“You’re drunk.”
Cooper heard a click.
The wind had begun to die down, and there wasn’t as much noise floating over from the bar. Cooper could still see a few people milling about-the sunburned faces, tank tops, Bermuda shorts and flip-flops, one or two of them wearing slacks, probably somebody told them long pants helped fend off the no-see-’ems. Watching all this in silence, Cooper thought that perhaps Julie Laramie the junior analyst wasn’t so junior after all.
She had just taken him to the cleaners.
After draining the Cuba libre, Cooper ducked into his bungalow and found the two business cards he’d pilfered from the box on the witch doctor’s desk. Trying the easy way first, he dialed both numbers with his sat phone. The Puerto Rico number was no longer in service, Cooper yanking the phone from his ear when the annoying triple-tone blare jolted him and a woman’s recorded voice told him in Spanish that the number had been disconnected. The second number, which he’d figured for a Kingston, Jamaica, area code, went right through and gave him three short beeps. He punched in his number and the pound sign.
It took about fifteen minutes-not a bad turnaround, he thought, for two o’clock in the morning.
“Yes,” Cooper said into his phone.
A muffled male voice mumbled, “Yeah, who this.”
“It’s me,” Cooper said. “Eddie.”
A second or two of static. Sounded to Cooper like another pay phone call.
“You page me, yeah?” the voice asked.
“I’m calling about the Haiti thing,” Cooper said. “My talking to the right guy?”
Static ruled. Finally, in its mumble, the voice said, “What you need?”
Cooper hesitated a beat longer than he’d intended. He was well aware that lies worked better when you were fast on your feet, but Julie Laramie, he thought, stripped me of my bulletproof vest. Took away my edge. Her distracting effect has been to make me consider whether this moron with the pager can see right through the game.
“I need somebody,” Cooper said. “Another Haitian-know what I mean?” Wincing, he knew he’d blown it the second the words escaped his mouth.
“Fuck you, pig.”
Pager-man hung up.
Cooper shook his head. That was ridiculous-he’d had the guy going, should have been able to set up a meet, and he blows it that fast. Practically a seamless fuck-up, in fact.
He set the sat phone on the kitchen table, came over to his bed, picked up the Louisville Slugger, and took some practice swings. Thinking things over.
He’d tried the easy angle first, and if nothing else, he’d found his boy. Pager-man had bitten on the Haiti ask-hadn’t told him to fuck off till he’d blown the improv later in the conversation. Now he’d just have to track the man down-maybe meet up with him wherever he made his phone calls, ask him a few questions about witch doctors. About zombies and business cards, no need to play charades any longer with the Browning pinned to Pager-man’s eyebrow.
Without even seeing him yet-without asking enough questions to know anything for certain-Cooper had the impulse to hunt down Pager-man and whack him with the baseball bat. Maybe it was the guy’s cocky, mumbling tone, Pager-man sounding stoned out of his gourd, ready to deal some crank, or hell, maybe a recently exhumed Haitian, dial one-eight-hundred, Z-O-M-B-I-E-S-
Cooper tossed the Louisville Slugger on the bed and migrated to the chair. He fired up his PowerBook, worked through some firewalls, and got himself to the inquiry page of Interpol’s reverse-telephone directory. He pulled the business card and punched in Pager-man’s phone number. It took about five minutes for the system to spit out the phone company-Verizon. Easy enough, he thought. Exiting the Interpol database, he worked his way into an Agency site, filled out the appropriate online form, and e-mailed a request. This one would take two or three days to get an answer, but when the drones working the night shift in the basement in Langley got back to him, they’d deliver on his request and provide the correct billing address of the Verizon account coinciding with the number he’d dialed to get a hold of his new, though somewhat rude, phone pal.
Laramie knew of a Kinko’s near the turnaround point on her morning run. Since finding the China intel, she was only running twice a week; while this meant her weekly exercise quota had been halved, she’d nonetheless been able to check her new e-mail account twice while out on the runs. Outside of a canned WELCOME, EASTWEST7! from somebody called Mail Services, the in-box had remained woefully vacant.
She thought about the odd phone call from W. Cooper on the outbound segment of her morning jog. Maybe she was becoming a mean-spirited person, but she had to admit her most enjoyable moment in weeks had come when she outed the inebriated, so-called college recruiter. She’d easily been able to tell he was hammered, the man working hard enough against slurring his words to give it away, but Laramie had an unfair advantage on reading such mannerisms after spending the first twelve years of her life with a similarly and consistently inebriated father. No matter how frequently W. Cooper tossed ’em back, Laramie thought, it was unlikely he could have hung with Dad in the consumption department.
W. Cooper’s voice had sounded familiar to her. Not because she had met him before-she knew she hadn’t-but there’d been an ease between them, the kind you shared with a friend you’d been holding daily water-cooler conversations with, bonding in the copy room of some high-stress office environment. It occurred to her now that this was largely due to the fact that W. Cooper actually sounded a lot like her father-though this, she thought, probably stemmed from the fact he’d have tested out at somewhere near the blood-alcohol percentage Dad would have registered the last time she’d seen him.
Or maybe he was just an asshole, and because of this, she’d enjoyed coming out ahead in their little sparring match.
She came around a corner and slipped into the Kinko’s. She checked her watch and saw it was almost six-forty-five; as with the two other mornings she’d visited, the store was just opening for the day. It said OPEN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS on the window, but for reasons on which Laramie chose not to speculate, the place usually opened at six-thirty and closed before midnight.
She bought a computer-hour in cash, logged on, and found senator Kircher’s reply. She read his request a few times and still couldn’t figure out how to answer.
Did it make any sense to continue the game? After Korea, she’d been unable to find even a shred of additional supporting evidence. Rogue faction, my ass, she thought. Rogue analyst, yes-sitting here like a buffoon in my running bra, digging for trouble where none exists. Still, she thought, at least Kircher might be able to tell me whether this connect-the-dots guesswork of mine has any legitimacy, or whether I’m simply full of shit.
She composed an adaptation of the pair of reports she’d filed during the prior two weeks. She included all of it-everything she’d written, all the material she’d presented totally against Agency protocol, even the speculative guesswork she’d shared with Malcolm Rader in the commissary.
When she’d worked up a draft, she reread it four, then five times, editing nearly every word on each pass. She nearly deleted the entire document twice, then ultimately decided the whole thing needed an introductory statement, which she added as the first line of her note:
It’s better for the both of us if my identity remains confidential. Look at it this way: I’m an informed source, privy to the following intelligence, which you may or may not find useful. Some of this is theory, in fact most of it is theory, but my voice is not being heard in the community you oversee. Thus it occurred to me you might want to hear what I’m about to tell you.
She inserted a paragraph break between her introductory statement and the body of her document, reread the entire thing a sixth time, and decided to add some closing remarks: