Man in the middle sd-6

by Brian Haig

  He asked, "What's going on here, Drummond?"

  What was going on was that I neither needed nor wanted Barry and the police to pursue this investigation any further. For one thing, as I said, this had become personal, and I wanted to take care of it myself. But also, if everything I now suspected panned out, a thousand tons of shit was going to land on anybody involved with this. Though I knew he wouldn't see it this way, I decided to do Barry a big favor.

  "What's going on is not what you think," I lied. "Daniels was suspected of espionage-I told you that. And Bian was a lead investigator. So, yes, they were acquainted before his death. And yes, they spoke over the phone."

  "About something as sensitive as espionage? Over an insecure airwave? Do I look that stupid to you?"

  Actually, Barry Enders was the farthest thing from stupid. Of all the people I had met in this case, he was the smartest, and he had come closest to uncovering the truth.

  Well, on second thought, that made him the second smartest. Bian was the smartest. And Sean Drummond, who had looked over her shoulder every step of the way, was the biggest halfwit.

  Because, here again, Bian had cynically gambled on the government's worst instincts-the institutional infatuation with covering up failures and embarrassments. And, here again, the government came through with flying colors; the Feds were dispatched to quash Enders's investigation and Bian got more of the one thing she desperately needed-time. Time to pursue more leads, time to get to Iraq, time to place the noose around the necks of her targets.

  "Are you out of answers, Drummond?"

  Not yet. I explained, "Bian's assignment was to establish a social connection, to create trust, and see what she could learn about his activities." I added, "They not only spoke over open airwaves, they even met in public places a few times."

  "She never mentioned that she even knew Daniels."

  To me either, Barry. "What can I say? It was a highly classified government investigation."

  "Yeah?" There was a long, dubious pause. Reaffirming my high estimation of him, he said, "I also accessed her phone records and her charge card."

  "So what?"

  "Well… they went on two dates. September 20, a nice dinner at Morton's steakhouse, she had lobster, he had steak, and somebody slurped five scotches and two very expensive bottles of red wine. That came to three hundred big ones. October 15, they attended a ballet at the Kennedy Center-tickets at two hundred a pop." He added, "You know what's really interesting? She booked the reservations on her phone, and she paid both bills. And with cash, not charge."

  "Tell me something I don't know. It's in her expense reports."

  "As a taxpayer, I'm incensed. I saw Daniels's other lady friends. She didn't have to spend a nickel to get this guy."

  "Welcome to our new, kinder, gentler federal policy. We try to send them upriver with a nice memory." I said, "Barry, she's not a suspect."

  He said, with real steel in his voice, "I'm the cop. I say who's a suspect, and I say she's a suspect."

  "Forget about her."

  "Where is she?"

  "Someplace you can't touch her. She's-"

  "The hell I can't. Watch me."

  "… in Iraq and-"

  "A subpoena will fix that. Have her ass on the next-"

  "Shut up… just listen, Barry." He quieted down. "Bian was shot and kidnapped by terrorists two days ago."

  He went quiet.

  I reminded him, "They don't respond to subpoenas."

  He stayed quiet.

  "We all feel bad, Barry. She's a fallen hero. You'll look like an unpatriotic shit if you push this."

  This, obviously, was not what he expected to hear, and for a moment there was a stunned silence. Eventually, he said, "Well, I'm…" Whatever it was he was going to say, he changed his mind and told me, "You know what? If I had a buck for every time you've lied to me, I'd be eating at Morton's."

  "Call the public affairs office in the Pentagon. They'll confirm that she's listed as MIA."

  He promised or, considering the circumstances, threatened to do just that. On that distrustful note we both punched off.

  There was one more loose end, and Phyllis was dangling at the end of it. So I dialed her next and, when she answered on the second ring, I said, "Drummond here."

  She replied, with a note of impatience, "Where's here?"

  "Back." I told her very nicely, "And by the way, thank you for not blowing up my plane. It meant a lot to me. Seriously." I asked, "Did you get my message about Hirschfield and Tigerman?"

