Color Of Blood

by Keith Yocum

  She sighed. “OK. It would go like this: a civilian would not know what’s happening to him—remember you told me to describe taking out a civilian. I mean a civvy would have no more clue about what was happening than you would right now if someone walked up behind and stuck a shiv in your neck, severing your spine between C4 and C5.”

  Reflexively Dennis looked behind him, and Sally laughed.

  “Go on,” Dennis said dryly.

  “If he were a noncombatant, we’d take him in his bed, assuming he’s alone. Often they sleep with a partner, so we’d pick a venue like a parking garage at night, or a men’s room, something like that.”

  “But how would you inject him?” Dennis asked.

  “With a gas-powered syringe,” she said, stabbing another small, plump, candy-red cherry tomato. “They’re available everywhere. Nothing special.”

  “Fine, then what?”

  “If it doesn’t take place in his bed—which is best, as I stated—then we’d use a three-person team. They’d distract the mark with a pretty woman asking directions or an ugly old woman asking directions, something like that. We’d have two agents grab the mark from behind. They’d raise his left arm quickly, and the attractive or ugly agent in front would jab the civvy in the armpit of the raised arm. I mean it literally takes seconds. Needle would slide right through clothing, and then everyone would simply release the person and smile at him.”

  “Smile at him?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sounds weird but the PSY OPS folks taught us that civilians are usually so confused when they’re attacked that they will only try to defend themselves if we act like we’ve done something wrong—you know, if we run away or something like that.”

  “So let me get this right: the mark has just been groped by a smiling group of strangers that just injected him with a drug that will stop his heart. And they just stand there?”

  “Mostly, yes, but you know it’s very fast acting. Sometimes they’re down in less than a minute. You know their adrenalin has amped their heart rate, so the drug is quickly dispersed into the heart muscle. Usually the last thing they see before losing consciousness is a group of smiling, friendly people,” she said, chuckling.

  “Why the armpit?”

  “It’s nearly impossible to see discoloration or bruising in an armpit that’s covered with hair. And remember, if it’s a civilian, and he just died of a heart attack, is a goddamn coroner going to painstakingly shave every piece of body hair on a cadaver to look for signs of a tiny injection? No fucking way.”

  “And the drug?”

  “I can’t tell you that, Cunningham. It’s a classified product made under contract by one of the big pharma companies. We call it ‘bug juice’ because we don’t even know the name of it, much less the active ingredient. I’m told it has an incredibly fast half-life, is an obscure substance that is nearly impossible to test for, and is lethal in ninety-nine point nine percent of all subjects at the correct dosage.”

  “Is there an antidote in case someone gets stuck accidentally?”

  “You bet. And you better believe we need it. One member of a hit squad accidentally injected one of his team members. Happened in Ankara two months ago,” she said, laughing as if it were the funniest thing she’d heard in months. “Can you believe it? The two guys grab the mark from behind and raise his right arm, but the agent in front is so friggin’ nervous that he jams the syringe into the armpit of our agent by accident. He injects our guy!”

  “God, what happened?”

  “Oh, they shot him,” she said, searching for more tomatoes in her salad.

  “They shot our agent?”

  “No, stupid, they shot the mark in the head and then injected our agent with the antidote. My God we had tears in our eyes, we were laughing so hard back here. I thought Perkins was going to wet his pants. Do you know Perkins?”

  Dennis shook his head.

  “Jeeze!” Dennis momentarily lost track of his line of questioning. “Guess you had to be there to get the humor. But back to how we’d take out a civilian. How does our competition do it?”

  “For civilians?”

  “Yes.

  “Well, it depends. The Israelis use ‘bug juice,’ I’m told, in much the same manner. The Brits use another substance that is ingested, so there’s no need for all the hoopla around injecting and standing there smiling, crap like that. But it’s traceable, breaks down more slowly, etcetera. And the Russians prefer really exotic stuff like polonium. They’re fucking crazy over there and don’t really care if it’s traceable. They’re scarier now than when the KGB was running amok.”

