A Dark Place

by Keith Yocum

  “Of course,” Simpson said.

  “I’ll summarize for everyone, if that’s all right?” Louise said.

  Simpson nodded.

  “In April, the deputy chief of station in London, Richard Arnold, disappeared,” she said, glancing at an open folder on the desk. “He is a twenty-two-year veteran of the agency and has spent his entire career in operations. As we all know, the London station is one of the most important sites for the agency, given the newly resurgent Russian aggressiveness. Arnold is only the second senior agency employee to go missing in the last twenty years. It is highly unusual for a person of his stature to simply vanish. Usually, someone of his rank would be protected from foreign intelligence actions, since it could start a tit-for-tat cascade of disappearances. Britain’s MI5 and MI6 have not been very helpful in the investigation of this case.

  “Given the knowledge base that Arnold had of agency operations in Europe, there have been two separate, extremely in-depth investigations of his disappearance by the agency. The general consensus now is that Arnold’s disappearance was carried out by a non-European foreign group, most likely an Islamic terrorist team.

  “Recently, a request was made by a high-ranking member of Congress to reinvestigate Arnold’s disappearance. The request specifically identified Dennis Cunningham, from the agency’s OIG, to spearhead the effort. So here we are.”

  Simpson, Felton and Louise all looked at Dennis, who gazed down at the high-gloss tabletop. He looked up at her and said, “So why are we here?”

  She looked blank. “I just stated why we’re here. You’ve been requested to review the investigation of Arnold’s disappearance.”

  “No, I got that part, Louise,” Dennis said. “But what are doing here? At Fort Meade in Maryland, at NSA headquarters? Sitting in a high-security room with these two guys?”

  “Oh, that,” she said, turning to Simpson.

  Simpson gave Dennis a brief, patronizing smile. “Arnold was the agency’s primary contact with the NSA in the UK,” he said. “Arnold had almost full access at the NSA’s Menwith Hill Station in North Yorkshire. I’m sure you’ve heard of the facility?”

  Dennis shrugged.

  “Does that mean you are or are not familiar with the facility?” Simpson asked.

  Louise shot Dennis a sharp glance.

  “I’ve heard of it,” Dennis said. “Part of the NSA’s vast network of digital vacuum cleaners, sucking in electronic communications everywhere to store in vast databases that no one will ever use. You mean that Menwith Hill?”

  “Mmm,” Simpson said.

  Louise’s mouth twisted sharply.

  “Cunningham,” she said, “it appears that Arnold visited Menwith Hill twice right before he disappeared. The last time was three days prior to going missing. The last visit was very unusual, and the NSA is rightly concerned. They’ve had their own investigation as well.”

  ✦

  To Judy, the yellow tape marked the limits of a demilitarized zone: the world outside the yellow tape was the normal, ordinary planet, replete with human beings who were nice to each other, waved at their neighbors, petted dogs and said “gidday” on the street. Inside the yellow tape was the world at war; the planet of evil, hostility and death.

  Judy lifted the police tape and slid under it, walking with her partner Clive down the driveway toward the back of the house. She nodded to a uniformed policeman as she rounded the house and took four steps up into the kitchen, where she stopped immediately.

  The bodies of two young men lay face down on the floor. One body was in front of the stove, and the other was awkwardly wedged under the kitchen table. Blood covered nearly half the floor.

  A man wearing slip-on protective foot covers was on the far side of the kitchen taking photographs.

  “Neighbors heard nothing, except for the barking of the dog, a great Alsatian that wouldn’t let up,” Clive said. “At around 2:00 a.m. someone called the police and complained about the dog keeping the neighborhood awake. This is what they found.”

  “No one heard gunshots?” Judy asked.

  Clive shook his head. “Silencer.”

  At one time Judy might have been sickened by the site of two dead bodies that had bled out on the kitchen floor of a suburban house, but drug violence in Western Australia was now a common occurrence. Cheap heroin from Asia mixed with Chinese-manufactured fentanyl was devastating a segment of society here, and she was inured to it.

