Color Of Blood

by Keith Yocum

  “Yes, but your name is still on the shipment. And you seem to know about its contents.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Then we have no other choice but to ask you some questions.”

  “Are you guys robots?” Dennis said, stepping closer to the man. “I told you it’s a mistake. These are the personal belongings of someone in Operations. I’m in IG’s office.”

  The freckly-faced man took a quick sideways glance at his partner, a tall, lanky black man. Dennis noticed the look of alarm on the man’s face and it was the visual cue he needed.

  “OK, look, I’m sorry,” Dennis said. “It’s just a little tight in here—and hot.”

  “Of course,” the freckly-faced man said.

  “So what do you want to know?” Dennis tried to slow his breathing.

  “OK.” The man consulted his clipboard again. “Were you aware that the materials in the containers were contaminated or were suspected of being contaminated?”

  “No,” Dennis said.

  “Do you know how the materials got contaminated?”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure what you guys are talking about. I got a call last night from someone in your office saying the crates were radioactive, or something like that. These are the personal belongings of a guy I never met. He died unexpectedly while on assignment. I did a follow-up investigation. That’s all I know.”

  It didn’t stop the questions, which went on for nearly twenty minutes. Dennis did his best to remain calm, but toward the end, he began to get flustered.

  The questions stopped. Dennis stared at the two men; the two men stared at Dennis.

  “So?” Dennis finally said.

  “So?” the freckly-faced man said.

  “Can you tell me anything more about the contamination—the radiation?” Dennis said. “Where it came from?”

  “We finished some tests just a few minutes ago.” The black man spoke for the first time. “It appears to be uranium.”

  “Uranium?”

  “Uranium,” the black man said.

  “How did it get all over his belongings?” Dennis asked.

  “That’s a good question,” the man said. “Our guess is that it had collected on the soles of his shoes and perhaps on some of his clothes, and when all the items were packed up together, the particles just spread around.”

  “What kind of uranium are you talking about? I mean would it kill someone?”

  “No, not this stuff. This is mined uranium, not enriched: sort of mild stuff, really.”

  “Mined uranium?”

  “From a mine, yes.”

  “Like, from a hole in the ground? That kind of mine?”

  “That is correct. From a hole in the ground.”

  ***

  Dennis had requested but never looked at some of the reports available on Garder’s activities. Sitting in his office for the first time in a while, well-wishers kept stopping by to say hello.

  “How ya feeling?”

  “Dennis, good to see you back in the office.”

  “Glad to see you back, Dennis.”

  “Ready to get back into the shit again, Dennis?”

  He finally closed his door to keep people at bay while he pored through more than thirty digitized documents. He finally found a list of Garder’s travels that were reported back to his handler. They were listed chronologically by date and destination.

  “Aug. 13, Ningaloo: Red Hat Mining Co.

  “Sept. 4, Pandera: 3M Mine.

  “Sept. 29, McClure’s Gap: Austral Mining Co.

  The list had seventeen entries. The document was print-protected and all the department’s computer screen-copy utilities were disabled, so Dennis painstakingly copied each entry in longhand. Afterward he rechecked each item.

  The phone rang.

  “You bastard,” Marty said, laughing. “Thought you could sneak in without telling me?”

  “I was just coming down to see you,” Dennis said. “Got something I need to talk to you about.”

  “I hope it’s about the hazmat thing.”

  “Yep.”

  ***

  “I need to look into this a little more,” Dennis said. “Seems odd to me that none of Garder’s reports mention uranium. I’m going to map his trips to mining companies to see if he visited any uranium mines. If he did, well, that would explain it. If not, well, Houston, I think we’ve got a problem.”

  Marty leaned far back in his chair, his traditional judicial-like stance when listening to one of Dennis’s pitches. It was the same dance the two men had practiced all these many years: Dennis would explain why he needed to do something, and Marty, at six feet two inches tall, would lean back like a Supreme Court justice and weigh the evidence, his naturally curly hair bobbing slightly as he rocked in concentration. Just before passing judgment, Marty would lean forward for effect and say something perfunctory like: “Forget it, Dennis, it’s not happening,” or “Fine, do it.”

  Today Marty seemed to lean farther back than normal, and Dennis found himself leaning forward in an attempt to get his attention.

  After Dennis finished, several moments passed before Marty bent forward, his ancient chair creaking as it sprang ahead.

  “What are you trying to do with this case? I thought it was over,” Marty said.

  “Something doesn’t fit; the uranium thing is strange,” Dennis said. “I’ll find out soon enough if he reported visiting a uranium mine. Hell, I don’t even know if there are uranium mines in Western Australia. But you’ve got to let me take one more pass at it.”

  Marty stared at Dennis for some time, and Dennis took that for a good omen; typically, if Marty had reservations about something, he’d just come out and say it. The more he equivocated, the more likely Dennis would get his way.

  But, uncharacteristically, Marty kept staring at Dennis.

  “OK, what?” Dennis finally said.

  “I don’t like this entire thing,” Marty said.

