“I know I’ve offered to pay you before and you laughed at me then too. I know you don’t need-”

“No problem,” Cooper said. “If I were interested in coming, I’d happily pay my own way. Actually, I’d charge it to my expense account, so it’s just a matter of which department pays.” He realized something, thinking of Laramie’s call in a slightly different way, then said, “Or which agency.”

“It’s important for you to come up here and meet with us. With me. There isn’t really a choice.”

Cooper said, “No choice, eh?”

“We’ll discuss it when you arrive. I can’t until then. You’ll need to trust me. But we’ll get you up here the fastest way we can do it.”

“Not interested,” he said.

“No, it’s not-look, you have to come. You’re necessary.”

“Not sure,” Cooper said, “how I was unclear.”

The occasional, distant ping of interference over the satellite connection did its audio dance while neither of them said anything for a while.

Then Laramie said, “If you don’t come, the people I work for have told me they will consider freezing your assets. They have the capability, and you’ve told me where you put enough of it for us to get hold of a significant portion of your money.”

Cooper’s monotone Morse chuckle resumed then quickly overtook him, verging on an all-out belly laugh of the sort the Polar Bear of Caracas had levied on him two days before. After about a minute of this, Cooper finished up his laughter as though it were a delicious drink and sighed.

“I’m sorry,” Laramie said, “but the people I work for instructed me to tell you that this would be our only recourse were you to decline my initial recruitment effort. It’s that important. And I don’t have time to ask more than once. If I need to force you to come, I’ll do it.”

“‘Initial recruitment effort,’” Cooper said. “That’s nice. You know, I find it amusing the way the American government believes itself all powerful in places it has less pull than a gecko. Good luck to you.”

He took a great deal of time removing the phone from his ear, holding it beneath his chin so he could find the button, and plowing his thumb into the word End printed in red letters on the upper-right corner of the keypad. He set the phone on his reading table, leaned back against the rear spine of the deck chair, and closed his eyes to soak in the convection waves of mercury-busting heat.

He considered, with enormous satisfaction, that he still had at least another hour and a half before the temperature would sink below three digits again.

23

Throughout Collier and Lee counties and all the way back to Miami, Ricardo Medvez was regarded by all-rich, poor, chic, nearly everyone in between-as the news anchor of choice. Their trusted man, host of the six and eleven o’clock news, telling it like it was from his seat in the studio of the Fort Myers NBC affiliate.

In certain, less public circles, Medvez was also known for some other things: a gambling addiction, frequent trips down the crystal meth, coke, and freebase superhighways, and a generous propensity for lump-sum payoffs engineered to discourage numerous paternity suits from making the rundown of his own news broadcast.

Having largely succeeded in keeping his evening and weekend activities under wraps, however, Medvez-who otherwise considered himself starkly heterosexual-had, one night, made a tape. Perhaps it’d been the freebase talking, or maybe he’d just unlatched a long-locked closet door, but one night Medvez, jumping on the phone, ordered up half a dozen male prostitutes, punched the record button on a couple of camcorders, and made a private porno flick that made Deep Throat look like a Pixar movie. He got plenty of mileage out of the tape, taking it with him wherever he knew he’d possess sufficient private time with a VCR.

The odometer wore out, though, when one of the people he owed a hundred grand in gambling debts to got hold of the tape. From that point on, the interest rate on his gradually accumulating vig jumped a few dozen percentage points and Medvez assumed he was fucked for life.

This remained the case until a year and a half later, when the olive skinned news anchor stumbled across a high-stakes card game in Key West. A few of the guys in the game kept referring to the weathered, baritone-voiced card shark taking all of their money that night as the “spy on the island,” and Medvez wondered what this meant. Afterward, putting his finely honed interviewing skills to work-dulled somewhat by the lines of coke he’d done in the bathroom between hands-he ascertained that his fellow gambler was in fact a spy of sorts, and resided on an island in the British Virgins.

Medvez propositioned him on the spot.

“What would it cost if I wanted a favor done?” he asked.

Cooper sized up Medvez, the two of them out on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant they’d used for the game.

“What kind of favor,” he said.

When Medvez explained, Cooper pondered the request for a few minutes-standing there in his Tommy Bahama short-sleeved shirt at four in the morning-then said, “I won’t kill anybody for you, but this shouldn’t be too hard to handle. I’ll need whatever information you have on them, everywhere you’ve seen or associated with them, who you think they might work for, and so on.”

Then he asked what Medvez had to offer in return.

“You like boats?” Medvez asked.

“Sure.”

“Wanna take a walk?”

“How far?”

“Old Key West Marina. Five minutes, tops.”

Parked as it was, roped beside the fuel depot in the island’s marina of choice, Cooper would always remember his first encounter with the squat-hulled, off-white-and-burnt-orange Apache 41 custom racing vessel. For him it had been like meeting that woman you were meant to be with-he felt he’d known her all along. Upon further inspection, the forty-one-foot boat revealed its brawny twin engines, luxury quarters belowdecks, and nearly untouched, mint-condition state. He knew the boat to be worth somewhere close to four hundred thousand dollars.

“I’ll take it in advance,” he’d told Medvez back then, “but if I can’t solve your problem, you can have it back.”

Medvez agreed, and in an odd way-because of his own love for the racing boat he’d had built to his exact specs-he found himself, over time, to be mildly disappointed by the lack of contact from the people Cooper had somehow silenced. Medvez never asked Cooper whether he’d actually retrieved the tape, and ultimately didn’t really want to know.

Cooper took the name and number El Oso Polar had passed him on the Post-it and ran them through three separate wash cycles-the reverse directory services of CIA, FBI, and one private think tank. The machines returned three neatly pressed but slightly different packages. Between them came one post office box, three residential addresses-two in South Florida, one in Louisiana-one business address, two different versions of the man’s name, his social, printouts of four different credit bureau reports-the kind the manager at a car dealership pulled when you went in to buy a car-plus a basic breakdown of the person’s various bank and credit card accounts and loans and various supposedly current addresses.

Cooper didn’t have much interest in placing phone calls to people he didn’t know, who didn’t expect his call, and who wouldn’t have any interest in answering the kind of questions he intended to ask. He did, however, have an interest in finding out who had sent the contract killer to take out Cap’n Roy. And his only current lead-at least outside of the entire federal government of the United States of America or anyone else who had access to reports or radio communications from U.S. Coast Guard antidrug task force fleets-was the name of the fence the Polar Bear had provided him. Cooper figured an in-person conversation with the man might yield some answers on who else had been aware of the intended transaction.