"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, suggestive 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.