Painkiller

by Will Staeger

  When he found what he was looking for, he set his finger against the photo.

  “You’re the analyst,” he said. “What’s that?”

  Laramie hesitated. Cooper didn’t grasp why at first, then understood what it was-the way he was sitting, facing her, and the place he was asking her to look, could have meant he was planning on showing her something in addition to the satellite shot. He adjusted the position of his leg; she lowered her eyes and crawled over.

  When she’d examined the place in the ocean where Cooper was pointing, Laramie rose to her knees, looked around, found Cooper’s unused glass-he was drinking from the bottle-flipped the glass upside down, and set it on the surface of the photo. She checked, found it did what she wanted it to do, and, using it as a magnifying glass, leaned over the place where Cooper was pointing and took as close a look as she could under the circumstances. When she was through, Laramie leaned back on her heels and looked at him.

  “I think that’s the conning tower of a small submarine,” she said.

  Cooper nodded. “Pretty good, Lie Detector. That was my guess too.”

  Cooper watched her as she thought of the same series of things he’d thought of when he’d made the discovery of the submarine.

  “Go ahead,” he said, “ask.”

  “All right, I will. How the hell are we going to take a look underneath Muscle-head’s island?”

  Cooper smiled. He realized as he did it that it wasn’t something he did often.

  “Let me see what I can do,” he said, and pulled his sat phone from his waist.

  46

  When Carlos Muske, the president’s national security advisor, had finished reading the Julie Laramie surveillance reports compiled by Sperling Rhone, Gates’s former private security man, he closed the file and said to Lou Ebbers, “The motives of your deputy director are somewhat difficult to grasp.”

  Ebbers said, “Yes.”

  They were seated in Muske’s office in the West Wing.

  “And the suspended analyst,” Muske said. “Laramie. Appears she ain’t bad at this.”

  Ebbers had already known Laramie to be quite an analyst, for reasons unrelated to the current predicament.

  “Agreed,” he said.

  Muske looked at Ebbers across his desk. The national security advisor cut a leaner form but otherwise gave the impression somebody had performed a visual effect morphing together Colin and Michael Powell.

  “You could have taken this straight to the president.”

  “Could have,” Ebbers said.

  “Probably would have helped repair your profile with him.”

  “Might,” Ebbers said. “Though at the moment I’m not particularly concerned with that.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “You’re concerned with the matter of”-Muske licked his thumb, leafing through one of the documents Ebbers had given him-“Mango Cay.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the missing dictators.”

  “And the speed,” Ebbers said, “of any actions we might undertake in these matters.”

  Muske thought about that.

  “I suppose you mean, among other things, the president,” he said, “would have taken a while to schedule the meeting once you contacted him.”

  “At which point,” Ebbers said, “once he’d read those reports, or heard me out, he’d have contacted you.”

  Muske inclined his head. “And you figure I would then have…”

  “Called the secretary of defense to request a navy reconnaissance team be dispatched to investigate the island where the missing dictators were photographed.”

  Muske nodded.

  “Be damned,” he said, “if you didn’t save yourself twelve or thirteen hours.”

  “If not a whole day.”

  Muske said, “Give me a minute,” punched the intercom on his phone, and when the voice of his assistant floated from the speaker, he said, “Could you get Wally on the horn please.”

  Ebbers knew Wally to be Walter Parke, the secretary of defense. He listened to Muske’s conversation with Parke, in which it was decided that the nearest navy vessel equipped with a marines recon squad would be redirected to Mango Cay.

  Muske hung up and Ebbers stood.

  “You don’t mind,” Ebbers said, “I’ve got a little family business to tend to.”

  Muske rose and shook Ebbers’s hand.

  “Give my regards to Deputy Gates,” Muske said.

  Cooper’s call from the deck of his boat had been to an extension at the Pentagon.

  When a thick female voice with a Louisiana lilt answered with the words, “Admiral Sullivan’s office,” Cooper identified himself and said that he would need to be connected to the admiral immediately.

  “Chop-chop,” he said.

  After a stretch of blank air, the secretary said that she would check whether Admiral Sullivan was available. In fewer than five seconds, the crisp, reserved voice of Robert C. Sullivan, Admiral, USN, punched into Cooper’s right ear.

