Will Staeger - Public Enemy

Dalessandro grunted, or maybe chuckled, or was just clearing his throat again, Laramie wasn’t sure. Then the noise progressed into a well-defined chuckle, and finally to a level-toned, mean-spirited sort of laugh.

He kept at it, Dalessandro utterly pleased with himself, until the laugh slowed, then subsided back to the phlegmy throat-clearing noise. At that point Dalessandro lowered his head and glared at her with eyes that looked, set behind his dripping-wet skin as they were, flat, black, and long since dead.

When his next words came, they streamed forth in an unabashed, thick, odd-sounding accent Laramie couldn’t place and could barely understand.

“Good luck, bitch,” he said. “Good luck finding any of us. Good luck stopping us. All one hundred and seventeen of us.”

Laramie felt ice water trickle down her spine.

“You didn’t know that, did you, bitch? That’s right-you have no fucking idea-no fucking idea what is about to happen. You’ll never find the others. No matter what I tell you. And I won’t be telling you shit. So just get it over with. Kill me, bitch-do it. Do it!”

He made a game attempt at leaping from his chair to attack her, but only succeeded in stretching the ropes and tipping himself forward an inch or two. Veins popping in his neck, eyes bugged and frantic, Laramie saw in his otherwise useless lunge an undistilled rage-the kind, she supposed, from which terrorist plots are hatched.

In catching her glimpse of this, Laramie came to two realizations instantaneously: first, they could torture this guy with every technique known to man, and no way in hell would he tell them a thing. Second-though she supposed it should have been obvious-one doesn’t train, hide for more than a decade under an alternate identity, then mobilize to execute a mass killing without being driven by the kind of anger that no threat, law, or preventive strategy has much chance at all of stopping.

Benjamin Achar and the love he’d found in himself for Janine and Carter notwithstanding-true love, she thought, being a one-in-a-million score anyway, or at least far worse odds than one-in-six-Laramie now understood with a concrete certainty that there would be no turning this army.

For the first time since her meeting with Lou Ebbers in the Library of Congress, it occurred to her she was probably going to die. A lot of people were-however they’d done it, Márquez’s army of sleepers were now immersed in the American fabric, and whatever it was they were pissed off about-genocide, murder squads, whatever-it was painful and sure enough for these people to seek only the destruction of every last one of us.

And who the hell was going to stop them?

Me?

Something on her hip vibrated-the GPS unit her guide had provided her. It doubled as a cell phone and her team had the number. The thing had surprised her because she hadn’t used it yet.

Laramie rose, climbed the stairs without another word to Dalessandro, and found a room bereft of bounty hunters in which to talk on the phone.

“Yes,” she said.

“Laramie.”

It was Rothgeb.

“The other sleepers are on the move,” he said. “Not all of them-only two of the other five. But each of them just drove to a home and garden store of one kind or another and bought pretty much the same quantity of fertilizer as your Scarsdale pal.”

“Crap,” she said. She fought against asking whether they’d seen any activity on the screen that was tracking Cooper’s homing device.

She knew he’d have told her if they had.

Laramie asked Rothgeb to put her guide on the phone, and once he’d announced his presence on the line, Laramie said, “Even if you’ve already updated him, call Ebbers immediately.”

“No problem,” he said.

“Tell him it’s time,” she said, “to pull the fire alarm. Tell him it’s time-as he put it on his call with me-for the federal government, the media, and everybody and their grandmother to board up the windows and hunker down for the storm.”

When Cooper came to, he discovered his body to have recovered from its toxic bout with post-traumatic stress, or whatever the fuck, he thought, turned me into a puddle of hyperventilating mush. But maybe that’s what you get when you pay a visit on the worst episode of your past-you wind up throwing it in reverse for real, your body deciding it’s time to curl up and see whether there’re any available wombs interested in taking you back.

Coming around, the first thing that occurred to him was that he was screwed. Even if the security squad managing the presidential residence believed the intruder to have fled through the woods rather than into the belly of the beast, he held no doubt they’d keep the facility canvassed 24/7 for at least the next few days. And until some slice of evidence turned up proving he was no longer around, they’d be forced to maintain an elevated security presence.

Cooper knew they’d also need to operate under the assumption this raid was an attempt on Márquez’s life, aborted though it might have been. Point being, he wasn’t going to have much of a shot at getting home, let alone taking down Márquez. At the moment, the fact that he’d escaped capture and torture was satisfaction enough-at least now, having calmed his dysfunctional body toward something approaching normalcy, he had the freedom to mull things over. Could be there’s even a plan C, or a plan D, that could get you in front of the man.

He sat up in the dank, humid tunnel.

As much as he enjoyed playing whatever games with Laramie that would irritate her the most, there remained the issue of his mission-which, even as the most obstinate member of Laramie’s team, he had nonetheless come to believe to hold probable significance.

Having read Laramie’s documents from the terror book, examining the San Cristóbal theme park up close and personal, and seeing that fucking Pentagon memo…hell, even before dropping from the MU-2B, Cooper concluded that the U.S. populace was, in fact, up to its ears in some very deep shit. And were the U.S.-government-employed snuffer-outers who’d taken out the likes of Cap’n Roy also ultimately responsible for putting their own nation’s populace in the deep shit in which it currently found itself? Probably-make that definitively yes.

But it didn’t matter now-when it came to the suicide-filo threat, too many somewhat innocent lives were at stake. Which Laramie had been trying to point out to you during her huff at Paddy Murphy’s lively Irish pub.

Possessed of too much firsthand experience staring at the ass end of U.S. foreign policy, Cooper couldn’t discount the danger of the products the Guatemala research lab might well have turned out-meaning that whoever had been culpable to begin with, even if they were trying to silence that culpability now, the fact remained that if Márquez had got his hands on the filo that fucking lab had pumped out, and was now planning on using it in a wholesale bomb-dispersal scheme, then somebody had to stop him.

And why wouldn’t the bastard stepchild of the government that had empowered Márquez to begin with be the right man for the job?

Yet here you sit, an emissary of the Great Developer of Weapons and Hate, sent to dispose of public enemy number one-

And you’ve failed miserably.

In fact, you failed pathetically: all that you’ve managed to do is kill a couple of twenty-year-old soldiers and suffer a panic attack.

Flicking on his Maglite, Cooper picked a direction and started carefully down the tunnel. It wasn’t long before he grew comfortable-cozy, even-experiencing that feeling of pulling on an old sock, wrapped around you in a way you’re accustomed to, but not without a hole or two. Like a paroled convict finding solace in the stupidity of returning to the joint.