CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

It was the last thing I needed to do, the final mystery that had to be solved.

I pushed open the glass door and entered the restaurant. Seated at a table near the back was my date, Phyllis, alone, sipping tea and studying a menu.

She was dressed conservatively in a smart red wool suit, with a colorful scarf pinned around her neck by a shiny brooch, and I, more casually in a blue blazer over a polo shirt and faded jeans.

I fell into the chair directly across from her and asked, "Come here often?"

She looked up from the menu and said, "My God, Drummond, I do hope you've never actually used that line."

"Never," I lied.

She flagged down the waiter, who happened to be the same gangly kid with purplish hair who had served Bian and me. Phyllis said something to him in Vietnamese, which surprised me; another reminder of how little I knew about this lady.

The kid looked equally surprised, but he recovered quickly, smiled pleasantly, and they chatted back and forth for about three minutes; for all I knew, Phyllis was recruiting him to go back to Vietnam and overthrow the commies.

I quickly got tired of listening to a conversation I didn't understand, and I turned my attention to the menu-still no red meat, still no cold beer. I really wanted a hamburger. I really needed a beer.

Earlier that afternoon, I had made the quick trip to Arlington National Cemetery and located the grave of Major Mark Kemble. It was raining and windy, and I saluted his grave, and then knelt down and we had a long, amiable chat. Maybe Bian had found time to stop here before she fled, maybe not. So I told Mark that he would be proud of Bian, and I told him everything she had done, and I confided how jealous I was of him.

The kid was laughing at something Phyllis told him, and then he disappeared back into the kitchen. Phyllis mentioned to me, "He recommends the freshwater white fish. It's the house speciality." She then reminded me of how well she knew me and observed, "But you don't like fish, do you?"

I asked her, "How long have you known?"

"About the white fish?"

"I'm tired of the games, Phyllis."

"Humor me about the fish, anyway," she replied. "I was first introduced to it in Vietnam. Did you know I spent five years there? During the war, of course. I loved the country, and especially, I loved the people."

Phyllis is not much for small talk, so she was leading up to something, and I had to let it play out.

She looked at me and said, "I wish I could say I look back fondly on those years. I don't, though."

I was obviously expected to ask why, and I did.

"I could say because it was such a horrible and ill-conceived tragedy for our nation. That's how Americans look back on it. We lost fifty-eight thousand lives. I knew some of those people… I knew very many of them, actually."

"One of my uncles is on the wall. As are the fathers of several of my friends."

"Not many fathers are on the wall. They were mostly so young." She looked away for a moment, then said, "At least we were able to fit all our dead on a wall. They lost two million lives, and we left millions of southerners to a hellish fate. What about them?"

Usually, Phyllis's ulterior meanings are more nuanced and subtle than this. What it boiled down to was this: The two people at this table knew enough to possibly force a premature end to this war as well. She wasn't going to insult my intelligence by lecturing me about American honor, or the geostrategic stakes, or even my security obligations. I appreciated that. I know my duty, and I do it-most of the time. I would've told her to screw off, anyway.

So I told her something she already knew. "You knew about Bian from the beginning."

"I knew more than you knew."

"Then why?"

"Why did I let Bian into the investigation in the first place? Why did I allow her to go with it? Why didn't I confide in you?" She paused, then asked, "Or why did I let her slip away?"

She sipped her tea, obviously pleased that I had figured out this much. After all, no boss likes to think they hired a complete idiot-it makes them feel stupid. At the same time, she was testing me.

"Start with how you knew."

"Well… like you, I wondered why an MP officer was at a civilian murder scene." She added, "When I saw how very determined she was to become involved… Let's just say that aroused my curiosity all the more."

"Because, unlike me, you knew this was the second related murder."

She did not reply.

"Reason to be suspicious, right?"

"At least reason to dig a little deeper," she acknowledged. "From a background check at Army personnel I learned about her former job in Baghdad. General Bentson is an acquaintance. I called, and he told me the whole sad story."

"And you already knew how her fiance died?"

"Did I forget to mention that I'm in charge of that investigation, too?"

"In fact, I think you did fail to mention it."

"Well, I'm mentioning it now. We spun our wheels for two months, Sean. All the resources of the Agency, and we couldn't figure out who compromised this very sensitive and important operation, or who murdered Diane. How frustrating. Embarrassing, too."

"But then, you were pretty sure you had your murderer."

"I thought I had a reasonable suspect."

"Why didn't you have Bian arrested? I would."

"It was all circumstantial. No evidence linked her to Diane's murder, and Daniels's case could have been suicide." She picked at something on the table, a piece of lint, maybe. "You yourself told me that it looked like suicide."

Actually, I had said that it was murder made to appear like suicide. Phyllis has an amazing memory for details, incidentally. I nodded anyway.

She said, "In my judgment, a premature arrest was too risky." She smiled and added, "She would have lawyered up, and you know what a mess lawyers make of things."

I nodded again, though this was not exactly true. The toughest part of a homicide investigation is finding a suspect and a motive. There are no perfect crimes, only unsolved ones, but sometimes you have to find the suspect to find the imperfections. Detective Barry Enders, in fact, absent both suspect and motive, had already collected evidence sufficient for any competent prosecutor to put Bian away for a long time. Every criminal investigator knows this, I knew this, and I was sure Phyllis knew this, too.

I said, "Regardless, you had to understand the dangers of placing a murder suspect inside an investigation about a crime in which she had a conflict of interest. She was the killer, after all."

"Turn that logic on its head-can you think of a better place to park a suspect than right under your nose?"

"How about in jail?"

The boy reappeared with a plate of appetizers, a combination of squiggly dead things and rice squashed into marble-size balls. Phyllis said something to him in Vietnamese, and he laughed and scampered back into the kitchen. The kid was obviously charmed by her. I really needed to have a talk with him.

Phyllis speared a rice thing with a chopstick and handed it across the table. She said, "Try one of these. They're marinated in vinegar and sugar. Quite tasty."

I bit into it. Not bad. An interesting combination of sweet and sour, yin and yang, sort of easy and hard to take at the same time-like Phyllis.

She speared another one, popped it into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. She said, "Putting Bian into the investigation was the key that unlocked everything. We learned how the leak occurred, who was responsible, and why."

"And what about the collateral damage?"

"I don't worry about that." She noted, "The country doesn't really understand this war. Nor does it seem to care to. Turki al-Fayef was right about that. Forgive my cynicism, but our people are more interested in Tom Cruise's silly antics on Oprah's couch than who's giving secrets to the Iranians. In a week, the Saudi princes will be forgotten, washed away by a hurricane or a gruesome murder somewhere. And Mahmoud Charabi, should he ever come back to Washington, will be welcomed like a visiting dignitary."