“Whether or not I can,” came Ebbers’s voice, “I did. Do you not believe it to be the correct strategy?”

“You did. That doesn’t mean the people you work for did. And I may believe it’s the correct strategy, but the people you work for may not. So if they haven’t been made aware-”

“Don’t jump to conclusions.”

Laramie took in some air.

“I assure you,” Ebbers said, “that the people I work for knew of my decision. And authorized it.”

Laramie said, “But it’s an illegal tactic, there is no way anyone in the federal government who…”

She stopped herself midsentence as the point that Ebbers was trying to express finally dawned on her.

A little too slowly, she thought. Very carefully, she said, “So all this time, you’re telling me you-and I-haven’t been working for the federal-”

“Some things are better left unsaid,” Ebbers said, managing to effectively interrupt her even over the encrypted phone line. “And as I told you, I had every confidence you would come around to this in due course. Now that we understand each other, I’ll repeat my question to you: do you agree we’re taking the appropriate measures?”

Laramie began counting out the Mississippis in her head. She got all the way to eight, rather than her usual three, before she’d sorted through all her potential follow-up questions-namely, Who the hell is it we’re working for then?-along with the accompanying concern of whether to ask such questions, and what the answers might possibly mean, presuming she’d even get any answers out of Ebbers if she asked. By the time she’d finished thinking these things through-by the time she hit eight-Mississippi-Laramie decided the wisest course was to zip it. She’d be better served by storing this knowledge for later. She could then use it, or make inquiries as she saw fit, to her advantage-rather than under the stress of the current crisis.

She’d ask her questions later-if and only if, she thought, they could figure out, down one operative, how in the world to stop multiple terrorist sleepers from dispersing clouds of an airborne filovirus certain to kill thousands of Americans, even with massive quarantining measures put into place. Which would need to be done immediately.

And we’re supposed to do all this, she thought, while keeping our own role in matters a state secret?

Or a non-state secret.

She decided to answer Ebbers’s question.

“So far, yes,” she said, “I believe we’re taking the appropriate measures. But we’ll need to change the strategy immediately. We haven’t identified any other sleepers-so for all we know there could be ten, or twenty, or fifty more set to go.”

“And you think you’ve lost your operative?”

“I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “Not yet. But even if he succeeds, this morning’s activity from the Scarsdale sleeper means it’s likely the activation command has been sent to more than one of the bombers. How, by what means, in what form-as with the rest of this goddamn thing, we have no idea. Our private party is over, Lou. It’s out of our ‘cell’s’ hands, and that’s the understatement to top all understatements. We need to cause multiple agencies to immediately activate all the avian flu quarantine measures they’ve been rehearsing behind the scenes until now. We need to arrest and interrogate the six sleepers we have under surveillance. We need to bring the media up to speed-so that Mom and Pop in Tulsa can phone in a tip that somebody’s been stockpiling fertilizer in his garage in the house up the street. There’s no more time for this compartmentalized spy game you recruited me to play.”

“All right, Miss Laramie,” Ebbers said, “I am hearing you, and we are not thinking differently from each other.” She heard the measured tone in his delivery, even with the electronic garble. “But we do, however, have a moment. We’re not sure of the progress of your operative yet, if any, and we’re also not yet positive any of the other sleepers are being activated. If more than just the Scarsdale sleeper stops by his local Home Depot this morning, then I agree. There won’t be any alternative. It’ll be time for FEMA, CDC, DHS, FBI, CIA, the media, everybody and their grandmother to board up the windows and hunker down for the storm.”

Laramie felt the heat easing back down her neck.

But I’m certainly not prepared to undertake the risk of waiting another day, or two, or more, when the quarantining efforts and the tried-and-true Soviet strategy of impelling your citizens to spy on their neighbors could very well prevent thousands of casualties from turning into hundreds of thousands, or more-

“In the meantime,” Ebbers said, “pick up your Scarsdale sleeper, and get up there and interrogate him. See if you can deploy the same charm you did with Janine Achar while you’re at it.”

It suddenly occurred to Laramie she’d been idiotic not to already have done what Ebbers was telling her to do. Because Achar set off his explosives before anyone was able to speak to him, Laramie had only been able to interview his widow-and now they had the chance to interrogate one of Achar’s comrades while the man remained alive and kicking.

“Not sure why I didn’t already-”

“The moment one more of them stops by his local nursery or hardware store, we go in and take all of them,” Ebbers said. “At which point I’ll pull the fire alarm-the leaders of the disbanded task force will be provided the new intel discovered by the ‘special investigator’ and will immediately, I suspect, activate all the measures you mentioned.”

“Right,” Laramie said. “The fire alarm.”

A moment of static clicked by.

Then Ebbers’s electronically distorted voice said, “All right, then,” and the red indicator light on the spiderphone flickered out and the line went dead.

49

Cooper identified what he assumed were most but not all of the video cameras monitoring his side of the mansion. There was also a roving patrol, two guys walking together around the outside of the house, plus a few Secret Service equivalents camped out near a pair of black Chevy Suburbans toward the front of the residence.

There were some weak points in the house’s design, mostly the sort related to the historical qualities of the home, including the lead casement windows they’d kept in order to maintain the authentic hacienda look. Still, having seen photographs of Márquez’s wine cellar-and working from the dread of his sixth sense on the certainty that a sequence of tunnels and rooms originally designed as a prison and torture chamber ran beneath his feet-Cooper decided now, as he had when he’d examined the images provided by Laramie’s guide, that the surest way in would be underground.

There were no electrical wires, television cables, or other utility connections visible on the exterior of the home. He looked for and found the mansion’s air-conditioner units, which they’d planted in a bed of bark chips alongside some tropical greenery. As he suspected, in a kind of garden of technology, it was in this bed of A/C units that the various utility meters were planted too. Another, larger utility box of some kind stood among the other measuring devices; initially at a loss, he was finally able to identify it as the head end of a cable connection, probably capable of distributing television service across a small city. He learned this by cracking open the lock and peering inside the panel door, where he found labels, printed in Spanish, for the various feeds and splits to forty-three televisions.

Salvadorans’ tax dollars, he thought, hard at work.

His theory hit paydirt upon his discovery of a rectangular equivalent of a manhole cover. It was nestled in the bark behind the various meter stands and boxes. With the aid of the knife he’d brought for any hand-to-hand encounters with the security staff, he got the heavy metal lid pried from its roost, exposing beneath a broad band of wires and pipes, held together by an oversize plastic strip of the sort used to secure extension cords and hoses.