Gates looked ahead, behind, to the side, seeing no one but the usual derelicts loitering in defiance of the city ordinance, draped across the benches like they owned the place. There were no members of Cleo’s to come to the rescue, so Gates continued walking.
“Why shouldn’t I?” he said.
“Because,” the stranger said, “I’ve got a solution.”
“Oh?”
“What we’ll do,” the stranger said, “is find a nice posting somewhere. I’m seeing a small place-lots of sun, some sand, water, not much going on, maybe some fishing to pass the day. There’s a spot I’m thinking of that might just work. They call them the British Virgin Islands-the BVIs. Why not? Then let’s tenure me. You can finance it out of, oh, I don’t know, pick a fund. Call me a GS-14 and pay me that plus hazard pay. Any GS-14 in the British Virgins is likely to be chief of station, so let’s go ahead and assign me that title too. This sound all right so far?”
“It sounds difficult,” Gates said.
“But not impossible. I’m in the BVIs, hell, there probably isn’t much else to do-I’ll even work for you. Keep a keen eye out for any intel, routine or otherwise, coming out of the strategically significant Antilles region. Even better are the things I won’t say to-”
“I get it.”
The stranger stopped and stared at Gates with those vacant eyes.
“If you get it,” the stranger said, “then I’ll see you in your office tomorrow morning at nine, at which time you’ll provide me all necessary documentation on the numbered account which will already contain the trust. The trust should be of sufficient size to afford my salary for a minimum of forty-five years, including cost-of-living increases, periodic promotions, and hazard pay. I will control the trust, not you. I’ll be using the name Cooper, first initial W., because I like the sound of it, and will expect a pass waiting for me at the gate, along with my Agency ID and a manufactured employee-history file under that name. Do we need to go into the ‘attorney-at-law who’s been instructed to release such-and-such to the Justice Department and news media under the following circumstances’ crap in order to keep you from sending your goons after me?”
Gates said, “No.”
The stranger didn’t nod, acknowledge that he was leaving, or otherwise announce the end of the conversation, but, instead, simply walked away.
Before he reached the fountain in the center of the park, the stranger turned. Gates caught a flash of his hollow eyes.
“There’s something else,” the stranger said. “If I ever need you, I’ll call under a code name. Could be an emergency, something I need taken care of, or maybe just a favor for a friend I’m looking to impress. When I call, you’ll do as I say, no questions asked, and if I’m using the code when I make the call, then you’ll know I’m not calling just to chat.”
Gates said, “Fine. What’s the name?”
“Lunar Eclipse,” the stranger said. “I like the sound of that too. You?”
Back in his seventh-floor office, Starbucks still in hand, Gates listened to the caller.
“Snorkeling’s great this time of year,” Cooper said. “You ought to come down and visit.”
“I don’t particularly like the Caribbean.” He pronounced Caribbean with the emphasis on the be.
“That’s odd,” Cooper said. “Then again you’re an odd one, aren’t you, Pete?”
“What do you want?”
“A favor.”
Gates felt a prickly sensation, his skin starting to sweat underneath the fabric of his suit. He took a sip of the coffee. He wanted to say, You’ve got some nerve, or something like that, but there was nothing like that he could say. Nothing that would get him anywhere.
“Go ahead,” he said.
Cooper talked for two minutes, providing a detailed set of instructions, then hung up.
Standing behind his desk, Gates set the phone back on its cradle. After another minute or so, he pulled the lid off the coffee, took one last sip, then dumped the remainder on his telephone. He held the overturned cardboard cup above the receiver until the last dark drop slid from the rim and splashed against the phone.
Then he picked up the telephone console and threw it against the wall.
Following a two-minute stare-down with the brown dent he’d made in the white wall, Gates relented, walked around his desk to the guest telephone on the other side of his office, and buzzed Miss Anders.
When she answered, he told her there was a call he would need her to place for him.
30
When Cooper got back to Conch Bay, the satellite shots he’d ordered via the Peter M. Gates delivery service were waiting for him. Ronnie had deposited the fat enclosure from the diplomatic pouch on his front porch.
Cooper had ordered Gates to send him images captured by various military intelligence satellites during a seventy-two-hour period. The period commenced with the approximate time of departure of the fifty-foot Chris-Craft from the pier outside of Kingston; Cooper knew he could order printouts of another day, week, or more if he needed to.
Looking over the spread of glossy black-and-white prints on the table in his kitchenette, he saw little more than a strangely uneventful voyage by the mystery boat. Each massive print was folded into an eight-by-ten rectangular stack, an oversize version of a folded glove-compartment map, which, when unfurled, blossomed into some thirty-six square feet of high-definition, mostly featureless ocean. Cooper thinking that if you knew how to examine the photos properly-as Laramie surely did-you could find the boat in there with your naked eye. Cooper had to dig out a magnifying glass to see what he was looking for and verify the relevant speck was in fact the boat he was tracking.
He’d ordered shots of virtually the entire Caribbean Sea and adjacent Atlantic but was able to narrow his choices, throwing out one map stack after another as he kept his eye on the boat’s progression. There was little for him to see outside of the unerring course of the boat: a handful of other ships passed within twenty or thirty miles, none close enough to make contact; the boat did not appear to dock anywhere; the vessel simply steamed east-southeast for some eight hundred miles, hove to in calm seas twenty miles east of the island of Martinique, then retraced its course back toward its apparent home port in Jamaica. The odyssey lasted forty-plus hours on the outbound route, and, following a pause lasting about two hours, the boat headed back along the same course. Cooper ignored the remainder of the prints once it appeared likely the boat was destined to return to Jamaica.
It didn’t make any sense. One thing for sure-that boat had some fuel tanks to kill for. Maybe the captain of the boat preferred to eat human steak with his morning eggs; maybe the vessel’s crew had some dirty work to handle and needed some form of slave labor on board. If so, he decided that the only way to learn anything, if there was anything to be learned at all, was to take his own boat along the course he’d just tracked. Follow the coordinates he’d scribbled on the edges of the photographs, sail out to where the mystery boat had turned around, fire off a memory card’s worth of digital photos with his Nikon, and see if there was anything he could find offering some explanation.
He could also ambush the Chris-Craft, check it over, and interrogate the two guys he’d seen on it-but he had a pretty good idea the wino would be nowhere near that boat by now, and as for the guys piloting it, he knew the type. They were hired hands, guys who’ve been told nothing by nobody.
He set out at dawn on his second day back from Jamaica.
It took him three hours, going south, to intersect the course the boat had taken to Martinique. From there it took him another four hours-Cooper’s Apache over three times faster than the mystery boat, even when he was taking it easy. He saw little of interest along the way-nice weather, a few birds, some flotsam. He planed over the rolling swells and crashed down into the ocean on the other side of them. Every two or three hours he would ease up and consult the charts to confirm his course, have a sandwich, or nod off for fifteen minutes.