Color of Blood(35)

“What kind of uranium are you talking about? I mean would it kill someone?”

“No, not this stuff. This is mined uranium, not enriched: sort of mild stuff, really.”

“Mined uranium?”

“From a mine, yes.”

“Like, from a hole in the ground? That kind of mine?”

“That is correct. From a hole in the ground.”

***

Dennis had requested but never looked at some of the reports available on Garder’s activities. Sitting in his office for the first time in a while, well-wishers kept stopping by to say hello.

“How ya feeling?”

“Dennis, good to see you back in the office.”

“Glad to see you back, Dennis.”

“Ready to get back into the shit again, Dennis?”

He finally closed his door to keep people at bay while he pored through more than thirty digitized documents. He finally found a list of Garder’s travels that were reported back to his handler. They were listed chronologically by date and destination.

“Aug. 13, Ningaloo: Red Hat Mining Co.

“Sept. 4, Pandera: 3M Mine.

“Sept. 29, McClure’s Gap: Austral Mining Co.

The list had seventeen entries. The document was print-protected and all the department’s computer screen-copy utilities were disabled, so Dennis painstakingly copied each entry in longhand. Afterward he rechecked each item.

The phone rang.

“You bastard,” Marty said, laughing. “Thought you could sneak in without telling me?”

“I was just coming down to see you,” Dennis said. “Got something I need to talk to you about.”

“I hope it’s about the hazmat thing.”

“Yep.”

***

“I need to look into this a little more,” Dennis said. “Seems odd to me that none of Garder’s reports mention uranium. I’m going to map his trips to mining companies to see if he visited any uranium mines. If he did, well, that would explain it. If not, well, Houston, I think we’ve got a problem.”

Marty leaned far back in his chair, his traditional judicial-like stance when listening to one of Dennis’s pitches. It was the same dance the two men had practiced all these many years: Dennis would explain why he needed to do something, and Marty, at six feet two inches tall, would lean back like a Supreme Court justice and weigh the evidence, his naturally curly hair bobbing slightly as he rocked in concentration. Just before passing judgment, Marty would lean forward for effect and say something perfunctory like: “Forget it, Dennis, it’s not happening,” or “Fine, do it.”

Today Marty seemed to lean farther back than normal, and Dennis found himself leaning forward in an attempt to get his attention.

After Dennis finished, several moments passed before Marty bent forward, his ancient chair creaking as it sprang ahead.

“What are you trying to do with this case? I thought it was over,” Marty said.

“Something doesn’t fit; the uranium thing is strange,” Dennis said. “I’ll find out soon enough if he reported visiting a uranium mine. Hell, I don’t even know if there are uranium mines in Western Australia. But you’ve got to let me take one more pass at it.”

Marty stared at Dennis for some time, and Dennis took that for a good omen; typically, if Marty had reservations about something, he’d just come out and say it. The more he equivocated, the more likely Dennis would get his way.

But, uncharacteristically, Marty kept staring at Dennis.

“OK, what?” Dennis finally said.

“I don’t like this entire thing,” Marty said.

“What thing?” Dennis said.

“This Garder thing. Don’t like it. Stinks.”

“Why do you say that?” Dennis said. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?”

Dennis knew Marty’s nuanced vocabulary by now, and the term ‘stink’ meant the case was nonlinear, complicated, and had the potential for political trouble.

“So you don’t believe the ‘big-f*cking-shark’ theory?” Dennis said.

“No.”

“Neither do I,” Dennis said, “but we have no body, no motive: just an empty car and an empty swimming flipper.”

“I think we walk away from this one,” Marty said, grabbing a pen and opening a manila folder on his desk. “In fact, I’m ordering you to drop it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“Just drop it, Dennis. I don’t like this one.”

“We’ve been working together a long time, Marty, and this is maybe the first time you’ve talked like this. Walk away? That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Dennis, the Agency has changed a lot in the past couple of years, and you know that. It’s less professional and more political. And there are more players in the game, and you know what I’m talking about. You’ve never mentioned the fact that Garder wasn’t reporting to the station chief in Canberra. Didn’t you wonder about that?”

Dennis smiled. “His file says he was reporting to folks in our Special Activities Division, which in my book means he was in all likelihood working with JSOC.”

The Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, had been around since the 1980s as a super-secret military group answering only to the White House. But post-9/11 JSOC had grown in size and power. They were widely considered to be involved in some of the most controversial parts of the war on terror, including assassinations and rendition. More importantly, JSOC operated independently of the CIA. The only group in the Agency connected to JSOC was the strange, ultra-secret group with the bizarre acronym SAD, the Agency’s Special Activities Division.