Valley of Spies Read online

  Judy craned her neck and peered underneath the car and saw Nick walking back to the front door. Her palms were wet around the pistol grip. For the first time, she noticed her right wrist was bleeding from scraping the asphalt as she dropped behind the car.

  “Here, give me the gun,” the father said.

  “They were going kill to me!”

  “Well, it’s all over now. Just hand me the gun. Why don’t you go lie down for a while?”

  The front door slammed, and Judy saw the sad, hunched figure of the father holding the warm pistol.

  Chapter 2

  She rested her head on his left shoulder as they lay in bed. Judy inspected his chest hairs, twisting and turning a few of them. She wore her pajamas, while Dennis sported his old gym shorts and was bare-chested.

  “I think this is a gray hair,” she said.

  “I don’t have gray hair on my chest,” Dennis said.

  “Right here,” she said pulling at a strand.

  “Must be someone else’s.”

  “No, it’s yours. Getting old, Mr. Cunningham.”

  Judy continued to fiddle with his chest hairs, cozying up to his left side as Dennis watched CNN with the sound muted.

  “Are you OK?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t seem to be OK.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “You seem pensive. And distracted. Or something.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “And it’s not every day that you get shot at by a meth addict.”

  Judy sighed and rolled over onto her back and stared at the ceiling.

  “No, it’s not every day; just some days,” she said.

  “I’m not really crazy about this police job of yours. I know you’ve been doing it for a while and are good at it. But can’t you get a desk job away from these crazies?”

  “You should talk,” she said, rolling again toward him and placing her left leg over his thigh. “You were almost killed several times at the agency.”

  “But I quit, remember?”

  “Yes, that’s true. Perhaps I’ll quit.”

  “You’d do that? Really?”

  “The way I feel today, yes. The part that’s so difficult is how this job goes from complete boredom to a killing zone in seconds. You think you know what to expect, but it just shocks you. I mean, that little bastard could have killed Daniel.”

  “And you.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Why don’t you ask for one of those cushy desk jobs?”

  “They don’t just give desk jobs to agents because you ask for it, Dennis. Besides, I’m one of the few women agents in the AFP here in the west, and how would it look if I begged to get off the street? Another weak female who can’t handle the pressure and needs to be coddled?”

  “I’m just thinking of all the stress you’re under, and the stress that I’m under worrying about you at work.”

  “Let’s not talk about me any longer. How about you? What was your day like? How was golf?”

  “Golf was fun, but I had some visitors.”

  Judy pulled back from Dennis and sat up on her elbow.

  “What visitors?”

  “Two idiots.”

  “Can you please speak English? What do you mean ‘two idiots’?”

  “Two guys from the agency were at the clubhouse. They just want me to know they’re here.”

  “What are they doing here?”

  “They’ll make contact soon enough.”

  “Dennis, you’re retired, correct? They have no right to contact you.”

  “They can do whatever they want. I have no intention of talking to them. Don’t worry.”

  Judy sat up in bed and turned toward Dennis, crossing her legs and looking down at him as he stared at the TV.

  “Dennis, don’t you think this is very strange.”

  “Yes, a little. But remember it’s a strange organization.”

  “Can’t they just leave you alone? Why can’t you report them?”

  “Report them to who?”

  “I don’t know, someone important.”

  “Calm down. After what you went through today, I was almost afraid to tell you. In fact, I shouldn’t have.”

  Judy stared at him, then slid back next to him in bed, and remained silent for several minutes.

  “It is a gray hair,” she said twisting a coiled strand. “Definitely gray.”

  Dennis had settled into a rhythm, of sorts, in his new life. While Judy lived in a single-family house in the suburb of Bicton, they decided that they would officially live apart while her son Trevor attended university in Nedlands. They spent almost all their nights together, mostly at his apartment on Wellington Street.

  They never talked directly about marriage, though there was an assumption that as Dennis became more comfortable in his new setting that they would tie the knot.

  After Judy left for work most mornings, Dennis would shower and, weather permitting, take a walk down five blocks to Langley Park next to the Swan River. He would hike either toward Lake Vasto or down to the Bell Tower. The winter weather was colder in Perth than he anticipated, and walking was more bracing than enjoyable. But he liked getting out and moving about.

  After his walk, he would stop at a sleek, modern coffee shop on Hill Street and have several flat white coffees and a pastry. He bought two newspapers and read them thoroughly, finally getting back to the apartment by 10:30 a.m.

  He had just returned from one of his walks when he heard a knock at the front door. He opened the door and saw the two men he’d seen at the clubhouse.

  Before the older of the two could speak, Dennis slammed the door shut and returned to his laptop in the small kitchen.

  The visitors continued to knock, with little pauses in between. The knocks got louder, until Dennis flew out of his chair, raced to the door, flung it open, and yelled, “If you two don’t stop that shit, I’m calling the police.”

  Again, he slammed the door before they could finish speaking, but not before he heard the words “your visa” yelled at him.

