Will Staeger - Public Enemy

When I signed on, I’m not so sure “execution” was on my list of job duties. Maybe it was. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I knew it was, and didn’t want to think about it. Would we prefer to have taken out Osama bin-Laden in advance, if given the chance?

Of course we would, she thought. I think.

Ebbers’s next words answered all her questions at once, though not simply.

“Send Cooper to pay a visit on Márquez,” he said. “I’ll work with you on the rest.”

Christ.

“I’ll read your silence as a form of shock,” Ebbers said, “and offer you some information with which to treat it. In case you didn’t know this, your operative has done this before. A different Central American country, and it was a long time ago, but he’s done it, and done it well. Despite his subsequent capture, in fact, and the passage of considerable time, one might still call this type of assignment the man’s specialty.”

Laramie once again experienced the sinking sensation she’d felt in her initial conversations with Ebbers. Not only did it seem Ebbers had picked her partially or solely because of her relationship with Cooper, but now it appeared he may well have been planning all along to give an assassination order, and for Cooper to execute it. And Cooper’s long experience in Central America didn’t seem like pure happenstance anymore.

All that had been expected of me was to identify the target.

Once an analyst, always an analyst.

Her thoughts of Cooper brought Laramie to the last item she’d wanted to cover with Ebbers.

“Speaking of our operative,” she said, “my team would like your help in tracking down a classified document we believe to exist in the Pentagon. As I covered in my briefing, we have reason to believe the discoveries Cooper made in Guatemala point to a connection between the facility that was burned to the ground in that country and the Marburg-2 filo Achar dispersed-and which, of course, we believe Márquez’s other sleepers also have in their possession.”

Ebbers broke in, speaking flatly.

“The Pentagon,” he said, “figures in how.”

Laramie chose her next words carefully, and sparingly.

“‘Project ICRS,’ possibly a reference to ‘Project Icarus,’ is the name of a file in the Pentagon. ‘ICR’ were the three letters Cooper discovered on a charred portion of a crate at the site of the facility that was burned to the ground in Guatemala.”

After a short pause, Ebbers said, “Not exactly a precise fit.”

He’s choosing his words carefully too, Laramie thought. She held no doubt her guide had prepped him on this in advance, but they both understood the stakes, and Laramie wasn’t going to back down and give him a way out if Ebbers planned to bury the possible connection because of the stakes.

“We know the file location,” she said. “At least the location we understand, once, to have been accurate. If there is a connection, sir, we need to understand it. At least you and I do.”

She’d planned on using her last phrase from the beginning: it was designed to help him perceive an opportunity to progress and investigate without risk-it was something she, her guide, and Ebbers could bury if they’d need to.

Not that she intended to bury anything. Which he probably understood. But he might nonetheless believe he could impel her to keep quiet-and he might also want to find out the answer for himself.

If he didn’t already know it.

Laramie thought back to the CIA man who’d posed the question in the initial task force meeting-the man she’d figured, on sight, to be a Langley spook. His question had sought clarification on how the CDC had obtained documentation of the Guatemala health clinic filo outbreak.

That CIA man knew about the connection, and maybe Ebbers did too.

Maybe she was the only one who hadn’t known. Goddammit-had the whole purpose of the task force, and the subsequent transition to her “cell,” been to confirm where the organism had come from? Or simply to stomp out the sleepers as quietly as possible, ensuring that the origin of the filo would be kept a secret?

“This isn’t going to be easy to get,” came Ebbers’s voice from the spider-phone. “Presuming it even exists any longer.”

Laramie understood Ebbers to have just given himself an out.

He was saying he’d look into it, but she would have to wait and see. Even if he got it, and read it, he could still keep it close to the vest and claim he’d had no luck in the archives.

Either way, she knew this was as far as she could take it.

“I have the file location here,” she said, unfolded the page of alphabetical listings of Pentagon files, and read him the details.

“That it?” came Ebbers’s electronically distorted voice.

Laramie nodded at the speakerphone.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s it.”

“All right, then,” he said, and she heard the line go dead as the red indicator light doused.

Following his eavesdropping session by way of a sat phone connection to the Flamingo Inn, Cooper snatched an extra towel from a housekeeping cart in the Naples Beach Hotel and headed, shoeless, for the beach. He’d chosen to hunker down in his preferred four-star digs in Naples while Laramie and her Three Stooges, as he’d begun to think of them, hashed things out at the Flamingo Inn. He’d expected at least some sort of shit to hit the fan following their discovery of the theme-park-for-rent; Cooper, being the dedicated employee that he was-and, mostly, seeing little choice-elected to stay stateside while the shit-fan contact proceeded.

He decided to go easy on his bones today, halving his usual fourteen-mile Naples beach run. He finished in just over an hour-not bad, he thought, for a conch fritter addict.

By the time he trudged back to his towel and sat phone, Cooper found himself to be a heaving ball of sweat, not quite able to find his wind. Running anything faster than fourteen-minute miles now seemed to cause him nothing but physical grief. Used to be he’d log two miles in the same stretch on the clock.

So be it.

He strolled off the exhaustion before returning to discover just what he expected: somebody had left a message for him. After confirming the call had come from the Flamingo Inn, Cooper called Laramie back.

“Where have you been?” she said before he said a thing.

Cooper considered the question.

“I’ve been where I please.”

Laramie waited a moment or two, and when she spoke again Cooper thought he detected a notch less tension in her voice.

“We’ll need to talk in person,” she said.

This didn’t surprise him. He checked his watch-12:45.

“How’s a late lunch at Paddy Murphy’s Irish Pub sound,” he said, “great little joint right downtown here.”

He expected Laramie to shoot down this idea, and that he’d soon be hoofing it northeast to LaBelle, but Laramie went the other way on him.

“Sounds fine,” she said. “See you there at four.”

Cooper hung up and tossed the phone back onto its nest in the towel.

He had a pretty good idea what Laramie was going to tell him when they sat down for their late lunch-or early dinner-or whatever the hell it would be. In fact, after listening in on the conversation at the Flamingo Inn, Cooper knew with virtual certainty what was coming. It had only been a matter of time-time enough for Laramie to contact “the people she worked for,” and for the decision to be made and sent back down the line.

The “cell’s” choice of how to proceed at this point was an easy one-particularly, he thought, when you had someone like me at your disposal. And intelligence agencies always did. Was Laramie’s team right about the man at the top of their suspect list? Cooper figured they were. And that was the only real variable-that and the decision-maker’s call, but U.S. foreign policy decision makers, Cooper had learned long ago, were predictable. They inevitably thought they could get away with anything, and he imagined the people Laramie was working for would offer no exception.