Authors: Keith Yocum
Lorraine tilted her head toward Marty’s open door.
Dennis returned to the doorway and stuck his head in.
“New Hampshire,” Marty said. “The MIA’s parents are from New Hampshire, the same New Hampshire that our Representative Barkley is from.”
Dennis nodded and turned again.
“How are you doing, Dennis?” Lorraine asked.
“Feel great.”
“Good to see you back,” she said. “We missed you.”
“Thanks, Lorraine. It’s good to be back.”
***
A bump.
It was nothing more than a small thermal disturbance that jostled the airplane, but it was enough for him to taste that copper-metallic sensation of anxiety in the back of his throat. He cinched his seatbelt tighter. The pilot illuminated the seatbelt sign, and the serious voice of the co-pilot directed passengers to check that their belts were fastened.
Dennis looked out the window of the passenger jet. At thirty-six thousand feet there was a thin smear of haze between the jet and the dusty gray-red soil of the Nullarbor Plain a mile below.
Another thermal shook the airplane, and Dennis clutched his armrests, his heart now racing far ahead of itself.
Calm down,
he thought.
But he could not calm down. It was the same embarrassing fear Dennis had battled his entire adult life. He could take on the most delicate assignments in the oddest corners of the Earth to confront the CIA’s most troublesome employees, but he would pulsate with anxiety when an airplane ran into turbulence. He knew, according to Dr. Forrester, it was related to his fear of losing control, but that knowledge did not seem to help.
Thank God no one is sitting next to me,
he thought, closing his eyes.
Breathe, let it out slowly; breathe, let it out slowly.
After ten minutes the jet stopped shuddering, and he waited to see if they were clear of the chop. Satisfied they were in clean air, Dennis flagged a stewardess and asked for a glass of water.
***
Regina, the mother hen in the travel office, had warned him about the jet lag he could expect from the long flight to Western Australia, but Dennis failed to pay attention to her recipe of pre- and postflight sleep, over-the-counter melatonin, blindfolds, and bourbon.
Over the years he had taken to the air on every conceivable form of transportation from vintage DC-3s to state-of-the-art Russian Mi-24 Hind helicopters. He barely tolerated the air travel and treated it as a kind of penance that offset the perverse pleasure of his job, which was to hunt bad people in the Agency.
Still, as he sat on the springy hotel bed in the Hilton in Perth, he felt exhausted and tried to remember what Regina had recommended about jet lag. Was he supposed to go to sleep immediately as if he were still on US eastern time, or was he supposed to stay awake until nightfall?
Overcome with fatigue, he fell backward onto his bed, arms flopping out to each side.
He stared at the ceiling and focused on the infinitesimally small blinking red light of the smoke detector: blink, ten seconds later another blink, followed by yet another blink . . .
At first he did not comprehend the sound; it was loud and disturbing. His unconscious interpreted the sound as if it were a jet taking off, but the noise continued at non-jetlike intervals, and he found himself staring at the hotel telephone on his bedside table.
“Hello,” he said hoarsely.
“Mr. Cunningham?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Stephen Casolano. I work at the US Consulate here in Perth. I was just checking to see if you got in all right, and if there was anything I could do for you. The consul general asked me to check in.”
“No, um, I’m fine, Stephen. Just trying to catch up on some sleep.”
“Absolutely, sir. Sorry to have woken you.”
“Not a problem.”
“Well, good afternoon—um, good night, sir.”
“Goodnight, Stephen.”
He poured himself a large glass of water from the bathroom faucet and set up in front of his laptop. He had grown to resent the Agency’s digitization of the intelligence business and their infatuation with new electronic devices and security software.
Truth be told, Dennis had sinned in his handling of computers. He had fried two laptops on previous assignments and was determined not to do it again. The Agency insisted that all sensitive material for traveling personnel be digitized, encrypted, and loaded onto specially constructed laptops. After three attempts with the wrong password, the hard drive would be destroyed by the release of a small amount of acid that ruined the hard drive’s thin magnetic coating. Any attempt to open up the plastic shell of the laptop would also release the acid.
After the second laptop was destroyed—and a new one sent out by diplomatic pouch to Bangkok two-and-a-half years ago—Marty threatened to ground him.
“If you can’t remember a simple goddamn password, Dennis, then you don’t belong out there any longer,” Marty said. “You can sit at a desk here in Langley and battle coronary artery disease and hemorrhoids like the rest of us. Simple as that.”
Dennis reached for his wallet and extracted his Virginia driver’s license. Holding the laminated object six inches from his face, he read the tiny text he had made with a thin-tipped Sharpie pen. Of course it was against Agency rules to write down your username and password, but like so many Agency rules, he didn’t care. The fact that the Agency required passwords to change every six months further displeased him and justified his rebellion.
He typed his password in.
The password failed.
“Damn,” he said. He tried to judge whether he mistyped the password, or in fact made a more egregious error in miscopying the new password in the first place.
