Color Of Blood

by Keith Yocum

  Dennis had maintained one of those modern, quasi-casual relationships with a Starbucks barista for at least a year. She was a college student at Northern Virginia Community College, and they had struck up a conversation about school a long time ago during his stops for coffee. In modern suburban society, it was the kind of connection that made strangers feel familiar when, in fact, the relationship was glancing and superficial.

  “Well, you’re still working here, so things must be good,” Dennis said. “Just try not to drop out and postpone college.”

  “The loans are a killer,” she said, “but I can’t think about it now. It’s too depressing.”

  “You know,” Dennis said, “where I work we have small projects that we outsource to college students. Simple things like looking stuff up on the Internet. You interested some time?”

  “Can I do it from home?”

  “Sure.”

  “How much does it pay?”

  “Twenty bucks an hour.”

  “Really? How long do these things take?”

  “Not long. I’ll get our secretary to see if she has a project, and I’ll give it to you next time I’m in.

  “Really?”

  “Sure.”

  The following day, Dennis visited the coffee shop during her shift and revisited his offer. “We track shipping containers all around the world,” he said. “I know it sounds dull, and some of it’s for the government, so don’t go telling folks about it. We’re not allowed to outsource this stuff to India.”

  She laughed. “OK, what do I do?”

  Dennis handed her forty dollars in cash, and on top he had a piece of paper with three items: two long numbers and a URL.

  “All you need to do is go to that address and type in those two numbers: the first number is your login, and the second is your password. Then look at a map of the world and tell me where the shipping container is and how long it’s been stationary. There’s a little counter at the bottom of the screen that will tell you how long it’s been at its current position. Simple.”

  “That’s it? And for that I get forty bucks?

  “You don’t have to do it, just thought you’d be interested.”

  She slid the venti mild roast over to him and said, “This one’s on me. And what’s your name?”

  “It’s Dennis.”

  “I’m Marie. I’ll have that stuff for you tomorrow.”

  “Great,” he said, turning away, praying that the entire exchange looked like an older man shamelessly hitting on a young woman.

  ***

  The following day Marie was not on duty, so Dennis waited yet another day and went for his mid-afternoon coffee stop.

  “Hey, I got your information,” Marie said, pushing a twenty-dollar bill to him across the counter with a yellow sticky note on top with some writing. “It took like ten minutes, and I can’t take forty bucks for that,” she said.

  Dennis pulled the sticky note off the bill and said, “Are you sure this is its location? Is it still moving?”

  She laughed. “No, it’s been there for sixty-seven hours. I had to look up the city where it was. Hope I spelled it right!”

  Dennis smiled and tried not to sound perplexed.

  “Marie, I hate to ask, but are you absolutely sure this is where the container is? There was no mistake or confusion about it on the map?”

  “No, I checked it several times, and when I enlarged the map, this is the town and country it was located in. Really. I don’t know how to pronounce it, but I wrote it down—Qom. It’s in Iran.”

  Dennis pushed the twenty-dollar bill back and said, “Please take it, Marie, and I’ll have a venti mild roast, room for milk.”

  “OK, Dennis.” She smiled. “Any more projects like that, let me know!”

  ***

  There was nothing to do but listen to the piped-in folk-rock music, sip his coffee, and read the Washington Post. He expected the GPS on the shipping container to give him the answer, but he had no answers yet, only more questions.

  After all the chasing, he could not put the pieces together into a coherent narrative.

  He looked at the front door of the coffee shop, glanced at his watch, and took another sip of tepid coffee.

  Dennis was lost in a lengthy Post story about the complexity of improvised explosive devices when his visitor joined him at the table.

  “Peter,” Dennis said, “good to see you.”

  Peter, dressed in his usual blue blazer and khaki slacks, laughed. “You still have that tan. Australia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hope you had some R&R while you were there.”

  “A wee bit,” Dennis said. “Mostly work.”