  Sally finished her salad, pushed away her plastic plate and looked at her watch. “Got to go, Cunningham,” she said. “War’s a-calling.” She stood up. “Oh, I heard something about you,” she said, concentrating. “What the hell was it?”

  “Something good, I hope,” he said, looking up at her and trying to avoid eye contact with her bra that pressed furiously against the blue, pin-striped blouse.

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “I heard you were working with Massey and his group. Tell me that’s not right?”

  “Jeeze, news travels fast.”

  “So it is true,” she said. “What a big, fat bastard he is. You must be off your rocker to work with him. You know he’s the Agency’s link into JSOC, don’t you? And isn’t he a good buddy of your boss?”

  “Marty?”

  “Yeah, him.”

  “I guess they know each other.”

  “You must be really hard up to work for Massey.”

  “My project’s a small one, believe me,” Dennis said. “Short-term deal, then back to the IG.”

  “Riiiight,” she said, stringing out the word so it lasted for about three seconds.

  “Really.”

  “Nice knowing you, Cunningham.”

  She walked away. Dennis watched her saunter across the cafeteria, nodding hellos to employees and generally looking terrific.

  Chapter 23

  Judy had broken the rules only a few times in her career, but this was by far the worst breach.

  She knocked on the door and waited in the shade of the front-door awning, the beam of the burning sun only a foot away. A woman, slightly plump but handsome at the same time, answered the door.

  Judy introduced herself as a member of the WA Department of Public Health and wondered if she had a few minutes to answer some questions.

  The woman seemed perplexed and asked for identification. After holding Judy’s ATF badge and looking at it closely, she said, “All right, then.” The woman did not notice the discrepancy between the ATF card and Judy’s introduction, which is what Judy anticipated.

  The interior of the house was well appointed, a blend of Australian casual and English Country. The house was in the fashionable City Beach area, north of Fremantle, and Judy felt a little tug of envy. It was the kind of house and neighborhood she and Phillip had planned for.

  “How may I help you?” the woman asked.

  Judy took out a notebook and pen. “We had just a couple of questions to ask about your late husband, Mrs. Pearson. I know this is difficult for you, coming so soon after his passing, but the Health Department requires follow up interviews with the families of heart-attack fatalities. It’s a public health survey of the risks associated with heart disease.”

  Judy had struggled to create a cover story to explain why she needed to interview Pearson’s wife and had settled on a diabolically simple ruse: the Australian government had a pervasive network of social programs. Numerous bureaucratic initiatives were announced annually, and citizens learned to accept interactions from a Byzantine list of Water Boards, City Councils, and the like.

  “I’ve never heard of that program,” Mrs. Pearson said.

  “It’s new,” Judy said.

  “What kind of information does the Health Department want now?”

  “We noticed that the cause of death for your husband was sudden cardiac arrest, and since it
is one of the leading causes of death for Australian men, we wanted to ensure that we were providing appropriate public information on good cardiac health.”

  Mrs. Pearson’s eyes welled up, and Judy felt a surge of guilt for the visit.

  “He did not have heart disease,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “His blood pressure was normal, and his cholesterol levels were normal. Our family physician was stunned when Drew died, but he said sometimes there’s an irregularity in the electrical activity of the heart muscle—or something like that . . .”

  She reached across the couch to an end table and pulled a tissue out of a box, dabbing both eyes while she composed herself.

  “Well, that’s the question really, Mrs. Pearson. Did your husband complain about his heart or shortness of breath: anything like that?”

  “No!” she said. “Never! That is why this entire thing is so difficult to manage. He was in truly good health.”

  “Mrs. Pearson,” Judy said, moving quickly, “what happened the day that he perished? Were you with him?”

  “No, he was with his mates at the pub, like he was every Thursday evening.”

  “So he suffered a heart attack at the pub?”

  “No; that would have been preferable,” she said, choking up. “He would be alive today if that had happened. Someone could have given him CPR or called an ambulance.”

  “Where was he when he suffered the attack?” Judy pressed.

