Will Staeger - Public Enemy

After hours was another story.

When he wasn’t on the job, Cole, a five-foot-eleven-inch, two-hundred-and-ten-pound former athlete of a man, behaved more or less like a bulimic teenager. Starting sometime approximating 5:01 P.M. each day, Cole drank, ate, and then-between the hours of three-thirty and five A.M.-purged. He drank so much at night, so consistently, that his aching liver demanded a postmidnight caloric intake sufficient to nourish an elephant. This, in turn, led to an early morning ritual, of which he partook with savage consistency: just prior to four, he would stumble down the hall in his one-bedroom shithole walkup in Queens, usually rising from odd, ever-new places in the apartment where he’d passed out the night before. Sometimes falling and denting various bones on the hard surfaces in the bathroom that was his destination-sometimes smacking a knee on the floor or a shin on the edge of the tub-every morning, he roamed in there and loudly vomited his guts out.

It always seemed his traumatized body had failed to digest even an ounce of the food and beverages he’d consumed hours before, all that food and drink just hanging around his belly waiting to be ejected. And eject it he did. Painfully.

His stomach expanded over time, becoming first soft, then thick, then monstrous, until the weakened muscles around his ribs became little more than a source of stabbing pain as he repeatedly blotched his guts into the 1930s-era American Standard nobody had seen fit to replace because the fucking thing kept working just fine.

It was in approximately the same manner, at approximately the same time, that Cole and Knowles expressed their common rage in an uncommon way. During the same week in early January-four months to the day on which they’d lost their ex-wives-each man composed his own letter to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Knowles’s note was more eloquent, but the point in each was the same: Knowles and Cole each expressed, in approximately one and one-half pages of handwritten text, a desire to serve his country. Each told the story of his murdered wife, of his desire to retaliate. Each confessed a suspicion he was too old, that it was too late for him to volunteer as a soldier, at least in the strictest sense. Thus, each man said, the logical choice of service was either the intelligence or, more specifically, antiterror ranks of the federal government.

In the years that followed 9/11, Cole and Knowles were not alone, and CIA was not the only recipient of such offers. Both CIA and FBI recruiting personnel, obsessed as they were on developing HUMINT assets fluent in Arab languages and cultures, tended to simply keep such letters on file, occasionally offering the names of the volunteers to other inquiring agencies.

Following repeated interviews, deep background checks, and some in-person monitoring of day-to-day routines, it was precisely because of each man’s rage, and the letters that rage spawned, that Dennis Cole and Wally Knowles came to be included in the pool of names from which Julie Laramie had been instructed to assemble her “counter-cell cell.”

A former TraveLodge gone private, the single-story motel had been given a fresh coat of paint, a sickly beige that drew a strange contrast with the trademark blue-and-white “sleepy bear” still standing vigil above the lobby entrance. The billboard beside the bear proclaimed the place the Flamingo Inn, though the old TraveLodge insignia could be seen peeking out from beneath the new name, which somebody had painted in pink with a sweeping cursive flourish. The bear, chipped and fading, still wore his blue pajamas and nightcap out front.

With the help of her guide, Laramie had procured two adjoining rooms as an office, opening the door between to connect them. In one of the rooms they moved all the furniture except one table against a wall, then added some folding seats and the armchair they’d discovered in a closet. Toss in a dry-erase board retrieved from LaBelle’s only office-supplies store, and they had themselves a poor man’s war room.

Wally Knowles wore a black linen suit, black loafers, and Ray-Bans. He sat on the bed with his legs crossed, his trademark black hat on the bed beside him. Dennis Cole, who’d chosen one of the folding chairs, came in jeans, a green polo shirt, and a seersucker blazer. Laramie’s guide sat just out of sight in the adjoining room doing something on a laptop. She knew he would soon be leaving to retrieve their third recruit of four from the airport-a tenured professor of political science at Northwestern University named Eddie Rothgeb.

Rothgeb was the professor with whom Laramie had worked on her two independent study projects-as well as a few other things maybe she shouldn’t have. Bringing him to the table wasn’t exactly a move that put her squarely in the comfort zone, but he was the best at what he did and his was an expertise she could use right now.

Laramie had also been given the green light to pay Cooper-recruit number four, as her guide had called him upon relaying the message from Ebbers, or whoever it was who made such decisions. There had been no questions asked and no negotiating: twenty million bucks, approved with little or no red tape, for a single man. She decided she’d have to ponder the meaning of that later, but one thing it meant was that somebody-CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, DEA-whoever-was taking the antics of Benjamin Achar very seriously.

Meaning that the guests of my little convention here at the Flamingo Inn aren’t exactly gathered to suck down piña coladas by the pool.

Overnight, each had been given an abridged version of the terror book, inclusive of some of Laramie’s conclusions, which Knowles and Cole had read in the privacy of their respective rooms at the inn. Rothgeb, she mused, should be listening to his version right now.

Laramie stopped fiddling with the dry-erase marker she’d been holding.

“So,” she said.

Cole raised his eyebrows and dropped them. Laramie thought of the way she remembered Tom Selleck doing this on reruns of Magnum, P.I., except that she remembered Magnum being a lot better-looking than Cole.

“You might have wondered initially why you were summoned here,” Laramie said. “Or why you were asked to read the package of documents with no explanation or preamble. That was intentional. The document you read last night is this incident’s version of a ‘terror book,’ aka murder book, as it is usually known in domestic homicide cases. We didn’t explain it in advance because we wanted you to form your own impressions. To give weight where you chose to give weight, to consider circumstances the way you naturally would upon reading the document.”

She grabbed hold of the dry-erase marker again, popped off the top and tacked it back on again with her forefinger and thumb. She’d rehearsed parts of this speech but had ultimately decided to more or less go with the flow.

“You’ve each volunteered your services in defense of the country. You’ve been screened for suitability and liability and, for now at least, you’ve passed. Congratulations. You now work for me. I work for someone else. The man in the other room keeps an eye on all of us; he also gets us what we need. There will be another member of the team arriving here shortly.”

To the extent the $20 million fee would buy his time, Laramie had decided to use Cooper in the way you were supposed to use field operatives-secretly. She wasn’t yet sure how they’d be putting him to use, and until she’d figured that part out, she wasn’t planning on telling the other members of the team about his involvement.

“Operating alone, in whatever degree of secrecy one finds at the Flamingo Inn, here is what you will now be asked to do,” she said. “Despite the indirect references to the contrary in the terror book, we are operating under the assumption Benjamin Achar was not acting alone. We are assuming that five, or ten, or twenty or more fellow deep cover operatives are living within our borders under assumed identities, armed with an equivalent stash of Marburg-2 filovirus and the wherewithal to disperse it over a much wider zone than Achar succeeded in reaching.”