Cooper made some calls and ultimately found a clerk in the appropriate records hall in Martinique. The midday sun had begun to bear down on him, the old porch oriented poorly when it came to the blistering afternoon heat. Nonetheless, he managed to score from the clerk the reasonably uninteresting and possibly useless ownership history of Mango Cay. The current leaseholder was a Delaware corporation called Global Exports, whose signa-tory officer was somebody named Spencer H. Gibson. Global Exports had bought the Mango Cay lease just over ten years ago. The prior owner, according to the clerk, was a Liberian firm called Freedom Partners, LLC, which had controlled the land for nine years. Two individuals held it prior to that; Cooper jotted down the names as the clerk rattled them off. Before the clerk’s list of four ownership entities, the land had apparently been classified as uninhabited public property.
By the time he’d hung up on the clerk, Cooper had already clicked back into cyberspace and determined that no particular Agency record existed on anybody named Spencer H. Gibson. He was also unable to find any CIA-originated intelligence on either Global Exports or Freedom Partners, and the earlier owners, two American multimillionaires, were now deceased. Cooper dialed up the phone numbers the clerk had given for both Global Exports and Freedom Partners, reaching a disconnection notice for Global Exports and a loud, repeating bratt-bratt noise when he tried Freedom Partners. He tried the number a few more times and kept getting the same sound.
Annoyed and overheated, Cooper leaned his head back and fell asleep in the chair, the sun stinging hot on his face.
They kept her in the Scuds unit for thirty-eight hours. Sleep was not permitted and no food was provided. The throbbing headache that resulted from Laramie’s inability to quench her caffeine addiction would have made it impossible for her to sleep in any case, but with the added irritation of the headache, enduring the last hours of the interrogation nearly did her in. There were moments-for instance, the utterance of the thousandth repeat of the identical question, queried by the sixth interrogator of the session, with Laramie strapped into the lie detector seat, EKG stickers adorning breasts, belly, hips, wrists-when Laramie was forced to dig her fingernails into the skin of her palm, even to bite a bleeding incision into her tongue, in order to keep from leaping from the chair and bashing the interrogator’s brains in.
Ironically, it was the interrogation simulation they’d given her at The Farm that gave her the chops to survive the thirty-eight hours intact. One of the first lessons they’d conveyed to the fresh batch of recruits back then had been simple enough to remember now: never go belly-up. No matter what they had on you, never admit that you did anything wrong, who you worked for, or whatever it was they were trying to get out of you-or so went the lesson. The principle was intended for use in the unlikely event a DI analyst subjected to torture in a Syrian prison just happened to possess the secrets underpinning America’s national security, but it proved particularly useful as a guide on what to admit, and what to deny, as the Agency’s own investigators sought to pry various confessions from her on the topic of her supposedly treasonous activities.
They had everything-she wasn’t sure how they had it all, but they did-everything she’d said into a pay phone, cell phone, home phone, some things she’d said aloud to herself at home, the text from each of the e-mails she’d let fly to Senator Kircher from Kinko’s and Morpheus. They knew about her relationship with Eddie Rothgeb, they had transcripts of every conversation she’d had with the mysterious W. Cooper, and they had meticulous documentation of her precise whereabouts within the confines of the headquarters building, pretty much minute by minute.
What Laramie decided to do was admit to divulging classified intelligence to Eddie Rothgeb and W. Cooper; she chose not to go belly-up on the Kircher e-mails. She’d devised this strategy on the walk over to the IIU wing from her cubicle, and stuck to it for the duration of the session. She found she had some ground to stand on, since she’d never put her name on anything, had never sent or received anything relating to the senator from home, or the office, or anywhere tied to her real name; she’d been careful with her language in the summary she’d sent, steering clear of names, departments, and specific intel and analysis that could be directly tied to her. She didn’t actually see how it really made any difference that she refused to own up to the cyber communiqués with a U.S. senator who supposedly oversaw the government’s intelligence operations, but stonewalling the interrogators at least gave her something to focus on during the caffeine-deprivation marathon. She also guessed that anybody inside or outside CIA contemplating bringing criminal charges against her would see the Kircher leak as the most egregious of the offenses she’d committed over the past three weeks of her life, and any physical evidence they’d have linking her to Kircher would be dicey at best. She’d passed the lie detector tests with flying colors.
While she chose not to own up to the Kircher notes, she found, oddly enough, that the line of questioning pursued by the roster of interrogators focused almost solely on her correspondence with W. Cooper. Between bolts of pain from the caffeine headache, she found this emphasis disturbing, presuming Cooper was in fact who he purported to be. She had a pretty good hunch he wasn’t anything or anybody different than he claimed, and at least until recently she’d done all right sticking by her instincts. Cooper himself had pegged her as a human lie detector machine. Why, then, the fourth degree on her phone calls with an Agency operative?
At 11 P.M. the day after they’d come for her, the last interrogator in the succession of faces told her she was free to go. She was made to sign a document agreeing to the fact that her employment status had officially been categorized as “suspended without pay pending internal investigation” and that she was now legally required to notify the gentleman listed on the document if she intended to leave the greater Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area for any period of time whatsoever. Laramie knew from the expression on the last interrogator’s face that she wasn’t free to go anywhere-they’d follow her everywhere she went, as had now been bluntly pointed out to have been the case for some time.
On the way home she pulled into the same 7-Eleven where she’d first used a pay phone to call Cooper and bought a vial of Advil, a Diet Pepsi, and a PowerBar. She swallowed eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen between Power Bar chunks and drove home, noting with neither surprise nor concern that one particular set of headlights seemed to find its way into her rearview mirror regardless of where she turned or how fast she drove. The car would drop back, vanish when she made a turn, then reappear, never coming closer than a few hundred yards behind.
As she pulled into her condo complex, she observed the guest parking lot adjoining her unit now featured three black sedans and one minivan, no single one of which she had ever seen parked here.
The garage door opened at the base of her town house and she slid inside.
It wasn’t until she pulled on the emergency brake and killed the engine that Laramie acknowledged how hungry she was. Still behind the wheel, she punched 411 on her cell phone, connected to Domino’s, and ordered a large pepperoni-and-green-pepper pizza. The delivery took a great deal longer than thirty minutes, and Laramie had a pretty good idea why. She didn’t ask the guy delivering the pizza whether he’d been pulled over by the police halfway through his run, or whether, when he was pulled over, the cops searched his Altima bumper to bumper, but figured that was about the size of it. The boy drove off-subject, no doubt, to another stop-and-search, probably for that same ineffective blinker.