Color Of Blood (44 page)

Barkley looked confused.

“He went AWOL because he discovered an illegal and unauthorized operation that the Agency was conducting to funnel rare earth metals to Iran in exchange for that country’s help in pulling back on their support of Shiite jihadists in Iraq.”

Dennis had practiced his one-sentence elevator pitch for the powerful Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee while waiting, and he was pleased at how smoothly it was delivered.

“I’m sorry, but what is your name again?” Barkley said, leaning toward Dennis.

“Dennis Cunningham, senior investigator in the CIA Office of Inspector General.”

“Are you here at the behest of the IG?”

“No, sir,” Dennis said. “I’m here at the behest of me. I just thought you and the Intelligence Committee would like to know about this program before the only two people who are in a position to tell you about it disappear from the face of the earth, sir. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, I doubt you know about this program.”

Barkley sat up in his leather chair, its brass tacks shining brightly like rows of Christmas lights in the glare from the huge window.

“This is an awkward conversation, Mr. Cunningham,” Barkley said. “I don’t know who you really are, whether you’re wearing a recording device, or having mental health problems.”

“That’s a negative on both questions,” Dennis said.

They looked at each other. The congressman sat perfectly still in his chair, and Dennis noticed that it looked like he was hardly breathing.

“Mr. Cunningham, I’m going to note my conversation with you, and then I’m going to share it with the IG’s office. You, more than anyone, must understand how these things are handled. This is an out-of-channel conversation that I’m uncomfortable with. You understand that?”

“Of course,” Dennis said. “But I felt like someone outside of the Agency should know about this program.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Cunningham.” He reached for his phone and dialed an extension.

“Bill, could you please come in here and escort Mr. Cunningham out of the office?”

***

He walked slowly away from the Rayburn Building down First Street SW and toward the National Mall. It was a chilly spring day, and he felt a cool northerly breeze against his face and neck as he walked past street vendors selling American flags, plastic busts of presidents, as well as countless postcards and cast-metal, miniature Washington Monuments. After twenty minutes of walking, he slowed near the Natural History Museum and sat on one of the empty benches on the Mall.

His cell phone rang, and he reached in his pocket.

“Hey, Marty,” Dennis said.

“You need to get back here ASAP,” Marty said. “Massey has scheduled a meeting with you at one thirty this afternoon in his office. You have to be there, or they’ll send people out to get you. Do not, under any circumstance, do anything other than be in Massey’s office at one thirty. Whatever the fuck you did, it’s very serious.”

“I’ll be there,” Dennis said.

“For the record, you are a Class A train wreck, Cunningham,” he said.

***

He arrived at Massey’s office at 1:15 p.m. and was told to take a seat in the small waiting room. Dennis bided his time by looking at an old copy of
US News & World Report
.

After ten minutes he was ushered into the huge office. Massey and two other men were already there. The weasel-faced assistant, that followed his master everywhere, sat to Massey’s right; another man Dennis had never seen before sat to his left.

The secretary left and closed the door behind her. Dennis sat in the only chair remaining; it was positioned directly in front of Massey’s desk. The three men stared at Dennis; Dennis stared at them. An ornate clock on a shelf behind the three men
tick, tick, ticked
.

Dennis’s normal operating style, of course, was never to talk first, but this situation was different.

“So,” Dennis started, “I don’t have the pleasure of meeting the man sitting to your left.”

“That would be Dr. Norris,” Massey said.

“A medical doctor?” Dennis asked.

“Yes,” Massey said. “A psychiatrist.”

“There’s no telling who will show up next in your office,” Dennis said. “Maybe the Rolling Stones?”

“Very funny, Cunningham,” Massey said.

“Maybe I’m just nervous,” Dennis said. “It’s been a long, strange trip since you sent me looking for Garder six months ago.”

“Indeed it has,” Massey said, “for all of us.”

“I know that you’ve been running an illegal and dangerous program that is certain to get the Agency into very hot water once Congress finds out. That’s why you wanted Garder found.”

