Initially, Cooper ignored the pouch’s presence on his darkened porch, ambling into his bungalow after seventeen hours on the high seas and plunging directly into his pillow for however long a snooze the goat-of-the-day would let him enjoy.
He awoke to the sounds of people and music, shocked by the midday illumination creeping through the jalousie panes, his first thought that the snuffer-outers might have succeeded in taking out the goddamn goat.
He checked his watch to find it was lunch, not breakfast, underway down at the Bar & Grill.
The restaurant’s music selection always included the same rotation of Caribbean-themed songs, but he never failed to find them pleasing to the ear anyway. The lifestyle many planned for a whole year or more just to ingest for seven nights-the sounds, the rum, the sun, the sand, the lapping waves, the fish, the reefs, the SCUBA and snorkel gear-Cooper took in every day of the year, and never grew tired of it. Never. It got a little more crowded every year-there seemed one less layer to the sheen every time you took a close enough look-but in his view, the British Virgin Islands could have trademarked the elixir bubbling up from every lagoon in the chain. It was the essence of the Caribbean-at least the essence of the part you could enjoy if you had enough money, or had decided along the way that money didn’t matter all that much.
Maybe he’d call Lieutenant Riley and recommend the RVIPF apply for a patent-with Cap’n Roy gone they’d be needing a new revenue source.
Unaccustomed to his good mood but writing it off as the fruit of his long sleep, Cooper moseyed onto his porch, cooler today than usual, and eyed the diplomatic pouch. Can’t hurt to be prepared-just in case my preposterous $20 million request gets the thumbs-up from “the people she works for.”
“Ronnie!”
Cooper screamed this at considerable volume. It didn’t take long for the ponytailed errand boy to wander over through the garden and approach the base of his stairs.
“Ham sandwich, conch fritters, bottle of Cabernet.”
Appearing no more annoyed by the embarrassing form of summons as usual, Ronnie started off wordlessly, taking a couple steps down the garden path, then stopped, turned, and laid a quizzical, narrow-eyed look on the grizzled permanent resident of bungalow nine.
“Cabernet?” he said.
“Just get it.”
Cooper took a seat, unzipped the bag, and withdrew the short stack of files from within. He set them on the floor, plucked the first manila folder from the stack, and started in on the recent and tumultuous history of Hendry County, Florida, and the opinions of the small army of people who’d examined that history since. Laramie had left a message on his sat phone with the decryption code.
When Ronnie came with his food and the open bottle of wine, Cooper poured himself a glass, took the first sip, remembered as he always did how much he didn’t like the taste of wine as it first hit the tongue, then got himself through the predicament with a second sip and a few more in succession.
He ate, read, and drank. When he’d finished the last of Laramie’s files, Cooper set it on the stack he’d already read and settled a creak deeper in the chair.
“Well, Benny Achar,” he said aloud. “How do we find the old you?”
He thought a little of his own disappearance-an unwilling, unwitting one-and his subsequent reappearance as a man of his own crafting. A man with a made-up name, one with a new home, new habits, new neighbors-everything different. With no contact from the people or world of his past. Not that he’d had much of anybody around from before anyway, not by the time the ties with that old life had been severed, against his will or no.
Maybe that’s what Benny Achar had faced. Back home, wherever home had been-maybe he didn’t have anybody there. Maybe whoever he’d had in his life was gone. Dead, or killed. He must have had something, though-if only hatred, or anger, or misery-considering what he signed up to do. If Laramie was right about Achar’s intentions-and Cooper knew Laramie usually turned out to be right-then Achar, as his new self, had possibly discovered the opposite: satisfaction, happiness, or better. And because of these new companions-maybe found by way of his wife and son-Benny decided to abort the mission. To send the warning; to lay the bread crumbs.
Cooper could relate to the satisfaction Achar may have found in his new life-there was a measure of that for him here in Conch Bay, at least during the hours following a good night’s rest. And he’d had another measure of satifaction too-at least until the woman serving up the dose of contentedness of a sort he’d rarely known decided to cut off his supply and head back to the civilized world.
Ah, the civilized world, he thought, his musings made palpably clear by the effects of the Cabernet, home to such nifty things as “counterterror units.”
He considered for a moment how somebody might go about unearthing his former identity. It wouldn’t be too much of a challenge-the information wasn’t exactly buried, covered up, or otherwise classified. He knew himself to be listed as buried-dead-killed, supposedly, in a plane crash that’d had nothing to do with the way he’d actually vanished. He supposed that somewhere, buried in some compartmentalized file cabinet, there would be documentation on the mission that actually got his fellow special-ops goons killed. The trip that had erased the old version of himself.
Maybe there was something to that-the part about his being officially dead. Maybe the real version of Benjamin Achar was dead too. In the same way he’d assumed the identity of someone who’d died, maybe he’d abandoned a similarly, if only officially dead identity he’d once worn around.
Or maybe there wasn’t anything to it at all, and it wouldn’t matter anyway.
Cooper observed that he’d polished off the sandwich, fritters, and all but a quarter inch of the last glass of Cabernet. He also observed that with the whole bottle of vino inside him, he was feeling pretty good.
Not quite all the way to satisfied, but still pretty good.
He swallowed the last swish of wine, found the fax Susannah Grant had sent him, and punched in her number on his sat phone.
She answered on the third ring, prompting Cooper to decide this was all the confirmation he needed. He clicked off-no need to heat up any of the bad blood from their aborted rapture session in Austin. She was doing fine, and even if her phone had its caller ID feature intact, she wouldn’t know anybody besides RESTRICTED NUMBER had just called. The snuffer-outers would have got her by now if they knew about her.
Cooper punched in a second set of digits-the Caracas number for Borrego Industries. When he asked the receptionist to connect him to the Polar Bear, the woman shot back a terse reply, struggling as she had in person with her English.
“Who is this?”
Cooper felt a pit form in his stomach on hearing her tone.
“Tell him it’s Cooper,” he said.
“What does this regarding?”
“Just tell him it’s Cooper.”
She put the call on hold and Cooper waited. After about a minute, the call was answered by a man whose voice Cooper didn’t immediately recognize, except that he recognized it wasn’t Ernesto Borrego.
“Why are you calling here,” the man said. He had a deep voice, almost as deep as Cooper’s, with English as heavily accented as the receptionist’s-along with a kind of masterfully projected audio scowl discernible to Cooper even across many thousands of miles of sky.
“Well, I called to speak with Borrego,” Cooper said. “That would be why I asked for him.”
“He is not available.”
“I thought he was proficient at returning calls?”
“Proficient?”
“Expert. Good. Skilled-”