Cooper nodded at this. It partially confirmed the last piece of the crypt-puzzle he’d been assembling.

“By ‘next,’” Cooper said, “you mean she’d have beheaded you too?”

Márquez looked at him again but didn’t offer a reply.

“I’m curious how she would have found the Pentagon memo,” Cooper said, “but then again maybe she had access to that kind of thing through the university.”

Either way, he thought, it seems the Indian girl from the village has sought and found her vengeance-both on the people who authorized the lab and, depending, an unhealthy dose of citizens from the country who funded it.

Too bad the swing of her machete missed the neck of a couple last souls-the snuffer-outers, the last survivors of the vengeance she hoped to exact on the architects of the filo lab.

Enter me.

He coaxed his thoughts back to the topic of the names on the memorial slab of marble. Despite the fact that they’d need to work in reverse, and track the current identity of the sleepers from their original, local names, Cooper figured Laramie, the Three Stooges, and the Grand Poobah could still make use of the list of names he’d just transcribed.

And aside from the fact that he’d been sent to “eradicate” the man, he’d now have some use for the continued survival of Raul Márquez-the King of the Sleepers.

He straightened his elbow and held the Browning tight, taking aim at Márquez’s head. Márquez almost seemed to sigh in relief-even pleasure.

“The assassin,” Márquez said, closing his eyes, “taking the assassin.”

Yeah, Cooper thought, I’ve wanted to die plenty of times too after what happened to me.

“Not quite,” Cooper said.

Márquez opened his eyes.

“I thought you were here to kill me,” he said.

“I was,” Cooper said. “And I am. But too bad-you’ll need to wallow in your misery for a little while longer.”

Keeping the Browning trained on Márquez, Cooper came around Sleeping Beauty’s coffin and-making sure to maintain a few feet between himself and Márquez’s watchful eyes-grasped the handle of the door.

“Let’s take a walk,” he said.

54

Upon her return to the Flamingo Inn, Laramie found herself greeted by a strange call from Lou Ebbers.

Not unexpected, but strange nonetheless.

He told her he had pulled the fire alarm-how, he hadn’t clarified further than before, but he said he’d pulled it nonetheless. He mentioned that emergency quarantine preparations were now in process; the identity and location of the sleepers Laramie’s cell had found had been revealed to the FBI, CIA, and other relevant agencies, and busts made immediately. “Other cells,” as he’d put it on the call, had also identified additional sleepers on the same approximate time line as her team, and those sleepers had been rounded up too-fifteen total captures. He indicated that in the past hour, the media had just been given a great deal of advance intel, something Laramie already knew from the coverage of the “credible terror threat” she watched on CNN from the DirecTV-equipped seat on her Jet Blue flight back down south from JFK.

This much she’d expected; these measures, among others, were the idea behind pulling the fire alarm in the first place. She had even expected to hear, at some point, that there were “other cells” doing what she and her team had been doing, parallel to them.

The part she found strange, though also not unexpected, was the warning Ebbers mentioned next.

“Just a quick reminder, Miss Laramie,” he’d said to her over the spider-phone. “You haven’t been doing what you’ve been doing. None of the intelligence you or your cell has generated, in doing the things you haven’t been doing, is to be revealed to anyone.”

When it seemed he was waiting for an acknowledgment of his order, Laramie went ahead and gave him one.

“I’ve always understood that to be the case,” she said.

“I mention this not because of what you will now see in the media coverage of the ‘credible threat’ to the nation’s security-but because of what you won’t see.”

Laramie had a pretty good idea what was coming.

“In the media, as well as in the government circles that have now been exposed to your findings,” he said, “you will find no mention of Guatemala. You will hear nothing about a research lab there, or a hemorrhagic fever outbreak that occurred in the same region as documented in a journal found by the CDC. You will hear nothing about Cuba, Fidel Castro, or an underground theme-park-for-rent under a hill in San Cristóbal. And finally, Miss Laramie, you will hear nothing about Raul Márquez, nor any operations related to his assassination.”

From the moment she’d logged her request, through Lou Ebbers, to see the Pentagon memo referencing the “Project ICRS” research lab, Laramie had assumed these pieces of the puzzle would be left out of any official government inquiry into the suicide-sleeper situation. It didn’t mean she liked it, but she knew she wasn’t going to be given any say about whether the omissions should remain omitted, or not. She also knew this piece of the puzzle didn’t need to be addressed immediately.

“Thank you for keeping me in the loop on that,” she’d said, and Ebbers told her she was welcome and broke the connection.

In the twenty hours since she’d taken the call, her guide had instructed Laramie to keep the Three Wise Men doing their work; also in the meantime, the shit had hit the fan.

The Krups brewer in her room made its exasperated sounds announcing the end of its percolation and Laramie rose to refill her Flamingo Inn-issue Styrofoam cup. The television blared as she walked past it for the refill, and kept on blaring on her way back.

Laramie had left the war room to brew a fresh cup of coffee, but now that she was here, she realized she hadn’t sat through a full coverage cycle from any of the news bureaus, and that she should probably take the chance to watch one now.

She sat at the table and watched the news.

The Fox News Channel had its usual BREAKING NEWS banner at the bottom of the screen, punctuated by the words TERROR ALERT: RED, both of which circulated with the freshly devised label for the crisis ruling the day: BIOTERROR BOMBS: AMERICA UNDER FIRE.

Various updates rotated through their cycle beneath the banners at the base of the screen, most of the headlines related to a pair of suicide bombings that had taken place in the past six hours. The first had been set off around five P.M. in an Illinois suburb near Lake Michigan; the second, in Yakima, Washington, along the Columbia River, two hours later. News on such matters as the quarantine measures officials had enacted following the blasts were also being covered by the headline prose.

The first pair of suicide blasts had come from sleepers they hadn’t known about.

On-screen, Brit Hume was busy discussing with a terrorism expert Laramie didn’t recognize the likelihood that “additional bombings may be planned,” something the Homeland Security secretary had stated in a press conference thirty minutes following the Illinois blast. Concluding his grilling of this first expert, the news anchor turned in his chair and moved on to the next authority, an official from the Centers for Disease Control to whom he was connected live via satellite. As they dove into a discussion on the topic of the potential filovirus outbreaks-along with such statistics as the quantity of Tamiflu and other antivirals the CDC kept on hand, and various measures individual citizens could take to avoid infection-Laramie swallowed a few sips of the sour coffee.

The quarantining efforts, she knew, would remain productive only if a sufficiently low number of filo bombs were set off. If more than a handful of the suicide sleepers were able to succeed in launching localized animal-and-human breakouts, the quarantine barriers would be breached and the casualties would mount horrifically.