  “What do you want?”

  Sullivan had the acronym CINCLANTFLT affixed to the tail end of his rank. Sullivan hadn’t always been commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, and in fact had spent some time in Cooper’s neck of the woods a little over a decade ago. He’d been the captain of a destroyer pulling regular calls in Puerto Rico, Guantánamo Bay, and St. Thomas, and during his stops at these various ports, Sullivan, who was married with three then-teenage children, had been prone to frequenting local massage parlors. The former captain made sure that he cultivated a reputation as a generous tipper, provided, of course, the services were sufficient to warrant the gratuity. The menu offered to Sullivan at these parlors always included happy endings, and Sullivan had been happy enough to lose count somewhere between four and five hundred sexual encounters, a hundred bucks a pop plus the tip. Cooper had always been curious whether Sullivan’s wife ever asked her hubby why he’d withdrawn so much cash during his tours of duty.

  Cooper had occasionally visited such establishments himself, mainly in Puerto Rico and St. Thomas. During his visits, he’d come to note some familiar faces among the clientele out in the waiting rooms. Accordingly, he came to see the shops as a lucrative opportunity to build his list. He found that for a small fee, for instance, the proprietors of the various parlors were more than willing to install an automatic digital camera in each therapy room, and even agreed to handle the arrangements for monthly delivery of the data files to Road Town One-Hour Photo for convenient printing.

  On the occasional night under the stars on the porch of his bungalow, Cooper would peruse the inventory of photographs, and found, to his delight, that many clients of the St. Thomas and San Juan massage parlors happened to work for such interesting organizations as the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Senate, 354 of the Fortune 500, the FBI, CIA, Russian military intelligence, and, as in Sullivan’s case, the navy.

  One autumn morning, Cooper had landed at Washington National, driven to Annapolis, and telephoned then rear admiral Robert C. Sullivan at home. He introduced himself as a lobbyist for a PAC seeking higher military budgets, offered to buy Sullivan a lunch, and Sullivan took him up on the offer the following day. At lunch, Cooper ordered a cheddar bacon burger and a Bass Ale, waited for the burger and Sullivan’s chicken parmesan risotto to arrive, then slid a pair of eight-by-ten black-and-white prints across the table.

  In the first shot, though Sullivan was hard to identify, a “masseuse” had her hands wrapped around Sullivan’s not-insignificant member as he sat upright during what might have been referred to as a massage. In the second, Sullivan’s face was clearly recognizable, the navy man’s neck flexed and his trim waist slightly blurred as, in the picture, he fucked his masseuse, doggie style, one knee atop the table for balancing purposes.

  Sullivan didn’t quite spit out his first bite of risotto, but did halt mid-chew. He coughed gently and set down his fork, then lifted his glass, took a sip of water, set i
t down, rested his elbows on the table, looked at Cooper without moving his head, and said, “Who the hell are you and what is it you want.”

  After telling Sullivan he was merely a colleague on the federal payroll who might, someday, call upon him for a favor, Cooper raised his glass and toasted the unfaithful future CINCLANTFLT.

  “May we all achieve happy endings,” he said.

  Cooper was hearing Sullivan’s voice tonight for the first time since the lunch. Laramie watched him from her cross-legged position on the deck of the Apache.

  “What I want, Admiral,” Cooper said, “is a favor. The favor I’m looking for shouldn’t present much of a challenge-not considering your rank, anyway. Congratulations, by the way, on your rise to glory.”

  “What is it, then,” Sullivan said. “Tell me. I’ve been waiting for your call for nine years, you sadistic prick!” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I haven’t committed marital infidelity since our lunch. You’ve driven me into a born-again, self-imposed puritanical hell. I see cameras everywhere I go-even looking up some slut’s skirt from across a conference room. At least you’ve called-maybe now I can get you and your little cameras out of my head.”

  “I’d like to know the selection of nuclear submarines currently at sea in the vicinity of the Windward Islands. Martinique, specifically. I’m fairly certain you’ve got three, maybe four down here with the feature I’m looking for, provided my bedtime reading is accurate. Which it probably is, since I wouldn’t be reading it if I didn’t have the twenty-first-highest security clearance in the United States. What’s your ranking?”

