Valley of Spies Read online

  A small white utility van was parked near the bottom of the gangway, where the SUV pulled up. The car stopped, and Bill turned to Dennis.

  “Just so we’re clear on what’s going to happen, Cunningham, you’re going to be searched and wanded. You’ll need to leave every single piece of metal behind before you enter the plane. The aircraft is one of the most secure in the world, as you can imagine, and no one is allowed on it without being one hundred percent cleared of any potential eavesdropping devices. Got it?”

  “Any anal probes?” Dennis said.

  “Not unless you request it,” Bill smirked.

  “Just checking.”

  Judy shook her head and sighed. She could never understand Dennis’s sense of humor at tense moments like this. She held his arm tightly.

  “It’s going to be alright, Judy,” he said gently prying her arm from his.

  Bill got out of the car and opened Dennis’s door. As he did, the back of the van opened, and two men got out and surrounded Dennis. One held a hand scanner, and the other ran his hands repeatedly over Dennis’s body. They removed his watch, his wallet, and a pair of reading glasses in his jacket pocket, his mobile phone, and his belt.

  As they led him to the gangway, he turned and gave thumbs up to Judy. She waved.

  Inside the running car, Judy stared up at the bulbous US Air Force jet. She bit the inside of her lip, sighed, and sat back in the seat.

  “I know you don’t trust us,” the young man said looking in the rearview mirror at Judy, “but he’s going to meet with the director, and he’ll be back out before you know it. I’m sorry this is so distressing for you.”

  “Distressing is not the word I was thinking of,” she said.

  “What word were you thinking of?”

  “Several words, actually. Like ‘What the hell is wrong with you people?’”

  “I see,” he said.

  Dennis was relieved to see the jet, which he recognized as the Air Force’s E-4B, or National Airborne Operations Center. A modified Boeing 747, it was the designated secure airplane for the Director of the CIA when traveling overseas.

  Dennis followed a strikingly tall, casually dressed agent up the steps, with Bill behind him. They entered the plane’s rear door and were led through a small kitchen into a walled-off lounge area, with two couches in an L shape to his left, and several stuffed chairs to his right. All the furniture was bolted securely to the floor, and the comfy upholstery gave the room the feel of a Hilton business suite.

  The lounge area was empty, and the tall agent directed Dennis to sit down on one of the small couches. Both the agent and Bill sat down on the couch facing him. While they sat, Dennis heard someone walk up the gangway, step into the plane, and pull the door shut.

  He was not prepared for this lock down and reflexively stood up.

  “Hey,” Bill said. “Chill out. You can’t leave a door open to the outside world. Anyone can train a parabolic disc on that door and listen to what’s being said.”

  Dennis sat, but he was not content. He kept his eyes on the hands of the tall agent; the hands don’t lie. He knew the tall, buff, and stone-cold agent sitting across from him would be the heavy in an altercation.

  After several awkward minutes of silence, a door to the small lounge opened, and the face of a thin-lipped, gray-haired man with blue-gray eyes scanned the room, and then disappeared. Almost immediately, the door opened again and in walked the diminutive, slightly rotund figure of CIA director Kenneth Franklin, or Kenny, as the media referred to him. He was followed by the gray-haired man.

  Everyone stood, including Dennis.

  “For god sakes, sit,” Franklin said.

  The director walked over and thrust his hand out to Dennis, who shook it.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Cunningham,” he said smiling broadly. “Boy, you sure have one of the most interesting files I’ve read. Amazing stuff, albeit some of it is an embarrassment to the agency. You got the worst of it from several of our more wayward folks, and I’m sorry for that.”

  Franklin sat directly across from Dennis, while the gray-haired man sat on one of the open stuffed chairs to the side.

  “Bet you’re wondering what you’re doing, sitting in an E4-B with the director in Perth, Western Australia?” he laughed.

  Dennis tried to smile back, but his teeth were clenched, and his earlier caution had been replaced by paranoia. Yes, he thought, what the hell am I doing here?

  “I don’t blame you if it seems a little strange,” Franklin said, leaning back. “But everything we do seems a little strange to the outside world.” He laughed again, and this time Bill and the gray-haired man chuckled in the cynical, inside-baseball way Dennis had seen many times before.

  “Hey, Phil,” Franklin said to the gray-haired man, can you ask Stephanie if she could take an order?”

  “Dennis—you don’t mind if I call you Dennis, do you?—this is Phil Simpson, deputy director of operations. Simpson shook hands with Dennis and then left through the door into the belly of the giant airplane.

  “I never know what time zone I’m in,” Franklin said. “These international trips are not my favorite part of the job.” He laughed, and Dennis tried and failed yet again to smile in return.

  The door opened, and a young, short dark-haired woman wearing a white cotton blouse and dark-blue slacks entered. Dennis guessed she was Air Force from her short, military bob and modest earring studs.

  “Sir, can I get you a Diet Coke?” she said to Franklin.

  “Stephanie, that would be great. And you, Dennis, what can we get you? We have everything, including beer, wine, and the hard stuff.”

  “Nothing, thanks.”

  “Oh come on, Dennis. If I’m going to sit here and drink a Diet Coke, you need to have something. Coffee? Beer?”

  “Water.”

  “Still or bubbly?” Stephanie asked.

  “Still, thanks.”

  She left, though Phil had never returned after leaving to fetch her, and Franklin seemed to notice his absence. He reached for a small phone set on the wall beside him and picked it up, pushed a button, and said, “Is Phil up there? Can you send him back, please? Thanks.”

  He hung up and smiled at Dennis.

  “Can I get outside for a minute?” Judy asked. “I need to stretch my legs.”

  “No, ma’am. You can’t do that—” but Judy had already exited the car onto the tarmac.

  The young man bolted out of the car and raced to Judy.

  “Please get back in the car, miss.”

  “Oh, now it’s ‘miss.’ Just a second ago it was ‘ma’am.”

  “Please get back in the car, ma’am. Please. You’re not supposed to be out of the car and I’ll be reprimanded severely. Please?”

  With the glare of flood lights from the plane illuminating only one side of his face, Judy guessed he was perhaps thirty-five years old. His bristly, short black hair stood straight up, as if in alarm. His dark eyes were pleading with her, and for a moment she felt sorry for him.

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name? Ma’am, please. Just get in the car.” He glanced wildly around the tarmac.

  “Your name?”

  “My name is Joe,” he said. “Please!”

  “Do your friends call you Joe, Joey, or Joseph?”

  “Oh Christ, they call me Joe.”

  “OK, Joe, I’ll get back in.” He yanked open the door, she slid in, and he closed it behind her.

  He raced back to the driver’s seat and they sat in silence, while Joe kept looking at his mobile phone.

  After several minutes, he said, “Actually, my friends call me Joey.”

  “Alright, Joey, can you answer one question?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Am I going to see Dennis again?”

 
Joey twisted abruptly to face her. “I think you’re a little too cynical, ma’am. Not everything we do is so diabolical.”

  “Says who?” she said.

  He turned again to face the front. “You’re a tough one,” he said. “We didn’t expect that.”

  Phil returned to the lounge area, and the small group of men stared at the director.

  “So, I understand you quit the agency about ten months ago,” Franklin said. “You were involved in a very complicated case involving a missing employee from the London station.”

  Dennis shrugged. Of course, all that was true, but it was a pitifully short summary to a painful case involving duplicitous employees of the great agency that Franklin ran.

  “And I gather you were nearly killed by a foreign entity while pursuing the case, which is a high price to pay for anyone in service of the agency,” Franklin said, pausing for another sip of Diet Coke.

  “You mean ‘in service of the inspector general,’” Dennis said. “I wasn’t serving the agency, I was serving the internal department that investigates the agency.”

  “Ah yes, well, that office is an agency department,” Franklin said. “We’re all on the same team.”

  “No, actually they’re not. The inspector general has three bosses: you and the two congressional intelligence committees. That was done to keep it an independent group.”

  “You might be splitting hairs very closely there,” Franklin said, “but I grant you that your old department has a unique purview over the agency’s business.”

  Franklin took another sip of soda, and the sound of a nearby airliner taking off shook the plane momentarily. Dennis found Franklin’s demeanor friendly and not particularly intimidating. He seemed genuinely friendly toward Dennis, but Dennis was not lulled into a false sense of camaraderie. High achievers like Franklin get ahead in the world for precisely these kinds of people skills, not in spite of them.

  “I’m sure you understand then how complicated the intelligence business is, with operations simultaneously unfolding throughout the world. My task is to make sense of all this and provide adult supervision.”

  Dennis kept his gaze on the director, but peripherally he noticed that all sets of eyes were on Dennis, as if he was the critical element in the day’s drama, sitting in a jet on an isolated patch of the runway in an isolated city on an isolated continent.

  “Sir, if you don’t mind, can I ask why I’m here?” Dennis said. “I’m not an employee, and I’m not aware of any reason why we’re having this conversation.” He noticed that all eyes in the lounge now slid to the director as if they were a crowd in the bleachers at a tennis match.

  “Well, they said you were quite direct, and I guess they were right,” Franklin said. “I’m meeting with you because I have a problem.”

  Dennis expected Franklin to continue, but he didn’t. Instead, Simpson suddenly asked Bill and the tall agent to give them some privacy, and he opened the door into the plane’s interior. After they left, Simpson closed the door, sat, and said, “You understand of course that anything that is discussed today is still covered by your oath of secrecy.”

  Dennis did not like being cornered by this sudden legalistic imperative.

  “Cunningham, did you hear me?” Simpson said leaning toward him. “Please acknowledge.”

  Dennis said nothing.

  “Damnit, Cunningham, acknowledge!”

  “It’s OK,” Franklin said raising his hand toward Simpson. “I’m sure we have his understanding on this.”

  “It’s like this,” Franklin said looking out the small window into the darkness, “there was an incident involving someone that is important to the agency. After a comprehensive investigation by Simpson’s group in Operations, it was determined that a foreign country was involved in this incident. The incident was very serious, and typically, in cases like this, we’d authorize a counterstrike against the foreign service. But these things can quickly get out of hand, especially” – here he looked at Simpson – “if we had it wrong about who was involved. Do you get where I’m going with this?”

