“Time to earn your money.”
Upon hearing Laramie’s voice over the earpiece of his sat phone, Cooper checked his watch-ten of twelve. He decided he had no idea when he’d fallen asleep-ten minutes ago? Twenty? However long it had been, it hadn’t been enough. If nothing else, at least the beers he’d put in the icebox would be cold now, so he’d be able to drink something chillier than piss-warm brew.
He thought immediately of asking Laramie to look into the letters “ICR” for him-admit he was a failure as an investigator, that he’d be better off swimming laps, consuming lukewarm beer, and taking his cherished late-morning naps, and leave it at that. Rub her nose in the scent, he knew, and Laramie could find just about anything-including how to get his goat like nobody’s business. Julie Laramie, he thought-the woman he’d once referred to as the human lie detector machine. Maybe I’ll just put her on the case.
Since Cooper wasn’t thinking any of these thoughts out loud, Laramie went on.
“You’ll need to get us into Cuba,” she said. “The sooner the better.”
“Us?”
“You and me. Or, if you prefer to think of it this way, the operative and his commanding officer in the ‘counter-cell cell.’”
Cooper thought for a moment, reclined as he was in the hammock that stretched between a pair of palms at the far end of the beach. He couldn’t see the restaurant from where he lay, which meant that nobody in the restaurant could see him either. Either way, it was the ideal time of day-the sun was high and hot, the sky clear, and most of the guests had headed into the restaurant or their bungalows from the beach, either eating lunch or readying to do it. A pair of kids played in the water all the way down the other end of the beach, but no one else was around.
“Whatever it is you want done on Fidel’s home turf,” he said, “if you’re calling me to do it, it can’t be good, and if it’s nasty business, you’ve got no business going along for the ride. Even as commander-in-chief of your empire of dirt.”
He had a feeling the skin on Laramie’s neck was turning a splotchy, pinkish red right about now.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” was all she said.
Cooper said nothing, unimpressed with the reaction he’d failed to earn.
“How do you go about getting there?” Laramie said. “I know you’ve been plenty of times.”
“Cuba?” Cooper said. “Pretty much the way you’d go about getting anywhere.”
He heard something that sounded like a sigh over the phone.
“I understand Cuba is happy to take tourism dollars despite the U.S. trade and travel embargo,” Laramie said. “I’m not talking about a pleasure cruise. We’ll need to go there in secret. Probably under false names. And preferably-”
“Going that way’s simple for somebody with your connections. And mine. Book a seat aboard a military transport into Guantanamo Bay and sneak in from there. That’s the preferred means of entry for CIA. Everybody, including Fidel, knows it, and no one really cares anymore. Once in a while the Cuban government’ll toss an American in prison, hold him for a day or two-”
“I don’t want to use my ‘connections,’” Laramie said, “and I don’t want you using yours, either. Technically, the investigation we’re conducting is nonexistent. I think the people I work for would be more concerned about my operating through CIA or military channels than if we were to get in there in some way that alerts the Cuban government to our presence. Anyway, it seems to me this is one of the main reasons we have you on the team-to generate HUMINT. Unconventionally, if need be.”
“One of the reasons,” Cooper said, not quite making it a question.
After enough silence had passed for Cooper to be forced to admit Laramie had refused to bite, Cooper said, “By boat, then. I’d do it by boat.”
“Yours?”
“Hell, no. Always a chance Fidel’s Revolutionary Navy’ll take your boat if they find out what you’re doing and don’t like it. It’s a small chance, but still a chance.”
“How do you do it then?”
“If you want to do it undetected, or relatively so, you just sail on in. Literally. Preferably on a pretty quick boat, but one you can afford to lose. When you say ‘sooner the better,’ how soon are we talking about?”
“However soon you can get us there.”
“Also, where we going? Pretty big island, Cuba.”
It took a moment for Laramie to answer. “Near the western tip, on the south coast. San Cristóbal,” she said.
Cooper flipped over his wrist and checked the time on his Tag. He’d need to make a couple of calls, and they’d need to get themselves on a couple of flights-neither of which tasks would put them past midafternoon.
“Unless things have changed in the last five years, there’s a three o’clock nonstop to Cancún out of Fort Myers,” he said. “American. Get yourself on the flight and I’ll pick you up outside the baggage claim. I were you,” he added, “I’d pick up some Dramamine in the airport gift shop. Don’t take it until after you land-it’ll be another hour from there before we’re out on the water.”
Cooper knew it would take at least six hours by sea, maybe more, before whatever shitbucket his friend Abe Worel procured would deliver them to the land of Fidel, Che, and good baseball-and that Laramie would probably be heaving her guts over the side maybe fifteen minutes into the trip, regardless of how many Dramamine tablets she took. But the drug usually mitigated the effect, if nothing else.
After a moment Laramie said, “You’re saying we’re going in tonight?”
“That soon enough?” he said. “Call if you miss the flight. Otherwise I’ll see you at the baggage claim.”
Cooper ended the call.
With nothing much else to do during the usual delays on the pair of flights he was taking to get from Tortola to Cancún, Cooper brought Laramie’s terror book along for the trip and reread most of the material. He couldn’t concentrate particularly well-whenever he hit a boring passage, which was always, he’d begin experiencing visions of the various dead ends in his triple-murder, seek-to-save-your-own-ass case-the golden-idol priestess screeching for help, Cap’n Roy dead by his pool, Po Keeler’s tarp-covered body down in the Dump, these images all sloshing around his sodden mind’s eye between thoughts of Belize City, the contract killer, U.S. Coast Guard cutters, the Polar Bear, and that strip of wood from the bottom of the fucking cave in-
Guatemala.
