Color of Blood(114)
“You know that Iran has one of the highest opium addiction rates in the world?” Peter said.
Dennis nodded. “That’s what I read.”
“They have more opium than almost any other country in the world, though you wouldn’t know it from their politicians,” Peter said.
“Yes, I read that, too. So?”
Peter leaned forward.
“This poem, or whatever it was, do you remember it?”
“Sure, why?”
Peter pulled out a ballpoint pen from his inside blazer pocket and pushed a napkin over to Dennis. “Write it out.”
“Really?” Dennis said.
“Sure; let’s see if you can remember it.”
Dennis thought about it for a bit, and then slowly wrote the stanza in block letters. Then he pushed it over to Peter, who turned the napkin around so he could read it. Dennis glanced casually at the older man in the jogging suit and saw his face turn slightly in Peter’s direction.
Peter stared at the napkin for a while, and then looked out the shop window that opened onto Connecticut Avenue. Pedestrians and cars moved in a stream, like capillaries feeding the heart of Washington.
Before Dennis could speak, Peter took the pen on the table, circled a word in the poem, and turned the napkin so Dennis could see it.
Peter raised his eyebrows to confirm he was asking a question.
“Yeah, I see it,” Dennis said. “So what?”
Peter stared at Dennis. “You never bothered to check this out?”
“No. It’s that important?” Dennis asked.
Peter nodded, turned the napkin around, and deliberately tore the small piece that held the stanza off the napkin. Dennis watched in amusement as Peter wadded the tiny piece of napkin into a ball the size of a BB, then plopped it into his mouth like mint and washed it down with his coffee.
“Sorry, Peter,” Dennis said. “That was just a little dramatic, even for a veteran field agent.”
“I can see now why they might be concerned about you,” Peter said. “Do you remember what project first brought us into contact? Pay attention to what I circled. For one of the best investigators I’ve ever met, I’m surprised you missed this part. Please be careful, Dennis. They’re going to ask me about this meeting, you know.”
“Yeah, I figured. What are you going to say?”
“That you told me you were in trouble, and wondered whether you should retire. And that I said, ‘yes, you should retire.’ Oh, and Margaret says hello.” Peter stood, drained his coffee, and tossed the empty cup in the trash on his way out.
***
On his way home from work, Dennis spontaneously decided to do a computer search himself instead of relying on his barista. He performed some simple switchback anti-surveillance tactics to slip a potential tail. Earlier in the day he used the hobby shop radio frequency detector on his car to see if they had bugged his vehicle but could find nothing.
After thirty minutes of evasive driving, he pulled into the rear of the Hilton Garden Inn in Shirlington, Virginia, and walked through several of the restaurants lining Campbell Avenue. He cut through a mini-mall, onto Twenty-Eighth Street South, walked a block, and then entered through the rear of another restaurant and back out onto Campbell Avenue. He quickly entered the front entrance of the Shirlington Branch Library and stood in the vestibule reading several pamphlets, periodically looking out through the plate-glass windows into the sparse crowd in the street. After twenty minutes, he entered the library and browsed the nonfiction section so he could see the front door. After another fifteen minutes he grabbed a book about the opening stages of World War I.
He sat and flipped through the book, watching the front door. He saw only two middle-school girls walk in, and finally he scooted to one of the public-access computers and started surfing the web. No more intermediaries to surf the web, he thought.
It was not hard to look up the word “Europium.”
After reading several more scientific articles, Dennis rubbed his eyes, more out of anxiety than fatigue. He went to the web browser settings and cleared the history of his searches. Not a single adult had entered the library since he arrived, but he was still nervous. Peter’s warning at the coffee shop was enough proof that Dennis had touched a nerve somewhere, and it was the same nerve Garder had grabbed hold of and yanked.
Peter was right, Dennis thought. How could I have missed it?
Dennis went back to the web browser and searched the white pages for the home listing of the person he was looking for. Every piece of information about someone, it seemed, was on the Internet these days, even Agency employees.
After jotting down the person’s home address, he visited the Starbucks official store-locator site. After nearly twenty minutes of searching, he guessed which Starbucks location the person stopped at in the mornings before work. It has to be on the right side of the road inbound to Langley, he thought. This individual was renowned for their Starbucks grande latte each morning, replete with an extra shot of espresso. He cleared the browser’s memory again and left the library.
Dennis ate dinner at his favorite small Vietnamese restaurant in Shirlington. The place was packed on a Thursday evening with young, well-paid government bureaucrats spending wads of money on exotic drinks and fancy dinners. It was now March of 2007, and he thought the Iraq War was turning ugly for the soldiers on the ground, but good for the contractors and subcontractors here at home.