“We need to get something straight,” he said.
Cap’n Roy watched him.
“If you had anything to do with this,” Cooper said, “even indirectly, I will find out. Understand, I chewed up a pair of favors arranging the buy. People know I set it up-people who aren’t such good people. The kind of people you like to think I know so well. My guess is these people, or some of their friends, or somebody they work for, will be coming down here when they find out about that plane blowing up. They’ll be coming down to pay me a visit and find out what this little airborne conflagration was all about.”
Cooper rolled a shoulder, easing a crimped nerve with a little stretch.
“What I’m saying is, if you did this, Cap’n, it’s you who brought that on me.”
Cap’n Roy stared at him, Cooper surveying the look but unable to read it. Back held ramrod straight, face all but blank, Cap’n Roy’s eyes were saying something, but it wasn’t anything Cooper could read. He knew enough about the man to know Roy would work hard to avoid giving him any response or reaction-Cap’n Roy’s way of telling him to fuck off.
Go fuck yourself, Cooper. Figure it out for yourself, mon.
Cooper tried to get his mind to do some more quick work on the matter at hand-to think about who might be behind all this crap if Cap’n Roy wasn’t the man. He didn’t like the place his mind went: while there were people like Susannah Grant who knew something or other about the shipment, the fact of the matter was, the Keeler murder, and now the detonation of the plane, had come, first and foremost, following a bust by the U.S. Coast Guard…
He came out of this brief mind-drift to realize that Cap’n Roy appeared to be waiting for something. It looked almost as though the chief minister of the British Virgin Islands, in fact, was seeking Cooper’s permission to depart. Then Cooper realized Cap’n Roy wasn’t looking for that at all.
He isn’t waiting for permission to leave-he’s waiting for reassurance that he won’t be the next to go.
“Watch your back, Cap’n,” Cooper said.
Cap’n Roy turned and walked away. As he watched the man turn the corner around the terminal, it appeared to Cooper that Cap’n Roy had been swallowed by the night precisely the same way the plane had a few minutes before.
15
Laramie loaded up on coffee with Sadie, Bill, and Sid in a place called the Circle Diner, to which Bill had driven them in one of the black-on-black Suburbans. The diner was four miles up the two-lane highway from headquarters, and Laramie took note of the fact there was actually some activity here-customers, waitstaff, people eating and serving dinner to the clink of dishes and silverware.
While Sid and his senior staff were perfectly polite and informative, Laramie learned little at the caffeine-intake session outside of the fact that the task force meeting in the ballroom of the Motor 8 Luxury Motel had more or less been staged for her benefit, at the order of some senior administration official or other. Admitting as much, Sid told her the bottom line on the progress made by the task force since their last fully attended session was close to zilch: they were pretty much where they had been a week ago, when they’d stood pretty much where they had one week before that.
Enter me, Laramie thought-emissary from God knows where, here to show these twenty-year veterans of counterterrorism how it’s really done.
Following a lift back to the Motor 8 in Bill’s urban assault vehicle, Laramie retreated to her room, where, just after dark, a series of files was delivered to her. She answered a knock at the door and a young male agent, clean-cut and suited up like everyone else, wordlessly handed over a tall stack of three-ring binders. He withdrew something resembling a UPS man’s delivery pistol and, with it, swiped the bar-code sticker affixed to the spine of each binder. Laramie waited calmly; the little gun beeped each time it got a reading, and then the agent departed without so much as a nod. Laramie was quite familiar with the classified-intel-logging device; it was used in Langley too.
Since she didn’t plan to study the files on caffeine alone, Laramie had taken some advice proffered by Sid during their meeting at the diner and called room service to get a meal sent up. She found the room’s ice bucket on the bathroom counter, headed down the hall to fill it, and came back to her room and kicked off her shoes. It was only another couple of minutes before a second suited-up young fellow arrived to deposit a Cobb salad, bereft, by Laramie’s request, of eggs and cheese, dressing on the side, packaged in a clear plastic enclosure with accompanying Saran-wrapped plastic utensils. She jammed into her ice bucket three of the six-pack of Diet Cokes she’d added to the tab, and popped a fourth.
Then she came over and sat at the room’s lone, circular table to confront the binders.
As Laramie understood it, investigations of international terrorist acts played out pretty much the same as ordinary homicide cases, only with more people, more organizations, and-ostensibly-greater secrecy. The investigators assigned to either sort of case did mostly the same things, primarily because they were looking for the same things-evidence, suspects, motive-and, by definition, acts of terror typically involved homicide anyway. This meant, among other things, that a terrorism-incident version of the homicide detective’s “murder book” was usually created by antiterror investigators.
From what Laramie had heard, even following the intelligence reform enacted by Congress in 2004, rarely was the “terror book” held in its entirety in one place, and whichever agency housed it rarely shared its contents with other agencies. This, however, did not appear to be true for the Emerald Lakes incident. By Laramie’s count, there were 3,697 pages in the three binders combined, and if there were pages missing, or kept somewhere else, she had some difficulty determining what the content of those pages might have involved.
The task force, she found, had been thorough. Every cubic inch of the Emerald Lakes blast site had been scoured, accounted for, studied. The entire curriculum of any number of graduate forensics programs could have been taught from the work performed on the casualties; the page count on the binder packed with interview transcripts-emergency room doctors, friends of the Achar family, Achar’s widow, in-laws, eyewitnesses to the explosion, local law enforcement and civic officials-tripped the meter at just over one thousand sheets of single-spaced printouts, give or take a few interrogations.
Laramie read all of them. In the area where it seemed the task force had focused their investigation-the forensics piece-Laramie concluded these guys had watched too many reruns of CSI. She skimmed her way through these voluminous sections. The last 124 victims of the outbreak died the same way the first had, so how many different photographs of orifice hemorrhaged corpses did she need to see? The pages provided by Sadie, the Centers for Disease Control’s designate, made it pretty clear that all 125 had died from the same pathogen-the “filo,” as task force investigators seemed to relish calling it.
It took her a few hours, but Laramie got through all three binders before dawn, spending at least some time on every page. Salad long gone, Diet Coke supply dwindling, she took a restroom break-splashed some water on her face, mashed her cheeks into one of the barely absorbent towels on the rack-then came back to the table for a second read.
This time she took aim on two specific parts of the terror book. She plucked pages from the binders and set them out on the bed, the floor, the laminated cabinetry holding the television. She set them out in order of what she cared about, what occurred to her, what she couldn’t figure out. Most of her selections focused on Benny Achar-everything she could find that the task force had gotten on him, from interview transcripts to cell phone and credit card statements, all the way through to his career-long UPS delivery schedule, tracking number by tracking number. She also pulled the pages on the conspiracy theory stuff: the doomsday scenarios, the extrapolations and forecasts on what could have happened had Achar’s complete stash been disseminated-what could still happen if there were other Benny Achars, living in other suburban housing developments around the country under false identities stolen from Mobile, Alabama’s town hall, or wherever else one stole identities.