Inside the bucket were his implements of destruction: the tools, towels, and solvents he used to clean his boat. The five-hour boat-cleaning job was something he could have paid one of the local kids, or even Ronnie to do, but he didn’t trust anyone but himself to do it properly, or at least that was what he told himself. In truth, he had discovered it was as good a way to confront his demons as any. A kind of self-controlled therapy session.
Unlike the nightmares.
He did the work every sixty days or so, not because the Apache needed it, but because he did. He would always need the work; it would never go away. It would always stay with him, and that was why he was here, killing the pain, in one of the only places in the world where he’d thought there might be enough natural painkillers to salve any wound. But not his; his never left. It always needed fresh treatment, another dose of medication to ease the pain. A prescription to help escape the episode of his life that had brought him here-accomplished by way of skin diving, drinking, dope smoking, fucking, sunbathing, poker playing, and six or seven thousand other idle pursuits the British Virgin Islands and its environs had to offer.
But sometimes it took facing the music-and when he knew he’d need to play the tune, he preferred to do it while cleaning his boat.
The twelve-man team descended on the palace under the cover of night. They came by way of a high-altitude drop, released into the jet stream miles east of the target, the plane inaudible from the palace grounds. They came to earth silently, invisibly, the soft pads of their specialized boots ballet shoes in the choreography that followed.
It was sickeningly easy. They slaughtered the small army of sentries in seconds, aware of precisely where each guard was posted, the position of the dictator’s defenders matching the satellite images each man on Cooper’s team had studied relentlessly before taking the plunge into the night sky. It was too easy, Cooper soon coming to the nauseating realization that no leader of any country, of any size, could possibly be taken down so simply, with so little resistance.
Even so, they executed the prime minister in his bed while he slept, the silent spits from Cooper’s muted assault rifle ending the prime minister’s reign as planned-planned, Cooper came to learn, by a desk jockey aspiring to a spymaster’s seat on the hallowed seventh floor of the CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia. The desk jockey, though, had grossly underestimated the influence and savvy of the minister of defense overseeing the palace guard. So poor was the desk jockey’s intelligence, in fact, that he’d been fully ignorant of the defense minister’s ability to catch wind of the mission Cooper’s team had been deployed to accomplish. Cooper supposed he, or somebody on the squad at least, should have considered the possibility too. But what the hell, he came to think, did we know back then? We were stupid goons, riding on adrenaline, raiding the palace of an evil dictator, an ally of the Soviet empire America intended to vanquish.
As the last breath passed from the lips of the sleeping dictator, a second wave of soldiers in the prime minister’s guard rose from hiding places throughout the palace and dispatched with eleven of the twelve members of Cooper’s goon squad in the span of sixteen seconds. Fleeing the palace by way of a hall behind the first-floor kitchen, Cooper found himself surrounded-undiscovered in the initial trap wave but doomed to certain capture. He was hopelessly outnumbered, finding a guard lurking behind every door, window, or passage, Cooper creeping along in his vain search for a way out of the palace and into the jungle beyond. But he found no such means of escape, and instead hid in a janitor’s closet, hoping to remain in his hiding spot until they’d forgotten him, or decided they’d counted wrong-that they’d taken down the whole invasion team. It worked for a few hours, but they knew he was around, Cooper hearing the search as they worked through the nooks and crannies of the palace, approaching the kitchen, the hallway, and finally his precious closet. He decided the best chance at anything was surrender, so when he heard them in the kitchen he eased open the closet door, reached his hands out past its knob, and pushed his gun into the hall with his padded shoe.
He’d never been able to determine why they hadn’t just killed him. He supposed their anger needed a symbol, a puny enemy to attack, and as the sole survivor of the assassination squad, he gave them that. He learned much later that the minister of defense had publicly decried the terrible tragedy of the loss of the nation’s leader, then declared martial law and announced the appointment of himself as prime minister for the length of the late leader’s term. He’d promptly locked up or killed the senior members of the opposition party who might otherwise have defeated him in an election.
He also locked up the sole surviving member of the assassination squad that had assisted him in his rise to the throne.
As many times as it was possible to take a human being there, they took him to the brink of death. The very limits of pain and blood loss. On a rotating cycle-following a few days of isolation and continued starvation-they would walk him to a torture chamber in the depths of a seventeenth-century dungeon he supposed he had some Spanish explorer to thank for. They would strap him to a chair. The chair had no seat, and Cooper, fully naked, his balls exposed through the bottom of the empty chair, would be whipped-strafed. Torn. The whip had something on it, not nails but something like them. Sharp. Grating.
They whipped his penis, his nuts, and ass, the same every time, doing it until he bled a puddle, and they thought he might be dead. Each time, the clouds of pain would lead him to a serene, peaceful state, the cliff edge of death. After it was determined he had survived yet again, they would throw him back in the prison cell, one of a few dozen subterranean rooms in the subterranean facility. They would come back and check a couple of days later to see whether he had died. Seeing his chest bobbing slowly, they would give him just enough food-usually in the form of a crusted tortilla chunk-for him to notice he was dying of starvation.
Enough to get him through to the next session.
After too many cycles to count-when he sensed death’s tendrils becoming more permanently present, like the prosthetic Clancy’s tendril of smoke from his uninhaled cigarette-Cooper vowed to make whatever pathetic move he could muster the next time they came. With what little he had left, he would take them.
And when he did, he would kill them all.
6
Cooper remoored the Apache about ten minutes ahead of the first Zodiacful of lunch guests. He came back in on the skiff, tying it to one of the tacks on the dock, and headed back to bungalow nine. As he had hoped, there was a ham-and-cheese sandwich and some ice water waiting for him on the table beside his kitchenette. He opened the room’s tiny fridge and found a fresh six-pack of Budweiser too-Good work, Ronnie, you putz, he thought. Planting himself in the chair at the table in the kitchenette, Cooper put away the water, three beers, and the sandwich, watching people come over for lunch from their very expensive sailboats moored in the bay. He could see out through the jalousie panes of his kitchen window, louvered open as they were on the other side of the screen designed to keep out the bugs.
When he was through with the sandwich, he looked over at the built-in shelving behind his reading chair. He’d been attempting to ignore the presence of the foot-high statue he’d put there, but the more effort he put into ignoring it, the more he noticed the thing.