  “In his car; he said good night to his mates, went out to his car, put the key in the ignition, and then,” she paused for a deep breath, “he just died.”

  “Did anyone see anything in the parking lot?”

  “No one saw him. It was dark, of course.”

  “Who found him?”

  “One of the bartenders. He was closing up late at night and walked past Drew’s car. He saw him slumped over the steering wheel and thought for a moment that he was drunk, or so he reported. The fellow drove part way home and felt guilty—that’s what he told the police, anyway—so he turned around and came back to the lot and tried to wake him. That’s when he discovered he was . . .”

  Judy stayed for a few more minutes and said she did not think it was appropriate to disturb Mrs. Pearson any longer with silly Health Department surveys.

  ***

  “Well,” Judy said, “I suppose it does meet some of the hallmarks of the kind of ‘termination’ you describe, Dennis. Still, there’s no proof, and don’t, for a second, think of trying to exhume the body so you can shave his bloody underarms. That’s perfectly macabre, even from you, Dennis.”

  “But let’s just imagine that Pearson was executed,” Dennis said. “No one else but Garder had a motive to do it. It’s likely Pearson was feeding Garder vital information that Garder needed to cover up, so Garder slips back into Australia on a bogus passport—or maybe he never left the country—and waits for Pearson to come out of the pub. Garder would probably have had access to ‘bug juice’ and know the drill for injecting someone. It’s possible he injected Pearson while talking to him outside and then slid him into the car.”

  Judy tried hard not to see Dennis as paranoid, but every now and then she couldn’t avoid the thought that he looked for conspiracies everywhere. It worried her vaguely, and she tried to dismiss it.

  “All right, Dennis, I’ll grant you that it’s possible, given your scenario, but it’s also possible that Pearson just croaked because his heart gave out—no rogue spies injecting strange substances into Mining Department employees.”

  To her surprise, Dennis laughed. “Yes, that’s an option. Still, we know for sure Garder faked his own death, made off with a bundle of cash that belongs to the US Government, and is on the lam. My job is to find him before those other agents do. I’ll show Massey that I can do what a bunch of snotty, college-graduate, pretend-agents can’t do—find a corrupt needle in a haystack.”

  ***

  It was a simple jewelry store display window that did it.

  Dennis sometimes walked around shopping malls to beat back boredom and loneliness. He would saunter aimlessly down the sterile look-alike corridors until he got hungry, then grab lunch or dinner at a California Pizza Kitchen or Cheesecake Factory, and then go home.

  He had just passed the Williams-Sonoma store at Tysons Corner Center and was distracted by a bunch of adolescent boys hooting at some girls nearby when he turned to stare into the thick plate-glass window of a high-end jeweler.

  There were sparkling diamond bracelets, several ruby and diamond rings, and five watches. The watch manufacturers were exotic and sported names he had never heard of, like Pippo Italia, Spazio24, and Baume & Mercier.

  Dennis marveled about the market for fine vintage watches he’d gleaned from the Garder case. Anyone interested in fine vintage watches, and who had money to spend, would probably be interested in fine new watches. Transfixed by the precision jerks of the second hand of the Spazio24 men’s watch in the display case, it came to him.

  He laughed out loud and looked around in amusement, as if he needed to share something.

  Later that afternoon, sitting in front of his home computer, he laboriously ran several web searches, playing with the search terms. He clicked on several additional entries, smiling as he did so.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said out loud. “Son of a bitch,” he repeated, drawing out each word for his own amusement.

  ***

  Judy had spent the evening at dinner with two girlfriends: Cilla, the mother of a boy in Simon’s class whom she had known for many years, and Sarah, a good friend of Cilla’s, whom Judy adored for her brash and ribald sense of humor. They’d eaten dinner at their favorite restaurant in Subiaco and laughed their way through two bottles of sauvignon blanc.

  Sarah had peppered Judy with questions about “this mysterious Yank” who Judy had a platonic relationship with.

