A Dark Place

by Keith Yocum

  ✦

  “Yes, I know you are very concerned, as we are, Trevor,” Clive said, using his shoulder to press his work phone against his ear. “Believe me, we have been in very close contact with the London authorities. I talked to your grandfather, and he says the family is heading to London tomorrow, is that correct?”

  Clive doodled on a writing pad in his office as he listened to Judy’s distressed teenage son explain the family plans. Her disappearance was so depressing that he and the rest of the staff in the AFP’s Perth office could barely discuss it.

  His police experience told him that after fifteen days without a trace, it was likely Judy was no longer alive. Yet, after talking to the Yank, Clive was intrigued. He did not believe Dennis was responsible for her disappearance.

  He was also angry, and the policeman in him wanted some kind of closure, including the burning desire to get hold of the bastard who took Judy. If the Yank’s instincts were correct, Phillip might have something to do with it. That’s why he needed to tease a fragment of information out of the poor teenage boy on the other end of the line.

  “So, Trevor, I assume your father knows about the family’s plans to go to London?” Clive froze his doodling as Trevor answered.

  “He does? I see.”

  Trevor explained the details of the London trip, including the London Police and Australian embassy employees the family were meeting with and when.

  “Tell me, Trevor,” he said, holding his ballpoint pen absolutely still, “your mum said that you hadn’t been in contact with your father while he was in prison. Is that so?”

  Trevor admitted that he had not seen his father but had been pressed to do so by Judy and relented.

  “Ah, well good on ya for seeing your dad, Trevor. Tell me, do you remember when you saw Phillip? Do you remember the date, by any chance?”

  Clive wrote down a day of the week and date then slowly circled the date several times.

  “When you met with your dad in prison that day, it must have been difficult, I’m sure. I mean, all the publicity about his crimes working with that drug ring. Must have been very rough, but Judy said you were a strong young man.”

  He consoled Trevor as the boy admitted his distress at seeing his father in the prison meeting room. But he also admitted that when they got talking, it was sort of like old times.

  “And so did you get a chance to tell Phillip about your mum’s trip to London? Ah, he was surprised? Yes, I suppose he would have been. He didn’t happen to ask where your mum was staying, did he? Oh he did, did he? Ah, yes, Judy would have told you the hotel. Perhaps he was just a little envious, you know, being in prison and all. London is such a grand city.”

  ✦

  Judy had thrown up the ice cream and was now dry-heaving.

  She crawled back to the bed and wrapped herself around the pillow, hugging it tightly as she fought the sickness that made her skin crawl, her teeth ache and her muscles cramp up. Briefly, she thought she was going to die, since it was impossible to confront this much agony and not expect to die.

  She had initially resisted banging on the door to ask for an injection, because she knew now what they wanted her to do. The thought of performing oral sex on the small man made her sick in its own right, but the drug sickness was a thousand times worse, and she eventually started hammering on the door.

  Rocking back and forth on the bed and moaning, she heard them open the door. She sat up as the small man, Agata and the stranger came in. Agata looked nervous.

  The small man said, “Come here.”

  Judy rushed over.

  “Kneel.”

  She kneeled, keeping her eyes on the black bag.

  “Pull down my zipper,” the man said.

  Judy felt her stomach swirl with hatred and sickness as she fumbled with his zipper.

  “Take it out,” he said. “Gently.”

  Judy closed her eyes and felt like there was another person in the room that was kneeling in sexual supplication before a man she loathed. She fumbled with his underwear, trying to find out how to navigate the fabric, when she heard the stranger speak.

  “You were not joking, Stefan,” he said. “It always works. This is something I’ve waited a long time for.”

  Judy froze. The voice. It was him. She looked up.

  He laughed. “Yes, it’s me, you bitch. You thought I was going to let you get away with destroying my business?”

  His Afrikaner accent was crystal clear.

  “Hey,” the small man said. “Be gentle. I want to see you take it nice and slow. It is part of your training here.”

  Afterward, she recollected very little of what happened next. Pain and trauma do strange things to a person’s memory.

  CHAPTER 18

  Yes, I hate to admit it, but you were correct. He told his father that Judy was going to London. And yes, he asked Trevor where she was staying.”

  Dennis’s jaw tightened as he took in this latest piece of information. It was that son of a bitch, Phillip. He had turned Judy over to Voorster, the thug who had escaped into thin air after she busted his drug ring in Western Australia.

  “I’ll kill him,” Dennis said.

  “Hey, mate. I’m not supposed to be talking to you. This is privileged information, and I’d be in very serious trouble if they knew I was talking to you.”

  “Come on, you guys weren’t even looking at this angle! Shit, if you would have jumped on it earlier we might have found her!”

  “I’ll admit that we thought he was dead, but now we can start with Phillip. I need to turn this over to my boss right away. And I don’t have to remind you that this new information does not prove Voorster is involved.”

