Valley of Spies Read online




  Valley of Spies

  Copyright© 2019 Keith Yocum

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-0-9978708-3-1

  eISBN 978-0-9978708-4-8

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Book cover design and typesetting by Stewart A. Williams

  As always, for Denise

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  Chapter 1

  He opened his eyes, but the glare was blinding, and he shut them.

  “I think he just opened his eyes,” someone said.

  “Sir, can you hear me?” a man’s voice floated from far away. “Hello? Sir, can you open your eyes?”

  He opened his eyes again, closed them, and finally squinted through thin, watery slits. A man’s face was only a foot away.

  “Sir, can you hear me? Just nod if you can hear me.”

  He nodded.

  “That’s great. Can you open your eyes? Can you look at me? Yes, I’m right here. Can you see my hand? I’m waving it.”

  He nodded.

  “Great. How are you feeling?”

  He stared up at the face of a young man with dark hair and a white coat.

  “Can you talk, sir? Can you tell us your name?”

  He felt immense confusion as if he were locked inside a white room with white walls, a white table, and a white light. He tried to speak, but his lips felt leathery and cracked. He tried to raise his right hand to his face, but his hands would not move.

  He craned his neck up from the pillow and looked at his hands. They were bound to the sides of his bed. He dropped his head back onto the pillow. He coughed.

  “Sally, can you give me the water?” the man said.

  He felt something on his lips and saw the man was pressing a straw from a container against his lips. He sucked and his mouth filled with cold water. He gulped huge amounts of the liquid until the overflow streamed down his chin and onto his chest.

  “There you go,” the man said.

  He coughed, cleared his throat, and tried to speak, but only managed to gargle. He heard a motor humming and felt his head being raised.

  “That should be better for you,” the man said. “Now, can you speak? Can you tell us your name?”

  He tried again to speak, but his tongue felt like it was fighting a mouthful of steel wool. He managed a word.

  “What was that? What did you say?” the man said.

  “Hand,” he said.

  “Hand? Did you say ‘hand’?”

  He nodded.

  “I see. Your hands? Your hands are being kept in restraints. You’re in a hospital. I’m afraid we were required to use restraints before you hurt yourself or someone else. Do you understand? You were brought into the hospital last night by the police. You were naked and had no identification. We’d like to know what your name is. Can you tell us? It would help us a great deal if we know who you are.”

  He closed his eyes. Naked. No name. Hospital. Police. He shook his head.

  “You don’t know your name?” the man asked. “Did you fall and hit your head? Did someone hit you? Were you taking any drugs, or were you drinking heavily, sir? Is there anything you can tell us about what happened last night?”

  Sixteen days earlier

  It was a typical round of golf for Dennis. Relatively new to the sport, he had a few good holes, some bad holes, and some really, really bad holes. Even though it was winter in Western Australia, the day temperatures in July were often pleasant.

  His playing partners were non-judgmental and friendly. Amateur golf, he discovered, is really an excuse to chase a small, dimpled white ball around a beautiful landscape just so you could gossip, grumble, and share stories for several hours. Afterward, you could sit around the clubhouse and rehash the intricacies of chasing the white ball through the landscape, all the while drinking alcohol.

  Dennis played regularly with three men at golf courses around Perth. The best golfer of the group was Joe Parsons, an American executive working for a South African mining company. A small, compact man in his fifties, he was an excellent golfer with a low handicap and a laugh that broke the sound barrier.

  Fergus McMaster – or Fergy – a tall, red-headed Aussie corporate lawyer in his late forties, was a solid golfer with a dry sense of humor and a penchant for profound self-abasement after a bad shot. “You bloody, bloody idiot,” was his favorite phrase after launching one of the white balls into the bush.

  And then there was Norman Cower, a diminutive Aussie retiree in his late sixties who played an indifferent game of golf but was charming, funny, and a genuinely nice fellow.

  The four golfers sat around a small table in the clubhouse of the public golf course in Melville, nursing their second beers. Ordinarily, there would have been a spirited recap of the preceding round, with accompanying guffaws at lame putts or magnificent hooked or sliced drives into the surrounding landscape.

  But today Dennis was not engaged in the conversation; instead, he was tense. He gripped the frosty beer glass with two hands as if he was steadying himself. The cause of his discomfort was the presence of two strangers sitting nearby.

  The strangers sat at a table on the other side of the clubhouse sipping soft drinks and watching golfers finish up on the eighteenth hole.

  The presence of the two men was rattling Dennis.

  Ten months into early retirement from the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General—OIG—he had constructed a new life in faraway Perth. He had followed Judy, his Australian girlfriend, to the quaint city on the west coast and settled down to golf, beaches, Aussie Rules Football – but not cricket, especially not cricket, the single most boring sport invented by mankind.

