Will Staeger - Painkiller

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.

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 midnight 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-