He read the word on the page just as he thought it. He focused on what he’d been reading, realizing he hadn’t comprehended a word in the past ten, maybe fifteen pages. He was camped in the section covering the “filo,” authored by somebody from the Centers for Disease Control; it seemed there was a mention of a case of hemorrhagic fever in Guatemala in the early 1980s that the CDC indicated was a fairly close match, symptoms wise, with the “Marburg-2” bug Benjamin Achar has loosed upon the Central Florida population.
Having just returned from a trip in which he’d witnessed the skeletal remains of a village worth of Indians all dying quickly and at about the same time-in the same neck of the woods as the case of hemorrhagic fever outbreak mentioned in the report-Cooper decided he’d have to consider the unlikely possibility of a connection. He found this hard to believe, but as he pondered it, the scenario actually sounded more plausible every minute.
If the “isolated remnant civilization” he and Borrego had discovered to have been killed sometime less than fifty years ago hadn’t been dispatched by a Marburg filovirus, the village had certainly been exposed to something like it-which, in turn, he had to assume had been released, whether intentionally or no, by the torched-to-the-earth facility formerly occupying the upper portion of the crater. Maybe it wasn’t a chemical plant after all-but a biological weapons plant.
Any further connection became rapidly more disturbing.
It seemed obvious that his own discovery might be of great value to the commander-in-chief of the “counter-cell cell” by which he was now employed-but he also wondered whether there might be something from Laramie’s case, or the connections possessed by “the people she worked for,” that could aid him in solving his own, seemingly endless sequence of dead ends.
Cooper flipped back to the last paragraph he remembered paying attention to and reread from there. The “filo” dispersed by Achar was an airborne filovirus, or hemorrhagic fever pathogen, easily caught by and transmitted to both animal and person. According to the report, there were synthetic components of the “filo’s” makeup, meaning it had been bioengineered. The CDC author mentioned numerous laboratories, hostile regimes, even one clandestine American facility in Utah as possible institutions where filovirus engineering had taken place within the “preceding decades,” but stated that no evidence existed indicating such a revolutionary technological breakthrough as found in the “Marburg-2” had been achieved at any of these labs.
“In our effort to find the origin of the organic portion of the pathogen,” the report went on to say, “the CDC followed two investigative paths. First, we accessed CIA’s most current intel on the inventory and status of all facilities known to have done illegal biological weapons research. We isolated three active facilities that have, at one time or another, been known to focus on filo-related R & D: one in Malaysia, operated and funded by the Jemaah Islamiya terrorist organization; a second, possibly run by al-Qaeda, in Algeria; and a third housed on the grounds of a privately held pharmaceuticals company in the Ukraine. At the urging of the task force, the Pentagon sent [REDACTED]…”
By necessity, Cooper skipped the blacked-out portions of the report and kept on. He wondered whether Laramie had blacked out sections she didn’t want him to see, or if she’d received the report this way.
“The second angle we’re taking in our search for the origin of the strain assumes the organic portion of the filo serum is a naturally occurring bug,” the report said, and here, Cooper saw, was where the report referenced Guatemala, and the outbreak the CDC had focused its investigation on.
He read that in 1983, a caregiver’s journal documented the outbreak at a health care clinic in “rural Guatemala”-the report, Cooper found, offering no greater precision than that. Before the caregiver ran out of gas herself, she described the symptoms of the outbreak, as incurred by the entire clinic’s staff. The CDC had recovered the journal from some vaguely explained source. The symptoms of hemorrhagic fever, Cooper read-uncontrollably high fever, total breakdown of all organ functions, bleeding out through every orifice, rapid death-were similar wherever the pathogen struck. But the specific characteristics of the LaBelle outbreak matched the symptoms suffered by the victims in the Guatemala clinic very closely, at least per the caregiver: the incubation and infection periods, aggressive symptom development, and other disease “mile markers” tracked in the missionary’s journal matched the LaBelle fever death pattern nearly to the minute.
The journal described a local teenage girl “of Indian dialect” who had been treated in the clinic for flu-like symptoms and subsequently released before the onset of the symptoms among the staff.
Cooper leafed back to check the date again: 1983.
Poor man’s forensics team though he and the Polar Bear made, he and Borrego had put the deaths of the members of the Indian village somewhere in that basic time frame. Yet another disturbing match-it wasn’t too far-fetched a scenario to presume that the filo-infected girl “of Indian dialect” had strolled into the health clinic the same week, or month, or year that the Indian village was taken down by some similar outbreak.
Cooper checked for and found no further reference to the fate of the girl in the passages from the journal as photocopied into the binder.
Christ-a survivor?
He closed the binder and stuffed it in the bag he’d brought along for the flights, Cooper thinking the CDC report had decided it for him: he would be asking Laramie the lie detector about “ICR,” in addition to recommending that she, as the “counter-cell cell” commander-in-chief, plug into her suicide-sleeper equation the connection he’d just unearthed.
The only problem being what and who it all seemed to connect to-unfortunately, by way of that fucking burned-down lab, he thought, the bio-engineered filovirus and the murdered village seemed connected to none other than the fucking snuffer-outers. The snuffer-outers he now felt safe assuming to be camped out in Washington, or Langley-or wherever the hell it is that powerful government assholes camp out these days.
Meaning that the minute he brought Laramie into the loop, he may as well be signing her death warrant-as surely as Po Keeler and Cap’n Roy, in their innocent greed, had signed their own.
“Crap,” he said, realizing, without caring, that he’d said it aloud on the small plane he shared with fifteen other passengers.
He closed the terror book and fixed his eyes out the window. The plane ducked below the clouds and the Yucatan Peninsula revealed itself a few thousand feet below.