  She did not respond to my paranoia, yet could not resist reproaching me about procedural minutiae. She said, "You know better than to leave an electronic message. What if I misplaced the phone, or if I hadn't checked my messages?"

  "They'd be dead. So what? I never liked them anyway. Neither do you."

  "You wouldn't be so cavalier if they were dead."

  "Wouldn't I? There are more where they came from. Arrogant eggheads are a dime a dozen."

  "I don't think I like your attitude." That was the whole point. Phyllis had decided there were things she didn't want me to know that turned out to be things I needed to know. As a lawyer, I expect clients to mislead me and withhold important information, because they are guilty and they want to hide it. So now it was time to learn the source of Phyllis's guilt. She said, "Tell me what that message was about. What exactly is the threat to Tigerman and Hirschfield?"

  "I'm not in the mood." I changed subjects and asked, "Hey, how about those two dead princes? Did your sheik friend freak out or what?"

  "It's very… unfortunate. Turki won't even take my calls. In our business, these deals are supposedly sacred." She added in a tone suggesting I should be very concerned, "The White House is ordering a full investigation."

  "So now we're investigating our investigations. Do you realize how stupid that sounds?" I added after a moment, "You should remind them that investigations don't always turn up results they like. Consider this one."

  She now sensed that Sean Drummond was a problem employee whom she was mishandling. She said in a far friendlier tone, "Sean, come straight to Langley. We're all waiting for you."

  "I don't think so. I'm now the spy out in the cold. Isn't that how you people phrase it?" I added, "I told you to get rid of me. You should've listened."

  "Don't be foolish."

  "I know about it, Phyllis. About the leak, about the soldiers who were killed, and about the Agency's effort to keep a lid on it. I'm not sure it need ever have been hidden. But it shouldn't stay hidden."

  For a moment she said nothing. I had just moved the conversation from the abstract to the specific, and she needed a moment to think about this. She took that moment.

  She asked, "What do you want?"

  Smart lady. "A name. The courier for your exploitation cell."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  I remained silent.

  She asked, "How do you know it was a she?"

  "You're wasting time with stupid questions. I'm three minutes from the Washington Post building-that's two minutes longer than you have to answer. Are we on the same wavelength yet?"

  Long pause again. "Diane Andrews."

  "What happened to Diane Andrews?"

  "Why did anything have to happen to her?"

  "Who's your favorite Post reporter?"

  "Sean, please, let's-"

  "Personally, I'm torn over where the Pulitzer should land-Mideast desk or national desk? Hey, what do you think?"

  "She's dead."

  "Dead how? Heart attack? Another fake suicide? Another skiing accident? What made her heart stop ticking, Phyllis?"

  "No… it was murder. Open and shut."

  "Tell me about the murder."

  "About seven weeks ago, jogging in a park, at night, not far from here, somebody drove a hatchet through her forehead. No fingerprints, and no forensic evidence. Even the footprints were swept clean with a broom. There were some bruises on her arms, suggesti
ve of a slight struggle, and her killer was right-handed."

  "And obviously her killer wasn't caught. Who are the suspects?"

  "There are no suspects. Just theories."

  No suspects? I thought about this. "But you knew it was premeditated and planned, and the killer understood enough about police procedure to clean up the trace evidence. You knew she wasn't an arbitrary victim and you knew it probably was related to her work."

  "Those were our assumptions, yes."

  Except that the killer had made no effort to mislead about the cause of death, this smelled a lot like the murder of Cliff Daniels. But before I made that leap, I needed to know more. I took a stab in the dark and asked, "Had she been tortured?"

  "Yes… no." She said, "Two fingers had been cut off. Her right pinkie and ring finger." She added, "Possibly it was torture. Or, just as possibly, she tried to use her hand to fend off the blow."

  "What did she look like? Physically?"

  "I don't believe this is getting us anywhere."

  "Wow, nice building. I'm cruising the block around the Washington Post. Do you think they'll run my picture? I didn't have time to shave."

