by Will Staeger
Hiram, his voice gruff and thick, the accent falling somewhere between that of Barry the witch doctor and the screeching ghost of Marcel S., said, “Maker’s Mark. Painkiller. Shake for Mr. Gibson.”
He made the drinks and served them.
“Creatine shake,” Gibson explained.
“For the workouts?” Cooper said.
“For the workouts.”
Gibson drank, but Cooper did not. Laramie watched Cooper hold the glass, twirl it, push and pull it, but never drink from it. She followed his lead and left the painkiller on the bar, observing the posture and behavior of Cooper and Gibson while she fiddled with her glass.
“The way your shirt drapes in the back,” Gibson said, “I can’t tell for sure. Browning?”
“Correct. You, I’m betting Glock.”
“Absolutely.”
Given the size and weight of his knapsack, Cooper figured Hiram for an Uzi or MAC-10 but didn’t verbalize his guess.
After another sip of his shake, Gibson said, “This resort is private property, and while we don’t mind the occasional visitor, we would prefer that visitors not take photographs.”
Cooper nodded. “Unfortunately,” he said, “if I feel like taking pictures, there isn’t much you can do about it.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Cooper twirled his drink on the bar.
“Spike,” he said, “-or do you prefer Spencer?”
“Spike will do.”
“Well, Spike, as you might expect, we popped over here to ask you a couple questions.”
Cooper jerked his head toward Laramie. Laramie noticed that Cooper did not take his eyes off of Gibson as he did it. “To begin with, my friend here-‘EastWest7’-asked me to inquire as to the business purpose, or theme if you will, of the convention held here by the aforementioned dictators.”
Gibson gulped most of the remainder of his shake. Hiram watched. “We don’t divulge the identity, itinerary, or agenda, if any,” Gibson said, “of our guests.”
“I didn’t think you would answer that one. It was somewhat broad in nature. My question, however, is a little more specific.”
Gibson inclined his head.
“You ever get any boats around here, running forty-five, maybe fifty feet? I’m thinking specifically of an old Chris-Craft, kind of a shitty, rusting gray. Pretty sure it operates out of Jamaica. In fact, the boat I’m thinking of stopped a few miles west of here, and drifted for maybe two hours before turning around and heading back to Bob Marley’s homeland.”
Spike Gibson turned his head to the side and shook it a little. “This is the West Indies, friend, so we see quite a few boats come through here,” he said. “But some like that? Hell, I couldn’t tell you.”
“See, that particular boat was loaded up on the Jamaica side with a half-dead Kingston rummy, who, it seems, had been abducted and sold as a kind of modern-day slave, at least the way I’m figuring it. It’s funny-I find this to be an interesting coincidence.”
“Oh?”
“See, it just so happens that another guy, actually a resurrected, well, zombie, recently turned up dead for the second time-I know this sounds complicated, but I think I have it right-on a beach in Road Town. This would have been one day after a hurricane passed southeast to northwest across your resort and was downgraded to a tropical storm as it made its way up to the British Virgins. Road Town, of course, being part of the BVIs.”
“Of course.”
“The Road Town zombie appears to have died from an intriguing combination of causes: burn wounds caused by direct contact with non-weapons-grade uranium, and gunshots to the back. Put another way,” Cooper said, “what do an illegal nuclear power plant, zombie slave laborers, and a dozen disappearing communist dictators have in common? Besides you, me, EastWest7, and Hiram here with the assault pistol in his backpack, that is.”
A high-pitched girl’s voice peeped from the vicinity of the pool. To Cooper it sounded as though the voice had said, “Spike?”
Gibson excused himself and walked toward the pool. Between bar stools and cabanas, Cooper and Laramie caught glimpses of Gibson and what looked to Cooper like a sixteen-year-old girl talking, gesturing, and finally touching, as the girl handed Gibson a vial of tanning lotion and Gibson proceeded to take a full fifteen minutes to lube her sunburned body from head to toe. The girl was topless and didn’t shift her position-face-up-on the poolside recliner for the duration of Gibson’s massage, including the grip she had on what appeared to be a mai tai. When Gibson completed the massage, he slapped the girl on the side of the ass and came back over to his stool at the bar.
