"I can get you your own beer," I told her. "The owner has a big crush on me."

She laughed. And then we found ourselves staring into each other's eyes.

I broke eye contact first--somebody had to before this turned complicated.

Obviously, she and I, somehow, were becoming intimate. There was a natural sensuality to this woman, an unconscious s.e.xuality that I was very conscious of.

The Army, unique inst.i.tution that it is, has managed, through bureaucratic dictates and brute legal force, to quell or repress nearly all of the flawed human compulsions and quirks, from social inequalities, to racial and religious intolerance, to the inbred American inclinations toward indiscipline, laziness, and disobedience. Send us your bigots, your sn.o.bs, your slovenly punks; we will unkink their screwed-up heads and return to you a model citizen, an individual of tolerance, good citizenship, and self-discipline--or a fairly convincing fake.

Yet the attraction between the s.e.xes has eluded even the Army's most Orwellian programs and mind games. Here we are, some thirty years after the congressional order imposing the integration of the s.e.xes, and there still is rutting within the ranks, affairs between married officers and their spouses, s.e.xual favoritism, s.e.xual blackmail, voyeurism, rape, and every other imaginative act two or more h.o.r.n.y people can conceive of. The modern battle dress uniform, baggy and shapeless as it is, is as aphrodisiacal as a knee in the groin; yet the fevered male imagination fills in the blanks and primitive impulses take over.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I knew I was attracted to her; for some reason, I think she found me attractive as well. Of course, I don't like to make a move on somebody else's lady. Relationships are hard enough without complications. That's not an ironclad thing, though.

I draw the line, however, when her beau is serving our country, in uniform, overseas, battling our enemies in a theater of war. I do this as a patriotic gesture. After all, the least the home front can do is keep our hands out of their ladies' undies. Also, the fiance has a gun, and knows how to use it.

Apparently Bian also recognized we were on thin ice, because she immediately shifted the conversation back to safer ground. She broke eye contact for a moment, then said, "Why did America lose the will to keep fighting in Vietnam? Fifty-eight thousand Americans dead. Hundreds of thousands horribly wounded."

"Because somebody finally asked, why make it fifty-nine thousand dead?"

"Still . . . that's a large down payment. How could you walk away from it?"

"That's a question we're still trying to answer. I think you know that."

"The answer is important."

"For you, maybe. For most of us, the war ended thirty years ago. The dead are mourned and buried, and the survivors have their monument." I added, "For most Americans, it's a brief and confusing chapter in a long history book."

"That's a shallow answer."

"Good. I'm a shallow person."

She put down her fork and stared at me. "You are not. I've known you only one day, but . . . you're deeper and more perceptive than you act."

"Eat your fish."

She smiled. "Hey, I didn't call you sensitive."

"That's why you're still alive."

She finished off my beer. I popped the second can.

She said, "I was on the other end of that decision. It cost my father his life. It nearly killed my mother. Look around you--see what it meant for her future."

"Is she happy?"

Bian repeated my question, and then seemed to contemplate this for a long moment. "She opened a Vietnamese restaurant, and after nearly thirty years she barely speaks English. What does that tell you?"

"She doesn't want to die here."

"She misses her own people. Her sister runs an orphanage outside Ho Chi Minh City. My mother and I send every penny we can spare. The boy . . . the one who's helping her, that's where he's from."

"And are you bitter?"

"I . . . no. I'm the good immigrant story. I've adapted to America, and America adopted me." Apparently enough said about this, because she changed the subject again and asked, "About Iraq, though. Could history repeat itself?"

"Why should it?"

"Well, there are obvious similarities . . . historical a.n.a.logies."

I reached over and took my beer out of her hand. "Every war is different. The only similarities are that they all suck, and good people get killed."

"That's too simplistic."

"Not if one of those dead people is you, or someone you love."

"You know what I'm talking about. A lot of people believe we went to Iraq on false pretenses, that the government lied, that this war has lasted too long, too many casualties . . . clearly things haven't gone as predicted or antic.i.p.ated. It was sold as short and simple. It's complicated and b.l.o.o.d.y. That sounds a lot like Vietnam, doesn't it?"

"That was then, this is now. That was a different time, a different world, a different America. The country was at war with itself--black versus white, young versus old, the establishment against the new order. A messy foreign war was one more than we could handle."

I had the sense this was more than casual banter, and she confirmed that, asking, "What if we find that Clifford Daniels did something really bad? Something really stupid?"

"Like what?"

"I have no idea. But look what he was involved with. As you mentioned earlier, consider where he worked, and who he worked with." She took back my beer and drained it. She handed me the empty can. "This case makes me nervous."

"This case is making a lot of people nervous. We'll find what we find, and let the chips fall where they may. It's not our job to calculate or curb the political fallout."

"Are you sure you're right?"

Before I could answer, my cell phone went off. I pulled it from my pocket and answered. It was Phyllis, who, without any preamble, informed me, "Get over here right away."

"Where's here?"

