“Our operative,” she said, “has surfaced,” and she and her guide stood over the machine as it began printing page one, announced it was receiving the second page, and repeated the cycle for a third time before declaring with a bleep that the data feed had been halted, at which point Laramie heard Cooper’s whisper on the machine’s speaker.

“Goddamn this thing, how does it work-”

She snatched the machine’s receiver from its cradle. She could see the long list of names on the fax printouts, all seemingly Central American native in their spelling, hastily scribbled on a smaller sheet of paper highlighted by darker shading outside its rim on the pages-

“You’re alive,” Laramie said.

“Not for long. I sent three pages, you get ’em all?”

“Got ’em. Wait a minute, are you telling me-”

“Those are your sleepers. All one hundred and seventeen of them.”

“What? How could you-”

“These are their original names, obviously. So you’ll need to track ’em backward-or whatever way you analyst types and the Three Stooges you have working for you track those sorts of things.”

“My God,” Laramie said, looking at her guide, who offered her a shrug. She handed him the list and he went immediately over to the seat in front of his laptop and jumped on his telephone.

Laramie thought through what this meant as quickly as she could. It would be a challenge working backward against the clock, with only the original names and no places of original residence, let alone photographs to work from-but Cooper had just put them ninety-nine names closer than where they’d been a minute ago-one-seventeen minus Achar, the fifteen captured sleepers identified by them and the “other cell,” and the Illinois and Yakima bombers. Local records with photographs would be the first, and hardest step, depending on whether Márquez had recruited from multiple Central and South American nations-

“He sent the activation by television ad,” Cooper said, “and that’s all I’ve got, except for the fact that I’ve got our pal Raul here in a headlock. One question-just in case, against every probability imaginable, I make it out.”

“A headlock-what? What is it?”

“Yes or no answer. No maybes.”

“Fine. What is it?”

“You agree?”

“Fine!”

“Mr. Grand Poobah,” Cooper’s whisper said.

“What?”

“You let half of it slip-only once, but I need to know. For my own reasons, and don’t ask. Is Lou Ebbers your boss?”

Despite the evident circumstances in motion on the other end of the line, Laramie hesitated. What in the hell is he going to do with-

“No fucking maybes, Laramie. And have some goddamn faith.”

One-Mississippi-

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

She flicked her eyes in the direction of her guide, who was busy at his workstation.

Then she said, “I’m glad you’ve made it-so far, I mean.”

“‘So far’ being the key phrase,” he said. “I wouldn’t be throwing me any parties anytime soon.”

A few snaps of static came.

“See you around,” he said.

Then the fax machine announced with another bleep that the line had gone dead.

56

Cooper released the headlock, grasped both his guns, and rewrapped himself around Márquez like an Ace bandage in his own right. With his left arm, he got Márquez into a half nelson-elbow jammed against the man’s underarm, forearm mashed against his neck. Taking the Browning, he held it backward and jammed the barrel against Márquez’s temple. His thumb served as the trigger finger: any slight, unexpected jostle, and Cooper knew his beefy thumb would engage the weapon-some-thing he hoped the security people would immediately grasp. He pressed the front of his body against Márquez’s back and wrapped his right arm snugly around the front of him, MP5 in hand. He’d need to walk sideways to his left-like a crab-but he’d be protected by his quarry in the front, and could pivot and shoot with the MP5 by turning them both in a circle.

He crab-walked his hostage up a stairwell to a door-a door leading, Cooper was sure, to the main body of the house.

“Open the door, King,” he said.

When Márquez did, Cooper whacked his forehead against the softer backside of the president’s skull-a head-butt he hoped would stun the man but not drop him. He heard an umph from behind the Ace bandage and felt Márquez go slightly limp.

Then he crab-dashed through the door.

He immediately clocked three security men in the room as he and Márquez, joined at the hip, flew into the library.

Then he went nuts.

“¡Lo tengo! Tranquilizate, no haga nada! Lo mato, lo juro que lo mato! Back the fuck off!”

He kept moving, picking out the archway at the other end of the room and heading there, Cooper and Márquez a four-hundred-pound exit-seeking bundle waddling its way outta town. As he crab-shuffled along, he tried to keep all three men in sight. Their weapons were drawn; two of them were soldiers, Cooper seeing AK-47s, while the other wore a suit and came armed with a pistol. The man in the suit started talking, trying to get his words in over Cooper’s screams-

“¡Tranquilo, tranquilo!”

Cooper hearing muffled grunts from behind the Ace bandage, knowing his precious few seconds of advantage were wasting away. Keep moving, you useless old hack-another twenty feet and you’ll be through that fucking archway…

Cooper ready to guarantee he’d find windows, and maybe even a door, when he reached the room beyond the arch. He saw a fountain there, heard the clack of approaching shoes on tile.

“¡Tengo una bomba para matarnos! You move too fast, I’ll kill this motherfucker!”

He crossed beneath the threshold of the arch in his slow waddle, picked a direction, and turned immediately out from under the arch, pressing his back against a wall, so that the wall blocked the library goons’ view of him. The clackers appeared around a corner-two soldiers and two suits-and then Cooper saw the tall windows behind them and, beyond, the driveway.

He swiveled the barrel of the MP5 to point it in the direction of the approaching guards, coming to a sorry realization as he did it. You turned the wrong way-you’ll need to cross the archway again to get to the window.

Too bad-carpe diem time.

He let loose with the MP5 on the four newcomers, none of the men more than twenty-five feet from the mouth of his gun. The automatic fire from the rifle sounded oddly silent, Cooper first thinking the gun had jammed, then understanding the silencer at the tip of the barrel was doing its thing, a function he no longer required but seemed to fortify his jump on the guards.

Releasing his grip on Márquez, he plowed a knee into his back and sent him sprawling across the tile. Regretting he’d never taken the chance to practice such things with video games, Cooper rotated the Browning to a normal trigger hold and put half a dozen rounds into the King of the Sleepers while he kept at the four soldiers with the MP5.

He couldn’t be sure he’d taken down Márquez with his half-ass pot-shots, but he doubted he’d gone worse than four-for-six. Cooper wasn’t sure it would make a difference anyway. The King of the Sleepers’ memorialized army was already doing its thing.

Maybe Laramie, the Stooges, and the Poobah would stop them; maybe not.

He lowered his head and started a sprint for the window, turning as he ran across the open archway to fire blindly into the darker library and the three guards within-guards he knew would now be lighting him up without hesitation.

A bullet punched into his right leg below the knee and he almost stumbled into a heap when he felt a wrecking ball bury itself in his shoulder, but then he was past the open archway and realized he was in for a hard collision with the window-and with the window coming up on him, he let loose with the MP5, feeling the clip go empty as he drained its shells into the thick pane of glass-