Color Of Blood (27 page)

“Dennis, you can’t get involved in this thing.”

“Promise me you’ll come back this evening and let me ask some questions. That’s all. How hard could that be?”

She rushed over to Dennis, put her hands on the sides of his face, leaned down, and said, “You are such an interesting man—for a Yank.” She kissed him softly, stood up, and ran to the door. “And you need to brush your teeth,” she said over her shoulder.

“That’s a roger. And this evening?”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “I really must be going.”

***

He recognized the number on his mobile. “Hello,” Dennis said.

“When were you going to check in?” Massey said. “I’ve been waiting to talk to you.”

“I spent enough time with the extraction team,” Dennis said. “Their team lead—what’s his name, Khory? He was such a pain in the ass: kept repeating the same questions. I thought you would have read the report by now.”

“A report is a report. I thought I made it clear that you were to debrief with me on this case,” Massey persisted. “I never heard from you. And now you’re back in Australia.”

“So you’ve figured that out already?” Dennis said.

“Oh, come on, Cunningham, you know we have access to NSA data, and our Agency phones have GPS chips and cell-tower triangulation methods and God knows whatever new technology they can find. What are you doing back in Australia?”

“I think Garder’s either here now or going to be soon,” Dennis said.

“Well, given the fact that of all the agents we have hunting this guy, you were the only one to find him, I’ll go with your guess.”

“It’s more than a guess,” Dennis said.

“Let’s not quibble. I have a couple of questions. First: how did he get away so quickly? You had a gun and he was unarmed. The report says he jumped you?”

“Massey, he’s a field agent, I’m not. I warned you at the outset, remember?” Dennis said. “He was quicker than I anticipated. The door opened behind me, I turned, and he flew at me. He just about ripped one of my eyes out of its socket.”

“The woman he was with, are you sure she was French?”

“I said he spoke to her in French, not that she was French. She could be Swiss, Canadian, or Belgian. I have no idea. Remember, she held a gun to my head, so I wasn’t too busy checking out her nationality.”

“It says here that Garder told you that he was pissed off at the Agency for something and had tried to tell some newspapers about it. Is that correct?”

“Massey, I have been through this already. Yes. It’s in the report.”

“He used the terms ‘blind trawl’ to you? Those exact words?”

“Yes. I’ve never heard of it before and thought he was bullshitting me just to bide time until his girlfriend came back. Have you heard of it?”

“No,” Massey said.

“I’m just pissed that your team didn’t get there fifteen minutes earlier. We could have bagged him.”

“So here’s my second question: why didn’t he just kill you?” Massey said.

Dennis had thought a lot about that. “I’m not sure, to be honest. He didn’t seem to have the look of a killer, so I’m not surprised.”

“And you think you can spot killers?”

“Most of the time, yes; sometimes I’m a little off,” Dennis said. “But in this case, from a purely self-interested point of view, I’m glad he chose not to put a bullet in my skull.”

Massey laughed in a single, explosive bark that Dennis thought sounded like a trained sea lion.

“But he did say that if he saw me again, he’d kill me,” Dennis said. “That particular threat was not lost on me.”

“Do you want a protection team?” Massey said. “We could do that in a heartbeat.”

“No teams.”

“I guessed not.”

“But now I have a question for you,” Dennis said.

“You don’t ask questions,” Massey said. “I ask questions; you answer them. That’s how it works.”

“Right, so here’s my question anyway: Why, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going on, and Al Qaeda cells everywhere to be dug out, are we spending so much time and energy chasing a kid who stole one million dollars from Uncle Sam? That’s the cost of about four armored Humvees in Iraq. He’ll show up eventually, and we can grab the bastard then.”

“I thought you’d come around to that.”

“So?” Dennis said.

“So what?”

“Jesus, Massey. Come on.”

“It’s more than the one million dollars,” Massey said. “He’s shopping something else to the bad guys. I can’t tell you what because you’re not authorized to know, but he got hold of something that he apparently thought would be worth more than one million to the right group. So he took it. We want it back. Does that answer your question?”

“Who are the bad guys? Journalists?” Dennis said.

