Authors: Keith Yocum
“I’m game,” Dennis said. “Give me the phone.”
Marty walked back up the steps in the glare of the front porch light. He handed Dennis the cell phone.
Dennis took the phone, turned around, and went inside, gesturing Marty to follow him.
“Who is this?” Dennis said, shutting the front door and looking at Marty.
“Garder,” a man said, his voice low and barely audible.
“What happened to you?” Dennis said.
“In Belgium,” the voice mumbled.
Dennis had trouble hearing him. He covered his open ear with his left hand and arched forward slightly, concentrating.
The man said something unintelligible, and Dennis said, “I can’t hear you. Speak up.”
“They told me you . . .” the man said slowly, and then his voice trailed away.
“Garder, what the hell have they done to you? You sound like crap.”
Dennis squinted in concentration and plugged his left ear with his finger. A strange and alarming thought came lobbing into his consciousness.
Hunched over the phone, with Marty directly behind him, Dennis twisted reflexively from the cold barrel of the handgun against his temple.
The sound of the detonation inches away from his ear arrived at the same time as the bullet. Dennis remembered a roar and an all-encompassing white flash that seemed to invade every molecule of his body.
That was followed by a vivid sensation of effortless floating.
His vision slowly returned, and he found himself staring into a gauzy sea of dark gray. He was lying on his stomach on the ugly, gray living-room carpet. His eyes were two feet away from someone’s shoes. The owner of the shoes was talking, maybe on a phone. It was Marty, and he was angry.
“He’s not dead. He turned at the last goddamn second . . . Don’t give me that shit . . . there’s no such thing as a double-tap suicide. Now it’ll have to be a robbery. Goddamnit.”
Dennis was amused at how clever Marty had been: the offer to take him to the ER, the staged phone call, the inaudible conversation so that Dennis would cover his open ear and not hear Marty get in position behind.
Then the voice, loud and purposeful, came from the hallway. At first he thought it might be God talking.
But it was only Judy.
“Put the gun down,” she said. Dennis could tell she was quite angry.
“Who the hell are you?” he heard Marty say.
“I said put the bloody gun down,” Judy said again, this time enunciating her words slowly in the commanding tone of voice that every law-enforcement professional has at her disposal.
“Are you a friend of Dennis’s?” Marty said. “Oh, wait. You’re the Australian chick. Cunningham’s little Aussie bitch.”
Dennis heard another loud detonation and for a moment could not tell where it came from. Almost instantly, Marty’s shoes disappeared from in front of his eyes as if by magic, and in another feat of apparent trickery, Marty fell like Tom Thumb from far above, landing on his back about three feet away from Dennis’s face. Marty rocked back and forth on the carpet next to Dennis, grimacing.
“You stupid woman,” Marty yelled.
Judy’s face appeared several inches from Dennis’s. “Good God,” she said, touching his face. “Dennis,” she said, “how do I call for emergency help? Do I call 911? Is that what I do?”
It took an enormous amount of energy for him to respond. “Arggghhh,” is all that he could say.
She stood up, and instead of going right to the phone, he saw her beige, high-heeled dress shoes pass close over his face. He could see Judy’s shoes standing next to Marty’s rocking head, and then he saw Judy kick Marty above his left ear with so much force that it sounded like someone had dropped a ripe cantaloupe onto the kitchen linoleum.
“I can’t believe I missed the gun switch,” he said, holding Judy’s hand. They were in the emergency room at Arlington County Hospital.
“Don’t worry about that now,” she said. “Just relax.”
“When Marty went through my house before I returned from Australia, he switched guns,” Dennis said. “He took my gun and left me a duplicate Glock. Then he was going to take it back afterward. What a clever guy.”
“Stop talking,” Judy said.
“Then after shooting me, he planned to simply clean my gun and put it in my hand. No one would bother looking for powder burns on my hands.”
“Hush, Dennis, please.”
