Though it was fairly straightforward, Cooper read through the memo a second time before setting it facedown on the clear plastic tabletop, thinking, having followed the grainy words on the pages, that his theory on the place the snuffer-outers worked was becoming uncomfortably incontrovertible.
“Interesting memo,” he said.
“Yes. And by the way, I have personally broken six or seven laws in showing that document to you over lunch. But since such egregious security clearance violations seem to be emerging as my specialty, let’s stick to the more important reasons behind our lunch meeting.”
She plucked a celery stick from the veggie plate the waitress had brought with their drinks and snapped off a bite. As she spoke, Cooper felt another twinge of guilt-now that he’d let the human lie detector machine out of her cage, the snuffer-outers may well get handed to him on a silver platter-but he wondered how well he would do at sparing her from their wrath.
“Obviously the memo speaks for itself,” she said. “It is no longer a stretch to connect the dots between an illegal U.S.-funded biological weapons lab, a filovirus outbreak near that lab that managed to erase an entire village of people, a survivor who made it out and paid a visit on a local mission’s health clinic-and, somehow, the subsequent appearance of a similar or identical strain of genetically altered filovirus that is about to be used as a weapon of mass destruction within U.S. borders.”
Cooper nodded. “Agreed-it’s no longer a stretch.”
“The other thing about that memo,” she said, “the part not included on the page, is that Messrs. Knowles, Cole, and Rothgeb determined while I was making my way to your little kingdom on the bay here that every man on that memo’s distribution list is dead.”
Cooper raised his eyebrows.
“All of them were murdered,” Laramie said. “Separately, and, mostly-actually, in all cases but one-by the method of execution-style beheading.”
“They’re all dead?”
“Every name on the page,” she said.
The snuffer-outers, he thought, have been busy.
But as he thought that through, sipping from the pint of Bass, he considered that it didn’t fit. Didn’t mean it wasn’t the case; it just didn’t fit. The names on the distribution list of the memo must, he thought, all be on Uncle Sam’s payroll-and unless he’d been wrong from the beginning, it was his own status as a CIA hack that had spared his life. So far. It just didn’t make sense for the snuffer-outers to have iced the members of the memo’s distribution list sometime back, before they’d elected to try to take him out-and on top of it all, he found it unlikely federal government snuffer-outers would use execution-style beheadings anyway. Not exactly one of the top weapons of choice, as he and Riley had discussed near Cap’n Roy’s pool, of hired contract killers sent at the behest of U.S. government officials.
Last he checked, for example, he didn’t keep a machete under his pillow at Conch Bay.
Cooper decided he would operate under the theory that somebody else had performed the beheadings. This didn’t mean there wasn’t somebody who knew the details, however, just the way that somebody might have known the details had the snuffer-outers done it.
“It occurs to me,” Cooper said, “as I’m sure it does to you, that serial beheadings of people who work at or with the Pentagon probably wouldn’t go uninvestigated.”
“Yes,” she said, “that did occur to me.”
“Also occurs to me,” he said, “as I imagine it did to you, that this would be a good explanation as to how the people you work for were able to get their hands on a copy of the memo on such short notice.”
Laramie nodded absently. “It’s certainly unlikely,” she said, “that it would have been kept in the same file location after the attaché was busted selling his lists. You’re right-it’s more likely it would have been top-of-mind for somebody had there been multiple murder investigations under way.”
Laramie thought again of the CIA man at the task force meeting.
“The way my skeptic’s goggles see it,” Cooper said, “it would then follow that the people you work for knew about the memo you were asking to see. And if they knew about the memo, then they probably know what that memo authorized, and probably even what happened in 1983-or whenever it was that the lab sprang a leak and blew out an entire Indian village.”
“It also follows,” Laramie said, “those same people would have at least a rudimentary understanding of the fact-presuming it’s true-that it was the Pentagon lab that developed the filo the sleepers are about to try to kill us with.”
Cooper smiled with his lips sealed shut. What he thought, as he offered Laramie the smile, was that it also follows I’ll soon learn who it was who applied the muzzle to the potentially revealing artifact shipment by acing Cap’n Roy, Po Keeler, and a few other relatively undeserving souls. And since it’s likely to be the same person or group of people who saw to the slaughter of an entire Indian civilization, I’ll soon be in a place where I can seek a little payback for my second-ever client as detective-to-the-dead-that twelve-inch priestess statue and the murdered Indian village she came from.
“How do you manage to pull this shit off?”
Cooper took a few moments but couldn’t figure what it was he might have missed in the conversation that would lead Laramie to ask her question.
“What shit is that?”
“In the ordinary course of events,” Laramie said, “leading the life of leisure you prefer to lead, you’ve managed to uncover the key scrap of evidence indicating the U.S. government’s probable culpability in what may be the greatest threat to the country’s existence.”
“Oh,” he said, “that.”
The food arrived-for Laramie, tuna and salad; for Cooper, a bacon cheeseburger. Since he had finished his second Bass, he ordered a third. Laramie waved off the waiter’s suggestion she select a cocktail from the drinks menu and held tight with her ice water, which they’d refilled three or four times already. This despite Laramie’s taking, at most, a pair of quarter-inch sips from her glass between refills.
Cooper took a hefty bite out of the burger. When his beer arrived, Laramie set her fork on the table, crossed her hands together, and rested the weight of her chin on her hands, elbows propped on the table.
“Let’s talk about the here and now,” Laramie said.
Here it comes, Cooper thought.
“Do you think he’s the one?”
“Do I think who,” Cooper said, “is the one.”
“Márquez.”
Cooper nodded.
“Hard to see how it’s anyone else,” he said. “But you never know.”
“I can’t believe we’ve chosen a lively Irish pub,” she said, “and are simply sitting out here on the sidewalk for lunch, considering the plan I’m here to tell you about.”
He let her get to it at her own pace. He took another bite of his burger.
“We need you to go in and ‘eradicate’ him,” she said after a while-and a little more quietly than she’d been speaking till now.
Cooper chewed his mouthful of bacon, cheese, sirloin, roll, and barbecue sauce, then sipped from the pint glass to wash it all down.
“Márquez, I mean,” Laramie said, “of course.”
Cooper nodded dully but still didn’t say anything.
“I take it this doesn’t come as much of a surprise,” she said.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
Laramie told him the options she had presented to the people she worked for and the choices that had been made.
Cooper nodded again, about as dully as before.
“More or less the only choices,” he said.
Laramie cleared her throat.
“I was told to tell you a number of things about what happens if you’re capt-”
Cooper held up a hand and Laramie stopped midword.
“Nobody knows me, nobody’s heard of me, nobody is affiliated with me. Hell, he’s not even American, that Cooper character,” he said, then gave her another emotionless grin. “Comes with the territory.”