Will Staeger - Public Enemy

The alarm box in the building’s basement had taken some highly technical fiddling, but once he’d disarmed the window sensors, Cooper had been able to climb into the Georgetown brownstone undetected-and now sat in a very expensive leather reading chair in the brownstone’s library.

Besides the glow from a couple of safety lights in the hall-lights that hadn’t managed to keep the place safe from trespassing beach bums-the room was dark. Alone for the moment, Cooper pondered the concluding act of his “snuffer-outer” theory from his throne of darkness.

The snuffer-outers, which Cooper now believed to be a snuffer-outer, singular, had sought to eliminate all traces of the shipment of gold artifacts seized by the late Cap’n Roy. The snuffer-outer had caught wind of the artifacts’ existence upon the Coast Guard’s discovery of Po Keeler’s cargo in the hold of the Seahawk. The snuffer-outer had applied the muzzle to the tale of the pillaged artifacts because he knew where the artifacts had come from, and what had happened there: the snuffing out of an entire indigenous civilization. Said genocide occurring due to an accident, leak, or spill from the Pentagon-funded biological weapons laboratory operating, until then, under a shroud of secrecy a couple miles east of the village in the same rain forest crater.

And while the snuffer-outer had, until now, kept Cooper-CIA employee that he technically remained-out of the dead pool, Cooper figured the exclusion would now be rescinded. Particularly since Cooper, and the “cell” for which he worked, had found enough to connect the dots between the late Raul Márquez, his army of bio-bombers, their genetically engineered strain of filovirus, and the lab that had developed the strain.

The crayon that connected the dots, oddly enough, coming in the form of the sole survivor of the accidental genocide-a woman immortalized, at least temporarily, in a mausoleum beneath some very fine wine. And she’d had her revenge-she’d taken more American lives than the American filo lab had taken from her brethren. Including a sequential beheading of the full roster of names from the “Research Group” memo.

But in the end, she and Raul had been a little off target: they’d missed the actual author of the memo-the one to authorize the funding of the lab in the first place.

In the sealed envelope delivered to the Jefferson Hotel came a list of four names. The envelope had been addressed to Cooper’s real name, rather than his current, made-up identity. Though already fully aware of how Ebbers knew, Cooper still enjoyed the joke.

Four men had run the “Research Group” from 1976 to 1979, or so the new document retrieved by Ebbers revealed. Following a Langley database check of the three names he didn’t recognize, Cooper confirmed what he’d assumed to be true on his first read: only one of the four former Pentagon staffers on Ebbers’s list now held the kind of position that would have allowed him to learn of the Coast Guard’s seizure of the good ship Seahawk-and only one of the former staffers, the same man, possessed the power to engineer the snuff-out whose wrath Cooper had thus far managed to avoid.

He now sat in the man’s library-the personal study of the Snuffer-Outer-in-Chief.

When he came, Cooper knew the man would be arriving in a Lincoln Town Car, same as Lou Ebbers always did.

Henry Curlwood removed his coat and came into his brownstone.

“Hennie,” as he was called, had been Lieutenant Curlwood during his days at the helm of the Pentagon’s Research Group, but was now known-by Cooper and just about everyone else who read a newspaper-as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Curlwood.

Curlwood wore a holier-than-thou expression everywhere he went, including in the privacy of his own home-a fact to which Cooper was able to attest as the safety light in the vestibule illuminated the man’s face from the angle Cooper had on him from the library.

Cooper knew there would be a Secret Service detail accompanying Curlwood, but he didn’t much care. He was betting on a reaction from Curlwood, the Snuffer-Outer-in-Chief, that would preclude the need for the bodyguard to come to his rescue. Cooper assumed the deputy chief of staff’s famously brilliant mind would quickly estimate the meaning and ramifications of Cooper’s presence in his study.

Presuming, of course, Curlwood was the snuffer-outer.

“Hennie, my boy!” Cooper said. “How about a fire?”

He’d considered lighting up the fireplace earlier but reconsidered-might have brought the Secret Service man in the door first.

Curlwood poked his irritable face into the opening that connected the hall and library as Cooper flicked on the light beside the leather chair-Cooper’s peeling hull of a tan popping to life in the splash of the lamp. The expression on Curlwood’s face popped to life too, as it registered first confusion and surprise, but next, a calming sort of recognition-Curlwood giving Cooper all the confirmation he needed in that one look.

There’s no reason he would recognize me except as the man he decided not to snuff out.

The Secret Service man was good. In one swift motion, he shouldered Curlwood behind the wall, drew his gun, took one and one-half steps across the study, and smothered Cooper with a diving tackle, the barrel of his pistol digging into Cooper’s rib cage as Cooper toppled backward in the chair and let the bodyguard spin him to the floor and cuff him, knee-to-head and gun-to-back, with relatively little resistance.

“Nice work,” Cooper said.

“Shut up,” the Secret Service man said with a thrust of the gun, hard, into the space between two of Cooper’s ribs.

He’d begun to radio for backup-by way of the usual communication device secured to his wrist-when Curlwood reemerged in the hall.

“Let him up,” he said to his bodyguard. “I know him.”

“You sure about this?” the Secret Service man said, shifting all his weight to the knee planted on Cooper’s head. Cooper thinking the guy must have wanted to add, He seems like a fucking wiseass-I wouldn’t trust him if I were you, but knowing as well as the bodyguard did that these guys didn’t get paid to offer their opinions to the people they guarded.

“Let him up.”

When he had, and the Browning had been carefully removed from its spot in the small of Cooper’s back, the Secret Service man said, “Cuffs on or off?”

“Off,” Curlwood said. “Leave us alone here for a minute, please.”

“I’ll be in the next room if you need me,” the bodyguard said. He picked up the fallen chair and lamp and set them in their original places. Then the cuffs came off, and the Secret Service man canceled his call for backup and began explaining to his wrist what had happened as he turned down the hall. Cooper noticed the man didn’t holster either firearm-Secret Service-issue Sig Sauer nor CIA-issue Browning.

The deputy chief of staff hadn’t suggested he return to his place in the chair, but Cooper did so anyway. Curlwood remained standing despite the available clone of a chair two steps behind him.

When the guard had passed out of earshot, Curlwood spoke.

“What do you want?”

Grinning like a kid in a candy store for the duration, Cooper dictated arrangements to Curlwood as he saw them proceeding, giving the deputy chief the same basic fuck-with-me-and-Project-Icarus-goes-public threat he’d used with Ebbers. This time, he mentioned Ernesto Borrego and Lieutenant Riley of the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force as the other individuals who, were they to step into harm, would also trigger the release of the documentation on the lab and the various and sundry roles its genetically engineered “filo” had played.

“Including,” Cooper said, “the name of the lieutenant who allocated the funding for the lab in the first place.”