Man in the Middle

Lt. Col. Sean Drummond, Haig's wisecracking series hero, finds himself partnered with an exotic female military police officer, Bian Tran, when Clifford Daniels, a high-ranking Defense Department official, is found dead in his Virginia apartment, an apparent suicide. The pair soon learn that Daniels was the U.S.'s main liaison with Mahmoud Charabi, an Iraqi exile who, like the real-life Ahmed Chalabi, was a leading advocate of military action to topple Saddam Hussein. The discovery that Charabi may have been in the employ of Iranian intelligence raises the stakes for the inquiry, which takes place just weeks before the 2004 presidential election.