A Dark Place

by Keith Yocum

  “What are you going to tell her?”

  “I think we both know that it’s over.”

  Fred drove north into the rain, the windshield wipers and water spray from the M1 were the only sounds for a while.

  ✦

  By the time they turned right onto B4561, the weather had cleared and they could easily see the huge, dimpled, golf ball-shaped antenna domes in the distance. The sight even took Fred by surprise.

  “God, there must be at least thirty domes,” Fred said. “And look, there’s a flock of sheep. Weird.”

  “You’ve never been here before?” Dennis said.

  “Nope. I’m sure you know that this is one of the most closely guarded sites in the world. It sits here in the middle of the English countryside. Locals know what goes on here, and there are regular demonstrations at one of the entrances by some loonies, but by and large, this place is a self-contained NSA listening post. Got their own baseball fields, bowling alley, crap like that.”

  Fred pulled the car onto the side of the country road next to a bank of hedges. He put the car in park and turned toward Dennis. “So here’s the drill: you shut the hell up when we’re in there talking to Sorenstam. You got that? Nothing from you; no confrontational interrogations, no wise-ass stuff. This is NSA territory, and I’m the investigator from the NSA’s Office of the Inspector General. You’re from OIG at Langley. This is my turf. Are we clear on this?”

  Dennis crossed his arms. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “I can’t ask a single question?”

  “Nope. Otherwise you can get out here and wait for me. Just don’t bother the sheep.”

  “Freddie, come on. What if I think you’re missing something?”

  “You can tell me what I missed later. I’m deadly serious about this.”

  Dennis opened the car door, got out and leaned in. “You sure about this?”

  “Close the door, I’m late. Like I said, leave the sheep alone.”

  “God, you’re such a pain in the ass,” Dennis said, sitting back in the car.

  “Give me your word.”

  “Yes. I agree. Won’t say a damn thing. Just hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “So help me, if you go back on your word, I’m going to stand up and ask Sorenstam for security. And by the way, you have no idea how serious they are about security here. So once I call for it, you will be escorted to a clean room, and if you thought I was kidding about an anal probe earlier, wait till you see what they’ll do to you in that room. Meanwhile, I will have finished my interview and be waiting for you in the car. Maybe eating a cupcake from their cafeteria. And drinking a Diet Coke.”

  “Got it; can we go now?”

  They drove down several country roads until they came onto a small roadside sign with the words “RAF Menwith Hill, Nessfield Gate.” Pulling up to the brick guard shack, an RAF policeman packing a submachine gun asked for their identification cards. He consulted a list on a clipboard and waved them five feet farther ahead to a glass-enclosed guard station. They went through the same drill and were told to drive to a small parking area after the metal gate was opened. At the parking area, the car was thoroughly inspected by four men in blue overalls, one of whom slid under the car on a rolling sled. Dennis and Fred were told to walk to an adjacent building.

  Inside, they were again asked for identification and were directed to a small room. There they were physically searched while being monitored by several CCTV cameras.

  Dennis went through a metal detector, was wanded by two different devices, asked to empty his pockets of everything and told to take off his shoes, his belt and watch. His phone had been turned over already. After his shoes were scanned separately, all of his personal belongings except his eyeglasses were put into a clear plastic bag with his name on it.

  He joined Fred in a meeting area, and they were told their car was to be parked a hundred yards away in a special parking lot, and they would be driven to their destination in a golf cart.

  “Is all this really necessary?” Dennis said while they were driving to the parking lot.

  “Yes. Try not to let it bother you. Just remember: you’ll be under electronic surveillance while you’re here, including audio and video tracking. Everything you say — and you promised you wouldn’t say a goddamn thing — will be recorded. Even a whisper. Got that?”

  “What if I burp?”

  “Then they’ll shoot you.”

  “Okay. I got it. Let’s get going.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Sorenstam was a very ordinary-looking man in his mid-fifties. His gray-flecked brown hair was cut short, Dennis noticed, in the habit of former military men. He wore a gray fleece vest over a polyester long-sleeve white shirt.

  “So Arnold never asked for you on his last visit?” Fred said. The interview had been going on for forty-five minutes, and Dennis was unimpressed with his companion’s questions. Still, he felt like he owed it to Fred to remain silent. Plus the anal-probe warning thing bothered him.

  “No,” Sorenstam said. “You’ve seen the records, I assume. He said he had an appointment with me, and it’s recorded on his intake forms that day. But he never stopped by, never called me, and as far as I was concerned, he was never here.”

  “But isn’t it protocol that once he checked in at the gate and reported he was meeting with you, that you would have been called and told your visitor was here?”

  Dennis was surprised by Fred’s question and looked closely at Sorenstam.

  “Yes, that is normal protocol, but he’d been here so often that security just let it ride.”

  “That is a serious breach of security,” Fred said. “None of the earlier reports mention this, which leads me to believe that there was not a thorough investigation of Arnold’s last visit here.”

  Why the hell didn’t he tell me about this? Dennis wondered.

  For the first time since the interview started, Dennis noticed Sorenstam’s demeanor change from attentive but bored to attentive and agitated.

  “That has been corrected,” he said. “The man responsible for not alerting me has been sent home.”

  “Why didn’t it come out in the earlier interviews?” Fred asked.

  “It might have, I just can’t remember. I don’t have access — as you well know — to reports from the earlier investigations.”

  “Okay, let’s move on,” Fred continued. “Arnold was here for thirty-three minutes. His every move was recorded, and I know you must have gone over it a hundred times.”

  “Maybe a thousand times,” Sorenstam said.

  “According to the reports we’ve seen, Arnold drives all the way up from London in four and a half hours or so, goes through security, and instead of seeing you, he goes to the men’s room in Building 4C, checks into the reading room there, spends ten minutes reading sigint, then stops by the cafeteria and picks up a bottle of water and leaves the facility for a long drive back to London.”

  “That is correct,” Sorenstam said, shifting in his seat and looking bored again.

  “Cunningham and I do not have the appropriate clearance to read the sigint that Arnold perused that day, but we have been told that we’ll get the clearance soon. Have you looked at the data he was reading that day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything jump out at you that you want to share with us? Reports show it was a routine telephone intercept he looked at.”

  “When you get clearance to read the intercept and have an analyst explain the context of the phone call, then you’re free to reach your own conclusions.”

  “I’m asking about your conclusion,” Fred said.

  “My conclusions are irrelevant,” Sorenstam said.

  “Not to me.”

  Dennis watched as Sorenstam struggled to control his anger. Dennis was more than a litt
le impressed with Fred’s persistence.

  “My own personal judgment,” Sorenstam said, “was that the intercept was important information regarding the geolocation of a person being targeted by a unit at Langley. Again, if you insist on pressing me on this issue, I would have to say the sigint he read that day was important. But I think everything we do is important.”

  A brief period of silence fell on the room as Fred looked at a small notepad in his lap.

  “Did Arnold ever complain to you about being watched or feeling like he was in danger for any reason?”

  “We didn’t have the kind of relationship where he might divulge that,” Sorenstam said. “I’d check with his station chief on that kind of information.”

  “One of the theories floating around is that a rogue unit from the Middle East snatched Arnold, presumably for the intel he had or just to be assholes. What do you think of that theory?”

  “I don’t think anything; that part of the business is not my bailiwick. Why don’t you ask your partner there about what Langley thinks happened to him?”

  Dennis was about to speak, but he glanced at Fred and saw his “Don’t-you-friggin-dare-talk look” and shrugged instead.

  “Does this guy talk?” Sorenstam said.

  “I don’t want him to talk,” Fred said. “He can be a real asshole, and I’m trying to save you.”

  Sorenstam laughed for the first time. “You serious?”

  “Yep. Best let sleeping dogs lie,” Fred said.

  “Now you’ve got my curiosity. What can someone from Langley say or do to rile us up here at NSA?”

  “You’d be surprised. Can we continue, please?”

  “No, I’m serious. These jerks from Langley are not equipped to know how or what we do; all they can do is take our intel and screw it up. How is this guy any different from the other idiots we have to deal with there?”

  Fred’s cheeks suddenly developed small red circles the size of silver dollars, and Dennis realized he was getting angry, which impressed him.

  Fred turned to Dennis. “Do you have any questions for Mr. Sorenstam here?”

  “You’re going to let me talk?”

  “Do I have to ask again?”

  Dennis looked back at Sorenstam. “Okay. I have just two questions. First, given the voluminous — and boring, I may add — reports I’ve seen on this case, including Arnold’s phone activity, his geolocation tracking, his every digital move in the past two months here, why is it that you guys don’t know what happened to him? I mean, my understanding is that right now your analysts and programmers here are tracking text messages between jihadists in Afghanistan talking about their girlfriends or hedged trades they made on the New York Stock Exchange, but you don’t know what the hell happened to a very important intelligence official right in your own backyard. Why is that?”

  Sorenstam looked at Fred. “I see what you mean, they are assholes over there.”

  “Well, you started it. And by the way, could you answer his question?”

  “No, I can’t answer his question, because as I stated, I don’t know what happened to him or why he stopped by here for thirty-three minutes that day. You guys at Langley may think we have all the answers here, but we don’t. And neither do you.”

  “We have women at Langley, so it’s not appropriate to say ‘you guys,’” Dennis said.

  Sorenstam glared at Dennis and was about to speak when Dennis interrupted.

  “And my second question is: Can we see the video of Arnold’s visit? It’s not in the reports.”

  ✦

  The monitor was a large flat-screen in a small room with a laptop to the side. Dennis, Fred and Sorenstam looked at the blank screen while a fourth man typed into the laptop.

  “Got it,” the man said.

