by Will Staeger
“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.
Gibson had used the cargo cave as a clandestine freight entrance during Operation Blunt Fist’s construction phase, and while only substandard-size submarines could access the cave, due to the lesser dimensions of its docking bay, much of the operation’s more important cargo had been delivered here. Gibson, for instance, had seen no need to expose the arrival of shipments of enriched uranium, explosive caps, or completed warhead-MIRV replicas to the mercenary guards and construction staff working in the main cavern when, at times, crews there had numbered as many as fifteen or twenty men. Most of these workers had already been or would soon be killed, but Gibson never saw reason to take undue risk.
Standing this afternoon on the catwalk that rimmed the cargo cave’s underground lagoon, Gibson touched a button on his wristwatch to check the time under the dim illumination of the safety lights. The reboot sequence had begun almost a minute ago; if Hir
am and the slave arrived on time, he would have just over six minutes and twenty seconds to fulfill the day’s objective.
Just past the 1:05 mark, the door connecting the transport tunnel and the cargo cave eased open and the overloaded golf cart emerged, its suspension dragging with every bump.
Gibson climbed into the control seat of a squat yellow crane positioned in the corner of the cavern. A miniature version of the sort found at container terminals, the crane’s body formed a cube of some twelve feet in width. It stood on a set of rails beside the dock; with its long arm, the crane was capable of accessing nearly any portion of the cave from its home on the rails. A hook was affixed to a cable that dangled from the arm.
Gibson fired up the crane’s two-cylinder diesel engine and steered the machine to one end of the rails, where a series of spare rods, struts, and storage boxes lay against the far wall of the cavern. As Hiram brought the cart to the same spot, Gibson rotated the crane, dipping its hook until it bumped against the roof of the cart. Hiram grabbed the hook and secured it to the harness he and the wino had wrapped around the warhead earlier.
With a surge of its engine, the crane lifted the warhead as if it were a pillow, and at Gibson’s direction maneuvered it out across the field of equipment. Hiram leashed the wino to the side of the golf cart with a dog chain; after yanking on the chain to make sure it held, he walked through the debris to the rear wall of the cavern, where the largest of the room’s cargo boxes sat in apparent disrepair against the wall. He crouched before the first of the box’s eight locks and waved to Gibson. On his cue, Gibson punched a lengthy code into a remote control device, and the first in the sequence of locks clicked open in Hiram’s hands. He removed it, hooked it around his belt, and moved to the next. Once all eight locks had been remote-unlocked and removed, Hiram flipped aside a pair of latches and, feet planted, clean-and-jerked open the box’s thick lid. This act exposed the contents of the box: two W-76 warheads, resting side by side in protective foam padding. The warheads looked like stretched versions of the standard bombs portrayed in Road Runner cartoons-long, rounded, bullet-shaped projectiles with a four-spoke fantail at the rear. There were two remaining warhead-shaped spaces in the padding that filled the crate.
With the help of Hiram’s guiding hands, Gibson worked the controls in the driver’s seat of the crane and lowered the third warhead into one of the slots. Hiram released the hook and unbuckled the harness from the warhead; the bomb rolled into its nook. Hiram replaced the crate’s lid, snapped shut the eight locks, and began his return trip through the mound of industrial debris.
Gibson was off the crane and aboard his private golf cart when he noticed something and motioned to Hiram.
“Looks like we lost another one,” he said. “Toss him in.”
Hiram came around the corner of his cart to see the wino collapsed on the cavern floor. Still leashed to the cart, the former occupant of the alcove on East Queen Street had nonetheless fallen hard on the lava rock floor, which fall seemed to have resulted in the puddle of blood beneath his head. The blood had drained from his ears.
Hiram unleashed the body, dragged it to the edge of the underground lagoon, and heaved it into the water. He hung back a moment to watch as the water roiled in a froth of bubbles and blood, then jumped aboard his cart and drove out on Gibson’s heels.
He cleared the surface exit of the transport tunnel with twenty-five seconds to spare.
43
They reached the waters off the western shore of Mango Cay around four-thirty. Cooper anchored where the water was deep, outside the reef that ringed the lagoon. There was no way he could get his Apache in over the reef, but he spotted a narrow channel where the water looked to be three or four feet deep, Cooper thinking the two float planes he’d seen last time had probably used the channel to enter the lagoon after landing on the open water. He lowered the Apache’s skiff into the water, and once he had it there, climbed in and offered Laramie a hand. She took it with a shrug, Cooper reading the shrug as Laramie’s way of saying she didn’t need the help, but since she appreciated the gesture she’d do him the favor of accepting his assistance. He knew, however, that she could use the help, since Laramie, having refused his offer of Dramamine at sunrise, had turned green around seven, falling into a repeating thirty-minute cycle as Cooper drove them southeast: lean over the railing at the stern, try to find the horizon, lose track of it as the boat planed over a swell, heave whatever was left of the seafood Caesar salad over the edge, feel completely better, stand, return to the seat next to Cooper at the bow of the boat, feel it coming on again and retreat to the rail at the stern. Eventually she’d settled permanently into the copilot’s seat, resigned to her useless state, a glazed, sickly expression on her face. After a while of watching her sit there, Cooper had asked Laramie what she planned to do with whatever evidence they retrieved from Mango Cay.
