Valley of Spies

by Keith Yocum

  Dennis was lying on his bunk when he suddenly sat up and looked at Chili.

  “I know Judy!” he said. “Chili, I know Judy!”

  “I know Judy too,” Chili said. “She gone. She moved a long time ago. Back to L.A.”

  “Yes! Damn, damn, damn,” Dennis said. “Judy!”

  “Judy gone,” Chili said.

  “Naw, she’s here,” Dennis said.

  “She gone, man.”

  “Naw, she’s going to visit me, probably tomorrow. Hey Chili, this is a jail, right?”

  “No, it’s a McDonald’s, man. Shit, of course it’s a fuckin’ jail. Now you mention it, I could use a Big Mac right now.”

  “What did I do?”

  “You kilt someone.”

  “I did?”

  “Fuckin’ A you did. A whore. You’re a bad dude. You scare me.”

  “A whore?” Dennis said. “I killed a whore?”

  “I didn’t kill no whore. You the one who kilt her.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Dennis said. “Wouldn’t I remember something like that?”

  “I sure as shit would. But you crazy white dudes, you do all them drugs and shit, you get crazy. Not me. I don’t do no drugs. Anymore. I used to. Not now.”

  “Chili, I didn’t kill a woman. How could I kill a woman?”

  “Dude told me you cut her up.”

  “Me?”

  “Well, who do you think we talkin’ about? ‘Course it’s you. You cut that poor girl up bad.”

  “I did no such thing,” Dennis said. “Hey, do I have a lawyer?”

  “Don’t ax me. I don’t know that kinda stuff.”

  “I must have a lawyer. Man, I feel different right now.”

  “You just calm down there. I don’t want you gettin’ all worked up. Don’t make me call the jailer.”

  “I’m not getting worked up. I’m just remembering things.”

  “Keep your ‘memberin’ to yerself. Yer the one that kilt that girl.”

  Dennis leaned back in his cot, and for the first time in what seemed like years, he felt giddy. He remembered things.

  “Hey, man,” Chili said, “you got any cigarettes.”

  “No. Sorry, Chili. I don’t smoke.”

  “Jus’ askin’. Sure could use a smoke.”

  Judy slept on the long flight back to Reagan National Airport. She drank two glasses of malbec and had a bad dream about a desert plant that came to life and bit her.

  It was 8:30 p.m. when the American Airlines flight turned for its final approach north up the Potomac River. Judy was in the window seat on the right side of the plane and saw the Capitol dome and the Washington Monument lit up. It was an impressive sight for a city that she had grown to loathe.

  She decided to rent a car, though she was not sure why. There was something about Louise that bothered her, and she thought it better to have complete freedom of movement. The last thing she wanted to do was be trapped inside Louise’s car with the little blond ball of intensity.

  Google Maps got her to the Hyatt, and she had the car valeted. Checking in was easy, but getting the release of Dennis’s suitcase was not. The hotel manager had gone home for the day, and the assistant manager—a short Hispanic man with a thin mustache named Rodriguez—refused to hand over the suitcase until the manager arrived in the morning.

  Stressed, exhausted, and suddenly very angry, Judy unleashed on the assistant manager, to the extent that other guests walking by stood and watched. Judy demanded that she be given the suitcase now.

  “Mr. Rodriguez, call your manager right now, and tell him that I’ve just arrived and demand access to that suitcase. You have received the appropriate clearance letter from Mr. Cunningham’s daughter. Give me the goddamn suitcase, or I’m calling the police and my lawyer.”

  Judy did not have a lawyer and had no intention of calling the police, but she was angry.

  The assistant manager did his best to mollify Judy, but she insisted that unless he gave her the suitcase, she was going to go into the back room and get it herself.

  Rodriguez disappeared to make a phone call. He returned ten minutes later and asked to see her identification. She showed her passport; he looked at it closely. He pushed a form across to her and asked her to sign it. Then he disappeared behind the counter, into a room that required a key to unlock. He returned, pulling Dennis’s black roll-on.