  “It’s an interesting country. Did you know I was stationed there once?”

  “No, you never mentioned it.”

  “Sydney, 1976,” Peter said. “Australia had taken in thousands of Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon. Agency was convinced some of the refugees were plants by the North Vietnamese and Chinese. We assisted the Aussies in interrogating the refugees.”

  “Find any plants?”

  “Yes, actually: a woman. Very beautiful, spoke French and English fluently.”

  “What did you do to her?”

  “Flipped her, or at least we thought we flipped her into being a double agent,” he said. “God, I wonder whatever happened to her? She was quite beautiful.”

  “Do you ever look back on things you’ve done and wonder about whether you did the right thing?” Dennis asked.

  “No, not really,” Peter said, taking a measured sip of coffee. “Can’t really do that. It was a job: sometimes exciting, often boring, rarely dangerous. A job, that’s it.”

  Dennis closed the newspaper and took a sip of coffee.

  “So what’s going on in your life these days?” Peter said. “You sounded a little stressed when you called.”

  “Well, I got myself into some trouble.”

  “Last time we talked you were in trouble: the same trouble or new trouble?”

  “Same sort of trouble.”

  “Is that why you’re being watched?”

  “You noticed?”

  “Of course,” Peter said. “The technology has changed over the years, but a tail is a tail. It’s funny how they’re so obvious to people like us.”

  “Yeah, she came in after me and sat at the back talking on the phone. I saw her last week at a restaurant with a guy ten years her senior. Think they could be a little more discreet.”

  “Who’s doing the watching?”

  “It’s a contract team; they’d never use employees on this one. Paper trail would be problematic.”

  “I’m afraid to ask what you did to get this kind of attention, but try me.”

  Dennis led him through a forty-five-minute narrative. Peter asked some clarifying questions. Both men didn’t miss a beat when the woman in the back left the coffee shop. As she did, an older man in his fifties, wearing a jogging suit, walked in and sat near them after buying a newspaper, coffee, and bagel. Dennis and Peter locked eyes in amusement and continued in lower voices.

  After Dennis finished, Peter sat back in his chair like a priest who had just heard confession. In the background a plaintive male folk singer crooned about missed opportunities.

  “And your theory is opium is being moved through Iran by the Agency to Europe?”

  “Or we’re giving Iran something they need and they, in turn, are moving opium to Europe for us. That’s the best I can come up with, though it does sound kind of lame,” Dennis said.

  “You know that Iran has one of the highest opium addiction rates in the world?” Peter said.

  Dennis nodded. “That’s what I read.”

  “They have more opium than almost any other country in the world, though you wouldn’t know it from their politicians,” Peter said.

  “Yes, I read that, too. So?”

  Peter leaned forward.

  “This poem, or whatever it was, do you remember it
?”

  “Sure, why?”

  Peter pulled out a ballpoint pen from his inside blazer pocket and pushed a napkin over to Dennis. “Write it out.”

  “Really?” Dennis said.

  “Sure; let’s see if you can remember it.”

  Dennis thought about it for a bit, and then slowly wrote the stanza in block letters. Then he pushed it over to Peter, who turned the napkin around so he could read it. Dennis glanced casually at the older man in the jogging suit and saw his face turn slightly in Peter’s direction.

  Peter stared at the napkin for a while, and then looked out the shop window that opened onto Connecticut Avenue. Pedestrians and cars moved in a stream, like capillaries feeding the heart of Washington.

  Before Dennis could speak, Peter took the pen on the table, circled a word in the poem, and turned the napkin so Dennis could see it.

  Peter raised his eyebrows to confirm he was asking a question.

  “Yeah, I see it,” Dennis said. “So what?”

  Peter stared at Dennis. “You never bothered to check this out?”

  “No. It’s that important?” Dennis asked.