“You heard the doc,” he said. “I’m going to be fine. The round just skimmed me.”
“He said you have a skull fracture and you need to remain calm,” she said. “There’s always a chance of a blood clot.”
“I’m going to be fine,” he said.
“Of course you are. But I don’t understand why they’re going to move you to another hospital.”
“Oh, that’s just to get me away from civilians,” Dennis said. “They’re moving me to Walter Reed National Medical Center. It’s military. More control over the situation. Where’s Marty?”
“I’ve already told you twice before, they moved him a while ago,” she said.
“Oh yeah,” Dennis said. “I remember.”
“Is he OK?”
“You mean his shoulder or his legal problems?”
“His shoulder.”
“His shoulder is fine, and why do you care? The man almost ended your life. God, Dennis, you have a funny sense of loyalty.”
“Just feel bad for him, that’s all. People do strange things for money.”
“And you think Marty knew nothing about the rare earth metals?”
“Don’t think so,” Dennis said, adjusting a strip of gauze that was pressing his eyebrow. “Idiot was doing odd jobs for Massey for years to get some extra cash. Little surprised he’d go this far, though. You know, Marty warned me several times to let this thing go. He begged me to give it up. I see why.”
“Oh, so that exonerates him from trying to kill you? Dennis, can we stop talking about that man?”
Judy slumped in the chair next to his bed and listened to the chirping of medical monitors. The adrenaline had finally worn off, and she was physically and emotionally spent. She had been interviewed four times already: twice by Arlington County Police and twice by the US government investigators that hardly identified themselves. She repeated the story each time about what happened when she arrived at Dennis’s house.
She was familiar with police interrogations, of course, and knew it was critical to remain consistent. Judy also knew how fatigue could cross up even the most ardent truth-teller, so she was careful and measured during her interviews.
She also had a brief conversation with a woman at the Australian Embassy who called the hospital looking for her. Someone had alerted the embassy, which she was thankful for.
Holding Dennis’s hand, she wondered about the wisdom of remaining emotionally attached to him. Every single thing about him was complicated.
Still, as he lay with his eyes closed and the cartoonish, bulky white swath of gauze around his head, she felt a fondness toward the man. She liked his wry attitude and his penchant for solving complicated riddles—and he was a very good lover. She had the unmistakable impression he would do anything for her. That in itself was worth the price of admission, she reckoned.
“Do you think you should let your daughter know you’re in the hospital?” she asked.
“Not now,” Dennis said, yawning. “I’ll never hear the end of it. When I get out, I’ll call her. She deserves to know what happened. All of it.”
“I’m sure she’ll appreciate your call,” Judy said, but Dennis had already closed his eyes. He slept a lot these days.
***
The worst part was the relentless round of interrogations. Though Dennis was prepared for the onslaught, he grew tired and angry as they persisted. He finally refused to answer any more questions.
“Read the transcripts of the other ten thousand people who have interviewed me,” he told a team of staffers from the House Intelligence Committee. “I’m finished talking. I’m well enough to go home, and that’s what I’m planning to do.”
The people who interviewed him had pinched faces, taciturn demeanors, and spoke in clipped sentences. The entire case touched a nerve somewhere deep in the labyrinth burrows of the intelligence establishment. He sensed that the shooting and its aftermath had set off a cascade of denials, obfuscations, and finger pointing.
Peter was the only unofficial visitor, besides Judy, that he was allowed to see.
“Well, look at you,” Peter said. “You managed to stay just far enough away from a bullet. Very lucky man, Dennis.”
“I’d like to think skill and anticipation saved me,” Dennis said, “but it was luck, just plain luck that I turned my head at that moment.”
“You’ve created quite a buzz around Langley with your heroics,” Peter said.
“How much of it leaked out?”
“Enough to make you a kind of hero to some and a traitor to others.”
“Do you think they’ll take me back into the IG’s office?”
“Of course they will; you’re a cause célèbre for some of the staffers on the Hill. They rarely get a chance to catch the Agency doing stuff like this.”
