Cooper had polished off the fritters; wordlessly, Ronnie swiped the empty basket and delivered Cooper’s burger and an array of condiments.
“The leaders,” Laramie said, “the ones from your pictures. Are you aware of what has happened?”
“That they’re MIA, you mean?”
“Yes. And the rhetoric from China’s premier-new premier-Deng Jiang-”
Cooper, observing that he’d nearly polished off the burger, said, “Education, tax cuts, and war on terror. Everybody uses the same line of bull the minute they take office.”
“Yes, but he’s specifically identified a ‘well-funded international terrorist organization.’ Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“No.”
He noticed Laramie had drunk a reasonable dose of Chardonnay, consumed all the lettuce, but failed to eat even half the seafood or any of the dressing. He considered asking whether she was planning on finishing her dinner and was going to reach over for the strips of swordfish and rings of calamari she’d left untouched, then thought better of it and devoured his fries instead.
“I’m saying,” she said, “that Deng has the same theory I do. Or that I originally did. I call it a ‘rogue faction’; he calls it an international terrorist organization. Same thing.”
“Possibly.”
“Don’t you find it odd that the international terrorist organization Deng has mentioned-assuming it’s run by the people you photographed and who are now missing-played host to an admiral from Deng’s navy?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, well these supposed enemies of China have also been conducting military exercises that coincide precisely with Deng’s Taiwan simulation. You could, if you thought of it this way, interpret the simulations as preparations for attacks best conducted once a change in political climate has taken place. Such as, for instance, the change that just happened with the Beihaide nuclear warhead blast. Did you know that now-premier Deng was one of only three council members who was late to the meeting where the bomb detonated? He happened to have been the first in line for succession were the premier to die, and his political allies happen to have been the other survivors of the blast. Why is nobody talking about these things?”
Knowing his brain to be significantly more sluggish than it once had been-and knowing it hadn’t exactly started out as a fighter jet-Cooper took the time to glance into the sky above Laramie’s head while he put her theory through the motions a few times.
“You’re drawing some pretty brash conclusions,” he said when his mind had finished the workout.
“Thus far,” she said, “every ludicrous conclusion I’ve reached has pretty much proven to be accurate. Or close to it.”
“I didn’t say they were ludicrous. I said they were brash.”
“I’d say it’s pretty ludicrous operating under the theory that a Chinese vice premier detonated a nuclear weapon in his own country to succeed the sitting premier and, further, knows more than he’s letting on, or his lieutenant knows more than he’s letting on, about the leaders of the terrorist league he’s publicly identified-though still anonymously-as the perpetrators behind the detonation.”
“I’ll come back to what I was going to say when you interrupted me on my porch: you do realize there are maybe five thousand people better suited-”
“What do you propose I do,” she said, “besides attempt to get my hands on hard, physical evidence that I’m right?”
Cooper thought about that, then said, “One option would be to retire to a tropical isle and do approximately nothing for the rest of your life.”
Laramie’s neck and cheeks had turned, and held, a ruddy shade of pink. Ronnie came, took away their plates, then returned to solicit their dessert order, that same annoying expression on his face throughout.
“Despite the lack of decent help here,” Cooper said, “I think we should order dessert.”
“I don’t usually order dessert,” Laramie said.
Ronnie took a long step backward but otherwise remained stationed in the vicinity of their table. Cooper glared in Ronnie’s direction, then returned his gaze to Laramie without the glare.
“You should eat up,” he said. “There won’t be time for breakfast if we want to get to the island before dusk, because if we do, we’ll need to leave at dawn.”
“Do we?”
“Do we what?”
“Do we want to get to the island before dusk?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good.”
Laramie eased back in her chair. She reached for her glass of wine and took a sip.
“How much?” Cooper said.
“What?”
“How much are you offering? You said you’d pay me to take you there.”
“Um, well-how much will you charge?”
“Nothing.”
She looked at him in a way that made Cooper think she was weighing whether she should throw a punch across the table.
He said, “Would you like to know why?”
“Sure, Professor.” She appeared to be amusing herself with a joke he didn’t understand. “Why?”
“The ferry was already headed there.”
Laramie thought about this.
“You were there taking pictures for your own reasons, of course,” she said.
“Correct as usual, Lie Detector. And while there may or may not be a connection between your brash theories, the owners of the Mango Cay lease, or even the second death of a young man named Marcel S., the fact remains I’ve got some unfinished business to handle, and the place it’s looking like I’ll have to handle it is out on that fucking island.”
Laramie smiled a little bit, causing another, somewhat alien twinge in Cooper’s belly.
“Who,” she said, “is Marcel S.?”
“Long story. I’ll fill you in on the ride over.” He twirled the thinning bourbon and melting ice in his glass. “You should know,” he said, “that the thing I’m taking care of, if it turns out that’s the place to take care of it-there’s a pretty good chance it’ll get ugly. Very.”
Laramie didn’t react one way or the other.
“Ronnie,” Cooper said.
Ronnie, who had held his position at the expense of various other tables-ostensibly to await their dessert order, but primarily to eavesdrop-stepped forward and inclined his chin.
“Mud pie. Couple spoons.”
“Aye-aye, Guv.”
42
Once the mainframe’s reboot sequence began for the day, Hiram and the wino returned to the cart they had hidden in the tunnel the afternoon before. If the cart’s motor and the wino’s measly muscles cooperated, it would take them just over one minute to pilot the warhead-laden cart down the length of the tunnel. Hiram had done this before, and the key was the morning rain: when the rainfall was light or nonexistent, the tunnel was dry, and transport relatively easy. Following a storm, it took some serious muscle to move the cart through the mud. Gibson had sunk over two hundred grand into sump pumps and other contraptions, but nothing seemed to work.
Today had been a dry morning, so Hiram was optimistic-he figured he wouldn’t need to use the cattle prod more than half a dozen times on the minute-plus journey.
Though Gibson preferred his own label of “cargo cave,” Deng had originally called the island’s secondary freight cavern “the Lab” for fairly self-evident reasons. The Lab was less than half the size of the primary missile cavern and significantly less organized, strewn with industrial equipment, spare parts, and the six defunct C-4 Trident I missiles that had yet to pass inspection. A dust-free, sterile laboratory, built in the cavern’s back room early on, had been used by Deng’s scientists for adjustments to the barometric pressure units serving as the detonation triggers for the W-76 warheads, earning the cavern its nickname.