  "Stop threatening me."

  "Start telling the truth."

  "All right… she wasn't… she was not overly attractive. Short, about five foot one, chubby, dark-haired, and… Is there a point to this?"

  This was my turn to ask questions, so I ignored her and asked, "So you became worried when you learned she was murdered?"

  "We became… concerned. Sad. Diane was one of our own, Sean. She was a nice person and well liked. Nearly twenty years of good and honorable service."

  "You know what I'm implying."

  "Yes… we considered it. Of course we did. But we weren't married to any particular theories."

  "Tell me about your other theories."

  "Andrews had worked other things, been involved in other sensitive operations. The monsters that haunt us often have long shadows."

  As she had from the start of this thing, Phyllis was parsing and limiting information. Had I known about Diane Andrews in the beginning, I would've understood we were dealing with two connected murders, I would've approached the investigation differently, I would've flipped over different rocks, and maybe I would've found Bian lurking beneath one. But Phyllis had put secrecy above effectiveness, and institutional ass-covering over truth. When you get your priorities wrong, you get bad results, and a pissed-off subordinate.

  I couldn't resist. "Speaking of long, guess who her boyfriend was?"

  Her not having observed Daniels's one memorable anatomical feature, this clue sailed by her.

  "Here's another hint," I told her. "She and her lover are now forever together. In heaven-maybe that other place."

  This clue struck home, because she promptly said, "There was zero indication of that. Mating habits are always probed during polygraphs. Cliff Daniels never came up."

  Interesting phrasing. But during my plane ride, I had given some thought to this mystery, and I asked, "Her murder, did it happen before or after you initiated your leak investigation?"

  "It was… the exact dates, I can't remember… but I think, nearly coincident. Why?"

  "I'll lay you even money the affair occurred after her last polygraph session, and that she didn't live long enough for another one. Check it out."

  "Who told you about this affair?"

  "Does it matter?"

  "Sean, stop acting paranoid."

  "Stop? I should've been this way from the beginning."

  She took a moment to clear her throat, or to turn off the recording machine. "Please come in, Sean. Now. We all want the same thing."

  But that wasn't exactly true. What Phyllis and her boss wanted was to get the Agency off the blameline for the lousy prewar intelligence, with enough ammunition to screw the Pentagon, and enough clout to remain first among beltway equals at a time when Congress was considering a new national intelligence apparatus that might knock their beloved Agency down a few pegs. At least, that was what they wanted at first.

  But once she and her boss learned the scale and breadth of this thing, their appetites swelled. And why not? Handled properly, the President and his political people, who for four years had treated the Agency like a bureaucratic pi-ata, would be made to see the error of their ways. In exchange for four more years, the President would have to do a little penance, his people would have to kiss a lot of Langley butt, and in return, the Director would keep a special file locked in his office safe, labeled "For Emergency Use Only."

  Or alternatively, this President was already so high on Langley's shit list that a contract extension was out of the question-and his competitor would be awakened in the dead of the night by a dark man in a trench coat and handed a packet of interesting information, and Phyllis and the new President would share a victory waltz at his inauguration ball.

  Either way, the Agency couldn't lose. Perfect. What could go wrong?

  Bian Tran could go wrong. Neither Phyllis nor her boss had factored her into the equation. They missed what people in Washington usually miss: the human factor.

  With that thought in mind, I told her, "If you and I wanted the same thing, we wouldn't be where we are." You can't slam down a cellular, so I settled for punching off with my middle finger.

  Now I had another important piece I needed to consider. After Mark's death, Bian had returned from Iraq, mad with pain, grief, and guilt; not emotionally mad, not metaphysically mad-literally mad. And as it so often goes, pain bred anger, fury begat revenge, and revenge meant murder.

  But where to start? That was Bian's question.

  Kemp Chester had said that everybody in the G2 exploitation cell assumed that compromised intelligence-however it had occurred- had caused the death of Mark Kemble. Chester also described Bian as a hunter by both training and natural instinct. For her, finding the betrayer would be child's play because, unlike the jihadis in Iraq, her prey had not a clue they were prey.

