“Wondered how long it would take,” he said with a flash of those sharp yellow-brown teeth. “Not long, turns out.”

Since none of the Polar Bear’s crack security staff had seen fit to take away his gun, Cooper racked a bullet into its chamber and pointed it at the couch-bound Borrego.

“I’ve got a few questions,” he said.

“Ask away.” As usual, there wasn’t any discernible tension in the Polar Bear’s tone.

“I was thinking of taking you up on your spelunking offer,” Cooper said, “when it turned out you were dead. So I thought I’d come see your guy here, and see if I might compel him to tell me the things you wouldn’t before.”

“You mean the answer,” Borrego said, “to your question of who I bought the artifacts from.”

“And the additional question,” Cooper said, “of exactly where the sellers found these things. Plus how any of this might explain why somebody’s killing everybody who had anything to do with the loot.”

“I think we’ve got the same questions,” Borrego said. Cooper was enjoying the Polar Bear’s no-nonsense manner. “And I do know a little more than I told you-but not a lot. We’ll still need to go find them-the sellers, I mean-in order to find out the rest.”

Cooper surveyed the behavior of the velociraptor and the doorman. They hadn’t noticeably moved and didn’t seem particularly on edge.

“What made you think I’d show up?” Cooper said.

Borrego shrugged.

“You struck me as a sharp cookie.”

“No doubt,” Cooper said. “Why else?”

“I believe I told you I found it odd I hadn’t received a call when the shipment didn’t show in Naples. After you left, I tried to reach my fence. Couldn’t. I had a vague idea as to his preferred list of buyers-always a good thing not to rely too heavily on a middleman-so I called three or four of them. Also not reachable. Missing-dead, I expect. Like my fence. Caught the story online in the Fort Myers papers.”

“A story broken first on the nightly news,” Cooper said, “by one Ricardo Medvez.”

Borrego thought for a moment, digesting this.

“You went there, then,” he said.

Cooper nodded. “Found his body. Frozen in an icebox beneath a couple hundred pounds of Alaskan king crabs.”

“In Florida?”

“Fresh frozen,” Cooper said.

“This Medvez a friend of yours?”

“Wouldn’t really call him that.”

“You gave him the story, though.”

“Maybe you’re doing the killing,” Cooper said.

The Polar Bear didn’t shift, fidget, or change expression. He didn’t say anything either.

After a while, gun still drawn, Cooper said, “If it isn’t you, I don’t really see any other way of finding out who the snuffer-outers are, and why they’re taking people out, besides paying a visit on whoever it is who found the artifacts and having a look at whence they came.”

“‘Snuffer-outers’?” Borrego said.

“That’s what I’ve come to call them.”

Borrego considered this.

“Snuffer-outers it is, then. Incidentally, you should know,” he said, “that we may not find a thing.”

“Maybe so,” Cooper said.

He backed up, shuffled one step to his left, and kicked the place on the doorman’s hip where the man had been keeping his gun. As Cooper had suspected from the drape of his jacket, the gun, a fat, black automatic pistol, hadn’t been housed in a holster, so it dislodged from its spot in the waistband, sort of leaped up into the air, and clattered to the floor. Cooper retrieved it and placed both it and his Browning beneath his own waistband.

In no rush, the Polar Bear disentangled himself from the leather sofa and rose.

“Jesus and his boys will pack a few things for us,” he said. “We can leave in the morning. You want us to find you a place to sleep, or do you still suspect me of doing the snuffing?”

Cooper said, “I’ll take that M5 Jesus just parked in the driveway and bring it back in the morning. You an early riser?”

“See you at six,” Borrego said.

He inclined his chin in the velociraptor’s direction and Madrid tossed Cooper the keys.

“Hasta mañana,” Cooper said on his way up the stairs.

32

Cooper took the call when he saw the area code on the caller ID readout display the same number he’d used to invite Laramie to breakfast. Ordinarily, there was nothing remarkable about his taking such a call, but since Cooper did so while seated aboard the Borrego Industries Gulfstream G450, winging it over the Caribbean to Belize, he found the clarity of Laramie’s voice mildly surprising.

“Your proposal has been accepted,” she said, “and the payment wired. You can call whoever it is you need to call to confirm the wire.”

The pilot hadn’t warned him not to use the phone in the air, and neither Borrego nor Madrid made any motion to stop him now. Cooper knew that the prohibition on the use of standard mobile phones on commercial airliners was horseshit-the weak wireless signal had no effect on an aircraft’s instruments-but he wondered about the signals sent by a portable satellite unit.

Cooper thought he’d choose his words carefully-no need for the Polar Bear and his lieutenant to learn anything they shouldn’t on the topic of the Emerald Lakes affair.

“Enjoyed the book you sent,” he said. “A real thriller.”

It only took a short pause for Laramie to say, “You’re not alone?”

“Nope. But it doesn’t really matter. Seems to me your boy Benny did one hell of a job leaving his real self in the dust.”

“That’s your analysis? That our sleeper hid his true identity well? You aren’t exactly giving the federal government its money’s worth.”

“You getting your money’s worth from Professor Eddie?”

Another pause, slightly longer this time, then, “He’s working at a slightly lower pay grade. But we do have some ideas, so I’ll be in touch. I was going to recommend you get going on the reading, but it seems you anticipated the government’s response.”

Cooper said, “I know that you can be very persuasive,” then wondered immediately why he’d have said something like that.

“Sometime in the next two or three days, I’ll be calling you back with the rest of the team on the line. It may be sooner rather than later if an assignment crops up.”

Cooper eyed the landscape passing a few miles beneath the Gulfstream jet.

“I may be a little busy,” he said. Thinking of something, he pulled the phone from his ear and regarded the caller ID numerals. “I can reach you at this number?”

“Room eighteen.”

“I’ll be in touch,” he said, and broke the connection.

The pilot came on over the intercom and informed his trio of passengers they should buckle up for the descent into Belize City.

Belize, a tall, skinny nation occupying the western edge of the Caribbean Sea, rests just south of the technical demarcation between the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Cooper had been here a few times, mainly by boat and mainly to dive along the country’s celebrated barrier reef. What he’d seen gave him the impression of a landlocked Caribbean island: dark-skinned locals, colorful paint jobs on weather-ravaged buildings, fishing boats everywhere you turned.

After a brief taxi through Philip S. W. Goldson International Airport, the G450 cooled its jets before a private hangar, where Cooper observed a waiting two-vehicle convoy consisting of a black Cadillac sedan and a dull yellow jeep. Upon closer inspection, Cooper observed the jeep to be a Land Rover Defender, probably worth a hundred and fifty grand outfitted the way it was. If nothing else, Cooper thought, considering the M5, the Land Rover, and the Gulfstream, the top brass of Borrego Industries certainly did travel in style.

It turned out the Caddy was merely there for the driver of the Defender to hitch a ride home; upon handing the key to the velociraptor, the guy-looking to Cooper like Derek Jeter’s long-lost brother-hopped into the sedan via the passenger-side door and it sped off across the tarmac. Madrid opened the luggage hatch on the side of the plane and set to transferring their bags to the back compartment of the Defender. The man, Cooper thought, seemed endlessly willing and able to accomplish any task, of any type, that Borrego didn’t want to tackle himself. Hell, Cooper thought-pay me as much as Borrego probably pays good old Jesus, and maybe I too would be happy to sign on as a multihyphenate comrade.