So Bian and I leaned our butts against the wall and cooled our heels. The room was hot and stale, with that pungent, unpleasant odor of damp earth. The young man behind the desk had said "back up"-ergo, there was a hidden stairwell or elevator that led to a subterranean facility, and probably there was a control device on his desk, and for sure there was a gun under the desk for unwelcome visitors. I smiled at him and tried to look welcome.

It was all coming together-an underground jailhouse. Actually, it made sense. No visible footprint, the noise and activity would be muffled, belowground facilities are fairly secure from breakout, or from break-in, and better yet, are largely bombproof. Ironically, the prisoners here were probably in the safest place inside a country they had made incredibly unsafe. I mentioned to Bian, "I'll bet there's a camera inside that light fixture."

She pushed a lock of hair into place. She said, "Smile for the viewing audience."

Why not? I smiled. A by-product of this shadowy war against terrorism has been the emergence of these clandestine detention and interrogation facilities, about which my reaction can best be described as Jekyllish and Hydey. My lawyer side regards them as an abomination of all that the American legal establishment holds dear-transparency, rights of the accused, timely representation and trial, due process, and so forth. And in my soldier's heart, I have absolutely no problem with them.

The truth is, the people incarcerated in these hidden prisons aren't ordinary criminals; in fact, they aren't criminals at all. Nor, in my personal view, are they prisoners of war, because terrorism is not war, it is the incoherent slaughter of innocents. No, these perps are something else entirely, a conspiracy of assassins and mass murderers who obey no rules, who respect no boundaries, neither moral or geographic, in an age when technology affords them the ability to really bring down the house. New games, new stakes-new rules.

I mean, nobody squawked when the tools of law enforcement were fudged and expanded to handle the Mafia, who, comparatively, are just a bunch of quaint fat guys who never got the message about gold chains and leisure suits. At least they have a code of behavior, and the awareness that they can whack themselves to their heart's content, but when they kill cops or innocents, the gloves really come off. For the terrorist, innocence is the target, and deterrence is the need to look around for a softer target.

No, the nature of this war wasn't of our making; it was theirs, and in a conflict such as this, you win or you lose on intelligence. As Bian noted, this isn't a battle for the enemy capital, or for the decisive terrain, or to capture enemy guidons, the traditional measures of victory in war as we knew it; it is a struggle to locate and get the worst assholes off the street, then climb inside their heads and learn who their friends are, and what nefarious schemes are afoot before you learn about it on the evening news.

This doesn't mean the wardens get carte blanche; however, a little isolation and secrecy and some imaginative mind-bending can be worth their weight in human lives.

Anyway, reverting to my lawyer half, I stared into the light fixture and waved my middle finger. Bian laughed.

"Excuse me," I asked the nice young man, "Is there a bar in this compound?"

He looked up and gave me the best news of the day. "Yep."

I smiled at Bian. She gave me the middle finger and said, "I'm shocked."

"And I like scotch." I turned back to him and asked, "Where?"

"Third building back."

After a moment, I mentioned to him, "I don't drink myself. But the lady's a lush."

His smile widened. "Well, it's off-limits to military personnel. Tough luck, huh?"

The nice young man in the white shirt wasn't so nice after all. I asked, "Does your mom know you're here?"

He stared at me a moment. "I can let you go downstairs, but I don't have to let you back up." He laughed.

Sometimes it pays to be polite, and I joined him.

Bian asked him, "What's downstairs?"

"A state-of-the-art interrogation and detention center. Constructed right after the war. The prisoners call it the dungeon. We call it the toilet." He laughed. "Get it? This is where we flush the biggest shits."

Got it. And I'll bet this wasn't the line he used with visiting Red Cross delegations. His phone rang and he answered it. "What?… Yeah… okay, they're here." Pause. "Sure, I'll tell them." He then pressed his left forefinger on a pad on his desk and, after a long moment, a plate in the wall slid open and revealed a cargo elevator. Unbelievable.

He looked at me and said, "Pretty cool, huh? Ms. Carney says to come down. I'll tell your people to bring in the detainee."

Bian and I walked to and then entered the elevator. He pressed another button, the door closed, and we were flushed downstairs. After about ten seconds it reopened and we stepped out into a small operations center, a warren of interlocked cubes where thirty or so people were performing activities that ranged from sitting on their asses, to resting their derrieres, to loafing on their butts, all functions they could as easily do back in the good ol' USA.

A middle-aged gent in civilian khakis was waiting for us, and he introduced himself as Jim Tirey. He had clean-cut, all-American good looks, serious eyes, and he offered me a firm, businesslike handshake and said, "That will be your last obscene gesture into our cameras.

Understand?"

"You must be FBI," I concluded.

"I must be," he replied coolly. "The Special Agent in Charge in country. Follow me."

So we did, down a short hallway, where we hooked a left, and then down a far longer hallway, at the end of which was a conference room that we entered. The air down here was damp and cool, with yellow fluorescent lighting that was intermittently spaced, as though the contractor had overlooked certain sections-but probably generators powered everything and energy conservation was at a premium. The prevailing ambiance, however, was a little spooky, as were our hosts, if you'll pardon the pun.

The conference room itself was small and stuffy, about ten by twelve, with a scarred, worn mahogany dining room table, unupholstered metal chairs, and hanging on the wall, a huge plasma-screen television with wires running octopus-like to a wall-mounted surround sound system. The room smelled of cigarettes and stale sweat, frustration and desperation. Actually I'm making that up; it smelled like lemon Pledge. But on the screen was a top-down view of a cramped prison cell containing only a metal bunk, no blanket, no sheets, and the proverbial pot to piss in.

My CIA friends call this a surveillance room, and my naval friends an observation deck. Same thing, though there's a world of difference in the mind-set.

Phyllis and the sheik stood in front of the plasma screen, slurping coffee from foam cups. Waterbury leaned against a wall on the far side of the room, and at the moment we entered he was regaling them with a tale about his time as an MP, something about how he singlehandedly cleaned up the nastiest post in the Army.

Retired soldiers manufacture more bullshit than cows, but considering the source, it sounded about right.

Phyllis had endured this guy on the drive down and her face now had the fixed look she gets in the presence of insufferable assholes, so I cut in by pointing at the screen. "Nice room. Is it mine?"

She smiled at me. "Don't give me ideas."

Tirey took that as a cue and said, "What you're seeing is a one-way cable feed from bin Pacha's cell. Agents from Turki's service are already there and set up." He went on for our benefit, "The only people in this facility with knowledge of the detainee's identity are inside this room or inside that cellblock. That's it. Hermetic containment. We employed identical arrangements when Saddam was our guest."