A Dark Place

by Keith Yocum

  Judy looked at the sandwich, grabbed it and took a small bite.

  CHAPTER 19

  Dennis had taken many long walks through London, both to satisfy his irrational hope that he’d see Judy sitting on a park bench and his need to burn off energy. He was growing angry and restless in his hotel room, wondering if the NSA employee would ever help or whether Judy was even alive.

  Louise had called once, telling him that Fort Meade agreed to let Dennis see the Menwith Hill video again, but only under supervision at the London Station. He did his best to act enthusiastic about this latest twist, but Dennis could care less about the Arnold case and was no longer interested in seeing the video.

  Dennis’s hotel gave guests the option of having a newspaper delivered to their door each morning, and he had chosen USA Today, though he rarely read it. This morning he decided to eat in the hotel restaurant instead of using room service. He picked up the newspaper and took it with him downstairs.

  He ordered scrambled eggs and toast and opened the newspaper. A yellow sticky note was attached to the top of page three of the newspaper. Reflexively, he looked around the restaurant and then ripped the note off the page.

  In block lettering there were three items listed: at the top, the word Alpha was followed by a phone number with an Australian country code. This was the phone number of the person Phillip called from prison after seeing his son. The next line started with the word Beta, and listed another phone number with a UK country code, which was the follow-on call by the person Phillip had called from prison. The last line was an address in London that received the follow-on call.

  Dennis pulled out his phone, opened Google Maps and typed in the address, which was in the affluent Mayfair neighborhood. For the first time since Judy disappeared, he felt buoyant. A thread had emerged that might actually take him to her. He took a large sip of coffee and looked at his watch: 7:44 a.m.

  The waitress put his breakfast in front of him, and Dennis asked for the bill right away. He wasn’t hungry. He pushed the plate away and again scanned the small restaurant, looking for evidence of surveillance, but only saw a young couple cooing over their pastries and an elderly gentleman methodically stirring his cup of tea.

  Dennis paid the bill and rushed back to his room. He put the yellow sticky note on the small desk and opened his notebook.

  On a blank sheet he drew a diagram with the prison phone number on the left, Alpha in the middle, and the Beta number to the right. He drew arrows as he followed the suspected chain of phone calls: Phillip found out from his son that Judy was going to London and was staying at a particular hotel. The next time he had access to the prison phone, he called Alpha, which was in Australia. Phillip knew better than to try to contact Voorster directly and probably had established an intermediary.

  Dennis guessed that the intermediary would immediately contact Voorster, which was why he not only needed the Beta number but its geolocation. Leave it to the NSA to have the metadata of nearly every international phone call.

  He prayed that his instinct was correct and that Judy was still alive, albeit at the mercy of Voorster. And — he felt sick at this thought — if Judy were not alive, he would simply kill Voorster.

  As an investigator with the agency’s inspector general’s office, Dennis was a far cry from a trained street agent and had only a passing knowledge of weapons and hand-to-hand combat. He had never been trained to kill.

  But today, sitting in his hotel room and using his finger to trace the suspected trail of communications that led to Judy’s disappearance, he felt he could easily kill someone if they had hurt Judy. He just needed to find Voorster, and he was nervous enough about the fact that phone number Beta was probably a mobile phone with a geolocation that moved.

  Dennis assembled his kit into a small black backpack, including two different colored nylon jackets, a second red St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, a small pair of binoculars and his cell phone charger.

  ✦

  It had been almost thirteen hours since the last injection, and Judy felt the dread of the sickness, along with the fear of what they were going to do next. Out of thin air she had finally found a powerful motivating force to keep her focused: she needed to stay alive long enough to kill the small man and Voorster.

  Granted, she had plenty of reasons to stay alive, not the least her son, her parents and even Dennis. But those goals were based on love and affection; they made her sad and listless.

  Hatred and enmity were perverse flip sides of that coin, and for some strange reason Judy could not understand, they motivated her to action. The mere thought of killing these two men had provided the only boost in concentration during her incarceration. Her rudimentary knowledge of drug addiction, gleaned during her time on the drug task force in Australia, suggested that they were accelerating her addiction by spiking the heroin with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid a hundred times more powerful than morphine. And the gap between injections had been consistently less than twenty-four hours, so her brain chemistry was rapidly dumping and depleting her endorphins. The onslaught on her brain chemistry change was so furious that she was now going into withdrawal faster and more painfully than a maintenance addict might.

  She found herself picking at her skin, her mouth had become permanently dry, she was constipated and she fell into sudden and severe depressions, unlike anything she had experienced before.

  And she could not stop thinking about the little black bag that the small man carried under his arm. The pleasure emanating from the thin little syringes in that bag was otherworldly. But how to stay alive long enough to kill these two men? She fantasized how she might kill them, and the perverse pleasure it gave her only sometimes overcame her sickness.

  Judy heard footsteps that she recognized as Agata’s and turned to see the woman carrying a small tray with a sandwich and a bowl of ice cream.

