He watched her with lukewarm interest. She’d earned a portion of his attention-as to whether that would get her anywhere was anybody’s guess.
“The reason I’m skipping the pleasantries is for your own benefit. The organization that has captured you is not the Central Intelligence Agency. This is relevant to your situation because CIA, or any other arm of the American government, frequently has to concern itself with pesky little things like international law. Things like civil rights and trials. At least most of the time.”
She shrugged.
“The people I work for-the people who brought you here-don’t have to answer to any of that. Plus, Tony, you don’t really exist to begin with. Therefore I’d say the simple solution to this filovirus-dispersal scheme, at least as far as your involvement with it goes, is pretty simple: after our conversation, you vanish. I think that in the place you come from, it’s probably called ‘disappeared’-you’ll be ‘disappeared.’ No trial, no sentencing. One bullet. Two, if necessary.”
She stood in the way a person would when she’d said all she’d come to say.
“If you’re interested,” she said, “I’ll give you an alternate scenario. If not, you’ll die an anonymous failure within the hour. Goodnight.”
She offered him a courteous smile and turned to go.
About the time she was halfway up the rickety old stairwell, she heard a phlegmy kind of grunt that might have been Anthony Dalessandro clearing his throat. Then again it might have been something with the plumbing, so she continued to the door and had it open before Dalessandro said, “Just a second, lady.”
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.