Color Of Blood

by Keith Yocum

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. If I knew what the connection was, I would tell you. You think I like having my parents scared to death?”

  “No, of course not. Still, this threat doesn’t add up. What would they expect you to do after being threatened? How could it advantage them?”

  “Maybe they expected me to throw the case somehow,” she said. “Maybe I’d claim that Wu wasn’t the man I stopped at the airport or deny some other point of evidence. But that’s a stretch, if you ask me. They had to consider that I’d certainly report the threat.”

  They were sitting in a small pastry shop near their office, and Judy toyed with her coffee cup, lost in thought.

  “I think it will pass,” Daniel said. “Really, Jude, they’ll just forget about you and your family. Must be a new triad that’s not very sophisticated. It’s silly, really. We have a team giving round-the-clock protection for your family, and they shouldn’t be alarmed.”

  “You’ve never met my stepfather, have you?” she said.

  “No,” he said, laughing. “Not had the pleasure.”

  “Lucky you,” she said.

  Daniel’s mobile phone rang, and he reached into his back pocket and put down his tea to answer it. Judy’s phone also rang, and she pulled it out of her purse.

  “Judy?”

  “Yes”

  “This is Erica.” Miller’s secretary often made calls for him when he was pressed for time. “Calvin wanted me to tell you that they’ve just made the biggest heroin bust in Australian history,” she said. “A small freighter in Fremantle: about a thousand kilos of heroin. He thought you should know. It’s a great day for the department, and he wanted me to tell you and the others.”

  “Erica, was this an AFP effort or was it WA Police?”

  “It was the AFP, Judy. Don’t you remember? I thought you and Daniel did surveillance on this one, right?”

  “Ah, yes we did,” she said. She remembered a ten-day period last winter when she and Daniel followed two Pakistani merchant mariners from a Hong Kong–chartered container ship. Neither Judy nor Daniel could ascertain anything unusual from their wandering around Fremantle and Perth.

  “Well, Calvin wanted to thank everyone who worked on it. He said it will be on the telly tonight for certain. Everyone will be able to see our success.”

  “Of course,” Judy said.

  ***

  After pressing the doorbell several times, Dennis wondered if it even worked. He grabbed the tarnished brass knocker and banged the metal door. Ambivalent and a little confused about his presence there, he secretly hoped she was not home.

  He heard movement inside the apartment, and he could see a flicker of light at the peephole.

  “Dad!” Beth threw her arms around his neck. “What are you doing here unannounced? Is something wrong?”

  “I just thought I’d drop in and say hello.”

  “In California?” She pulled him into the living room. “Since when do you drop in three thousand miles away from home? I mean, it’s great to see you. It’s just that I didn’t know you were coming. Why didn’t you call?”

  “Oh, you know me,” he said.

  Standing in the dining room, looking surprised and nearly incredulous, was Nathan, her husband.

  “Mr. Cunningham!” he said. “What a surprise.” Mercifully, Nathan never referred to Dennis as Dad, and Dennis took it as a redeeming quality. Wearing a button-down, long-sleeve blue dress shirt and a pair of dark blue slacks, Dennis thought Nathan looked very much like the patent attorney that he was. A dark-brown tweed sports coat hung over the back of the dining room chair that he had just risen from.

  “Oops,” Dennis said, noticing they had been eating dinner. “That’ll teach me. I should have called; you’re eating dinner.”

  “Don’t be silly. We have plenty of food for another setting.” Beth dragged him to the small round table. “How about some turkey meatloaf and mixed vegetables?”

  “No, really,” Dennis said.

  “Nonsense, just sit right there.” She pointed to a chair.

  “Beth, really—”

  “Dad,” she said, giving him the same kind of cut-the-shit-look Martha used in their marriage.

  “Fine. I’ll shut up and eat.” He sat down and was joined by Nathan. Beth quickly plated a slice of turkey meatloaf and a pile of steaming vegetables and put it in front him. In truth he was famished, and eating would be a good distraction from his self-consciousness.

