Color of Blood(54)

Only through the combined interventions of Marty and Sally did Dennis escape a serious reprimand.

Over the years Sally and Dennis had maintained a perverse symbiotic relationship by exchanging gossipy bureaucratic information that lubricated much of intra-Agency interaction.

“I’m sorry to hear about your wife,” Sally said.

“Thanks, I’m slowly getting my act back together.”

Just then a young woman approached and talked with Sally about a conference call that afternoon. After the woman left, Sally muttered, “Jesus, you’d think the only thing going on in the world right now is the war in Iraq and those Cro-Magnon towelheads in Afghanistan.”

Sally may have presented like a movie-star version of a spy, but in real life she sounded like a union dockworker. Dennis liked that about her. She was coarse, unsentimental, and crass: attributes appropriate for someone who spent her life approving waterboarding, blackmail, and the occasional drone strike.

“Are you up to your elbows in Iraq?”

“Elbows? Shit, I’m up to my ears, Cunningham. Since the stupid war started, they’ve been working us twenty-four seven to come up with a magic bullet to keep American troops from being killed. Tell me, how do you fight a war and not lose troops?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s insane. They want a TV war where no Americans get killed. They show those silly low-res videos of some building being blown up by a smart bomb to prove how brilliant we are, but when American ground troops get killed, they go bananas and hatch schemes to keep our boys from being killed. In a war! In a war against other armed men! You wouldn’t believe the harebrained schemes some of the idiots on Pennsylvania Avenue are coming up with. Whack jobs, the lot of them. And of course we’ve got our share of idiots here.”

They chuckled, a kind of shared derision born of years fighting enemies, both external and internal.

“So what’s on your mind?” she asked.

“Kind of a stupid question, but thought you could help,” he said.

“Don’t bullshit me, just ask the question,” she said.

“OK, here goes: how would an Agency hit team cause a cardiac arrest in a normal, healthy man and do it undetected?”

Sally picked at her salad, stabbing a piece of Romaine lettuce with her plastic fork and plopping it into her mouth. She chewed it and shoved around the remainder of the salad as if she were looking for something important.

“Depends,” she said after swallowing a small cherry tomato. “It’s less complicated if it’s a civilian, messy if it’s a combatant.”

“OK, a civilian,” Dennis said.

“Well, that would be fairly simple then,” she said. “Assuming of course”—she turned her voice into a mocking monotone—“that we’d received an Executive Order for a targeted killing.”

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was understood the Agency could terminate anyone anywhere if he or she looked, smelled, or talked like a terrorist. Increasingly the effort to whisk high-value targets off the street in Paris and drop them into prison at Guantanamo was losing favor. Civil libertarian lawyers, left-wing media, and some legislators were demanding public disclosure of the prisoners’ treatment, and even public trials. It was easier to simply kill them.

“So,” she continued, “we’d put a team onto said civilian and surveil, looking for a time slot when we could get clean, private access. They’d plan the intervention, rehearse, and then go in. If there are no complications, the intervention is done in less than three minutes.”

“How would you do it?”

“You mean kill him?”

“Yeah,” Dennis said.

“In most cases, injection.”

“How would you inject someone with something that’s going to kill him and then just walk away?” Dennis asked.

“You prissy little IG folks are so stupid about this shit.”

“Come on.” Dennis tried to deflect her back to his question. “I agree we don’t know how this kind of stuff is done, but just humor me here. How would we ‘do’ a civilian like you described without the mark screaming for bloody murder and fighting his attackers?”

She sighed. “OK. It would go like this: a civilian would not know what’s happening to him—remember you told me to describe taking out a civilian. I mean a civvy would have no more clue about what was happening than you would right now if someone walked up behind and stuck a shiv in your neck, severing your spine between C4 and C5.”

Reflexively Dennis looked behind him, and Sally laughed.

“Go on,” Dennis said dryly.

“If he were a noncombatant, we’d take him in his bed, assuming he’s alone. Often they sleep with a partner, so we’d pick a venue like a parking garage at night, or a men’s room, something like that.”

“But how would you inject him?” Dennis asked.

“With a gas-powered syringe,” she said, stabbing another small, plump, candy-red cherry tomato. “They’re available everywhere. Nothing special.”

“Fine, then what?”

“If it doesn’t take place in his bed—which is best, as I stated—then we’d use a three-person team. They’d distract the mark with a pretty woman asking directions or an ugly old woman asking directions, something like that. We’d have two agents grab the mark from behind. They’d raise his left arm quickly, and the attractive or ugly agent in front would jab the civvy in the armpit of the raised arm. I mean it literally takes seconds. Needle would slide right through clothing, and then everyone would simply release the person and smile at him.”