Man in the Middle

by Brian Haig

  But maybe it wasn’t all that hard to figure out. It could have been as innocuous as her justifying her frequent absences to Baghdad, or as mundane as her bragging to her lover about her important work, or she mumbled in her sleep, or she sloppily dropped enough clues that Cliff put it together on his own.

  Any or all of these explained how the leak occurred. They did not, however, answer how this courier got past her polygraph sessions. Because, if I believed Phyllis, anybody and everybody involved in this fiasco had been lie-tested so many times that the Agency would know the names of everybody this lady played doctor with in kindergarten, and everybody who hid the pickle in her thereafter. Money, sex, and drugs/booze—these sins are the source of most betrayals, and also these are the things Agency inquisitors show great interest in and never fail to ask about.

  Well, also, there are ego, ambition, and power—consider Cliff Daniels and Don, aka Lebrowski—but if those were disqualifying evils, the only people left in D.C. would be janitors. Maybe.

  Charabi broke into my thoughts and insisted, “I have answered your question. You will now answer mine.”

  “Okay. The major and I were investigating everything about Cliff Daniels, including his bosses, and including you. Plus we have Cliff’s computer, and that’s known inside the Pentagon. So Tigerman or Hirschfield contacted you and told you to find out what Major Tran and I know, and maybe to stop us. Damage control. Right?”

  He laughed; I scooted another few inches forward. He seemed amused by my logic, and he leaned back in his chair and said, “No, this is not right. This is very stupid. Tigerman and Hirschfield stopped talking to me months ago. I am a pariah in Washington.” He laughed again.

  “All right. If you didn’t kidnap the major, who did?”

  “I believe that is your problem, Colonel.”

  “Is it? Then why did she write your name in her blood?” Another short scoot.

  “I really have no idea,” he replied, and we stared at each other a moment.

  I knew this man was a liar and a cheat, and I shouldn’t believe a word that came from his fat lips. Not his denial about murdering Cliff Daniels, or about kidnapping Bian, but I did. That left open the issues of who did kill Cliff and who took Bian, but as he said, that was not his problem; it was mine.

  I mean, he had already confessed he was a liar, that he had betrayed his pals in Washington, and that he was willfully consorting with Iran, our presumptive enemy. On second thought, confession was the wrong word; he was bragging. He was enjoying himself, looking an American officer in the eye and boasting openly and freely about how smart he was, and how deeply and easily he screwed the big, powerful USA, and his enemies in the CIA.

  And why not? He thought he was talking to a dead man. Which reminded me, and I took another short scoot closer to his desk, and to his gun. But he quickly picked up the pistol and asked in a coldly reasonable tone, “Do you really think I am so stupid I haven’t noticed you doing that? Back away.”

  Whoops. I backed away.

  But it seemed our conversation was drawing to a close, because he sort of summarized our situation, saying, “So, you and I, we seem to be at a crossroad. I do not have this major you want, and you have this computer that is very troubling to me.”

  “And you have the gun.”

  “Yes, that also.” He leaned toward me and asked, “If I asked you where this computer is, can I trust you to tell me the truth?”

  “Can I trust you not to shoot me afterward?”

  I saw that his finger was back inside the trigger guard. He was too preoccupied with his own thinking to answer my question—actually, I knew the answer—and he leaned farther forward and began sharing his own thoughts. He said, “Of course, only you and this missing major know where Cliff’s computer is located. Now she has been kidnapped, and of course, this is Iraq—forgive me if this sounds cruel— she is as good as dead.” He paused very briefly and then said, “So . . . if you are dead, too, nobody will find this computer.”

  I was afraid he would put that together. Looking like a man who was happy with his own reasoning, he aimed the pistol at my chest, and his finger began to squeeze.

  I quickly said, “Well . . . maybe I wasn’t completely forthcoming about the computer.”

  The pistol didn’t go down, but neither did it go off.

  I told him, “When I said I have the computer, I meant the Agency has the computer.”