  Sullivan remained quiet.

  “Basically, Admiral, I could use a UUV and an MSLC. Both of which I assume you understand come as standard equipment in your typical SEAL Hole.”

  Sullivan again said nothing.

  “We both know how the Holes work-as a result, and fortunately for you, nobody will know a thing. Hell, Admiral, for a man like you, that might have a couple of meanings.”

  “I’ll take a look at the available inventory,” Sullivan said.

  Cooper said, “Do it in the next ten minutes and deliver the submarine by dawn.”

  “Fine.”

  “Got a pen? I’ll give you directions.”

  When the pizza, and most of Cooper’s stash of beer, was gone, Laramie curled up on the deck beside the copilot’s seat and dozed off. Cooper set a hand on her shoulder.

  “There’s a bed downstairs,” he said. “All yours if you want it. Probably isn’t a bad idea for me to stick around topside. Muscle-head may still send friends.”

  A combination hum and grunt came from Laramie’s throat, but she only curled into a tighter ball. Cooper pulled a jacket from the compartment beside the box where he kept the charts and draped it over her shoulders and back. He found one of the Apache’s life preservers, slipped it beneath her shoulders and head, and sat upright on the deck beside her. He leaned his back against the railing along the copilot’s side of the boat.

  He’d just begun to realize how uncomfortable a position he’d chosen for his lookout duties, and lifted a foot to stand, when Laramie, asleep, repeated her hum-grunt sound, pulled herself a few inches off the life preserver, moved it aside, then resettled her head and shoulders on his thigh. With Laramie’s cheek against his leg, Cooper reconsidered the discomfort he was feeling in his back muscles.

  In another hour it began to rain. It came the way it did in the Caribbean, a few fat drops, then nothing, followed by a curtain blast of water hurtling downward. Laramie woke up sputtering, slightly confused, maybe even a little perturbed, he thought, after realizing she’d been sleeping on his leg.

  When she put her weight on one arm to lean up and get her bearings, Cooper leaned down and kissed her. He did it hard, pushing through the rain that had already coated the smooth skin of her face. Oddly, considering they’d both been drinking beer, she tasted to him like the distant fruit of white wine. She also tasted like coolness, and warmth. As she kissed him back he could feel that her tongue was smooth, like her skin, Cooper getting the overwhelming sensation he’d been engulfed by wet flower petals.

  As they fell back onto the fiberglass deck, the torrential rain soaking through their clothes, Laramie pulled her lips from Cooper’s, leaned her mouth against his ear, and said, “What about keeping an eye out?”

  Cooper pulled her on top of him, pressing her lips back against his by grasping the back of her head with his palm. Through their cemented lips, he said, “Fuck it.”

  The way their mouths muffled the words, he wasn’t sure whether she’d been able to understand what he’d said, but he soon developed a theory that Laramie didn’t really care.

  He had those lie detector powers down to a science now.

  47

  The rotors of the helicopter shot a streaming gust of wind against the quiet harbor, compressing a circular section of the ocean’s surface, the water churning, then breaking into white spray as the chopper cleared the lagoon’s edge and settled on the soft white sand of the Sainte-Anne marina. It continued to rain hard. A spotlight roved around the marina, directing its beam from one boat to the next, finding, leaving, then returning to Cooper’s Apache, the boat’s registration number highlighted in the center of the blinding white cone of light. The chopper was a UH-1N “Huey,” standard U.S. Navy issue, its olive exterior at peace with the moonless Caribbean night.

  Ignoring the pounding rain, Cooper rose on the deck of his boat, hand shielding his eyes from the searchlight. Laramie emerged from the cabin door behind him wearing a pair of Cooper’s sweat pants and a T-shirt that didn’t come close to fitting. The black shirt had the words FEEL ALRIGHT emblazoned in white across her chest.

  “Our ride,” Cooper said, yelling to be heard over the roar of the Huey. The two of them, he decided, had been doing too much yelling.

  Laramie looked up at him. Cooper decided she looked like a very appealing wet rat.

