Rothgeb said, “Those routes have mostly dried up, primarily due to the increased aggression of U.S. immigration policy, but that was not the case ten years ago.”

“Anyway,” Cole said, “they’re ‘probable’ because we haven’t exactly knocked on their doors and looked around for racks of filovirus serum. It could be there’s no connection at all, but in our view that’s unlikely. There are too many matches with our criteria.”

Christ, Laramie thought, we may just turn out to be qualified for this gig after all.

She realized as this thought occurred to her that in one significant way, their job was all but over. They had now accumulated enough intel to push things up and out of their reach: she would have to take a closer look at their research, but it was time to offer the whole plate of goods to Lou Ebbers.

Time to take her “cell’s” findings to her “control”-presuming her guide hadn’t already updated the man top to bottom. Regardless, it seemed to Laramie that Lou Ebbers-and whoever he was working for-was about to have some tough decisions to make.

She took in a breath and let it out slowly, refocusing on the discussion at hand.

“Why don’t you show me what you have on these six people,” she said. “I assume you’ve got a working file with the scoop on each.”

Cole reached over to the bed, lifted the manila folder he’d been keeping there, and gave it a Frisbee toss to the table. It skidded over to Laramie.

“Scoop enclosed,” he said.

44

The spiderphone was in use again.

Laramie’s guide had deployed the bizarre-looking contraption on the bedside table in her room. As before, its red indicator light was illuminated.

Laramie sat alone in the room with her guide.

“So where are we?” came the static-ridden and otherwise distorted voice of Lou Ebbers over the spiderphone.

Laramie continued to appreciate the no-nonsense approach of her new boss: do your job, give me my answers. Good. She liked it that way.

“Where we are,” Laramie said, “is we’ve reached a decision point.”

She’d filled him in earlier on Castro’s theme park, so Laramie launched in with the identities of the six probable sleepers. Then, feeling more or less like a teaching assistant to her former professor, she laid out Rothgeb’s earlier lecture, providing Ebbers with all criteria, factors, and suppositions her team had incorporated into the “public enemy equation,” as they called it afterward, including Cooper’s discoveries of the Guatemala facility and its adjoining village of death.

She offered up her “counter-cell’s” conclusion that the Salvadoran president and perennial thorn in America’s public relations hide was their man. She made sure to cover Raul Márquez’s background, which she assumed Ebbers already understood-but even if he did, as the “prosecutor” making her case, Laramie wanted to emphasize the point to her boss that Márquez’s genocide-survival story explained the leader’s motive. She’d already presented the circumstantial evidence, based mostly on his relationship with Castro, which had granted him the cooperation he’d needed for the Americanization training and that the refugee-dump demanded, in addition to Márquez’s potential access to the filo. The motive sealed the case: he had a reason behind his actions, not just the rhetoric he was famous for, and his tale of murder-squad survival gave him the best possible recruiting pitch with fellow victims of regional genocide across the Americas.

“Bottom line, Lou,” she said, briefing complete, “is it’s definitely a theory based on speculation, but it’s educated and informed speculation. When you do the math, he’s the guy.”

Ebbers took little time digesting.

“The six probable sleepers,” he said. “They may be only six of ten, or six of fifty-we still have no way of knowing, at least outside of the apparent enormity of the theme park training operation. Correct?”

“That’s right,” Laramie said.

“And we’ve got nothing on timing.”

“You mean, when the other sleepers are set to be activated?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing there,” she said. “Not yet.”

A click of electronic static echoed from the speaker.

Then Ebbers spoke up again.

“As usual, Miss Laramie,” he said, “you’re right-we have, in fact, reached a decision point.”

Before setting up the call, Laramie had prepared herself for what she assumed would come next. Starting with the first “job interview,” she’d grown familiar with the way Ebbers preferred to work-meaning she had a pretty good idea he’d ask what strategy she recommended they follow.

“I’ve got my own ideas,” Ebbers said, confirming Laramie’s suspicion, “but you should take me through the response scenarios as you see them-our choices on what to do now that we know what we know. In other words, what would you do, Miss Laramie,” he said, “if Márquez is, in fact, the man?”

Even though she was ready for this, it didn’t mean Laramie liked being the one suggesting some of the options she was about to lay out. She counted out a couple of Mississippis in her head, and was about to start in on response strategy number one, when Ebbers spoke again.

“You can assume something else too,” he said. “Assume, in making your recommendations, that the president, or some other decision-making entity of equivalent clout, has asked the question. That I am simply posing it for the decision maker, and that the decision maker can act immediately upon reaching a decision.”

Laramie hesitated-the way he’d put it, saying “or some other decision-making entity of equivalent clout,” struck her as an odd thing for Ebbers to say considering he was comparing such decision-making clout to the commander-in-chief’s. Whose clout, of course, was supposed to be unequivocal.

Unless, of course, you consider Congress, and the rest of the checks and balances, as “equivalent.” But the way he’d said it gave her pause-she knew Ebbers did not let slip a single word, so there was something to what he’d just revealed. And in her independent study paper, Laramie’s recommendation had been for the counter-cell “cubes” to function entirely outside the umbrella of government. She found it hard to believe the structure of Ebbers’s organization would follow every last one of her recommendations-

There was no more putting it off, so Laramie got to it.

“The alternatives are simple enough to conceive,” she said, “but to enact-”

“Get to it, Miss Laramie.”

“Fine,” she said. “Option one: roll the dice and immediately take out the six deep cover sleeper agents. Remove the pathogen vials from their possession and eradicate the threat they present. Are there ten others? Five? Twenty? Even if there are, we’ve cut down the threat to American lives by a presumably significant percentage.”

“Next.”

“Next, possibly executed simultaneously with option one, is to wage war on Márquez’s regime. Immediately. I say this because if the action isn’t immediate, and immediately effective, it could well cause Márquez to sound the alarm and activate the sleepers faster than he would have without the military action.”

The line hissed and clicked dully, Ebbers keeping mum for a minute. Laramie had a pretty good idea he was thinking this one through in precisely the way she’d thought it through before putting it on her list. He spoke up, once again confirming another suspicion of the human lie detector machine.

“War cannot exactly be waged with immediacy,” he said, “except, of course, by nuclear strike.”

“I had considered and was concerned about that version of the war strategy,” Laramie said.

Ebbers dove in on that one.

“You don’t think the threat of a virtually unchecked spread of the modern equivalent of the 1918 flu pandemic-and therefore the credible threat to upward of hundreds of thousands of American lives-outweighs the potential damage inflicted on the offending nation by a nuclear strike?”