by Will Staeger
It was a marlin, her side bluer than the ocean in the sun as the graceful fish got airborne, reaching skyward, bucking, infuriated at the presence of the hook in her mouth. Cooper knew the fish was sending him a message as clearly as if she had called him to deliver it on his sat phone: Go ahead, try and bring me in, Cooper, you old sack of shit. Look at my lines, a world-class athlete of the deep-go ahead and try to drag me in with that useless rod.
Cooper thinking he was ready, knowing what he had in store for the next four, five, or who knew, maybe eight hours, judging from the size of that bitch offering up her challenge. What he had in store was the chair, the rod, the fish, and pain. Lose your concentration three hours in, let up on the tension, and that marlin would burn you for your moment of weakness. She’d shake the hook and be off for a tuna dinner that didn’t feature a hidden hook in its gut.
Up top, Worel worked the boat backward, chasing the fish as it ran. The kid pulled in the last of the other lines. Chalking up his palms in the attached bin, Cooper settled in for the unique form of bliss he knew he’d find-the physical exhaustion, the sharp pain, muscle failure, dehydration, blood loss, and sunburn, combining to deliver a sensation more liberating than even the purest chemical high. Peaceful, floating nothingness-the ultimate painkiller.
Beginning the cycle, Cooper fell into the rhythm of his own thoughts.
During the past few days, he had found some interesting stories in the seven newspapers Ronnie always delivered to his porch. He probably wouldn’t have given a flying leap about any of these stories had it not been for the whispering prompt from his omnipresent comrade-in-arms, the ghost of Marcel telling him, Regardez-vous, mon ami-there something here I’m thinking you maybe wanna see.
It wasn’t the nuke blast he and his supernatural comrade found intriguing-though once he’d seen the story, Cooper had logged a few calls to Laramie’s numbers and found her oddly unreachable. Instead, it was a series of articles, each failing to make the front page, that Marcel nudged him to examine. It seemed a number of heads of state, along with the occasional minister of defense, had gone missing. Each affected country had released its own version, in a different way and at an alternate pace, but the story was the same. Joe Leader of Such-and-Such Nation had been traveling on business or pleasure, and failed to reach his scheduled destination. In fact, he had failed to reach any destination at all.
Ordinarily, Cooper simply notched such news in his memory banks, looking forward to the day when one of the missing leaders turned up on some adjoining island with a botched face-lift and a few billion bucks of extorted dough. This time, though, he found the stories more relevant. The men who had gone missing, he found, were the same people he’d captured in the digital photos he’d sent to Laramie before she too had gone MIA.
What this meant-at least the way Cooper saw it-was that something stunk on that fucking island.
It was early in the seventh hour when the marlin, worn out, attempted and failed to make another run at freedom. Cooper delivered the sluggish fish to the kid’s waiting gaff with one final heave of the rod, and the boy swung the hook and stuck it in the marlin’s side. It was a shallow stab, not deep enough to hold, and with its remaining fumes of energy, the marlin slipped the gaff, moving back from the boat, a gentle weave all she could muster. That was when the fading fish took a look at him.
The fish stared right into his eyes-the old girl spent, still putting up a fight, weaving in the swells while some punk kid sought to jam a gaff hook in her back. He heard her speak too, and when she did, her words floated to him in the soothing voice of Simone, Marcel’s widowed lover. That fish, or Simone, he wasn’t sure which, pleading to him, to her corrupt soldier of honor:
Wi, monsieur, she said-somethin’ done come to pass on that island. Then Simone’s voice shifted deeper, becoming more masculine as the boy approached the marlin with the hook again. You the only one can deliver justice, Cooper-mon.
Oh yeah, she said, the truth, it shall set us free.
“Leave her alone,” Cooper said.
The boy looked over his shoulder at him, hook held aloft. Halted midswing.
Cooper motioned to the boy with a flick of his bleeding, blistered hand.
