“Be tougher,” Cooper said, “for the government’s spin to take effect if, say, the reporter had documentation, double-eyewitness testimony, artifacts, and other hard evidence backing his piece. Come to think of it, it’d be even tougher if more than one reporter broke the same story on the same day.”

Ebbers looked at him for another little while, then said, “Yes. Tougher still.”

Cooper nodded again, appearing marginally more cheery in doing so.

“So there are two issues for us to tackle here today, Lou.”

“Two issues.”

“Right. Issue number one,” Cooper said. “Starting yesterday, if Laramie, myself, or any of the Three Stooges should step into harm’s way-for any reason, you understand, anything outside of expiration from old age, which only I am in danger of experiencing-then on the day of that harm, six prominent journalists will be provided all the documentation we just discussed. Laramie and the Stooges, by the way, are unaware we are having this conversation. In fact I am certain she, at least, would be highly ticked off to learn that I’ve added her to my little self-preservation scheme.”

Cooper shifted in his seat, wincing at the discomfort of the full slate of injuries from which he was recovering.

“But Lou, I foresee at least some scenario by which you, or the people you work for, will someday conclude the personnel you recruited to work this suicide-sleeper case know just a little too much about the wrong things. I doubt, however, that you or the people you work for would like to see the Pentagon’s funding of biological-weapons research debated ad nauseum by the likes of Hannity & Colmes. I’m sure you had nothing to do with it in the first place, but you and your gang seem to be charged, if nothing else, with the preservation of this lovely status quo you’ve got going. Wouldn’t want to disturb that, now would you?”

“Go on to number two,” Ebbers said.

“Number two is quite simple. A single request.”

Ebbers did and said nothing.

“You or the people you work for were highly instrumental in acquiring a copy of the ‘Research Group’ memo authorizing funding for ‘Project Icarus,’ or however else the Pentagon referred to the lab in Guatemala.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Why, thank you,” Cooper said. “However, due to the efficiency with which you obtained the document, I would like you to deploy your ingenuity and wherewithal once more. I’ll say again: it’s a simple task. I’ll just need you to tell me who wrote it.”

Cooper shifted again in his seat.

“I want to know who worked for the ‘Research Group’ during the period in question-1979 or thereabouts, or in other words, the time when the lab was funded. Mostly, I’d like to know who made the call. I’m sure it shouldn’t be too difficult-hell, Lou, based on the efficient way most of the findings unearthed by the ‘cell’ that reported to you were kept utterly quiet, I’d guess you’re probably fast friends with some or all of the relevant parties anyway.”

Cooper tapped the steering wheel a couple times.

“Once you track down the names, you can leave the list, however long it might be, under my name at the front desk of the Jefferson Hotel. I’ll need it by eight A.M. tomorrow.”

Ebbers said, “Under your real name, or your assumed one?”

Cooper chuckled.

“Not bad, Lou,” he said. “Tell you what-take your pick. And just in case there are one or more names on the list with considerable clout-which I suspect there are-it goes without saying that once I get it, well, I didn’t get the list from you. Not, of course, unless I step into that aforementioned harm’s way.”

Cooper unlocked his door, opened it, and climbed out. He leaned in and tossed Lou Ebbers the car keys.

“Your driver’s in the trunk,” he said. “Slap him once or twice and he oughta come around.”

Cooper grinned.

“Live slow, mon,” he said.

Then he shut the door and strolled around the empty corner, Ebbers seeing the awkward fits and starts in his walk as Cooper limped his way out of view.

59

The alarm box in the building’s basement had taken some highly technical fiddling, but once he’d disarmed the window sensors, Cooper had been able to climb into the Georgetown brownstone undetected-and now sat in a very expensive leather reading chair in the brownstone’s library.

Besides the glow from a couple of safety lights in the hall-lights that hadn’t managed to keep the place safe from trespassing beach bums-the room was dark. Alone for the moment, Cooper pondered the concluding act of his “snuffer-outer” theory from his throne of darkness.

The snuffer-outers, which Cooper now believed to be a snuffer-outer, singular, had sought to eliminate all traces of the shipment of gold artifacts seized by the late Cap’n Roy. The snuffer-outer had caught wind of the artifacts’ existence upon the Coast Guard’s discovery of Po Keeler’s cargo in the hold of the Seahawk. The snuffer-outer had applied the muzzle to the tale of the pillaged artifacts because he knew where the artifacts had come from, and what had happened there: the snuffing out of an entire indigenous civilization. Said genocide occurring due to an accident, leak, or spill from the Pentagon-funded biological weapons laboratory operating, until then, under a shroud of secrecy a couple miles east of the village in the same rain forest crater.

And while the snuffer-outer had, until now, kept Cooper-CIA employee that he technically remained-out of the dead pool, Cooper figured the exclusion would now be rescinded. Particularly since Cooper, and the “cell” for which he worked, had found enough to connect the dots between the late Raul Márquez, his army of bio-bombers, their genetically engineered strain of filovirus, and the lab that had developed the strain.

The crayon that connected the dots, oddly enough, coming in the form of the sole survivor of the accidental genocide-a woman immortalized, at least temporarily, in a mausoleum beneath some very fine wine. And she’d had her revenge-she’d taken more American lives than the American filo lab had taken from her brethren. Including a sequential beheading of the full roster of names from the “Research Group” memo.

But in the end, she and Raul had been a little off target: they’d missed the actual author of the memo-the one to authorize the funding of the lab in the first place.

In the sealed envelope delivered to the Jefferson Hotel came a list of four names. The envelope had been addressed to Cooper’s real name, rather than his current, made-up identity. Though already fully aware of how Ebbers knew, Cooper still enjoyed the joke.

Four men had run the “Research Group” from 1976 to 1979, or so the new document retrieved by Ebbers revealed. Following a Langley database check of the three names he didn’t recognize, Cooper confirmed what he’d assumed to be true on his first read: only one of the four former Pentagon staffers on Ebbers’s list now held the kind of position that would have allowed him to learn of the Coast Guard’s seizure of the good ship Seahawk-and only one of the former staffers, the same man, possessed the power to engineer the snuff-out whose wrath Cooper had thus far managed to avoid.

He now sat in the man’s library-the personal study of the Snuffer-Outer-in-Chief.

When he came, Cooper knew the man would be arriving in a Lincoln Town Car, same as Lou Ebbers always did.

Henry Curlwood removed his coat and came into his brownstone.

“Hennie,” as he was called, had been Lieutenant Curlwood during his days at the helm of the Pentagon’s Research Group, but was now known-by Cooper and just about everyone else who read a newspaper-as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Curlwood.

Curlwood wore a holier-than-thou expression everywhere he went, including in the privacy of his own home-a fact to which Cooper was able to attest as the safety light in the vestibule illuminated the man’s face from the angle Cooper had on him from the library.