“I don’t really have an answer to your question,” he said.
Cooper nodded; Laramie said and did nothing. The resort’s maid floated past, dropping a short stack of bright white towels on a table near the bar. Cooper and Laramie noticed separately that for a member of the housekeeping staff, the woman leaving the towels on the chair was exceedingly muscular. Her appearance, from the black coffee skin to the sinewy neck, was strikingly similar to Hiram’s, though she was considerably shorter. Once she had deposited the towels, the maid moved off to busy herself with some other task on the opposite side of the pool.
Cooper said, “Mind if we have a look around?”
“Yes,” Gibson said, “we mind.”
“Private property,” Cooper said.
“Private property.”
Cooper stood. Laramie stood. Gibson stood. “Thank you for the drink,” Cooper said. “Are you still a signatory for Global Exports?”
Gibson smiled, said, “Nice having you,” and motioned toward the beach. Cooper and Laramie followed his cue, Cooper keeping his head turned at an angle that kept Gibson and Hiram in full view for the full stroll.
When they reached the boat, Hiram helped untie the line. He waded out to the boat, helped Laramie aboard, and stood, prepared to push the boat back from the shallows as Cooper faced Gibson.
“Spence,” he said, “at some point you and I will have a conversation about the boys who stopped by for a drink at the Conch Bay Beach Club.”
Cooper flung a leg into his skiff, and when Gibson didn’t say anything to him, Cooper said, “Live slow, mon,” and pushed the boat out into the lagoon without Hiram’s help. He got the outboard humming and sped across the lagoon, churning up enough sand and coral chunks to form a wedge of dirty water, the skiff painting a nasty stripe of brown across the otherwise pristine bay.
44
Admiral Li found Spike Gibson in his private gym, where Gibson was on his fourth repetition on a bench press of 360 pounds. The rippling musculature of Gibson’s upper chest was striated with a spiderweb pattern of blue veins, a beastly, unnatural feature that looked somehow appropriate beneath Gibson’s acne-scarred, grease-spattered face.
Gibson had been made aware of Li’s approach by a series of indicator lights on a wall-mounted console that would pass for a thermostat to the untrained eye.
“Admiral,” he said in Mandarin during the exhale phase of his twelfth rep.
“Who were those people?”
“Random visitors.” Gibson exhaled with a hiss and pushed up number thirteen.
“You seemed to know each other.”
“Did we?” Fourteen.
“What did they want? Why did you have them up for a drink?”
“It’s resort policy to be cordial and unassuming,” Gibson said. He concluded the set with no discernible effort and sat upright solely with the use of his abdominal muscles. He massaged his hands, then separated his arms and reached backward, stretching his chest.
“They knew something,” Li said. “I watched, and understood some of their words.”
Gibson enjoyed watching Li’s transformation, slight though it was-no man, he believed, could resist it. Island life influenced you like a gravitational pull, and however imperceptibly, Li’s hard-nosed attitude was under the influence. The rear admiral of the People’s Liberation Navy, standing there with his assigned tropica
l-print-shirt-and-khaki-shorts disguise, unwittingly allowing it to affect his manner. Gibson remembered a beer commercial he’d seen, two people sipping a cold one on a tranquil beach, a caption beneath them saying “Change your whole latitude.” He liked that commercial; that was what had happened to him, and that was what he was seeing develop in Li. Not that the admiral had taken to doing laps in the pool, or baking on the beach, but it was still there, more in the angle of the man’s shoulders than anything else. Stay long enough, Gibson thought, and it mellowed you out-that was what the islands did.
They changed your whole latitude.
“Those visitors,” Gibson said, “will be taken care of. This is nothing you or General Deng need concern yourselves with.”
Li stared at the grotesque, inhuman figure before him.
“It is Premier Deng now,” he said.
