Will Staeger - Painkiller

“Professor Eddie,” Cooper said. “Professor Eddie gives you advice and you don’t take it.”

“Yes. Mr. Lie Detector.”

“Was he right?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, was it good advice?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t take it.”

“No. Listen-what can I help you with?”

Cooper thought for a moment.

“Not sure,” he said.

The road noise on the other end of the line evaporated. Cooper heard the yank of an emergency brake, the ding-ding of the car telling Laramie the door was open with her keys in the ignition, the jangling of keys and slamming of a door.

“So I’m home,” she said.

“Tell me about the memo.”

“What do you want me to tell you about it?”

He heard more jangling of keys, a door opening and closing. He imagined Laramie turning on the light as she came in. He found he couldn’t picture either her or her house. Maybe she had an apartment. Condo-a salad person would own a condominium.

“It came from something you found,” Cooper said. “As with every widely distributed Agency memo, it made a generic statement which obviously didn’t reflect what you found, but which came from something you found nonetheless. What was it you found?”

“What do you care?”

“The long hours you’re clocking have something to do with your discovery?”

Laramie stayed quiet and so did Cooper. The chill from the car’s air conditioner, Cooper sitting there in the Taurus, felt as if it had frozen the cartilage beneath his kneecaps. Nonetheless he could still feel the sweat oozing from his back, causing him to stick, like a suction cup, to the seat.

Laramie said, “I found something, and I’m looking for something more, but I’m not finding the something more I’m looking for. Actually I found a little something more, but I’m not finding anything else.”

“That’s vague.”

“I can’t talk about this.”

“I’m cleared higher than the head of your department, Laramie.”

“Well that’s very impressive,” she said, “but isn’t the issue.”

“No?”

“I’m not-”

“Ah,” Cooper said.

“Ah?”

“You’re not supposed to be working on what you’re working on, are you?”

Laramie hesitated.

“Fuck them,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Tough talk,” Laramie said. “You know, Professor, ‘fuck them’ isn’t the kind of advice professors usually give.”

Cooper heard a few rustling noises. Keys being dropped somewhere. And maybe, way in the background, the sound of feet kicking off shoes.

Then Laramie sighed, the sigh loud in his ear with Cooper busy straining to hear what she was up to.

“Look,” she said, “I analyze satellite intelligence. I found an unscheduled military exercise in the province they’ve assigned me in China. Shandong. The base there has mobilized and added troops in sufficient numbers to indicate there are plans in store for the real-world version of the exercise. The simulation I saw was a sea-to-land assault.”

“Taiwan.”

“That was my deduction too,” she said. “But perhaps you’re not aware of the recent strides we’ve made in Sino-American relations.”

“No,” Cooper said, “I’m not.”

“Suffice to say that if you were to write an internal Agency report documenting the deduction to which we just came, you might get a reprimand from pretty high up the chain of command.”

Cooper thought, Gates, but didn’t say anything.

“The reason I’m not officially working on what I’m working on is a little more complicated. I’m a China analyst. I know we’re growing our relationship with the PRC; it’s happening precisely due to the ideological makeup of the State Council. I know that plans for the annexation of Taiwan don’t fit the profile of eight, or even nine, of the eleven council members. I do realize the likely situation is that a couple of the most extreme vice premiers are doing it on their own. Or not alone, at least internationally speaking. So I check around and find the same thing going on in another country.”

“Where?”

“North Korea. And superanalyst Julie Laramie’s knee-jerk concluding hypothesis? A multinational ‘rogue faction’ exists. I believe it is possible that the members of the faction are jointly planning independent military actions, each hostile to U.S. interests.”

Cooper digested this for a moment. “Sounds like a reasonable hypothesis,” he said.

“Fortunately-or unfortunately-depending on whether I’m looking at it from the perspective of national security or personal job security-I’ve been checking other countries for similar exercises and seem to be finding zilch.”

“Burning the midnight oil.”

“Burning my career to a crisp. And by the way, if they didn’t have enough to go on to pink-slip me already, this phone call ought to wrap things up nicely.”

Cooper thought he heard a cork thuk gently from a bottle.

“Cell phone conversations are more labor-intensive to review,” he said. “How old are you?”

“Old enough.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“You don’t remember the cold war then.”

“You must be joking. I’ve studied-”

“When the wall came down, you were what, eleven? Go back another decade or so. Around when you were born.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Soviet Union was beating our pants off. They had fifty, sixty countries lined up, the Comintern’s revolutionary brotherhood, ready to gang-tackle us. You know how we won?”

“Are you going to give me a Ronald Reagan speech?”

“They ran out of money, and we didn’t. They couldn’t keep funding the brotherhood that had signed up for the revolutionary gravy train.”

There was silence for a moment.

Then Laramie laughed. She laughed pretty hard. Hard enough so that it took her a couple minutes to settle down.

“No kidding, Columbo,” she said, finally.

Cooper frowned.

“My dad used to say that-‘No kidding, Columbo.’ I’m an analyst, mystery man. I already thought to select the countries I was checking based on ideology. If I can be so bold as to presume that’s the advice you’re suggesting I follow.”

“Well-”

“I’m in the midst of examining SATINT from a handful of Marxist-Leninist, socialism-espousing, or otherwise anti-American, capitalism-hating countries for similar military exercises. But I can only review so much of the world per week-at some point I need to know where to look, and even then it’s still the needle-in-the-haystack thing, presuming there’s a needle to find in the first place. My one semidiscovery is in Yemen, where there is a broad troop buildup by the rebels in the southern part of the country. They’re led by a terrorist you may know of-nickname’s the Arabian Bull-dog-and they want to secede. This, however, pretty much reflects exactly what’s been going on in that pocket of the world at least once per decade for the past fifty years. Conclusion? My hypothesis is bullshit. My bosses are burying my findings because they’re wiser than I.”

Cooper sat there, stuck to the seat, thinking for a moment.

“You know,” he said, “and some of us can speak from experience on this-one thing most of your bosses are not is wise. In fact, I can think of one of them in particular who happens to be a horse’s ass. And about as wise as a horse’s ass too, while we’re at it.”

Cooper saw the door open across the street. Jim came out hurriedly, a protesting Rhonda in tow. He looked down at the in-dash clock. It said 12:33.

“Gotta run, Lie Detector,” he said. “Go easy on the Chardonnay.”

It was a guess, but Cooper took the lack of any reply before the click when Laramie hung up as affirmation of the guess. He wondered if she’d been smiling as she broke the connection-Cooper the fellow lie detector, figuring her out.