“Do you know if Garder came in yet?”
“He’s the young agent that stumbled on the scheme in Australia?”
“Yes, him.”
“Rumor was that he came in, but I’m a little out of touch these days,” Peter said.
“He’s the one that deserves a medal,” Dennis said.
“Don’t count on it. He’s lucky they don’t post him to Siberia.”
“That’s ridiculous. He’s a hero in my book.”
“You are such an idealist,” Peter laughed. “Look what it almost cost you.”
“I’d do it again,” Dennis said.
“Well, just relax for a while and get better. It’s a little distressing to see you with gauze wrapped around your head. You look like The Mummy.”
“I feel like The Mummy,” Dennis said, putting his arms out straight, zombielike.
They laughed until Dennis said “Ow,” and dropped his arms.
“It hurts to laugh,” he said.
***
The final meeting before discharge was held in an empty doctor’s office the strangers had commandeered. A woman in her late- thirties and an older man, perhaps in his sixties, sat in front of Dennis. They identified themselves as members of the legal department from the OIG. Dennis had never met these people before, but it didn’t matter. He was not certain any of the people he spoke to were giving him their real names and titles.
As is the case in vast bureaucracies, the person raising the uncomfortable questions is not entirely welcome. Dennis understood all of this and played his part well, he thought, but it didn’t matter any longer. He just wanted out of the hospital.
The young woman did most of the talking.
“You’ll need to sign this document,” she said. “After you sign, you may leave.”
“What is it?”
“A binding agreement not to disclose to any unauthorized individuals the events involving your assignment in Australia, the events leading up to the shooting in your home, the shooting itself, and everything that occurred throughout your stay in the hospital,” she said, holding out a two-page form on a clipboard. “And you also agree not to file a whistleblower complaint against the Agency or any federal entity.”
“You already have a blanket nondisclosure agreement from every employee of the Agency, so I don’t understand why you need another one,” he said. “And do you really think the whistleblower piece will hold up in court?”
“This agreement is specific to this incident,” she said.
Dennis stared at her for a moment and then reached for the clipboard. There was a ballpoint pen underneath the clip, and he pulled it out.
“Before I sign, I have a couple of questions. First, what happened to Marty? I gather from the people who interviewed me that Marty was hard up for money.”
“We can’t comment on anything like that,” she said.
“Will I see Marty again?” Dennis said.
“I strongly doubt that.” The man finally spoke.
“Is he incarcerated?” Dennis asked.
The man looked at the woman, then back at Dennis, and simply nodded.
“Second question: where is Massey, and what happened to him?”
Silence.
“Come on, folks,” Dennis said. “What’s the point of keeping this stuff away from me? I’m the guy who nearly got killed so that Massey could protect his little program.”
Silence.
“Well then, I’m not signing it,” Dennis said, returning the clipboard to the woman.
“You have to sign it,” she said, pushing it back. “You can’t leave here until you do.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No, Mr. Cunningham, we’re not kidding. This is a very sensitive subject.”
Dennis took the form back, clicked the ballpoint pen, frowned histrionically, and signed it. He gave it back to the woman.
“You’re not expected back to work until thirty days from now,” the man said, standing up. “You are free to travel anywhere within the contiguous United States and are forbidden to travel abroad, and that includes Australia. We don’t want you falling into any third-party hands in transit. It appears several non-friendly services have discovered what you’ve been up to.”
“What!” Dennis said. “I can’t travel?”
“Relax, Mr. Cunningham,” the woman said. “You’re still recovering.”
“And to ensure you aren’t tempted to leave the country, your friend, Judy White, will be back in the States next week,” the man said. “We’ve arranged for her to be released from her Australian police duties for a month to join you here. We thought you’d appreciate that.”
“Seriously?” Dennis said. “You got the AFP to release Judy for a month?”
“Why would we lie?” the man said.
“Please don’t start,” Dennis said.