Color of Blood(3)
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.”
Chapter 2
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.