Actually Gibson had lied again: he had no intention of risking exposure by sending another assault team to deal with Albert Einstein. Gibson’s time on Mango Cay had just about concluded, and he’d decided he no longer gave two shits whether Einstein and his girlfriend ratted out Deng. As long as they didn’t do it in the next twenty-four hours, it just didn’t matter. He didn’t think they would anyway. In fact, it didn’t seem to him that Einstein and friend knew anything besides what they’d seen in the photographs. The speculation the man had tried to bait him with on the topic of his disposable labor pool meant nothing, since as long as Einstein and his bicoastal babe were here alone, it was only that: speculation.
He stood, popped another ten-pound ring on each side of the overloaded barbell, and returned to his bench press position.
“Premier Deng, then,” Gibson said. “I stand corrected. Now if you’ll excuse me, Admiral.”
He began the next set of fifteen reps.
Li watched through the ninth repetition of the set before turning away and leaving the suite.
Just past 5:40, Deng ordered his submarine to the surface and sent his third official statement to the international media via a single, mass-burst e-mail. In addition to the inclusion of more aggressive language about the antiterror response the PLA had in store, Deng provided a series of attachments with the e-mail missive and indicated that his intelligence unit had now identified definitive evidence of culpability for the nuke strike. The attachments included a series of photographs documenting a meeting held by the chief architects behind the attack, men whom Deng described as the leaders of the international terrorist organization his intelligence officers had managed to infiltrate. The meeting of these leaders had taken place, the statement said, at an undisclosed warm-weather location. As Deng completed his distribution of the e-mail, the countdown clock in the Mobile War Room ticked from 36:00:00 to 35:59:59.
It was six o’clock even as he flipped a switch and watched Admiral Li’s face pop up on the monitor. Li did not appear unduly nervous or agitated.
“Status at T-minus thirty-six hours: all systems go,” he said. “One perimeter breach this time, occurring at sixteen-thirty-eight hours. Vessel: pleasure craft. Passengers from the craft inquired about the resort. Inquiries were fielded by Mr. Gibson and the visitors dismissed. I have not been fully informed of the response strategy, but believe that Mr. Gibson will deploy a two-man surveillance team to dispatch with the visitors as he has done before.”
While Deng could tell that Li was acting differently from usual, he had neither the time, nor the empathy, to bother monitoring Li’s day-to-day mood shifts. Thus, following an initial pause, Deng concluded that Li’s report satisfied him, at least to the degree that he needed satisfaction from his Mango Cay staff and the security perimeter they kept this late in the game.
“See you at oh-six-hundred tomorrow,” Deng said.
Li bowed as Deng zapped him from the screen and ordered the submarine beneath the surface.
45
That was one hell of a strategy,” Laramie said, “that tried-and-true espionage technique of yours.”
Cooper took the pizza box and nodded for Laramie to lead the way.
“It appears,” he said, “your case has reached the same dead end as mine. Either that, or the cases are one and the same, and between the two of us we lack sufficient IQ to figure the whole deal out.”
They strolled along a grubby asphalt lane in Sainte-Anne, Martinique, about two blocks from the marina that Cooper had picked to moor the Apache. It was almost dark; they’d made the twenty-mile trip from Mango Cay, and Cooper had recommended pizza as a meal Laramie might be capable of keeping down. To his surprise she’d agreed, so he’d taken her to the joint across the road, which he’d heard a little about.
They came down a long dock and climbed aboard the Apache.
“U-238/U-235,” Laramie said.
When Cooper figured out what it was she’d just told him, he said, “Ah.”
“The reason you called me about the memo.”
“Also, I was bored.”
“The uranium could connect our…cases,” she said. “It might be a stretch, but follow me for a second. Your guy, um-”
“Marcel.”
“-could have been exposed to fuel rods on Muscle-boy’s island.”
“Head,” Cooper said. “I think of him as Muscle-head.”
“Head sounds fine. Nuclear power is quiet, of course, and invisible if you run it right, except for maybe steam.”
