Man in the Middle

by Brian Haig

  I stepped onto the land transporter and squeezed past the travelers, who seemed mostly to be part of a tour group from someplace where everybody was short and addicted to snapping pictures of tall guys in dirty, wrinkled uniforms.

  I leaned against a window and checked my watch: 5:10. The flight was scheduled for departure at 5:55 and was listed on the monitor as on time, so boarding should begin around 5:30.

  Seven minutes later, the transporter docked and I pushed my way through the height-challenged people into Concourse B—essentially a long corridor extending off to my left and right. A sign showed that Gate 48 was to my left and I began jogging in that direction through the crowds, working my way down.

  Bian was either going to be here or not. If she was here, that meant one thing; if not, something else. I wasn’t really clear on what either meant except I knew that it was important.

  I was more conflicted than I had ever been in my life. In spite of everything, I was still at least half in love with Bian Tran, and more jealous than ever of Mark Kemble. I recalled Bian once telling me that love has no past tense. And also, I remembered how Sean Drummond had skeptically and cynically dismissed this as naive, syrupy mush. Yet, for Bian, it wasn’t. She was sacrificing everything she had accomplished—her career, her citizenship, and possibly even her life—all for a man who no longer was even alive to appreciate it. Every guy should be so lucky. And every government should be scared out of its wits.

  For the truth was, much of what Bian had done I approved of; parts of it I admired; some of it I even envied. Washington had taken from Bian something she loved, and in return she had robbed Washington of something it loved, the false arrogance that you can fool most of the people most of the time.

  And, indeed, much of what she had done was morally ambiguous: treachery in some eyes, justice in others.

  Murder—that’s where the line stopped. Evil does not correct evil; nor does it bring back the dead; nor does it heal the pain. I could forgive her for killing in the heat of the moment, and the law, as well, makes mitigating exceptions when passion collides with reason. That wasn’t what happened here, though.

  Directly ahead of me was the sign for Gate 48. I slowed to a walk and looked around a bit. Bian would be dressed in civilian clothing, whereas I was in uniform, so I was ceding a big advantage: She was blending into the crowd and would spot me before I saw her. Also, a lot of short people seemed to be gathering around Gate 48, and I felt as self-conscious as Gulliver wading through a flock of Lilliputians.

  So I moved to the corner wall beside the gate waiting area, leaned casually against it, and peered around the corner. This flight was crowded, and all the seats in the waiting area were filled, with some people lounging on the floor, and others clustered in small knots, chatting or reading. No Bian, though.

  Recalling her thing for disguises, I surveyed the crowd again, trying to imagine Bian as a blonde, a brunette, a schoolgirl, an arthritic grandmother. Still no good. The passengers were mostly Asians, and if she was wearing a costume, I was unable to debunk it.

  I decamped from my hiding place and approached the ticket counter, where a few people were lined up, rearranging their seats or whatever. People are respectful of uniforms these days, and I butted ahead of an old lady who was in discussion with the counter person, a uniformed lady who looked a little harried and overburdened. I said, “Excuse me, ma’am,” to her, and to the counter lady, “Could you please check if Bian Tran is booked on this flight?”

  She replied a little frostily, “That information’s confidential.”

  “Of course it is. Could you please step away from the counter?”

  She wasn’t sure what she was dealing with here and looked apprehensively at the guard, who was loitering beside the entrance to the boardwalk. I smiled reassuringly and said, “Government business. Please. This will take only a moment.”

  “Oh . . . all right.”

  She joined me by the window. I withdrew my Agency ID and allowed her a few seconds to study it. Airline people are understandably paranoid about terrorists these days, and before she freaked out, I reassured her, “Ms. Tran works for us.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “I hope I can confide this. We suspect Miss Tran of cheating on her expense accounts and billing us for her boyfriend’s travel, who might also be on this flight.” I smiled nicely and added, “The government can screw you, but it doesn’t like to pay you to screw.”

  She smiled at my little joke. Nor did she inquire why an Agency person was wearing a military uniform, which was good, because I was winging it and didn’t really have a good alibi.

