Authors: Keith Yocum
“Sounds odd that the loss wasn’t picked up earlier,” Dennis said.
“I couldn’t care less what you think,” Massey said.
Silence settled over the room; the only sound came from Betty, who had a nervous habit of clicking her ballpoint pen.
“If you suspected he had stolen the money, why didn’t you just tell me?” Dennis said. “I’m a little confused about the timing of my investigation on the heels of the earlier one done by Operations. They must have picked up on the missing funds.”
“We didn’t find out that his payments were bogus until after you left,” Massey said. “As you can imagine, it’s a delicate task to confirm that people he listed as sources were in fact not sources at all. And then you report back from Australia that he’s been eaten by a shark. Your report seemed pretty definitive about his death, no?”
“Yes, I suppose,” Dennis said. “So, let me guess: you were a little embarrassed—is that too strong a word—by the missing dollars, but now that Garder was dead, well, why report it back up the chain?”
Massey raked Dennis with a withering stare.
“Fuck you,” Massey said. “Is that too strong a word?”
Betty clicked her pen twice in succession.
“Well,” Dennis said, standing, “Garder’s running around with your million dollars. Go get the bastard before he spends it all.”
“Sit down,” Marty said.
Dennis sat down.
“We want you to help us find Garder,” Massey said with a half-smile, half-grimace.
“I don’t do that kind of work,” Dennis said. “Marty can vouch for that. That’s typically handled within Operations. You guys do that for a living. We always maintain lists of bad agents circulated to all the other friendly intelligence agencies. The Germans, Brits, or Israelis will find him. There’s nothing a lone IG investigator could do in this circumstance.”
“On the contrary, Cunningham,” Massey said, “we think you could help us a great deal. Your reputation is one of a dogged, intrepid—if somewhat prickly—investigator. We’ve got permission from the inspector general to have you attached temporarily to our unit. Your job is to do whatever it takes to find this little shit. We’ll give you two months; if at the end of eight weeks you’re no closer to finding him, then we’ll repost you to the IG’s office. We will of course be sending other teams out to look for him; mostly new agents in training.”
Dennis looked at Marty, but he already knew what his boss’ response was going to be. Sure enough, Marty gave him one of those you-called-it-upon-yourself-you-stupid-shit looks.
“Fine,” Dennis said. “It’s about as unorthodox a use of the OIG as I’m familiar with, but sure, I’m a good soldier. I’ll do what I’m told. Just two questions.”
“Shoot,” Massey said.
“Number one: Who do I report to?”
“Me,” Massey said.
“Two: What do I do when I find Garder—because you know I’m going to find him, don’t you?”
Massey smiled. “You’ll get a single phone number, and you will call it if and when you’ve found him. Just observe him remotely and point our team in the right direction; we’ll take care of the rest. If it looks like he’s in danger of fleeing, you can apprehend him and hold him until help arrives. We can get an extraction team to you within an hour in most major metropolitan areas of the world.”
“So I can’t just shoot him?”
“No,” Massey said. “Shoot to wound as a last resort only.”
“I was just kidding,” Dennis said.
“Ha, ha,” Massey said.
***
“I tried to help you,” Marty said back in his office. “I warned you to stay away from them, and you just kept going. Now you work for them. You may be a bright, intuitive investigator, Dennis, but you have a knack lately of finding trouble where none existed beforehand. I’m trying to cut you some slack about what happened to your wife, but it’s getting tiresome.”
Dennis sat slumped in a chair with his neck bent so far back that he looked straight up at the ceiling. He felt very strange, since he knew all along that he was toying with Massey.
Why did I do it? What did I think was going to happen? Given the circumstances, Marty was indeed looking out for me,
he thought.
Now that I think about it, yes, I was egging Massey on. Why did I do it?
“I feel sorry for you,” Marty said, sighing. “I really do. This is not going to end nicely. You’re not cut out for those folks.”
“So why did you let them grab me?” Dennis asked.
“They made a request directly to the IG, Dennis. I tried to explain your circumstances: that you were an excellent investigator with an unorthodox style and had just returned to work after your wife’s passing. I said you were not suited to this Special Ops-type of work.”
