“Anyway, I’m in town,” the voice said. “Thought I’d give you a call. Maybe we could get together.”
“Really.”
“Hell, you know, catch up some. I’m curious what you’ve been up to.”
After a moment, Laramie said, “Me too.”
“While I’m in town, I’m staying with our old buddy WC. You remember old WC, don’t you?”
Laramie realized something: this was her opportunity to protect herself from the people who would later be reviewing the tapes. All she had to do now was contradict what the voice was feeding her. No, she could say, I never knew the guy, and while we’re at it, I don’t know you either.
She knew, though, that if she were to say that, the mystery behind the call, and the mystery of the caller’s identity, would aggravate her no end.
She said, “Of course I remember WC. So he’s in Washington now?”
“Yeah, how about that. You know something else? I think that after all these years, old WC’s still a virgin. You believe it? Anyway, he’s in the phone book. Give me a call on your way home. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
Laramie was thinking what to say next in this oddly calculated conversation when she heard a click and the line went dead.
By the time she reached her car, Laramie the puzzle solver was on the case.
She considered the clues deposited by the mystery caller. He had wanted her to call him on an outside phone, that part was easy enough: Give me a call on your way home. And since, unless she knew what number to call, no call would be made, it followed that he’d provided enough information for Laramie to determine where to reach him.
The mystery man had also read the memo. While the memo had gone to all stations, still, such documents were only distributed to duly cleared staff; this meant the mystery man could be working anywhere in the world, but it also meant he was probably no less senior than a case officer, and considering that he had been able to pinpoint Laramie as the author of the memo, chances were he ranked pretty high on the ladder-or, if nothing else, he’d been around for a while.
He hadn’t sounded like a younger man in any case.
He’d picked up on her blunder of using Rothgeb’s name and run with it, working that angle into everything he said, making it sound like a perfectly normal conversation while giving her enough to figure out how to reach him. He’d repeated the initials WC-their old buddy WC; their old buddy WC was still a virgin-these, she knew, were the bread crumbs he wanted her to follow.
She released the emergency brake and made for the gate.
The names of case officers were highly compartmentalized, generally not available to DI analysts without specific need-to-know clearances. But if he knew she’d written the memo, he also knew she didn’t have the kind of clearance that would allow her to look up the contact information of a typical field officer outside of her assigned projects, even a chief of station whose identity might have been more publicly known. Pulling up to the gate and waiting for it to rise, Laramie considered the two territories she knew to be called virgin-the U.S. and British Virgin Islands.
“Shit,” she said, gestured to the guard in the booth through her closed window that she’d forgotten something, drove out the gate, turned around, and came back in, the guard raising the gate and waving her back in with a smile. She parked closer to the entrance, tempted to borrow the slot reserved for the Peter M. Gates Town Car before thinking better of it. Back in her cubicle, she logged back in, navigated to the internal telephone directory, and clicked the Index icon. She typed BVI into the empty field-Laramie figuring that for the appropriate abbreviation-and got a fresh screen headed by the words BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS.
There was a post office box listing in the city of Road Town, Tortola, a phone number, and the name W. COOPER alongside what appeared to be the man’s cover job: PUBLIC RELATIONS/COLLEGE RECRUITER.
Laramie wrote the phone number on a Post-it, shoved the Post-it into the breast pocket of her blouse, logged out, and trudged back down to her car. She got a salute from the guard on her way out.
23
“That Laramie?”
“Why,” Laramie said, “would we need a public relations officer in the British Virgin Islands?”
Cooper had a Cuba libre in his left hand and his sat phone in his right, reclined as he was in the chair on the deck of his bungalow. It was dark, the swish of the trades soothing against the palms, a distant stream of voices and music floating over from the restaurant. He could just see the bar through the garden; tourists were telling stories there, Cooper thinking gleefully that Ronnie was getting what he deserved, serving the sunburned drunkards and cleaning off their tables with a wet rag when they were done.
“Image is everything,” he said.
“Who are you?”
“Mere fact of the call,” Cooper said, “indicates that you already know my name.”
“I don’t mean your name, which I assume isn’t your real name anyway. I was asking who you are. Meaning why you called, and why you wanted me to solve your little riddle and call you back.”
“Which you did.”
Laramie was silent.
“I,” Cooper said, “would be what the BV Islanders refer to as the ‘spy-ade-island.’ Chief and sole officer of station, British Virgin Islands.”
“And the ‘college recruiter’ portion of your title?”
Cooper thought about that for a moment and said, “Not a great number of schools down here, Laramie.”
“Can I ask how it is that you know my name?”
Cooper took a sip of his drink. “No,” he said.
“Then I suppose I also won’t hear how you know I wrote the memo.”
A mechanical female voice said, “Please deposit one dollar and seventy-five cents to continue your call for two minutes.” Cooper heard the sounds of Laramie inserting the proper change into the slot.
“This is an expensive call,” she said.
“Pay phone.” Cooper left it at that.
“Meaning you’re pleased I’m playing this game of yours?”
“I’d like to ask you a question,” Cooper said. “That list of materials-those I’m supposed to report on a priority basis. Would that include non-weapons-grade uranium, specifically a U-238/U-235 combination found in older power plants?”
After considering the question, Laramie said, “Based on my limited understanding of nuclear weaponry, fuel rods can be processed to create bombs, but non-weapons-grade uranium in and of itself cannot be used, practically speaking, as explosive material in a nuke. Not that it shouldn’t be reported if you’ve discovered the illegal transportation of uranium, Mr. Cooper.”
“So your list would or would not include that substance?” Cooper twirled the ice in his drink. “You did write the memo?”
“You know that I’m not officially allowed to comment on whether-”
“It was a rhetorical question, Laramie.”
Cooper wondered what the analyst was thinking on the other end of the line, Laramie standing in a random phone booth, probably bolted into the corner of a convenience store’s parking lot. The enigma from the Caribbean getting under her skin.
“Who’s Eddie?” he said.
“What?”
“Your buck-seventy-five is running low.”
“An old professor,” Laramie said.
“Old?”
“No, not old. Old as in former. A former professor of mine.”
“Where?”
“What is this?”
The hiss of the connection rose in Cooper’s ear.
“Northwestern,” she said.
“Good school.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Good professors.”
Dig around enough, Cooper thought, and you find dirt. Even with this junior analyst and her former college professor. He was thinking-