“Not journalists, though most journalists are bad guys in my book.”

“So who are the bad guys then?”

“They’re bad guys; that’s all you need to know.”

“Bad guys with head scarves or bad guys with Slavic accents?”

“Bad guys.”

“Thanks for the deep intel. I need to go.”

“Wait,” Massey said. “We have an extraction team in place in Australia. You’re to use the same number given to you before. Call that number if you find him again. I’m confident you will, for some crazy reason.”

Dennis hung up and put the phone next to a large map of Western Australia he had purchased at a bookstore. He’d also bought a felt-tip black pen and a small packet of yellow sticky notes.

Well, he either believed me or he didn’t,
he thought.
My guess is that he did, so I’ve got a small head start. But I’ve really got to help Judy first. Poor Judy.

He stood up and went into the bathroom, filled up a glass with water, came back to the small round work table in the suite, set the water down, put the large, unfolded map on the floor gently, so that none of the sticky notes became dislodged, grabbed a lined, yellow pad of paper and yellow No. 2 pencil, and started to write every relevant fact Judy had told him.

***

She started out the day running late and never seemed to catch up. Judy was aware her frazzled demeanor was attracting the notice of her office mates. Daniel had asked her again if she was not feeling well.

During the day she allowed herself to nibble at the image of Dennis. She did so with the same controlled excitement with which she approached a small bar of dark chocolate: nibble too fast and the pleasure was gone too quickly; nibble slowly, and the enjoyment would last so much longer. She had showered at home that morning, but by late afternoon, she felt she could still smell Dennis on her body. It was a warm, sexy odor.

Or was it a warm, manipulated odor? she wondered.

Dennis had appeared out of nowhere. In her darkest moment of fear and doubt, he had promised to help her. Would she use Dennis out of desperation to save Simon and her?

Yes, she decided. She would do anything to save Simon.

***

Dennis ate dinner by himself at an Irish pub near the hotel. He ordered a hamburger at the bar, paid, and took his numbered sign to an open table. A solo male singer wailed a Celtic love song, and he marveled at how an Irish pub could be found in nearly every city in the world. He returned to his hotel.

Judy grabbed a quick bite at home and came to his hotel at seven thirty. Dennis noticed she did not bring a small bag of clothes.

“You look exhausted.”

“I am,” she said.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

Dennis asked Judy a series of questions about every facet of her work life, her professional partnership with Daniel, her relationships with everyone near and far in the AFP; the West Australian Police Department, which she called WA Pol; and the Australian Crime Commission, which she referred to as the ACC. He took notes on the pad of lined paper. Judy noticed he had already accumulated a stack of hand-written pages on the table.

After an hour and twenty minutes, Judy said, “Can we take a break? I really need a break. Feels like an interrogation.”

“Do you want something to eat? A drink?”

“Yes, a drink. A glass of wine, white wine: any sauvignon blanc.”

Dennis ordered room service. He observed her closely and noticed she had lost both the sexy flirtatiousness of the prior night, as well as the bouncy silliness of the morning. Now she simply looked tired and depressed.

They made small talk until the drinks were delivered.

“Hey, what’s that over there?” Judy said.

“It’s a map.”

“I didn’t notice it when I came in.” She walked over to the large map of Western Australia taped to the wall. Small yellow sticky notes with words hand-printed on them were pasted everywhere.

“What in the blazes are you doing?” she asked, laughing for the first time that evening.

“None of your business,” he said. “That’s for later. I need your help on that, but not now. I have an idea about how to solve your problem, and I just need a little more time to pull together some details. Then you can work on my work problem.”

Judy laughed. “You are a funny one.”

“But really, we should stop, Dennis. I think I need to reach out to one of the blokes I know in Canberra at the ACC. I’ve been thinking about it all day, and while I appreciate all you’re doing for me, it would be best to rely on the ACC. It will be messy, but I think I can trust them to protect Simon and my family.”

“Can you sit down here just for a moment?” Dennis asked. “If we do this right, you come out protecting your family and are seen as a hot-shit investigator to boot.”

