Will Staeger - Public Enemy

He took his time chewing another bite of his burger and swallowing a sip of the beer.

“Since none of you has the luxury of doing the deed,” he said, “the decision, of course, rests elsewhere.”

“Well certainly, if you’re the one pulling the trigger-”

“You may want to keep it down, Laramie, here in this lively Irish pub. Volume aside, what I’m telling you is I’m not going to do it unless I know he’s the guy.”

Laramie’s cheeks popped pink.

Cooper said, “You can feel free to tell the people you work for-if you even know who they are, that is-that these are the only terms under which I’ll conduct this mission. Of course, if you, or they, would like to find somebody who takes orders with a bit more verve, then go right ahea-”

“This is the way these things are done, do you understand that?” Laramie said. “There is no way we have of knowing any better that he’s the one. This is how it works-you assess the intel, analyze it, determine the probabilities, and make a goddamn decision, whether you like that decision or not. Hundreds of thousands of American lives could be at stake, Mr. Twenty Million Dollar Man. You can’t just elect to cancel the decisions Lou’s mak-”

Cooper interrupted her but didn’t miss the slip.

“You can stop with the campaign speech. You’d make a great CIA spy-master. Like our old friend Peter M. Gates, and our other old friend Lou Ebbers. Hell,” he said, watching Laramie for a reaction but getting none, “if I were the president, I’d appoint your cute little ass to director of national intelligence in a Caribbean minute. But down here at my lowly level, this here foot soldier-duly assigned the icing of a president of an entire, if annoying, country-has decided he will go ahead and find out for himself from the horse’s mouth whether it’s the right horse we’re talking about. If I’m satisfied he’s the ‘doer,’ then I’ll happily do the deed. If not, not. Accordingly, you, the Poobah, and the Stooges can blow this whole thing out your ass, or you can proceed with sending me on my way. Your call.”

Laramie didn’t say anything, or change expression for a time that felt to Cooper like ten minutes. He decided to keep eating while this inactivity took place. He ordered and began nursing yet another beer while he was at it.

When she finally spoke, Laramie said, “You’re not doing this for us. Are you?”

“Ah,” Cooper said after swallowing his last morsel of beef. “The return of the lie detector.”

“It’s not about the threat to American citizens for you at all,” she said.

Cooper shook his head in utter nonchalance.

“No,” he said.

“It’s about you. You’re doing this because of your own need to go back. Or,” she said, “at least something related to that. To you.”

“Why, yes,” he said, sounding as though he were about to fall asleep. Which, thanks to the beers, the run on the beach, and the talk of foreign policy decision making, he was.

Laramie’s eyes locked on his. She held the stare, and Cooper saw the red splotching creep up past her jawbone before she spoke her next words, so he knew he’d be getting something good. Still, he didn’t expect quite what he got.

“In coming here to see you,” she said, “I was fully intending, as the commanding officer of this unit, to order you to take me to your hotel room and have your way with me. Because you know what? I don’t know whether you’re going to make it in, make it out-or make it, period, taking this assignment. But in your inimitable way,” she said, “you have managed to infuriate and frustrate me to the point where I almost, but not quite, fail to give a holy shit-”

“And that’s because I’m skeptical as to the intentions of the government that put the filo in the hands of Márquez to begin with?”

Laramie kept it zipped, still red in the neck but cooling off a few degrees as she considered his statement. Cooper drained his beer and signaled for the check.

Laramie leaned across the table, almost to where her nose was touching his.

“Maybe that happened,” she said. “And maybe Ollie North or one of his pals paid some bills for the genocidal maniacs who killed Márquez’s friends and family when he was a twelve-year-old kid. Maybe we’ve murdered our share of Native Americans directly, in fact, and even used atomic weapons. I’m not disputing those facts.”

Cooper stared back at her hard look, but felt himself falling apart again-Laramie the lie detector causing him to feel embarrassment about his rambunctious behavior, logical though it always seemed from the confines of solitude.

“Nonetheless, Mr. Twenty Million Dollar Operative,” Laramie said. “This likely victim of our flawed foreign policy intends, it seems, to take more than an eye for an eye. So exactly how much sympathy for the devil do you intend to show?”

Cooper unrolled four twenties on the table, snatched the turned-over memo, and gave Laramie the third version of his unpleasant smile.

“I’ll let you know when I reach my limit.”

Slowly, Laramie stood, lifted the bag she’d brought, and plopped it on the table.

“Here’s the intel on your target. The man I told you about will be in touch to handle your logistics, so be available through the number at your hotel. I’ll be in touch also, since, among other reasons, we’ll need to sort out the way we communicate during your trip.”

Cooper offered his commanding officer a salute from his seat at the table.

Laramie threw back her own unenthusiastic smile.

“Break a leg,” she said.

Then Laramie crossed the street to her car and started in on the drive back to the Flamingo Inn.

Despite its preponderance of crashes, the MU-2B turboprop cargo plane remained a favorite among drug runners, its high-capacity cargo bay and relatively fast and quiet engines still managing to do the trick for regional dope-transit duties nearly thirty years past its birth date. Plus, the plane also happened to be one of the primary aircraft used by FEMA, the Red Cross, and numerous other international aid organizations-meaning that if you chose your routes carefully, there was a pretty good chance an MU-2B full of cannabis would be ignored by the semiomnipresent U.S. Coast Guard AWACS and P-3 Orion airborne antidrug phalanx.

It also meant that on one particular, startlingly humid night in the moonless skies east of San Salvador, the unmarked, privately owned and cash-leased MU-2B droning by at twelve thousand feet would not have appeared as anything out of the ordinary-just another, technically illegal but government-ignored dope harvest making its way to an equally ignored processing plant along the country’s northern border.

Cooper separated from the MU-2B by way of the rear cargo door. Outfitted and equipped all but identically to the way he’d gone in the last time around, he reflected as the wind slammed him in the face that the only real difference between this dive and the last was that he was doing it solo-that and the fact that he’d aged a century in the nineteen years since that first airborne diplomatic overture to a Central American head of state.

Less than a minute later, he landed-brutally.

Coming into a stand of trees he hadn’t seen in the darkness-or maybe he hadn’t seen them because his eyesight just plain sucked, and any paratrooper worth his ass would have been capable of avoiding a crash landing with a simple glance downward-Cooper spotted the tall trees a second too late, and plowed right into them while still trying to maneuver away. This caused an instant of confusion-he hesitated in switching from steering to landing mode, and the hesitation resulted in a direct impact with the trunk of the first of the trees in the stand. He struck the tree square, a silent, invisible battering ram that pummeled him in one smack, his body absorbing the crushing blow more or less equally from head to toe. He felt more than heard a muted crunch, thinking it was somewhere near his pelvis, maybe a hip-but there wasn’t enough pain for the noise to be that of a broken bone.