"My office. The decoded transcripts have arrived." She drew a heavy breath. "It's . . . it's worse than we imagined."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Bian trailed behind me in her car, a cute little green Mazda Miata-- Maseratis for poor chicks. I turned on the radio and listened to the 8:00 p.m. news update.

The newscaster spooled off the results of the latest poll for the upcoming presidential election, just over a week off and picking up steam fast. This poll, like the ten polls that preceded it, showed a nation more or less evenly divided, and an election too close to predict.

A smug blabberperson for the President came on the air and described the poll numbers as a stunning victory for his camp, because after nearly four years his boss had only managed to p.i.s.s off half the electorate.

The contender's equally self-a.s.sured spokesperson used his equal time to proclaim a signal triumph for his man, as, even after two years of energetic campaigning, half the electorate still did not realize what a complete stinker he was.

Though it's possible I paraphrased their words incorrectly.

What I thought it showed was a margin so thin that the smallest political fart could blow the election either way. I wondered if the big guy in the Oval Office had yet been notified about the death of Clifford Daniels--probably yes and probably, somewhere in the White House bas.e.m.e.nt, unsmiling people were burning the midnight oil.

The next news item was casual and succinct: A car bomb went off in Karbala, a Shiite city south of Baghdad, with sixty dead and more than thirty wounded. Somewhere else, north of Baghdad, three U.S. Marines were killed by a roadside bomb. Then we rushed into the weather--chilly and wet for the foreseeable future--which accorded with what I could see through the windshield, and with my mood.

Regarding the discussion a few minutes before, it struck me that I, too, had become inured, even blase, toward these recurrent reports of death and destruction in Iraq. It's a little like Chinese water torture-- either you ignore the incessant drumbeat or it drives you nuts.

But for Bian, who had served there, who had lost soldiers there, whose fiance was serving there, her emotional investment was bigger--for her, detachment wasn't an option. Nor was it for several hundred thousand other families and loved ones who would spend the next few days cowering each time the doorbell chimed, fearing the sight of a Jarhead officer on their doorstep, delivering the tragic news that one of the dead Marines shared their surname.

Anyway, when we arrived, Will and John were lounging in Phyllis's office. As was a third gent, whose mother must've been acquainted with Will's dad--their resemblance was scary.

Phyllis introduced us to this new gentleman, whose name was Samuel Elkins, from the NSA Office of External Support, whatever that means.

Samuel--not Sam, he stipulated--spent a few moments explaining to Bian and me what he did for a living. Who cared? He eventually suggested, "Why don't we all sit, and I'll go over what we found."

We all sat.

In the middle of the conference table were two imposing stacks of paper, about three inches thick each. A third stack was in front of Phyllis, which, from the bent and misaligned edges, had already been read and digested. But before Bian or I were allowed to indulge our curiosity, we had to go through the usual obligatory self-congratulatory claptrap.

Samuel summed it up, telling us, "The point is, you were lucky. The code on Daniels's computer is one we're familiar with. The patent belongs to a company named NEMOD, a small boutique outfit outside San Francisco."

Apparently, he and Tim had already talked about me, because he glanced in my direction and mentioned, "I'll spare you the technical details, except to make a few points."

I informed him, "My hands are registered weapons. A very very few points." few points."

Everybody chuckled. I'm a lot of fun at these things.

Samuel continued, "NEMOD creates and handles secure accounts for customer groups. You pay them a fairly stiff monthly fee, certify the individual members of your transmission group or cell, and they send you encoding and decoding software, which you upload on your computer. The messages are routed through NEMOD's proprietary servers directly between correspondents. It's fairly foolproof."

Bian commented, "It's a closed system, right?"

He nodded. "That's why it's fortunate you got that laptop. There's really no other way to detect and read these e-mails." He looked at me and hypothesized, "Whoever owned that computer, maybe he had a background in counterintelligence."

No maybes about it, buster. But Phyllis quickly cut off that line of inquiry and informed me, "NEMOD does mostly private-sector work--as a matter of interest, it has legally binding confidentiality agreements with its clients. But after the CEO and I had a brief and amicable discussion, he became reasonable."

Samuel must've overheard their conversation, because he laughed. He noted, "After Phyllis busted his . . . well, after she talked with him, we e-mailed NEMOD the files, and they promptly decoded and e-mailed back the transcripts."

In a sign of impatience that I shared, Bian reached across the conference table and asked, "May we see these?"

He nodded, and we both ended up with a large stack of messages, all written in English, some short, others long and fairly wordy.

As I thumbed through the tops of the pages, it seemed like all of them were back-and-forth stuff between two parties, labeled Crusader One and Crusader Two.

Bian, also perusing her stack, mentioned, "The headers, the two subjects, they appear to think of themselves--or maybe they relate to each other--as conspirators involving Iraq."

Samuel replied, "That would seem to be correct."

I read through the first few missives. They opened with warm salutations, a little friendly banter and gossip, then segued into the more substantive material. The style of writing was informal and the tone suggested correspondents who were well acquainted, even chummy. A lot of Arab names and Iraqi organizations were cited, which looked to me like alphabet soup.

