Will Staeger - Public Enemy

Cooper didn’t like what the analysis was telling him about the people who belonged to the artifacts-or had, once. He didn’t like what it meant about the plea for help he was now certain he’d heard the golden-idol priestess on the shelf demand of him. And he didn’t like something else about all of this-particularly if Cap’n Roy hadn’t been the one to ace the belonger-to-the-rich.

Cooper tossed the fax onto the cement floor of his bungalow. It made a loud slapping sound-to Cooper, a perfect noise, an exclamation point on this episode of his life. He stood, shrugged his shoulders, rolled his head around to loosen the kinks in his neck, reached over to flip off the light, took the two blind steps he’d taken a few million times before-usually drunk-and fell back into bed. Thinking, as he imagined the muck and grime slipping from his body, that Susannah’s map, and what existed within it, didn’t matter for shit. Thinking that he’d heard all he needed to hear, and that the end was therefore near.

Cap’n Roy’s stash was worth as much as Roy had hoped, maybe considerably more-one large shitload of dollars. With one, or maybe two phone calls tops, Cooper held no doubt he’d be able to find somebody to take the goods off Cap’n Roy’s pesky little hands-a fence-and be done with it.

Done with the artifacts-and done with Cap’n Roy.

For good.

Laramie arrived in the freshly built Southwest Florida International Airport terminal and followed the signs to the exit. Hoofing it past the baggage claim, she wondered whether they’d had somebody on the flight, or sent somebody to keep an eye on the gate. Somebody who’d tell the guide, whoever the guide was, that she was here.

Less than a minute after she stepped out into the humid heat, a Jeep Grand Cherokee nosed into the crosswalk stripes nearest her. The Jeep’s passenger-side window zipped down, and when nobody else on the sidewalk made a rush for the car, Laramie stepped to the curb and leaned down for a look inside. She saw behind the wheel a man in a corduroy baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. The color of the hat was a muted pastel falling somewhere between pink and orange. He wore a clean white T-shirt and worn blue jeans, his skin a sunbaked version of what looked to Laramie like Mexican heritage. There was a subtle athleticism and wear and tear to the man-he looked, Laramie thought, like a migrant farm worker who’d come to own the farm.

“Welcome to Fort Myers,” he said, speaking across the seat through the open passenger-side window.

Laramie nodded, bag still strapped over her shoulder.

“Ever been here before?”

Laramie looked around. “Florida? Yes. Fort Myers? No.”

“Old people, golf courses, a few beaches, one hell of a lot of oranges, and a lot less swamp than there used to be. Hop in.”

Laramie decided not to be a nervous Nellie-there was no reason to think the farm-owner sitting behind the wheel was anyone but the “tour guide” sent by Ebbers. She opened the door, tossed in her bag, and climbed in.

The guide eased off the brake and the Grand Cherokee slipped out into the traffic loop.

“Drive’s about an hour,” he said, eyes on the road. “More than enough to bring you up to speed. Not that there’s much to talk about yet. Not that’s been figured out, anyway.”

Laramie watched the airport’s landscaped palm beds switch over to pines and ponds as they moved off airport property and climbed a ramp to I-75 North.

“So what exactly are we talking about, then?” she said.

Her guide looked over at her.

“We’re talking about a ‘flight school clue,’” he said.

Laramie thought she understood but asked him to clarify anyway.

“Somebody made a mistake,” he said. “Blew himself up a little ahead of schedule with the ammonium nitrate car bomb he’d put together in his garage. Blew up his house while he was at it, and dispersed, in the process, a miniscule percentage of the airborne filovirus serum he’d been storing in his basement freezer. When we say ‘flight school clue,’ we’re saying what you think we’re saying. We feel we have in our suicide bomber today’s equivalent of the clue left by the 9/11 hijackers, which was fumbled, when they enrolled in various flight schools to learn how to fly a 767 into a skyscraper.”

Laramie noticed his use of the term we, her “tour guide” deploying the word in the same way Ebbers had. Except, that was, when he’d referenced the 9/11 flight school clue being missed.

“Key difference being,” he said, “is if our bomber had succeeded in dispersing the whole batch of the pathogen he was keeping, a lot more thousands of people than took the hit in 2001 would be dead already. With more on the way.”

“Who was he?”

“Name was Benjamin Achar.” The guide pronounced the ch as though it were a k. “However, based on his Social Security number, Mr. Achar appears to have resurrected himself from a case of SIDS he came down with thirty-six years ago.”

“As in sudden infant death syndrome?”

“One and the same.”

The guide flipped on his blinker, changed lanes to pass a semi, turned off the blinker, and slid past the rig.

Laramie looked out the front windshield as they exited the turnpike at State Road 80. Once they left Fort Myers behind, SR-80 became somewhat more barren, the strip malls and golf communities on either side of the highway switching over to pine barrens and driving ranges, then orange groves-lots of them.

“You’re saying he was a sleeper, then,” Laramie said. “A deep cover terrorist.”

“That’s the theory.”

“Working for who?”

The guide smiled a compact, tight-lipped grin.

“Believe that’s why I was told to pick you up at the airport.”

“We don’t know,” Laramie said.

“Nope.”

The highway lost its extra lanes and narrowed to one lane in each direction. Laramie thought about the things he was telling her. She considered thirty or forty questions she could ask, then thought that it would probably be a busy seventy-two hours between now and the time she’d need to give her findings to Ebbers, and that maybe the better idea would be to play it by ear.

They passed through the city of LaBelle, followed by an endless residential development called Port LaBelle-each looking utterly bereft of activity-and then Laramie saw a sign indicating he’d turned them onto State Road 833 South. Orange groves and a patchwork of other farms gave way to some very small homes in terrible disrepair, followed by a roadside trinket shop, gas station, and short bridge. The bridge took them over a narrow stripe of water, the skinny waterway straight as a canal, stretching to the horizon in both directions. Over the bridge a stretch of swamp came, then more pine trees.

A berm blocked the swamp water from the pines; the trees looked emaciated, bereft of green outside of the occasional branch or needle. The stretch of trees didn’t last long. At its back end, rapidly approaching, Laramie could see the identical roofs of a number of houses.

The guide slowed the Jeep. Ahead of them stood a set of orange pylons and two Florida Highway Patrol cruisers parked lengthwise across the road. The guide lowered his window as the state trooper standing against the hood of the nearest cruiser approached, hand resting lazily on his firearm. Her guide pulled what looked to Laramie like a pair of credentials from a pocket on the door-the kind of credentials VIPs wore at sports events, clipped to a lanyard you could keep around your neck. The trooper took the credentials, peered inside the Jeep for a look at Laramie, then, wordlessly, retreated to his cruiser, withdrew a clipboard, copied some information to the sheet on the clipboard, replaced the clipboard in his cruiser, and returned the guide’s credentials.