Color of Blood(71)

“That’s a roger. And this evening?”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “I really must be going.”

***

He recognized the number on his mobile. “Hello,” Dennis said.

“When were you going to check in?” Massey said. “I’ve been waiting to talk to you.”

“I spent enough time with the extraction team,” Dennis said. “Their team lead—what’s his name, Khory? He was such a pain in the ass: kept repeating the same questions. I thought you would have read the report by now.”

“A report is a report. I thought I made it clear that you were to debrief with me on this case,” Massey persisted. “I never heard from you. And now you’re back in Australia.”

“So you’ve figured that out already?” Dennis said.

“Oh, come on, Cunningham, you know we have access to NSA data, and our Agency phones have GPS chips and cell-tower triangulation methods and God knows whatever new technology they can find. What are you doing back in Australia?”

“I think Garder’s either here now or going to be soon,” Dennis said.

“Well, given the fact that of all the agents we have hunting this guy, you were the only one to find him, I’ll go with your guess.”

“It’s more than a guess,” Dennis said.

“Let’s not quibble. I have a couple of questions. First: how did he get away so quickly? You had a gun and he was unarmed. The report says he jumped you?”

“Massey, he’s a field agent, I’m not. I warned you at the outset, remember?” Dennis said. “He was quicker than I anticipated. The door opened behind me, I turned, and he flew at me. He just about ripped one of my eyes out of its socket.”

“The woman he was with, are you sure she was French?”

“I said he spoke to her in French, not that she was French. She could be Swiss, Canadian, or Belgian. I have no idea. Remember, she held a gun to my head, so I wasn’t too busy checking out her nationality.”

“It says here that Garder told you that he was pissed off at the Agency for something and had tried to tell some newspapers about it. Is that correct?”

“Massey, I have been through this already. Yes. It’s in the report.”

“He used the terms ‘blind trawl’ to you? Those exact words?”

“Yes. I’ve never heard of it before and thought he was bullshitting me just to bide time until his girlfriend came back. Have you heard of it?”

“No,” Massey said.

“I’m just pissed that your team didn’t get there fifteen minutes earlier. We could have bagged him.”

“So here’s my second question: why didn’t he just kill you?” Massey said.

Dennis had thought a lot about that. “I’m not sure, to be honest. He didn’t seem to have the look of a killer, so I’m not surprised.”

“And you think you can spot killers?”

“Most of the time, yes; sometimes I’m a little off,” Dennis said. “But in this case, from a purely self-interested point of view, I’m glad he chose not to put a bullet in my skull.”

Massey laughed in a single, explosive bark that Dennis thought sounded like a trained sea lion.

“But he did say that if he saw me again, he’d kill me,” Dennis said. “That particular threat was not lost on me.”

“Do you want a protection team?” Massey said. “We could do that in a heartbeat.”

“No teams.”

“I guessed not.”

“But now I have a question for you,” Dennis said.

“You don’t ask questions,” Massey said. “I ask questions; you answer them. That’s how it works.”

“Right, so here’s my question anyway: Why, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going on, and Al Qaeda cells everywhere to be dug out, are we spending so much time and energy chasing a kid who stole one million dollars from Uncle Sam? That’s the cost of about four armored Humvees in Iraq. He’ll show up eventually, and we can grab the bastard then.”

“I thought you’d come around to that.”

“So?” Dennis said.

“So what?”

“Jesus, Massey. Come on.”

“It’s more than the one million dollars,” Massey said. “He’s shopping something else to the bad guys. I can’t tell you what because you’re not authorized to know, but he got hold of something that he apparently thought would be worth more than one million to the right group. So he took it. We want it back. Does that answer your question?”

“Who are the bad guys? Journalists?” Dennis said.

“Not journalists, though most journalists are bad guys in my book.”

“So who are the bad guys then?”

“They’re bad guys; that’s all you need to know.”

“Bad guys with head scarves or bad guys with Slavic accents?”

“Bad guys.”

“Thanks for the deep intel. I need to go.”

“Wait,” Massey said. “We have an extraction team in place in Australia. You’re to use the same number given to you before. Call that number if you find him again. I’m confident you will, for some crazy reason.”