  The stress of being one of the agency’s internal policemen had receded nicely. He was near equilibrium in his new life; he no longer fidgeted and acted distracted in mixed company. The agency’s bizarre, unorthodox employees and byzantine political forces were no longer his concern.

  But those two men sitting at the table were agency people, and he could feel their presence. His felt his right foot tapping the floor nervously.

  He recognized the classic agency procedure of agents announcing their presence; show yourself from a distance to alert the subject. Afterward, at another time and place, make a formal introduction. Most importantly avoid surprises. Surprises always create trouble.

  “You with us today?” Fergy McMaster said to Dennis.

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry. Just thinking.”

  “Was it the seventeenth hole you were thinking of?” Parsons said. “Thought for sure you were going to birdie that thing.”

  “Not to be,” Dennis said. “One day I’ll learn how to putt.”

  “Maybe we all will,” Cower said. The group laughed.

  “Excuse me for a second, guys,” Denn
is said.

  He pushed back his chair, stood, and strode quickly across the room. He loomed over the two men.

  “What the hell do you want?” he said.

  “Nothing,” said the older of the two, a man in his forties with thick, wavy gray hair.

  “Why are you here?” Dennis said.

  “We’re watching golf,” he said, with a Midwest American accent.

  “I could smell you from way over there,” Dennis said. “Sort of like rotten eggs, but worse. More like horse shit.”

  “Mmm,” the older man said.

  “So get lost,” Dennis said.

  “Sure,” the man said. “We’re almost done.”

  Dennis returned to the table, sat down, and took a huge gulp of beer.

  “Friends?” Fergy asked, looking at the two men as they left the clubhouse.

  “Hardly,” Dennis said, his eyes tracking the men as they left.

  The drive southeast toward Mandurah was pleasant enough, though Judy was distracted.

  “What’s on your mind, Jude?” Daniel, her Australian Federal Police partner asked. “Not that Yank boyfriend of yours is it?”

  She smiled. “No, it’s not Dennis. Well, not directly him. Just everything. And nothing.”

  “Why are women so mysterious,” Daniel asked. “They have these secret lives that men just can’t understand. I swear sometimes that Monica is not really paying attention when I talk to her. We’ve been married fourteen years, and have two children, but I sometimes feel she’s not really there, you know?”

  “Oh, Monica is there,” Judy said. “Perhaps you need to ask what she’s thinking about.”

  “I have, and she just says, ‘Oh, nothing really.’”

  “Well then, I would let it go,” Judy said.

  They drove in silence until Judy said, “Who are we meeting with again?”

  “The senior sergeant down there. Fellow named Murphy.”

  “And why are we meeting with him?”

  “He says that there’s a young fella that we should talk to. I guess the fella lives at home in Golden Bay with his parents. The parents have gone to the police several times complaining of their son’s odd behavior and his unsavory friends. They think he might be into drugs. The sergeant suspects the son might be involved in the distribution of methylamphetamine, and he requested help from the AFP to visit the parents.”

  “What can we possibly get from talking to the parents?” Judy said.

  “Now don’t start, Jude. The sergeant down there doesn’t quite know what do with this meth problem. And it’s a nice day for a drive.”

  “Mmm,” Judy said, staring at the flat landscape. “Righto then.”

  Senior Sergeant Murphy was remarkably rotund, and Judy wondered what the physical standards were for police in Western Australia.

  “It’s just that his parents keep calling me,” Murphy said. “I’ve talked to the fella once when I saw him in town here at the chemist. He looked sick. I mean, I’m not an expert in this drug situation. I can’t say that he is dealing drugs, or not dealing drugs. And, well, you’re the experts. Being with the Task Force and all.”

  Judy looked at Daniel.

  “I guess we’ll go out and talk to the parents then,” Daniel said. “Is the son home now?”

  “Don’t know about that,” Murphy said. “Should I ring his parents?”

  “No need for that,” Daniel said. “We’ll take care of it.”

  The house was thirty minutes from the police station. A neighborhood grid of traditional, one-story homes with small yards and red tile roofs spread out east from the town’s popular beaches.

  Judy pulled her coat tight as she stepped outside. Winter in the southern hemisphere had moderated over the past decade, but there were still cold spells like this one. They walked up a chipped and cracked concrete path to a small flight of steps and onto the covered porch. Daniel knocked on the rock-solid jarrah wood door.

  Judy could hear movement inside and she shivered a little in the cold. The door cracked open, and a man in his early fifties put his head out.

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  “Are you Steven Cappocia?”

  “Yes. And who are you?”

  “My name is Daniel Carson, from the Australian Federal Police in Perth. This is my colleague Judy White. We understand that you have been in contact with Senior Sergeant Murphy here about your son.”

