Don had known about this, and I now knew about it as well. The policy wonks in the Pentagon had muscled their way into the intelligence business, and a larger bureaucratic war was going on here, a battle for tax dollars, for influence, for reputations-and now a battle over blame-and I wanted to know where Don stood on it. Well, I already knew where he stood; I just wanted him to admit it. Then, when the bullshit flew, we would all know where he was coming from.

I looked at Don. "In any event, we all know the Agency has been made the public scapegoat. Does that piss you off?"

"Personally? Why should it, Drummond? Just business."

Bullshit. "How did Charabi end up as the Pentagon's man?"

"That's a long and complicated story."

"You're a clever guy. Come up with an abbreviated version."

"All right." He offered me a strange smile, like he was measuring my coffin size.

As I mentioned, Don was full of himself-arrogant, actually-and that nearly always equates to thin-skinned. Also, he would tell us what he wanted us to know unless I pissed him off enough to provoke a few inadvertent truths from his lips. Sizing him up, he was a cool customer, a world-class bullshitter, and he affected a certain imperturbable coyness. He actually seemed to be enjoying this game of cat and mouse, and he obviously liked being the center of attention.

He stopped smiling and said, "Charabi approached us after the first Gulf War." He paused and appeared thoughtful. "Late 1993… maybe early 1994. I, myself, met with him."

"What was the purpose of this meeting?"

"It was in the nature of a negotiation."

"Go on."

"He was offering to provide intelligence about conditions inside Iraq. It sounded attractive. In fact, it sounded great. The truth is, getting and keeping good sources inside Iraq was… difficult. Saddam was-surely you've read this-almost insanely paranoid and ruthless. A lot of our sources ended up in graves. This was not helpful for recruitment."

He paused and looked at Bian. She said, "So it sounded good. What happened?"

"His offer came with stipulations. For one, we had to agree to emancipate his people from a monster."

"I thought that was our policy."

"It was. Later. But then-and even later-we were… let's just say, concerned about Charabi's additional conditions."

Bian suggested, "He wanted you to put him in power."

He nodded. "He wanted to be king." He paused, then said, "He claimed he had hundreds of Iraqis in his pocket, exiles, and also people in country willing to help. And of course these were Iraqis-very cliquish, very clannish. You get one, you get dozens of relatives and tribal members. They would gather intelligence, and after Saddam was gone, they would form the base of his power. Also, he's Shiite, as are about 60 percent of Iraqis. Better yet, he's a secular Shiite, so the Kurds-and maybe even the Sunnis-might find him palatable."

Bian commented, "For the situation, that sounds like an attractive resume."

"The perfect resume. So, yes… I agreed to meet with him." He paused, then added, "I brought along another gentleman. An Agency psychiatrist who specializes in quick profiles of foreign leaders. He's quite good at it. Would you care to hear his assessment?"

I said, "Sure."

"A classic narcissist, compounded by a manipulative personality classification."

I looked at Bian and shrugged. She shrugged back.

Don was amused by our ignorance and with a snotty smile informed us, "Here's language even you'll understand, Drummond. A self-serving asshole with a velvety tongue who will screw you for a nickel."

"Was that you, or Charabi? Or both?"

He gave me a long, hard stare. He turned to Phyllis. "Do I really have to put up with this?"

She advised him with some insight, "He's trying to taunt you. Ignore him and he'll stop."

I smiled at Phyllis. She ignored me, and to humor her, I stopped smiling.

Bian said to Don, "I have no idea how these things work. Presumably this was a vetting process and this snapshot psychoanalysis was part of it. Right?" He nodded, and she asked, "Did this psychiatrist veto an arrangement?"

"That's not how it works. He offers insights; I decide. However, he classified Charabi as a high-risk asset. Specifically, he predicted Charabi would follow his own agenda, guided by his own scruples, which in the doctor's judgment were scarce and very elastic."

Incidentally, every time he spoke, Don's eyes flashed toward Bian. You knew exactly what was going through his filthy mind. Geez- dogs in heat show more savoir faire than this guy.

Bian, for her part, seemed totally oblivious, or perhaps she mistook Don's interest as intellectual flattery. Message to Bian-it's not your mind he wants to get into.

I have known women who live for this kind of attention; others I know do nothing to invite it and are perilously blind to the signals. I don't mean that Bian was naive, or a naif, but she spent four years at West Point, where the boy-to-girl ratio is about ten to one. In such a male-dominated environment, I imagine the female either dampens her antennae or becomes a sexual hypochondriac.

Anyway, I tried to catch Don's eye and said, "I haven't knocked over any foreign governments, so maybe this is going over my head. For replacing Saddam, isn't that a reasonable trade?"

"On first blush, Drummond… yes, sure… I might agree with you. A duplicitous liar for a pathological mass murderer. Sure. Why not?"

"That's what I asked you-why not?"

"I ran his background and he wasn't… credible."

Credible, for most people, concerns integrity and trustworthiness; these people, however, play by different rules, and more often it's about whether they can get a grip on his short hairs.

Having not spent time with Agency types, however, Bian found this concept elusive and asked, "Can you explain that?"

"Well… why do you think he fled Iraq in the first place?"

"The newspapers said-"

"I know what the media reported. He experienced some political squabble with Saddam and was forced to flee for his survival. Where do you think they obtained that story, Major?"

"I see. Then what did Charabi forget to include?"

"Charabi was a banker in those years. A midlevel account executive at the Iraqi national bank. A virtual nobody"-he smiled-"for Saddam, a nonentity. The man and his views were irrelevant."

"But Saddam later went through a lot of trouble to have him murdered. There had to be something."

"Over three million Iraqis went into exile during Saddam's rule. Many of these people were politically opposed to Saddam. He would've run out of bullets if he tried to kill all of them." He stared at Bian. "When he went to that much trouble, the motive was always personal."

"I see."

"But you still haven't guessed, have you?" He gave us both one of those triumphant, I-know-something-you-don't little grins and said, "Charabi was an embezzler. He moved about twenty million dollars from one of Saddam's personal accounts to his own personal account in Switzerland. It had nothing to do with politics." He added, "It was, for Saddam, a matter of personal honor, of principle."

Bian remarked, "That principle being that Saddam could loot billions from his own people, and they couldn't steal it back."

Don laughed and awarded her a wink. "Hey, I like that." He said, "Here's another insight I think you'll find fascinating. After the invasion, we found, inside Saddam's palaces, dozens of copies of The Godfather videos." He added, "It seems Saddam perceived himself as a godfather figure-that formed his self-image, and that inspired his style of leadership. Pathetic, isn't it? Life imitating art."

This was interesting; also, it was irrelevant. Returning to the topic, I said, "So you told Charabi you weren't interested. What happened next?"