Will Staeger - Public Enemy

It occurred to him as he caught the second man’s toppling body that he’d just allowed himself to get caught up in things a bit too fervently. As he’d informed Laramie, he wouldn’t be icing President Márquez before determining whether Márquez was definitely the king of the sleepers-but apparently he was willing to take out random members of Márquez’s guard detail with reckless abandon.

Whatever, he told himself, attempting to buy into his own fairly unconvincing argument: they’re in the military. They get paid to defend their president. They failed.

Trying to avoid thoughts of the families these guys had just widowed, he propped one of the bodies in its seat, doing his best to shield the flow of blood from the hole in the man’s forehead from the view through the open door. He laid the second body on the floor. Then, sequentially dismantling his own array of strapped-on tools and gear, he stripped the guard of his Che Guevara fatigues and stepped into the outfit. He noticed that once he’d buttoned it around his own frame, the guard’s uniform stretched embarrassingly tight-undoubtedly due to the paratrooper suit I’m wearing underneath.

He took the man’s rifle, pistol, and walkie-talkie, reattached his own gear, and got immediately to light-footing his way through the jungle along the exterior of the wall. He managed to traverse the half-mile crescent to the last guard tower without smacking headlong into any other patrol buildings.

The next part, he knew, would get more complicated.

He camped out for a few minutes in the woods near the tower and assessed the feasibility of his scheme. The guard in the tower strolled slowly around his circular platform, eyes active but heavy in the lids. The wall immediately below the tower appeared easily scaled-the stones in the face of the wall were large and held together by mortar or some other substance, the mortared sections full of dugouts that offered plenty of hand-and footholds. Then there was the razor-wire gap: the architects of the perimeter security design hadn’t seen the need to stretch the razor wire across the towers themselves, only along the wall leading up to and away from the places where the towers had been built.

He took as much time as his schedule allowed, watching the routine as performed by the guards in all of the towers until he had the hang of things. There was an irregular but continuing cycle each guard followed: walk over to face the mansion, stare that way for a while, rotate to the other side of the tower, take a look out at the woods. Repeat.

He got his silenced assault rifle set, waited until the men in the two nearest towers reached appropriate and coinciding spots of their observation cycles, then aced the guard in the closest tower with a single, scope-aided shot. As he’d hoped, the guy toppled silently and uneventfully, any sound of his thumping fall, or crashing AK-47, obliterated entirely by the incessant chorus of crickets, frogs, and whatever other creatures were doing their singing from the jungle behind him.

Cooper made sure the guards in the other towers hadn’t come around on their loops. When he saw they hadn’t, he dashed down the hill from his hiding spot, climbed the wall aided by the momentum of his downhill sprint, and rolled himself over the rail and into the tower. He found that he’d lost the hat he’d taken from the shack-guard, so quickly snatched the cap from the tower guard’s body and put it on. He swung the shack-guard’s AK-47 strap into the appropriate place on his shoulder, stood, and started in on what he’d observed to be the guard’s walk-and-look observation routine.

Slouching as he did it to help hide his face, it occurred to him that this was an occasion on which his tan came in handy-In my brown-paper-bag fatigues and sun-dried skin, I look positively Salvadoran.

The guards in the other towers came about as their own routines progressed. He bit his cheek waiting for a problem to arise, but there came no wave, shrug, or other panic-instilling gesture from his newfound comrades.

He realized he’d need to stand the guard’s body against the railing and hope it would take a while before the others noticed he was dead in order for his harebrained scheme to work. Maybe I’m still the homicidal maniac who escaped torture by way of sheer murderous brutality-and chose this option solely because it would require me to kill the most guards possible.

He had to wait longer than he wanted before making his move, but approximately nine minutes in, the other guards synched up their cycles and appeared to all be looking out at the mountains at once. He got the body propped up, clambered down the tower’s interior ladder, and strode across the fifteen yards of grass with as calm a nonchalance as he could muster.

Then he rolled his way into the banana palm beds and crawled quickly away, out of the splash of the lights.

Still no screams, whistles, shots, or sirens.

Per his pre-mission conversations with Laramie and her guide, this was the moment when he was to report in by way of his sat phone. Made it inside the perimeter, he might have told Laramie. Taking a look at the type of video surveillance they’ve got on the exterior of the house but will need to get in ASAP. You won’t hear from me after I get inside.

Unfortunately, because of the plastic shards in the pouch that had once been his sat phone, there would be no such conversation. He assumed the GPS homing beacon that marked his position on their monitoring equipment would, without battery or logic board, also have failed to work the minute he’d plowed into the tree.

The radio he’d swiped from the shack-guard suddenly made a chuck-pfft sound that almost popped him out of his combat boots, but the noise wasn’t followed by any dialogue. He turned around and took in a view of the mansion that loomed above him, looking ominously like the Spanish fort it had once been.

Cooper didn’t like the look of the place.

He’d read that the fort had originally been built in the late-seventeenth century for the Spanish land baron overseeing the territory. Perhaps-but it looked, for Cooper’s tastes, too much like the same kind of seventeenth-century fort where those ruthless, mustached bastards had kept him locked in a subterranean cell almost twenty years ago now.

He knew this place too would contain its own underground labyrinth of dungeon cells and related facilities-after all, no self-respecting Spanish land baron, acting more or less as imperial governor, could manage the savages without his own private chamber of horrors in which to enforce his reign.

Cooper could practically feel the tunnels beneath his feet-the ghosts of those fucking Mayans, or whatever cousins of the golden princess statue had been tortured and killed beneath him, calling out from six feet under the endless emerald meadow. Oh, yeah, Cooper, those pals of the golden priestess screeching to him, welcome back, old friend. It’s been too long a time coming. But there’s no salvation waitin’ for you here-only pain. Pain and sufferin’ enough to last an eternity. Come share in our misery, you tired, drunken fool!

He shook off the ghost-talk thoughts and checked his watch. It was almost a quarter to five. At best-unless President Márquez was as lazy as he, and preferred to sleep in-he had an hour to get in while Márquez was still asleep, and the sun had yet to rise.

If not less.

“All right, Island Man,” he said in a croaking whisper. “Time for the hard part.”

His own voice sounded oddly unfamiliar to him.

Detective Cole let Laramie into Knowles’s room at the Flamingo Inn and closed the door behind her. She held in her hand another Styrofoam cup loaded with bad black coffee, Laramie utterly confused in her caffeine addiction: what had once been a two-cups-per-morning habit seemed to have graduated to a 24/7 unquenchable need that offered no real effect.