Bian protested, "Sir, five minutes is-"

"Is more than enough. Choose your questions wisely. In fact, I'm coming with you. Step over the line, and I'll gladly terminate the interview."

I said, "What are you afraid of, Waterbury?"

"Deal with it, Drummond." He stood. "Follow me."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Albert Tigerman's office was located on the second floor of the E-ring-the outermost ring-which, within this building, is the equivalent of a beachside condo on the Cote d'Azur.

Grand titles are the coin of the realm in Washington, and particularly among political appointees-many of whom paid a fortune for these jobs-the title at least has to sound impressive. It can get fairly confusing, and even annoying, as there is this bewildering array of deputy this and assistant that, with the ever-popular stringing together of two or more of these prefixes, and a flowering of suffixes on the caboose to tell you what the guy actually does. So you get things like the Deputy Assistant Under Secretary of Defense for Facilities Management and Building Restoration. Translation: janitor.

I would limit everybody to one prefix, one suffix, and fire the rest. If it takes more than four syllables to describe your job, there is no job. Period.

But the danger is, when you meet one of these clowns with a multisyllabic title, you don't know whether you're dealing with a superfluous taxmuncher or somebody who can really mess up your paycheck. Generally, the more prefixes, the less they can hurt you. Not always, though.

Anyway, the office of Albert Tigerman, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, was located on the most prestigious wing, and on the most prestigious floor, a mere six doors from his lordship, the Secretary of Defense. If proximity is influence, this guy had his tongue deep in the boss's ear.

Waterbury gently eased open that door and we entered an anteroom where a pert, efficient-looking young assistant was hidden behind a large wooden desk covered by a forest of computers and phones.

She looked up, and Waterbury said to her, "Please inform Al that we're here for his six-thirty. He's expecting us."

"I know." She lifted the phone, punched a few numbers, and said, "The OSI people are here." She listened and hung up. "He'll be a few minutes. Please have a seat."

I mentioned to Waterbury, "Wow… chairs. This guy's a managerial pussy."

He tried to ignore me.

Bian, I noted, had retreated into a sort of meek silence. From my dealings with her this seemed out of character, though I thought I knew what was behind it. She was using me as a foil for the idiot she worked for, which was politically shrewd, and possibly even entertaining for her, and probably dangerous for me.

Well, whatever her reason, she wasn't in a talkative mood, and I wasn't being paid enough to chitchat with Waterbury. What would we talk about, anyway-how many people you can fit inside a boxcar?

So the three of us were seated, somewhat awkwardly, on a stiff leather couch with a coffee table to our front. Neatly organized on that table was a thick stack of magazines I quickly browsed through for something to kill the time. Unfortunately, they all had such interesting titles as Foreign Affairs, the New Republic, Orbis, the Economist, and such. I wondered, did the man inside the office actually read this stuff? Probably yes-and probably Albert spent his weekends watching C-SPAN and gardening, and his children rode horses and played squash, and his wife was on a first-name basis with all the helpful salesladies at Bloomingdale's. My lower-middle-class snobbery aside, I didn't think Mr. Tigerman and Mr. Drummond drank the same brand of beer.

So, with nothing better to do, I spent my time reviewing what I knew about this man we were about to meet. Before we departed my building to drop in on Theresa Daniels, Bian had made a trip to the powder room, and I had made a trip on the Internet to see what I could discover about our presumptive host. I located his official CV on the Defense Department Web site and, a few entries later, a more enlightening article from Washington Insider that fleshed out the juicier personal parts.

Chronologically, he was born in the year 1946, in the city of Boston, on the better side of town, to a wealthy family. What followed was a prototypical northeastern rich boy's passage to adulthood: St. Paul's prep, Yale, Yale Law, then a fast-track partnership at a top New York firm. Not exactly a Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches tale; his was the more archetypal American riches-to-riches struggle. I love this country.

Anyway, over the proceeding thirty years, Albert had bounded between Washington jobs when Republicans were in power, and back to the New York money mill when not. Along the way, he acquired a venerated reputation as a defense intellectual.

Regarding this term-"defense intellectual"-for the life of me, I wouldn't recognize one if he pontificated on my lap or blew a brilliant opinion in my ear. For one thing, war is hardly an intellectual exercise; it's visceral, not cerebral, a contest of wills settled by pounding the crap out of each other until one guy screams uncle.

But, from the best I can tell, you get to be a defense intellectual by attending a lot of windbag conferences and writing scholarly articles that employ big theoretical and largely abstract expressions to describe small ideas. The battlefield lab work is left to somebody else.

But, well… shame on me for being so small-minded toward my host. I'm sure Albert's heart was in the right place. I might feel better about him, however, if I thought he could distinguish an M1A1 tank from an M1A2 as their treads crushed his shiny Beemer in the Pentagon parking lot.

Also, according to a number of articles I had read, Albert Tiger-man and his boss, Thomas Hirschfield, were now in a bit of a jam because they were publicly credited with being the intellectual and bureaucratic forefathers of a war that had run a little longer than they predicted, gotten a lot messier than they had foretold, with casualty lists that were large-with no end in sight.

As Bian mentioned, this was Albert's second time in the Pentagon, in both incarnations working with and under his longtime mentor, Thomas Hirschfield.

Tigerman's door opened, and I looked up. A pair of Air Force generals walked out, thick briefing binders under their arms, and they ignored us, as military folk tend to do toward civilians, which I wasn't, though I was dressed like one. The assistant waited two beats, then said, "You may now enter."

We followed Herr Waterbury into the office, and three feet inside the doorway Albert Tigerman was standing waiting, like a perched bird. His hand shot out to Waterbury.

I took a moment to study our host and was a little surprised to observe that he was not even remotely impressive-looking-short, slightly pudgy, silver-haired, with thick horn-rimmed glasses, sort of a fleshy, characterless face, and a small, pinched mouth. I'm embarrassed to admit, he looked like a lawyer.

He finished shaking Waterbury's hand, saying, "Mark… damned good to see you again. I hear you're doing damn fine work up there."

I watched their faces and I knew. What a load of crap. This was not the first time these two were together that day.

There was a long, telling hesitation before Waterbury, unaccustomed as he was to slyness, replied, "Well… it's always a pleasure to see you, too, Al. I'm… sorry the occasion is such grim business."

"Can't be helped, can it?" Turning to Bian and me, Tigerman announced, "And you must be Drummond and Tran."

Who else would we be?

Bian said to him, "Sir, let me start by thanking you for taking this time out of your busy schedule to see us."

Not wanting him to get the misimpression that I regarded this as a big favor, I immediately said, "If you don't mind, sir, we'd like to start." I added, "I'm sure you are very busy. In fact, Waterbury told us our time is limited to five minutes."