Authors: Keith Yocum
“Sir?” the woman said.
“Yes,” Dennis said, collecting himself. “So you knew Mr. Jansen for nearly all his time here, and I gather were one of his ‘party friends.’”
“Mr. Cunningham, as I told you already, we weren’t, like, romantically involved. The way you put it, it sounds like we were hooking up or something. We went out as a group. There were a bunch of us all about the same age, and we did things together.”
“You weren’t attracted to him?”
“No. We were friends!” she repeated. “You keep trying to insinuate things like that, and you’re upsetting me, Mr. Cunningham.”
“Why are you upset?”
“Because you seem to keep suggesting we were lovers. That’s stupid, and I feel like you’re trying to trap me.”
Dennis noticed her eyes were beginning to well up, and again he heard a tiny little bird chirp a warning.
“Do you know what happened to him?” Dennis said.
“No, do you?” she said defiantly.
“No, I don’t,” Dennis said.
“Miss Carter, do you know what Mr. Jansen did here at the consulate?”
“No,” she said, wiping one of her eyes. “But there are a lot of people here that I don’t know what they do.”
“Did he ever talk about his work, his assignments?”
“No, not really. Just that he did a lot of traveling around the state. He was teased a little bit because he would be gone for weeks at a time, and we all said we wanted his job. To be out of the office and driving around: seemed liked fun.”
“Did he tell folks what he was doing driving around the state?”
“No.”
“Did he ever argue with anyone in the group?”
“He wasn’t like that. Geoff was a really nice guy and would never argue and be loud.”
“Did he have any hobbies?”
She laughed, and Dennis was relieved to have changed the mood. “Well, he had unusual hobbies: things that I thought were cool.”
“Like what things?”
“Well, like watches. He would tease me about my watch; it was a Timex. And he would talk about how those kinds of watches were mass-produced and did not have the workmanship of mechanical watches. He was pretty intense about that, but in a good way. I certainly learned a lot about watches. And he helped me get a nice watch, too,” she said, holding up her wrist to show a stainless steel timepiece.
“How did he do that?”
“He told me that he’d sell my Timex on eBay, take the money, and buy a nice, older mechanical watch. I had to throw in about a hundred more, but it seemed like a good idea. So he showed me this one online and I bought it. It’s an old Tudor, which is, like, the cheap line of watches from Rolex.”
“Besides watches, did he have any other hobbies?”
“Well, I guess you’d call poetry a hobby for him.” She smiled. “I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t understand his poetry thing but, like, he’d suddenly speak a line from a poem to make a point. Or sometimes he’d just compose something out of thin air. He’d say it with, like, a dramatic flair. We just laughed at him, but he didn’t mind. Like I said, he wasn’t a self-conscious guy or anything.”
Not like me,
Dennis thought.
Now with her guard down again, Dennis moved in quickly.
“Did he like to do drugs?” Dennis said.
Her face hardened, and she said sharply, “We didn’t do drugs.”
“Any drugs?”
“Nope.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yep.”
“Do you have any idea what happened to Mr. Jansen?”
“Nope.”
“Anything else you wanted to tell me about Mr. Jansen?”
“Nope.”
As the young woman left the small office, Casolano, the consulate’s PR man, put his head in. “The CG would like to see you, Mr. Cunningham. He’s in his office now if you’d like to follow me.”
Dennis had experienced another night full of vaguely disturbing dreams. As he walked to the CG’s office, he felt tired, and for the first time since he had taken on the assignment, he wanted to go home. This, by itself, was new. Dennis relished the hunt and tolerated everything, really, until the prey was cornered and bagged. Sometimes the prey was a person, sometimes just a piece of information. But it always needed to be hunted down.
Now, in an odd twist, he wondered when he could go home.
St. Regis served up a wan smile as Dennis sat down.
“How is your investigation going?”
“Fine.”
“Have you had any luck finding out what happened to Mr. Garder?”
“Nothing I can tell you about,” he said.
“Of course.”
A dull, muffled silence fell over the two men, and Dennis wondered what St. Regis wanted. Dennis had requested Langley look deeper into the consul general’s background and was waiting on that report.