  “You look healthy today,” Agata said, putting the tray on the bed. “That is good.”

  “Yes, I feel a bit better. I’m trying to eat. But I’m starting to feel sick again. Will he come soon?”

  “Yes, perhaps,” Agata said.

  “Perhaps?”

  “Soon, I’m sure.”

  Judy took a bite out of the sandwich.

  “Why are they doing this to me?” she asked nonchalantly, as if it were an idle conversation.

  “Why?”

  “Yes, why? Do they expect me to be one of their prostitutes? To work for them?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Do they have lots of women working for them?”

  “They have some, yes. But it is a good life with plenty of fun. All the women like this life.”

  “How about you? Do you like this life? Were you one of the girls that worked for them?”

  “Yes, for a little.”

  “How did they find you?”

  “You know, they just find me. My friends were not careful and some got into drugs.”

  “But don’t these women have families that go to the police?”

  “Like me, many are illegal.”

  “You mean undocumented?”

  “Yes, it is not hard to get into this country without a passport. I’m from a very poor country. Serbia is small. My friend and I come here to work as models. But we get trapped.” Agata shrugged. “It’s not so bad here.”

  “Can you help me a tiny bit?” Judy asked.

  Agata winced. “Not so much. I cannot help you get out.”

  “No, I mean can you help me with my sickness? Perhaps some times you could bring me a little bit extra of the drug when I’m feeling sick? It would help me.”

  Agata shook her head violently. “No, I cannot do that. You will resist more of the training.”

  “What will they do with me if I resist?”

  Agata got off the bed. “The ice cream is melting. You need to eat the ice c
ream.”

  “Will they kill me?”

  “I don’t know anything. Please eat. Get strong and healthy.”

  “So I have no choice?”

  Agata turned away, walked slowly to the door and leaned against the door jam.

  “I don’t know why that man want you. He is crazy. My boss is frightened of him. This is not good.”

  “I can tell you why he wants to break me,” Judy said, mashing the ice cream down distractedly with the plastic spoon.

  “Why?” Agata said. “You steal from him?”

  “Well, in a way, yes. I’m a policewoman. From Australia. We broke up his drug ring.”

  Agata bounced off of the door jamb as if shocked with electricity.

  “Who is policeman?”

  “Me. I’m a policewoman.”

  “You?”

  “Didn’t you know that?”

  “No one tell me that. Oh my God.” Agata turned and walked out the door and down the hallway but quickly returned to retrieve the tray of food.

  “You lie,” she said, her brow furrowed in deep horizontal lines of anger.

  “No.”

  “You lie,” she repeated, grabbing the tray and rushing out of the room, this time careful to close the door behind her.

  ✦

  The rental car was small and awkward to drive. And of course he was required to drive on the left, but after several close calls and many florid verbal and gesticulating exchanges with cabbies, Dennis managed to find the address listed as the location of phone Beta in Mayfair.

  He parked in a no-parking zone and retrieved his binoculars to glance at the building. It was a swank section of London, and there was not much traffic through the neighborhood. Dennis locked the car and sauntered down the block across the street from the address, turned around at the corner and then walked back up the street directly in front of the house and back to his car.

  He sat in the December chill, the windy day sending puffy small white clouds skittering across the landscape. He started the car every now and then to keep warm.

  No one entered or left the house during the five hours he sat there. He periodically got out and walked nearby, each time changing his hat or jacket.

  As the afternoon sun accelerated and dipped behind the buildings, Dennis realized how silly this exercise was. There was no telling if Voorster was living in this building, whether Judy was in there, whether the geolocation was correct at all. As he settled into despondency, someone banged on his car window, startling him.

  A traffic warden pointed to the sign and raised her ticket book.

  Dennis started the car, pulled out and drove around the block. He took a series of turns and after ten minutes managed to return to the same no-parking zone. The sun was setting, and some of the homes twinkled with festive Christmas lights.

  Dennis did not feel festive; he felt frustrated and gloomy as he stared at the building a half-block away. He tugged absently at his beard, twisting a couple of strands into a point and then brushing them back.

  He opened the cap of a plastic water bottle and took a swig. Putting the cap back on, he tossed the bottle onto the passenger seat and yawned. He rubbed his eyes, yawned again, and then watched in amazement as the door of the home opened and two men and a woman walked out and down the steps to street level.

  CHAPTER 20

  She rocked back and forth on the bed, clutching a pillow around her stomach as if it were a child. The sweat had already beaded up on her brow, and the sickness was in full force. She dreaded what was going to happen next but tried to focus on how she might kill the small man. The hatred was strong enough to occasionally break through the sickness, but only slightly.

  And she thought about Dennis, the blue-eyed American who had brought her to London in the first place. Would he save me? she thought. Could he piece together clues to recognize it was Voorster? And if he did save me, would he forgive me for what I’m going to do to stay alive?

