Cooper knew there would be a Secret Service detail accompanying Curlwood, but he didn’t much care. He was betting on a reaction from Curlwood, the Snuffer-Outer-in-Chief, that would preclude the need for the bodyguard to come to his rescue. Cooper assumed the deputy chief of staff’s famously brilliant mind would quickly estimate the meaning and ramifications of Cooper’s presence in his study.
Presuming, of course, Curlwood was the snuffer-outer.
“Hennie, my boy!” Cooper said. “How about a fire?”
He’d considered lighting up the fireplace earlier but reconsidered-might have brought the Secret Service man in the door first.
Curlwood poked his irritable face into the opening that connected the hall and library as Cooper flicked on the light beside the leather chair-Cooper’s peeling hull of a tan popping to life in the splash of the lamp. The expression on Curlwood’s face popped to life too, as it registered first confusion and surprise, but next, a calming sort of recognition-Curlwood giving Cooper all the confirmation he needed in that one look.
There’s no reason he would recognize me except as the man he decided not to snuff out.
The Secret Service man was good. In one swift motion, he shouldered Curlwood behind the wall, drew his gun, took one and one-half steps across the study, and smothered Cooper with a diving tackle, the barrel of his pistol digging into Cooper’s rib cage as Cooper toppled backward in the chair and let the bodyguard spin him to the floor and cuff him, knee-to-head and gun-to-back, with relatively little resistance.
“Nice work,” Cooper said.
“Shut up,” the Secret Service man said with a thrust of the gun, hard, into the space between two of Cooper’s ribs.
He’d begun to radio for backup-by way of the usual communication device secured to his wrist-when Curlwood reemerged in the hall.
“Let him up,” he said to his bodyguard. “I know him.”
“You sure about this?” the Secret Service man said, shifting all his weight to the knee planted on Cooper’s head. Cooper thinking the guy must have wanted to add, He seems like a fucking wiseass-I wouldn’t trust him if I were you, but knowing as well as the bodyguard did that these guys didn’t get paid to offer their opinions to the people they guarded.
“Let him up.”
When he had, and the Browning had been carefully removed from its spot in the small of Cooper’s back, the Secret Service man said, “Cuffs on or off?”
“Off,” Curlwood said. “Leave us alone here for a minute, please.”
“I’ll be in the next room if you need me,” the bodyguard said. He picked up the fallen chair and lamp and set them in their original places. Then the cuffs came off, and the Secret Service man canceled his call for backup and began explaining to his wrist what had happened as he turned down the hall. Cooper noticed the man didn’t holster either firearm-Secret Service-issue Sig Sauer nor CIA-issue Browning.
The deputy chief of staff hadn’t suggested he return to his place in the chair, but Cooper did so anyway. Curlwood remained standing despite the available clone of a chair two steps behind him.
When the guard had passed out of earshot, Curlwood spoke.
“What do you want?”
Grinning like a kid in a candy store for the duration, Cooper dictated arrangements to Curlwood as he saw them proceeding, giving the deputy chief the same basic fuck-with-me-and-Project-Icarus-goes-public threat he’d used with Ebbers. This time, he mentioned Ernesto Borrego and Lieutenant Riley of the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force as the other individuals who, were they to step into harm, would also trigger the release of the documentation on the lab and the various and sundry roles its genetically engineered “filo” had played.
“Including,” Cooper said, “the name of the lieutenant who allocated the funding for the lab in the first place.”
“Fine,” Curlwood said.
He didn’t ask for explanation or clarification.
Cooper hunkered down in the chair, staring up at Curlwood for a long, silent while. Curlwood didn’t say anything to fill the void. He didn’t particularly hold Cooper’s gaze either.
“You’ve got some kind of faith, Hennie,” he said. “Misplaced though it is.”
Curlwood the crackerjack advisor digested and interpreted in two seconds flat.
“I suppose,” the deputy chief of staff said, “I could say something like, ‘I spared you, and therefore assumed you’d spare me,’ but in actuality I had you checked out. Quite early in the process. Top to bottom.”
“That so,” Cooper said.
“You’re known for your extortion schemes. You show up in my library-logic completes the equation.”
“You ought to exercise a little more caution with your profiling, there, Hennie,” Cooper said. “Normally, your assessment might prove correct, but Cap’n Roy Gillespie was a good man. And though I didn’t know them, the Mayans in the fucking rain forest crater probably weren’t bad folks either.”
“Perhaps he was. And perhaps they were. Are we through?”
Cooper breathed in a long, slow volume of air and let it out the way a slow leak might result in the deflation of an inner tube. He’d given this a lot of thought-short of establishing a scholarship fund for other, as-yet-alive Mayan Indian villagers, what the hell was left to be done? Sleeping Beauty’s fellow villagers were dead and gone. Lying in a hospital bed in Sáo Paulo for the few weeks of recovery his wounds had required, Cooper had ultimately decided that unless he decided to make his appearance at the snuffer-outer’s home armed with a machete-prepared to behead the final target on Sleeping Beauty’s vengeance list-there existed few options beyond the usual self-preservation extortion scheme, albeit loaded with a shot at protecting a few others in the process.
Seated before him now, however, Cooper found he had to physically tamp down the temptation to throw his Sáo Paulo thinking to the wind, reach up, and strangle Curlwood with his bare hands.
Hennie, it’s your lucky goddamn day: after two trips down the hatch, my murderous streak seems to have been replaced by a stronger than normal desire for self-preservation-as though for the first time in twenty years I’ve got something to live for, and somehow it turns out that an institutionalized, murderous powermonger like you gets the honor of being the first to be spared.
Cooper stood. He stepped up to the shorter Curlwood, leaned his face down until their noses nearly touched, and grabbed hold of Curlwood’s head, feeling the man’s fleshy ears and cheeks against his palms. Then he slapped the deputy chief of staff on his left cheek-twice, extremely hard.
“For now,” he said. “We’re through for now.”
He released Curlwood from his grip.
Curlwood didn’t do anything but stand in place as Cooper limped into the hall and said, “My gun,” speaking in the direction he’d seen the Secret Service man go.
When no reply came, Curlwood yelled, “Give it to him!”
The Secret Service man came into the hall and flipped Cooper his Browning, which Cooper noticed, upon snatching the weapon, felt considerably lighter than before.
He returned the bulletless gun to the waistband at the small of his back and headed for the hills.
60
Laramie hadn’t told anybody but her supervisor that she was back in town, so the knock at the door concerned her. There hadn’t been word of any new bombings-not that she had heard, at any rate. But once the filo was found to spread into fresh territory-it was happening in small pockets throughout most regions of the country-Laramie understood part of the quarantine process to involve door-to-door visits by the National Guard.
This city is now under lockdown, she expected her visitor to announce. You are not to leave your home; not even to stand in your yard. Violators are subject to immediate arrest.