Will Staeger - Painkiller

Cooper said, “Mind if we have a look around?”

“Yes,” Gibson said, “we mind.”

“Private property,” Cooper said.

“Private property.”

Cooper stood. Laramie stood. Gibson stood. “Thank you for the drink,” Cooper said. “Are you still a signatory for Global Exports?”

Gibson smiled, said, “Nice having you,” and motioned toward the beach. Cooper and Laramie followed his cue, Cooper keeping his head turned at an angle that kept Gibson and Hiram in full view for the full stroll.

When they reached the boat, Hiram helped untie the line. He waded out to the boat, helped Laramie aboard, and stood, prepared to push the boat back from the shallows as Cooper faced Gibson.

“Spence,” he said, “at some point you and I will have a conversation about the boys who stopped by for a drink at the Conch Bay Beach Club.”

Cooper flung a leg into his skiff, and when Gibson didn’t say anything to him, Cooper said, “Live slow, mon,” and pushed the boat out into the lagoon without Hiram’s help. He got the outboard humming and sped across the lagoon, churning up enough sand and coral chunks to form a wedge of dirty water, the skiff painting a nasty stripe of brown across the otherwise pristine bay.

Admiral Li found Spike Gibson in his private gym, where Gibson was on his fourth repetition on a bench press of 360 pounds. The rippling musculature of Gibson’s upper chest was striated with a spiderweb pattern of blue veins, a beastly, unnatural feature that looked somehow appropriate beneath Gibson’s acne-scarred, grease-spattered face.

Gibson had been made aware of Li’s approach by a series of indicator lights on a wall-mounted console that would pass for a thermostat to the untrained eye.

“Admiral,” he said in Mandarin during the exhale phase of his twelfth rep.

“Who were those people?”

“Random visitors.” Gibson exhaled with a hiss and pushed up number thirteen.

“You seemed to know each other.”

“Did we?” Fourteen.

“What did they want? Why did you have them up for a drink?”

“It’s resort policy to be cordial and unassuming,” Gibson said. He concluded the set with no discernible effort and sat upright solely with the use of his abdominal muscles. He massaged his hands, then separated his arms and reached backward, stretching his chest.

“They knew something,” Li said. “I watched, and understood some of their words.”

Gibson enjoyed watching Li’s transformation, slight though it was-no man, he believed, could resist it. Island life influenced you like a gravitational pull, and however imperceptibly, Li’s hard-nosed attitude was under the influence. The rear admiral of the People’s Liberation Navy, standing there with his assigned tropical-print-shirt-and-khaki-shorts disguise, unwittingly allowing it to affect his manner. Gibson remembered a beer commercial he’d seen, two people sipping a cold one on a tranquil beach, a caption beneath them saying “Change your whole latitude.” He liked that commercial; that was what had happened to him, and that was what he was seeing develop in Li. Not that the admiral had taken to doing laps in the pool, or baking on the beach, but it was still there, more in the angle of the man’s shoulders than anything else. Stay long enough, Gibson thought, and it mellowed you out-that was what the islands did.

They changed your whole latitude.

“Those visitors,” Gibson said, “will be taken care of. This is nothing you or General Deng need concern yourselves with.”

Li stared at the grotesque, inhuman figure before him.

“It is Premier Deng now,” he said.

Actually Gibson had lied again: he had no intention of risking exposure by sending another assault team to deal with Albert Einstein. Gibson’s time on Mango Cay had just about concluded, and he’d decided he no longer gave two shits whether Einstein and his girlfriend ratted out Deng. As long as they didn’t do it in the next twenty-four hours, it just didn’t matter. He didn’t think they would anyway. In fact, it didn’t seem to him that Einstein and friend knew anything besides what they’d seen in the photographs. The speculation the man had tried to bait him with on the topic of his disposable labor pool meant nothing, since as long as Einstein and his bicoastal babe were here alone, it was only that: speculation.

He stood, popped another ten-pound ring on each side of the overloaded barbell, and returned to his bench press position.

“Premier Deng, then,” Gibson said. “I stand corrected. Now if you’ll excuse me, Admiral.”

He began the next set of fifteen reps.

Li watched through the ninth repetition of the set before turning away and leaving the suite.

Just past 5:40, Deng ordered his submarine to the surface and sent his third official statement to the international media via a single, mass-burst e-mail. In addition to the inclusion of more aggressive language about the antiterror response the PLA had in store, Deng provided a series of attachments with the e-mail missive and indicated that his intelligence unit had now identified definitive evidence of culpability for the nuke strike. The attachments included a series of photographs documenting a meeting held by the chief architects behind the attack, men whom Deng described as the leaders of the international terrorist organization his intelligence officers had managed to infiltrate. The meeting of these leaders had taken place, the statement said, at an undisclosed warm-weather location. As Deng completed his distribution of the e-mail, the countdown clock in the Mobile War Room ticked from 36:00:00 to 35:59:59.

It was six o’clock even as he flipped a switch and watched Admiral Li’s face pop up on the monitor. Li did not appear unduly nervous or agitated.

“Status at T-minus thirty-six hours: all systems go,” he said. “One perimeter breach this time, occurring at sixteen-thirty-eight hours. Vessel: pleasure craft. Passengers from the craft inquired about the resort. Inquiries were fielded by Mr. Gibson and the visitors dismissed. I have not been fully informed of the response strategy, but believe that Mr. Gibson will deploy a two-man surveillance team to dispatch with the visitors as he has done before.”

While Deng could tell that Li was acting differently from usual, he had neither the time, nor the empathy, to bother monitoring Li’s day-to-day mood shifts. Thus, following an initial pause, Deng concluded that Li’s report satisfied him, at least to the degree that he needed satisfaction from his Mango Cay staff and the security perimeter they kept this late in the game.

“See you at oh-six-hundred tomorrow,” Deng said.

Li bowed as Deng zapped him from the screen and ordered the submarine beneath the surface.

That was one hell of a strategy,” Laramie said, “that tried-and-true espionage technique of yours.”

Cooper took the pizza box and nodded for Laramie to lead the way.

“It appears,” he said, “your case has reached the same dead end as mine. Either that, or the cases are one and the same, and between the two of us we lack sufficient IQ to figure the whole deal out.”

They strolled along a grubby asphalt lane in Sainte-Anne, Martinique, about two blocks from the marina that Cooper had picked to moor the Apache. It was almost dark; they’d made the twenty-mile trip from Mango Cay, and Cooper had recommended pizza as a meal Laramie might be capable of keeping down. To his surprise she’d agreed, so he’d taken her to the joint across the road, which he’d heard a little about.

They came down a long dock and climbed aboard the Apache.

“U-238/U-235,” Laramie said.

When Cooper figured out what it was she’d just told him, he said, “Ah.”