“Come on, Cunningham,” he muttered. “Get it right this time.” In times of stress Dennis had developed the habit of referring to himself in the third person.
With painful deliberation he typed in the username and password, double-checking every click of the keyboard.
The computer unlocked, and he found the file he was looking for.
GOVERNMENT FORM D-10
TOP SECRET
FOR USE BY THE INSPECTOR GENERAL’S OFFICE OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY. IT IS UNLAWFUL FOR ANY UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL TO READ THE CONTENTS OF THIS FORM. PLEASE CONTACT THE INSPECTOR GENERAL’S OFFICE IF YOU COME INTO POSSESSION OF THIS DOCUMENT.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
DATE: OCT. 10, 2007
INSPECTOR: DENNIS CUNNINGHAM
ASSIGNMENT: REVIEW THE PRIOR INVESTIGATION OF THE DISAPPEARANCE OF AGENT GEOFFREY GARDER, UNDERCOVER AT US CONSULATE IN PERTH, WESTERN AUSTRALIA. AGENT GARDER FAILED TO REPORT TO WORK ON SEPT. 3, 2007, AND WAS REPORTED MISSING ON SEPT. 5 WHEN CONSULATE EMPLOYEES ENTERED HIS APARTMENT. WEST AUSTRALIAN POLICE WERE NOTIFIED OF HIS DISAPPEARANCE AND HIS LEASED AUTOMOBILE.
BACKGROUND: AGENT GARDER, AGE 29, HAS BEEN EMPLOYED BY THE AGENCY FOR SIX YEARS IN THE DIRECTORATE OF OPERATIONS. PLEASE SEE GARDER’S ATTACHED PERSONNEL FILE. THIS WAS HIS SECOND OVERSEAS ASSIGNMENT.
GARDER’S ASSIGNMENT AT THE CONSULATE WAS “HUMINT” ON AUSTRALIAN MINING AND MINERAL INDUSTRY. AGENCY SOURCES HAD RELIABLE INFORMATION THAT SEVERAL NON-FRIENDLY COUNTRIES HAD SET UP SHELL COMPANIES IN ASIA, AFRICA, AND AUSTRALIA TO FRONT ILLEGAL PURCHASE OF VALUABLE MINERALS FOR DEFENSE-RELATED PROJECTS.
AGENT GARDER’S ALIAS WAS:
GEOFFREY JANSEN
. HIS COVER WAS
DEPUTY ASSISTANT TO THE CONSULATE GENERAL IN PERTH
. HIS IDENTITY AS AN AGENCY EMPLOYEE WAS KNOWN ONLY TO THE CONSULATE GENERAL, AS IS SOP FOR AGENCY-STATE DEPT. COOPERATION.
AGENT GARDER HAD BEEN ON SITE FOR ELEVEN MONTHS PRIOR TO HIS DISAPPEARANCE. INTEL FROM HIM HAD BEEN ORDINARY AND GENERATED NO COMMENT FROM LANGLEY ANALYSTS. HE WAS SCHEDULED FOR REASSIGNMENT IN DECEMBER. HE WAS NOT AWARE OF THE REASSIGNMENT PLANS.
AGENT GARDER WAS FULLY VETTED DURING HIS TRAINING AT CAMP PEARY. ALL PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENTS WERE NORMAL. HE HAS NEVER BEEN DISCIPLINED.
MARITAL STATUS: HE IS SINGLE, BUT POSTDISAPPEARANCE INVESTIGATION SHOWS HE HAD BEEN DATING AN AGENCY EMPLOYEE IN LANGLEY (SEE PERSONNEL ATTACHMENT, ALSO DEBRIEF FROM RHONDA SAMPSON). SAMPSON REPORTS NO CONTACT WITH AGENT GARDER AFTER SEPT. 1. EMAILS BETWEEN AGENT GARDER AND SAMPSON END ON SEPT. 1. SAMPSON REPORTS THE RELATIONSHIP WAS INTIMATE THOUGH STRAINED BY LONG DISTANCE. SURVEILLANCE OF SAMPSON WAS INITIATED ON OCT. 4 AT THE DIRECTION OF THE DEPUTY IG. TO DATE THIS SURVEILLANCE HAS PRODUCED NEGATIVE RESULTS.
ON SEPT. 23 TWO AGENTS FROM DIRECTORATE OF OPERATIONS WERE DISPATCHED TO INVESTIGATE AGENT GARDER’S DISAPPEARANCE. (SEE ATTACHED REPORT.) CONCLUSION: CRIMINAL (NOT CLANDESTINE) FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED. AGENT GARDER IS FEARED TO HAVE BEEN VICTIM OF RANDOM CRIMINAL ACT. AT THE TIME OF THE REPORT, AGENT’S AUTOMOBILE HAS NOT BEEN RECOVERED. INVESTIGATORS EXPECT ADDITIONAL DETAILS RELATING TO HIS DISAPPEARANCE ONCE HIS VEHICLE IS RECOVERED.
AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE INVOLVED IN INVESTIGATION; SECURITY PACT REQUIRES OVERSIGHT BY AUSTRALIAN INVESTIGATOR ON NONDIPLOMATIC PROPERTY. COMPLIANCE REQUESTED.
ASSIGNMENT FOR INSPECTOR CUNNINGHAM: FULL REVIEW OF PRIOR REPORT ON DISAPPEARANCE OF AGENT GARDER. PRESS LOCAL AUTHORITIES ON LIKELY SCENARIOS REGARDING CRIMINAL ACTIONS AGAINST AGENT. FINAL REPORT EXPECTED WITHIN THIRTY DAYS.
He reread the assignment form and painstakingly reviewed the accompanying reports. Dennis tried to remain excited about the assignment, but he knew it was what he and the other investigators referred to as a “Grade D” assignment—pure, bureaucratic dog shit.
A life has a trajectory, much like an artillery round, Dennis believed. It starts with an explosion out of the womb—OK, not a great metaphor, but stick with the idea—and follows a parabolic arc across time with varying gravitational influences on the projectile exerted by objects like marriage, sickness, war, idiotic families, and crap like that. The other end of the arc was another womb, of sorts—a coffin that held a body in the ground.
It wasn’t the most original concept about existence, but he didn’t care. It suited Dennis just right; it was blunt, cynical, and approximately accurate.
Here was his conundrum, sitting in a hotel room on the west coast of Australia—was he near the end of the arc, or somewhere near the middle? Lately he was consumed with an overarching sensation that his life was about to end. He had even experienced panic attacks, which he found more disturbing than his fear of turbulence—at least in an airplane he knew the cause and effect of his hyperventilation. The free-floating anxiety attacks, on the other hand, were unpredictable and upsetting.
And of course there was the enervating sadness that seemed to follow him when he wasn’t anxious. So much had occurred over the past half-year that his psyche was exhausted, regardless of Dr. Forrester’s spirited pep talks.
With his wife gone, he was now alone: really alone. He was, by his own reckoning, a workaholic widowed father who lived by himself in a small house in Arlington, Virginia. He knew vaguely that it would not stay this way forever, but his appetite for change had been lost.
His friends were all grizzled agents and analysts of assorted intelligence services spread throughout the Washington, DC, area. It was a small community consisting almost entirely of men that worked for an alphabet soup of obscure and not-so-obscure organizations like the CIA, the FBI, Naval Intelligence Service, the Army Intelligence branch, the National Security Agency, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, and many others. Men often switched jobs just to fight boredom or to get away from the personality conflicts that seemed to be a backdrop for this kind of work.
For the past six months Dennis had rarely hung with this crowd, hunkering down instead in his house watching TV and reading books that he never quite seemed to finish. He found himself in an alternating flux of lethargy and anxiety.
“It’s entirely normal to feel sad in these circumstances,” Dr. Forrester said in their first session. But in a later session she had gone further than Dennis expected one afternoon by pointing out, almost as an afterthought, that Dennis had likely been depressed for years in reaction to his childhood.
Dennis expended a great deal of energy avoiding the past and was a reluctant patient for Dr. Forrester. He just wanted to get well enough to go back to work. Forget the past; move ahead. More than anything he needed to get out of his little Cape Cod–style house in Arlington and get back to work. He needed to prove his worth to the inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency. The fact that he could not remember who the current IG was didn’t matter. Work equaled survival, he reckoned.
***
Dennis had rented a Holden Barina, a small car made by General Motors’ Australian subsidiary. The US Consulate was on St. George’s Terrace, not far from the hotel. He reminded himself that Australians drove on the left side of the street, which meant that the steering wheel was on the right side of the car. If that was not complicated enough for a jet-lagged American investigator, he inadvertently turned on his windshield wipers instead of his blinker when he pulled out of the hotel.
“Goddamnit, Cunningham,” he groaned as he lurched down Mill Street with the wipers screeching across his barren windshield. “Stay on your side of the road.”
By the time he arrived for his appointment, he was running late. He was met by Casolano, the public relations officer.
“I’m so sorry I woke you up, Mr. Cunningham,” he said, holding out his hand. “Please forgive me.”
“Really not a problem,” Dennis said.
“Well, I hope you got some sleep nevertheless,” Casolano said.
“The CG is just finishing up a meeting with the West Australian Farmers Federation and will meet with you in about fifteen minutes. Can I get you something to drink while you’re waiting?”
“No, thank you.” Dennis flopped onto a large faux leather couch in the waiting room, picked up a copy of the consulate’s newsletter, and leafed through the fourteen pages of US propaganda: the consul general opening the WA Prime Lamb Sire Sale in the town of Moora, the consul general welcoming a Fulbright Scholar from the University of Wisconsin, the consul general commemorating Remembrance Day at the State War Memorial in King’s Park, the consul general blah, blah, blah. While he knew that someone had to wave the flag out here in the farthest reaches of the globe, he still could not fathom why anyone would choose to do that for a career.