“Get my line out of her mouth,” he said, “and let that old bitch go.”
From up top, Worel said, “May die anyway, Cooper.”
“Let her go!”
The boy shrugged and did as he was told.
40
In the Virgin Gorda marina, Cooper had Worel pull alongside his Apache. He stripped, heaving his short stack of soggy clothes into his own boat, and dove into the tranquil waters of the marina to cleanse his body of the fish-battle grime. He boarded the Apache, kicked on the Mer-Cruisers and, nude and upright, rode at full throttle, blow-drying himself in the usual manner.
When he’d completed the ten-minute trip to Conch Bay, he secured the bowline to his mooring and ambled to the rear of the boat. Balancing on the very edge of the stern, toes wiggling beyond the edge of the fiberglass, he pissed long and far into the sea.
Since there appeared to be the usual amount of business under way at magic hour in the Conch Bay Bar & Grill, Cooper obeyed some sense of decorum and clothed himself in tie-dyed shorts and a tank top adorned with a sketch of three Charlie’s Angels-looking women riding the same surfboard. He rode his dinghy to the dock and jumped off without tying up; he passed Ronnie on the way in.
“Hustle up,” he said as Ronnie sped by him to secure the skiff.
He noticed that Ronnie displayed an oddly self-satisfied look as he ran past; Cooper also found it strange that the putz hadn’t fired back with some retort or other and concluded that something fishy was under way. Stepping behind the bar to pour himself some bourbon, he was sure of it. He told the bartender to have Ronnie bring the usual sandwich to his bungalow and made his way out of the restaurant.
He was halfway up the stairs of his porch when he noticed a well-toned set of legs, naked from mid-thigh down and crossed in that supremely feminine knee-over-knee way. The legs were visible, but just barely, in the dim post-sunset twilight. Ordinarily Cooper would not have taken issue with a woman seated on his deck chair, awaiting his arrival while showing some of the best legs he’d ever seen. Today, though, he knew there to be the high probability the owner of the legs was playing a role in Ronnie’s, and hell, probably also Woolsey’s latest idea of practical joke.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “Whatever it is they convinced you is going to happen, it’s been a long day. Too long. So it’s not going to happen.”
“Your hands are bleeding.”
Cooper recognized the voice but wasn’t immediately sure where he’d heard it; since he couldn’t yet see the woman’s face in the shadows of his porch, he looked down at his bandaged hands while he tried to figure it out.
“They’ll do that for a while,” he said. “Maybe a day or two.”
“You always sail nude?”
Her voice kind of drifted out to him. The feeling it gave him was somewhat disturbing-warmth, familiarity, imbalance. It felt good, but he felt immediately off guard. There’d only been one woman, a long time ago-
Wait a minute.
He tried to take back the thought he’d been in the midst of having, his mind’s hand reaching out, clutching, grasping for it in his attempt to reel it back in. He’d just realized who it was seated there on his porch, and he wasn’t about to acknowledge that kind of effect from her. Try as he did, he couldn’t grasp the thought-it hung there in his mind, evading him, the impression caused by her voice lingering.
He moved to the top stair, and through the inky shadows caught a flash of white from her eyes. He saw that her skin was nearly as bright as her eyes-woman needs a tan, he thought, like nobody’s business.
“Yes, I do,” he said, answering her question, “but that isn’t a sailboat, Laramie.”
He saw more white-a flash of teeth. Laramie was smiling.
Realizing she’d
seen him pissing off the edge of the boat, Cooper felt suddenly childish. Everybody at the club, of course, was forced to regard that particular spectacle on a frequent basis, but having Laramie there to witness the nude blow-dry-and-piss session actually gave him the feeling he’d made a fool of himself.
“When you say your hands will do that for a while,” she said, “how do you know?”
“I did it while deep-sea angling.” Cooper wasn’t sure why he used the term angling, since he couldn’t remember ever having called it that. “Bring in a game fish the size we got today will usually take you six or seven hours. You’re out of practice, you’ll blister up in the first hour. Start bleeding before you’ve got the fish halfway home. I’m out of practice.”