  In the four years that his daughter had lived in San Francisco, he had been in sporadic contact with her, but he had only visited her apartment once. He was on completely foreign territory and might as well have been having dinner with a strange couple in an apartment in Kazakhstan.

  The three of them made pleasant small talk for a while. Beth and Nathan were drinking red wine, and they offered some to Dennis, but he took a glass of water instead. Beth asked Dennis how he was feeling. He assured her he was feeling fine and tried to change the subject.

  “You’re not still depressed, are you?” she asked.

  “Nope, back at work. Fit as a fiddle or something like that.”

  The conversation veered to Nathan’s legal work and their goal to buy a single-family home in the next two years, and to have children.

  During a brief pause, Beth turned to Dennis.

  “You know, Dad, I still can’t believe you work for the CIA,” she said in a mildly scolding tone. Dennis noticed that Nathan winced slightly and looked down at his plate. “I mean I can easily see you working for them, but that’s not the problem. It’s that you kept it from us for so long. I’ve done some research on the web, and it seems like they relaxed those disclosure rules some time ago.”

  Dennis frowned, turning his forehead into deep horizontal furrows developed from repeated use.

  “Dad,” she said. “Please don’t go into one of your huffs.”

  He quickly caught himself. Beth was the only person left in his very small family, and he needed to treat her with a new level of respect. He had found out painfully and brutally that isolation was no longer an option for him.

  When Dennis had started working at the Agency it was indeed against regulations to divulge to his family who his employer was; his cover was that he worked in security for an obscure Department of Defense group. But in reality Dennis loved the partitioning of his life into home and work. It suited his vision of the boundaries of his life. When the Agency rules changed in the early 1990s and most employees could disclose to their families that they worked for the CIA, Dennis chose to maintain the old rules and keep his work life cordoned off.

  “Well, Beth, I can’t really say why I kept up the charade for so long,” he said, taking a sip of water. “It was a habit.”

  “A bad habit,” she said.

  “Beth,” Nathan said quickly. “Come on.”

  Dennis held up his hand, waving off Nathan’s intervention, and then he did something that was completely unexpected, and in its own small way, shocking. He laughed. Not out of derision, or even mockery, but in a pose of surrender.

  “You know I’m a nutbag,” he said, chuckling. “So why are you so surprised? Just do me a favor and don’t put my employment situation on your Facebook page.”

  Nathan laughed, and Beth made an odd, startled smile.

  “Since when do you make jokes?” she countered. “I’ve never heard you make a joke before. What kind of medication do they have you on?”

  “Beth!” Nathan said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m not on any medication,” Dennis said. “Don’t be silly. I’m fine. Don’t I look fine?”

  “Yes, actually you do,” she said, reaching for her glass of wine. “You even look tan. Didn’t you say you were in Australia?”

  “Yes, I was there for a bit. It’s a pretty interesting place: really nice people.”

  “You know—and don’t get all mad at me, but when you called me from there I had the strangest feeling you were in
danger,” she said. “I mean it gave me goose bumps. It was very creepy.”

  “Yeah, it was weird,” Nathan said, finishing off his meatloaf. “She thought some evil force was descending upon you there in the great Australian outback. I couldn’t talk her out of it. Thank God you came back to the States because, honestly, she was a nervous wreck.”

  “Beth, I told you that I don’t have the kind of job that puts me in danger,” Dennis said. “And please tell me you didn’t call Langley again looking for me.”

  “I told her not to call,” Nathan said, standing up and clearing the plates from the table. “But she had it in her head you were in trouble, and she needed to talk to you. And when Beth gets her mind on something, there’s no letting go.”

  “Now you’re ganging up on me! You think people don’t have premonitions? I’m telling you that I had a strong feeling something bad was going to happen to you, or that you were near something that would harm you.”

  Nathan laughed from the kitchen. “See, Mr. Cunningham? Was she like this growing up?”