  “So you lied. It is not . . . hidden?”

  “That depends on your definition of hidden.” Actually, it was hidden from me; that’s a pretty good definition.

  He asked, “And what is your definition?”

  “It’s in the possession of my boss, who works directly for the Director. Only three or four people have read the messages, or know about them, including the Director.”

  I was telling the truth, of course, but he looked a little surprised, and also a lot dubious. He asked, “If you lied to me once, why should I believe you now?” Then he answered his own question and said, “I think I will just kill you and take my chances.”

  “I thought you were smarter than that. You know, for instance, that your e-mails were professionally encoded. Do you really believe a couple of Army officers broke that code? It was a real ballbuster.” I tried to remember some of John’s technogibberish, and sort of mumbled, “VPN, and ISP protocols . . . firewalls layered upon firewalls . . .”

  While he mulled this over, I said, “Kill me, and the deal will be off.”

  “You have never mentioned a deal.”

  “Well . . . the idea was that you and I would have a confidential discussion. This whole thing would be kept under wraps, and nobody would be the wiser.”

  He stared at me very intently with his finger caressing the trigger.

  I said, “Why do you think you and I are in here alone? Why did I lock your door? Talk with the agents searching your office—they’ve been told they’re investigating a kidnapping, period. So I go out, tell them you’re free and clear, we go away, and you resume your rise to power.”

  “And why would the CIA consider this a good outcome?”

  “We regard it as a terrible outcome.”

  “Then—”

  “You outsmarted us, Mr. Charabi. We recognize reality.”

  I could see that it made him happy to hear this, and he asked, “And what is this . . . reality?”

  “Discretion is best for you, best for us, and best for Iraq.” I told him the truth, saying, “The Agency and this administration have taken more than enough black eyes over Iraq. The last thing Washington wants is another public scandal. This scandal in particular.” I added, after a beat, “Unless you kill me.”

  “And then?”

  “Good question. Because then . . . well . . .” Because then, well, what? Well, then Sean Drummond would be dead, and who cares what happened afterward? I didn’t say that, of course. As persuasively as I could, I said, “Because the CIA does not like it when you kill one of its own. Right now, it’s professional. You don’t want to make it personal.”

  He needed a moment to reconsider the situation in light of this new variable. Mahmoud Charabi was indeed sly, and also, I thought, a more complex individual than I had been led to believe. As Don— aka Martin Lebrowski—had described, the man was an inveterate schemer, and a brutal and habitual manipulator of truth and people, as well as nations. But what Don missed—what you would expect an egocentric, careerist prick like Don to miss—was that Charabi could self-justify these behaviors as necessary means to a good end, a moral end, a righteous purpose.

  I thought, too, that Charabi truly believed he was the anointed savior of his people, just as he now genuinely believed that he, and he alone, could lead them to the Promised Land. He wasn’t the first man to mix selfless impulses with his own greed for fame and power, and he wouldn’t be the last. And depending on how things worked out, Mahmoud Charabi would have a place in his country’s history books, either as a cherished hero or as a miserab
le flop who overreached and delivered only more death and misery to a land that already had suffered more than enough of both.

  He asked for a war, and he had gotten his wish; I was sure, though, that this wasn’t the war he anticipated—or wanted. I looked at his face as he contemplated what to do with me, and it struck me that, like America, he had assumed that the war would be swift, the victory complete, and with the Pentagon’s backing, he would already be on the throne. As they say, man plans, and God laughs. Now he was jukin’ and jivin’, caught up in a civil war partly of his making, playing one side off the other, dividing powerful governments against each other, dancing on powerful cracks, and praying the tectonic plates did not shift and squash him in the middle.

  This squat, unimpressive-looking man had grabbed a hungry wolf by the ears. And I was sure I did not need to explain to him what would happen if the wolf got loose.

  No, I could not really condemn Mahmoud Charabi for his deceptions, his lies, and his plots; but I could and I did blame those in Washington who wrapped his lies into a nation’s justification for war, and in so doing, allowed his machinations to become ours.

