Will Staeger - Public Enemy

“Your proposal has been accepted,” she said, “and the payment wired. You can call whoever it is you need to call to confirm the wire.”

The pilot hadn’t warned him not to use the phone in the air, and neither Borrego nor Madrid made any motion to stop him now. Cooper knew that the prohibition on the use of standard mobile phones on commercial airliners was horseshit-the weak wireless signal had no effect on an aircraft’s instruments-but he wondered about the signals sent by a portable satellite unit.

Cooper thought he’d choose his words carefully-no need for the Polar Bear and his lieutenant to learn anything they shouldn’t on the topic of the Emerald Lakes affair.

“Enjoyed the book you sent,” he said. “A real thriller.”

It only took a short pause for Laramie to say, “You’re not alone?”

“Nope. But it doesn’t really matter. Seems to me your boy Benny did one hell of a job leaving his real self in the dust.”

“That’s your analysis? That our sleeper hid his true identity well? You aren’t exactly giving the federal government its money’s worth.”

“You getting your money’s worth from Professor Eddie?”

Another pause, slightly longer this time, then, “He’s working at a slightly lower pay grade. But we do have some ideas, so I’ll be in touch. I was going to recommend you get going on the reading, but it seems you anticipated the government’s response.”

Cooper said, “I know that you can be very persuasive,” then wondered immediately why he’d have said something like that.

“Sometime in the next two or three days, I’ll be calling you back with the rest of the team on the line. It may be sooner rather than later if an assignment crops up.”

Cooper eyed the landscape passing a few miles beneath the Gulfstream jet.

“I may be a little busy,” he said. Thinking of something, he pulled the phone from his ear and regarded the caller ID numerals. “I can reach you at this number?”

“Room eighteen.”

“I’ll be in touch,” he said, and broke the connection.

The pilot came on over the intercom and informed his trio of passengers they should buckle up for the descent into Belize City.

Belize, a tall, skinny nation occupying the western edge of the Caribbean Sea, rests just south of the technical demarcation between the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Cooper had been here a few times, mainly by boat and mainly to dive along the country’s celebrated barrier reef. What he’d seen gave him the impression of a landlocked Caribbean island: dark-skinned locals, colorful paint jobs on weather-ravaged buildings, fishing boats everywhere you turned.

After a brief taxi through Philip S. W. Goldson International Airport, the G450 cooled its jets before a private hangar, where Cooper observed a waiting two-vehicle convoy consisting of a black Cadillac sedan and a dull yellow jeep. Upon closer inspection, Cooper observed the jeep to be a Land Rover Defender, probably worth a hundred and fifty grand outfitted the way it was. If nothing else, Cooper thought, considering the M5, the Land Rover, and the Gulfstream, the top brass of Borrego Industries certainly did travel in style.

It turned out the Caddy was merely there for the driver of the Defender to hitch a ride home; upon handing the key to the velociraptor, the guy-looking to Cooper like Derek Jeter’s long-lost brother-hopped into the sedan via the passenger-side door and it sped off across the tarmac. Madrid opened the luggage hatch on the side of the plane and set to transferring their bags to the back compartment of the Defender. The man, Cooper thought, seemed endlessly willing and able to accomplish any task, of any type, that Borrego didn’t want to tackle himself. Hell, Cooper thought-pay me as much as Borrego probably pays good old Jesus, and maybe I too would be happy to sign on as a multihyphenate comrade.

When Cooper came down the stairs and hit the tarmac beside Borrego, the Polar Bear smiled.

“This is us,” he said, and motioned for Cooper to join him in the Land Rover. As Borrego offered him the passenger seat, Cooper was thinking of shooting for a bout of politeness when he noticed the setup in the rear of the Defender. Beneath the vinyl top, just aft of the jeep’s roll bar, sat a custom-built throne resembling something between a Recaro racing seat and a La-Z-Boy. The seat’s color scheme matched the exterior of the jeep, black and muted yellow, and there were sealed baggage compartments on both sides of the seat, into which Madrid placed the last pieces of luggage. Once the velociraptor locked them, it was hard to tell the compartments were there-they simply appeared to be part of the jeep’s floor, raised as it was to accommodate the special design of the throne. Cooper assumed there were some monster fuel tanks built into the vehicle too.

The three-hundred-plus-pound Borrego hopped over the side of the jeep without opening the driver’s-side door and climbed nimbly into the back, Cooper thinking of The Dukes of Hazzard. He located a cooler, dug out a bottle of Gatorade, and plunked it into the movie-theater-style cup holder built into an armrest in the throne. The Polar Bear seized and buckled his seat belt, took a long pull on the Gatorade, and-once Cooper had clambered into the passenger seat-popped open the cooler and offered him a beverage.

“Why not,” Cooper said, and palmed the cold plastic bottle.

Madrid slid behind the wheel and bounced them out of the airport.

After a pit stop by the Polar Bear at a quasi-governmental building near Belize City’s sprawling container docks, Madrid piloted the Defender through a series of narrow streets and the kind of colorful, worn-out overcrowdedness Cooper had grown accustomed to seeing in the Caribbean and points south. They made their way out of the waterfront district, Cooper turning for one last look out the rear of the Defender at the cool blue Caribbean, obscured somewhat by a forest of industrial piers but still there, making him feel good. The velociraptor sloped them up a highway ramp and Cooper watched the tall cranes of the container terminal fade into the distance.

He asked the enthroned Borrego where they were headed.

“Kind of a laundromat for cars,” Borrego said. This, between chugs of Gatorade. He bent down between bumps in the road, returned his empty bottle to the cooler, brought a new flavor out, twisted off the top with two fingers, and put away half of it. “Belize City’s maybe the third or fourth most corrupt port in the Americas. Maybe every two months or so, a regular shipment of-how does Lexus put it?-‘pre-owned’ cars comes into the docks, probably a couple hundred vehicles in the hold. Comes in at night. The customs agents policing the docks don’t seem to mind as the shipment is divided and loaded aboard six or seven smaller ships. The smaller boats hit a few ports around the region to unload their abbreviated load of Honda Accords, where people like the people we’ll soon be visiting clean off the VINs and send them on their way.”

“And this,” Cooper said, “has what exactly to do with the artifact shipment?”

“The tomb diggers I bought from are all working at the laundromat.”

Cooper considered this.

“Day jobs,” he said.

“Right. I stopped by the port authority first because we need to find out where the laundromat is operating today before we can get there. Normally,” he said, “the port authority personnel taking the payola to keep that sort of information quiet don’t exactly part freely with it.”

Cooper eyed the outskirts of the city as it passed by along the side of the highway.

“But some of those containers back at the shipping terminal,” he said, “are yours?”

“Most.”

Cooper nodded. He didn’t exactly need to whip out a calculator to assess how easily Borrego, as the local shipping kingpin, could glean the whereabouts of the “laundromat” from the “port authority personnel”-each of whom, he supposed, Borrego was probably paying two or three times their salary in cash just to keep them friendly.