various distribution lists for memoranda, and to give him the ability, for any reason at all, to order research on virtually any topic from the army of analysts housed in Langley. Cooper took advantage of this from time to time, using the Directorate of Intelligence as a sort of public library. He’d always preferred to read nonfiction anyway.