Massey, Dennis noticed to his credit, did not blink once or show the slightest flicker of distress.

Massey put his hands on the desk and interlaced his fingers together, dropped his eyes, and just for a moment, Dennis thought he was going to pray.

“How long have you been feeling depressed?” Massey said.

“Who says I’m depressed?”

“Weren’t you on sick leave for half the year because of depression?”

Dennis shifted in his chair.

“I’ve been back to work for a while. Who said I’m depressed?”

“How long have you been having suicidal thoughts?” Dr. Norris said.

“The only time I get suicidal is when I talk to doctors like you,” Dennis blurted. “That was a joke. Massey here is getting on my nerves, so I’m a little edgy.”

“Are you always this angry?” the doctor said.

“Who said I’m angry?”

Dr. Norris stared at Dennis.

“And you knew Garder was faking his death all along,” Dennis said to Massey. “I was just sent there to close the official file on him and get the congressman and Garder’s parents to stop squawking. Meanwhile, you were trying to find the guy before he went public with what he found.”

“Your medical file shows that you talked openly about your suicidal feelings with your therapist,” Dr. Norris said in a calm and authoritative tone.

“So?” Dennis said. “That was a while ago.”

“Your file shows that you’ve had a history of erratic behavior, including belligerence directed at superiors.”

“About eighty percent of Agency employees are belligerent to their superiors on any given day,” Dennis said.

“Your file also shows that you experienced a severe childhood trauma,” Dr. Norris said.

Dennis felt like someone had just turned his chair sideways. He tried to collect himself by focusing on a maroon ballpoint pen in Massey’s shirt pocket. For the first time since entering the room, he felt warm.

“Isn’t that true, Mr. Cunningham?” the doctor persisted.

Dennis stared at Massey’s pen.

“You were raised in Chicago, right? Your father was a Chicago police officer, correct?”

Dennis kept staring at the pen, trying to figure out whether the color was actually maroon or a dark red.
Actually,
he thought,
maybe it was ocher
.

“When you were ten years old, you came home from school one day and found your mother dead on the living-room floor. Isn’t that right? She had been shot in the head by your father. You found him in the kitchen, according to the police report, with a fatal gunshot wound to his temple.”

Dennis slowly bit the inside of his cheek and stared at the ballpoint pen. The clock ticked loudly on the mantel, and Massey shifted in his seat.

“So you’ve been depressed for a long time, isn’t that right, Cunningham?” Massey said. “It’s quite unfortunate what happened to your family; you being the only child and all. Raised by an aunt and uncle in Minnesota: very sad state of affairs. And you’ve suffered a lot lately with your wife’s passing. It’s understandable how depressed a person can be in those circumstances.”

The weasel-like man next to Massey stirred slightly in his seat and scratched the top of his head.

“We’d like you to turn in any firearms you have in your possession,” Massey said. “We have your Agency-issued handgun, but our records show you also have possession of a Glock 17 handgun that you purchased at a sporting goods store two years ago in Virginia. We believe it would make sense, given the circumstances, for you to volunteer your weapon.”

Dennis was already at the door, turning the knob, when Massey said loudly to great effect, “It’s for your own wellbeing, Cunningham.”

***

He was furious that he had not driven to work that day and had to wait twenty minutes at the front desk for another cab.

He had the cabbie drive him back to the National Mall and ordered him to stop near the Science and Technology building. Dennis told the cabbie to wait while he bought a Diet Coke from a street vendor. He sat on a bench under a bus stop awning and watched the tour buses and cars crawl by.

Dennis liked being around tourists sometimes. They seemed so innocent, patriotic, and earnest. It was refreshing.

The cabbie honked his horn at Dennis to show his irritation at having to wait.

Dennis held up his forefinger suggesting just one more minute.

Dr. Forrester had warned Dennis that his unwillingness to deal with his father’s murder-suicide, which had happened nearly forty years ago, had turned his life into “a stilted, venomous existence.” Martha’s passing made it more important for him, Dr. Forrester said, to start examining that dark corner of his family life. She even encouraged Dennis to tell his daughter about it as a way to start the cleansing process.

