Will Staeger - Painkiller

She tapped the speaker button.

“Yes,” she said.

“Laramie.”

The voice sounded a lot like Eddie Rothgeb’s, so it made sense, she would later think, that in responding to it, she let his name roll off her lips.

“Eddie?”

Once the sound of his name vanished into the phone line, Laramie’s impression of the voice began to register. The caller was certainly not Eddie Rothgeb. It was a man’s voice, silky and deep-she didn’t recognize it in the slightest.

“Yes,” the voice said. “It’s me.”

She felt a flush of heat rush into her face. Whoever it was had just lied, and he’d thought about the lie before giving it.

Her first thought was that it might be Senator Kircher, but she knew she’d recognize his southern drawl instantaneously, and she hadn’t. It could be a ruse-one of Gates’s stooges keeping an eye on her. Maybe they’d found her e-mail to the senator and Gates had ordered her tested. Find out how much classified intel she was willing to part with.

“Hello, professor,” she said carefully.

“Loved your memo.”

Laramie’s father had told her that whenever you didn’t know what to do, you should count to three. He’d recommended the one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi technique, and also claimed that if you didn’t figure something out by the time you counted to three, you never would; she thought that her father had probably added his own flair to it, something like, If you can’t figure something out by then you’re still an idiot, but the first part had stuck.

One-Mississippi.

The voice hadn’t mentioned any e-mail, at least not yet. It could still be a Gates crony playing games with her, but she’d have to assume it was not, since the caller had directed the conversation toward the memo.

Two-Mississippi. She knew the memo had been released-Rader had done her the favor of blind-copying her on the distribution-and it had probably hit all stations as of a couple days back. What confused her was how the caller might have known she’d written it.

“That’s very kind of you,” she said. “How did you know?”

“I’ve got people in the right places,” the voice said. “I say people, because I don’t consider them friends.”

Laramie needed to figure out what was going on, but she also needed to be brief in what she said. In fact, she thought, you probably shouldn’t have asked him how he’d known, since you just managed to give away the fact that you’d written the memo, which the mystery caller might not have actually known without your confirmation. In any event, she had to remember Agency people would later be listening to the recording of the call. And if this wasn’t one of them on the horn with her now, the roster of eavesdroppers would no doubt include a posse of Gates’s cronies. Be careful.

“Anyway, I’m in town,” the voice said. “Thought I’d give you a call. Maybe we could get together.”

“Really.”

“Hell, you know, catch up some. I’m curious what you’ve been up to.”

After a moment, Laramie said, “Me too.”

“While I’m in town, I’m staying with our old buddy WC. You remember old WC, don’t you?”

Laramie realized something: this was her opportunity to protect herself from the people who would later be reviewing the tapes. All she had to do now was contradict what the voice was feeding her. No, she could say, I never knew the guy, and while we’re at it, I don’t know you either.

She knew, though, that if she were to say that, the mystery behind the call, and the mystery of the caller’s identity, would aggravate her no end.

She said, “Of course I remember WC. So he’s in Washington now?”

“Yeah, how about that. You know something else? I think that after all these years, old WC’s still a virgin. You believe it? Anyway, he’s in the phone book. Give me a call on your way home. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

Laramie was thinking what to say next in this oddly calculated conversation when she heard a click and the line went dead.

By the time she reached her car, Laramie the puzzle solver was on the case.

She considered the clues deposited by the mystery caller. He had wanted her to call him on an outside phone, that part was easy enough: Give me a call on your way home. And since, unless she knew what number to call, no call would be made, it followed that he’d provided enough information for Laramie to determine where to reach him.

The mystery man had also read the memo. While the memo had gone to all stations, still, such documents were only distributed to duly cleared staff; this meant the mystery man could be working anywhere in the world, but it also meant he was probably no less senior than a case officer, and considering that he had been able to pinpoint Laramie as the author of the memo, chances were he ranked pretty high on the ladder-or, if nothing else, he’d been around for a while.

He hadn’t sounded like a younger man in any case.

He’d picked up on her blunder of using Rothgeb’s name and run with it, working that angle into everything he said, making it sound like a perfectly normal conversation while giving her enough to figure out how to reach him. He’d repeated the initials WC-their old buddy WC; their old buddy WC was still a virgin-these, she knew, were the bread crumbs he wanted her to follow.

She released the emergency brake and made for the gate.

The names of case officers were highly compartmentalized, generally not available to DI analysts without specific need-to-know clearances. But if he knew she’d written the memo, he also knew she didn’t have the kind of clearance that would allow her to look up the contact information of a typical field officer outside of her assigned projects, even a chief of station whose identity might have been more publicly known. Pulling up to the gate and waiting for it to rise, Laramie considered the two territories she knew to be called virgin-the U.S. and British Virgin Islands.

“Shit,” she said, gestured to the guard in the booth through her closed window that she’d forgotten something, drove out the gate, turned around, and came back in, the guard raising the gate and waving her back in with a smile. She parked closer to the entrance, tempted to borrow the slot reserved for the Peter M. Gates Town Car before thinking better of it. Back in her cubicle, she logged back in, navigated to the internal telephone directory, and clicked the Index icon. She typed BVI into the empty field-Laramie figuring that for the appropriate abbreviation-and got a fresh screen headed by the words BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS.

There was a post office box listing in the city of Road Town, Tortola, a phone number, and the name W. COOPER alongside what appeared to be the man’s cover job: PUBLIC RELATIONS/COLLEGE RECRUITER.

Laramie wrote the phone number on a Post-it, shoved the Post-it into the breast pocket of her blouse, logged out, and trudged back down to her car. She got a salute from the guard on her way out.

“That Laramie?”

“Why,” Laramie said, “would we need a public relations officer in the British Virgin Islands?”

Cooper had a Cuba libre in his left hand and his sat phone in his right, reclined as he was in the chair on the deck of his bungalow. It was dark, the swish of the trades soothing against the palms, a distant stream of voices and music floating over from the restaurant. He could just see the bar through the garden; tourists were telling stories there, Cooper thinking gleefully that Ronnie was getting what he deserved, serving the sunburned drunkards and cleaning off their tables with a wet rag when they were done.

“Image is everything,” he said.

“Who are you?”

“Mere fact of the call,” Cooper said, “indicates that you already know my name.”