Will Staeger - Public Enemy

“Yes,” she said, “that did occur to me.”

“Also occurs to me,” he said, “as I imagine it did to you, that this would be a good explanation as to how the people you work for were able to get their hands on a copy of the memo on such short notice.”

Laramie nodded absently. “It’s certainly unlikely,” she said, “that it would have been kept in the same file location after the attaché was busted selling his lists. You’re right-it’s more likely it would have been top-of-mind for somebody had there been multiple murder investigations under way.”

Laramie thought again of the CIA man at the task force meeting.

“The way my skeptic’s goggles see it,” Cooper said, “it would then follow that the people you work for knew about the memo you were asking to see. And if they knew about the memo, then they probably know what that memo authorized, and probably even what happened in 1983-or whenever it was that the lab sprang a leak and blew out an entire Indian village.”

“It also follows,” Laramie said, “those same people would have at least a rudimentary understanding of the fact-presuming it’s true-that it was the Pentagon lab that developed the filo the sleepers are about to try to kill us with.”

Cooper smiled with his lips sealed shut. What he thought, as he offered Laramie the smile, was that it also follows I’ll soon learn who it was who applied the muzzle to the potentially revealing artifact shipment by acing Cap’n Roy, Po Keeler, and a few other relatively undeserving souls. And since it’s likely to be the same person or group of people who saw to the slaughter of an entire Indian civilization, I’ll soon be in a place where I can seek a little payback for my second-ever client as detective-to-the-dead-that twelve-inch priestess statue and the murdered Indian village she came from.

“How do you manage to pull this shit off?”

Cooper took a few moments but couldn’t figure what it was he might have missed in the conversation that would lead Laramie to ask her question.

“What shit is that?”

“In the ordinary course of events,” Laramie said, “leading the life of leisure you prefer to lead, you’ve managed to uncover the key scrap of evidence indicating the U.S. government’s probable culpability in what may be the greatest threat to the country’s existence.”

“Oh,” he said, “that.”

The food arrived-for Laramie, tuna and salad; for Cooper, a bacon cheeseburger. Since he had finished his second Bass, he ordered a third. Laramie waved off the waiter’s suggestion she select a cocktail from the drinks menu and held tight with her ice water, which they’d refilled three or four times already. This despite Laramie’s taking, at most, a pair of quarter-inch sips from her glass between refills.

Cooper took a hefty bite out of the burger. When his beer arrived, Laramie set her fork on the table, crossed her hands together, and rested the weight of her chin on her hands, elbows propped on the table.

“Let’s talk about the here and now,” Laramie said.

Here it comes, Cooper thought.

“Do you think he’s the one?”

“Do I think who,” Cooper said, “is the one.”

“Márquez.”

Cooper nodded.

“Hard to see how it’s anyone else,” he said. “But you never know.”

“I can’t believe we’ve chosen a lively Irish pub,” she said, “and are simply sitting out here on the sidewalk for lunch, considering the plan I’m here to tell you about.”

He let her get to it at her own pace. He took another bite of his burger.

“We need you to go in and ‘eradicate’ him,” she said after a while-and a little more quietly than she’d been speaking till now.

Cooper chewed his mouthful of bacon, cheese, sirloin, roll, and barbecue sauce, then sipped from the pint glass to wash it all down.

“Márquez, I mean,” Laramie said, “of course.”

Cooper nodded dully but still didn’t say anything.

“I take it this doesn’t come as much of a surprise,” she said.

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

Laramie told him the options she had presented to the people she worked for and the choices that had been made.

Cooper nodded again, about as dully as before.

“More or less the only choices,” he said.

Laramie cleared her throat.

“I was told to tell you a number of things about what happens if you’re capt-”

Cooper held up a hand and Laramie stopped midword.

“Nobody knows me, nobody’s heard of me, nobody is affiliated with me. Hell, he’s not even American, that Cooper character,” he said, then gave her another emotionless grin. “Comes with the territory.”

They were silent for a bit. Nobody ate anything.

“So are you saying you’ll do it?”

Cooper saw the splotchy redness flooding its way up Laramie’s neck into her cheeks. He decided he would read the embarrassment as Laramie failing to grasp how to do two things at once-first, to get his confirmation-the ol’ “Yes, ma’am”-and second, to express whatever fear or empathy she was feeling about the fact he was about to head into Central America with a ninety-nine percent chance of failing to come out alive. So she came at it from the all-business side, the skin language telling him the rest.

“I’m assuming the people you work for,” he said, “can load me up with some intel on our friend with the, ah, possibly short life expectancy.”

Laramie reached below the table and touched the shoulder bag she’d brought with her.

“I have a great deal of it here,” she said. “But yes. We will get you all that we can. The support issues will of course be handled for you.”

“A plane,” he said, “not of government affiliation. Et cetera.”

Laramie nodded, thinking of the conversation she’d held with her guide just prior to hitting the road.

“There’s a man who handles these things for us,” she said. “And you’re correct, of course-there will be no affiliation or documentation of any kind.”

“Famous last words,” Cooper said, and held up the memo.

Laramie shook her head. Cooper thought her gesture looked like the kind of action in which somebody would engage to rid herself of an aggravating flying insect.

“So you’ll do it,” she said.

Cooper ate some more of his burger without looking at her. Then he polished off most of his beer, looked at then elected to take Laramie’s water, and drank some of that too.

“I didn’t say I agreed to do it yet,” he said.

“I know you didn’t say-”

“No doubt the Three Stooges believe their theory to be correct, but let me ask you this: are you positive he’s the guy? Is he definitely, positively, beyond a reasonable doubt, absolutely good for it?”

Laramie didn’t move much or say anything for a minute. Then she said, “The Three Stooges, huh?”

“Your cell.”

“No kidding. Look,” she said, “I wouldn’t put it beyond some doubt. But I will say I find it likely enough for us to take a calculated gamble and make this call.”

Cooper nodded. “Not that it matters, but you’ll be ‘making this call’ and taking that calculated gamble on more than one life.”

“You mean you? In addition to him? Of course I know-”

“Yeah, me too, but that’s not what I mean. I mean others also. Along the way.”

“We recognize that too.”

“You and your Grand Poobah, you mean,” Cooper said.

“Grand-” Laramie shook her head. “Right. Okay-I, then. I recognize that. But yes, him too. The Grand Poobah as well as the Three Stooges. It should go without saying I don’t like risking-”

“Doesn’t matter,” Cooper said, holding up a hand. “It’s just conversation.”

“What do you mean?” Laramie said.