  Now, it was just an unpleasant feature of her job in the Australian Federal Police. The AFP was partnering with an alphabet soup of government agencies, including the Western Australia Police Force, Australian Border Force and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission in order to beat back the scourge of drug smuggling.

  “They leave anything behind?” she said.

  “Not really,” Clive said. “These fellows were tortured. The one under the table appears to have been stabbed through his hand several times. One of them must have told where the drugs and money were kept. We found a hiding place behind the wall in the upstairs closet. It’s cleaned out.”

  “Mmm,” Judy said. “Fun, fun and more fun.”

  “Indeed,” Clive said, chuckling in the manner of all homicide detectives, coroners and funeral home operators.

  ✦

  There was nothing to like about the NSA, Dennis believed; it had too much money, too little adult supervision, and was run by nerds: engineers, programmers and data analysts.

  The American intelligence community once had two main tools: human intelligence, or humint, and signals intelligence, or sigint. Lately he was aware of new toolset called imint, or image intelligence, which combined satellite information with aerial photography. Dennis believed most assuredly in the old-fashioned humint side of the business: men and women, boots on the ground, using intuition, training and sometimes violence to get at the truth of a situation. The Office of the Inspector General had three operational groups: one did financial audits, another did inspections and Dennis’s group did investigations.

  Dennis thrived on digging out deception, graft and illegal behavior by agency employees, but only if it involved working with human beings and not spreadsheets. He could accost people, verbally harangue them and even threaten them to get information he needed. It was a visceral exercise that fit perfectly with his naturalistic view of the world.

  The NSA, on the other hand, spent most of its resources capturing data and analyzing it. Employees were often former military people whose job it was to manage the nerds. Dennis found these individuals idiosyncratic, self-absorbed and irritating. Their work was more like playing chess or solving a mathematical problem than helping keep the world safe from bad people.

  Or that was his bias, anyway. He knew bad people communicated by text messages and social media, and that they could be tracked and surreptitiously listened to in order to keep the world safe. He just thought there was too much emphasis on sigint and that it drained dollars and good people from the humint side of the business.

  So he was not happy to be sitting across the table from a short, paunchy, prematurely balding man in his early forties named Fred Kaczka.

  Simpson, the NSA official that Dennis did not like, had called Kaczka into the glass-walled office using a very odd-looking small desk telephone.

  “Fred is a member of the NSA’s Inspector General’s Office,” Simpson said. “He has been in the department for twelve years. He is a graduate of Georgetown undergrad and the law school and is one of the most valued members of the department. He will be the NSA’s representative on the team to do this final review of Arnold’s disappearance.”

  “What team?” Dennis said.

  “The OIGs from all the intelligence groups commonly work together,” Louise said.

  “But I thought Representative Barkley requested me to do the final wrap-up?” Dennis said. “Did B
arkley say anything about a team?”

  “Not that we’re aware of,” Simpson said, flashing the condescending smile that Dennis was already worked up about. “Nevertheless, this is how the ‘wrap-up,’ as you call it, will proceed. It can’t happen any other way.”

  Dennis looked at Louise for help, but the corners of her lips were pinched in what he took to be an attempt to control herself. His natural instinct was to strike out at their insistence that he work with another investigator. It was well known within his department that he was a solo practitioner who bristled at collaborating. They allowed him to work alone because he was so good at it. He knew Louise knew this as well. It suddenly occurred to Dennis that she either knew what was going to happen but didn’t care how Dennis reacted, or that she had absolutely no control over the situation and was praying Dennis would not explode.

  He cleared his throat in an attempt to gain a second or two to decide what to do. “I see,” he said. “This must have come from high up. Okay, I see that.” While Dennis and Louise had just started to work together, and they had already clashed, he decided not to embarrass her. It was not something he would have considered a year ago, but things had changed. A bullet one-eighth of an inch away from ending his life makes a man pause. Besides, his therapist said he needed to build relationships, not destroy them.