  “No.”

  Franklin shifted in his seat, folded his hands together in his lap, and for the first time seemed frustrated.

  “Simpson’s group and several other very capable professionals recommend that the agency act aggressively toward another country’s foreign intelligence service. I have the greatest respect, of course, for Operations”—he nodded to Simpson—“but I’m reluctant to approve the action without one more pass at due diligence. I’m not afraid to order the deaths of some foreign nationals, Cunningham, but those deaths will likely lead to the deaths of our agency personnel. It’s a tit-for-tat world, and they’ll come back after some of our people. I want to be certain it’s the correct thing to start, or as certain as anyone can get in this business. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I’m under tremendous pressure to move ahead on this project. It’s very sensitive and has people worried at the agency and elsewhere. The Director of National Intelligence is waiting for my recommendation.”

  Franklin fiddled with his fingers as they rested in his lap. He turned and peered out the small window again into the darkness.

  “What do I have to do with any of this?” Dennis said. “I’m just a tad confused right now.”

  “Ah, the reason is that you might be part of the solution,” he said, reaching for his Diet Coke. “One of my assistants suggested you were good at finding people, or at least finding out what happened to people. I didn’t know we had folks with that kind of special expertise, but we do. You’re the expert I was looking for.” He took a big gulp and smiled at Dennis.

  Dennis laughed. “Me? Didn’t we just agree that I am no longer in the agency? I’m retired.”

  “But you’re perfect for this kind of thing,” Franklin said. “You have no ax to grind, are suspicious about everyone’s motives, I’m told, and come at this with a fresh set of eyes. I need someone just like you to give this investigation one more go. Either confirm or dispute the conclusions that I’m working with. I need more certainty than I have now.”

  Dennis took a small sip of water.

  “Um, thank you for your consideration, but I can’t help you. I’m done with this kind of work. Sorry.” Dennis stood.

  “Please sit down until the director is finished,” Simpson said.

  Dennis sat down.

  “Aren’t you just a bit curious about who recommended you for this job?” Franklin said.

  “No, I could care less.”

  “Well, this person seemed to think you were a natural, especially since you knew the missing person quite well.”

  The drive back to the apartment was quiet except for the swooshing of cars passing by in the night. Judy held Dennis’s arm tightly and except for a moment when he returned to the car, she avoided looking at him. Nevertheless, there was tension in his arm muscles, and she noticed his head pointed straight ahead and never swiveled.

  My God, what did they do to him? she thought. It’s taken ten months for him to decompress, and now, in a matter of minutes, he has that look again.

  The car stopped in front of the apartment, and they got out without exchanging a word with their escorts. Dennis watched the rental car drive off into the night before moving from the sidewalk.

  “What happened back there?” Judy asked.

  “I don’t really want to talk about it,” Dennis said.

  This was the first time that Dennis’s voice was clipped, and Judy did not like it.

  Inside the apartment, they hung up their coats and Dennis immediately went into the kitchen and grabbed the Macallan single malt from the cabinet, put in one ice cube, and poured the amber liquid slowly into the small glass.

  “Dennis,” Judy asked. “Are you going to talk to me? I don’t like this. Can you please l
et me into your life? You haven’t acted like this in a long time.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was caught off guard. Guess I’m still processing everything.”

  “Can you process with me, instead of by yourself?”

  “Technically I’m not supposed to be discussing it.”

  “Dennis!” she snapped. “Stop it. Talk to me.”

  He swirled the glass and watched the lone ice cube slowly circumnavigate its confined space.

  “Do you remember I used to see a therapist?” he said. “I was trying to get over my wife’s death and about a hundred other crappy things that orbited around me.”

  “Yes, but that was several years ago. You stopped seeing the therapist.”

  “Yes, her name was Dr. Forrester. Don’t know if I even remember her first name. Anyway, she was one of the approved therapists that the agency uses. The approved therapists have to get clearance and then meet certain security requirements about storing notes, stuff like that.”

  “So?”

  “Well, Dr. Forrester disappeared on a business trip. The agency is pretty sure they know who grabbed her and why, but the director’s not so sure. Wants someone else to look at it before he authorizes an action plan.”

  Judy frowned and tried to get Dennis to look at her, but he was focused entirely on the amber liquid in the glass.

  “Dennis, the first thing that comes to mind is why in heaven’s name would someone want to nab a psychologist who’s seeing some CIA employees? Doesn’t that seem a little ‘out there’?”

  “Well, there are lots of reasons why some adversary would want to get their hands on her. She knows too much about her patients. She knows their weaknesses, their vulnerabilities, and even their dark secrets. Some of the information could be used to compromise an employee. I know it’s a little strange, but this is a strange business.”

  “Alright, I grant you that she might have some information they’d want, but my other question is: why you? What in god’s name is the director doing enlisting the help of a retired member of the inspector general’s office? There’s something very odd about this.”