Cooper smiled without putting any heart in it and got to the business of setting the hook.

“I’ll take a look at whatever you send me,” he said, “and whatever you call to brief me on later. But I’ll only do it if the people you work for are willing to make it worth my while.”

“What?”

“I’ve got a deal structure in mind.”

“Wait a minute, you did hear the part about the others volunteering to work on the team-are you actually saying you’re looking to profit from a terrorist-”

“Yes.”

She stared at him, silent, Cooper seeing in her look a hostile kind of pity, Laramie clearly upset with him for displaying such a lowlife’s priority scheme. He found himself to be both thrilled and disappointed by the reaction. It was the way she’d made him feel from the beginning-like he was constantly getting in trouble for his rambunctious behavior.

“Here’s what I suggest,” Cooper said. “I suggest you take this back to the people you work for. Inform them that one of the members of your team would, upon further consideration, have ultimately decided to sign on for the sake of national security pro bono-except for the threat they suggested you make in hopes of coaxing me to join up. Since you, and they, went ahead and made that threat, I’m therefore going to charge whatever organization is involved for my services. Homeland Security? NSA? Somebody new? I don’t give a shit who it is. You want my expertise-what little I have-it’ll cost you. It’ll cost you exactly what it cost our late, mutual former boss Peter M. Gates eighteen years ago, plus interest. Though because we know each other so well, I’ll play nice and keep the interest to a nominal, even token rate of, say, four-point-five percent per annum.”

“Christ,” Laramie said, her look of pity now deteriorating to one of disgust. “What kind of money are we talking here?”

“Not much. What Pete paid was twenty years of salary beginning at the GS-14 level, including annual merit raises, periodic promotions, and the usual annual hazard bonus. Plus the interest, of course.”

“You’re kidding. I can’t-”

“Did they know you knew me before they hired you?”

“What?” Laramie blinked, then glared. “Why are you assuming somebody else hired me?”

“You mean, somebody besides CIA?”

“Yes.”

“They don’t work this way-they don’t give anybody the kind of authority it sounds as though you’ve been granted. Not anymore. Not unless you extort them into it, anyway.”

He grinned.

Laramie sighed. “What does it come to?”

“Rounding off, we can just call it twenty million.”

“Come on.”

“I thought I was necessary?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have put it that way.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have. I’ll need it as a single lump-sum disbursement. I’ll provide you the relevant numbered account into which they’ll need to do the disbursing. And the account will vanish a few seconds after the money is posted to it, so don’t get any ideas.”

He thought for a moment, then reached over and retrieved the pen from Laramie’s side of the table and wrote four phone numbers, all with the same area code and prefix, on a napkin stained with a splash of Tabasco sauce.

“You can find me at one of these numbers for the next eight days. Forty-eight hours per number; they expire and switch on a more or less annual cycle.”

He handed her the napkin, stood, then promptly spun and walked off.

26

Cooper spent most of the ride home from Naples thinking through recent history as crafted by, or against, Po Keeler, Cap’n Roy, El Oso Blanco’s stateside fence caught sleeping with the frozen crabs-and the anonymous killers who’d snuffed them out. Cooper thinking of them as snuffer-outers-the snuffer-outers who’d hired the killer Lieutenant Riley had shot on the hill beside Cap’n Roy’s infinity pool.

He decided he would call Lieutenant Riley to see whether they’d found a ballistics match between the bullets that killed Keeler and the gun the assassin had used on Roy. He’d guess it’d turn out that way-as the body count added up, the game of connect-the-dots was getting easier. This much he knew: everybody who’d been offed to date had been immersed in the shipment, seizure, or resale of the gold artifacts stash. The list of duly immersed parties still among the living wasn’t long-himself, El Oso Blanco, Lieutenant Riley and his staff, and Susannah Grant, whose involvement he estimated couldn’t be traced. Either way, though, unless he found some way of identifying and taking down the snuffer-outers, chances were he and his surviving associates would soon show up in the dead pool.

He continued to find it odd there hadn’t been an attempt on his life already, and if he could presume El Oso Blanco was continuing to chow down on a daily rotation of bucket-served take-out luncheons-which he should probably no longer assume-it was just as odd that Borrego too had not had the pleasure of an assassination attempt. He wondered whether it had been assumed by the killers that Lieutenant Riley would be scared into silence by his chief minister’s murder, or whether Riley was being crafty about keeping an eye out-or possibly that the snuffer-outers just hadn’t yet dispatched a second contract killer to take aim at the lieutenant. Still, if the snuff-out mandate remained in effect, Cooper figured Riley for third in line.

He and the Polar Bear would be vying for top honors.

It didn’t compute, though, that the snuffer-outers, in wanting the trail of the gold artifacts stamped out, wouldn’t have thought to kill the Polar Bear first. Maybe they hadn’t known of the big man’s involvement to start with, though Cooper found this unlikely-Borrego had been the one to kick-start the whole goddamn thing. Maybe Borrego was just a tough guy to kill-but that theory didn’t hold water, particularly given the Swiss cheese security configuration at his Venezuela headquarters.

Could be, he mused, that the Polar Bear is the snuffer-outer-but however snugly the pieces might have fit for this answer, Cooper decided it was hogwash. There was nothing in it for Borrego, same as there’d been nothing in it for Cap’n Roy.

Despite multiple hours of theorizing, he kept coming back to the same conclusion. The snuffer-outers hadn’t killed him yet because of who he worked for. Now that Cap’n Roy had been taken down, it was clear it wasn’t just a government thing-the snuffer-outers obviously didn’t mind taking down the chief minister of a small, though NATO-allied, island nation. They did, however-at least by his working theory-hesitate before snuffing out an employee of a federal agency of the good ole U.S. of A.

Meaning the snuffer-outers were probably U.S. of A. types themselves-specifically, U.S. of A. government types. Other hues fit the color scheme of this picture too: the contract killer, for instance, was the kind of man certain federal agencies of the Evil Empire would hire. Cooper thinking that if you threw in a botched assassination coup, the impossible survival of imprisonment and torture, a reverse-extortion scheme, and maybe a couple decades of sun and alcohol, then that contract killer would probably look reasonably similar to someone else.

Plowing through the crest of a fifteen-foot swell fifty miles east of Cuba, he found himself-following a few hours of brooding-in exactly the same place he’d started.

Cap’n Roy was dead. Somebody, probably somebody on Uncle Sam’s payroll, didn’t want anybody finding out about the antiquities stash El Oso Blanco had bought, sold, and shipped. Among a set of stupid, greedy people, Cap’n Roy had simply been unlucky enough to emerge as either the stupidest, greediest, or both-and got himself killed for it.

It struck Cooper that in case he were to find himself in a vengeful mood-And when do I not?-he’d need to find out who the snuffer-outers were. And unless he felt like yanking the stateside fence’s hard drive from the marshfront condominium and spending a few weeks tracking down every single name on the man’s electronic Rolodex, which he already knew wouldn’t tell him a goddamn thing about the snuffer-outers anyway-