  “What thing?” Dennis said.

  “This Garder thing. Don’t like it. Stinks.”

  “Why do you say that?” Dennis said. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?”

  Dennis knew Marty’s nuanced vocabulary by now, and the term ‘stink’ meant the case was nonlinear, complicated, and had the potential for political trouble.

  “So you don’t believe the ‘big-fucking-shark’ theory?” Dennis said.

  “No.”

  “Neither do I,” Dennis said, “but we have no body, no motive: just an empty car and an empty swimming flipper.”

  “I think we walk away from this one,” Marty said, grabbing a pen and opening a manila folder on his desk. “In fact, I’m ordering you to drop it.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why?”

  “Just drop it, Dennis. I don’t like this one.”

  “We’ve been working together a long time, Marty, and this is maybe the first time you’ve talked like this. Walk away? That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “Dennis, the Agency has changed a lot in the past couple of years, and you know that. It’s less professional and more political. And there are more players in the game, and you know what I’m talking about. You’ve never mentioned the fact that Garder wasn’t reporting to the station chief in Canberra. Didn’t you wonder about that?”

  Dennis smiled. “His file says he was reporting to folks in our Special Activities Division, which in my book means he was in all likelihood working with JSOC.”

  The Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, had been around since the 1980s as a super-secret military group answering only to the White House. But post-9/11 JSOC had grown in size and power. They were widely considered to be involved in some of the most controversial parts of the war on terror, including assassinations and rendition. More importantly, JSOC operated independently of the CIA. The only group in the Agency connected to JSOC was the strange, ultra-secret group with the bizarre acronym SAD, the
Agency’s Special Activities Division.

  “I don’t like this thing,” Marty said. “Drop it. I have another assignment for you. I think we’ve got a situation in Taiwan. We’ve been asked to investigate some missing funds. You’ll go in with a forensic accountant, a new college kid from Fordham. She’s very young and new, so for God’s sake be nice to her.”

  “You can’t be serious about dropping the Garder case?”

  “Deadly serious.”

  “But something’s very wrong here, Marty.”

  “You already turned in your report, Dennis. Don’t be an idiot.”

  “But that was before his clothes showed up radiated.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Marty! Just because Garder was involved with Special Activities doesn’t mean we have to turn away from it.”

  “This isn’t a strict Agency deal, and I don’t think we need to do anything else,” Marty said. “Besides, I’ve got a few more years before retirement, and I’d just as well go out on my own terms and not be shown the door. You get my drift?”

  “OK, fine, but can I at least talk to the guys in Special Activities here to see if they’ll let us keep going?”

  “Why in the hell would you do that?” Marty said.

  “Come on, Marty, maybe we’re missing something. You’re jumping way too far ahead. They may be looking for answers, too. We could look like heroes. They’re very powerful people since they go right into the White House.”

  Marty sat back on his creaking chair, and Dennis took it for a good sign. They stared at each other. Marty suddenly leaned forward.

  “OK, Mr. Smartass. Go ahead and talk to them, but that’s all. Hell, maybe you’re right. Maybe we could come out looking good in this. Those dicks over there think they know everything.”

  Chapter 16

  The message was audacious.

  Judy’s father had gone to the pharmacy one morning, and when he returned to his car from picking up his wife’s heart medicine, there was a folded piece of paper under his windshield wiper.

  It said simply: “Your family is in danger. Just ask Judy why.”

  Her father was so startled that he dropped the note, and only after calming himself did he get on his knees and reach under the car to grab it.

  Judy’s mother called her at work, sobbing uncontrollably, and told her what happened. Judy ordered her father not to touch the note again and warned her parents that investigators would be there soon, and they were not to tell anyone—their neighbors, her sisters, anyone—about the contents of the note. She assured them it was an idle threat and was nothing to be upset about.

  But after explaining to Miller in his office what had happened, she began to shake.

  “Good God, Jude,” Miller said. “That’s outlandish. What a pack of bloody bastards.”

  “My family,” Judy repeated again and again. “They went after my father and mother.”

  Judy had an outlier status in the office; she was quietly resented by the male agents for being treated differently and was condescendingly coddled at times by the senior staff to show they were being inclusive.

  But through it all, she liked her career. Besides the welfare of her son and her family, her career was most important to her. It was her place to stand out and be recognized.

  ***

  The two men sat on the other side of the desk and faced Dennis with the classic blank Agency stare—no facial expression of any significance, just a look bordering on ennui. Dennis was mildly perturbed that there were two people on the other side of the desk. The unstated rule in these kinds of delicate meetings was that a one-on-one meeting allowed for discretion and deniability; either person could say things that might be denied later.

  A meeting with two people on the other side of the table raised the intimidating inference that whatever Dennis reported about the content of the meeting could be effectively disputed by the recollections of the two other participants.