“And what did the IG say?” Dennis asked, his voice squeaky from his bent windpipe as he continued to stare up at the ceiling.
“He said: ‘If it’s that important, then you’ve got him, but only for eight weeks.’”
“Mmm.”
“Let me ask you a tough question,” Marty said. “Sit up and look at me, for God’s sake.”
Dennis sat up.
“Now would be a good time to think about an early retirement. I mean it. You’ve got your time in; you don’t need this shit. Staying around now will only add a few bucks to your pension. You could do some consulting and make a fortune.”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course I am. Take the plunge early. Get out. Go hang around a beach in Florida or Greece. Play golf. Leave all this shit behind.”
“I can’t do that, Marty. I don’t do anything else but this stuff. Sitting around after Martha died just about killed me.”
Marty sighed. “For the record, that was my last attempt to save your sorry ass. And try to remember, Dennis—I know this is difficult for you—but given your family background, you wouldn’t even be allowed into the Agency these days. You would be screened out. Just remember that; you have a lot to lose.”
Dennis felt a strange sensation swarm over his skin, akin to vertigo. It was the same feeling he felt when Dr. Forrester tried to bring up the same subject.
After a few moments, his normal breathing returned, and he stood up.
“And I’m going to find that little prick.”
Daniel had a way of sipping tea that Judy found comical. Not only did her partner continue to drink tea when many Aussies had moved on to coffee, but he insisted on steeping his teabags for exactly three minutes. He then added just the right amount of regular milk that turned the drink an almond-brown color and finished up with two sugar packets that he stirred for fifteen seconds. When he was finished with his preparation, he held the cup in both hands—always with two hands—anchored his elbows on the table, and leaned forward to drink.
“So,” he said, “why do you think they picked on you? What’s the bloody point in frightening you and your parents? Please don’t misunderstand, Jude, but you and I know that your piece in the money laundering investigation was perfunctory. You weren’t leading the team, nor did you contribute any more than I did, or William—or Des for that matter. Doesn’t really add up to me.” He took a long, loud sip of tea.
Judy sighed. “I know. The only thing I can imagine is that they think I know more than I do. They just assume it.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. If I knew what the connection was, I would tell you. You think I like having my parents scared to death?”
“No, of course not. Still, this threat doesn’t add up. What would they expect you to do after being threatened? How could it advantage them?”
“Maybe they expected me to throw the case somehow,” she said. “Maybe I’d claim that Wu wasn’t the man I stopped at the airport or deny some other point of evidence. But that’s a stretch, if you ask me. They had to consider that I’d certainly report the threat.”
They were sitting in a small pastry shop near their office, and Judy toyed with her coffee cup, lost in thought.
“I think it will pass,” Daniel said. “Really, Jude, they’ll just forget about you and your family. Must be a new triad that’s not very sophisticated. It’s silly, really. We have a team giving round-the-clock protection for your family, and they shouldn’t be alarmed.”
“You’ve never met my stepfather, have you?” she said.
“No,” he said, laughing. “Not had the pleasure.”
“Lucky you,” she said.
Daniel’s mobile phone rang, and he reached into his back pocket and put down his tea to answer it. Judy’s phone also rang, and she pulled it out of her purse.
“Judy?”
“Yes”
“This is Erica.” Miller’s secretary often made calls for him when he was pressed for time. “Calvin wanted me to tell you that they’ve just made the biggest heroin bust in Australian history,” she said. “A small freighter in Fremantle: about a thousand kilos of heroin. He thought you should know. It’s a great day for the department, and he wanted me to tell you and the others.”
“Erica, was this an AFP effort or was it WA Police?”
“It was the AFP, Judy. Don’t you remember? I thought you and Daniel did surveillance on this one, right?”
“Ah, yes we did,” she said. She remembered a ten-day period last winter when she and Daniel followed two Pakistani merchant mariners from a Hong Kong–chartered container ship. Neither Judy nor Daniel could ascertain anything unusual from their wandering around Fremantle and Perth.
“Well, Calvin wanted to thank everyone who worked on it. He said it will be on the telly tonight for certain. Everyone will be able to see our success.”
“Of course,” Judy said.