  “Well, she was always headstrong, that’s for sure,” he said. “This premonition thing, though, I don’t remember much of that.”

  “Just promise me that you’re not going back to Australia,” Beth said, raising her glass of wine and taking a long sip. Dennis watched the deep ruby-red liquid swirl in the glass bowl as it tipped back.

  “No, I’m not going back to Australia,” he said. “And if I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”

  Nathan laughed loudly as he sat back down at the table. “That’s my approach as well! Great minds think alike.”

  “Men are pigs,” she said.

  For a brief moment—perhaps a millisecond—Dennis felt a profound sense of warmth toward his daughter that he had not experienced before. It felt alien, but surprisingly good.

  ***

  Dennis stopped going into Langley and busied himself with silly, nameless tasks like going to see a movie at 2:00 p.m. at a deserted multiplex. He bought a new pair of shoes he didn’t need. He cleaned the bathroom, though it took a long time to find the cleaning materials—and he waited.

  To fill the time he called Judy twice; once she was traveling and could not talk. He wondered if she was just blowing him off. He chatted with her a few days later, and they talked like long-lost friends. Like Marty, she did not think working for Massey was a good idea.

  “I sort of worry about you,” she said, trying her best to not sound emotionally invested.

  “If I can’t handle Massey,” Dennis replied, “then I’ve no business working for the Agency.”

  “But he’s powerful, Dennis. You said so yourself. Be careful.”

  “Roger that,” he said.

  ***

  The contact protocol was always the same. First, he called the man’s home, and his wife, Margaret, would answer; the man never answered the phone himself. Dennis and Margaret would then chat amiably about the weather, politics, and whatever was on their mind. Finally Margaret would say something like, “Dennis, would you like to talk to Peter? He’s in the den.”

  “Sure,” Dennis would respond.

  Peter and Dennis would make their own attempt at small talk until Dennis asked Peter if he’d like to grab a cup of coffee sometime.

  Peter Harbaugh was seventy-seven years old and retired from the Agency, where he had worked for forty-one years. An éminence grise, Peter was a product of the gritty and complex Cold War that was fought on nearly every continent. Dennis had come in contact with Peter at the end of his career when the gray-haired veteran was briefly detailed to the IG’s office to help assess operational culpability for a failed assassination attempt. A Pakistani nuclear weapons engineer was discovered selling his services to henchmen like Moammar Khadafy in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. After the Israelis failed to kill the engineer, the job was taken up by the Agency, but it failed, too. Peter and Dennis had authored a report detailing broad-based Agency malfeasance in their failed attempt.

  Dennis had instantly taken a liking to the diminutive, reserved, and professorial Harbaugh. Peter, for his part, seemed to relish Dennis’s brash investigative style, and they developed one of those odd Agency relationships—so much so that when Peter retired, Dennis managed to visit him at least once every six months. Dennis enjoyed chatting with the elder statesman, though he was not always sure why. Perhaps he found comfort in Peter’s wise and calm demeanor, or maybe Dennis was simply lonely for company. Nevertheless, their relationship endured.

  On this occasion, Margaret chatted for a very long time before passing the phone along to Peter, and the two men agreed to meet at a Starbucks near Peter’s Wisconsin Avenue condo.

  Peter dressed in the same preppy attire in retirement that he was famous for during his tenure. Dennis smiled when he saw him dressed in a navy-blue blazer, pressed blue button-down dress shirt, and khaki slacks. His slacks were always cuffed at the bottom. With his thinning gray hair and small, angular face, he looked like the aging preppy that he was. Peter sat at a small table cradling a coffee cup and smiling. Dennis waved, purchased his coffee, and joined Peter.

  “How are you feeling?” Peter asked. “You look good. Is that a tan I see on your face?”

  “Very observant,” Dennis said. “Australia.”

  “That’s a funny place for a man of your talents.”

  Dennis chuckled. “Was on a vetting mission to cross-check an MIA investigation by Operations. Marty said it was a small job to get my sea legs back. Something like that.”