“What did you catch?”
“What exactly are you doing here? Unless you’d prefer to beat around the bush for another hour or two.”
“Come on, what did you catch?”
“A marlin.”
“How big?”
“Hard to tell. Four-fifty, five hundred pounds.”
“Five hundred? Where is it?”
Cooper looked at her. The lie detector.
“I let her go.”
“Her?”
“Why are you here, Laramie,” he said.
Laramie stood. She brushed her shorts flat, and he saw she was wearing a pair of Conch Bay-issue knee-length khakis, part of the merchandising line Woolsey had launched the year before. Meaning maybe she’d come down in a hurry-packed light. Cooper thought of how she’d been difficult to get a hold of.
He could see her in full now, the recently set sun casting her in a glow he placed somewhere between crimson and sepia: buttery skin, pink from a couple hours of sun, compact features with little to nothing amiss, longish hair he’d call something like brownish blonde pulled back in a ponytail. She had the trim frame of a runner-fit and lean, but not about to go out and win any Puerto Rico bikini contests.
“Tell you what, W. Cooper,” she said. “Why don’t you bop into your room and shower off those little waves of salt.”
She pointed to his chest, where there were, indeed, crusted white wavelets of salt, distributed in the approximate pattern of sand on a beach. Cooper knew the salt water to dry that way when he started wet and rode home in the breeze.
“After that,” she said, “maybe we can have something to eat. I’ll buy you a dinner at the restaurant down there and answer your question of why I’m here. In fact, I’ll do you one better: I’ll make you a proposition.”
When it became apparent she wasn’t going to tell him the nature of the proposition, Cooper said, “If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say you’re down here on the sly. Maybe you even had your cute little rear end handed to you by some of those supremely wise bosses of yours. Meaning that the thing you’re probably interested in, I’m not necessarily capable-”
“Thanks for the ‘cute little rear end’ thing, just then,” Laramie said.
Cooper found he’d run out of fuel for whatever thought he’d been in the midst of conveying. He stood there at the top of the stairs, looking at Laramie’s particularly bright eyes with what he figured to be as blank an expression as he’d seen in the marlin’s half-dead stare.
“Just take that shower, mister,” she said, then sat down and recrossed her legs.
41
Cooper figured out what Ronnie’s smart-ass look was all about. The errand boy pulled a bottle of Chardonnay from a nest of ice beside their table, poured Laramie a glass, and replaced Cooper’s melting tumbler of tinted ice with a fresh pour of Maker’s Mark. Then Ronnie stood tall, hands clasped behind his back, and announced he was ready to take their orders, flaunting his smug gleam of pleasurable contempt in a way that made Cooper want to kick him in the shin.
Cooper knew that Ronnie was thinking there had never been a legitimate dinner date hosted by the occupant of bungalow nine, not that he’d seen in his tenure anyway. Ronnie was well aware that Cooper spent plenty of time helping women get drunk and enticing them to sneak up to his bungalow-leave your husband and his Izod shirt at the bar-but now, in the presence of Laramie, Cooper knew Ronnie could smell his vulnerability like a shark on the scent of blood. And the kid thought he was succeeding in delivering his implicit threat: Give me a few minutes with the lass and I’ll have her high-tailing it for the States in no time, mate. Tell her a story or two about her knight in shining armor, few of the things been said to have gone down over the years in good old bungalow number nine. Cooper resisted the tangible urge to grab Ronnie by his ponytail and inform the putz he didn’t give a shit about either Ronnie’s implicit threat, or the woman Ronnie was evidently so impressed with.
Laramie ordered a seafood Caesar salad and asked for the dressing on the side. Cooper told her nobody eats a Caesar salad with the dressing on the side, since that would keep it from being a Caesar salad. Then he ordered a Cabernet to accompany the Maker’s Mark, conch fritters, and the house burger with cheddar.