  “Wait, you can’t talk to your boss until you get me two pieces of information,” Dennis said, opening his notebook.

  “I can’t do any more sleuthing for you, Dennis. I have to turn this over.”

  “What are you, about eight hours ahead of the time zone in London?” Dennis said.

  “Well, yes, but what does that have to do—”

  “It’s 1:10 a.m. here, so it must something like 9:10 a.m. there in Perth. Is that right?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “All I need from you — and I bet you can get this stuff pretty quickly — is the precise date and time that Phillip used the telephone for an outbound call from prison immediately after he met with Trevor. I’m sure he has weekly access to a phone there in prison. So I just need the date and time of that call. And then I need the prison telephone number he made the call from. Got that?”

  “Dennis, you’re not hearing me. I can’t do anything more for you on this. I need to tell my superiors immediately.”

  “Do you want me to find Judy or not?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then simply get those three pieces of information for me: the time and date of his call after meeting his son, and the number he called from. And then you can chat with your supervisors until the cows come home. I mean, you could get that stuff in less than an hour, I bet.”

  “Judy told me you were persistent to the point of boorishness.”

  “Yes, I’m a royal pain in the ass — just please get me that information. Call me at any time. I’m either going to find Judy alive or I’m going to find the person who took her and kill them.”

  “I didn’t hear that last part.”

  “Get going, Clive! Go, go! We don’t have time!”

  ✦

  When Judy knelt in front of the small man her plan was simple and she acted fast. The purity of her hatred momentarily overwhelmed her desire for the drugs, but she knew the battle would tip in favor of the heroin in a millisecond if she didn’t act.

  She leaned forward on her knees, used her left hand to push his thighs apart — which he accommodated nicely by spreading his feet — and
with her right hand made a fist near the floor and rammed it up as hard as a drug-addicted waif could.

  Judy felt her knuckles crush his testicles, and he collapsed like a giant ragdoll on top of her.

  He made a very odd shrieking groan and fell onto his side, clutching his groin. Judy heard Agata scream. From her right she saw a boot flying toward her face, and she gamely tried to block it with her wrists, but Voorster was strong and fit, and his boot easily made it through her feeble arms, catching her on the side of her head and knocking her backward.

  She slid easily across the cement floor up against the bed. She felt her hair grabbed and her head yanked upward. The first blow glanced off her temple, with little damage. But the second one hit her squarely on the side of her jaw, and she went out into an unpleasant blackness.

  She wondered whether she was dead. What were those screams? Was it the drug sickness or something else that made her whole body ache? Why was she so cold? Who was crying?

  Opening her eyes, she found herself on the cement floor. Her eyes were wet.

  She had been crying.

  Even before she felt the crust of blood around the corner of her mouth, the drug sickness roared to life, sending her into small, rolling convulsions.

  ✦

  “Louise, I’m telling you that the London station is just a pack of hyenas. It’s probably that jackass Chandler who’s doing it. Complete asshole.”

  “Who told you that Arnold was gay?” she asked.

  “My friend in MI5.”

  “Well, I looked through the file, and I didn’t see any mention of it, but I have to tell you, Dennis, that we’re not supposed to have that kind of notation in personnel files any longer.”

  “But he disappeared Louise! What if he got snagged in a honeypot? I mean, how would we know to look for a male instead of a female?”

  Dennis knew that a honeypot scheme was one of the oldest tactics to compromise a target in an intelligence operation. The target is typically seduced by someone working for the opposition and either blackmailed or coerced into gathering intelligence.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Louise said. “I’ll look into it on my side. But what’s this about radiation found in the Ukrainian’s home? Are you sure about that? Nothing’s come through on that, and there has been no update to the Arnold file.”

  “I’m telling you, something is wrong in the station here, and I think it’s Chandler.”

  “Why would he hold out on this?”

  “You tell me.”

  She sighed. “Jesus, this Arnold thing is a cesspool that keeps running deeper.”

  Dennis started to sign off when Louise interjected. “How’s your other task going?”

  “You mean Judy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I found something; could be nothing but right now, the flimsiest thread is better than nothing.”

  “Well, good luck on that front. But promise me that you’ll keep me the loop on the Arnold thing?”

  “Yes, of course. I smell a giant rat named Chandler.”

  After hanging up, Dennis felt relieved. He had fulfilled Louise’s part of the bargain, albeit just barely. Dennis did not care about Arnold, Chandler or anyone except Judy. Every ounce of energy would now be spent on finding her.

  ✦

  It was not something he could articulate, but Dennis had the undeniable sensation that Judy was disappearing from his world forever. He refused to consider that she might be dead, and knowing that she was alive — actually, feeling that she was alive— kept him going.

  But something had changed, and he struggled with uncertainty.

  His phone rang. “This is the last time I’m talking to you about this subject, so get a pen ready,” Clive said.

  Dennis rushed to the hotel desk, grabbed a pen and wrote down a time, a date and a phone number.