“I am a hot-shit investigator,” she smirked.

“Of course you are, but you’ll be seen as a really, really hot-shit investigator.”

“But you’re doing all the work,” she said.

“There’s much more to be done,” he said.

Judy walked over, slumped into the chair, took a long sip of the white wine, and looked at him with blood-shot, sunken eyes that eye shadow and mascara could not hide.

“I’m at the end of my endurance,” she said. “You’ve been too kind.”

Dennis ignored her and plowed ahead.

“Just answer these last questions. Ready?”

“No. I can’t go on.”

“OK,” Dennis said, ignoring her. “So when you were being restrained, and this idiot was telling you that they had a snitch in the WA office, he mentioned a PowerPoint presentation, correct?”

“Yes,” Judy sighed. “Yes. That’s what he said.”

“He didn’t mention anything specific that Miller said? He didn’t quote Miller directly?”

“Correct.”

“And you said you looked through the photo files from the AFP and could find no one who looked like this guy you saw when the tape lifted off your eyes?”

“Yes.”

“And you said some time ago that you had investigated a shooting of a Chinese national that had been killed with a powerful rifle?”

Judy stopped in mid-sip and put down her glass.

“Did I tell you that?”

“Yes, one of the first things you told me yesterday.”

“Why are you going back to that?”

“You said a medical examiner had made a comment about why they might have used that powerful weapon to kill a man. Right?”

“God, Dennis, I have to go home. I’m sorry.” She stood up, leaned forward, and kissed his forehead gently. Judy got a whiff of Dennis’s smell, and it excited her, but she grabbed her purse and headed to the door.

“And this medical examiner— you said his name was Lynch, I think—he told you and your partner, Daniel, that the gun was probably used to warn someone else who was in the room at the time of the shooting. That was his guess, right?”

“Yes,” Judy said, her back to Dennis.

“Great. This all works; I like it. Judy, before you go, one last thing. Just take a second.”

She opened the door.

“Goodnight, Dennis.”

“I think I have a photograph of your bad guy: the guy who cut your toe off.”

Judy froze in the doorway. She pursed her lips and blinked in exhaustion.
Time to go,
she reminded herself.

But.

She was a policewoman. She solved crimes. She knew he
knew that. Now she felt manipulated.

Time to go.

But.

She was a policewoman.

The door closed, and she turned to face him. He had his laptop open.

“I have access to a much larger database of photos than you: one of the benefits of working for the best-funded intelligence agency in the world.”

She walked over without saying a word, sat down, and dropped her purse onto the floor with a thud. Judy looked at Dennis and not at the laptop.

Those bloody blue eyes,
she thought,
are they going to be good for me or bad for me?

She turned to face the screen.

“I’m going to show you three pictures. Tell me if any of them look like your fellow.”

He clicked, and the screen showed what looked like an arrest photograph that had Cyrillic lettering underneath the scowling face.

“That’s not him.”

“How about this one?”

It was a grainy color photograph taken by telephoto of a man getting out of an Audi somewhere in Germany, she surmised by the signage on the nearby storefronts.

She peered at it closely. “I don’t think so.”

“OK, last one.”

Another color photograph that appeared to be taken surreptitiously showed a man walking toward the camera on a city street.

Judy squinted.

“Damn,” she said. “I think that’s him.” She kept looking at it, then at Dennis, then back at the photo.

“Dennis, where did you get this photo?”

“I told you; we have photos of half the people on the planet. Didn’t you read
1984
in high school? Well, for better or worse, this is what you get.”

Judy reached for the half-consumed glass of wine.

“Who is he?” she said curtly.

“A South African: name is Kurt Voorster. He’s been implicated in illegal arms sales to rebels in Africa, primarily Ugandan militia and Burundi gangs. Lives very well. Homes everywhere. Only one arrest in 1999 for possession of narcotics in Pretoria. That’s it.”

Judy sagged in the chair. To Dennis she looked very small, as if she were collapsing into a child before his eyes. She took another sip of wine. A bead of condensation rolled down the glass and flew off, hitting Judy’s maroon silk blouse, turning the spot dark red.