  Without a thank you, Judy pulled the two suitcases to the elevator, with her purse awkwardly strapped around her shoulder.

  She put her suitcase on the bed and started to unpack. The burner rang.

  “I’m here, Louise,” she said. “Room 421.”

  “Do you have the suitcase?”

  “Yes. But can we do this tomorrow? It’s late.”

  “I’m on my way now.”

  “Fine.” Judy hung up and stared at Dennis’s suitcase.

  What the hell did Louise think she was going to get from Dennis’s belongings? she thought. And why right now? Jesus, that woman is crazy, or I’m crazy, or we’re both crazy.

  Twenty minutes later there was a knock at the door. Judy opened it to see Louise standing there, wearing skinny jeans, a light-blue silk blouse and muted, dark-blue dangling earrings.

  “Hey,” Louise said stepping inside.

  “Welcome to my home away from home,” Judy said.

  Louise dropped her purse on the dresser. Judy had forgotten—or perhaps she had chosen not to notice—how attractive Louise was. While she was no more than five feet tall in raised heels, her medium-length, Nordic white-blond hair hung in a modern page cut. Her ice-blue eyes were striking, and her face—except for the area at the outside of her eyes—was creaseless. She walked with a mild limp, and Judy remembered her prothesis.

  “Is that it?” Louise said pointing to the suitcase,

  “Yes.”

  “Have you opened it?”

  “No. I was waiting for you.”

  Louise went over, grabbed it by the handle, and threw it onto the bed with a flourish.

  “What are you looking for?” Judy said.

  “I don’t know. Something to help me make the case.”

  “What case?”

  “That someone at the agency was trying to stop the Forrester investigation.”

  Louise unzipped the suitcase and flipped both sides open. The clothes were haphazardly packed into the suitcase, and Judy suddenly felt proprietary ownership of Dennis’s clothes, as Louise ran her hands through the contents. She tossed his underwear, shirts, and socks onto the bed like she was playing in a pile of leaves.

  “Shit,” Louise said. “Didn’t he have a notebook? I saw him writing notes down. Where is the damn thing?”

  “Yes, he did have a notebook. Must be there somewhere, unless he took it with him.”

  “There was no notebook found with his clothing, according to the Las Vegas police report. And it wasn’t in his hotel either.”

  Judy was irritated at Louise’s brusqueness with his clothes, as if they demonstrated some intimacy between Louise and Dennis. She sat down and took a sip out of her clear, plastic cup that held the remains of a cheap white wine from the mini-bar.

  “You want something to drink?” Judy said.

  “No,” Louise said, unzipping Dennis’s toiletries bag. She looked up and saw Judy’s wine. “Actually, yes. Is there a red wine in there?”

  Judy got up, opened the mini-bar, and removed a small bottle of cabernet sauvignon. She unscrewed the tiny metal top with a twist and poured it in a clear plastic cup.

  Louise walked over and took it. She held it up, and Judy reciprocated by holding her cup up, and they touched them together.

  “Cheers,” Judy said.

  Louise took a sip, then returned to the contents of Dennis’s suitcase.

 
“There’s no notebook,” she said. “Just this blank pad of lined paper.” Louise took another sip with her left hand and with her right hand picked up the pad. She held the pad up to the light. “He wrote something but it’s very light. I don’t think they’d be able to pull anything off this. Shit. I bet they got into this room and cleaned it out. They had his room cardkey.”

  “Louise, who is ‘they’? You’re not filling me in. You said you had something interesting to share.”

  Louise sighed, drained the remaining wine in a single, impressive gulp, and walked around the bed and sat facing Judy.

  Judy plopped down in the hotel desk chair, and they stared at each other from three feet apart.