  They had started to leave her door open again, since she had shown increasing compliance. The small man’s attitude toward Judy had changed, of course. He was visibly cold and angry toward her, sometimes being reckless with the injection site and damaging already hemorrhaged veins.

  Agata and the small man wheeled quickly into the room.

  “Come here,” the small man said. “Kneel.”

  Judy jumped off the bed and kneeled in front of him. This was the first time since her attack on the man that he had tried to force her to perform. But this time Voorster was not present, and Agata stared at Judy with wild, nervous eyes.

  “Let’s go,” the man said. “You know what to do.”

  Judy’s fingers could barely work the man’s zipper, she was shaking so badly.

  And then she did it; though she did not remember it afterward because she was elsewhere. In the imaginary place she went to, there was just a knife in her right hand, and the small man. And she did bad things to the small man with the knife, since the knife was so incredibly sharp.

  ✦

  Dennis had left his car quickly and followed the three people as they went down the block to the main thoroughfare. The maelstrom of early evening rush hour made it difficult for him to follow. His attempt at nonchalance was tested by the salmon upstream-run of pedestrians as he shoved through to follow from twenty yards behind.

  And before he knew it, they were gone.

  “Shit!” he said out loud. “Goddamnit!”

  Several passersby gave him a wide berth as he cursed and spun around, looking for the group.

  Dennis raced ahead for a half block and could not see them, though it was difficult in the darkness and crowds. He retraced his steps to where he’d last seen them. He was in front of an upscale pub and decided to look inside.

  The place was busy, and the smell of beer permeated everything. Dennis quickly canvassed the interior and did not find them. Stepping into the cool air, he moved next door to an Italian restaurant.

  He was too nervous to be careful and simply walked through the dining room as if it was his own house, staring at everyone with wild-eyed panic.

  The threesome was seated at a back table, looking at menus and laughing. Dennis caught his breath and went past them to the men’s room. He stared at the bearded madman in the mirror and washed his hands, dried them and walked past the group to the bar, where he could watch them.

  He ordered a beer and asked for a menu so he could hide his face behind it. The woman in the group was attractive, tall with short blond hair, an angular face with high cheekbones. Dennis concentrated on the men, one of whom he thought looked familiar. He took out his small black notebook and turned to the back, where he had glued several pictures of Voorster downloaded from a database. All of the photos were of a blond-haired man; neither man at the table was blond.

  But there was something about one of the men that resembled Voorster, and Dennis kept glancing down at this open notebook on the bar top and peering over the top of his menu to stare at the threesome.

  After his second beer, Dennis had convinced himself that one of the men was Voorster. It was not inconceivable that the South African, who was on the lam from international law enforcement, would dye his hair and eyebrows.

  It was the nose that Dennis convinced himself was the telling feature; the Voorster in the three photos he had pasted in his notebook sported a slightly off-kilter nose, perhaps the result of a fistfight or a wayward elbow in a rugby match. And one of the dark-haired men at the table had a little notch at the top of the nose and a slight twist to its shape.

  He needed a clean, head-on photograph of this man in order to certify he had his man.

  Dennis took out his iPhone, opened the camera app and played with the settings to turn off the flash. He stood up, making an overly dramatic attempt to act like he was using two hands to type in a text message as he walke
d to the bathroom, all the while taking still photos as he fake texted a message.

  After his third beer, Dennis decided to leave the restaurant before he did something stupid. He was a little tipsy, and worried that he might do something crazy like use the large beer pitcher on the table next to him to crush the skull of this man.

  But what if it wasn’t Voorster? And what if it was? Attacking him would get Dennis no closer to finding Judy.

  Dennis paid his bill and stepped out into the sharp, cold air. A biting wind was rushing down the streets of Mayfair, pushing a candy wrapper and a single forlorn oak leaf skittering along the pavement. Dennis got back to his rental car and barely made it back to the hotel without injuring a pedestrian or motorist.

  He went to the hotel’s business center and spent almost an hour reviewing the still photos he had taken of the Voorster lookalike, then picked three and printed them. He went back to his room and filled out a prepaid postcard. Before retiring for the night, he managed to mail it.

  ✦

  The next three days were one of the worst periods in Dennis’s life. According to the protocol established by the skittish NSA employee, Dennis could expect to meet him exactly three days after the postcard was mailed. There was no way to speed up the process, and it infuriated him.

  Dennis passed the three days by periodically driving by the house he suspected Voorster lived in. It was a useless behavior and even potentially reckless if someone in the house noticed the same car passing by. Still, he did it, mostly out of nervous energy.

  The morning of the third day his cell phone rang.

  “Hi, Louise,” he said. “How’s things back at the ranch?”

  “Fine. Same crap, different day.”

  “Ha, sounds like my life.”

  “Have you been looking at your emails?” she asked.

  “Um, not closely.”

  “I’m guessing not at all.”

  “Maybe that is correct,” Dennis said, opening his laptop and letting it run through its security scanning protocols. “Guess I was busy on the other thing.”