  “Thanks,” he said, but Clive had already hung up.

  ✦

  This time Dennis employed every trick he knew to shake a tail. Though he was not a trained field agent, he had absorbed many of the secrets of the trade over the years of investigations. He knew that he needed to temporarily alter his clothing while in transit, use public transportation, move through the rear of restaurants or hotels, if possible; anything to throw his tail or tails off his track.

  He left his hotel wearing a faded blue Boston Red Sox baseball cap and a thin tan windbreaker; he took several different lines on the Tube, walking slowly, then faster. Twice he barged through the kitchens of pubs out the back door, all the while taking off his baseball cap and putting on sunglasses.

  Two hours after taking off from his hotel, Dennis found himself inside St. Paul’s at Evensong with his baseball cap bundled up in his windbreaker, which lay in his lap. The blue wool sweater was not as warm as he had hoped, but it was enough. He could barely wait for the service to end.

  He waited in vain at the back of the cathedral and managed to light two candles before leaving. Dennis decided to visit the restaurant bar.

  The NSA employee sat at the bar, reading a newspaper and drinking a beer.

  Dennis sat next to him and ordered a beer. Neither spoke or looked at each other.

  Finally the man said, “No phone?”

  “No phone,” Dennis said.

  “No electronics at all?”

  “Just my Seiko watch.”

  “Get a real watch.”

  “Ha.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Fred said you could help. You created a beta program of some sort.”

  The man said nothing and toyed with his beer while looking down at his newspaper.

  “He was not supposed to mention it. I’m disappointed.”

  “Too late, he did. And I need your help.”

  “To find who killed Fred?”

  “In a roundabout way, yes. First I need another problem solved.”

  “I don’t care about your other problems. Forget it.” He closed the newspaper and raised his hand. “Check please.”

  “The two things are related,” Dennis lied. “I need one to get to the other. Don’t go dark on me now. I’m close to getting his killer. These things are complicated.”

  The bartender slid the man his check.

  Dennis pulled a folded piece of paper from his pants pocket and pushed it across to the man.

  “Here’s a date, time and a phone number. It’s a prison phone. The man in prison made a call to someone at precisely this date and time. I need the number that he called. That’s what I’m calling phone number alpha. Then I need the first phone number that alpha called right after getting the call from prison. I’m calling that follow-on phone number beta. This beta number is critical. I need to know its geolocation. My guess is it’s in the UK.”

  The man said nothing, put some cash on the bar and slid the folded piece of paper into his palm. As he stood he whispered, “You’re fucked if this isn’t to help solve Fred’s murder.”

  ✦

  She was shaking and bent in a fetal position on the cement floor, rocking gently to take her mind off the sickness. Though she was very sick, she also felt a glimmer of hope. She had taken charge and acted against her jailers, although she was paying a price. Somewhere amidst the agony created by her brain receptors aching for opiates, Judy felt a wisp of empowerment.

  She crawled to the door and slowly opened it. Sticking her head out, she looked down the dark hallway and heard raised voices. Feeling sick but strangely emboldened, she crawled down the hallway on her bony knees, the silk dressing gown making a thin whooshing sound, like sand falling onto a tabletop.

  Near the end of the hallway she stopped and listened.

  “Why don’t you just take care of her,” the small man said. “This is stupid. Let’s just be rid of her.”

  “You told me you cou
ld break anyone,” Voorster said.

  “That is true, and we can break her, but you are rushing things. I told you that already. It takes time, and you are impatient. This is too personal for you, and I don’t like it. Just take care of her. Get it over with. We have a stable of women who are compliant and work very well. We don’t need her. And she is losing weight; our paying customers are very wealthy and discriminating. They don’t want to have sex with emaciated drug addicts. Let me get rid of her.”

  “Not until I see her broken and working. She has cost me many millions of dollars, and just putting her in a grave is not satisfaction enough.”

  “I don’t like it,” the small man said.

  “You don’t have to like it. I pay you plenty. Break her.”

  Judy rolled on her side and put her left cheek onto the cold cement floor.

  That is why I’m here, she thought. How odd that Voorster enjoys seeing me suffer so much. How does a person get that evil? Can I survive this nightmare? What will I have to do to survive?

  Judy got back onto her knees and crawled to her room, closing the door silently behind her. She got off the floor and onto the bed just as Agata opened the door with some food.

  “Agata,” Judy said. “Can you help me?”

  “Yes, of course. Please eat. You are too skinny.”

  “No, I mean can you help me get out of here?”

  “No. That I cannot do.”

  “Why?”

  “They will kill me.”

  “But they are killing you slowly here, don’t you see that?”

  Agata put down the food tray and stared at the wall on the other side of the room.

  “Please do not ask this,” she said. “It is bad for both of us.”

  “Do you help them break the girls? Is that what you do?”

  Agata gave a sharp, angry look at Judy and stood up.

  “Please eat your food,” she said, walking out and closing the door behind her.