Woolsey nodded, and the two of them stared out at the bay, sitting in the two lounge chairs, the sun glaring down at them from the sky, careening off the water and the sand, keeping the air warm as the wind rustled the trees behind the bungalows.
“I’ve given this some thought,” Woolsey said.
Cooper didn’t say anything.
“I get through putting this place together, I’m thinking it’ll have nine bungalows. I’m thinking the one I’ll build over there, the one with the most privacy, I’m thinking you ought to stay in that one.”
Cooper kept looking out at the turquoise bay. Soaking up the sun.
“I’m thinking you ought to stay there free of charge,” Woolsey said, “and I know you like to drink a lot, so once I get the restaurant going, remodel the bar, maybe put up a thatched roof, then you’ll also be able to eat and drink for free. That sound all right to you?”
After a while, Cooper nodded, said, “I don’t see why not,” and fell asleep.
After a while Woolsey stood, but didn’t leave. Cooper woke up, feeling Woolsey’s annoying presence behind him as he attempted to relax. Woolsey shifted his weight from one foot to another in the sand. Finally, Cooper shaded his eyes from the sun with a hand again, craned his neck to look up at Woolsey, and said, “What do you want?”
“What I told you that day,” Woolsey said, “that part about skimming off the top. I just wanted to let you know I won’t be doing that any longer.”
Through with what he had to say, the gangly young man walked away and left Cooper alone with the sun.
20
For his first exercise since the long haul up the hill, Cooper took one of those twenty-lap runs on Conch Bay’s quarter-mile beach and swam across the lagoon a dozen times. Afterward, he collapsed into a chaise lounge under the shade of a palm tree. After almost a week of zilch, his legs and back still ached. The salt water and sand had stung the healing blisters on his feet, but he could feel the water’s purifying effect on his wounds, the exercise clearing his arteries. Opening his lungs.
Trudging up the hill, he’d dropped Alphonse only five times. Upon reaching the summit, he found that nobody had stolen the pickup, so he put the vehicle to use and got Alphonse to a hospital in Port-au-Prince. The journey had taken maybe eighteen hours, cemetery-to-door. In the end, they hadn’t been able to save Alphonse’s arm, but when the docs said it looked like the kid would make it, Cooper had a specialist flown in from the U.C.L.A. Medical Center, assembled a wire transfer covering the treatment, and arranged to have the kid outfitted with the latest version of a prosthetic arm. He wired enough to cover a few months of recovery in the hospital room, food included, Cooper thinking it meant better living than Alphonse had ever known, but still came up short of the boy’s natural-born right arm. At least the kid would get three squares for a while, and maybe even get laid, thanks to the conversation piece they’d be hooking up to his shoulder.
It was easier, Cooper thought, to help somebody when the person was actually alive. Somebody’s dead, you can bust a few caps in the witch doctor who offed him and still wind up with the kid’s ghost banging around your head. Ce n’est pas fini, mon ami, Marcel’s ghost saying to him, Cooper hearing him more clearly in his mind’s ear now, knowing the accent he’d have after listening to Simone-Non, mon ami, you not finished. Not yet. You still all I got, Cooper. Et wi, c’est vrai-I still got more for you, too.
He’d left a bag beside the chaise lounge before embarking on his morning workout. The beige canvas sack was stenciled with the words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT BUSINESS.
The regularly scheduled diplomatic pouch that Cooper received as chief of station for the British Virgin Islands came every three weeks. International law specified that customs officials weren’t allowed to examine diplomatic pouches, and some countries actually observed this rule. BVI customs officers rarely even opened personal luggage at Terrance B. Lettsome International, let alone a U.S. government pouch; Cooper figured he could probably run dope with the bag if he ever ran low on funds.
Usually the contents of these shipments meant nothing to him. On days when the pouch arrived on the launch, typically accompanied by food supplies and a handful of guests, Cooper had a tradition going: he would sit on a lounge chair, smoke a cigar, and burn each of the papers as he withdrew them, reading a line here, a paragraph there, brushing the end of the cigar against the page, blowing to get the flame going, then flipping the burning page into the sand. Nobody bothered him when he sat out here lighting fires. Not even Ronnie. He figured he looked dangerous, or possibly even insane. It gave him some space.
Today, he fired up a cigar, opened the sack, purged it of its contents, and lit up a half-dozen documents without reading anything past the heading of the cover page. Toward the bottom of the pouch, Cooper came across a DI memorandum which, as with the others, he nearly burned without reading. It was a standard memo, sent to all stations, not much different from the documents he’d already torched. Cigar butt held beside the corner of the page, Cooper took a closer look, almost out of coincidence, and saw that after a few meaningless introductory sentences, the memo said:
Unauthorized international or extranational transport of substantial military weaponry, including but not limited to large handgun shipments, antiaircraft guns, armored vehicles, missiles, warheads, or lethal substances with possible military use, even by nation-states, may have special significance. Please report on a priority basis.
Cooper wondered about a couple of things. First, he wondered whether “lethal substances with possible military use” could include U-238/U-235 uranium. Second, while an oceanic voyage of uranium molecules aboard a supposed menial laborer’s body didn’t necessarily qualify as “transport of substantial military weaponry,” there was something that Cooper understood about memorandums like this. What you had to ask yourself was the reason some deputy director or other, most of whom were highly educated, would authorize the distribution of such a ludicrous letter. Come across an inane memo like this and it was a safe bet something serious was afoot. You just had to translate, maybe ask around-make a couple phone calls, for instance.
Cooper figured he’d be able to discover who’d written the memo with no more than a single call.
Once he’d identified the author, he could ask a question or two of him, or her, in hopes of finding additional reasons to ignore the plea for help from the ghost of Marcel S. Maybe he could even bolster his case against digging out those business cards he’d lifted from the witch doctor’s desk. He knew Barry the fucking bokor had killed Marcel the first time around, that much was obvious-but once that fat fuck had resurrected the boy, the odds were he’d passed the kid onto someone else. Someone who’d gone on to kill the kid again.
Wi, Cooper-mon, ce n’est pas fini.
He also knew the longer he put off avenging the second murder of Marcel S., the greater the chance his natural laziness would overcome him. That laziness would tend to keep him sequestered along the quarter mile of white sand, in the snorkeling holes, among the reefs, at the bar, in his bungalow, or on the chaise lounge under the palm tree.
And calling around Langley to unearth the nasty little secret behind the plain vanilla memo, he thought, was as good a form of procrastination as any.
You know something, Marcel, he thought-wondering whether he was talking aloud as he thought it-if I’m all you got, then you, mon ami, are fucked.
21
Peter M. Gates hadn’t joined the Agency to fool around. His first exposure to CIA had come from political science textbooks as an undergrad, when he was bitten by the bug-the feeling, reading about the great spy-masters, that he’d found his calling. Dulles. McCone. Schlesinger-men who’d hashed out deep-cover operations, pondered war strategy, run intelligence webs over fine tobacco and brandy. Gates could see it happening to him, knowing it was his destiny to become a spymaster, a strategy guru, a sophisticated gentleman spending his evenings in the richly furnished surroundings of a men’s club-Gates thinking, even then, that Cleo’s, the club in Dupont Circle, might just do.