I turned to Bian. "Do you recognize any of these people?"

"Yes, a lot are familiar. Mostly senior Iraqi political or religious figures."

At this point, Phyllis turned to Tim, John, and Samuel. "I'm sure you three can find something better to do."

Tim, John, and Samuel did not seem to mind, and they gathered their stuff and departed, without the door hitting them in the a.s.s. Actually, she'd done them a favor, a big one, and I think they knew it. If they were subpoenaed later, they could honestly say they left before we got into the real muck. Sean Drummond would've followed them if I had a brain in my head. But I was curious. And we all know where that gets you.

I continued to read. The messages sent by Crusader One to Crusader Two, judging by the language and vernacular, were auth.o.r.ed by a native-speaking American--presumably Cliff Daniels.

Crusader Two's English was decent and showed a good command of vocabulary, though he occasionally confused his verb tenses--the land mine of all languages--or he switched his verbs with his nouns, and he polluted a few fairly common idiomatic expressions.

Ergo, Crusader Two wasn't a native speaker; he was someone for whom English was a second language.

I saw no dates on the messages, and no subject headings. Based on the themes and contents, however, the first thirty or so messages seemed to reference the same general time frame.

The initial messages from Crusader One kept Crusader Two abreast on events and moods inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the State Department, and occasionally within the White House. Certain figures were mentioned and discussed by name, a few of whom were famous and I recognized. The two names cited most frequently I definitely recognized: Hirschfield and Tigerman.

These particular references were usually in the form of relayed requests or orders from Tigerman and/or Hirschfield--for information, for insights, or imparting special instructions to Crusader Two. For example, one relayed an instruction from Hirschfield ordering Crusader Two to meet with two officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, and to put them into contact with various Shia authorities in the city of Karbala. Another relayed an order from Tigerman to transfer ten million dollars from Crusader Two's operating account to an account number provided later in the message. And so on.

The initial messages from Crusader Two essentially involved his take on current events inside Iraq, including his personal struggle to form his own militia--recruiting, provisioning, weapons, training, and so forth--and his progress at creating a political power base.

Bian glanced over at Phyllis. "You do recognize the true ident.i.ty of Crusader Two?"

Phyllis said, with a tiny note of impatience, "Yes, Mahmoud Charabi. Keep reading."

I took the remainder of my stack, roughly a hundred and fifty pages, and divided it into two neat piles: those sent by Crusader One and those by Crusader Two.

To be honest, all these messages were becoming a blur. I have enough trouble with American names--all the Arab names and the inside baseball stuff about Washington and Baghdad were sailing over my head. Also, most of these messages contained replies to other messages, and they made better sense when I compared them side by side. Not full sense. Better sense.

A third of the way through, the tone, mood, and demeanor began to shift--faintly at first, then the anger and sense of betrayal took root and picked up steam. The time frame appeared to be mid- through late in the initial year of the occupation. Daniels, in increasingly purple prose, began accusing Charabi of providing prewar tips, promises, and intelligence that weren't panning out. There were a number of references to various Iraqi weapons depots and factories that Charabi and his pals had pinpointed before the war, now being searched by American forces with an embarra.s.sing absence of bugs, noxious gases, or glow-in-the-dark stuff.

Charabi's initial responses were bluff and confident rejoinders to keep looking, the evidence was there--America and the world would soon witness the wicked elixirs and technological nasties he and his friends had prophesied. At one point, he offered the interesting aphorism, "Persistence is the mother of invention." After a while he changed tack, blaming Ali-this or Mustafa-so-and-so, insisting that he had only pa.s.sed on, in perfectly good faith, what others had sworn to be fact.

By midway through the stack, the trust and bonhomie between the two men had visibly deteriorated; the opening salutations became shorter, pointed, frostier, with the ensuing language more formal and factual than conversational. No longer were they big pals sharing a most amazing adventure. The prevalent themes became strained negotiations, threats, and counterthreats--Charabi reminding Daniels of his own personal criticality to the American occupation, Daniels reminding him back that if American protection, money, and support dried up, Charabi was toast, his a.s.s was gra.s.s, and so on.

Another thought struck me--the time frame of these messages seemed roughly to correspond to the letters in the computer from Daniels to Theresa, his ex. Clearly, this was a man coming apart at the seams, a man with melting wings frantically flapping to stay aloft; betrayed, angry, overwhelmed by events, bitter, and lashing out.

I checked my watch. Ten p.m. I stood and stretched.

Phyllis, despite being twice my age, looked amazingly alert, without a wrinkle in her suit or a hair out of place, like she'd just had an Ovaltine fix.

Bian, also looking perfectly fresh, somehow remained intensely concentrated on her stack, plowing through the pages like a real trencherman. Maybe it was the fish. Maybe Phyllis also was a fish eater.

Phyllis saw me standing and asked, "What do you think?"