Will Staeger - Public Enemy

Cooper digested the business speak.

“Containing some phrase or other,” he said.

“Or other,” Márquez said. “Yes.”

“Care to provide some of your army’s assumed identities? Lessen your sentence at the pearly gates?”

Márquez almost let a smile crease his lips.

“My dear assassin,” he said, “please go fuck yourself.”

Cooper nodded, then jutted his chin at his captive.

“Who is she,” Cooper said. “Sleeping Beauty, here.”

Márquez then offered a clamp-lipped smile-not appreciating the joke, it seemed.

“My lover and partner.”

“The king and queen of the suicide sleepers,” Cooper said. “How nice.”

The thin-lipped smile held, serving as Márquez’s response to Cooper’s wiseass commentary. In a moment, the smile evaporated.

“Ironic, isn’t it,” Márquez said, “that in life, her blood may have yielded a vaccine.”

Cooper blinked.

“For the ‘filo’?”

“Yes. She survived it.”

“Christ,” Cooper said. “The girl from the clinic?”

Márquez looked at him and sort of shrugged-the expression meant to convey, Cooper figured, that Márquez didn’t really care to understand, but had no idea what Cooper was talking about.

Cooper thought about the story from Márquez’s childhood, as relayed by Laramie’s Three Stooges during the “cell’s” powwow at the Flamingo Inn. Then he thought about the village he and Borrego had found in the rain forest crater.

“The bride and groom of pain,” he said. “Birds of a feather, eh, Raul? She made it out of the village that took the brunt of the Pentagon lab’s little error, and you made it out of another Pentagon-funded genocidal strike?”

Márquez looked at Cooper about the way Cooper would expect a man to look at somebody as certifiably loony as himself-or the way he’d look at somebody who couldn’t possibly know all these things-but then spoke up again.

“You could put it that way,” he said.

“The irony you mentioned,” Cooper said. “It’s ironic because she held the key to surviving the ‘filo’ in her bloodstream but brought you the weapon in the first place?”

Márquez just kind of dead-eyed him.

“How did she do it? Come on, by the time you’re through with your end of that cycle you were talking about, I’m sure you’ll have exacted a few thousand American lives as your toll. Why don’t you come clean-maybe it’ll give you some extra credit when you visit the big man upstairs.”

“You know,” Márquez said, “you’re a strange sort of assassin.”

“You don’t know the half of it, Señor Presidente.”

“She studied science. Earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins-her specialty was pathology. Came to me with an idea following my first election. And a few other things.”

“Such as some fine rapture, I’ll bet,” Cooper said.

“Yes, that too,” Márquez said.

“And among the other things-a crate or two of goodies?”

Márquez gave him the same dead-eye stare.

“Left behind,” Cooper said, “by the lab people when they tried to burn the evidence to the ground. But she lived up there, so she knew where to look. And maybe she found a stockpile the idiots with the napalm missed. How am I doing?”

Márquez had apparently decided to clam up.

“What happened to her?” Cooper said.

“I killed her,” el presidente said.

“Why?”

“It became necessary.”

“For what reason?”

Márquez eyed him, then shrugged. “I think she would have killed me next. Lot of rage in that woman.”

Cooper nodded at this. It partially confirmed the last piece of the crypt-puzzle he’d been assembling.

“By ‘next,’” Cooper said, “you mean she’d have beheaded you too?”

Márquez looked at him again but didn’t offer a reply.

“I’m curious how she would have found the Pentagon memo,” Cooper said, “but then again maybe she had access to that kind of thing through the university.”

Either way, he thought, it seems the Indian girl from the village has sought and found her vengeance-both on the people who authorized the lab and, depending, an unhealthy dose of citizens from the country who funded it.

Too bad the swing of her machete missed the neck of a couple last souls-the snuffer-outers, the last survivors of the vengeance she hoped to exact on the architects of the filo lab.

Enter me.

He coaxed his thoughts back to the topic of the names on the memorial slab of marble. Despite the fact that they’d need to work in reverse, and track the current identity of the sleepers from their original, local names, Cooper figured Laramie, the Three Stooges, and the Grand Poobah could still make use of the list of names he’d just transcribed.

And aside from the fact that he’d been sent to “eradicate” the man, he’d now have some use for the continued survival of Raul Márquez-the King of the Sleepers.

He straightened his elbow and held the Browning tight, taking aim at Márquez’s head. Márquez almost seemed to sigh in relief-even pleasure.

“The assassin,” Márquez said, closing his eyes, “taking the assassin.”

Yeah, Cooper thought, I’ve wanted to die plenty of times too after what happened to me.

“Not quite,” Cooper said.

Márquez opened his eyes.

“I thought you were here to kill me,” he said.

“I was,” Cooper said. “And I am. But too bad-you’ll need to wallow in your misery for a little while longer.”

Keeping the Browning trained on Márquez, Cooper came around Sleeping Beauty’s coffin and-making sure to maintain a few feet between himself and Márquez’s watchful eyes-grasped the handle of the door.

“Let’s take a walk,” he said.

Upon her return to the Flamingo Inn, Laramie found herself greeted by a strange call from Lou Ebbers.

Not unexpected, but strange nonetheless.

He told her he had pulled the fire alarm-how, he hadn’t clarified further than before, but he said he’d pulled it nonetheless. He mentioned that emergency quarantine preparations were now in process; the identity and location of the sleepers Laramie’s cell had found had been revealed to the FBI, CIA, and other relevant agencies, and busts made immediately. “Other cells,” as he’d put it on the call, had also identified additional sleepers on the same approximate time line as her team, and those sleepers had been rounded up too-fifteen total captures. He indicated that in the past hour, the media had just been given a great deal of advance intel, something Laramie already knew from the coverage of the “credible terror threat” she watched on CNN from the DirecTV-equipped seat on her Jet Blue flight back down south from JFK.

This much she’d expected; these measures, among others, were the idea behind pulling the fire alarm in the first place. She had even expected to hear, at some point, that there were “other cells” doing what she and her team had been doing, parallel to them.

The part she found strange, though also not unexpected, was the warning Ebbers mentioned next.

“Just a quick reminder, Miss Laramie,” he’d said to her over the spider-phone. “You haven’t been doing what you’ve been doing. None of the intelligence you or your cell has generated, in doing the things you haven’t been doing, is to be revealed to anyone.”

When it seemed he was waiting for an acknowledgment of his order, Laramie went ahead and gave him one.

“I’ve always understood that to be the case,” she said.

“I mention this not because of what you will now see in the media coverage of the ‘credible threat’ to the nation’s security-but because of what you won’t see.”

Laramie had a pretty good idea what was coming.