  The father took a quick glance inside his house, then stepped outside and closed the door behind him.

  “Yes, well, my wife and I have had some concerns about Nick for some time. We don’t quite know what to do about it. My wife has MS and is in a wheelchair, and I need to be available to care for her.”

  Judy and Daniel nodded but waited for more.

  “And well, our son Nick, he’s changed over the last year or so. Doesn’t work any longer, but he’s not on the dole. He has a nice car, you can see over there.”

  The two officers panned to the driveway and noticed a new black Mini Cooper with red racing stripes.

  “Is your son home now?” Judy asked.

  “Yes, he is, but I think he’s sleeping. He sleeps a lot during the day.”

  “Sergeant Murphy said you and your wife are concerned that he might be involved in drugs. Is that so?” Judy asked.

  “Perhaps. Yes. But again, we don’t know much about drugs. We were hoping that the sergeant could come and have a talk with Nick. You know, we reckon Nick would get the message that he needs to stop what he’s doing. That’s if he’s doing anything. We’re not sure of anything, really. These young people are difficult to understand.”

  The father shivered a bit in the cold and stared at Daniel, then Judy, then back at Daniel. No one spoke as a car drove by in the street.

  “Would you like us to talk to Nick?” Daniel asked.

  “He’s still sleeping,” the father said. “He’s sometimes in a disagreeable mood if we wake him. He can be quite cross.”

  “Why don’t you try to wake him?” Judy said.

  The father frowned, he turned and as he put his hand on the door, it flew open.

  Nick glared at Judy and Daniel.

  “Who are these wankers?” Nick said to his father.

  “Police, son. They just stopped by.”

  “What do they want? You,” he said jutting his chin at Daniel, “what the fuck do you want?”

  “Son, watch your language please.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Nick said stepping onto the porch toward Daniel.

  “I assume you’re Nick Cappocia,” Daniel said.

  “No, I’m Father fucking Christmas,” he said.

  Judy felt an electrical current of fear. Years of working with violent people had sharpened her instincts. She had seen this kind of behavior before from angry men: they would instantly ignore her and move to exert control over the male policeman.

  This young man was gaunt and yellowish in pallor. Judy noticed a scab on his right cheek and the stubble of a beard. It was his eyes, though, that bothered Judy. They were wild and bulged like small ping pong balls. Daniel took a step back.

  “What are you staring at?” Nick said to Daniel.

  “Relax, mate. We’re just talking to your father.”

  “He’s an idiot. If you have something to say, say it to my face, copper.”

  “Nick, there’s nothing to get upset about,” Judy said.

  “Who’s talking to you, cunt.”

  “Nick, watch your language!” his father said.

  In her years on the force, Judy had heard about every possible combination of curse words and invective in the English language. But the one word she could not tolerate was the four-letter word Nick had just uttered. She didn’t know why it made her blood boil, but Judy felt a rage building as she stared at the
spindly young man.

  Daniel had seen Judy react to that curse many times before, and he hurried to head her off.

  “Nick, there have been reports that you may be involved in drugs, and we’re here to ask you about that.”

  The young man took a step back from Daniel, swiveled his head to look at his father, turned and re-entered the house slamming the door shut.

  “Oh, that did not go well,” the father said. “Perhaps you both should leave now.”

  “Are you sure you and your wife will be alright?” Judy said.

  “Yes, he’ll calm down I’m sure. He’s agitated right now.”

  Daniel and Judy thanked Cappocia for talking to them and said they’d follow up with Murphy. The father nodded, shook their hands, and returned inside.

  They walked to the street, both glancing at the new Mini Cooper. Reaching their car, Daniel opened the driver’s side door, while Judy walked to the passenger side. The front door of the house suddenly flew open behind them, slamming against the outside wall. The two turned to see Nick standing on the porch steps. He held a large pistol in his extended right hand.

  The first shot shattered the driver’s side window and the second hit the driver’s side door with a thud.

  Daniel dove across the hood of the car landing in a heap on the other side of the car; Judy had fallen and moved to shelter behind the rear wheel. She fumbled for her gun, pulling it out of the holster.

  Two more rounds hit the other side of the car as Judy glanced at Daniel. Nick screamed unintelligibly and walked toward the car. Daniel had his gun out and peered around the front bumper at the approaching shooter.

  “Nick! Son, come here!” his father yelled from the porch. “Stop it, Nick!”

  “Dad, they’re trying to kill me!”

  “No, they’re not! Just come here now. Now!”

  Judy and Daniel looked at each other behind the car. In the small, strange world of police work, the two officers knew they were milliseconds away from being forced to kill or be killed. In policedom, events sometimes unfold so quickly that officers are forced to make instantaneous decisions: either shoot or be shot or both.