Color of Blood(65)

Dennis stared at him, trying to figure out how to make him shut up without hurting him. He half-wondered whether he should shoot him in one of his hands, like he had threatened.

“Look,” Garder said, leaning forward a little, “I was on a ‘blind trawl’ in Western Australia. Do you know what that is?”

Dennis pushed his chair back and looked at Garder’s legs underneath the table as if he’d consider shooting one of them, but none of it had any effect on Garder.

“The Agency has a pretty clever way—actually they stole the idea from the old KGB—of making sure some of its more sensitive operations are airtight. It’s diabolically simple: they send a junior agent into the field to investigate some vague and suspicious activity that’s similar to their own black ops program that they’re running nearby. But the agent isn’t told anything about the real black ops program that’s being run by his own team. You get it? They let the agent stumble around to see if he or she will discover the real program. If the agent gets wind of the mysterious program, he reports it immediately, not knowing it’s being run by his team. The Agency gets some cheap quality assurance, maybe breaks in a green kid going into the field for the first time, and more importantly, they plug holes in the program’s cover so it’s even more hidden afterward. And the agent, who never knew his or her real job was Langley QA, gets reassigned. Get it? They call it a ‘blind trawl’ because the agent is blindly dragging a net, so to speak.”

Garder stole a glance at his watch, a stainless steel model with an oversize face and several knobs on the housing. Dennis sneaked a glance at his own watch and realized that just fifteen minutes had expired since he made the call. Only thirty-five minutes to go.

“So they sent me on a ‘blind trawl’ into Western Australia. They dropped me into the consulate in Perth and told me to research the mining industry there. Told me there were hints that some foreign powers were misusing mining permits and were shipping out unauthorized materials. I had no idea it was a ‘blind trawl,’ of course, I was just trying to do my job. But it turns out the Agency had a program going on that was incredibly supersensitive. And I found it, man. Took me a while, and I had a little luck, but I found it.”

Dennis had decided to simply wait out Garder as he babbled on. Nevertheless, he found himself amused with his storytelling prowess. If nothing else, it helped pass the time.

“And when I found it, of course I thought it was a foreign power running the program. But when I discovered it was the Agency running it, I was shocked. Who in their right mind would authorize something as crazy and dangerous as that? The more I thought about it, the more monstrously insane it seemed.”

Garder sat back in his chair and sighed, pulling his hands to the edge of the table.

“Put your hands back, Garder,” Dennis yelled. “Now!”

“Sorry,” Garder said, sitting forward and pushing his hands palm down on the table.

“I was so pissed off when I found out what was going on that I told them so. Of course they denied it and reassigned me right away. They even suggested I’d get a commendation. I was staggered with the sheer insanity of what they were doing out there. Who thinks of these crazy friggin’ schemes? And how in God’s name do they get approved? After telling them I was pissed off, they were, like, ‘Get your ass back to Langley and shut the f*ck up.’ But I had a crisis of conscience, I guess you’d call it. Don’t laugh when I say that. See, you’re smirking, but you’d be furious, too, if you knew what those jackasses were doing.”

“Do you have any idea what a pain in the ass it is for us folks in the IG’s office to spend our careers running around the globe trying to track you dopes down?”

“OK,” Garder said. “So I pulled off the shark thing. I thought it was original: maybe not so much now. I guess I knew they’d figure it out eventually, and all I needed was a head start.”

“I have to ask, now that you brought it up—and I’m only curious from a professional standpoint—but how did you manage to get a great white to bite your flipper?” Dennis said. “They pretty much certified that a white shark bit the flipper we found.”

“Oh, that was easy. You can buy great white teeth in tourist shops in Fremantle,” Garder said. “They shed them all the time. So I did a little research and measured out the distance of a medium-size shark’s bite. I used a pair of pliers to hold the tooth, and I slowly punctured the flippers.”

“Shit, that’s not bad,” Dennis said.

Again, Garder shot a quick glance at his watch.

“I’m sure they didn’t tell you what was happening because that would have blown the program. No, I bet you were duped, too: anything to keep the program rolling. Man, was I na?ve. I hid out for a while and then prepared a detailed package of documents spelling out the whole filthy little operation and contacted a reporter for the Boston Globe. The guy was great, and I must have talked to him for, like, three weeks straight. We met in person in London. Then when the Globe contacted the Agency for comment on the story, the Agency absolutely killed me. They produced all these falsified reports that showed I was unstable, was a thief, and was blackmailing the Agency. In the end, the newspaper buckled. They said there was no independent, verifiable information to support my claims. They wouldn’t print it. So you know what I did?”