Color of Blood(84)

Judy looked at her watch. “Well, I am a little hungry . . .”

Dennis ordered two large chicken Caesar salads, dinner rolls, and a bottle of sauvignon blanc from room service. They plowed into their task while waiting for the food. One by one they went through Garder’s trips, estimating how long it took him to drive and what his likely route was. They eventually found themselves kneeling on the floor, side by side, their elbows on the bed as if in a church pew. Judy used a yellow highlighter to trace the estimated driving route of each trip. The bed was soft, and she had to press lightly or the entire map would cave in.

Halfway through, they were interrupted by room service. They ate at the small meeting table after clearing it of academic supplies. Dennis poured two glasses of wine.

“I didn’t know you drank wine,” she said.

“I don’t,” Dennis said. “But I’m game.”

As was often the case, Dennis left CNN on in his hotel room with the sound turned down. Every now and then he’d glance up to see what might be happening in the crazy world around him, but mostly it was just habit that offered a sense of continuity to every trip. The hotel room, the city, the maladapted agent may be different, but CNN was always the same.

While they ate their salads, Judy pointed to the TV set that showed a correspondent reporting from Baghdad.

“Can you answer a question?”

“About what?”

“The war in Iraq. It’s been going on now for, what, four years?”

“Something like that.”

“So the US invades Iraq and deposes Saddam Hussein because they think he has weapons of mass destruction.”

“Yes.”

“But it appears there were no weapons of mass destruction.”

“So far that’s correct.”

“Now isn’t it true that Iraq and Iran hate each other and fought a brutal war in the 1980s?”

“That’s true.”

“And isn’t it true that Iran is the hated enemy of Israel, and by extension the US?”

“Where are you going with this, anyway? I thought we were having a bite to eat?” Dennis laughed.

Judy put another mouthful of salad in her mouth but continued to talk, alternately chewing and speaking.

“So let me get this straight. The US neuters Iran’s hated Arab enemy, Iraq, by destroying its military and letting the Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites fight among themselves. And Iran, which is hated by the US, sends Shiite fighters into Iraq to fight and kill Americans and Sunnis.”

“I don’t pay much attention to politics or foreign policy,” Dennis said.

“Well, that’s very American of you. But listen—now you’re sending even more Yank troops into Iraq, and undoubtedly more of them will be killed by Iranian fighters that America literally opened the gates for. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

“Stop trying to be logical about these things. Governments make stupid mistakes all the time. I’ll let the historians figure this one out.”

“Mmm,” she said, taking a sip of wine. “Maybe I don’t have the right amount of testosterone to understand these things.”

“You understand them just fine,” he said.

They finished their meals and started into a review of Garder’s trips. After nearly two hours, they had gone through each of his trips and identified three weeklong trips during which Garder was in proximity to uranium mines.

Judy was sitting down on the floor, her legs curled backward to the left. Her beige slacks had collected lint from the carpet, and she absently plucked away the fluff and tossed it back onto the carpet. Dennis was tired, but he remained on his knees, his stomach and elbows resting on top of the bed, staring at the map.

“It doesn’t seem right,” Judy said.

“It doesn’t?”

“No.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I don’t think Garder found a known mine. That just doesn’t work for me. If it were an established mining operation, then there’d be nothing secret about it, and the environmental regulations and record keeping would be very tight, even by Australian standards. That doesn’t sound like a black operation to me.”

Dennis turned and looked at her from the bed, the map crinkling as he twisted. He stared at her.

“So you think Pearson steered Garder to an unauthorized mining site, something not registered and not on the books?”

“Yes,” she said, looking distractedly at the fluff balls on her bent knees. “That would be my guess.”

Looking back at the map, Dennis sighed. “If that’s the case, we’re no further along than when we started.”

“And Dennis,” she said apologetically, “please don’t be displeased, but my guess is that the Special Activities Division would have purged any mention of the trip in which he discovered the mine. That’s what I would have done, if in fact the operation were so sensitive. I mean, you said yourself they took the extraordinary step to remove Pearson. For the record, I still can’t believe your CIA would assassinate an Australian citizen like you suggest, but I’m not going to argue with you any longer.”

“It’s not as complicated as you think,” Dennis said. “A lot of this stuff is contracted out, and the contractors think the operation is sanctioned. At the command level it’s not like someone wrote up an order in Langley saying terminate Pearson in Western Australia. No, it’s more like a bunch of grizzled old white men sitting around a table at two a.m. drinking shitty coffee and someone says, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if this guy Pearson were out of the picture?’ And they all nod. And later one of the guys at the table calls someone and says, ‘You know this guy Pearson is a problem for us.’ Before you know it, there’s a contractor who’s been given an assignment, and the contractor’s assumption is that the assignment is properly sanctioned. And two weeks later a guy named Pearson has a heart attack in an obscure pub parking lot across the globe. I didn’t make the rules, but that’s how it works.”