Will Staeger - Public Enemy

It took a moment for Laramie to answer. “Near the western tip, on the south coast. San Cristóbal,” she said.

Cooper flipped over his wrist and checked the time on his Tag. He’d need to make a couple of calls, and they’d need to get themselves on a couple of flights-neither of which tasks would put them past midafternoon.

“Unless things have changed in the last five years, there’s a three o’clock nonstop to Cancún out of Fort Myers,” he said. “American. Get yourself on the flight and I’ll pick you up outside the baggage claim. I were you,” he added, “I’d pick up some Dramamine in the airport gift shop. Don’t take it until after you land-it’ll be another hour from there before we’re out on the water.”

Cooper knew it would take at least six hours by sea, maybe more, before whatever shitbucket his friend Abe Worel procured would deliver them to the land of Fidel, Che, and good baseball-and that Laramie would probably be heaving her guts over the side maybe fifteen minutes into the trip, regardless of how many Dramamine tablets she took. But the drug usually mitigated the effect, if nothing else.

After a moment Laramie said, “You’re saying we’re going in tonight?”

“That soon enough?” he said. “Call if you miss the flight. Otherwise I’ll see you at the baggage claim.”

Cooper ended the call.

With nothing much else to do during the usual delays on the pair of flights he was taking to get from Tortola to Cancún, Cooper brought Laramie’s terror book along for the trip and reread most of the material. He couldn’t concentrate particularly well-whenever he hit a boring passage, which was always, he’d begin experiencing visions of the various dead ends in his triple-murder, seek-to-save-your-own-ass case-the golden-idol priestess screeching for help, Cap’n Roy dead by his pool, Po Keeler’s tarp-covered body down in the Dump, these images all sloshing around his sodden mind’s eye between thoughts of Belize City, the contract killer, U.S. Coast Guard cutters, the Polar Bear, and that strip of wood from the bottom of the fucking cave in-

Guatemala.

He read the word on the page just as he thought it. He focused on what he’d been reading, realizing he hadn’t comprehended a word in the past ten, maybe fifteen pages. He was camped in the section covering the “filo,” authored by somebody from the Centers for Disease Control; it seemed there was a mention of a case of hemorrhagic fever in Guatemala in the early 1980s that the CDC indicated was a fairly close match, symptoms wise, with the “Marburg-2” bug Benjamin Achar has loosed upon the Central Florida population.

Having just returned from a trip in which he’d witnessed the skeletal remains of a village worth of Indians all dying quickly and at about the same time-in the same neck of the woods as the case of hemorrhagic fever outbreak mentioned in the report-Cooper decided he’d have to consider the unlikely possibility of a connection. He found this hard to believe, but as he pondered it, the scenario actually sounded more plausible every minute.

If the “isolated remnant civilization” he and Borrego had discovered to have been killed sometime less than fifty years ago hadn’t been dispatched by a Marburg filovirus, the village had certainly been exposed to something like it-which, in turn, he had to assume had been released, whether intentionally or no, by the torched-to-the-earth facility formerly occupying the upper portion of the crater. Maybe it wasn’t a chemical plant after all-but a biological weapons plant.

Any further connection became rapidly more disturbing.

It seemed obvious that his own discovery might be of great value to the commander-in-chief of the “counter-cell cell” by which he was now employed-but he also wondered whether there might be something from Laramie’s case, or the connections possessed by “the people she worked for,” that could aid him in solving his own, seemingly endless sequence of dead ends.

Cooper flipped back to the last paragraph he remembered paying attention to and reread from there. The “filo” dispersed by Achar was an airborne filovirus, or hemorrhagic fever pathogen, easily caught by and transmitted to both animal and person. According to the report, there were synthetic components of the “filo’s” makeup, meaning it had been bioengineered. The CDC author mentioned numerous laboratories, hostile regimes, even one clandestine American facility in Utah as possible institutions where filovirus engineering had taken place within the “preceding decades,” but stated that no evidence existed indicating such a revolutionary technological breakthrough as found in the “Marburg-2” had been achieved at any of these labs.

“In our effort to find the origin of the organic portion of the pathogen,” the report went on to say, “the CDC followed two investigative paths. First, we accessed CIA’s most current intel on the inventory and status of all facilities known to have done illegal biological weapons research. We isolated three active facilities that have, at one time or another, been known to focus on filo-related R & D: one in Malaysia, operated and funded by the Jemaah Islamiya terrorist organization; a second, possibly run by al-Qaeda, in Algeria; and a third housed on the grounds of a privately held pharmaceuticals company in the Ukraine. At the urging of the task force, the Pentagon sent [REDACTED]…”

By necessity, Cooper skipped the blacked-out portions of the report and kept on. He wondered whether Laramie had blacked out sections she didn’t want him to see, or if she’d received the report this way.

“The second angle we’re taking in our search for the origin of the strain assumes the organic portion of the filo serum is a naturally occurring bug,” the report said, and here, Cooper saw, was where the report referenced Guatemala, and the outbreak the CDC had focused its investigation on.

He read that in 1983, a caregiver’s journal documented the outbreak at a health care clinic in “rural Guatemala”-the report, Cooper found, offering no greater precision than that. Before the caregiver ran out of gas herself, she described the symptoms of the outbreak, as incurred by the entire clinic’s staff. The CDC had recovered the journal from some vaguely explained source. The symptoms of hemorrhagic fever, Cooper read-uncontrollably high fever, total breakdown of all organ functions, bleeding out through every orifice, rapid death-were similar wherever the pathogen struck. But the specific characteristics of the LaBelle outbreak matched the symptoms suffered by the victims in the Guatemala clinic very closely, at least per the caregiver: the incubation and infection periods, aggressive symptom development, and other disease “mile markers” tracked in the missionary’s journal matched the LaBelle fever death pattern nearly to the minute.

The journal described a local teenage girl “of Indian dialect” who had been treated in the clinic for flu-like symptoms and subsequently released before the onset of the symptoms among the staff.

Cooper leafed back to check the date again: 1983.

Poor man’s forensics team though he and the Polar Bear made, he and Borrego had put the deaths of the members of the Indian village somewhere in that basic time frame. Yet another disturbing match-it wasn’t too far-fetched a scenario to presume that the filo-infected girl “of Indian dialect” had strolled into the health clinic the same week, or month, or year that the Indian village was taken down by some similar outbreak.

Cooper checked for and found no further reference to the fate of the girl in the passages from the journal as photocopied into the binder.

Christ-a survivor?

He closed the binder and stuffed it in the bag he’d brought along for the flights, Cooper thinking the CDC report had decided it for him: he would be asking Laramie the lie detector about “ICR,” in addition to recommending that she, as the “counter-cell cell” commander-in-chief, plug into her suicide-sleeper equation the connection he’d just unearthed.