Once Ronnie had tenderfooted his way back to the kitchen, Cooper looked at Laramie, whose face was growing pinker by the minute from whatever sun she’d got while waiting for him to return. She was staring back at him with a look he couldn’t interpret, something between skepticism, fascination, and determination.
“Shoot,” Cooper said.
“Hm?”
“What’s the favor?”
“Proposition,” she said, and smiled, and Cooper felt a funny twitch in his stomach. Laramie grabbed her glass of Chardonnay and peered around the place-beach, lagoon, stars, garden, bungalows, torches. The warm orange glow of the fire-lit restaurant.
“Your home,” she said.
Ronnie came with Cooper’s glass of Cab. “Everything all right here?”
“Fine, boy. Now leave.” To Laramie, Cooper said, “This, along with a few hundred thousand square miles of ocean I consider the better places to dive and fish, a couple dozen miles of various white sand beaches, sunrise, sunset, an ivory moon, that precision-engineered machine you call a sailboat, the humid heat that burns your skin, plus whatever whiskey, rum, vodka, and women are available, along with the credo of ‘live slow, mon.’ That, and an occasional visit to the handful of casinos within ‘sailing’ distance-yes,” he said, “this is my home.”
He drank a slug of the Cab.
“Now let me guess,” he said. “You want me to take you to Mango Cay.”
“The island, you mean?”
“The island.”
Laramie put her fist under her chin and leaned the weight of her head against her fist. Cooper wondered if she were considering how savvy he’d been in determining her reason for being here, or maybe admiring how sharp his features looked around the eyes.
Laramie said, “Let me ask you a question.”
“Go right ahead.”
“Is there maybe a little friction between you and the esteemed deputy director of our nation’s intelligence operations?”
Cooper raised his eyebrows once he thought about this for a moment, deciding Gates’s goon squad must have determined he’d been the one on the other end of Laramie’s phone calls. The DDCI would not have liked seeing that.
“‘Bad blood,’” he said, “may be the more appropriate term.”
“It probably wouldn’t have been a bad idea,” she said, “to provide at least some indication of the shitstorm I’m sure you knew would hit once Gates figured out it was you I was talking to.”
Again Cooper had the sensation of mild embarrassment, that feeling of foolishness-as though he’d behaved like a five-year-old and been caught at it. Before he could interject in his own defense, Laramie said, “Wouldn’t have mattered anyway. You illegally obtain access to classified SATINT you’re not cleared to review and proceed to leak an even more highly classified analysis of the intel to a senator hostile to the foreign policy platform of the president-which analysis had previously and personally been compartmentalized by the CIA’s chief operating officer-and I suppose it’s inconsequen
tial, relatively speaking, that I’ve befriended the COO’s arch-nemesis in the process.”
Ronnie delivered the conch fritters and Laramie’s salad. Once he’d topped off their wineglasses and departed, Laramie took a bite of her salad, the bite consisting of a morsel of sea bass and one square of romaine lettuce but no dip in the side dish of dressing.
Cooper ate three conch fritters slathered in Thousand Island sauce, took a thick sip of his wine, and said, “Who’s the senator?”
She told him about her notes to Senator Kircher, leaving out the casting couch episode.
“And yes,” she said, “I’d like you to take me to that island.”
Cooper drank some Maker’s Mark.
“I’ll pay you for your time,” Laramie said. “I’ll pay you to take more photographs while we’re there too. I have to warn you that I’m not sure what I’m looking for, or what we’ll accomplish in going there, but I can’t do nothing, and given what I know, nothing is something that shouldn’t be done. Nobody in Langley, or anywhere else that I can tell, is doing anything to connect the dots. The only dots anybody seems intent on connecting are those that would establish beyond a reasonable doubt that I showed classified intelligence and analysis to Senator Alan Kircher-and, above all, that I was secretly talking to you.”
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?”