The bounty hunter and a different but also large cohort were seated at the table in the kitchen consuming a couple boxes of pizza and Diet Cokes out of the can.
“Be another few minutes,” she said, then closed the door again and retreated down the stairs.
When she’d retaken the chair across from Dalessandro, he shook his head.
“You’ve got the wrong guy. I don’t have anything to do with what you’re talking about.”
In Laramie’s experience, anybody who used the phrase “You’ve got the wrong guy” had, in stating it, for all intents and purposes, admitted his guilt. She decided she’d play his game and let him stick with whatever he was trying to convince himself he’d convince her of.
“There’s something else,” Dalessandro said, his voice congested. He cleared his throat again, the same sound she’d heard climbing the stairs. “There’s something else I hear they teach you about interrogations in the CIA. Or at least I’ve seen it on CSI and Law & Order. It’s that if the cops haul your ass in, you should tell them what they want to hear. If you do, they’ll let you out of it. Make a plea-bargain deal. Or let you go. So what does that organization of yours want to hear? Tell me and I’ll give it to you, and you can let me go back to fertilizing my lawn.”
As nonchalant as he was being about this, Laramie continued to believe what she’d thought would be the case before coming here-that he wasn’t going to tell her much, but that he might, nonetheless, show some of the same tendencies as Achar. Maybe, she thought, he likes his “deep cover” life and, if caused to believe he might have a shot at getting back to some form of it-via witness protection or some such route-he’d give them something.
“You’re a smart cookie, Tony,” she said. “I’ve got some influence with the people I work for, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about: if I put a word in, you’ll be spared immediate execution. So yeah, you tell me what I want to hear-even if you’ve got nothing to do with any of this suicide-bombing business-and maybe it’ll work out for you.”
He shifted in his chair, waiting.
“I’m skeptical you can even help me with any of this, Tony. I think you’re a compartmentalized drone, busy with nothing but assimilating until the order comes in for you to wipe your useless self off the face of the planet.”
…but I’ll bet your fellow San Cristóbal alumni have followed whatever course you were told to take, and I’d like to hear a little more about it…
“But whatever,” she said. “If you’d like to walk me through how it is you knew to go out and buy the ingredients for your SUV bomb, I’ll consider putting that good word in. What was the signal?”
Dalessandro grunted, or maybe chuckled, or was just clearing his throat again, Laramie wasn’t sure. Then the noise progressed into a well-defined chuckle, and finally to a level-toned, mean-spirited sort of laugh.
He kept at it, Dalessandro utterly pleased with himself, until the laugh slowed, then subsided back to the phlegmy throat-clearing noise. At that point Dalessandro lowered his head and glared at her with eyes that looked, set behind his dripping-wet skin as they were, flat, black, and long since dead.
When his next words came, they streamed forth in an unabashed, thick, odd-sounding accent Laramie couldn’t place and could barely understand.
“Good luck, bitch,” he said. “Good luck finding any of us. Good luck stopping us. All one hundred and seventeen of us.”
Laramie felt ice water trickle down her spine.
“You didn’t know that, did you, bitch? That’s right-you have no fucking idea-no fucking idea what is about to happen. You’ll never find the others. No matter what I tell you. And I won’t be telling you shit. So just get it over with. Kill me, bitch-do it. Do it!”
He made a game attempt at leaping from his chair to attack her, but only succeeded in stretching the ropes and tipping himself forward an inch or two. Veins popping in his neck, eyes bugged and frantic, Laramie saw in his otherwise useless lunge an undistilled rage-the kind, she supposed, from which terrorist plots are hatched.
In catching her glimpse of this, Laramie came to two realizations instantaneously: first, they could torture this guy with every technique known to man, and no way in hell would he tell them a thing. Second-though she supposed it should have been obvious-one doesn’t train, hide for more than a decade under an alternate identity, then mobilize to execute a mass killing without being driven by the kind of anger that no threat, law, or preventive strategy has much chance at all of stopping.
Benjamin Achar and the love he’d found in himself for Janine and Carter notwithstanding-true love, she thought, being a one-in-a-million score anyway, or at least far worse odds than one-in-six-Laramie now understood with a concrete certainty that there would be no turning this army.
For the first time since her meeting with Lou Ebbers in the Library of Congress, it occurred to her she was probably going to die. A lot of people were-however they’d done it, Márquez’s army of sleepers were now immersed in the American fabric, and whatever it was they were pissed off about-genocide, murder squads, whatever-it was painful and sure enough for these people to seek only the destruction of every last one of us.
And who the hell was going to stop them?
Me?
Something on her hip vibrated-the GPS unit her guide had provided her. It doubled as a cell phone and her team had the number. The thing had surprised her because she hadn’t used it yet.
Laramie rose, climbed the stairs without another word to Dalessandro, and found a room bereft of bounty hunters in which to talk on the phone.
“Yes,” she said.
“Laramie.”
It was Rothgeb.
“The other sleepers are on the move,” he said. “Not all of them-only two of the other five. But each of them just drove to a home and garden store of one kind or another and bought pretty much the same quantity of fertilizer as your Scarsdale pal.”
“Crap,” she said. She fought against asking whether they’d seen any activity on the screen that was tracking Cooper’s homing device.
She knew he’d have told her if they had.
Laramie asked Rothgeb to put her guide on the phone, and once he’d announced his presence on the line, Laramie said, “Even if you’ve already updated him, call Ebbers immediately.”
“No problem,” he said.
“Tell him it’s time,” she said, “to pull the fire alarm. Tell him it’s time-as he put it on his call with me-for the federal government, the media, and everybody and their grandmother to board up the windows and hunker down for the storm.”
51
When Cooper came to, he discovered his body to have recovered from its toxic bout with post-traumatic stress, or whatever the fuck, he thought, turned me into a puddle of hyperventilating mush. But maybe that’s what you get when you pay a visit on the worst episode of your past-you wind up throwing it in reverse for real, your body deciding it’s time to curl up and see whether there’re any available wombs interested in taking you back.
Coming around, the first thing that occurred to him was that he was screwed. Even if the security squad managing the presidential residence believed the intruder to have fled through the woods rather than into the belly of the beast, he held no doubt they’d keep the facility canvassed 24/7 for at least the next few days. And until some slice of evidence turned up proving he was no longer around, they’d be forced to maintain an elevated security presence.
Cooper knew they’d also need to operate under the assumption this raid was an attempt on Márquez’s life, aborted though it might have been. Point being, he wasn’t going to have much of a shot at getting home, let alone taking down Márquez. At the moment, the fact that he’d escaped capture and torture was satisfaction enough-at least now, having calmed his dysfunctional body toward something approaching normalcy, he had the freedom to mull things over. Could be there’s even a plan C, or a plan D, that could get you in front of the man.