  Peter nodded, turned the napkin around, and deliberately tore the small piece that held the stanza off the napkin. Dennis watched in amusement as Peter wadded the tiny piece of napkin into a ball the size of a BB, then plopped it into his mouth like mint and washed it down with his coffee.

  “Sorry, Peter,” Dennis said. “That was just a little dramatic, even for a veteran field agent.”

  “I can see now why they might be concerned about you,” Peter said. “Do you remember what project first brought us into contact? Pay attention to what I circled. For one of the best investigators I’ve ever met, I’m surprised you missed this part. Please be careful, Dennis. They’re going to ask me about this meeting, you know.”

  “Yeah, I figured. What are you going to say?”

  “That you told me you were in trouble, and wondered whether you should retire. And that I said, ‘yes, you should retire.’ Oh, and Margaret says hello.” Peter stood, drained his coffee, and tossed the empty cup in the trash on his way out.

  ***

  On his way home from work, Dennis spontaneously decided to do a computer search himself instead of relying on his barista. He performed some simple switchback anti-surveillance tactics to slip a potential tail. Earlier in the day he used the hobby shop radio frequency detector on his car to see if they had bugged his vehicle but could find nothing.

  After thirty minutes of evasive driving, he pulled into the rear of the Hilton Garden Inn in Shirlington, Virginia, and walked through several of the restaurants lining Campbell Avenue. He cut through a mini-mall, onto Twenty-Eighth Street South, walked a block, and then entered through the rear of another restaurant and back out onto Campbell Avenue. He quickly entered the front entrance of the Shirlington Branch Library and stood in the vestibule reading several pamphlets, periodically looking out through the plate-glass windows into the sparse crowd in the street. After twenty minutes, he entered the library and browsed the nonfiction section so he could see the front door. After another fifteen minutes he grabbed a book about the opening stages of World War I.

  He sat and flipped through the book, watching the front door. He saw only two middle-school girls walk in, and finally he scooted to one of the public-access computers and started surfing the web. No more intermediaries to surf the web, he thought.

  It was not hard to look up the word “Europium.”

  After reading several more scientific articles, Dennis rubbed his eyes, more out of anxiety than fatigue. He went to the web browser settings and cleared the history of his searches. Not a single adult had entered the library since he arrived, but he was still nervous. Peter’s warning at the coffee shop was enough proof that Dennis had touched a nerve somewhere, and it was the same nerve Garder had grabbed hold of and yanked.

  Peter was right, Dennis thought. How could I have missed it?

  Dennis went back to the web browser and searched the white pages for the home listing of the person he was looking for. Every piece of information about someone, it seemed, was on the Internet these days, even Agency employees.

  After jotting down the person’s home address, he visited the Starbucks official store-locator site. After nearly twenty minutes of searching, he guessed which Starbucks location the person stopped at in the mornings before work. It has to be on the right side of the road inbound to Langley, he thought. This individual was renowned for their Starbucks grande latte each morning, replete with an extra shot of espresso. He cleared the browser’s memory again and left the library.

  Dennis ate dinner at his favorite small Vietnamese restaurant in Shirlington. The place was packed on a Thursday evening with young, well-paid government bureaucrats spending wads of money on exotic drinks and fancy dinners. It was now March of 2007, and he thought the Iraq War was turning ugly for the soldiers on the ground, but good for the contractors and subcontractors here at home.

  Chapter 41

  Dennis got dressed earlier than normal and left the house while other families in the neighborhood were just waking up.

  He used another new disposable cell phone to order a taxi, giving the address of a split-level colonial three blocks away. The dispatcher said the car would be there in twenty minutes.

  As quietly as he could manage, he opened the back door through the kitchen and stood quietly on the enclosed back porch listening to the sounds of his Arlington neighborhood waking up. A dog barked sharply nearby, and he heard a car door slam. An engine ignited, and a car pulled way.

  He walked out through the screen door on the porch, gently closing it behind him. He could see his neighbor to the left through their kitchen window; the army officer was fully dressed and was holding a cup of coffee while the flicker of a TV screen made the room jump haphazardly.

