Man in the middle

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Jim Tirey kindly gave me a lift to the airport.

As I mentioned earlier, the route from the Green Zone to the airport includes Iraq's deadliest roadway-known with grim unaffection as Suicide Alley-so Jim's favor wasn't in the true spirit of generosity. He wanted to see me climb on the plane, and be 100 percent sure I ended up seven thousand miles out of his hair. Really, who could blame him?

We pulled up before the terminal, and Jim pulled up to the curb and slammed the SUV into park. I went around to the rear, withdrew my duffel, and looked around for a moment. The hour was late, yet the terminal was crowded and bustling with soldiers; from their gleeful expressions, they all were outgoing, not incoming. This was the first place I'd been inside this troubled land where people looked happy, and maybe the only place where they were sure tomorrow would be a rosier day. Tirey came around and we ended up, face-to-face, on the road.

He said, "Enjoy the flight."

I said, "Enjoy Iraq."

"Hey, my bags are already packed. Any day now, the long arm of OPR-that's the Office of Professional Responsibility, our Gestapo- will have me on a plane back to D.C. for a long discussion about how this shit went down."

"D.C. is filled with idiots," I told him. He gave me a blank stare and I explained, "They think it's a punishment to boot you out of here."

He laughed.

During the drive, we had stuck to the kind of aimless chatter that did not distract us from identifying vehicular bombers who wanted to send us home in a box. There are no leisurely drives in Iraq, incidentally. If I haven't mentioned it, the place sucks. But we both knew there was a big piece of unfinished business, and I asked, "What have you heard from the Bureau?"

"Not a word… officially. I've got a pal in the Director's office, though."

"And?"

"He says I'll love Omaha, and Omaha will love me. Lots of free time, very quiet, very law-abiding citizens. It's impossible to screw up there."

"Hey, maybe there's a CIA station in Omaha. We'll get together. You know, prove them wrong." This prospect for some reason did not seem to excite him, so I offered him a synopsis of Drummond's Law. "Somebody else will screw up soon, and you'll be forgotten."

"Hey, I'm a big boy. I don't need-"

"Seriously. They'll send you someplace else that really sucks before you know it."

"I don't think so." He added, miserably, "That video of me with the reporter… they've sent it to the FBI Academy as a training aid for new agents. I'm famous."

I smiled at him, and he smiled back. A few seconds late.

Then came an awkward moment, and we stared into each other's eyes. He finally asked, "Did you do it?"

"Did you?"

He stared at me. "I saw that look the reporter gave you. I told Phyllis about it, too."

"No, I did not leak," I told him. He looked skeptical, however, and I told him, "I have an appointment with the inquisitor the moment I land-thumbscrews, rack, lie detector, the works. I'll be sure they send you the results."

"Do that." He smiled and said, "Tell them to ask what you really think of me."

"You… you don't really want them to ask that."

"Right… well…" He stuck out his hand and we shook.

I told him, "Keep looking for Tran."

"I'll do better than that. I'll even leave a memo for my replacement."

"Look me up when you get to town."

He laughed. "You know what, Drummond? I like you. I don't know why, but I really do. And if I ever see you again, I'll shoot you."

Leaving him at the curb, I carried my duffel inside and went straight to the Military Air Transport counter, where a young Air Force enlisted person, cute and perky, stood buffing her nails. I said, "Good evening, Airman Johnson. I need a small favor."

Air Force people are actually misplaced civilians, loose, jocular, with manners more befitting a college fraternity than an armed service. Army people, on the other hand, tend to exemplify the military mind-set, totally tightassed about trivial minutiae, and really into the yes sir/no sir funny business. So, as much as Air Force types grate on Army people, I can only imagine how they view us. Anyway, the young lady in question stopped swiping her nails for a moment and offered me one of those synthetic airline smiles. "Sure."

"I'm supposed to meet a friend here. We seem to have misplaced each other."

"Well… that can happen."

"Her name's Bian Tran… T-R-A-N. I was wondering if she caught an earlier flight."

"Hold on." She shifted her attention back to the computer, and I held my breath as she punched in Bian's name, and then said, "Wow… did you two get your signals crossed."

If only she knew.

"She flew out at eleven this morning," she continued. "She's long gone."

Gone, perhaps. But not abducted. Not dead. And not forgotten- at least not by me. What had been a suspicion, an ugly theory, now was a confirmed fact. Not a surprise, though.

The right and proper thing to do was immediately notify Phyllis about my suspicions and seek her instructions. But Sean Drummond wasn't in the mood to do that. Phyllis was playing her own game, and I still wasn't sure what that game was called. No, I did not trust her, and I definitely did not want to appoint her judge and jury. Besides, what could she, or what could the Agency do that Sean Drummond could not do?

