Color of Blood(86)

Judy sipped her coffee, her knees pulled up to her chest and the T-shirt pulled over her knees, stretching the fabric to its limit: her preferred cocoon-like posture when wearing his T-shirt.

“I don’t understand what Google has to do with this,” she said. “Enlighten me.”

“It’s the satellite and aerial photos they use for Google Earth. You must have used the program before. Anyone with an Internet connection can zoom in on any location on the globe.”

“Yes, of course I’ve used it,” she said.

“Well, Google gets requests all the time to alter a photograph,” Dennis said. “We do it, the French, Russians, Israelis, and everyone else. If a country has a physical site or military complex that they want to keep secret from the public, they make an official request to Google’s legal department to alter a photograph. It’s odd that Google has the most comprehensive public database of photos of the globe, but they do.”

“So you think that the CIA made a request to alter the Google satellite photos of this secret base here in WA?”

“Yes, that’s my hunch.”

“And what would Google do to the photo?”

“If it’s a request claiming national security concerns, they’ll alter the photo to cover up the site in question,” he said. “It’s not hard. They can do a hundred things, like pixelating it so it looks muddy, or they can replace it with another photo that looks similar; you know, things like that.”

“But why would Google bother to do this?”

“To play nice. I mean Google’s more powerful now than most governments and intelligence agencies. Hell, the NSA has to go to Google to retrieve data. We have a joke around the Agency that in the next decade, Google will be given status at the United Nations as a country.”

Judy laughed. “You’re a font of some of the most perverse knowledge imaginable. I don’t know whether to believe you or not half the time.”

Dennis laughed, too.

“Well, if my friend in the legal department at Langley can send me the Google request, it’ll show exactly which satellite photo they wanted altered, and it should help zero in on my search area. But the downside is that Massey will be alerted I’ve made the request, and he’ll go nuts. That’s the sticky part.”

An hour later Dennis received an email with an attachment that included the official request from the Agency’s legal department for Google engineers to alter particular satellite and aerial photos. Judy looked over Dennis’s shoulder and laughed.

“My God, you weren’t kidding,” she said. “This is just so unbelievable.”

They stared at a second document that was a screenshot of a Google Earth map of Western Australia. A circle was drawn around what appeared to be a small construction site. Both Judy and Dennis put their faces within twelve inches of the screen in an attempt to identify where the circled area was in relation to landmarks or towns.

“It’s hard to see where this area is exactly,” Judy said. “It’s all so barren out there. Wait, look: right there. That says the town is Newton. I know where that is. The photo they’re asking to have altered shows a complex due east of Newton.”

Dennis and Judy flipped back and forth between the image in the Agency request and Google Earth on his browser. The construction site was no longer on Google Earth.

Dennis’s laptop suddenly went dark.

“Your battery just died,” Judy said.

“It’s not my battery,” Dennis said.

“What’s wrong with it then?”

“They shut it down,” he said, closing it and standing up.

“Who shut it down?”

“My employer, who else?”

“They can do that remotely?”

“Of course they can, with Agency-issued laptops.”

“Why did they shut it down?”

“Massey or someone in his group got wind of my request and jumped in. Shit. They’ll have a team in this hotel room in an hour, maybe less.”

Judy sprang up, spilling coffee onto the T-shirt.

“What will they do with me?” she said.

“Nothing. Get dressed and get out of here. I’m going to leave my mobile phone here, and they’ll hit this room first. The rental is packed. Hurry, Judy. You need to get out of here now.”

She ripped off the T-shirt and dove into her clothes pile. Dennis grabbed the map and as many personal belongings as he could reach and threw them into a canvas duffel bag.

Before they left the room, Judy stood in front of Dennis and said, “For the last time, will you let this thing go? You don’t have to go north.”

He shook his head. “We need to go, Judy. Please!”

Judy begged Dennis to meet her in forty-five minutes at a small coffee shop in Subiaco for a last good-bye. He was so distracted that she gave him handwritten directions and made him read them back to her. Their whirlwind relationship was coming to an abrupt end, and she was determined to see him one last time.

How utterly unbelievable, she thought as she raced home. If I didn’t care for this man so much, I’d stay a thousand kilometers away from him.

Dennis had purchased several prepaid cell phones in Perth. While waiting in the coffee shop, he called his daughter in California.

“Where are you?” she asked.