Part 18 (1/2)

”Daniels writes like a man who just discovered his wife's s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his brother.”

She ignored my coa.r.s.e a.n.a.logy and asked, ”Do you understand what what you're reading?” you're reading?”

”Do I want to understand?” I replied, half in jest, half not.

She stared at me for a long beat. ”Explanations will come later. Break's over. Sit and finish.”

Phyllis, incidentally, tends to have the patience and forbearance of Job. My own parents, the older they get the less self-restraint they exhibit. I don't mean they wear diapers or drool or anything. But they tend to blurt the first thing that comes to mind. It can be fairly annoying; my mother, for instance, every time she calls, opens with the same tired question, ”Do I have grandchildren yet?” To which I always reply, ”Not with your last name.” Pop thinks this is a riot. Mom's checking into whether it's too late to arrange an adoption.

Anyway, Phyllis seemed uncharacteristically wound up, and maybe a little agitated, and for sure, her patience was wearing thin.

About five minutes later, I heard Bian murmur, ”Holy s.h.i.+t.”

Phyllis replied with some relief, ”Well . . . at last.”

Bian held a page in front of her face, staring at it with open amazement.

She slid the page across the table in my direction. It was from Charabi, and opened with one of his recurring themes, b.i.t.c.hing about the ineptness of American soldiers as occupiers. Halfway down, I read,

So you will see that my situation has become most tenuous and dangerous. My Iraqi s.h.i.+te broth-ers do not trust me. I am being out-maneuvered by Sadr and Sistani for leaders.h.i.+p of the s.h.i.+a people, because I am seen as a cowardly expatriate who escaped the worst of Saddam's years, and now works for the Americans, without proper loyalty to my country. In the streets, I am called an American puppet, a Pentagon lick-toadie, and other names too abominable to repeat. This is all so unfortunate and so terribly shameful. This is a big problem for me, and you must appreciate how this is also a big problem for you, my brother. America is the coun-try of my second love, and truly, I am your best hope for a leader for my country. You once saw this, and I pray you can still see this, yes? I know I am losing of your trust, but look into your heart and still you must see me as a good friend.So I have met with my friends I have earlier de-scribed for you, these Persian people from Tehran who say they do not like Sistani or Sadr. They have friends in the Iranian intelligence service, and have promised me that possibly there can be a trade of information that would be most beneficial to me, to you, and to them. I want to have back your trust, and I am knowing I must provide you something that will put you back into loving embraces with Thomas and Albert.I am sorry for this trouble I have caused you. Although you must remember, it was not me who resulted in these terrible embarra.s.sments of false intelligence and promises that have not come true. It was people I trusted, some of who you equally met and just as well trusted.But my friends in Tehran have information they can give me that they promise will prove of enor-mous value to you--valuable to your soldiers here, but also to you personally, and professionally, my dear friend of so many years.Unfortunately, they insist I must give them something in return, something that in importance is equally great. Alas, this is the land of bazaars-- always there must be something given for some-thing received. So I am leaving to you and your brilliant mind to decide what I can offer these Ira-nian friends. It is bad luck we cannot discuss this on the phone without the big ears of your govern-ment overhearing, but you must believe when I tell you what they are offering is bigger than you can imagine.

Bian handed me a few additional pages, essentially more back-and-forth stuff, as the two men argued about the conditions of this trade. Daniels's messages were furious complaints about how Charabi had already screwed him, ruined his professional reputation, destroyed his career, and how his bosses, Tigerman and Hirschfield, were threatening to fire him unless he salvaged the situation. The sum of Daniels's argument was this: Charabi had gotten him into this mess, and he now owed him a big favor, something dramatic, and in the spirit of dues owed, something unconditional.

I thought Daniels was exposing his desperation, and I thought further that Charabi recognized it, and shrewdly exploited it. With each message back, Charabi stubbornly insisted there had to be a trade, and he cleverly sank the hook a little deeper. Essentially, he promised a piece of intelligence that would make Daniels a big hero, a golden bullet that would result in a huge intelligence coup and restore him to good graces.

I looked up and asked Bian, ”You're familiar with the conditions over there. When were these--”

”Written? Oh, I would guess”--she appeared thoughtful for a moment--”five . . . at most, six months back. Around the time the s.h.i.+te insurgency erupted last spring.”

Phyllis stood up and went to her desk, saying, ”That's about right.” Over her shoulder, she asked us, ”Do you understand the full import of this message?” We indicated we did, and she lifted up a piece of paper and informed us, ”This message won't be found in either of your stacks.” She added, ”Several other messages have been extracted as well. In one, Charabi disclosed to Daniels what he's offering.” She paused, a little theatrically, then informed us, ”He claimed Iranian intelligence had the name and possible location of the key moneyman behind the most lethal wing of the Sunni insurgency. That information would be provided to Daniels only after the Iranians heard what he had to offer. I'm about to show you Daniels's eventual response.”

