By necessity, Cooper skipped the blacked-out portions of the report and kept on. He wondered whether Laramie had blacked out sections she didn’t want him to see, or if she’d received the report this way.

“The second angle we’re taking in our search for the origin of the strain assumes the organic portion of the filo serum is a naturally occurring bug,” the report said, and here, Cooper saw, was where the report referenced Guatemala, and the outbreak the CDC had focused its investigation on.

He read that in 1983, a caregiver’s journal documented the outbreak at a health care clinic in “rural Guatemala”-the report, Cooper found, offering no greater precision than that. Before the caregiver ran out of gas herself, she described the symptoms of the outbreak, as incurred by the entire clinic’s staff. The CDC had recovered the journal from some vaguely explained source. The symptoms of hemorrhagic fever, Cooper read-uncontrollably high fever, total breakdown of all organ functions, bleeding out through every orifice, rapid death-were similar wherever the pathogen struck. But the specific characteristics of the LaBelle outbreak matched the symptoms suffered by the victims in the Guatemala clinic very closely, at least per the caregiver: the incubation and infection periods, aggressive symptom development, and other disease “mile markers” tracked in the missionary’s journal matched the LaBelle fever death pattern nearly to the minute.

The journal described a local teenage girl “of Indian dialect” who had been treated in the clinic for flu-like symptoms and subsequently released before the onset of the symptoms among the staff.

Cooper leafed back to check the date again: 1983.

Poor man’s forensics team though he and the Polar Bear made, he and Borrego had put the deaths of the members of the Indian village somewhere in that basic time frame. Yet another disturbing match-it wasn’t too far-fetched a scenario to presume that the filo-infected girl “of Indian dialect” had strolled into the health clinic the same week, or month, or year that the Indian village was taken down by some similar outbreak.

Cooper checked for and found no further reference to the fate of the girl in the passages from the journal as photocopied into the binder.

Christ-a survivor?

He closed the binder and stuffed it in the bag he’d brought along for the flights, Cooper thinking the CDC report had decided it for him: he would be asking Laramie the lie detector about “ICR,” in addition to recommending that she, as the “counter-cell cell” commander-in-chief, plug into her suicide-sleeper equation the connection he’d just unearthed.

The only problem being what and who it all seemed to connect to-unfortunately, by way of that fucking burned-down lab, he thought, the bio-engineered filovirus and the murdered village seemed connected to none other than the fucking snuffer-outers. The snuffer-outers he now felt safe assuming to be camped out in Washington, or Langley-or wherever the hell it is that powerful government assholes camp out these days.

Meaning that the minute he brought Laramie into the loop, he may as well be signing her death warrant-as surely as Po Keeler and Cap’n Roy, in their innocent greed, had signed their own.

“Crap,” he said, realizing, without caring, that he’d said it aloud on the small plane he shared with fifteen other passengers.

He closed the terror book and fixed his eyes out the window. The plane ducked below the clouds and the Yucatan Peninsula revealed itself a few thousand feet below.

39

They were able to get ninety minutes of the voyage out of the way before the sun ducked behind the ocean. Cooper was powering them along at twelve knots with the catamaran’s eighty-horse motor, and the surface of the Caribbean was about as flat as it got-slow, rolling swells of the sort that never went completely dormant, but utterly lacking in wind and chop. This meant, among other things, that Laramie hadn’t yet begun to purge the contents of her stomach, slim as Cooper assumed the contents to be given Laramie’s usual intake of such things as small-size salads with nonfat dressing on the side.

The boat was a 30' Endeavorcat. Cooper had got Abe Worel, a longtime charter captain based out of Virgin Gorda, to reserve the boat for him through a Cancún outfit Worel had a stake in-Cooper suggesting to Worel that he secure comprehensive insurance as part of the rental arrangement and leaving it at that. Worel told him where to go to find the boat and that it would be ready for him anytime after four. By six, Cooper and Laramie were pushing off from the rental company’s dock.

As the sun began its hastened retreat below the horizon, Laramie explained her team’s theory that an “Americanization campus” of some sort would be what Achar had directed them to with his GPS-coordinates code. She also told Cooper her secondary suspicion about the site, generated when she’d seen the coordinates represented on the map of Cuba: she believed that whatever they’d find, they’d find underground.

Cooper said, “So we’re heading to this place, presuming we’ve got the location correct, to do what? Ask who’s in charge?”

“Maybe,” Laramie said.

“Why don’t you just snap off some satellite shots and whip out your magnifying glass? After you isolate what it is you’re looking for, the people you work for can send in somebody properly equipped to crash the party. Such as, I don’t know, possibly the U.S. Marines.”

“I already have snapped off some satellite shots, and you’re slowing down as you age,” Laramie said. “This isn’t the party we need to crash. If it’s an Americanization campus, then it follows it’s run by whoever sent the sleepers, but it doesn’t change the fact that he, or she, or they, have already planted the sleepers. It’s the sleepers we need to ‘crash,’ not the training grounds. And who knows-maybe we’ll find something altogether different. It could be-however unlikely it is at face value-that Castro’s the one behind this, and the GPS location represents the place where he actually keeps the list of sleepers.”

“Or maybe we find nothing.”

“True.”

“Then why are you going?” Cooper said. He checked the glow-in-the-dark compass and flicked the wheel slightly to starboard, adjusting the catamaran’s course by a few degrees.

Laramie didn’t say anything for a while. She didn’t do much either-just kept her head set back against the cushion in her seat. Maybe she’s keeping quiet, he thought, because the reason she came was to seize the chance, international terror crisis or no, to wing it southward with the ex.

Ex? Cooper made an attempt to withdraw the thought, something he always found himself trying yet failing to do in the presence of Laramie-and only Laramie. Otherwise, he was usually quite pleased by his own thoughts. At the moment, though, he found some fury swell up within, along with a question to himself: How could four months in the islands qualify as a relationship?

Well, that’s what you called it: you just referred to yourself as the “ex.” One in a long string of thoughts, words, and other annoying acts I’d usually prefer I never thought, or said, or did. Laramie-still the lie detector she always was, a goddamn truth serum you didn’t even have to drink to begin suffering its effects.

“I’m coming along because I need to see it for myself,” Laramie said, interrupting his thoughts.

Cooper wasn’t buying.

“Even though you don’t know what it is?” he said.

“What we’re finding?”

“Right-if it’s anything at all. You’re going just because you need to see for yourself?”

“I’m going,” she said, “because I have no idea what I’m doing.”

Cooper tried but failed to make the connection, but he didn’t need to prompt her, Laramie forging on with no delay.