As Cooper had known he’d be, Ronnie was already waiting for him on the path below the stairs. He came down and they talked for a minute, Cooper making some suggestions on what to tell the guests who would probably be swarming the bungalow in seconds.
Once they’d agreed on what Ronnie should tell them, Cooper noticed Dottie standing quietly on the path a few yards back from his porch, arms folded across her breasts, which, unfortunately, he wouldn’t have been able to see anyway, since she seemed to be wearing a tank top. She also seemed to be wearing a bikini bottom, or maybe just panties-either way, the Dottie-spotting, coinciding as it did with Ronnie’s zippy arrival, confirmed his suspicion. She’d been in the putz’s room when the firecrackers had gone off.
“Oh, look,” Cooper said, “Dottie.”
Ronnie shrugged and turned to head off the resort’s guests at the pass.
From the confines of bungalow nine, Cooper dialed Cap’n Roy’s home number with his sat phone.
“Yeah, mon,” Roy muttered.
“Roy,” Cooper said, starting right in, “I’ve got three dead commandos in the garden outside my room.”
It took a minute, but then Roy said, “How they get there?”
“I haven’t really thought it through, but I feel pretty safe making the wild guess they came to see me after I talked to the wrong person, or took a look around the wrong place, while working in my capacity as detective-for-the-dead.”
“What you talkin’ ’bout, mon?”
“What I’m talking about is, I’ve been asking around about that twice-dead zombie from your Marine Base beach,” Cooper said. “I assume you knew our boy was a zombie before handing him over to your unsuspecting friend the spook, by the way. His name, in case you wondered, was Marcel. Marcel S.”
Roy didn’t say anything for a while. When he did, he had that clarity in his voice that Cooper took to mean he’d sat up in bed, maybe even rolled his feet off the edge of the mattress and planted them on the floor while he thought things through.
“That right?” Roy said. “Marcel?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Where he from, then? You know that too?”
“Haiti,” Cooper said. “Kid was also engaged when he died. Additional fun fact.”
Roy cluck-clucked with his tongue. Cooper envisioned him shaking his head while he did it-What a shame, Roy thinking over there in Road Town, dat poor fella, then.
“Anyway,” Cooper said, “reason for the call, Roy, is one, to inform the authorities that I’ve just shot and killed three individuals who, in seeking to off me in the peace and quiet of my bungalow, wore body armor and carried automatic weapons.”
“‘Off you,’ eh?” Roy said. “And how ’bout two?”
“Thought you’d never ask. Mainly I wanted to see what you thought about the idea of my stuffing these boys into some SCUBA bags, dragging them out to my Apache, and paying an early morning call on that pair of makos and their barracuda pals in Eastman’s Cove.”
Cooper waited. It didn’t take long.
“Hungry sharks,” Roy said, “be a menace to us islanders.”
Cooper held on for any further pronouncement; receiving none, he broke the connection.
Cooper returned from Eastman’s Cove just before dawn. Heading inside, he retrieved a pinkie-thick joint from the drawer of his reading table, fired it up, and mourned the passing of the three commandos in a more mellow state of mind from one of the chairs on his porch.
Pondering their connection to his recent adventures, he concluded, about two-thirds of the way through the blunt, that since it couldn’t be Jimbo, couldn’t be Barry the witch doctor, and probably wasn’t within the means of either the Cat in the Hat or the parrot-voiced quack from Hôpital H. L. Dantier, it was almost undoubtedly somebody on that fucking island.
The island hosting the convention of Communist dictators, who must, he decided, have appreciated his visit to such a degree that they’d sent him the thoughtful gift of the three somewhat ineffective G.I. Joe impersonators.
While he smoked, Cooper waited patiently for his muscles to calm. The part of his dispatching of the commandos that he didn’t particularly want to acknowledge was that his muscles-particularly one of his quadriceps, just above his right knee-had been trembling since the bullet nipped him. Been a while, he supposed, since I’ve been shot-not, however, long enough for my nerves to be shot too.
He tried to focus on something else. He could hear the water breaking against the reef in the distance; there was a warm breeze that brought with it the smell of the sea, and palm trees, and a flower he couldn’t place.
When his muscles firmed up he killed the joint, ducked inside, and went back to sleep.
34
He reprimands her in his very office-in the presence of her direct supervisor and the head of her directorate-and Laramie has the ovaries to leak her entire report to a U.S. senator?
He had underestimated her.
Laramie, Gates thought, would be subjected to suspension, intimidation, interrogation, indictment, and one hell of a momentum against her ever again finding gainful employment-unless, of course, she wanted to upgrade to drive-through jockey at Burger King. This much was self-evident, since it was widely known that to defy Peter M. Gates without suitable leverage meant it was time to get ready to pay a heavy toll. He’d begin taxing her before the day was out.
None of this, though, would alter his newfound predicament.
Not in the slightest.
He’d grossly misjudged the girl, and the president-the fucking president-would, as a result, either be publicly embarrassed or privately mugged. Senator Kircher would see his way to victory in some form. Somebody would in turn be made to pay the price, and the moment Gates read, in Rhone’s report, that Laramie had been the one to spill the beans to the senator, Gates knew his own occupational death to be as imminent as Laramie’s.
His only hope now was to delay his demise, and the only way he’d be able to pull that off was to prevent Kircher-and subsequently Lou Ebbers and the White House-from learning the true identity of “EastWest7.” If the senator got hold of Laramie’s name, he’d undoubtedly track her down, and Gates had the feeling Laramie wouldn’t be shy about disclosing his own role in quashing her findings.
Stop the Kircher-Laramie conversation from taking place, and Gates knew he still had a shot at covering the president’s ass, and therefore the national security advisor’s ass, and therefore the Agency’s substantially exposed ass, and therefore his own, on the matter he figured Bill O’Reilly and company would soon be calling “the Kircher letter.”
Regardless, he’d underestimated the zeal of a junior analyst-and fucked himself accordingly. And perhaps, Gates mused, he might even be able to stomach this second major error of his career-the error that would surely prove his undoing-were it not for the horrific revelation contained in the transcripts of Laramie’s phone conversations.
Rooting through his bag in the back of his Town Car, Gates found the first Laramie file his security man had provided him and reread the encrypted summary of Laramie’s second recorded telephone conversation. It had been with her so-called former professor, but Gates felt a churn roil through his gastrointestinal tract as he read with a newfound understanding. He could practically hear the bastard’s voice as the words popped out at him from the page: