Color Of Blood

by Keith Yocum

  Dennis was also perplexed by one aspect of the Garder case: how did Garder know so much about mining in Western Australia? His files and research materials on mining companies were perfunctory. How did he learn so many corporate details about the vast, desolate expanse of Western Australia? How did he know where to visit? And what was he looking for?

  Dennis wondered again about the interview with Drew Pearson from the WA Mining Board. It had been a useless interview, but of all the people Garder had contacted, Pearson would have known the most. If Garder had money to spread around to buy information, wouldn’t it make sense that Pearson could have been a key paid source?

  Massey had finally given Dennis access to Garder’s black money account. It showed he had originally been given fifty thousand dollars to pay for information and develop contacts. He barely drew down the account, and then suddenly in September the account was drained and was replenished with $1 million. Soon that money was gone, too.

  Dennis was given the list of people Garder was allegedly paying as sources. Not only were the sources ordinary citizens of WA that Garder had used to cover his tracks, but Drew Pearson was specifically not on the list. Normally Dennis would interview the Canberra station chief who handled Garder. But Garder was being run outside of normal channels directly by Massey’s group.

  The poetry-reading, wristwatch-loving kid had run off with a million bucks that belonged to the US government. Dennis loved exactly this kind of case where right and wrong was clear. Some Agency employees simply chose wrong. His usual role was to lead the foxhunt until the fox was cornered; this time he’d have to lead the hunt and catch the fox.

  ***

  Judy sped to work, anxious not to be late for a scheduled conference. She had just left her lawyer’s office and was furious. Phillip had petitioned the court to adjust alimony payments downward, and even though her lawyer told Judy it would certainly be denied, Judy was infuriated. Why would he bring this frivolous item to court? To torment and humiliate her? To cause her to burn money for legal fees, as her father had wondered?

  Phillip was a well-connected criminal lawyer in Perth with a small commercial and civil practice on the side. His criminal work had forced Judy to recuse herself from several cases because he was defending the suspect. Perth was a small city with too many solicitors and barristers, but Phillip seemed to find plenty of work.

  They had rarely discussed their work at home. Maybe that’s why the relationship did not work out, she had wondered after the divorce.

  A taxi pulled out in front of her on Stirling Highway, and she rode the car horn for a few seconds, releasing her frustration. Her mobile phone rang, and she kept looking at the road while blindly groping her open purse.

  “Judy, it’s Dennis again. I looked at the clock, and I think it’s noon there, right?”

  “Yes.” Her closest relationship with an adult male right now, besides her stepfather, was with a cranky, blue-eyed Yank twelve thousand miles away.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about that guy Pearson from the Mining Bureau that we talked to. I think I’d like to talk to him again. I’m going to request a background check on him through your AFP. Just wanted to give you a heads up in case you saw it come through.”

  “Unfortunately it’s a little late.”

  “I thought you said it was noon out there?”

  “No, I don’t mean it in that way. I mean Pearson. He passed away recently.”

  “He what?”

  “He passed away, Dennis. Last week, I think it was. I read his obituary in the newspaper: sudden heart attack—very tragic.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Judy felt her neck muscles tense; another man was telling her she’d done something wrong.

  “Dennis, I thought we agreed that the Pearson interview was weak and unimportant. Didn’t you call it a complete waste of time?”

  “Yes, but he’s related to the case.”

  “Dennis, until just a few days ago, the case was closed, yes? Please don’t suggest that I failed to follow this up. That’s infuriating.”

  Her neck flushed, and her breathing grew short and labored.

  “Hey, wait, Judy, don’t get angry. I’m sorry. That was stupid of me. I don’t know why I said it that way. You are absolutely correct.”

  She looked up briefly in the rear-view mirror and saw the tense, angry face of a sandy-blonde driver staring back. It scared her a little.

  “No worries, Dennis,” she said.

  “He was pretty young to die of a heart attack, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, actually that’s what the obit stated.” She pulled into the parking lot at work. “I think he was forty-two years old. Something like that.”

  “Judy, is there any way that you could pull the autopsy report on Pearson? In your official capacity? Maybe?”

  She slid into a parking space, put the transmission in park, and let the air conditioner cool her down. Judy took a deep breath and realized, for better or ill, she liked helping Dennis.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll try to pull it.”

  “Judy,” he said, stumbling awkwardly, “if you can’t get it, that’s fine. Really. I can run it through official channels.”

  “I’ll pull it,” she repeated.

  “Are you angry at me?” Dennis said, startling her with his directness. He sounded hurt, like a little boy.

  “No, Dennis,” she said. “I’m just having a bad day.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Shoot my ex-husband.”

  “Oh,” he said. “It’s him again.”

  “Yes, it’s bloody him again, the bastard.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Try not to let him get under your skin, Judy.”

  She sighed. “It’s hard to forget him, Dennis, but I shouldn’t let him get to me this way. You’re right. And I have to go now. Sorry.”

  Judy rang off and stayed in the car another minute, calming down before exposing herself to the angry West Australian sun.

  Chapter 22

  Dennis sat in his living room with a book on his lap, his reading glasses tipped to the front of his nose; the light from the lamp shined harshly in the otherwise darkened living room.

  He had attempted to read Wilfred Owen’s poems several times, and each attempt was met by a baffling combination of words and verse endings that he could not comprehend. If this poet was so good, he thought, why can’t I understand a damn thing he’s saying?

  The last Owen poem in the anthology was titled “Strange Meeting,” and Dennis had attempted to read it twice before. Nevertheless he found himself tripping over it yet again, determined to unlock the peculiar code that hid its meaning.

  The poem appeared to describe a soldier’s dream:

  It seemed that out of the battle I escaped

  Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

  Through granites which Titanic wars have groined.

  OK, Dennis thought. He’s in a tunnel or a bunker. He’s escaping the war above. He read on.

  Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

  Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

  Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

  With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

  Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.

  Dennis smiled as if he had solved a complicated mathematical formula: the poem told the story of two dead soldiers meeting in hell.

  He stumbled through to the end of the poem, reading the last stanza several times before he grasped what one soldier tells the poem’s narrator:

  I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

  I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned

  Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

  I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

  Let us sleep now . . .

  Dennis slowly closed the book in his lap. The poem was not about two random soldiers meeting in hell
and commiserating on their short lives. In fact it was about two dead soldiers, one of which had killed the other just the day before.

  Dennis reached over and picked his drink off the coffee table. The ice cubes had melted, diluting it to a tepid mixture and leaving a ragged ring of warm condensation on the tabletop. Dennis sipped it absently, looked down as a bead of water fell off the glass bottom and splattered onto the dust jacket of the book.

  He suddenly did not like having the book in his lap, and he tossed it with a little too much force onto the coffee table, where it slid across the top and onto the carpet.

  “That was a stupid poem,” he said out loud as he stood and walked into the kitchen. He poured the remainder of his drink down the drain, placed the empty glass in the stainless-steel sink, and walked into his bedroom. He was in a foul mood and quickly brushed his teeth, hung his trousers over a chair, got into bed, and turned off the light.

  He wrestled with his pillow and sheets for at least thirty minutes before it came to him: he, too, had dreamed of dead soldiers he had killed. He had suffered a recurring dream in which the station chief in Nicaragua that had committed suicide would show up, sitting forlornly at the kitchen table, saying absolutely nothing.

  Dennis had never spoken about the dream to anyone, except a brief mention to Dr. Forrester.

  He had asked Dr. Forrester, “So in the dream, why does he just sit there? He never talks.”

  “What do you want him to say?” Dr. Forrester had asked.

  “Christ, I don’t know! Something! Just don’t sit there and stare at me.”

  ***

  “It was sudden cardiac arrest,” Judy said.

  “Did he have any history of heart disease?”

  “There was no sign of coronary artery disease,” she said. “The report simply says ‘sudden cardiac arrest’ as the cause of death.”

  “Were there any other signs of injury on his body: anything unusual or strange?”

  “No, not that the report states.”

  “And they didn’t do a toxicology test?”

  “No, Dennis, I already told you that. You keep asking the same questions, and I keep repeating the same answers. He died of cardiac arrest. It’s a common cause of death in many Western countries.”

  “But he was only forty-two years old,” Dennis said. “And there was no sign of narrowing of the arteries? No heart defects like arrhythmia? It just seems suspicious.”

  “Not to me: seems tragically normal in our day and age. A colleague here had a brother who died suddenly last year from a heart attack. I believe the man was in his late thirties: just collapsed watching a footy match. It happens, Dennis.”

  ***

  They met in the sprawling cafeteria in Langley. Dennis spotted her, stood, and waved. She nodded and weaved her way through the maze of tables and chairs to Dennis’s table.

  “Hello, Cunningham,” she said, plopping down on one of the cheap plastic-and-metal chairs. “I haven’t spoken to you in quite a while. I thought for sure you would have taken early retirement and gone to work for a contractor.”

  Sally Winston was a career officer in the Directorate of Operations. On the surface she defied the common perception of a woman who spent her life in the filthy sewers of the clandestine services. She was a tall, beautiful, dark-haired woman with a terrific figure who was married to another dashing Agency operative. They were an item for many years in Langley, the dream team of elegance and panache—the kind of spies you saw in Hollywood or read about in popular novels.

  Sally had aged very nicely, Dennis noted as they made small talk. She must be in her late forties by now, he thought, but her face was hardly creased, and though her waist had expanded slightly, she could still turn heads at the supermarket checkout counter.

  Dennis had worked with Sally a decade earlier in a complicated investigation of missing funds from the London station. Sally was the station chief at the time, and her team had an enviable record of “flipping” former Russian and Eastern Bloc émigrés. Sally was seen as a rising star, until suddenly the bean counters in Langley noticed that more than two million dollars had gone missing from a fund loosely managed by Sally and her team of agents.

  Sally was suspected of orchestrating the involvement of the inspector general’s office in an investigation of the missing funds. Typically the Operations staff would investigate an incident like this. It would only end up at the IG’s office if there were charges of gross malfeasance or a cover-up. Since the Directorate of Operations is a closed-loop environment, charges of malfeasance would never make it to the IG’s office unless, of course, the charges were leaked to the news media or Capitol Hill.

  In Sally’s case, the Republican senator from South Carolina who sat on the Intelligence Committee requested the IG’s office investigate the missing funds.

  The scuttlebutt at the time was that Sally or her husband had back-channeled the incident to the senator’s staff to get the IG to look into it. Sally denied any involvement, of course, and the IG went ahead by detailing Dennis to London.

  Dennis, aware of the controversy, worked with Sally to cull out the potential suspects from the list of operatives. In the end Dennis’s persistence and abrasive style had led him to Sally’s deputy, a fellow named Richard Silver.

  Silver had been in cahoots with another agent—his lover—and they had managed to salt away almost $1.5 million in several Swiss bank accounts.

  Before Dennis could confront Silver, the agent took off for Stockholm and defected to Russian intelligence. He left his love interest holding the bag. While Sally was exonerated, Dennis was roundly criticized for relying on old-school tactics like intuition and confrontation. It was argued that he should have put all suspects through a round of lie detector tests immediately. Instead Silver escaped and took with him a list of paid spies and informants; that mess took years to repair.

  Only through the combined interventions of Marty and Sally did Dennis escape a serious reprimand.

  Over the years Sally and Dennis had maintained a perverse symbiotic relationship by exchanging gossipy bureaucratic information that lubricated much of intra-Agency interaction.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your wife,” Sally said.

  “Thanks, I’m slowly getting my act back together.”

  Just then a young woman approached and talked with Sally about a conference call that afternoon. After the woman left, Sally muttered, “Jesus, you’d think the only thing going on in the world right now is the war in Iraq and those Cro-Magnon towelheads in Afghanistan.”

  Sally may have presented like a movie-star version of a spy, but in real life she sounded like a union dockworker. Dennis liked that about her. She was coarse, unsentimental, and crass: attributes appropriate for someone who spent her life approving waterboarding, blackmail, and the occasional drone strike.

  “Are you up to your elbows in Iraq?”

  “Elbows? Shit, I’m up to my ears, Cunningham. Since the stupid war started, they’ve been working us twenty-four seven to come up with a magic bullet to keep American troops from being killed. Tell me, how do you fight a war and not lose troops?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s insane. They want a TV war where no Americans get killed. They show those silly low-res videos of some building being blown up by a smart bomb to prove how brilliant we are, but when American ground troops get killed, they go bananas and hatch schemes to keep our boys from being killed. In a war! In a war against other armed men! You wouldn’t believe the harebrained schemes some of the idiots on Pennsylvania Avenue are coming up with. Whack jobs, the lot of them. And of course we’ve got our share of idiots here.”

  They chuckled, a kind of shared derision born of years fighting enemies, both external and internal.

  “So what’s on your mind?” she asked.

  “Kind of a stupid question, but thought you could help,” he said.

  “Don’t bullshit me, just ask the question,” she said.

  “OK,
here goes: how would an Agency hit team cause a cardiac arrest in a normal, healthy man and do it undetected?”

  Sally picked at her salad, stabbing a piece of Romaine lettuce with her plastic fork and plopping it into her mouth. She chewed it and shoved around the remainder of the salad as if she were looking for something important.

  “Depends,” she said after swallowing a small cherry tomato. “It’s less complicated if it’s a civilian, messy if it’s a combatant.”

  “OK, a civilian,” Dennis said.

  “Well, that would be fairly simple then,” she said. “Assuming of course”—she turned her voice into a mocking monotone—“that we’d received an Executive Order for a targeted killing.”

  Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was understood the Agency could terminate anyone anywhere if he or she looked, smelled, or talked like a terrorist. Increasingly the effort to whisk high-value targets off the street in Paris and drop them into prison at Guantanamo was losing favor. Civil libertarian lawyers, left-wing media, and some legislators were demanding public disclosure of the prisoners’ treatment, and even public trials. It was easier to simply kill them.

  “So,” she continued, “we’d put a team onto said civilian and surveil, looking for a time slot when we could get clean, private access. They’d plan the intervention, rehearse, and then go in. If there are no complications, the intervention is done in less than three minutes.”

  “How would you do it?”

  “You mean kill him?”

  “Yeah,” Dennis said.

  “In most cases, injection.”

  “How would you inject someone with something that’s going to kill him and then just walk away?” Dennis asked.

  “You prissy little IG folks are so stupid about this shit.”

  “Come on.” Dennis tried to deflect her back to his question. “I agree we don’t know how this kind of stuff is done, but just humor me here. How would we ‘do’ a civilian like you described without the mark screaming for bloody murder and fighting his attackers?”