  He stood motionless inside the door.

  “Cunningham, you better listen,” he heard through the door. “They’re going to revoke your goddamn visa if you keep this shit up. We’re just messengers. You need to calm your ass down and listen to what we have to say. Otherwise, they’re going to make sure your visa is revoked. Got that? Serious shit if you keep acting like an asshole.”

  Dennis faced the closed door, his head pointed down as he stared at the floor tiles. In the ten months decompressing from his career in the agency, Dennis had relaxed to the point of boredom. But he liked being a little bored, and he thought it suited him nicely.

  Now, with the two messengers just feet away from him on the other side of the door, he felt the old tension rise in his shoulders and neck. His jaw tightened, and he took shorter, shallower gulps of air.

  Revoke your visa? What the hell were they talking about? he thought. My travel visa is good for two more months.

  He opened the door again. The three men stared at each other as the cold air from outside poured into the apartment.

  Dennis turned and walked into the apartment, leaving the door open behind him. The two men walked in, closed the door, and followed him into the living room.

  “Can we sit down?” the older man asked.

  Dennis shrugged. The men sat down on the couch, but Dennis remained standing.

  “Be better if you just sat down and relaxed,” the older man said.

  Dennis sat down and tried his best to remain calm. He swallowed several times as if doing so would contain his anger.

  “Listen, we know this is upsetting you, Cunningham. We don’t like
this any more than you do. We have a job and it’s to deliver a message to you. Simple as that. Then we’re out of here.”

  “What’s this visa thing you mentioned?” Dennis barked.

  “Well, given your reluctance to even hear us out, we were directed to tell you that unless you talked to us, they were going to get your visa revoked.”

  “My travel visa from Australia that’s good for 12 months?”

  “Yes, of course—that visa.”

  “Who’s going to do the revoking?”

  “Jesus, Cunningham, who do you think?”

  “The agency would come all the way over here, to this remote little city, and threaten to revoke my travel visa? Give me a break.”

  “You know they can do that. But no one wants to do that. We were instructed to use the threat as a last resort to get you to talk.”

  Dennis sighed, swallowed again, feeling his Adam’s apple bob viciously.

  “The fact that I’m no longer an employee hasn’t gotten through to anyone? Why are you folks playing heavy with me? I’m a nobody retiree playing golf or trying to play golf. Revoke my fucking visa? You assholes.”

  “Listen, Cunningham,” the younger of the two finally spoke up, “all you have to do is listen to us. We’ll make this quick. The director wants to talk to you about a sensitive matter. That’s all. You just need to chat with him for a few minutes. That’s all. Just chat. After that, we’ll leave you alone. It’s simple. No need to get worked up. Right, Bill?”

  The older man nodded.

  Dennis closed his eyes to keep from looking at the two men, and he took several long, measured breaths. He opened his eyes.

  “You want me to talk to the director on the phone for a few minutes, and you’ve come all this way to threaten to pull my visa if I don’t?”

  “No, not on the phone,” the younger man said. “Talk to him in person.”

  “OK. Let me do this again: You two have come all this way to ask me to fly back to Langley to talk to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency for a few minutes. Or else you’ll yank my visa and force me out of the country? I’ve never met the director and have no idea who he or she is.”

  “No, that’s not it,” the younger man said. “Tell him, Bill.”

  “No,” the older man said, “the director will be here tonight. All you have to do is meet with him. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes, max. All done. Game over.”

  “Wait. Did you say the director of the Central Intelligence Agency – the same guy who’s in charge of 21,000 employees and has a budget of about $15 billion – is going to come to visit me in Perth to chat for ten minutes? Have either of you been drinking or using illegal substances?”

  The young man chuckled. “The director is flying through to Singapore and is planning a stopover at the airport here. He’s not going to leave the plane. We’ll escort you there. You chat. You leave, he leaves. All done.”

  “You didn’t answer my question?”

  “What question?”

  “What are you drinking, smoking, or injecting?”

  “That’s preposterous!” Judy said.

  “I agree, but what the hell am I to do? I don’t want my visa pulled. I like it here, not to mention what it would do for us being apart again.”

  She sat in her small office, mobile phone to her ear, scribbling a series of shapes on a pad of paper.

  “I don’t want you to leave Perth,” she said.

  “Well, I don’t want to leave either. And I can tell these two guys are for real. They don’t like it any more than I do.”

  “The director of the CIA is coming to Perth?”

  “He’s supposedly stopping over for a while. I’ll just go along, listen to whatever he has to say, and then leave.”

  “That’s not how it’s going to go, and you know it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Aren’t you suspicious about the director just chatting with you? When you enter that plane, who’s to say the director will even be in there? You’re just walking onto a plane. You’ve trained me to be suspicious about anything your former employer does, and now you want to walk serenely onto an empty American plane?”

  “Well, yes, that is a little odd. But I haven’t done anything. They wouldn’t just arrest me. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Do you think they opened an old case or something?”

