Color of Blood(53)

Dennis reached over and picked his drink off the coffee table. The ice cubes had melted, diluting it to a tepid mixture and leaving a ragged ring of warm condensation on the tabletop. Dennis sipped it absently, looked down as a bead of water fell off the glass bottom and splattered onto the dust jacket of the book.

He suddenly did not like having the book in his lap, and he tossed it with a little too much force onto the coffee table, where it slid across the top and onto the carpet.

“That was a stupid poem,” he said out loud as he stood and walked into the kitchen. He poured the remainder of his drink down the drain, placed the empty glass in the stainless-steel sink, and walked into his bedroom. He was in a foul mood and quickly brushed his teeth, hung his trousers over a chair, got into bed, and turned off the light.

He wrestled with his pillow and sheets for at least thirty minutes before it came to him: he, too, had dreamed of dead soldiers he had killed. He had suffered a recurring dream in which the station chief in Nicaragua that had committed suicide would show up, sitting forlornly at the kitchen table, saying absolutely nothing.

Dennis had never spoken about the dream to anyone, except a brief mention to Dr. Forrester.

He had asked Dr. Forrester, “So in the dream, why does he just sit there? He never talks.”

“What do you want him to say?” Dr. Forrester had asked.

“Christ, I don’t know! Something! Just don’t sit there and stare at me.”

***

“It was sudden cardiac arrest,” Judy said.

“Did he have any history of heart disease?”

“There was no sign of coronary artery disease,” she said. “The report simply says ‘sudden cardiac arrest’ as the cause of death.”

“Were there any other signs of injury on his body: anything unusual or strange?”

“No, not that the report states.”

“And they didn’t do a toxicology test?”

“No, Dennis, I already told you that. You keep asking the same questions, and I keep repeating the same answers. He died of cardiac arrest. It’s a common cause of death in many Western countries.”

“But he was only forty-two years old,” Dennis said. “And there was no sign of narrowing of the arteries? No heart defects like arrhythmia? It just seems suspicious.”

“Not to me: seems tragically normal in our day and age. A colleague here had a brother who died suddenly last year from a heart attack. I believe the man was in his late thirties: just collapsed watching a footy match. It happens, Dennis.”

***

They met in the sprawling cafeteria in Langley. Dennis spotted her, stood, and waved. She nodded and weaved her way through the maze of tables and chairs to Dennis’s table.

“Hello, Cunningham,” she said, plopping down on one of the cheap plastic-and-metal chairs. “I haven’t spoken to you in quite a while. I thought for sure you would have taken early retirement and gone to work for a contractor.”

Sally Winston was a career officer in the Directorate of Operations. On the surface she defied the common perception of a woman who spent her life in the filthy sewers of the clandestine services. She was a tall, beautiful, dark-haired woman with a terrific figure who was married to another dashing Agency operative. They were an item for many years in Langley, the dream team of elegance and panache—the kind of spies you saw in Hollywood or read about in popular novels.

Sally had aged very nicely, Dennis noted as they made small talk. She must be in her late forties by now, he thought, but her face was hardly creased, and though her waist had expanded slightly, she could still turn heads at the supermarket checkout counter.

Dennis had worked with Sally a decade earlier in a complicated investigation of missing funds from the London station. Sally was the station chief at the time, and her team had an enviable record of “flipping” former Russian and Eastern Bloc émigrés. Sally was seen as a rising star, until suddenly the bean counters in Langley noticed that more than two million dollars had gone missing from a fund loosely managed by Sally and her team of agents.

Sally was suspected of orchestrating the involvement of the inspector general’s office in an investigation of the missing funds. Typically the Operations staff would investigate an incident like this. It would only end up at the IG’s office if there were charges of gross malfeasance or a cover-up. Since the Directorate of Operations is a closed-loop environment, charges of malfeasance would never make it to the IG’s office unless, of course, the charges were leaked to the news media or Capitol Hill.

In Sally’s case, the Republican senator from South Carolina who sat on the Intelligence Committee requested the IG’s office investigate the missing funds.

The scuttlebutt at the time was that Sally or her husband had back-channeled the incident to the senator’s staff to get the IG to look into it. Sally denied any involvement, of course, and the IG went ahead by detailing Dennis to London.

Dennis, aware of the controversy, worked with Sally to cull out the potential suspects from the list of operatives. In the end Dennis’s persistence and abrasive style had led him to Sally’s deputy, a fellow named Richard Silver.

Silver had been in cahoots with another agent—his lover—and they had managed to salt away almost $1.5 million in several Swiss bank accounts.

Before Dennis could confront Silver, the agent took off for Stockholm and defected to Russian intelligence. He left his love interest holding the bag. While Sally was exonerated, Dennis was roundly criticized for relying on old-school tactics like intuition and confrontation. It was argued that he should have put all suspects through a round of lie detector tests immediately. Instead Silver escaped and took with him a list of paid spies and informants; that mess took years to repair.