  So, Diane Andrews. That was the one name Bian knew-that was where she would enter the trail.

  And as would later happen with Cliff Daniels, Bian tracked down Ms. Andrews, studied her habits, and like a couturier of death, she designed the kill around the victim's lifestyle and vulnerabilities. For Cliff Daniels, this would mean his seedier traits-his drinking, his brazen womanizing, his susceptibility to a fatal seduction. Ironically for Diane, her healthier impulses would be her ticket to hell.

  So, one dark night, while chubby Diane was out jogging, shedding a few of those unattractive extra pounds, in some isolated spot Bian showed up with a hatchet. Nobody uses a hatchet for murder in this day and age. Too savage. Too messy. Plus, from a forensic angle, you get splattered with your victim's blood and brain matter. Bian, a cop, would know this. But on a different level, what could be more primitively satisfying than bashing in your enemy's brains? As an instrument of primal rage, it was the perfect weapon. And if Bian had thought to bring along a broom in her murder kit, surely she included a flashlight to help brush away her tracks, fresh clothing, baby wipes, and a shovel to bury the DNA-enriched evidence in some nearby woods.

  I tried to picture it. Alone together on a dark path, Bian accused her, and Diane desperately denied everything. So strong, quick, athletic Bian pounced, wrestled Diane to the ground-chop-off went one finger-chop-off went a second, and then, with the hatchet hovering, Diane chose confession over further mutilation. So she explained about Iran's broken code, and about her affair with Daniels, and how she might-innocently or not-have exposed this secret to her lover.

  So Bian now had the name of her next kill, Cliff Daniels. And poor Diane had confessed to a crime for which neither tolerance nor leniency were ever in the picture. Plus, for Bian, Diane had become a liability-from her trips to Baghdad, Diane recognized her, Diane would report this terrifying assault to the cops, and Cliff Daniels would evade his retribution.

  Whack-the hatchet in the head took care of that problem.

/>   So there it was. Open and shut.

  Was it persuasive? Yes. Was I convinced? No. Not exactly. But maybe.

  What disturbed me was that image of Bian ruthlessly torturing her suspect. Sweet, funny Bian Tran? Did such a soulless monster lurk behind those warm and intelligent eyes?

  Well, I had watched her shoot four terrorists in the leg without a hint of remorse-that also surprised and shocked me. There's a big difference, though, between squeezing a trigger to wound four men and the close-in, more personal work of lopping off body parts.

  Well, a little difference. Maybe.

  The cabbie was performing an extended monologue, about the weather, about his daughter in college, about college bills, about life, about politics. I tuned him out as, inside my head, I conducted the summary court-martial of Bian Tran, soldier, patriot, almost-lover, and, very possibly, the most ballsy and clever murderer I had ever met.

  I must've been thinking long and hard, because before I knew it, I felt the cab come to a stop and the cabbie said, "Here we are."

  I looked out the window and saw that we were underneath the epic overarch of Dulles International Airport. I paid the cabbie one hundred and twenty bucks, threw in a twenty-dollar tip, and stepped out onto the curb, slinging my duffel over my shoulder.

  It was time to confront Bian Tran and her monsters.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  I passed through the revolving doors and checked the nearest overhead monitor, which showed United Airlines Flight 837 as departing from Gate 48 in Concourse B. From the second cell phone call I had made in the cab, I knew this to be the day's final direct flight for Asia-nonstop to Incheon Airport in Seoul-where, were one so inclined, one could transfer to Asiana Airlines for another destination: Vietnam.

  In fact, my first call from the cab had been to Happy Vietnamese Cuisine, whose proprietor was Bian's mother. I was not surprised when the lady who answered informed me that Mrs. Tran was not in, would not be in tomorrow, and would never be in again. The woman had then confided that Mrs. Tran decided to become Viet Kieu-a Vietnamese member of the diaspora repatriating to her birth country-and that Happy Vietnamese Cuisine had fallen under new management.