  “So”—I pointed at her counter—“if you could quietly check . . .”

  We returned to the counter, she punched Bian’s name into her computer, and said, “Yes . . . she’s booked. Seat number 34B.”

  “Who’s in 34A?”

  She looked again. “Mr. Arthur Clyde.”

  “And 34C?”

  “Mrs. Lan Tran.”

  Bingo. “Has Ms. Tran checked in yet?”

  Again she studied the screen, and she shook her head. “She has an electronic ticket. Not required to.”

  I winked and said, “Your government thanks you.”

  She winked back and replied, “Put that in a tax rebate and I’ll know you mean it. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . . I have to begin boarding.” She picked up her microphone and went through her announcement, which got the crowd excited and moving.

  I walked directly across the aisle to the waiting area for Gate 47 and stood behind a thick pillar from where I could observe without being observed. An elderly lady in a wheelchair, a middle-aged guy on crutches, and a well-dressed couple who looked perfectly robust and healthy—impatient pricks from first class, probably—were lined up, fingering their boarding passes and IDs.

  Despite Bian’s reservation on this flight, I was still concerned, because now I had an idea how her mind worked. I knew she was smart and cunning and, most important, diabolically evasive. I mean, this could be another ruse. In other words, it was time to consider whether this reservation was a diversion to draw me away from something else. That was a stretch, but I no longer underestimated this lady.

  The first-class passengers now were queuing up, an interesting mixture of mostly Asians, who were old and looked overdressed, and a few occidentals, all of whom were young and attired almost impossibly badly—an interesting snapshot in international contradictions.

  I had another thought. If Bian was Captain Ahab, oozing hatred and obsession, there still were two white whales she hadn’t bagged, Tigerman and Hirschfield.

  While Clifford Daniels was most directly responsible for Mark’s death, Tigerman and Hirschfield were directly responsible for Clifford Daniels’s. If you thought about it hard enough, as surely Bian had, these were the two officials who authored the circumstances that put Mark in a killer’s crosshairs—by placing a small, weak subaltern into the position where he could do so much harm, by fostering his relationship with Charabi, and afterward, once Charabi’s lies were exposed and made them all look like idiots, by twisting Daniels’s arm into doing something stupid and hysterically desperate to restore a little luster to their disintegrating reputations.

  Also, I was having difficulty with the Diane Andrews angle. I mean, in almost every way, it made sense. Andrews definitely had earned a high place on Bian’s hit list, and clearly the MOs in her murder and Daniels’s were similar. Not identical, but similar. Further, if not from the lips of Diane Andrews, where else did Bian learn about Cliff?

  Except . . . well, there were those troubling differences. The hand that tortured and killed Diane Andrews was enraged, brutal, and the manner of her execution abrupt and perfunctory. Cliff’s killer seemed cooler and, I thought, less impulsive. And then there were those interesting staging aspects that suggested passions more byzantine than rage. But what did that mean? Two different minds? Or a single mind clever enough about police investigations to avoid a signature m
ethod? Whenever the killer is a veteran cop, you have a real problem on your hands.

  But when two plus two equals five, you have to go back to the beginning and recompute. So I asked myself, had Sean Drummond been the first responder on the scene of both murders, what would have been his impressions?

  I thought he would’ve hypothesized that Diane’s killer was a male—somebody with big-time macho problems, a bad attitude toward women in general, and some fairly serious anger control issues. No finesse, no subtlety, just whack—down she went. Plus the killer used a hatchet, hardly a feminine tool. And the amputated fingers, maybe that was indicative of torture. But maybe it wasn’t. Because maybe, as Phyllis had theorized, Diane’s hand had merely been in the path of the deathblow.

  And by comparison, he would’ve observed that Daniels’s murder was more artful, more complexly dramatic, and in its sexually peculiar way, more vindictive. And that would reinforce something he already well knew: In matters of life, and of death, men are shallow. Women think of the little things—the birthday gift wrapped in colorful paper with a fancy bow, or the naked corpse with his hand gripped around his woodie—the special touches that make life or, in this case, death, more interesting.

