“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:
MALE VOICE: While I’m in town, I’m staying with our old buddy WC. You remember old WC, don’t you?
(pause)
LARAMIE: Of course I remember WC. So he’s in Washington now?
MALE VOICE: Yeah, how about that. You know something else? I think that after all these years, old WC’s still a virgin. You believe it? Anyway, he’s in the phone book. Give me a call on your way home.
Giving her sophomoric clues to locate him in the Agency’s internal directory-fuck! Fucking mosquito that he was, the man must have spent half his idle time-of which Gates knew he possessed a great deal-concocting ways to fuck him. Bite him, pass on some deadly viral disease, disappear for ten years to plan the next chomp. What was it-had Lunar Fucking Eclipse sensed an opportunity to destroy him simply by reading a copy of the allstations memorandum he’d ordered Laramie to write?
Gates read on, seeking a stream of logic to answer his fury:
LARAMIE: I’m not-
MALE VOICE: Ah.
LARAMIE: Ah?
MALE VOICE: You’re not supposed to be working on what you’re working on, are you?
(pause)
Fuck them. Tell me what’s going on.
LARAMIE: Tough talk. You know, professor, “fuck them” isn’t the kind of advice professors usually give.
Later the mosquito e-mailed photographs to her-Gates reviewed the pictures and instantly ID’d every face at the resort. Then Laramie had called him, Gates reading the date as the night before last, the time of the call 4:17 A.M. He noted from the report that Laramie had placed the call following another long night of unauthorized SATINT-viewing:
LARAMIE: How did you, what I mean is, why did you take them? The pictures? Do you live near there?
MALE VOICE: It’s a few hours from here by boat. By my boat. Longer on others.
LARAMIE: Where is it?
MALE VOICE: About twenty miles east of Martinique.
LARAMIE: Do you know what these-it’s Kim Jong-il, Fatah Duwami from Yemen, and an admiral in the Chinese navy, Li Zhu, did you know that? And-do you know what they were doing there?
MALE VOICE: I know who they are. I’ve got no idea why they’re there.
LARAMIE: You know what I did after you sent me these pictures?
MALE VOICE: No.
LARAMIE: I worked from the other faces. Not the three in the shot you cropped, but the other ones, you understand what I’m saying?