  “When is he coming back to the Land of Oz?” Sarah had said. “Doesn’t he know this available divorcée is waiting with bated breath for his return? Really, Jude, just buy him a plane ticket. Hell, Cilla and I will buy the bloody ticket, won’t we, Cilla?”

  “Too right.”

  Judy laughed. “I barely know him. I’m not even sure he’s fond of me. I keep wondering if he is just using me for his silly investigation.”

  “Well, there is that,” Cilla said. “I’m sure you can tell if he’s really interested in you. And he’s available, right? He’s a widower.”

  “Or that’s what he told you, anyway,” Sarah said. “Probably married and has ten children and a farm in Oklahoma or Manitoba. You’re just a safe tryst on the other side of the world.”

  “Manitoba’s in Canada,” Judy said.

  “Well, that’s two families he’s got then,” Sarah said.

  “Oh hush, Sarah,” Cilla laughed.

  “It’s not that I haven’t thought of that,” Judy said with a self-deprecating smirk. “Oh well, I don’t think he’s coming back to this side of the world anyway, and I’m not going over there. So that’s that.”

  Driving home that evening Judy felt tipsy, and not coincidentally, lonely. She pulled into her driveway and cursed. The front-door light bulb had burned out again, and she realized it was just another one of the manly tasks she was forced to do in Phillip’s absence.

  It was a beautiful, warm night with a gentle sea breeze flowing in from the Indian Ocean and rustling the waxy leaves of the giant eucalyptus tree in her small front yard. At the front door she fumbled trying to find the keyhole in the dark.

  The bear hug from behind was so powerful that she was lifted off the ground in one motion, her arms locked to her side. Before she could scream, another hand came from somewhere and clamped a thick cloth tightly over her mouth and nose. A cloying medicinal substance made her gag, and she furiously squirmed and kicked backward with her heels against the shin of one of her assailants, but he just squeezed harder. She tried not to breathe the fumes, but the constriction of her rib cage, combined with the asphyxiating e
ffect of the cloth over her mouth and nose, forced her to gasp.

  Then it was over. A pervasive, almost welcoming blackness enveloped her, and she could hear voices filtering through what seemed like miles of tunnels. Not unpleasant, really.

  ***

  “So how’s the hunt going?” Marty asked in that part-affable, part-serious tone of voice that came through loud and clear on the cell phone.

  “Going well,” Dennis said, “and that brat may not just be a thief, either.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “One of Garder’s sources in Australia showed up dead in what I’d call extremely suspicious circumstances. I think he might have slipped back into the country to cover his tracks.”

  “Dennis, I’m not suggesting I remember every aspect of that case, but I don’t think any of Garder’s paid sources were identified in the file that we had access to, right? They were bogus sources.”

  “That’s true,” Dennis said. “But I found a phone message from Pearson to Garder at the consulate. I’m certain he was a source: had to be. The guy knew everything there was to know about mining interests in Western Australia.”

  “But what proof do you have that Garder killed him?” Marty pressed.

  “No proof, just intuition,” Dennis replied.

  “Have you told Massey about your theory? You work for him now.”

  “I’ll tell him soon enough.”

  “Dennis, I hear loudspeakers and announcements in the background. Are you traveling?”

  “Hitting the friendly skies as we speak.”

  “Where to?”

  “Can’t tell you that,” Dennis said. “I work for Massey now.”

  “Christ, Dennis, you are a huge pain in the ass.”

  Chapter 24

  The flight from Dulles to Berlin was uneventful, except for a brief period of violent chop halfway across the Atlantic. Dennis tried deep-breathing exercises again, but in the end fell back to consuming several nips of Glenfiddich to deaden the anxiety.

  The layover in Berlin lasted two hours, and he read an old Newsweek he’d brought with him. He was a little giddy, pleased with himself for stumbling upon this plan of attack. It was the kind of instinctive, split-second decision-making that had been a big part of his career successes. Dennis had the scent of his prey, and he was on the hunt again. All of the self-doubt about this assignment had vanished in the dust of the chase.