She handed the page to Bian, who read it, and then slid it across the table to me. It was a brief and unambiguous e-mail from Daniels to Charabi:

Be clear on this--f.u.c.k me, and you're dead. This is not an empty threat. I'm going way out on a limb here. This works, or you're f.u.c.king dead. Simple as that.You insisted on something important, something the Iranians desperately want--so here it is. The National Security Agency has broken the Iranian intelligence code. From the beginning of the war, we've been reading their deepest secrets.I'm sure you recognize how valuable this infor-mation is to them. And I'm sure you know what would happen to me, and to you, should anybody find out where this came from.

Somebody had taken a Magic Marker and blacked out, or in Agency terminology, redacted, the next ten or so lines. I wondered about those pa.s.sages I wasn't seeing. Sometimes that's done when a vital source needs to be protected; more often it means the inst.i.tution needs to be protected, by hiding an embarra.s.sment or screwup. I wish I could do that with parts of my life.

Bian was staring at the top of the conference table. Sounding deeply stunned, she blurted, ”Do you realize what this b.a.s.t.a.r.d did?” Phyllis obviously did. We all did. Treason. To save his sinking career, Cliff Daniels had conveyed a huge and damaging secret to an enemy nation. I wasn't sure I understood everything, nor did I have the expert knowledge or regional expertise to fully a.n.a.lyze it. But I understood this: In exchange for the name of a terrorist, Clifford Daniels had exposed to Charabi, and thereby to the Iranians, the knowledge that we were reading and decoding their most sensitive communications. On top of everything, this wasn't even a good trade. I mean, Cliff Daniels not only was a traitor, he was stupid.

But instead of replying to Bian's question, to me Phyllis said, ”Now, give me back that page.”

So I did, positive it would never again see the light of day.

n.o.body said anything for a moment. We were all three, I think, too stunned and completely consumed in our own thoughts.

Regarding Phyllis, I had no idea what thoughts were running through her mind. But I had a premonition, or, considering the circ.u.mstances, a postmonition, that Phyllis knew when she sent me to Daniels's apartment that morning it might lead to something like this.

Maybe not exactly like this. But something.

As for Bian, I was sure she was thinking what I was thinking. Clifford Daniels was lucky; somebody beat us to him. By the time we finished lumping him up, a bullet through his brain would've been an act of leniency.

Phyllis stood and walked toward the door. She said, somewhat ominously, ”There is somebody here who can explain all this to you,” and then she walked out.

Normally, when you have a crime, through exacting detective work, the miracles of modern forensics, and pathology, you work backward, from the aftermath to the crime itself; you reconstruct, a.n.a.lyze, and reconnect the evidentiary traces, because the parts have to be made whole again, because that whole is a human ident.i.ty--a name--the person whose fingertips left the telltale stain, whose skin is embedded in the fingernails of the victim he shoved off the balcony and sent caterwauling down twenty floors onto the pavement below.

But when the crime is bureaucratic in nature and origin, you have a different species of criminal, with a different genre of evidence. To get from A to Z, you follow a different arc--less linear--more M to Z, then full circle back to A to M. In place of a corpse, and in place of forensic traces, you have a long trail of paper, words, thoughts, and expressions that, when added together, expose a deed--a crime.

So Bian and I now knew the category of the crime, the ident.i.ty of the criminal, and we even had a roughed-out portrait of the motive: treason, Clifford Daniels, idiocy fueled by naked ambition. Also a murder remained to be solved, though that suddenly looked like the least of our problems, though it was also, quite possibly, a related one.

Some sins are larger than others, no matter that they violate the same commandment. Thou shalt not kill--all its varying shades and distinctions are defined, pa.r.s.ed, and echeloned in the criminal code; murder in the first degree, murder in the second, murder in the third, criminal manslaughter, and right down the line. Yet when a killing is part of a holocaust, when it is a piece of a whole, one of thousands or one of millions, none of these terms fit--they become too tolerant, too morally shallow, too belittling.

Such appeared to be the case here. Bian knew this, and I, too, knew it; like Alice peering into a rabbit hole, we had just glimpsed the fool in a crazy hat, and clearly somewhere, Tweedledum and Tweedledee and a Ches.h.i.+re Cat were pounding the drums. I stared at Phyllis's empty chair and wondered about the crazy queen's role in all of this.

Bian s.h.i.+fted in her seat. ”Okay, I am starting to feel paranoid.”

”Do you want out?”

”No. Do you?”

”Yes. But it's too late.”

After a moment, she asked in a whispery voice, ”What about Phyllis . . . can I trust her?”

”Absolutely not.”

She stared at me. ”Do you trust her?”

This was a different question and I replied, ”Sometimes.”

”Do you trust her this time?”

”Her agenda and ours might not be the same.”

”Why?”

”Because there's bad chemistry between this administration and the CIA. You've probably read the gossip and rumors in the newspapers.”

”I have.” She took a moment to think about this.

I gave her that moment, then said, ”You know about the hunt for blame over who failed to prevent 9/11, and you know the White House and the Pentagon laid it on the Agency's doorstep. Now the Hill is investigating how flawed Iraqi intelligence made it through the net.

The administration's already shoving the blame here. So is the Pentagon. Langley is p.i.s.sed.”