Will Staeger - Public Enemy

She heard some kind of muffled sigh rumble from the receiver.

“Laramie, after our breakfast rendezvous, I’ll be hopping back aboard my refueled speed machine and heading south. Conditions are expected to worsen as the tropical storm currently dumping six inches of rain on Cancún moves into the Gulf, so if I don’t clear Key West by ten, said speed machine will wind up as fiberglass kindling somewhere near the halfway point of my intended voyage.”

“What if the storm moves faster than that?”

“Then you’ll be eating your granola alone.”

Fair enough, Laramie thought.

“All right,” she said. “Storm allowing, I’ll see you at seven and brief you there.”

“You can brief me all you want,” Cooper said, “and I’ll give you my thoughts on whatever it is you’ve got going. But if you were asking me then, and you’re asking me now, and you ask me over coffee, to come work for whichever people it is you’re working for now, I’m not interested.”

A bonking rattle sounded out, and Laramie knew he’d dropped the phone on its cradle.

She leaned back against the headboard, allowing some of the fog to clear from her sleep-deprived brain. She sat there with her eyes closed for a minute, or maybe five, then flipped off the covers and rolled her feet off the side of the bed.

She wondered, as she stood, what the simplest way might be of procuring one of the task force fleet’s black-on-black Suburbans at five in the morning.

“It’s only a matter of time.”

After swallowing the sip of black coffee he’d just taken, Cooper attempted and failed to determine what it was Laramie was talking about. He was certain she wasn’t talking about what had slipped into his mind once she’d uttered the words.

“You want to run that by me again?”

“The caffeine addiction,” she said. “You didn’t used to drink any coffee. Now you look suspiciously like a two-cups-a-morning guy to me. Addiction can’t be far behind.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But last I checked, there were a few other addictions chewing up most of my real estate. Not sure there’s room for any others.”

Cooper was feeling irritable-or highly uncomfortable, at any rate. Upon Laramie’s arrival at the table, it seemed there had been a slight quickening of his pulse. It was a familiar sensation-familiarly annoying. He’d thought himself impervious to it, which was what made it so annoying: he had assumed his year-plus of rage at Laramie’s decision to abandon him and his island way of life, coupled with the so-preposterous-as-to-be-humorous threat Laramie had made in her “initial recruitment effort,” would function as a kind of force field. A moat.

Here he was, though, a mere three minutes into his breakfast meeting, and the force field had already disintegrated in favor of the same old quickened pulse. He thought of an imaginary wall suddenly detonating into a million digital pixels and the pixels fading to reveal an image behind.

“You’re an asshole,” Laramie said.

Cooper blinked.

“You’re an infantile, inconsiderate, uncontrolled, obnoxious child,” she went on, “in an aging, sunbaked, time-and-fisticuff-abused adult male shell.”

She did not appear particularly incensed, or even emotional, Laramie just leaning forward with her forearms crossed on the table, telling him off over coffee. Cooper took a few slow sips, letting time pass, swirling the bitter, chocolately fluid around his mouth with each taste, depositing the cup on its saucer between sips to draw out the time between each sip-to-taste-to-swallow. Knowing there was more on the way from the analyst across the table.

“An adult human being,” Laramie said, “would respect another adult human being’s decisions and, despite such decisions being difficult and painful, or even hurtful, retain some sense of interpersonal decorum. Even a bratty child, taking a friend’s tormented, thoughtful, deliberate decision to return to work personally, would eventually come to grips with his boorish overreaction and call, maybe apologize, or even, for Christ’s sake-you horse’s ass-take my goddamn call when I show the maturity and patience to dial up that goddamn beach club in search of you, knowing Ronnie’s already been told to screen my fucking call.”

Her words were delivered in so matter-of-fact a fashion that Cooper felt as though he’d tuned into one of the lower-rated local newscasts that competed with Ricardo Medvez’s nightly displays of knowledgeable warmth.

Despite being in no mood to explain himself-despite never being in the mood to explain himself-Cooper said, “Hell, I called. Twice now.”

“Popping your rude head above the surface after ducking me for a year is not the kind of ‘eventually’ I was talking about.”

“‘Eventually’ is a relative term,” he said. “Subjective, even.”

She looked at him for a while, still leaning on her forearms, but losing some of the detachment factor. A little color worked its way up the sides of her neck in pinkish splotches against her pale skin. He could feel the crackle in the air as she fought to keep the color beneath the collar of her blouse.

“Here’s what’s going on,” she said.

Then Laramie started in on the sordid suicidal exploits of Benny Achar and the ramifications of his act as incurred by a hundred and twenty-five late and former citizens of Hendry County. She covered Achar’s false identity, the reality and likelihood of what could come to pass if Achar were one of many, and the engineered version of the facts as presented in the news media. Then she told him she had been asked to head a counterterrorist unit whose purpose was to identify and possibly destroy Achar’s comrades, if any, and those responsible for compelling Achar to action in the first place.

“So that’s all,” Cooper said.

Laramie ignored him and concluded with a brief explanation of her theory that Achar had meant to use his bomb-launched spread of the filovirus as a message-as bread crumbs for them to follow. She didn’t mention the similarity between the counterterror strategy she’d outlined in her independent study paper and the organization she now appeared to be working for. Including Cooper’s interruption, it took Laramie thirty-four minutes to lay out her briefing.

Since Cooper’s fourth cup of coffee was giving him a headache, he ordered eggs Benedict from the menu. When Laramie attempted to wave off the waitress, Cooper asked the woman to bring Laramie an order of granola served with seasonal fruit.

“Skim milk, please,” Laramie said before the waitress padded away.

When they were alone again, Cooper said, “That was interesting how you told the whole story of Benny Achar and your role in matters,” Cooper said, “without mentioning who it was who put you on the case, or whose jurisdiction this ‘counterterrorist unit’ happens to fall under.”

Laramie didn’t say anything.

“Also,” Cooper said, “I find it just as interesting when a five-foot-four female satellite intelligence analyst with smooth skin and tremendous legs tells me it has become her job to ‘identify and possibly destroy’ international terrorists. Perhaps,” he said, “instead of offering you advice, I should loan you the gun I’m packing just east of my right hip.”

Laramie leaned back slightly from the table and folded her arms across her chest.

“Wow,” she said. “Was that your only-partially-infantile way of offering me an apology? The smooth skin and tremendous legs part?”

“I’m not sure I’d go that far.”

“Knowing you as I do, which, I believe, is marginally better than you know yourself, I’ll take it as your apology. I know it’s all I’m going to get.”

They were silent until the food came. Cooper was halfway through his breakfast, and Laramie one bite in on her first wedge of cantaloupe, when Laramie said, “So what do you think?”