The annoying words RESTRICTED NUMBER blinked rhythmically on the caller ID screen. Laramie decided to roll the dice.
“Yes?”
“I need your e-mail address.”
Laramie felt the stiffness in her shoulders ease but she didn’t respond until she’d returned to her seat on the couch.
“Why?”
“You’ll see when I send these pictures. Could be nothing, random coincidence, but coincidence is overrated, if you ask me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“After China, you found the same sort of exercises in North Korea. Your other lead was in Yemen, where the rebels take their orders from quite an odd-looking man, correct?”
Laramie hesitated. Given how little credence she now gave her theories, any discussion of classified topics from her home phone no longer seemed worthwhile.
“I still have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Ah,” he said. “Disciplined.”
Cooper broke the connection, punched Laramie’s cell number into his sat phone, hit Send, and waited for Laramie to find and answer the mobile phone.
“Is this really going to make any difference?” she said.
“You’re being smart-if they even care about you at all, it’s likely they’re only into your hard line. Now give me your e-mail address.”
Obviously she couldn’t receive the photographs at her office; nonetheless, she’d made an effort to avoid using the fabricated Yahoo! account. The whistle-blower swallowing the whistle, returning to obscurity while she still had the chance.
“Fine,” she said, and gave him the EastWest7 address. “But I’m not sure how soon I’ll be able to access it. Also, this probably isn’t the best-”
“I took some pictures,” Cooper said, “of some people you’re familiar with. Together.”
Laramie wasn’t precisely sure what he meant, but if he was talking about the countries she’d been surveying, then she really didn’t know what he was talking about. What could he be talking about? Pictures? It didn’t seem possible.
“Who,” she said, “and where?”
“Have a look and call me back.”
Laramie knew he was about to hang up, W. Cooper playing the mystery man game, so she jumped in before he could do it.
“Um,” she said.
Silence-make that static. But she knew she hadn’t lost him.
“What do you do,” she said, stopped, put the phone in her lap, thought for a moment, lifted the phone again, and said, “how do you know when you’re being followed? Technically, I mean. How would you go about finding out, if you thought you were?”
More static. Laramie felt the mild warmth of frustration rise into her cheeks. She didn’t like the feeling it gave her, asking her odd new phone pal for serious advice. But who else could she ask? Eddie Rothgeb came loaded with a formidable knowledge base, but one thing he certainly didn’t bring to the table was operations experience.
“The first rule,” Cooper said, “is when you bust them, don’t let them know you’ve done it.”
“Fine, but maybe you could offer a couple, you know, technical-”
“Second rule: if you think somebody’s on you, then somebody is. Easiest thing to do, if you want to make them, is chop up your routine. Not the whole thing, just parts of it.”
Laramie thought about that for a moment. “All right,” she said.
“Where did you have dinner tonight?”
Laramie didn’t answer right away, which bothered her-and which also explained why she didn’t like asking W. Cooper questions like this. It put her at a disadvantage, Laramie knowing he’d somehow seize the opportunity to ask more personal questions than she cared to answer.
“Koo Koo Roo,” she said.
“Chicken?”
“Chicken.”
“Skinless?”
“I’m not finding the humor here, so if you-”
“Regular stop, maybe you get it to go, coming home, a couple nights a week? When you aren’t knee-deep in SATINT till two A.M.”
Laramie eyed the plastic bag with the restaurant’s logo on the kitchen counter near the phone.
Cooper said, “Keep the restaurant in the routine, but change it up. Dine in-house instead. Read a book for an hour while you eat. Visit the restroom five or six times-and keep an eye peeled while you do it. Do the same thing for every segment of your routine, and you may see the same face a couple times. You run, right?”
Laramie resisted the urge to sigh. “Yes, I run.”
“Head out the same way you always do, then change the loops. Log an extra mile or two. You get it by now.”
“I do.”
“Call me when you’ve looked at the pictures,” he said, and clicked off.
Laramie tossed the phone on the other side of the couch, lifted her wineglass, sipped, and noticed the blinds covering her living room window weren’t entirely shut. She closed them, came back to the couch, and tucked her bare legs beneath her. She pulled a blanket from the armrest, covered her legs with it, found the remote control, and punched up Headline News. She’d make her way through the gamut of 24-hour cable news networks, and maybe a few minutes of E! or Style before she crashed, but she usually chose to start things off with the twenty-two minutes as peddled by the Headline News marketing campaign.
W. Cooper, Laramie thought, is a fucking smart-ass-but I suppose I picked the right guy to ask.
33
When Cooper’s eyes opened in his bungalow, he did not feel as though one of his dreams had awakened him. Ordinarily he felt that way-he would burst awake sucking wind, soaked in sweat, gasping for oxygen after drowning in the river, or grasping at the locked dungeon door. Tonight, though, there was no such desperation. One moment he had been lost in the void of drunken slumber; in the next, he was awake, silent, and sober.
It might have been the sound of a twig, broken unnaturally; possibly it was a series of actions-breathing, walking, moving-audible only when performed by heavy mammals or the occasional oversize reptile. Whatever it was that had awakened him, it was not organic to the island, to the resort, or, for that matter, to life as he had lived it for what would soon approach two decades.
In a place even Ronnie could not find, Cooper kept something in addition to the Louisville Slugger. He had not used it once during his time in the Caribbean, but tonight, he knew, would be different. He found and withdrew the TEC-9 assault pistol from its hiding place and, checking over his senses, found himself to be strangely sober. It was as though he hadn’t tasted an alcoholic beverage in years, when in fact he had been blistering drunk when he’d passed out for the night a mere couple hours back.
He left his bungalow through a gate attached to the outdoor shower, neither noticing nor caring that he was stark naked as he did it.
Then Cooper was out in the night.
Shreds of moonlight allowed him to identify the black-clad shapes, hard shadows against the more inconsistent lines made by the palm fronds, the shadows creeping along the side of his bungalow. They were headed for his porch.
Wraiths, he thought. Always wraiths.
Without sound, in no rush, he strolled casually along the stones of the garden path and, with a cap-gun set of cracking spits, tagged two of the three wraiths with unerring head shots, reflexively averting the potential complications of body armor.
Wraith number three contorted his shadow into a turn-and-shoot motion and got a bullet headed in Cooper’s direction. Despite the wraith’s speed, his shot only lashed a burning stripe of pain across Cooper’s right shoulder. Otherwise it failed to affect the more deliberately aimed round from Cooper’s gun, and then there were no more wraiths, and in their place only unseen lumps in the unlit garden.
Cooper grabbed at his right shoulder and found his arm to be functioning. He continued his self-check, finding his entire body, notwithstanding the shoulder, remained in whatever moderately good health in which it had found itself prior to the incident. Then he took another form of inventory, realizing, among other things, that he now stood nude in the garden, and that the sound of gunfire must already be delivering every last one of the club’s occupants for a look-see. He slipped into his bungalow through the back, redeposited the gun in its hole, pulled on some Adidas shorts and the Tevas, found a bandage and some athletic tape, strapped the bandage over the shoulder wound, covered the dressing with a T-shirt, found his sat phone, and went back out by way of the porch.