  Dennis swung over the waist-high chain-link fence to his elderly neighbor’s property on his right. He moved swiftly across their backyard and jumped the small fence separating the property from the sidewalk and street.

  The night before, he had been struck by a severe case of paranoia and decided—even though it might be overkill—to play it safe. A cable company van had been parked in the street for the past several days, and it was enough of a coincidence that he was forced to take evasive measures.

  Dennis walked the three blocks to the address he had given the taxi company. To avoid drawing attention, he walked past the house and slowed, crossing the street and walking back. After ten minutes, the taxi pulled up to the house, and Dennis hustled over to it.

  He kept looking at his watch, trying to ensure he’d be in place at the Starbucks when his target showed up for their morning coffee. If he picked the wrong Starbucks, or the wrong morning, he’d have to think of another venue away from Langley to reach this person.

  The taxi dropped him off at the small strip mall on Route 123 in McLean by 7:00 a.m. Dennis went inside, ordered a tall coffee, purchased a Washington Post, and sat at a small table with a view of the front door. The place was already crowded with harried, desperate commuters in search of their morning fix.

  The front page of the Post was consumed with stories about the mounting cost of the war in Iraq. Roadside bombs maimed and killed more American soldiers than ever before. No amount of preparation or technology seemed able to prevent US soldiers from being shredded by these homemade devices. The US military blamed terrorist bomb-making cells of Shiite jihadists from Iran and Pakistan for fostering the expertise to kill.

  After nearly thirty minutes of waiting and watching, Dennis sagged. His hunting skills had misled him this time.

  He pulled the cell phone out of his pocket and was about to call the taxi service when he saw her walk through the door and stand in the lengthening line of coffee addicts.

  He waited until she picked her latte off the counter and was walking out until he moved in front of her.

  “Sally!” he said.

  “Cun
ningham,” she said, startled. “You scared the crap out of me. Jeeze! Um, how are you?”

  “Great,” he said. “How you doing?”

  “Same old crap,” she said. “War, war, and more war; it’s a shitty little business, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “Not my area of expertise.”

  She smirked. “Yes, we know you OIG folks don’t dirty yourselves. Oh well, such is the lot we’ve chosen. See you around the water cooler.”

  “Uh, actually, Sally, I wonder if you had just a few minutes—to talk. A few minutes.”

  She stared at him sharply over the top of her latte, taking a small, calculated sip.

  “So this wasn’t an accidental meeting on the way to work?”

  “Not entirely,” he said.

  “Cunningham, I have some vague recollection that you’re on the outs. Someone mentioned something to me the other day, but it was in passing. Any truth to that stuff?”

  “You know me, Sally. I couldn’t give a shit about that kind of gossip. It’ll take just a few moments. Please?” he said, gesturing to the small table where the Post lay sprawled.

  “Two minutes max,” she said curtly. “I have a con call in about forty-five minutes.”

  They sat down, and Dennis was again painfully aware of how attractive she was; her medium-length dark hair looked luxuriant, and her hazel eyes beamed from a ring of understated mascara and eyeliner.

  Only now the eyes had a steely cast to them: the look of an experienced intelligence analyst whose professional life was spent appraising data and its supplier for veracity, motive, and leverage.

  In the OIG, Dennis and the other investigators referred to it as the “Shake and Bake.” It happened the moment an Agency employee comprehended that an innocuous conversation with an IG investigator had taken a dangerous turn. The “Shake” referred to the figurative or literal shake of the head by the employee the moment they recognized their exposure; the “Bake” referred to them baking or cooking up an entirely new attitude that was either defiant or profoundly restrained.

  Sally had just pirouetted a perfect Shake and Bake.

  “What’s up?” she said.

  “You remember the last time we caught up with each other? It was in the cafeteria six or so weeks ago.”