  Dennis paced around the apartment with the phone to his ear.

  “No, my instinct—to the extent I have any of that left—is that this isn’t some kind of crazy rendition of a former employee. They wouldn’t bother with a complicated ruse like the director and his plane to do that. They’d just grab me at a coffee shop.”

  Dennis stopped walking. “Or would they? Shit, there’s no way I’m walking onto that damn plane.”

  “They must be bluffing about your visa,” Judy said.

  “Shit! I’m just minding my own goddamned business on the other side of the world. Why are they doing this? I haven’t done anything.”

  Judy kept doodling in big circles and Dennis started pacing again. Neither spoke as each processed this strange request.

  “If it’s one thing you’ve taught me,” she said, “it’s that you can’t trust anything they say. Any of them.”

  The knock was quiet, almost timid.

  Dennis opened the door and the two men stared at him.

  “Ready?” Bill, the older one, said.

  “I’m not going.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going.”

  “You can’t bail now, Cunningham.”

  “Why can’t I? Go ahead and yank my visa. I don’t give a shit. Do you think I’m dumb enough to walk onto a government airplane, probably a military flight, and expect to talk to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency? Just for a cozy chat? You two are the dumbest fucking bunch of idiots to think you could just talk me onto a plane by showing up and asking.”

  “I told you, Bill,” the young one said.

  “Yeah, Bill, he told you,” Dennis said.

  “Shut up,” Bill said to Dennis. “You’ve just complicated a very simple effort to get you ten or fifteen minutes with the director.” He looked at his watch. “Shit, the plane lands in an hour.”

  For the first time, Bill looked really, really pissed off, and Dennis felt his anger like the glow of a heat lamp. He also recognized the anger as that of a bureaucrat who would be forced to explain a plan gone awry. It was the de-personalized anger of all bureaucrats, but it was still anger.

  “You realize the director diverted his flight to land at Perth International Airport, just to talk to you? Do you know how pissed he’ll be?”

  “He’ll be pissed at you, or your boss, not at me. He doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall. That’s even if he’s on the plane. And let me remind you two Einsteins that you haven’t even shown me your IDs, and even if you did, there’s no way I can verify they’re real. Go cancel my visa, kids. Have a good night.”

  Dennis swung the door shut, but Bill had placed his foot in the doorway and the door bounced back open.

  “Cunningham, please don’t make us get crazy. We have very specific orders to get you to that plane to meet with the director. We have no reason to believe he’s not on the plane, but as you probably already know, we’re two goofballs that have orders, and we’re determined to complete those orders. Your job is to come along.”

  “No, my job is to stay here and watch TV with my girlfriend, who, by the way, is an agent of the Australian Federal Police.”

  Judy stepped into view down the small hallway behind Dennis. Bill sighed heavily.

  “We know who she is, Cunningham. We’ve read her file.”

  “Yeah, well, move your foot, Bill, so I can close the door.”

  “Can’t do that.”

&nbs
p; “You’ll have to, or it might end up broken.”

  “Hey, Judy,” the young man said suddenly. “Why don’t you come with us to the airport? You can keep Cunningham company in the car and wait for him on the tarmac. After he comes out of the plane, we’ll drive both of you back here. With an agent of the AFP in attendance, you can’t possibly think we’re going to do anything crazy. We typically avoid international incidents with strategic partners.”

  Chapter 3

  Judy had her arm snugly around Dennis’s as the rental car sped through the early evening rush hour. None of the four people in the car uttered a word. Dennis and Judy sat in the back. Dennis stared morosely at the smear of lights flashing by in the darkness.

  A part of him was nervous for precisely the reasons that Judy had raised: how could you ever trust the agency? He was painfully aware of the corrupting influences of power, money, and secrecy exerted on the country’s intelligence services.

  Yet, embarrassingly, there was another sliver of Dennis’s brain that was excited as they drove through the darkness. His life since early retirement was empty of raw excitement. Dennis was reluctant to admit he missed the thrill of hunting down those miscreants that gave the agency endless amounts of trouble.

  The reason his boring life in Australia had worked so far was the thrill of being near the woman he had fallen in love with. Still, although he kept it secret from her, he was bored.

  The younger man drove the car past the departure lanes at the airport and around to a section for employee parking. Judy clutched Dennis’s arm tightly.

  They approached a chain-link gate that did not have a gatehouse. It looked innocuous enough, she thought, except for the black SUV on the other side of the gate. They stopped several feet from the gate, and Bill got out and walked to the gate. He spoke briefly to another man on the other side. He returned to the car as the gate slid open.

  Judy craned her neck to look for a parked jet but there were only several huge aviation hangars illuminated with flood lights. Their car followed the black SUV as it navigated a well-marked driving lane past the hangars toward another set of hangars farther away. They eventually turned a corner and came upon a towering Boeing 747. A humming generator truck fed it from ground level. A walk-up gangway was connected to an open rear door that shined brightly from within.