“What do you mean?”
Laramie had to yell over the roar of the MerCruisers and the wind.
“Say we find Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction,” Cooper said, “and swipe one. As evidence. You’ll take it where?”
Laramie shrugged, then realized he couldn’t see the shrug given the motion of the boat. “Nobody in Washington seems to care what I have to say,” she said, “so maybe CNN will.”
Cooper steered.
“Since we don’t know what we’re going to find,” he said, “and don’t have much of an idea what to look for in the first place, I’m going to recommend that when we get there, we abide by my tried-and-true, supremely sophisticated espionage technique.”
“That,” she said, “being what?”
“Cause trouble, fuck with people, and generally operate as a pain in the ass.”
Laramie thought about that, then said, “See what shakes out?”
“See what shakes out.”
After a few minutes of nothing but the roar and the roll, Laramie had looked over at him.
“Nice strategy,” she yelled.
With Laramie now loaded into the skiff, Cooper fired up the forty-horse outboard and steered them into the channel. Coming around a bluff, he could see there was a man waiting for them on the beach. From the size of the man’s upper body, it appeared to Cooper that this was the Herculean individual he remembered seeing in one of his photographs, pretty much the only person in the set of photos, outside of the bartender and maid, he hadn’t been able to ID.
Cooper went as far as he could go with the engine. When he heard the outboard begin to clip the coral at the bottom of the shallow lagoon, he tilted it out of the water, slapped the skiff’s oars into place, and came into the lagoon under manual power. Cooper was wearing a short-sleeve beige-on-black Tommy Bahama silk shirt, and wondered whether Laramie was impressed with his physique, rowing the boat into the cove like a local fisherman who’s been doing it for fifty years. When they cleared the coral, Cooper flipped the oars back into the boat, lowered the engine, and broke the glassy surface of the lagoon at a marina-friendly five knots or so.
As they approached, Cooper could see, as he hadn’t observed fully in the photos, that the man waiting for them on the beach wasn’t simply bulked up, but grotesquely muscle-bound-and yet the man’s neck seemed far too thin to secure the head above it to the thick musculature beneath.
Another man, much taller and darker-the bartender from the pictures-came down the white sand slope and took Cooper’s bowline, pulled the boat onto the beach, and tied the line to a nail protruding from the sand. He wore a white polo shirt and khaki shorts, with a small knapsack strapped to his shoulders.
Cooper came off first and Laramie followed, stepping unsteadily. Outside of their two-man greeting party, the resort’s beach and poolside patio beyond were empty. There was a single remaining float plane and three cedar deck chairs dotting the beach; the plane looked as though it had made a few too many drug runs.
Cooper led Laramie up the beach to greet their muscle-bound host, extending a hand as he approache
d. The man shook.
“Welcome to Mango Cay,” he said. “How can we help you?”
“We,” Cooper said, “as in the royal ‘we,’ or ‘we’ meaning you and the baker’s dozen of so-called communist dictators you had staying here last week?”
Laramie looked at Cooper; Cooper watched as the bartender glanced sideways at his boss Mr. Muscle-head, doing it in a way, Cooper saw, that allowed him to check Muscle-head’s expression but still keep Cooper and Laramie in full view.
Muscle-head smiled and said, “Dr. Einstein, I presume.”
Cooper nodded. “Warmer here than in Paris,” he said, “don’t you think?”
Since it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume somebody who had taken the time to track his registration could also track his return course, Cooper decided to go ahead and flip Gibson’s ID of the Apache’s registration info into a confession: the man may as well just have told him he was the one who’d sent the commandos to visit him outside his bungalow at Conch Bay.
“Well, Albert, my name’s Spike Gibson. I have no need to hide my identity. Buy you a drink?” He motioned to the poolside bar.
Cooper extended his elbow for Laramie to latch onto, which she did. They walked together up the beach to the pool and sat in two of the stools against the bar. Gibson took the stool beside Cooper; Hiram went behind the bar.
“Choose your poison,” Gibson said.
“Maker’s Mark, rocks.”
“And the lady, whose name we didn’t get?” Gibson looked at Cooper. “The royal ‘we,’ ” he said.
Cooper started in on an answer then stopped when Laramie put her hand on his forearm. The way her hand felt gave him that familiar twinge, which he chose to ignore for the moment, considering that what he was doing required at least nominal concentration.
“My name’s ‘EastWest7,’” she said, “and I’ll take something sweet please.”
Gibson nodded. “Odd name. Hiram-painkiller.”