Will Staeger - Painkiller

“The reason you called me about the memo.”

“Also, I was bored.”

“The uranium could connect our…cases,” she said. “It might be a stretch, but follow me for a second. Your guy, um-”

“Marcel.”

“-could have been exposed to fuel rods on Muscle-boy’s island.”

“Head,” Cooper said. “I think of him as Muscle-head.”

“Head sounds fine. Nuclear power is quiet, of course, and invisible if you run it right, except for maybe steam.”

Cooper thought about this and said, “There was a fog over the woods behind the resort when we were chatting with Muscle-head. Looked the same way when I was out here taking pictures. According to this latest brash theory of yours, the missing dictators, if that’s who Muscle-head is working for, would be using the power plant for what purpose?”

“It’s remotely possible they could be using it to create plutonium, or highly enriched uranium, which they in turn-no, that’s a stretch.”

“In turn what?”

“Used to build a nuclear warhead, which they then detonated in Beidaihe, China.”

Cooper set the pizza box on the Apache’s copilot’s seat. “Definitely a stretch,” he said.

He ducked into the cabin and came out with a pair of ceramic plates, on which he stacked stainless steel utensils, cloth napkins, and a pair of high-ball glasses. He reached into a minifridge and came out with a pair of Budweiser longnecks.

“You’re eating pizza, you need to have beer,” he said.

Laramie was sitting cross-legged on the deck. She tugged on the pizza box until it slid off the seat and landed beside her. She opened the lid.

“Agreed.”

Laramie put a slice on each plate. Cooper found he liked her better over pizza than Caesar salad without the dressing.

“What were you talking about,” she said, “when you mentioned the ‘boys who stopped by for a drink’ at the club?”

Cooper chewed a bite of pizza and slung back some beer. “Believe our friend Muscle-head sent a couple mercenaries my way. They didn’t really plan for me to survive the visit.”

“What happened to-” Laramie thought better of where she was headed and decided to leave the question hanging. “This was after you took the pictures?”

“Yes.”

“So he figured out where you live.”

“Pretty easily.”

“But your boat isn’t registered locally.”

“Paris,” he said.

“So Muscle-head probably has some sophisticated tracking equipment. Or he could have had you followed.”

Cooper nodded. “But he didn’t,” he said.

“You’d have known?”

“The Caribbean is largely flat and featureless.”

“So he may have access to satellite imagery, then,” she said.

“That’d be my guess.”

“What’s he protecting?”

Cooper took a swig of his beer, then shrugged.

Laramie said, “You think Muscle-head’s going to send somebody else to pay us a visit?”

“Didn’t work before.”

“What if he does?”

“Well,” he said, “you may not have noticed that I’m doing so, but I am in fact keeping an eye out.”

Laramie looked at him. “I see.”

Cooper took another bite of pizza, the beginning of his third slice, and said, “I’ve got a riddle for you.”

“Okay.”

“Boat loads up a half-dead wino in Kingston. Sails, as you might put it, five hundred-plus miles east. Stops and drifts for maybe an hour, about five miles west of Mango Cay. Doesn’t head over to the island. Doesn’t come here to Martinique. Just sits, then turns around and goes back. What happened?”

Laramie thought for a moment. Cooper noticed she wasn’t half-bad at putting away pizza-she too had consumed the tip of her third slice.

“The half-dead wino,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Did he come back with the boat?”

“I’m not totally sure, but I think we can assume no.”

“I hate to admit it,” she said, “but for the moment, at least, I’m stumped.”

Cooper went into the cabin, came out with two more beers, set them on the deck, then turned and opened the box where he kept his navigation charts. He pulled out one of the accordion-folded satellite photos Gates had sent him, made some room on the deck by moving aside the pizza box and the plates, unfurled a few folds in the photo, and draped it across the space he’d cleared on the deck.

“SATINT,” he said.

Laramie sort of half-frowned. “No kidding, Columbo.”

“Your dad.”

“Right.”

Cooper pointed at a beetle-size image on one of the squares, the only visible variation from ocean in the huge photo spread.

“The boat,” he said.

Laramie rose to her knees and leaned over the square. She didn’t look only at the place where he’d pointed.

“Where did you get these?”

Cooper flattened a second square about half a chessboard from the square that featured the boat, and knelt beside it. He ignored Laramie’s question.

“The night after Muscle-head’s pals stopped by to say hi, I took another look at these things. They were just about all I had to go on. Except maybe your memo, that is.”

When he found what he was looking for, he set his finger against the photo.

“You’re the analyst,” he said. “What’s that?”

Laramie hesitated. Cooper didn’t grasp why at first, then understood what it was-the way he was sitting, facing her, and the place he was asking her to look, could have meant he was planning on showing her something in addition to the satellite shot. He adjusted the position of his leg; she lowered her eyes and crawled over.

When she’d examined the place in the ocean where Cooper was pointing, Laramie rose to her knees, looked around, found Cooper’s unused glass-he was drinking from the bottle-flipped the glass upside down, and set it on the surface of the photo. She checked, found it did what she wanted it to do, and, using it as a magnifying glass, leaned over the place where Cooper was pointing and took as close a look as she could under the circumstances. When she was through, Laramie leaned back on her heels and looked at him.

“I think that’s the conning tower of a small submarine,” she said.

Cooper nodded. “Pretty good, Lie Detector. That was my guess too.”

Cooper watched her as she thought of the same series of things he’d thought of when he’d made the discovery of the submarine.

“Go ahead,” he said, “ask.”

“All right, I will. How the hell are we going to take a look underneath Muscle-head’s island?”

Cooper smiled. He realized as he did it that it wasn’t something he did often.

“Let me see what I can do,” he said, and pulled his sat phone from his waist.

When Carlos Muske, the president’s national security advisor, had finished reading the Julie Laramie surveillance reports compiled by Sperling Rhone, Gates’s former private security man, he closed the file and said to Lou Ebbers, “The motives of your deputy director are somewhat difficult to grasp.”

Ebbers said, “Yes.”

They were seated in Muske’s office in the West Wing.

“And the suspended analyst,” Muske said. “Laramie. Appears she ain’t bad at this.”

Ebbers had already known Laramie to be quite an analyst, for reasons unrelated to the current predicament.

“Agreed,” he said.

Muske looked at Ebbers across his desk. The national security advisor cut a leaner form but otherwise gave the impression somebody had performed a visual effect morphing together Colin and Michael Powell.

“You could have taken this straight to the president.”

“Could have,” Ebbers said.

“Probably would have helped repair your profile with him.”