Well, an all-out manhunt was one possibility. Except the law enforcement community would never move on that without first demanding a valid legal justification from the Agency. And Phyllis would never do that, because exposing what Bian had been doing would also expose what the Agency had been doing, which would be like grabbing a shark's fin to save yourself from drowning-only the shark goes home happy.

Which left option two, termination, which with these people means losing a little more than just your job. Certainly, the stakes were high enough. Plus, Bian already was listed on Army rolls as missing in action and presumed to be in the hands of murderous terrorists, so it was really convenient for everybody. But would Phyllis do that? Phrased differently, why wouldn't Phyllis do that? Could I live with myself if I gambled no and yes happened?

Besides, for me this had become personal. I still had no idea what was really going on, but I knew this: Phyllis and Bian had both used me as a pawn for their own ends. Right now they both thought I was still Stupid Sean, totally clueless and in the dark. Wrong. I was now Totally Pissed-Off Sean. I was going to get to the bottom of this if it killed me-which it might.

So I thought back to what the young airman had just told me. Bian had caught an eleven o'clock flight. Tirey, his handpicked crew, and I had entered Charabi's Green Zone office at nine, and we exited with our tails between our legs some thirty minutes later. An hour and a half after that, Bian climbed on an airplane and blew town. Was there a coincidence? Or if I asked the same question differently, was there a connection between our raid on Charabi's office and Bian's decision to fly the coop? I don't particularly believe in coincidences, incidentally.

What I needed to do now was to reconstruct her actions, to work backward and consider what had occurred, to start at Z and find my way back to A. Because my only hope of finding Bian, and of stopping her, was by understanding what she had done. And from there, with a fertile imagination and a little mental elbow grease, how and why.

So, what was Z? Well, that would be the odd look the blonde female reporter gave me as we exited Charabi's office. I had never seen her before-I was sure of it-so it wasn't that she recognized my face, per se; it was the Drummond on my nametag that was familiar to her, because whoever had tipped her off about our raid on Mahmoud Charabi's office had also informed her that I would be there.

And I would bet that if I could go back and have a word with that reporter-if I could make her breach her journalistic omerta code- she would confirm that her source was Bian Tran.

And if I stepped back from that moment a few hours more in time, to earlier that morning, I would bet as well that Bian was that mysterious voice who, speaking Arabic, had called and anonymously alerted the MP Operations Center to the location of an abandoned and bloodstained Toyota SUV.

And earlier, there was that moment in the dining facility when Bian had insisted on driving alone to Baghdad, and then, despite orders, chose to depart without me.

Right. She had to be alone to stage her own ambush and kidnapping, and then to disappear into the streets she knew so well. She was a military cop, and she knew how abandoned U.S. military vehicles are processed and handled. So she deliberately planted the necessary documents to lead the MPs to Camp Alpha, as well as a bloody clue on the dashboard that would lead Sean Drummond straight to Mahmoud Charabi.

I wondered if she had found a concealed spot to observe us as we entered Charabi's office. Probably she did. I would.

But everything-her plan and her escape-depended on first creating, then sustaining and shielding the misbelief that she had been kidnapped. Which explained, I thought, what she had been doing during the days she supposedly was trysting with Mark in Baghdad- locating an AK-47 automatic rifle to shoot holes in her SUV, filling a medic's bag with her own blood, which she could splatter around the cab of the SUV, and scoping out where she would leave the ambushed SUV-arranging both the pantomime of her disappearance and the logistics for her escape.

"Excuse me…" the airman said, "I asked, is there something else?"

"Uh… where will she land?"

"Went to-" she again examined the screen, "-Dover Air Force Base."

"Thanks." I picked up my bag and shoved off to Gate 6 for my flight.

Not only had Bian taken a military flight, she had even used her own name on the manifest. This was so in-your-face, I should've been amazed. I wasn't, though-that's why I had asked. She was confident that she had fooled us all, and she knew that nobody was going to cross-check the flight manifest for a soldier who only that morning was listed on Army rolls as MIA. But this suggested more than confidence, this suggested a lady in a hurry.

As the MP at the terminal gate checked my orders I checked my watch. My partner had a ten-hour head start on me. But she would land at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, from where it would require two or, with luck and/or typical Washington traffic, possibly three more hours to drive to D.C. My flight would land at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, only thirty minutes from D.C.

I would cut her lead by at least two hours. No longer would I mischaracterize Bian Tran, nor would I underestimate her. Still, I had only a dim idea what was going on here, and I wasn't sure what she had planned next, or even if she had more plans.

I knew where to look, though.