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 identity 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 embarrassing 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 passed 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 ass was grass, 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?"
"Daniels writes like a man who just discovered his wife's screwing his brother."
She ignored my coarse analogy and asked, "Do you understand what you're reading?"
"Do I want to understand?" I replied, half in jest, half not.
She stared at me for a long beat. "Explanations will come later. Break's over. Sit and finish."
Phyllis, incidentally, tends to have the patience and forbearance of Job. My own parents, the older they get the less self-restraint they exhibit. I don't mean they wear diapers or drool or anything. But they tend to blurt the first thing that comes to mind. It can be fairly annoying; my mother, for instance, every time she calls, opens with the same tired question, "Do I have grandchildren yet?" To which I always reply, "Not with your last name." Pop thinks this is a riot. Mom's checking into whether it's too late to arrange an adoption.
Anyway, Phyllis seemed uncharacteristically wound up, and maybe a little agitated, and for sure, her patience was wearing thin.
About five minutes later, I heard Bian murmur, "Holy shit."