  “As you know, Dennis was tasked to evaluate the conclusions reached by operations regarding who kidnapped Dr. Forrester. I was the person who recommended Dennis for this effort. I thought we needed someone good, who would work fast, and was not beholden to anyone or group within Langley. Ergo: Dennis. For context’s sake, operations was furious that the director wanted another set of eyes on their recommendation. They had everything teed up for a series of actions on Iranian operatives across the globe. Intelligence agencies do this silly tit-for-tat crap all the time. So, that’s how it started. The only complication was that the director gave it to the director of operations, who is Simpson’s boss, who in turn gave it to Simpson—remember he’s the deputy director of operations. Simpson insisted that he be the lead contact for Dennis. For the record, I don’t like Simpson; he doesn’t like me.”

  Judy stirred in her chair. She was not particularly interested in the byzantine bureaucratic battles at the CIA, but she let Louise proceed, as long as this history lesson got around to Dennis and his problems.

  “Simpson was pissed off from the get-go and wasn’t happy with Dennis’s focus on Forrester’s agency patients, or her husband, or anyone in the U.S. He thought Dennis should have stayed in New Zealand. But as time ticked down—by the way, his report is now overdue—Simpson was furious that he didn’t know what Dennis was doing. And to be honest, the director was getting pissed off too. And I was feeling exposed because nothing seemed to be happening on Dennis’s investigation, and I was the one who recommended him.”

  “I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic,” Judy said, “but I’m one hundred percent focused on Dennis right now. He’s in jail in Las Vegas on charges that could keep him locked up for the rest of his life. I don’t care about Forrester, or Simpson, or New Zealand, or your problems with the director. I’m sorry, but that’s where I stand right now. I’m flying back to Las Vegas tomorrow to see what I can do to help Dennis, or at least the Dennis that I once knew. This new Dennis is not the man I know.”

  “Got any more wine in there?” Louise said, pointing her chin at the mini-bar.

  “Sure,” Judy said, a little taken aback at Louise’s change in topic.

  Judy rustled around in the small refrigerator. “Malbec?”

  “Fine.”

  Judy ripped the screw cap off and poured the small bottle into Louise’s cup.

  “When I saw Dennis in the hospital, I knew something was wrong,” Louise said. “He didn’t know who I was. I saw him struggling to place me, but he was just burnt toast. Nothing there.”

  “Yes, I know,” Judy said quietly.

  “And I recognized it right away,” Louise said. “It’s called C24. Or that’s our name for it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s a drug, a very powerful drug that’s similar to gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. But worse.”

  “The date-rape drug?” Judy said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You call it C24? That sounds like a joke. I’m sorry, this is too much.”

  “Ever heard of WD-40? It’s an oil in a spray can.”

  “I think so. Why?”

  “It’s called WD-40 because the guy that invented it kept running through a ton of different formulations. Formula number 40 is when he hit pay dirt. So, it was named WD-40, for water displacement formula number forty.”

  “You really are talking gibberish,” Judy said. “And you’re giving me a worse headache than before you arrived.”

  “Well, the researchers were looking at a host of different combinations of drugs to get what they wanted; at version twenty-four they got what they wanted. The ‘C’ stands for compliance and consciousness. So, C24 it is.”

  “You people are strange.”

  “Whatever. But the only thing you need to understand is that C24 is more powerful than the date-rape drug. We’ve used it sparingly in some sensitive operations where we needed to disable an individual and put them in a compromising situation. Depending on the dosage—remember, I’m not a doctor, but this is what the agency’s medical team presented—the person under the influence has severe, but mostly temporary, amnesia. And they’re compliant; very compliant. That’s why the ops folks like it.”

  “What do you mean ‘compliant’?”

  “The person under the influence does pretty much what they’re told. If the dosage is too high, they pass out; if it’s too low, they aren’t compliant. It has a long half-life too. So, when I saw Dennis, I just knew it. He was fried. But I needed proof, so I had his blood tested.”

  “Wait,” Judy said standing up, “you had his blood tested where? And how?”

  “I had one of our contractors go in and pull his blood.”

  “I’m sorry. You just ordered someone at the hospital to take Dennis’s blood? Even I don’t believe you can do that. Please, Louise, I’m not an idiot.”

