Man in the Middle (18 page)

“I lied.” She laughed. “I’m Vietnamese. Of course I love fish.”

At least the rice looked somewhat edible and smelled okay.

The owner mentioned something to Bian, who said something back. Bian said to me, “She says there is no beer on the menu because she doesn’t have a liquor license. But she keeps a hidden stock for favored customers in her fridge in the back. She’ll bring it out in a moment.”

Things were looking up.

I smiled at the woman, then at Bian. “Please thank her from the bottom of my heart for her hospitality. Tell her she is most gracious.”

Bian translated this, and the woman bowed. I added, “Also, please tell her she has a lovely and very deceitful daughter.”

Bian looked away for a moment. Then she looked back at me. “You’re very observant.”

“And you have your mother’s beauty.”

“Well . . . thank you.”

Her mother said something to her, and Bian patted her arm and said something in reply. Her mother looked at me a moment, then returned to the kitchen.

“What was that about?”

“Because she thinks you are a good man, she says she has a special surprise for you.” She added, smiling, “I told her she’s a terrible judge of men. She should poison your food.”

Bian’s mother returned a moment later, carrying a dish upon which sat two Big Macs, still hot and steaming in their boxes. She set the plate in front of me, and two cans of holy water blessed by Pope Budweiser.

I stood and hugged her. She giggled, saying something to her daughter that probably translated as, “Tell this round-eyed idiot to let go of me before I knee him in the nuts.”

I sat, and Bian’s mother left us. Bian sliced off a piece of fish and, holding it up on her fork, said, “Try a little of this. It’s very good.”

“No . . . thank you.”

“You’re sure? It’s a freshwater fish. It tastes different.”

“Did it swim in scotch?”

She laughed.

We ate in silence for a few moments. She asked, “How much do you remember about Vietnam? Not the country, the war.”

“For me, it was a TV war. You know what I mean, right?”

“No. Tell me about that.”

“It was the first war piped into America’s living rooms. Somebody described that as like seeing a hologram of a war. But for one year of my life—the year of my father’s second tour—I was glued to it. I wanted to see him on TV, but I really didn’t. You know?”

“I don’t know. All I had to do was step out in the backyard and watch the artillery flashes.”

“I had a friend who was watching CBS news one night. He actually saw his own father get shot.”

“Dead?”

“Wounded. They were in the middle of dinner, though. His mother actually vomited. But for most Americans it was—just as this war is— that moment on the evening news between the trial of the month and the weather forecast.”

“Did TV and the media make it unpopular?”

“Wars are never popular.”

“You know what I’m talking about. I read in a history book that Walter Cronkite did more damage in one night than the entire Tet offensive.”

“I think the media and TV exposed a truth—an unwelcome truth, an unhappy one, but an important one. They were biased and irresponsible in many ways . . . but I also think they did more good than harm, told more truth than lies. On the big truth, they nailed it.”

“What big truth?”

“We had become involved in a war we didn’t intend to win. Like sex with neither partner able to orgasm—eventually, somebody has to call it quits.”

“That’s a very . . . unique explanation.”

“I’m thinking of writing a political science textbook.”

“They come wrapped in brown paper?” She took a bite of her fish, then reached across the table, grabbed my beer, and took a long swig.

“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 sexuality that I was very conscious of.

The Army, unique institution 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 snobs, 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 sexes 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 sexes, and there still is rutting within the ranks, affairs between married officers and their spouses, sexual favoritism, sexual blackmail, voyeurism, rape, and every other imaginative act two or more horny 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 fiancé 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 analogies.”

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 anticipated. It was sold as short and simple. It’s complicated and bloody. 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

B
ian 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 piss off half the electorate.

The contender’s equally self-assured 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 basement, 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 blasé, 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 fiancé 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
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.”