  And, if I carried that logic a step further, had Bian been Diane’s assassin, for her this was all or nothing. Everybody with a hand in Mark’s death was going to atone; maybe, or especially, Tigerman and Hirschfield.

  So if Bian was in the airport, she wasn’t killing Tigerman and Hirschfield. And maybe she had killed Cliff, but maybe not Diane. Did it matter? Technically, no. Murder is murder—says so in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It was irrelevant how many she killed; just that she did commit murder. And Sean Drummond, sworn officer of the law, was supposed to do his duty and help apprehend the perp. Right?

  Damn it, no. It did matter.

  The counter person was calling for seat numbers 50 through 25, and a fresh crop of people began lining up. I no longer had a good view, so I left my hiding place and shifted to the middle of the aisle for a closer look.

  And ten people back from the front of the line, with her back turned, stood an elderly Vietnamese lady with stooped shoulders, and directly to her rear, a thin, broad-shouldered young Vietnamese male, short-haired, wearing baggy black dress slacks and a shapeless white office shirt, with a red knapsack slung casually over the left shoulder. At that moment, the elderly lady turned around and exchanged words with the slender boy to her rear, and I recognized her—Bian’s mother.

  Except for that look, I never would’ve recognized Bian. She stood like a male, erect, with her shoulders perfectly squared, just as she had been trained and molded in her first month at West Point.

  So now all that stood between Bian Tran and a new life were the last few people before her in line, and me. I took a deep breath.

  Flight or capture? Nobody would ever know. Nobody would know that she wasn’t in the hands of Iraqi kidnappers. Nobody would ever know she was alive and hiding out in Vietnam. And nobody would know that Sean Drummond had put his heart above his duty.

  Three more passengers entered the boarding walk. Bian and her mother took a few more short steps, closer to freedom.

  Possibly it was my ego, but I just could not believe Bian was a ruthless killer. And I knew what would happen if I apprehended her—a certain conviction for murder, possibly treason, and a slew of lesser charges tacked on for good measure by an overeager prosecutor. While I doubted she would get the chair, I was sure she would never leave Leavenworth and she would know I had sealed her fate.

  Could I be responsible for that? What would I do if the love of my life died because a bunch of venal bureaucrats back in Washington were playing career games? I didn’t know for sure, and I hoped I would never find out. But I would like to believe I would’ve found some clever way to make them pay.

  So that was it; I would let her go, but first, I would have a word with her. I wanted to tell her I knew what happened. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was for her pain. But, most of all, after all we had been through, after all we had shared, I needed to say good-bye.

  I stepped forward, when suddenly a hand grabbed my arm. I turned around, and a man in a dark suit said, “Excuse me, sir. Detective Sergeant Jones. Would you please step over here?”

  The suit looked nice and expensive, and the man was about my height, only larger, with more powerful shoulders. “Why?” I asked him.

  “A lady reported that she was assaulted by a soldier in uniform. You fit her description.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You know what?” He smiled and tightened his grip. “They never do.”

  I looked and saw that only two people were now ahead of Bian and her mother. I said to him, “Show me your badge.”

  “Sure. After you come with me.”

  “Just give me a moment. I need to say good-bye to a friend, then I’ll tell you why you’re full of shit.”

  “I’d rather learn why I’m full of shit now.”

  This guy was as sarcastic as me, and thus equally irritating. I looked again and Bian’s mother was handing her boarding pass to the gateperson. I tried to tug my arm away, but he tightened his grip and said, “Don’t make me cuff you. Come on, pal . . . do us both a favor.”

  “Get lost.”

  He pointed down the corridor and said, “My partner’s with the victim. Let’s give her a quick look-see. If it wasn’t you, you’re on your way.”

  Bian now was handing her pass to the lady at the gate. I reached over, twisted his wrist, and pulled my arm away, saying, “Don’t make me hurt you.”