Cooper thought about this and said, “There was a fog over the woods behind the resort when we were chatting with Muscle-head. Looked the same way when I was out here taking pictures. According to this latest brash theory of yours, the missing dictators, if that’s who Muscle-head is working for, would be using the power plant for what purpose?”
“It’s remotely possible they could be using it to create plutonium, or highly enriched uranium, which they in turn-no, that’s a stretch.”
“In turn what?”
“Used to build a nuclear warhead, which they then detonated in Beidaihe, China.”
Cooper set the pizza box on the Apache’s copilot’s seat. “Definitely a stretch,” he said.
He ducked into the cabin and came out with a pair of ceramic plates, on which he stacked stainless steel utensils, cloth napkins, and a pair of high-ball glasses. He reached into a minifridge and came out with a pair of Budweiser longnecks.
“You’re eating pizza, you need to have beer,” he said.
Laramie was sitting cross-legged on the deck. She tugged on the pizza box until it slid off the seat and landed beside her. She opened the lid.
“Agreed.”
Laramie put a slice on each plate. Cooper found he liked her better over pizza than Caesar salad without the dressing.
“What were you talking about,” she said, “when you mentioned the ‘boys who stopped by for a drink’ at the club?”
Cooper chewed a bite of pizza and slung back some beer. “Believe our friend Muscle-head sent a couple mercenaries my way. They didn’t really plan for me to survive the visit.”
“What happened to-” Laramie thought better of where she was headed and decided to leave the question hanging. “This was after you took the pictures?”
“Yes.”
“So he figured out where you live.”
“Pretty easily.”
“But your boat isn’t registered locally.”
“Paris,” he said.
“So Muscle-head probably has some sophisticated tracking equipment. Or he could have had you followed.”
Cooper nodded. “But he didn’t,” he said.
“You’d have known?”
“The Caribbean is largely flat and featureless.”
“So he may have access to satellite imagery, then,” she said.
“That’d be my guess.”
“What’s he protecting?”
Cooper took a swig of his beer, then shrugged.
Laramie said, “You think Muscle-head’s going to send somebody else to pay us a visit?”
“Didn’t work before.”
&nb
sp; “What if he does?”
“Well,” he said, “you may not have noticed that I’m doing so, but I am in fact keeping an eye out.”
Laramie looked at him. “I see.”
Cooper took another bite of pizza, the beginning of his third slice, and said, “I’ve got a riddle for you.”
“Okay.”
“Boat loads up a half-dead wino in Kingston. Sails, as you might put it, five hundred-plus miles east. Stops and drifts for maybe an hour, about five miles west of Mango Cay. Doesn’t head over to the island. Doesn’t come here to Martinique. Just sits, then turns around and goes back. What happened?”
Laramie thought for a moment. Cooper noticed she wasn’t half-bad at putting away pizza-she too had consumed the tip of her third slice.
“The half-dead wino,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Did he come back with the boat?”
“I’m not totally sure, but I think we can assume no.”
“I hate to admit it,” she said, “but for the moment, at least, I’m stumped.”
Cooper went into the cabin, came out with two more beers, set them on the deck, then turned and opened the box where he kept his navigation charts. He pulled out one of the accordion-folded satellite photos Gates had sent him, made some room on the deck by moving aside the pizza box and the plates, unfurled a few folds in the photo, and draped it across the space he’d cleared on the deck.
“SATINT,” he said.
Laramie sort of half-frowned. “No kidding, Columbo.”
“Your dad.”
“Right.”
Cooper pointed at a beetle-size image on one of the squares, the only visible variation from ocean in the huge photo spread.
“The boat,” he said.
Laramie rose to her knees and leaned over the square. She didn’t look only at the place where he’d pointed.
“Where did you get these?”
Cooper flattened a second square about half a chessboard from the square that featured the boat, and knelt beside it. He ignored Laramie’s question.
“The night after Muscle-head’s pals stopped by to say hi, I took another look at these things. They were just about all I had to go on. Except maybe your memo, that is.”