one, Charabi disclosed to Daniels what he's offering." She paused, a little theatrically, then informed us, "He claimed Iranian intelligence had the name and possible location of the key moneyman behind the most lethal wing of the Sunni insurgency. That information would be provided to Daniels only after the Iranians heard what he had to offer. I'm about to show you Daniels's eventual response."
She handed the page to Bian, who read it, and then slid it across the table to me. It was a brief and unambiguous e-mail from Daniels to Charabi:
Be clear on this--fuck me, and you're dead. This is not an empty threat. I'm going way out on a limb here. This works, or you're fucking dead. Simple as that.
You insisted on something important, something the Iranians desperately want--so here it is. The National Security Agency has broken the Iranian intelligence code. From the beginning of the war, we've been reading their deepest secrets.
I'm sure you recognize how valuable this infor-mation is to them. And I'm sure you know what would happen to me, and to you, should anybody find out where this came from.
Somebody had taken a Magic Marker and blacked out, or in Agency terminology, redacted, the next ten or so lines. I wondered about those passages I wasn't seeing. Sometimes that's done when a vital source needs to be protected; more often it means the institution needs to be protected, by hiding an embarrassment or screwup. I wish I could do that with parts of my life.
Bian was staring at the top of the conference table. Sounding deeply stunned, she blurted, "Do you realize what this bastard did?" Phyllis obviously did. We all did. Treason. To save his sinking career, Cliff Daniels had conveyed a huge and damaging secret to an enemy nation. I wasn't sure I understood everything, nor did I have the expert knowledge or regional expertise to fully analyze it. But I understood this: In exchange for the name of a terrorist, Clifford Daniels had exposed to Charabi, and thereby to the Iranians, the knowledge that we were reading and decoding their most sensitive communications. On top of everything, this wasn't even a good trade. I mean, Cliff Daniels not only was a traitor, he was stupid.
But instead of replying to Bian's question, to me Phyllis said, "Now, give me back that page."
So I did, positive it would never again see the light of day.
Nobody said anything for a moment. We were all three, I think, too stunned and completely consumed in our own thoughts.
Regarding Phyllis, I had no idea what thoughts were running through her mind. But I had a premonition, or, considering the circumstances, a postmonition, that Phyllis knew when she sent me to Daniels's apartment that morning it might lead to something like this.
Maybe not exactly like this. But something.
As for Bian, I was sure she was thinking what I was thinking. Clifford Daniels was lucky; somebody beat us to him. By the time we finished lumping him up, a bullet through his brain would've been an act of leniency.
Phyllis stood and walked toward the door. She said, somewhat ominously, "There is somebody here who can explain all this to you," and then she walked out.
Normally, when you have a crime, through exacting detective work, the miracles of modern forensics, and pathology, you work backward, from the aftermath to the crime itself; you reconstruct, analyze, and reconnect the evidentiary traces, because the parts have to be made whole again, because that whole is a human identity--a name--the person whose fingertips left the telltale stain, whose skin is embedded in the fingernails of the victim he shoved off the balcony and sent caterwauling down twenty floors onto the pavement below.
But when the crime is bureaucratic in nature and origin, you have a different species of criminal, with a different genre of evidence. To get from A to Z, you follow a different arc--less linear--more M to Z, then full circle back to A to M. In place of a corpse, and in place of forensic traces, you have a long trail of paper, words, thoughts, and expressions that, when added together, expose a deed--a crime.
So Bian and I now knew the category of the crime, the identity of the criminal, and we even had a roughed-out portrait of the motive: treason, Clifford Daniels, idiocy fueled by naked ambition. Also a murder remained to be solved, though that suddenly looked like the least of our problems, though it was also, quite