“In full disclosure, Mr. Cunningham, I have to tell you that I have lodged a formal complaint about you. I spoke to Mr. Roby after his meeting with you, and I will follow up with young Miss Carter as well. I don’t appreciate how you’ve treated us and wanted you to know that you’ll doubtless be hearing about it through channels. I’ve requested you be replaced with someone more agreeable.”
St. Regis proffered the wan smile again. “That’s all,” he said, opening a manila folder on his desk.
Dennis sat in the chair, staring above St. Regis’s head at a strange, primitive painting on the wall. It appeared to be a landscape in a shadow-box frame made of tree bark and dabs of white and black paint. He was momentarily captivated by its three-dimensional quality, and it gave him a good excuse to process what had just happened. He had made a stupid, self-destructive mistake. Marty would surely come down hard on him.
He sighed, looked at his watch, and said, “I have some work to do.”
St. Regis did not acknowledge him as he walked out. Dennis made his way to a small office door marked 209. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the stainless-steel key Casolano had given him. He unlocked the door, turned on the light, and looked at Geoffrey Garder’s small, windowless office.
Cunningham
, he kept repeating to himself,
what is wrong with you?
He sat down in the small chair in Garder’s office and planted both elbows on the desk. Cradling his face on both sides with his hands, he rocked gently to and fro.
Work
, he finally told himself.
Get to work. Do something, for God’s sake
.
So he began to bore into the minutiae of Garder’s office. Nothing intrigued him more than a subject’s personal surroundings.
How a person stacked pencils or organized folders, or even maintained a supply of staples, told Dennis a lot about their personality. Of course these days it was more complicated because of the computer.
The IG’s office maintained a stable of forensic computer engineers that could retrieve old data off hard drives and deleted emails and texts from servers. That’s what he’d been told, though he was typically suspicious of all things digital.
Still, he discovered to his amazement that accomplished thieves and liars write the most incriminating emails and texts.
Dennis had already seen a list of Garder’s emails. They had been retrieved and reviewed by the two analysts from Operations. The emails turned out to be innocuous and ran the gamut from gossipy workplace items to laborious interchanges with a local rental car agency. Garder was also a member of something called a Fantasy Baseball League, and there were many emails in which he traded for real-life baseball players.
Dennis also had seen a list of websites Garder had visited, and they consisted of long URL strings. Some of the sites were obvious, like the link to the Western Australian University English Department or an eBay link to a specific watch, but many of the links were unintelligible and useless unless he sat down and entered every single link, looking for a lead.
Typically Dennis might have requested a low-level Langley analyst pore over the URLs and prepare a report, but Marty would never authorize that kind of investment in such a small case. Dennis had been told that most of the geeks in the IG’s office had been repurposed to Operations teams tracking down Al Qaida cells.
Garder’s room appeared orderly and well kept. The small metal desk had a flat-screen computer monitor, a keyboard and mouse, an oversize official US Consulate coffee mug doubling as a pencil holder, a metal ruler, a black standard telephone, a small metal table lamp, and one of those give-away stress balls. Dennis picked up the soft stress ball and read the label: Compliments of the WA Agricultural Agency. He squeezed it softly in his right hand as he continued looking around the room.
A gray metal, horizontal file cabinet stood behind the chair, and he swiveled to open it. Three stacked drawers of vertical file folders held absolutely nothing. The sound of the vacant drawers echoed like an empty airplane hangar.
Turning back to the desk, he checked the drawers; one of the three small drawers to his left held blank sheets of computer paper, a small tray of push pins, and notepads; another held a dog-eared internal phone directory as well as a telephone directory for Perth. The other drawer held hanging file folders that were empty.
Dennis looked in the small trash bin under the desk. It was empty. The walls were nearly bare except for a hanging calendar on the back of the door and a large wall map of Australia. Standing up and positioning his face inches away from the portion of the map portraying Western Australia, Dennis strained to see if any area had been marked, circled, or stabbed with a pushpin.
