Color of Blood(113)

“It’s Dennis.”

“I’m Marie. I’ll have that stuff for you tomorrow.”

“Great,” he said, turning away, praying that the entire exchange looked like an older man shamelessly hitting on a young woman.

***

The following day Marie was not on duty, so Dennis waited yet another day and went for his mid-afternoon coffee stop.

“Hey, I got your information,” Marie said, pushing a twenty-dollar bill to him across the counter with a yellow sticky note on top with some writing. “It took like ten minutes, and I can’t take forty bucks for that,” she said.

Dennis pulled the sticky note off the bill and said, “Are you sure this is its location? Is it still moving?”

She laughed. “No, it’s been there for sixty-seven hours. I had to look up the city where it was. Hope I spelled it right!”

Dennis smiled and tried not to sound perplexed.

“Marie, I hate to ask, but are you absolutely sure this is where the container is? There was no mistake or confusion about it on the map?”

“No, I checked it several times, and when I enlarged the map, this is the town and country it was located in. Really. I don’t know how to pronounce it, but I wrote it down—Qom. It’s in Iran.”

Dennis pushed the twenty-dollar bill back and said, “Please take it, Marie, and I’ll have a venti mild roast, room for milk.”

“OK, Dennis.” She smiled. “Any more projects like that, let me know!”

***

There was nothing to do but listen to the piped-in folk-rock music, sip his coffee, and read the Washington Post. He expected the GPS on the shipping container to give him the answer, but he had no answers yet, only more questions.

After all the chasing, he could not put the pieces together into a coherent narrative.

He looked at the front door of the coffee shop, glanced at his watch, and took another sip of tepid coffee.

Dennis was lost in a lengthy Post story about the complexity of improvised explosive devices when his visitor joined him at the table.

“Peter,” Dennis said, “good to see you.”

Peter, dressed in his usual blue blazer and khaki slacks, laughed. “You still have that tan. Australia?”

“Yes.”

“Hope you had some R&R while you were there.”

“A wee bit,” Dennis said. “Mostly work.”

“It’s an interesting country. Did you know I was stationed there once?”

“No, you never mentioned it.”

“Sydney, 1976,” Peter said. “Australia had taken in thousands of Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon. Agency was convinced some of the refugees were plants by the North Vietnamese and Chinese. We assisted the Aussies in interrogating the refugees.”

“Find any plants?”

“Yes, actually: a woman. Very beautiful, spoke French and English fluently.”

“What did you do to her?”

“Flipped her, or at least we thought we flipped her into being a double agent,” he said. “God, I wonder whatever happened to her? She was quite beautiful.”

“Do you ever look back on things you’ve done and wonder about whether you did the right thing?” Dennis asked.

“No, not really,” Peter said, taking a measured sip of coffee. “Can’t really do that. It was a job: sometimes exciting, often boring, rarely dangerous. A job, that’s it.”

Dennis closed the newspaper and took a sip of coffee.

“So what’s going on in your life these days?” Peter said. “You sounded a little stressed when you called.”

“Well, I got myself into some trouble.”

“Last time we talked you were in trouble: the same trouble or new trouble?”

“Same sort of trouble.”

“Is that why you’re being watched?”

“You noticed?”

“Of course,” Peter said. “The technology has changed over the years, but a tail is a tail. It’s funny how they’re so obvious to people like us.”

“Yeah, she came in after me and sat at the back talking on the phone. I saw her last week at a restaurant with a guy ten years her senior. Think they could be a little more discreet.”

“Who’s doing the watching?”

“It’s a contract team; they’d never use employees on this one. Paper trail would be problematic.”

“I’m afraid to ask what you did to get this kind of attention, but try me.”

Dennis led him through a forty-five-minute narrative. Peter asked some clarifying questions. Both men didn’t miss a beat when the woman in the back left the coffee shop. As she did, an older man in his fifties, wearing a jogging suit, walked in and sat near them after buying a newspaper, coffee, and bagel. Dennis and Peter locked eyes in amusement and continued in lower voices.

After Dennis finished, Peter sat back in his chair like a priest who had just heard confession. In the background a plaintive male folk singer crooned about missed opportunities.

“And your theory is opium is being moved through Iran by the Agency to Europe?”

“Or we’re giving Iran something they need and they, in turn, are moving opium to Europe for us. That’s the best I can come up with, though it does sound kind of lame,” Dennis said.