***
After pressing the doorbell several times, Dennis wondered if it even worked. He grabbed the tarnished brass knocker and banged the metal door. Ambivalent and a little confused about his presence there, he secretly hoped she was not home.
He heard movement inside the apartment, and he could see a flicker of light at the peephole.
“Dad!” Beth threw her arms around his neck. “What are you doing here unannounced? Is something wrong?”
“I just thought I’d drop in and say hello.”
“In California?” She pulled him into the living room. “Since when do you drop in three thousand miles away from home? I mean, it’s great to see you. It’s just that I didn’t know you were coming. Why didn’t you call?”
“Oh, you know me,” he said.
Standing in the dining room, looking surprised and nearly incredulous, was Nathan, her husband.
“Mr. Cunningham!” he said. “What a surprise.” Mercifully, Nathan never referred to Dennis as Dad, and Dennis took it as a redeeming quality. Wearing a button-down, long-sleeve blue dress shirt and a pair of dark blue slacks, Dennis thought Nathan looked very much like the patent attorney that he was. A dark-brown tweed sports coat hung over the back of the dining room chair that he had just risen from.
“Oops,” Dennis said, noticing they had been eating dinner. “That’ll teach me. I should have called; you’re eating dinner.”
“Don’t be silly. We have plenty of food for another setting.” Beth dragged him to the small round table. “How about some turkey meatloaf and mixed vegetables?”
“No, really,” Dennis said.
“Nonsense, just sit right there.” She pointed to a chair.
“Beth, really—”
“Dad,” she said, giving him the same kind of cut-the-shit-look Martha used in their marriage.
“Fine. I’ll shut up and eat.” He sat down and was joined by Nathan. Beth quickly plated a slice of turkey meatloaf and a pile of steaming vegetables and put it in front him. In truth he was famished, and eating would be a good distraction from his self-consciousness.
In the four years that his daughter had lived in San Francisco, he had been in sporadic contact with her, but he had only visited her apartment once. He was on completely foreign territory and might as well have been having dinner with a strange couple in an apartment in Kazakhstan.
The three of them made pleasant small talk for a while. Beth and Nathan were drinking red wine, and they offered some to Dennis, but he took a glass of water instead. Beth asked Dennis how he was feeling. He assured her he was feeling fine and tried to change the subject.
“You’re not still depressed, are you?” she asked.
“Nope, back at work. Fit as a fiddle or something like that.”
The conversation veered to Nathan’s legal work and their goal to buy a single-family home in the next two years, and to have children.
During a brief pause, Beth turned to Dennis.
“You know, Dad, I still can’t believe you work for the CIA,” she said in a mildly scolding tone. Dennis noticed that Nathan winced slightly and looked down at his plate. “I mean I can easily see you working for them, but that’s not the problem. It’s that you kept it from us for so long. I’ve done some research on the web, and it seems like they relaxed those disclosure rules some time ago.”
Dennis frowned, turning his forehead into deep horizontal furrows developed from repeated use.
“Dad,” she said. “Please don’t go into one of your huffs.”
He quickly caught himself. Beth was the only person left in his very small family, and he needed to treat her with a new level of respect. He had found out painfully and brutally that isolation was no longer an option for him.
When Dennis had started working at the Agency it was indeed against regulations to divulge to his family who his employer was; his cover was that he worked in security for an obscure Department of Defense group. But in reality Dennis loved the partitioning of his life into home and work. It suited his vision of the boundaries of his life. When the Agency rules changed in the early 1990s and most employees could disclose to their families that they worked for the CIA, Dennis chose to maintain the old rules and keep his work life cordoned off.
“Well, Beth, I can’t really say why I kept up the charade for so long,” he said, taking a sip of water. “It was a habit.”
“A bad habit,” she said.
“Beth,” Nathan said quickly. “Come on.”
Dennis held up his hand, waving off Nathan’s intervention, and then he did something that was completely unexpected, and in its own small way, shocking. He laughed. Not out of derision, or even mockery, but in a pose of surrender.
“You know I’m a nutbag,” he said, chuckling. “So why are you so surprised? Just do me a favor and don’t put my employment situation on your Facebook page.”