And now, out of the blue, Massey had done what no other Agency official, including Marty, had done in all his years there—bring the subject up directly. Once or twice Marty had made small, glancing references to his childhood, but had never pressed the details or requested an answer.

Who in their right mind would want to remember a murder-suicide by his father forty years ago
? Dennis thought.

In fact, he could only remember two things about that day: his mother lying sideways on the beige carpet, the clothes hamper on the couch full of freshly folded clothes. A huge pool of dark-red blood had collected near his mother’s mouth. The shape of the pool looked like the bubble you’d see next to a comic-book character with words drawn in it. The other thing he remembered was that his father’s face was twisted as he lay back in the kitchen chair after shooting himself. Because of the angle of the shot and strange muscular contortion, in death his father looked like he was sneering.

Dennis had talked to Dr. Forrester about feeling depressed, and it was she who brought up the issue of suicide. Dennis had simply responded, “Maybe.”

He had agreed to have Dr. Forrester’s files reviewed by the Agency’s medical staff before returning to work but was naïve, in retrospect, to think that they’d know how to treat that interchange.

He finally stood up and got back into the cab; thirty minutes later, he was unlocking his front door.

The late-afternoon light slanted through the house windows, giving it a cathedral-like feel: cavernous, dank, and musty. He hung his suit coat on the kitchen chair, pulled off his tie, and threw it on the kitchen table. He felt agitated and confused. He opened a bottle of beer and turned on the TV, something he rarely did.

The channel was set to CNN, and he numbly watched a reporter from Iraq detail the sudden drop in violence against American soldiers.

He put his feet up onto the coffee table and on top of a book. The book slid a little, and he pulled his feet down and looked at it.

It was the War Poetry hardcover that he had purchased in Australia. He put down his beer, leaned over, grabbed the book, and opened it to a bookmark that he had made from an American Airlines ticket stub.

Dennis’s eyes fell to the third stanza of the Wilfred Owen poem titled “Insensibility” that he found himself returning to from time to time. He read:

Happy are these who lose imagination:

They have enough to carry with ammunition.

Their spirit drags no pack.

Their old wounds save with cold can not more ache.

Having seen all things red,

Their eyes are rid

Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.

He closed the book and set it down.

I’m not rid of the hurt of the color of blood,
he thought.
Blood has followed me my entire stupid life and I can’t escape it. I’m drowning in it.

And blood was following him now, at least it seemed that way. Something strange had gone on in Massey’s office earlier that day. It wasn’t merely the uncomfortable facts of his childhood, or the mention of his medical records. Massey was doing something, but what was it? It gnawed at him like a beetle boring into his brain.

The clues,
he thought.
Stay focused; just pay attention to the clues. Forget the distracting crap in your life he was digging up.

Why had Massey pulled the psychiatrist into the meeting? Why did he keep harping on his depression and talk of suicide? And when Massey had brought up the one subject he could not deal with—his father’s murder-suicide—Dennis had bolted from the room, looking, he guessed, like a crazed, depressed man.

Wait,
Dennis thought:
like a crazed, suicidal man
.

Dennis had bolted from Massey’s office to . . . to do what?

Jesus,
Dennis thought,
to kill himself
.

Dennis would have appeared angry, depressed, and capable of suicide to Dr. Norris.

A TV commercial droned on in the background, and Dennis reached for the remote and turned off the set. The old TV tube crackled as it went black. The compressor in the refrigerator started up, and Dennis listened to it drum on. He felt his heart racing, and he took a huge gulp of beer.

The scene was perfectly set for that evening; Dennis was going to kill himself with his personal handgun. He was distraught, depressed, and suicidal. Three Agency officials had witnessed his meltdown. It was perfect, really. If he weren’t so startled, he might have smiled out of admiration for Massey.

Dennis fought a furious pitched battle with his paranoia; was he crazy to think Massey would concoct something so outrageous? Was he losing his mind?