  “Nice night for one,” she yelled.

  When Cooper and Laramie boarded, the Huey’s copilot turned in his seat, formed a rectangle with his hands, and confirmed that Cooper was the man they’d come for when Cooper handed him one of his identification cards. The copilot then rose and distributed a pair of wireless headsets to his passengers. Once he saw they’d put them on, he said, “Good morning, sir. Ma’am. Please take a seat and buckle up. I assume you’re aware that our instructions are to deposit you in the open ocean on a safety raft approximately fifteen miles due south of Diamond Rock. That would be the southwestern corner of this island. The rain will continue, but we expect calm seas. The trip should take approximately twenty-five minutes. I’m Lance Corporal Miller, and I’ll be conducting the drop once we reach our destination. Any questions?”

  Laramie looked around the cabin. Cooper saw her doing it.

  “Got any barf bags?” he said to Miller.

  Miller produced a pair and nodded.

  “Even I use ’em sometimes, ma’am.”

  “Thank you,” Laramie said. Cooper wasn’t sure who she was talking to when she said it.

  “Appreciate the lift,” Cooper said.

  “No problem, sir.” Miller nodded at Laramie. “Ma’am.” He reached back, slammed the side door closed, secured its latch, and returned to his seat.

  When the pilot saw that Miller had buckled himself in, he applied some fuel to the turbines and left a white sandstorm in their wake as the Huey rose out of the marina and vanished upward into the downpour.

  At the drop point, the pilot let the Huey nose up and hover in a lazy circle. Laramie forcibly swallowed a few waves of nausea as the chopper settled into a stationary position thirty feet above a patch of dark sea.

  Miller flipped a switch, and the interior of the cabin lit up with a pair of dull red bulbs, one on either side of them. In a flurry, Miller hauled open the Huey’s side door, released a pair of nylon safety handles, removed a yellow cube from a storage container, grasped and pulled a red tab on the yellow cube, and
tossed the cube through the open door. The cube self-inflated wildly, bursting into a circular life raft six feet in diameter and floating through the thirty feet of altitude like a glow-in-the-dark parachute until it flopped lazily onto the ocean’s surface. Through the open door, Cooper saw the hard Caribbean rain popping off of the ocean’s surface in a hundred thousand pinpricks of white foam. The water’s surface was otherwise flat.

  Miller hand-cranked six feet of slack from a cable system behind a small door built into the cabin, found a pair of knapsacks in a square of netting, opened them, withdrew a slicker and a harness from the first knapsack, and flipped them to Cooper. The slicker and harness landed on Cooper’s lap.

  “You first, sir,” Miller said over his headset. He looked at Laramie with what was intended, and which Cooper figured she regarded, as a respectful nod. “Ma’am, rule of this procedure is the reverse of a rescue operation: women and children last. We don’t want you landing alone on that raft.”

  Miller looked outside. “Looks like you’ll get a little wet on the way down, sir,” he said.

  Cooper slipped into the harness. Miller snagged it with a hook affixed to the cable he’d paid out, set a hand on Cooper’s shoulder, and gave the hook a short, violent tug. Satisfied, he guided Cooper to one of the safety handles dangling from the open doorway. He laid out a brief set of instructions before taking back Cooper’s headset.

  Cooper leaned backward into the rain and sunk out of sight.

  A rumbling rush of water sounded out in the blackness, giving the impression of approaching bulk. A tremor passed through the raft beneath them; a large swell followed, with smaller, choppier waves behind it, and then the sea returned to its prior peaceful state. The raindrops had become fewer and less bulky in the past fifteen minutes.

  Cooper looked at his watch. Three-thirty.

  A spotlight hit them with hot white light, then doused. Another light popped on fifty yards off, this one more faint, a yellow floodlight bathing a section of the black sea with incandescence. It offered sufficient illumination for Cooper and Laramie to notice a small group of men approaching in a Zodiac. The light, Cooper saw, was affixed to a stationary black column featuring a small deck, a series of antennae, and a white number painted on its side. Beneath the column, just protruding from the water, a swath of black steel stretched far enough in each direction to be lost in the darkness before it ended.