“I happen to be in the area. I figured I’d do you and ‘the people you work for’ a favor. Save them some time-you know, in case they’ve started spinning their wheels in a vain hunt for the numbered account my initial extortion dough got siphoned into, or any of the many hundreds of investments my attorneys subsequently made with it, scattered around the globe like little financial Easter eggs. And don’t get your hopes up on your own personal knowledge contributing to the hapless mission of the federal government finding any of my assets-just because we hung out some doesn’t mean you have any more concept than the sea turtles south of Conch Bay as to where that money lives.”
“Ah,” Laramie said. I knew I shouldn’t have said anything…
“Anyway,” Cooper said, “since they’re not ever going to find any of it, not in a couple generations’ worth of IRS investigators, I’ll save them the trouble and have a cup of coffee with you-as per your ‘initial recruitment effort.’ As to the driving part-among the reasons you’ll need to be the one logging the miles is the fact that I’m not meeting you anywhere near the people you work for.”
“Fine.”
The phone line kind of sat there between them, part noise and part silence.
“You said you’ll have a cup of coffee,” Laramie said. “You drink coffee now?”
“Helps with the headaches.”
“What are the other reasons?” Laramie said.
“For drinking coffee?”
“You said ‘among the reasons’-that avoiding coming anywhere near ‘the people I work’ for was ‘among the reasons’ I’m the one who has to do the driving. Why else?”
She heard some kind of muffled sigh rumble from the receiver.
“Laramie, after our breakfast rendezvous, I’ll be hopping back aboard my refueled speed machine and heading south. Conditions are expected to worsen as the tropical storm currently dumping six inches of rain on Cancún moves into the Gulf, so if I don’t clear Key West by ten, said speed machine will wind up as fiberglass kindling somewhere near the halfway point of my intended voyage.”
“What if the storm moves faster than that?”
“Then you’ll be eating your granola alone.”
Fair enough, Laramie thought.
“All right,” she said. “Storm allowing, I’ll see you at seven and brief you there.”
“You can brief me all you want,” Cooper said, “and I’ll give you my thoughts on whatever it is you’ve got going. But if you were asking me then, and you’re asking me now, and you ask me over coffee, to come work for whichever people it is you’re working for now, I’m not interested.”
A bonking rattle sounded out, and Laramie knew he’d dropped the phone on its cradle.
She leaned back against the headboard, allowing some of the fog to clear from her sleep-deprived brain. She sat there with her eyes closed for a minute, or maybe five, then flipped off the covers and rolled her feet off the side of the bed.
She wondered, as she stood, what the simplest way might be of procuring one of the task force fleet’s black-on-black Suburbans at five in the morning.
“It’s only a matter of time.”
After swallowing the sip of black coffee he’d just taken, Cooper attempted and failed to determine what it was Laramie was talking about. He was certain she wasn’t talking about what had slipped into his mind once she’d uttered the words.
“You want to run that by me again?”
“The caffeine addiction,” she said. “You didn’t used to drink any coffee. Now you look suspiciously like a two-cups-a-morning guy to me. Addiction can’t be far behind.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But last I checked, there were a few other addictions chewing up most of my real estate. Not sure there’s room for any others.”
Cooper was feeling irritable-or highly uncomfortable, at any rate. Upon Laramie’s arrival at the table, it seemed there had been a slight quickening of his pulse. It was a familiar sensation-familiarly annoying. He’d thought himself impervious to it, which was what made it so annoying: he had assumed his year-plus of rage at Laramie’s decision to abandon him and his island way of life, coupled with the so-preposterous-as-to-be-humorous threat Laramie had made in her “initial recruitment effort,” would function as a kind of force field. A moat.
Here he was, though, a mere three minutes into his breakfast meeting, and the force field had already disintegrated in favor of the same old quickened pulse. He thought of an imaginary wall suddenly detonating into a million digital pixels and the pixels fading to reveal an image behind.
“You’re an asshole,” Laramie said.
Cooper blinked.
“You’re an infantile, inconsiderate, uncontrolled, obnoxious child,” she went on, “in an aging, sunbaked, time-and-fisticuff-abused adult male shell.”
She did not appear particularly incensed, or even emotional, Laramie just leaning forward with her forearms crossed on the table, telling him off over coffee. Cooper took a few slow sips, letting time pass, swirling the bitter, chocolately fluid around his mouth with each taste, depositing the cup on its saucer between sips to draw out the time between each sip-to-taste-to-swallow. Knowing there was more on the way from the analyst across the table.
“An adult human being,” Laramie said, “would respect another adult human being’s decisions and, despite such decisions being difficult and painful, or even hurtful, retain some sense of interpersonal decorum. Even a bratty child, taking a friend’s tormented, thoughtful, deliberate decision to return to work personally, would eventually come to grips with his boorish overreaction and call, maybe apologize, or even, for Christ’s sake-you horse’s ass-take my goddamn call when I show the maturity and patience to dial up that goddamn beach club in search of you, knowing Ronnie’s already been told to screen my fucking call.”
Her words were delivered in so matter-of-fact a fashion that Cooper felt as though he’d tuned into one of the lower-rated local newscasts that competed with Ricardo Medvez’s nightly displays of knowledgeable warmth.
Despite being in no mood to explain himself-despite never being in the mood to explain himself-Cooper said, “Hell, I called. Twice now.”
“Popping your rude head above the surface after ducking me for a year is not the kind of ‘eventually’ I was talking about.”
“‘Eventually’ is a relative term,” he said. “Subjective, even.”
She looked at him for a while, still leaning on her forearms, but losing some of the detachment factor. A little color worked its way up the sides of her neck in pinkish splotches against her pale skin. He could feel the crackle in the air as she fought to keep the color beneath the collar of her blouse.
“Here’s what’s going on,” she said.
Then Laramie started in on the sordid suicidal exploits of Benny Achar and the ramifications of his act as incurred by a hundred and twenty-five late and former citizens of Hendry County. She covered Achar’s false identity, the reality and likelihood of what could come to pass if Achar were one of many, and the engineered version of the facts as presented in the news media. Then she told him she had been asked to head a counterterrorist unit whose purpose was to identify and possibly destroy Achar’s comrades, if any, and those responsible for compelling Achar to action in the first place.
“So that’s all,” Cooper said.
Laramie ignored him and concluded with a brief explanation of her theory that Achar had meant to use his bomb-launched spread of the filovirus as a message-as bread crumbs for them to follow. She didn’t mention the similarity between the counterterror strategy she’d outlined in her independent study paper and the organization she now appeared to be working for. Including Cooper’s interruption, it took Laramie thirty-four minutes to lay out her briefing.