  ✦

  “Of course I miss you,” Dennis said, crushing the mobile phone between his left shoulder and ear. He was walking to his car from the mall with both hands carrying a heavy box. “You know I miss you. I can’t believe you think I don’t.”

  “I’ve heard you say it many times over the phone,” Judy said, “but you have yet to visit me here. You know I can’t just leave my son, with his father in prison and all that.”

  “I just started back to work, and I’ve got another case they’ve thrown at me,” he said, awkwardly scanning the huge parking lot with his head tilted, still holding the phone against his ear. “I was wondering if we could meet maybe halfway for a short trip?”

  The silence unnerved him, and he said quickly, “It was just an idea. I was hoping to make a work trip to London in the next couple of weeks. Is there any chance you could perhaps squeeze in a trip to the UK? I looked at the flights from Perth to London, and you have some options. Though it’s not really halfway, it’s longer for you. I’ll buy the ticket. What do you think?”

  “Is a trip to London going to resolve anything long-term for us?” Judy said.

  Dennis found his car and placed the box on the hood, regaining his breath and his composure. “I’m not good at this stuff. I, I,” he stuttered, “don’t know how to proceed. But I know I think about you a lot. Probably way too much. But I guess I need some time to plan things.”

  “How can you think of me too much?”

  “Well, I mean—”

  “Dennis, that was a joke,” she said. “I might be able to manage a trip to London. You don’t have to pay for my flight.”

  “No, I insist. I want to see you.”

  Judy sighed. “When will you know your travel plans? My work life is very complicated these days. Western Australia is not the placid little backwater it once was.”

  “Which reminds me,” Dennis said. “What’s the latest on that bastard Voorster? Have they found him yet?”

  Judy felt a chill whenever she heard that man’s name. “No, nothing yet. We don’t know how he got out of the country or where he went. I’m trying not to think of him.”

  “I’m sure he’ll show up in a prison somewhere,” Dennis said. “Just wish you knew so you could stop worrying.”

  Silence fell on the conversation, and Dennis squirmed.

  “I can’t stand being away from you.” Judy blurted. “I know you don’t like these emotional outbursts, Dennis. But I do miss you, and I wish I didn’t feel it so strongly. I’m trying to figure out where our relationship is going, and I think we’re running out of time.”

  Another moment of silence stretched between them.

  “I wish you were here,” Dennis said as he dodged a car backing out of the parking space next to him. “It’s a gloomy, cloudy day in the Washington suburbs. I just bought a small hi-fi system to listen to music. I think I told you I moved into a condo. It’s barren inside, and I realized that a TV set is the only form of entertainment I have. Shows what an exciting lifestyle I lead.”

  “Are you serious about London?” she said.

  “I told you, I already checked the flight schedules.”

  “A man who plans must be serious,” she said. “Men don’t plan.”

  CHAPTER 2

  You know, it would have been helpful if you had told me about the request from Barkley,” Dennis said. “If we’re going to work together, you can’t be holding shit like that from me and let me go into a meeting completely unprepared.”

  Louise tapped the eraser end of an unsharpened school-bus-yellow no. 2 pencil on the top of her desk. She made little tap-tap-tap sounds, punctuated by pauses. Dennis found it irritating and stared at the makeshift drumstick to emphasize the point. But Louise continued to tap.

  “Well?” Dennis said.

  “I didn’t mention it to you because I’d been warned that you can get pretty worked up over the smallest things. So I decided the best way to advance this effort was to keep you in the dark until the last moment.” She shrugged, tapping the pencil again.

  “Warned?” Dennis said. “What does that mean?”

  “Please don’t pretend that the OIG is clueless about its long-time employees,” she said. “Your reputation precedes me and will post-date your retirement, I’m sure. Your surliness and difficult behavior have long been a subject here. As you can imagine, they’ve tended to look the other way because of your successes. Your former boss was quite hands-off with you.”

