Will Staeger - Public Enemy

“Of the Achar predicament, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Cooper considered the query.

“Who do you have on your team,” he said. “Your ‘counterterrorist unit.’”

“I’ve been interviewing from a pool of candidates. Volunteers from various walks of life who’ve been background-checked to the hilt. Plus,” she said, talking faster, “I’ve contacted a former professor of mine, who we’ll probably bring on board.”

Cooper looked up from his eggs Benedict with a look of moderate disgust. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He thought of something else to say, then decided his growing irritation with matters wouldn’t be helped much by the nasty comment he had in mind, shelved it, and said, “And how is Professor Eddie doing?”

“He’s doing fine.”

Laramie left it at that.

“To give you answers,” Cooper said, “or advice, I’d need to know more than what you included in your half-hour speech. Probably need to dig into whatever documents you’ve got-I don’t know, transcripts of interviews, maybe whatever paper trail you’ve got on the guy back to whenever it was he first turned up under his false identity. I do have some experience in crafting a new identity, of course. But other than my own background, I’m not sure-”

“Wait a minute-unless you’re skipping the boat trip, there’s no way-”

“I thought you wanted my advice?”

“But I can’t just send you off on your boat with a copy of classified files-”

“Sure you can.”

“Look. You know I want-we want-need-your help, but it won’t work if you’re providing it from Conch Bay, or San Juan, or wherever it is you’re heading on your boat.”

“No? Well thanks for the breakfast, anyway. Always prefer to set sail on a full belly.”

He waved for the waitress to bring the check.

“You can’t just say no, or dictate how this is going to work,” Laramie said, and Cooper could see the pink coming up her neck again. “You do understand that if Achar was one of a dozen sleepers, each targeting a vast water table or some other vital area, that thousands-even hundreds of thousands, or more-could die.” She leaned in again, full of emotion for a change. “And you’re just going to go back and lie out on the beach?”

“Actually,” Cooper said, “yes.”

She stared at him.

“Perhaps,” Cooper said, “you and Professor Eddie can continue to work with your team of Salvation Army volunteers and solve your little riddle on your own.”

The check came and Cooper deposited a couple of twenties on the tray without checking the total. He thought of a story he’d once heard about Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.-outside a Vegas casino, Sinatra asks Sammy if he’s got change for a twenty, and Sammy says, “Twenties are change, baby.” Cooper couldn’t remember who’d told him the story, or whether Sammy had been the one asking for the change, but he’d heard it a long time ago and it had stuck with him since.

“Listen-wait, you goddamn pain in the ass,” Laramie said. She had reached her hand across the table but didn’t quite touch his arm with her fingers. He felt their warmth, though, resting an inch from his wrist on the cool glass surface of the tabletop. “I can get you some of the documents in a diplomatic pouch. They’ll be encrypted and I’ll work out a way for you to get the code. But it won’t be everything, and you’ll need to weigh in quickly-if Achar’s suicide bombing wasn’t ordered by his employers, they may have discovered what he’s done by now. Rung the alarm, I mean-and that could mean the other sleepers may be activated. We might have a month, a week-a day.”

Cooper smiled without putting any heart in it and got to the business of setting the hook.

“I’ll take a look at whatever you send me,” he said, “and whatever you call to brief me on later. But I’ll only do it if the people you work for are willing to make it worth my while.”

“What?”

“I’ve got a deal structure in mind.”

“Wait a minute, you did hear the part about the others volunteering to work on the team-are you actually saying you’re looking to profit from a terrorist-”

“Yes.”

She stared at him, silent, Cooper seeing in her look a hostile kind of pity, Laramie clearly upset with him for displaying such a lowlife’s priority scheme. He found himself to be both thrilled and disappointed by the reaction. It was the way she’d made him feel from the beginning-like he was constantly getting in trouble for his rambunctious behavior.

“Here’s what I suggest,” Cooper said. “I suggest you take this back to the people you work for. Inform them that one of the members of your team would, upon further consideration, have ultimately decided to sign on for the sake of national security pro bono-except for the threat they suggested you make in hopes of coaxing me to join up. Since you, and they, went ahead and made that threat, I’m therefore going to charge whatever organization is involved for my services. Homeland Security? NSA? Somebody new? I don’t give a shit who it is. You want my expertise-what little I have-it’ll cost you. It’ll cost you exactly what it cost our late, mutual former boss Peter M. Gates eighteen years ago, plus interest. Though because we know each other so well, I’ll play nice and keep the interest to a nominal, even token rate of, say, four-point-five percent per annum.”

“Christ,” Laramie said, her look of pity now deteriorating to one of disgust. “What kind of money are we talking here?”

“Not much. What Pete paid was twenty years of salary beginning at the GS-14 level, including annual merit raises, periodic promotions, and the usual annual hazard bonus. Plus the interest, of course.”

“You’re kidding. I can’t-”

“Did they know you knew me before they hired you?”

“What?” Laramie blinked, then glared. “Why are you assuming somebody else hired me?”

“You mean, somebody besides CIA?”

“Yes.”

“They don’t work this way-they don’t give anybody the kind of authority it sounds as though you’ve been granted. Not anymore. Not unless you extort them into it, anyway.”

He grinned.

Laramie sighed. “What does it come to?”

“Rounding off, we can just call it twenty million.”

“Come on.”

“I thought I was necessary?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have put it that way.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have. I’ll need it as a single lump-sum disbursement. I’ll provide you the relevant numbered account into which they’ll need to do the disbursing. And the account will vanish a few seconds after the money is posted to it, so don’t get any ideas.”

He thought for a moment, then reached over and retrieved the pen from Laramie’s side of the table and wrote four phone numbers, all with the same area code and prefix, on a napkin stained with a splash of Tabasco sauce.

“You can find me at one of these numbers for the next eight days. Forty-eight hours per number; they expire and switch on a more or less annual cycle.”

He handed her the napkin, stood, then promptly spun and walked off.

Cooper spent most of the ride home from Naples thinking through recent history as crafted by, or against, Po Keeler, Cap’n Roy, El Oso Blanco’s stateside fence caught sleeping with the frozen crabs-and the anonymous killers who’d snuffed them out. Cooper thinking of them as snuffer-outers-the snuffer-outers who’d hired the killer Lieutenant Riley had shot on the hill beside Cap’n Roy’s infinity pool.

He decided he would call Lieutenant Riley to see whether they’d found a ballistics match between the bullets that killed Keeler and the gun the assassin had used on Roy. He’d guess it’d turn out that way-as the body count added up, the game of connect-the-dots was getting easier. This much he knew: everybody who’d been offed to date had been immersed in the shipment, seizure, or resale of the gold artifacts stash. The list of duly immersed parties still among the living wasn’t long-himself, El Oso Blanco, Lieutenant Riley and his staff, and Susannah Grant, whose involvement he estimated couldn’t be traced. Either way, though, unless he found some way of identifying and taking down the snuffer-outers, chances were he and his surviving associates would soon show up in the dead pool.