It was hard to tell in the low light of the room, so he grabbed the table lamp off the desk and held it at an angle several inches away from the map. There were tiny holes here and there on the map that he took for pushpin holes. But these could have been from a predecessor who used the room. Putting the lamp down, he walked over and removed the calendar off the door.
It appeared to be brand new, and there was not a mark on it for any previous month, though it was open to the current month.
He sighed and finally put down the stress ball, tempted briefly to keep it, since he felt an odd satisfaction in squeezing it. Maybe if he squeezed it hard enough, his problems with St. Regis would simply go away.
Before he left the room, he employed on old investigator’s trick to look for fallen or misplaced items. He pulled open the bottom drawer of the file cabinet and reached behind the hanging files, searching for items that had fallen to the bottom. He found three paper clips and an empty hanging folder.
Standing up, he grabbed the entire file cabinet and hinged it forward at the top a few inches from the wall. Peering behind it he noticed a piece of paper had fallen and was wedged at the bottom. He managed to tease it out from the side, letting the empty cabinet boom as it went back into place.
He opened the folded piece of lined notepaper. In longhand were four lines written in pencil:
Not Kimberly
Nor the way of the lake
But a Savory treat!
For all Europium
This idiot was really into poetry,
Dennis thought.
Strange guy
.
He pocketed the verse, turned off the light, and pulled the door tight behind him.
Casolano appeared to have been waiting outside.
“Um, the CG would like to see you,” he said.
“Again?” Dennis groaned.
“Yes.”
“Before we see the CG, can you show me your mail room?”
“Can I ask what you’re looking for?” Casolano asked.
“Garder’s mailbox,” Dennis said. “You folks must have a mailbox for messages and mail, stuff like that.”
“Oh, I see,” Casolano said. “Sure, follow me. But we have to hurry. The CG asked me to tell you it was urgent he see you.”
On the second floor, near a bank of copy machines, Dennis was shown an old-fashioned, wall-mounted maze of boxes with names above each opening. Dennis found Garder’s name and was surprised that there was a single pink message slip.
Dennis snatched it. The message in longhand stated: Mr. Pearson returned your call. 899-1900, ext. 45.
He jammed the slip in his top pocket and followed Casolano to St. Regis’s outer office and was left there. After several minutes, St. Regis came out and stood over Dennis, who was leafing through a
Time
magazine.
“I just spoke to Jillian Carter, and she told me about the kind of questions you asked her,” he said, the corners of his mouth pulled taut with anger. “I find it unconscionable, your line of questioning. It’s boorish and unprofessional. I refuse to let you talk to anyone else here without my participation. That is, as long as you remain here. While the wheels at State work slowly, it should not be long before you’re recalled.”
Dennis looked up while distractedly turning pages of the magazine. He vacillated between rage toward St. Regis for interfering with his investigation, and fear that he was facing a professional and personal disaster. He had brazenly broken Marty’s rules. For just a second, he felt a pang of self-loathing, the kind of feeling he dreaded because it might start a very bad fall into a deep, dark hole.
Tossing the magazine onto the table with a flourish, Dennis said, “Why are you so hell-bent on interfering with the investigation?”
St. Regis’s nose flared; the wrinkles on his forehead disappeared as his face was pulled taut with anger. “You little bastard,” he said.
And with that, he turned and walked briskly into his office, slamming the door behind him.
Dennis left the building feeling a little woozy. This was a rubber-stamp project, a get-your-feet-back-under-you mission, and he had blown it. Dr. Forrester would tell him he was being self-destructive, but he
knew
that.
***
Dennis had set up at the hotel bar and was nursing a Macallan when his cell phone vibrated.
“Hello,” he said.
“Dennis?”
“Yes.”
“This is Marty.”
“Hey, Marty,” Dennis said after a brief pause. The older Agency-issued cell phones encrypted transmissions so that at the end of each sentence there was a brief half-second pause as the next speaker waited for voice data to be transmitted, unscrambled, and processed. It was a clunky concession to secrecy, and most agents found it a throwback to conversing on walkie-talkies, but it was the only technology the Agency felt comfortable with in 2007. One day soon they would be able to encrypt and decrypt in real time, but not today.