  “Marty,” Dennis said. “Good old Marty. He’s in prison now. But he knew how to point me in the right direction and was good at keeping the brass off my tail. So we got along great.”

  “Is that why he tried to kill you?” she said, giving the pencil a hard rap and then tossing it onto the table.

  “Oh, God, we’re not going there, are we?” Dennis said. “You swore you weren’t going to bring that Australia thing up again.”

  “I lied,” she said.

  Dennis squinted at her. “Mmm,” he said. “I think I like your sense of humor. But I’m not sure I like you.”

  “It’s not necessary that you like me, Cunningham, but you have to respect my actions as your boss. Otherwise, this isn’t going to work.”

  “You are correct,” Dennis said. “Are we done?”

  “No, not yet,” she said, picking up the pencil again. “This guy from NSA — Fred Kaczka — is a very bright guy, and you need to work as a team. There’s something going on over there about the Arnold disappearance, and NSA is not exactly coming clean with their concerns. As I stated, Arnold visited their listening post at Menwith Hill right before he went missing. See what you can get from Kaczka on this, because they’re not telling us. Anything you can pull out of him would be greatly appreciated at the highest levels here. Capisce?”

  Dennis nodded, stood up and paused. “I’m sorry for being a jerk sometimes,” he said.

  “No, you’re not,” Louise said.

  “No, I guess not,” Dennis said. “But I’m trying.”

  “Really?” she said, twisting her face into a smirk-smile-frown contortion.

  “Yes, really. It’s hard being a prick all the time. And my therapist says I need to stop.”

  “Mmm,” Louise said.

  ✦

  The room was brightly lit by exposed fluorescent bulbs; a small metal table was situated in the center. A laptop was placed in the middle of the table. There were no windows, no phones, no bookshelves, only two simple metal chairs without cushions.

  Fred directed Dennis to com
e to the meeting wearing casual clothing; even a sweatshirt and sweatpants if that suited him. Dennis would be asked to turn over nearly every object in his possession, including watches, rings, coins, money clips and even eyeglasses. Fred had asked for his reading glasses prescription so they could supply a temporary pair. He would even surrender his shoes and go through several scans of various devices before being allowed into the examination room.

  Dennis entered the room wearing disposable sandals and feeling like he was about to be operated upon. Fred sat at the table wearing a slightly stained and stretched white tee shirt. His chunky, hairy thighs were barely contained by a pair of old Georgetown University gym shorts.

  “Hey,” Fred said, smiling. “You made it through the gauntlet. We’re pretty serious here, as I’m sure you can tell. Did you get the anal probe inserted? Frickin’ thing hurts like hell in the beginning.”

  “What anal probe?” Dennis said, stopping in his tracks.

  “Damnit, you didn’t get it yet? Shit, we’re in trouble.” Fred stood up in alarm and looked at Dennis. Then he broke out in a huge laugh that resounded in the small room.

  “Ha, ha,” Dennis said slowly. “You NSA folks are pretty funny. Ha, ha.”

  “Oh, it was just a joke,” Fred chuckled. “Has to be some fun in this business.”

  “I guess.”

  “I was told you had a good sense of humor,” Fred said, “but a sour personality.”

  Dennis found himself frowning at the chubby, balding man about to split his ancient college gym shorts.

  “Well, the sour part was correct,” Dennis said, sitting. “Sense of humor part, well, that’s still an open question.”

  “Sorry if I was a little crass,” Fred said. “Shouldn’t assume things like that.”

  “No, it was pretty funny. In fact, I’m going to requisition that joke for my own purposes one of these days.”

  “Well, it was great being with you folks tonight,” Fred said, looking out over the table at the make-believe audience. “I’m here on Tuesdays and Fridays — eight to midnight. Stay safe and remember, I’ve been in love with the same woman for forty-one years. If my wife finds out, she’ll kill me. Thank you, thank you, you’re great.”