Laramie then spent almost an hour walking her cell through their operative’s discovery of a possible connection between the genetically engineered M-2 filo, some sort of industrial facility in Guatemala that had been burned to the ground, and the lost Indian village that coincided, in place and time period, with the hemorrhagic fever outbreak the CDC had identified at the clinic in “rural Guatemala.” She told them about the letters “ICR” that Cooper had found on the piece of wood near the facility.
“If the connection is real,” she said, “let’s find it.”
Once she’d wrapped up, Laramie watched as Knowles, Cole, and Rothgeb looked at each other and came to some unspoken agreement.
Rothgeb then piped up as the cell’s newly appointed spokesperson.
“Why don’t you give us till nine A.M.,” he said.
Laramie did the math. “Eight and a half hours? That’s not much-”
“We’ve become something of a well-oiled machine,” Professor Eddie said. “And while you’ve been out on your Caribbean vacation, we haven’t exactly been sitting around with our proverbial thumbs up our rear ends. We’ve got some progress to report, but it’s probably better if we brief you all at once. Eight hours should be plenty of time to isolate the top theme park tenant suspects.”
Knowles nodded; Cole did too.
Laramie thought that she should have expected it-Rothgeb, assuming the spokesperson duties for her ragtag clan. She wondered idly whether he’d barged in as the pompous professor of diplomacy and foreign affairs he was-spokesperson, self-appointed-but couldn’t detect any animosity from Knowles, or tension from Cole. Strangely enough, she thought, it seems this dysfunctional bunch has in fact become a well-oiled machine.
She told them nine A.M. would be fine and left the machine to do its work.
They gathered in Laramie’s room-Laramie watching as her team arrived and its members chose their seats in approximately the same arrangement as the morning Laramie had given her introductory speech. Knowles perched on the edge of the bed; Cole, wearing shades today, took the chair near the door to the adjoining suite, where her guide was sequestered as usual. Laramie had the same chair at the room’s lone table, only this time around, Professor Rothgeb sat beside her at the table. Cooper was listening in on the device Laramie had decided to call the “spiderphone”-the odd-looking contraption her guide had employed for her first report to Lou Ebbers.
She introduced Cooper as, “Our operative, whose identity will remain classified.”
Rothgeb got right to it. For Laramie, it was a repeat of Foreign Policy 101-only with a sinister edge.
“In seeking to isolate who is most likely to have entered into a lease with Castro for the San Cristóbal theme park,” he said, “we took into account the following prerequisites, evidence, and variables. First: relationship. Whether head of state or rogue terror financier, he or she needs to have had some relationship with Castro ten to fifteen years ago. And while we all know Castro would probably take money from anybody interested in paying, he was clearly involved in some way here, and that means ideology’s gonna be key. That’s second on our list-ideology-since Castro wouldn’t have cooperated to such lengths without this guy being left of left. Third, and quite obvious: this person has a beef with America. Fourth: resources. It doesn’t take billions to build a stadium-size theme park, but it does take a few mill. Plus, our guy would need to be capable of recruiting, training, possibly maintaining, and absolutely paying his sleepers. In almost all cases, the families of suicide bombers are handsomely rewarded by the faction for which they make the supreme sacrifice.”
Rothgeb gestured toward the phone.
“Fifth is access to the filo. And while we can’t yet point to a specific connection between the facility our operative discovered in Guatemala and the R & D it took to develop this bug, the confluence of factors is too significant to ignore. Bottom line here: any current or former Castro crony who’s got a beef with America, sufficient resources to assemble these sleepers, and who either hails from or maintains ties with Central America generally, or Guatemala specifically, is moving very high on our list. There are a few other factors we’ve plugged in, but we need to work with what we know, and the elements I just described are pretty much what we’re aware of.”
Despite the serious issues at hand, Laramie was having difficulty suppressing a smile at how familiar Rothgeb’s overly formal semantics sounded to her. She’d sat in too many lectures, among other things, to take him nearly as seriously as he took himself.
“There’s a list maintained by the federal government, which used to be called the ‘Strongman Ranking’-back in the days when Manuel Noriega and Moammar Khaddafi were our chief enemies of state-and now seems to be referred to more pedantically. I think it’s called ‘Terrorist Most Wanted’ now. Point being, it’s unofficial, so it isn’t shown around, but it exists, and is regularly updated as a joint effort of numerous agencies, based on a number of anti-American activities and other factors conducted by the people on the list. We have a copy of it, and while our guy doesn’t need to be one of the names on the list, if our suspect is one of those guys it’s another notch against reasonable doubt.”
Knowles passed around copies of the list, which had various headers and passages blacked out. The list was heavy on Middle Eastern names, and Laramie saw at least a few that shouldn’t have been there but for their public opposition to certain American policies.
“Coming back to Fidel,” Rothgeb said, “the man has held summits with virtually every enemy of the state, of our state at any rate, on a semiregular basis, in some cases annually, in some cases monthly, some for as long a period as the past thirty years. Anyway, in searching out staunch, fellow anti-U.S., anti-imperialist Castro allies, we’re talking about a long list. With our other factors plugged in, the list narrows, of course-and look, there may well be an unknown, undocumented multimillionaire behind this sleeper operation, and if so, then we’re making a mistake. But we’re prepared to stand by our pick, primarily due to the geographical proximity of the ‘filo lab’ vis à vis his background-and largely because of his background itself. We believe public enemy number one is Raul Márquez, or somebody associated with his regime.”
Laramie’s eyes dropped to Márquez’s name on the most wanted list. She knew who he was, and knew of his loud “beef”-many beefs-with America. On the resources front, she had her doubts, but he was certainly a Castro crony-
“He was the longtime head of organized labor in El Salvador,” Rothgeb said. “He’s held a position of influence and maintained a friendship with Castro for over fifteen years. His first candidacy for the presidency was a rout, and he hasn’t looked back; plus, he’s played a major role in helping organize labor and socialism-related movements with considerable political clout throughout Central and South America, to the point where you could say he is, in effect, a coalition leader of a number of socialist states, all of whom have a major beef with the U.S. and its ‘imperialism.’ You know his rhetoric-he and Hugo Chávez are the current heads of state who’ve essentially taken the anti-America torch from Fidel. The part of it bin-Laden isn’t already holding.”
Knowles adjusted his own sunglasses from his seat on the bed and jumped in, apparently on cue, since Rothgeb leaned back just as Knowles got started.
“We could make the case against Chávez, and a number of other figures, pretty effectively,” he said. “But for a variety of reasons, we’ve eliminated each of the others. Chávez, for instance, remains in dire need of the economic health of the United States-we buy most of his oil, among other reasons, and it’s his oil money that keeps him in power. His beef isn’t with U.S. citizens, but U.S. regimes. Finally, though, there’s one specific reason we believe we’re right to pin it on Márquez. He’s of native Central American descent-of Mayan ancestry. It’s said that if you’ll listen, he will tell-though only privately-where it is his hatred of all things American originated, and the accounts we’ve found of this tale are pretty consistent.”