  A black-and-white video flickered on the screen, which was time-stamped in the top right corner. The camera looked down at a sharp angle and showed Arnold driving up to the gatehouse; a video splice occurred, and Arnold was now going through the security inspection building, being wanded, removing his personal belongings and being inspected closely. Another splice occurred, and Arnold could be seen in the men’s room going into a stall and closing the door. The angle of the camera prevented a view into any of the stalls.

  “Why are these videos in black and white? You can’t spring for color? Looks like it’s circa 1928.”

  “Too much data packed into color video; black and white is fine for our purposes. Remember, we have to store all of this crap.”

  “I thought you had terabytes of data storage,” Dennis said.

  “Ha, we have petabytes of data,” Sorenstam said. “But we’re not going to waste it on color video.”

  Dennis had noted the time stamp when Arnold went into the stall; after three minutes Dennis said, “Jeez, guess he had to really go.”

  “It was a four-hour drive from London,” Fred said.

  When Arnold came out of the stall, six minutes and forty-two seconds had elapsed. In the video he washed his hands laboriously and then exited.

  The next splice showed Arnold entering the reading room; he sat down in the small room with his back to the camera. He typed a few items into the computer and then settled down to scroll through the contents.

  “What was he typing in just then?” Dennis asked.

  “Password,” Sorenstam said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, we track key strokes. It was his password.”

  Even though Arnold spent ten minutes in the reading room, Dennis realized after the first four minutes that nothing was happening. Arnold sat with his back to a video camera barely moving.

  “Is this it for ten minutes?” Dennis asked.

  “Pretty much,” Sorenstam said.

  “Does he take any notes?” Fred asked.

  “You can see he has a notebook with him, but he does not appear to write anything down.”

  “Did he take notes on his prior visits?” Fred asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Can we speed up to the end?” Dennis asked.

  Sorenstam nodded to the man on the laptop and the motion on the screen sped up until the time stamp showed ten minutes had elapsed.

  With less than a minute left in the reading room, Arnold suddenly stood up and hunched over his notebook. Because the camera was behind him and elevated, his body obscured his actions.

  “What was he doing just then?” Fred asked.

  “He was logging out.”

  “Standing up and logging out?” Fred repeated. “When he logged in he was sitting down. Why would he stand up to log out?”

  “If you find him, ask him that question,” Sorenstam said.

  On the screen Arnold finally turned toward the door to his left with the notepad in his right hand and left.

  The next splice showed him walking down a hallway, then another hallway into a crowded cafeteria. Another splice showed the same cafeteria from another angle, and Arnold’s body was identified with a white circle to show where he was in the room. He purchased a bottle of water then left. More splices showed him walking down halls, then retrieving his belongings, then driving away from the front gate.

  The screen went blank, and Sorenstam nodded toward the door and the video operator left the room and closed the door.

  “Who assembled the video into a single file?” Fred asked.

  “Myself and two other people. We did it together, and there is a record of our work. You’re welcome to review it.”

  “No thanks,” Fred said. “I think we’re done here.”

  ✦

  “He seemed like a warm and fuzzy guy,” Dennis said as they drove south in a light drizzle.

  “Shouldn’t be too harsh with these folks,” Fred said. “Their lives are pretty dull, and we can’t get anyone else to do this stuff. Yo
u think dragging your wife and kids to live on a locked-down RAF base in the middle of the English countryside is a great duty assignment?”

  “No, I guess not. Anything jump out at you back there?”

  Fred said nothing for a few moments and then shrugged. “Not sure.”

  “Not sure about what?”

  “Not sure of anything.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m confused, that’s all. Think we’re missing something. Just don’t know what it is.”

  “When you find it, would you let me know?”

  “Sure thing, kemosabe.”

  “Hey, I told you not to—”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay. You sure are sensitive for an agency guy who gives everyone else shit.”

  Dennis fell back into his seat and watched the gloomy and wet English countryside slide by in a long, continuous depressing smear. It had been a while since he had fallen into one of his funks, but the dreary weather and diffused light were wearing on him. And the fact that Judy was going to show up in a few days further agitated him. His response in circumstances like this was to grab on to work and dive in so deep that he couldn’t possibly be depressed or anxious.

  “What was it you said about that Russian guy? You said something about a correlation?”

  “Pavlychko. He’s Ukrainian.”

  “He’s in London?”

  “Yes. Under surveillance. But that was just a correlation of geolocation points. You know, same place, same time stuff.”

  “You said something about probability.”

  “An analyst friend suggested the probability of them being in two locations in the same timeframe was statistically very low. So the two matches are higher than pure chance, but it’s all probability. In reality it doesn’t mean much. Don’t know why I mentioned it to you. Don’t focus on that.”

  “Let’s visit Pavlychko.”

  “I think one of those radar domes back there fried some of your brain cells. We can’t visit him. He’s under surveillance by MI5.”

  “Who gives a shit if he’s being watched? We’ll just show up at his house and freak him out.”