57
Laramie came into the Weston Reading Room-vacant, as before, save for the solitary, seated figure of Lou Ebbers. From out in the stacks, she’d caught wind of the same scent as before: it seemed he’d brought along another grande Starbucks and commissary-issue breakfast sandwich.
She took the seat that coincided with the placement of coffee and food.
Just like the first time around.
“Thanks for the coffee,” she said, “but I’m surprised: when we began this process you knew my every routine. A week ago I decided it was high time I broke my addiction. I’m working on shaking my java habit.”
“Nectar of the gods,” Ebbers said. “Your loss.”
Eyeing him head-on, Laramie decided Lou Ebbers looked fifteen years older than when she’d seen him at this table only a month ago. His skin appeared jaundiced, the man’s fatigue punctuated by deep, sorrowful bags beneath his eyes. This was probably better than she could say for herself, and much, much better, she considered, than the 11,246 victims, according to the latest Homeland Security press release, of the six filo-dispersal bombings successfully detonated to date.
Most of the credit, in limiting the casualties, was being given to the relentless, multijurisdictional quarantine efforts. Laramie knew there to have been sixty sleeper arrests; only ten of these had been publicized, the judgment having been made that the real number was too big for America’s public relations palate.
She knew the other basics too: in addition to issuing a ban on all television commercials, the federal government had temporarily restricted commercial air travel to cases of documented emergencies only. In affected cities, only essential services were being conducted, and numerous anti-infection measures were being carried out under the martial-law-type command of numerous federal and local agencies and law enforcement organizations, including the National Guard and multiple wings of the active military. Trading had been suspended “until further notice” in all major financial markets.
There had not yet been a documented case of the fever in Virginia or the District of Columbia-nor a detonation-but Laramie hadn’t spotted more than a few dozen people out and about on her drive to the Library of Congress. Life in the U.S. of A. was one big ghost town, but there was the general impression, Laramie thought, that the government had things under control.
Ebbers busied himself reading a sheet of paper he held between table and waist.
“Numbers are leveling out,” he said. “As of this morning, it’s crossed twenty-four thousand. We’ll grow the publicly disseminated figures gradually, so that their impact can be mitigated with stories of successful quarantines, arrests, and so forth. We had two additional arrests since you and I spoke last. The total accounted-for sleeper count is therefore eighty-five of the hundred-and-seventeen totaclass="underline" Benjamin Achar, the probables your team identified, the six successful blasters, and the rest, as you know, found through investigations based on the list from the Márquez memorial.”
Laramie nodded. Both her cell and much of the rest of the federal government had worked around the clock on the names from Cooper’s list, investigating backward from the sleepers’ original names, tracking a family photograph here, a government identification card there-some of which they’d been able to match with photos taken under the sleepers’ new American identities. As Ebbers had just covered in his count, they’d failed to apprehend Márquez’s entire roster.
“Of the thirty-two remaining names,” Ebbers said, “we think it’s safe to assume ten percent of the total, meaning of the full one-seventeen, fell out-died in training, were eaten by sharks en route from Cuba, failed to establish an identity, maybe ‘went native,’ as you put it, like Achar. That puts us around fifteen active but un-ID’d sleepers, assuming our ten percent ‘churn rate’ is reasonable. As you know, we’ve had no detonations for eleven days now. We believe the threat has been mitigated for the time being.”
“At this point the remaining sleepers would be better off waiting it out anyway,” Laramie said.
“If they choose to think for themselves, yes.”
Ebbers inclined his chin.
“You heard from your operative?”
Laramie held his gaze for a moment. A story had run in the midst of the suicide-bomb crisis covering the assassination of the president of El Salvador by “rebel insurgents.” Laramie had assumed from this news that the “headlock” Cooper mentioned he’d held on Márquez when they’d last spoken had graduated to his assigned eradication. As to whether Cooper had made it out alive-that was another question.
“No,” she said. “No word.”
“Overall,” he said, “how you holding up?”
“Me? Better than most. We didn’t exactly save the day.”
“No?”
“Far from it.”
“I say we did,” Ebbers said. “I say you did.”
“Twenty-four thousand casualties? That’s a lot of people.”
“The task force,” he said, “was in the process of dismantling itself-a total failure-when we assigned you the case. There were one hundred and seventeen sleepers. Not ten, or twelve, or whatever was suspected by the eighteen-some-odd agencies examining the antics of Benny Achar. Twenty-four K is a boatload of people, I will agree with you, but what you did was save the other three hundred million. That is a larger boatload.”
Laramie examined the grain on the tabletop.
“We’ve arranged for your return to work,” Ebbers said.
Laramie looked at him.
“Malcolm Rader is expecting you back on Monday. Nobody there knows what you and your team have been doing. In fact, nobody anywhere does. Besides me, of course, your cell, and your guide.”
“Along with the people you work for,” Laramie said.
Ebbers looked at her-into me more than at me, she thought. She didn’t like the look one bit.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “Either way, we will need to maintain radio silence on the issues we covered by phone after your interrogation of the Scarsdale sleeper. The radio silence will need to extend further: any and everything you and your team did, thought, or spoke about during this matter shall never surface. We don’t want anyone in the federal government to know about it. We don’t want anyone in the media to know about it; we don’t want Congress to know about it. This includes whether you are someday subpoenaed to testify on these topics under oath.”
There it was again-the we. The we that she assumed would never be fully revealed or explained.
“As far as anyone involved with the task force is concerned,” he said, “the White House sent a special investigator. You were never named. As the unidentified special investigator, you generated some intel for the task force, and the task force and other federal and local agencies and law enforcement organizations reacted as effectively as possible to the gravest of threats to our nation’s security. The real you, meanwhile, has been gainfully and separately employed by the Central Intelligence Agency throughout this ordeal.”
As much as it bothered her, Laramie had to admit that the pieces of the suicide-sleeper puzzle that involved the Pentagon, its biological weapons research, and the origin of the Marburg-2 filo were better dealt with later. The only problem was that with this form of acquiescence, the chance these facts would ever see the light of day would decline in an accelerated manner as time progressed. Documents would be shredded; people would be bought; all that would remain in a few months’ time was hearsay from the likes of her, Detective Cole, Wally Knowles, Eddie Rothgeb, and Cooper. And numerous measures were probably already teed up that would discredit any such accounts.
Laramie had a pretty good idea how it had worked. Whatever authority Ebbers possessed-if any-waging a battle against another wing of the federal government wasn’t a part of that mandate. A judgment call had been made-and while she might well be capable of raising a stink in the media, or elsewhere, she decided to agree with the call. For the moment.