  I looked up and saw that the pistol still was pointed at me. I could almost hear his thoughts—kill me, or not? I was sure Charabi could, and without remorse, if he believed that was best for his people—and best for himself. Just as I would snap his neck if I could only get close enough. He eventually asked, “How do I know I can trust you?”

  If he was smart, he wouldn’t. But I decided to appeal to his kind of logic. “Because we all have dirt we want kept under the rug. Because this administration trusted you, it used your lies to justify this war, and it flew you over here to become the next prime minister. And because now it turns out you played them like gullible idiots, you were and you are working with Iran, and you betrayed us. In the midst of an election, this administration would be destroyed if the public became fully aware of what utter fools they’ve been. Our coalition partners might take a walk, and American public support for this war might evaporate.” I told him, “We would lose, and you would lose.”

  “Ah, but I have already prepared for this.”

  It was my turn to smile, and I said, “Were I you, I wouldn’t be so smug.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “Perhaps your Iranian friends might step up and save the day, or maybe a raging conflict in Iraq is more than they want to bite off, and they’ll take a pass. Then there will be a bloody civil war, and possibly a Sunni victory and another Saddam, in which case I wouldn’t want to be you.” It was time to force the issue and I stood up and said, “Make your choice.”

  This made sense to him; it should, because it was true.

  The pistol came down and he said, “Tell your CIA bosses I have embarrassing secrets about them also. We can burn each other’s houses down.”

  “I understand,” I assured him. “And they understand.”

  I got up and took a few steps toward the door, and he said somewhat weirdly, “You know, Cliff really was my dear friend. I liked him.”

  I turned around. We stared at each other a really long time, then I said, “What you like, Mr. Charabi, you seem to destroy. You killed Cliff as surely as if you had pulled the trigger yourself. And your scheming, lying, and manipulations have done the same thing for your people. They are still being slaughtered by Sunnis, and you are not the man to save them. That said, I truly do wish you good luck.”

  I walked out and closed his office door quietly behind me. I approached Jim Tirey and informed him that this was a bust, that Charabi was not in any way implicated in Bian’s kidnapping, or in the murder of Clifford Daniels, and it was time to clear out. He gave me a look that combined surprise and confusion with annoyance and said, “You told me it was conclusive.”

  “I was wrong.”

  “Wrong . . . ?”

  “He had nothing to do with Bian, or with Daniels’s murder. Sorry.”

  “You’re . . . sorry?” He asked, “And just how do you know this?”

  “Because he had a gun, the perfect legal justification to kill me, and I’m alive.”

  He stared at me for a long time. Eventually, he called his agents into a knot and informed them, “We had bad information. Time to get out of here—now.”

  He opened the door and we began quickly filing out.

  To our common surprise, however, awaiting us in the hallway was an attractive blonde female reporter with a man beside her holding a reflective light, and a second man hefting a camera on his shoulder.

  The reporter was staring at me, though I was sure we’d never met. But in her eyes I was sure I saw recognition, which was odd. Jim Tirey also caught her look, and he stared at me a moment inquisitively.

  Then the light flashed on and the lovely female reporter completely ignored me and stepped forward, directly in the path of Jim Tirey. She stuffed her mike into his face and said, “Inside sources tell us that Mahmoud Charabi is under suspicion of passing vital secrets to the Iranians. Specifically, that we had broken their intelligence code. Could you comment on what your search turned up?”

  Tirey looked at me, and we shared an unspoken thought. He then did something unfortunate and shared that thinking. “Oh . . . shit.”

  So in the interest of getting a more family-friendly comment, the reporter and Tirey tried again, and in true Bureau form, he told her, “No comment.”

  He shoved the mike out of his face and began walking as fast as his feet could carry him down the hallway and out of the building.

  We all walked behind him. The reporter, true to her profession— i.e., a big pain in the ass—jogged along beside us and persisted in peppering us with relevant questions like, “Is Charabi under arrest? . . . Did you find a smoking gun? . . . Who ordered this search?”