  “No, I couldn’t do that,” Louise said, taking a big sip of wine. “We have contractors everywhere, especially in places like Las Vegas, Macao, Bangkok. Important people get crazy in places like that. It’s handy to have contractors on hand. They’re well paid. And remember, a contractor hasn’t the faintest idea whether a mission was sanctioned by the president of the United States, or a disgruntled chief of station looking for revenge. That’s the weak link.”

  “They pull blood?” Judy said, incredulous. “Come on, Louise. Please.”

  “No, it’s true. Sorry if you don’t believe it. I got in contact with one of our guys in Langley that runs the group in Vegas, and I told him what the problem was: can they get me someone to put on scrubs and walk into the hospital and pull blood from a patient under police observation. The answer was yes, of course they can. You’d be surprised what someone wearing scrubs can get away with walking around a hospital with a fake name tag.”

  “Jesus,” Judy said, downing her wine. “I don’t know whether to believe you.”

  “The blood was flown back to our lab here, they ran the test, and found C24.”

  “Are you serious?” Judy yelled.

  “Hey. Calm down. I don’t want hotel security running up here.”

  Judy walked around the room running the fingers of her right hand through her hair. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe people do things like that. But wait,” she said, “why?”

  “Why did someone bother to set him up like this?”

  “I think the answer is obvious, Judy; someone or some group thought Dennis was close to nailing the Forrester case. This is just a theory now, but it’s a good one. No one uses C24 except the agency. Well, that’s not entirely true. We gave it to the Israelis, and they use it a lot. Our lab can test for it because it’s not a publicly known drug. My guess is that Dennis was nabbed in Rosslyn, drugged, taken to Vegas on a private jet, and set up to look like a drugged-out guy getting laid and on a bender. This way his investigation is never completed, and he looks like a complete, unreliable fuck up.”

  “So do something about it! Tell the police, tell your boss. Just get Dennis out of jail!”

  “Wait, Judy. Hang on. I told you, this is a theory. I was hoping that Dennis would have left some notes that would confirm he found who nabbed
Forrester. I just need something else.”

  “What about the C24? Isn’t that enough?”

  “Well, it would help. But by itself, it might lead down a rabbit hole to yet another investigation about who had access to C24, whether the Israelis were involved, or whether they sold it to someone else.”

  “They would do that?”

  “Yes, the Mossad’s completely unprincipled, if that’s even possible in this business. If I just had something else that tied Dennis’s arrest in Las Vegas to the Forrester case, I could get them to stop this Iranian operation. And my reputation wouldn’t end up in the shitter.”

  “I don’t care how many Iranians you folks kill, and your reputation is the last thing on my mind, Louise. In fact, I find it disgraceful that you’re concerned about your career while Dennis sits in that damn jail.”

  “Then help me find his notes, goddamnit! I need something more.”

  “Wait,” Judy said. “He sent me something.”

  “He what?”

  “Dennis asked me to look over a written summary of the investigation. I think he wrote it on the pad in his suitcase. I’m guessing someone took the page. But I have a copy.”

  “Well shit, Judy, let’s see it. For chrissakes, why didn’t you tell me? We’ve been sitting here all the fucking time, and you had his notes!”

  “I’m sorry,” she said fumbling for her business phone. “I should have thought of this earlier. My brain is upside down. He sent me a photo of the page, but we can make it work. Remember, I said these aren’t his notes, this is a one-page summary of his notes.”

  “I don’t care, just show me what you have.”

  Judy found the image and turned her phone sideways to make it more readable. The two women’s heads were six inches apart as they squinted at the picture Dennis took of his summary page. Judy clumsily enlarged and then reduced the image size.

  “Holy shit,” Louise said. “Someone stole Forrester’s notes on agency clients? Well, that’s what I need. This is enough along with the C24. Incredible. Can you send me this image?”

  Judy fiddled with the phone and sent the image to Louise’s burner. Louise never mentioned the last line of Dennis’s note, and Judy let it pass. It read: “NB: What does Louise have to do with any of this???”