  In the highly nuanced world of agents, handlers, and intelligence bureaucrats, the ability to deny you uttered something was more important than the initial utterance. Dennis knew it, and the two men staring at him knew it. This was a critical procedural point because the Agency forbade taping of any conversation inside Langley for fear they’d be involved in cataloguing, processing, and repeatedly turning over sound files to congressional oversight committees. So, inside Langley, unless it was a formal written report, it was classic he said/she said gamesmanship.

  “So what makes you so sure Garder did not die as attested by the shark expert in your report?” said Sam Massey, the man sitting behind a desk. He was a large man, perhaps two hundred fifty pounds. His face was a florid pink, enhanced by the white, synthetic, short-sleeve shirt he was wearing and the pile of thick, gray-white hair on his remarkably round head.

  “I don’t have any direct evidence at this point, though I’m waiting on a report that might help make my case. I think we might have blood splatter in his car.”

  Massey arched his unkempt eyebrows.

  “Blood?”

  “I think so,” Dennis said. “If it matches his blood type, I’d make the case that he never made it to the water alive.”

  Massey stared at Dennis; Dennis stared at Massey. A short, thin man with black hair swept straight back from his forehead sat in the chair to Massey’s right. Massey had neither introduced the short man, nor acknowledged his presence, so Dennis decided to act like he wasn’t in the room.

  “Even if there is blood, it doesn’t lead to the conclusion that he was killed,” Massey said finally.

  “The whole thing doesn’t work,” Dennis said. “I’ve been doing this a while, and this one doesn’t work. Something’s wrong.”

  Massey looked down at a manila folder and opened it slowly, his large sausage fingers barely able to grasp the thin folder.

  “Yes, I see you’ve been at this a long time. Even before the IG’s office, you were an investigator for military police.”

  “That was a short stint in the CID,” Dennis said.

  “Yes, I see it was during the Bosnian crisis. That must have been interesting. Crazy times.”

  Dennis was caught off guard by the fact that Massey had his personnel folder. He could not remember the last time someone had shown they had access to his file. It was certainly not standard operating procedure, and the brazen intimidation angered him.

  “You ever deal with the IG’s office before?” Dennis asked.

  “No, can’t say I have,” Massey said.

  “Well, you must be a big shot to have my personnel folder.”

  Massey chuckled. “We just want to see who we’re dealing with.”

  “Right.”

  Massey closed the folder with a flourish. “Listen Cunningham, we appreciate your interest in Garder’s disappearance, but to be honest, we don’t see much evidence to suggest foul play was involved. Your report said he was likely killed by a shark, and we see no reason to reopen the investigation.”

  “Tell me,” Dennis said, “did the two agents you sent out before me remove anything from Garder’s apartment or his office in the consulate? I couldn’t get access to their report.”

  Dennis noticed that the hulking man blinked twice in rapid succession—it was a small thing, but he looked for small things with professionals like Massey.

  “What do you mean?” Massey said.

  “I mean did those bozos take anything that they shouldn’t have? Garder’s office desk was too clean; even his calendar had been replaced—clumsily, I should mention—with a brand new one. If they removed stuff, I need access to it.”

  Blink, blink.

  “I’m not aware of anything that was removed,” Massey said.

  “Well, if anything was removed, that would be a serious breach of Agency rules,” Dennis said with relish. “There would have to be an investigation. The OIG takes this stuff seriously.”

  Blink.

  “Don’t get your bowels in an up
roar,” Massey said. “We’re accepting your report as it stands. Feel free to do whatever you IG folks do. It’s 2007, and we have two wars going on and don’t have time to waste on closed cases. As far as we’re concerned, Garder is shark feces at this point.”

  ***

  Judy stood in the shade of a large eucalyptus tree trying to make out Simon across the field. He was on the school’s track team, and they were competing against Scotch College, another of Perth’s private schools. Seeing all those healthy young men assembled in one place always stirred her maternal emotions—the young men seemed so strong, invincible, and innocent.

  Simon was an incredibly handsome young man. Judy figured he had his father’s height and good looks, but mercifully had her down-to-earth sensibilities.

  Judy was talking to one of the mothers when she froze. She spotted Phillip walking arm in arm with his fiancée, making their way down the slope from the parking lot.

  At first she didn’t hear her mobile phone ringing over the raised cheers from parents as the distance runners went by in a group. Digging it out of her purse, she saw the incoming number was blocked.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Judy?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Dennis: from the States.”

  “Dennis, I know where you’re from,” she said, smiling into the phone and moving away from her friends.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Well, to be honest, Dennis, at this very moment I’m not doing so well. I’m at an athletic event where my son is competing, and my former husband just showed up with his trollop. And I’ve had quite a strange turn of events on one of my cases. One day, if you ever pass through this side of the world again, we’ll sit down for a drink and I’ll entertain you with that story.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Judy,” he said. “I really am. Hope it’s not a serious problem at work. And try not to let your ex-husband bother you. He’s a dope.”

  She desperately needed someone to make her feel better, and even if they were the awkward entreaties of a Yank on the other side of the world, she would take them.

  “You’re too kind, Dennis.”

  “I mean it. The guy is a loser.”