  “How is Marty?” Peter asked, slowly raising the cup to his lips.

  “Piss and vinegar,” Dennis said. “Mostly vinegar.”

  “When is he going to retire?”

  “Says he can’t because of his divorce, but I think he just likes this crap. Plus, I think his second wife drives him nuts, and he’d rather be at work.”

  “And you, when are you going to pull the ripcord and float out of there?”

  “Ah, well, you know I’m in no rush to sell my soul to a Crystal City contractor at triple the pay. I mean I’d just be driving around Kabul in an armored Humvee wearing a flak jacket and eating goat kebabs. Naw, I’ll pass on that exciting lifestyle.”

  “Well, you have an unusual talent for investigations, Dennis, and I’m glad you’re back at the IG’s office,” Peter said. “I gather things are falling apart inside and outside of Langley. War is exciting for the first ten minutes, and then the rest is just horrid. I hear from my friends that we’re in the vast horrid phase of the two wars.”

  “I would say that is a roger.”

  They took simultaneous sips of coffee.

  “What’s on your mind?” Peter asked.

  “Well,” Dennis started, “I think I did something stupid.” He told Peter the convoluted story of Garder’s disappearance, the hazmat alert, the phone records showing Garder’s calls to his parents, and finally his enlistment by Massey to find the missing agent.

  “Massey?” Peter grimaced.

  “Yes.”

  “Why would you fool around with Massey?” Peter looked directly into Dennis’s eyes.

  Dennis put down his coffee cup and looked away. “I don’t know, really. I just felt like I could solve this puzzle. Guess I was being brash; you know, the regular bravado from me.”

  “Mmm. Massey is not a nice person,” Peter said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you knew that going in?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, if you can’t find the kid, you’ll be back to the IG’s office soon enough. And of course if you do find this young man, then you’re golden. Massey will probably get you permanently reassigned to his group. Is that what you want?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Do you want my advice?” Peter asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “I’d go back and tell Massey that you’ve reconsidered, and that you’re not up for the assignment. Make something up.”

  “He got me de
tailed,” Dennis said. “The IG signed me over. It’s too late.”

  “Mmm. Next time you get involved with folks like Massey, come see me first before you commit to anything.”

  “So you think he’s that bad?”

  “It’s not just him, it’s the context. There are no more rules, and when there are no rules, anything can happen—especially bad things. At least we had rules against the Russians, the East Germans, the Bulgarians—well, maybe not the Bulgarians—but there were rules, as strange as it sounds.”

  “And you think it’s worse now?”

  “Of course it is. You know that. Or you used to know that. I’m troubled by the fact that the first thing you do after coming back to work is insert yourself into Massey’s group.”

  Dennis frowned and looked out into the street again. “Like I said, it was a mistake.” They sat in silence.

  “I was tired of sitting at home brooding and thought this chase was perfect for me. I like the chase; I’m good at it.”

  “In that case you’ve done the right thing, Dennis.” Peter pushed his empty cup away. “Just watch Massey. Happy hunting. Let me know how it goes. And how bad could it be if you get to visit Australia?”

  ***

  And still Dennis waited.

  It was the same quirky method he’d used over the years: he would ruminate over the details of a case and wait for something to emerge to point him in the right direction. Maybe it didn’t always work, but his most successful cases had turned out that way.

  More than anything, Dennis felt impelled to prove his worth to Massey.

  Dennis reread the schoolboyish notes that he kept in his spiral notebook. Now that Massey had reopened the Garder case, he also had access to the official files again.

  There were a couple of new items he discovered: Garder was missing once for three weeks. His report showed that he had visited several mining operations, including a nickel mine five hundred miles northeast of Perth called Adams Mining Ltd. Garder’s notes on his interview with the director at Adams Mining were painfully boring, like nearly all his reports.

  But there was no explanation for one particular three-week period that was marked as “intrastate travel” in his daily report. In contrast to his other travel reports, no destinations were listed. It was blank.