  I felt something round and hard press against my back. He said, “I won’t.” He jammed the barrel harder into my back and said, “Let’s not upset the tourists by making me shoot you. Walk slowly—let’s get this over with.”

  I looked and saw Bian’s back disappear through the doorway and down the gangway to her flight, her new life, and out of my life. Shit.

  The detective remained behind me as we walked back to Gate 20, where another man in a dark suit stood beneath a Starbucks sign, holding a conversation with a mildly attractive young lady also in a dark suit. The detective stayed behind me and said to the lady, “Is this the man who assaulted you? Take a close look.”

  She examined my face a moment. Sounding annoyed, she said, “No, the man was short and slightly overweight. I told you that.”

  I felt the pistol disappear. I turned around and faced the detective. I said, “Who put you up to this?”

  “Don’t get worked up, pal. Shit happens.”

  We stared at each other a moment.

  The young lady said, “I told you, Officer, it wasn’t that bad. Maybe the soldier was having a bad day. Let’s forget this. I don’t really want to press charges.”

  As I suspected he would, the detective shrugged, turned to his partner, and said, “Well, what can you do?”

  The woman walked away, headed in the direction of the transporters back to the main terminal. I needed to call their bluff and said to both detectives, “Show me your badges. I intend to file a complaint with your department.”

  The one who’d been standing with the woman looked at the guy with the pistol. He gave me a nasty smile and answered for both of them, saying, “Fuck off and have a nice day.”

  They both walked away, and I stood and watched their backs until they were out of sight. I can usually smell cops and these two weren’t cops. And neither was the young lady in the dark suit a victim.

  I wanted to be mad, but what came out was a smile.

  Bian Tran had outfoxed and outwitted me, for the final time.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  I unlocked the door to my apartment, threw it open, and flipped on the lights.

  The first thing I noticed was good and bad news. Nothing had changed in my absence. The place was a complete mess, so obviously my maid hadn’t come and straightened things up, which I guess I understood since I don’t have a m
aid.

  If you’re interested, I tend to be very neat and tidy, which is maybe my only virtue, but in my rush to prepare for Iraq, the place looked like Berlin after the Russian army sacked it. If you’re still interested, my apartment is small, with a few pieces of ratty, cheap furniture I had purchased at a secondhand store, thrown around an outrageously expensive big-screen TV—bachelor chic, I believe it’s called.

  But Army life is migratory, Army movers are endlessly cruel, and only hopeless optimists buy nice or expensive furnishings. I take my chances with the TV.

  The second thing I noted was the envelope that had been slipped beneath my door, which I stooped down and picked up. It was the plain white variety without an address, stamp, or return address.

  My name was written in small neat letters, so I knew who it was for, and I had a fairly good idea who it was from.

  I placed the letter on the kitchen counter, threw my duffel on the couch, pulled three Michelobs from the fridge, and headed straight to the bathroom, peeling off my smelly combat uniform as I walked. I twisted the cap off the first beer and stepped into the shower, where I remained until three dead soldiers littered the floor, and the last Iraqi dirt and sand had been scrubbed and rinsed off. My motto is always wear the dirt from where you are, not where you’ve been. I wish life was that easy.

  I dried off, threw on clean sweats, and returned to the kitchen. I poured a tall glass of scotch, threw in a few ice cubes, sat at the dining table, and opened the white envelope. There were six handwritten pages, and I read:

  Dear Sean,

  I won’t apologize.

  By now, I’m sure you’ve figured it out. At least, most of it.

  After Mark died, I thought I would go mad. Actually, I did go mad, and once you’ve been to that dark place, I don’t know if you ever fully return. You once asked me about my dreams. So, I’ll tell you now the dream that comes every night: Mark dying in an ugly street, in an ugly city, in an ugly war, because of an ugly act.

  General Bentson believed my best hope of recovery was here, near my childhood memories, near my mother, with a job where the most stressful thing I would deal with was some randy old colonel who chased a female underling around his desk. It wasn’t working, it would never work, but at least I made it through the days without crying. My nights, well, they were another story.