  Nobody commented. We all looked like idiots.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Bad news always has company.

  Actually, bad thing number one, the story about how Mahmoud Charabi was suspected of exposing American secrets to the Iranians—including Jim Tirey’s awkward screen debut—was not even the lead event in the news trailers.

  It was almost totally eclipsed by bad thing number two: the shocking tale about the two Saudi princes who were named as financiers for al-Zarqawi, with an interesting sideline about how the Saudi government might be complicitous, and what this might mean for our already troubled relationship. Obviously there had been another leak, and I was sure people in Washington were very unhappy about that. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad thing for the American public to know, but it was profoundly bad news for the two princes, and for Saudi Arabia, and for those in the American government who had colluded in the attempt to cover it up. And, too, it could be very bad for my favorite guy—me. I mean, were I the one searching for the source of these leaks, Sean Drummond would be my number one suspect.

  I caught a little of this second story on one of those obnoxious cable news scream shows in my room in the Visiting Officers’ Quarters. The anchor was interviewing a pissed-off, loudmouth expert on things Middle Eastern, who was haranguing some slick-looking bullshitter sent over from the Department of State to try to defuse this thing. Middle East expert was screaming, “The Saudis are not our friends. Never been our friends. We buy their oil, they buy our terrorists.”

  Anchorman says to Middle East expert, “Aren’t you overstating things?”

  State Department guy answers for him, suggesting, “I would say he definitely is. This is not the occasion for histrionics. Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is very complicated.”

  Middle East expert guy stares with disbelief into the screen. “Complicated? If you pay a whore to bite off your own . . . uh . . . your thing off . . . what’s complicated about that? That’s stupid!”

  Pompous news anchor says, “Please . . . be careful here. Families are watching, and—”

  “We are not ignoring this,” State Department guy interrupts. “The Secretary is in discussions about this with
the Saudi ambassador. We’re requesting the immediate extradition of the two princes.”

  Middle East expert guy laughs and says, “Blah, blah, blah. You know what your Secretary should tell them. We changed our minds. We invaded the wrong pissant—now we’re gonna turn Jidda into a big Wal-Mart.”

  Both guys disappear, and anchorman looks gravely into camera, goes on a bit about what a big deal this is, then closes by noting, “But the big question is . . . what effect these newest revelations will have on the President’s poll ratings in this neck-and-neck race.”

  Which brought up bad thing three. Phyllis was gone, disappeared. She had, however, left behind a brief, perfunctory note addressed to me, that read, “I’ve been called back to Washington. Close out here, then be on the most ASAP flight. Go straight to Langley, and straight to Marcus Harvey of the Office of Professional Ethics, who will brief you about your rights (nonexistent) and then usher you downstairs for your polygraph appointment. Caveat Emptor; sinners fare better than liars.” That could be an excellent new Agency motto, I thought, and below her signature was a brief afterthought: “PS, Truly sorry about Bian.”

  As I mentioned earlier, you have to read between the lines. Since somebody had leaked and blown the whistle on the princes, somebody needed to be screwed, and a screwee—aka, scapegoat—was needed. Since Bian was kidnapped and beyond suspicion, since neither Phyllis nor Tirey had leaked, and since the Saudis hadn’t ratted themselves out, by process of elimination, that left moi. Nor did it matter if they could prove I was guilty or not—I was guilty.

  If blowing your cover is the cardinal sin of this business, exposing nasty secrets to the press is the mortal sin. I had no idea how the Agency handles these things. I know the Army policy, however, and it goes like this: What you can’t kill, you eat. But maybe the Agency had a different approach. Maybe it just killed you.

  Bad thing number four: still no word on the fate of Bian Tran. I had struck out and was out of reasonable suspicions, sensible leads, or even idiotic guesses. It didn’t matter anyway. My name was mud with Phyllis. And because of me, Jim Tirey was on a wanted poster back at Hoover City, and his tour had gone from career-enhancing to career-ending.