Damascus Station

by Unknown

  “It is a bill the National Council tried to submit to the French Foreign Ministry for a block of rooms at the Hotel Bristol. A delegation arrived from Istanbul.”

  “Only the best,” Bouthaina said, clicking her tongue.

  “The rooms were twelve hundred euros per night. Everyone appears to have required their own.”

  “Of course.” Bouthaina smirked as she bit off the horn of a croissant.

  “The French rejected the bill, so the council will eat the cost. There are a dozen other examples, and you can read in the reports that the profligate spending is leading to fissures among some of the senior leaders. Fatimah among them. She despises the waste.”

  “How can these fools think they are making a difference?” Bouthaina said. “We are fighting terrorists. These idiots party in Paris.”

  Mariam slid a memo toward Bouthaina. “My proposal: safe passage back to Damascus in exchange for a public description of the rebels as terrorists and silence upon her return.”

  “She’ll refuse you at first. She is stubborn.”

  Mariam respected Fatimah for it. We’d be sisters in another life, she thought, in a world that does not exist.

  “I agree. But Fatimah is the linchpin of the National Council. If she departs, it will collapse. If she does not cooperate, we should deploy less pleasant methods.” Mariam slid another paper across the table. A single sheet. The one that had made her queasy as she typed on her bed.

  “This is the list of Fatimah’s relatives still inside Syria, ordered by those closest to her. If she does not agree to our terms, I propose that we start the arrests at the top until she agrees. I will give her this list in Paris.”

  Bouthaina smiled, savoring the combat. “Approved. I agree the arm-twisting will be necessary, unfortunately.” She removed her glasses and set them on the table. Bouthaina looked toward the door to confirm it was closed.

  “You should know before we go to Paris,” Bouthaina continued, “that one of my sources in Jamil Atiyah’s office has told me that the old pedophile is conspiring against us. He wants our trip to fail.”

  Jamil Atiyah was another Palace counselor to the President. He and Bouthaina despised each other and had been engaged in a running turf battle for influence inside the Palace. Atiyah’s predilection for underage girls, typically procured on diplomatic trips to East Asia, was well known. But this had not yet been sufficient to oust him. Bouthaina still sought the appropriate bureaucratic weaponry.

  “What do you think he is planning?” Mariam asked. Atiyah had targeted others in her office to instill fear and throw Bouthaina off balance. Adnan, a clerical aide, had once spent three nights in the hospital after a visit from Atiyah’s thugs.

  “I do not know. Just be careful,” Bouthaina said. “He is a clever and savage old bastard.”

  MARIAM HADDAD’S FAMILY BELIEVED most of all in throwing parties. With a cousin at long last engaged, the family had an excuse. They rented out the inner courtyard of an upscale restaurant in Damascus’s Christian Quarter, once an Ottoman mansion.

  Tables were spread in the marble courtyard around the fountain. A waiter glided past Mariam carrying a bottle of champagne buried in ice. Mariam had chosen a tight silken black dress for the occasion, and she felt both beautiful and powerful as she slipped across the courtyard to her mother and planted a kiss on a cheek clotted with makeup. She instinctively scanned for her absent father and brother. A difficult habit to break. They were artillery officers in Aleppo, and they had been absent for close to six months. It’s Stalingrad in Syria, her brother had said during a phone call. Mariam accepted a glass of champagne from a waiter and spoke with her mother about nothing: clothes, shopping, her cousin’s drab fiancée.

  No expense had been spared. Stuffed grape leaves, tabbouleh, za’atar, and baba ghanoush were wheeled out and devoured just as quickly by the clan. There were courses of dawood basha—Syrian meatballs—kibbe, kebabs of all types, fried white fish covered in chilies, stews with leeks and tomatoes and okra, and trays of desserts from a renowned pastry chef in Souq Al-Hamadiya. A band played in a corner of the light-strung courtyard.

  Mariam’s uncle Daoud held court at one of the larger tables. Mariam had just finished an awkward dance with a very drunk cousin when he waved Mariam over.

  “We all miss your father and brother,” Daoud said. “I had to say it, we don’t have to talk about it anymore. We will see them soon.”

  Mariam nodded and smiled, weak and thin. “Thank you, Uncle.”

  Uncle Daoud twirled champagne in a full glass and held it up to gaze into the bubbles.

  “How is Razan?” he asked.

  “She is doing better. She is not meaning to ignore you, Uncle, she just—”

  Daoud raised his hand. “I understand she does not want to be seen in public. But tell her to call her father.”

  “I will, Uncle. She is just sad. She is healing. She is embarrassed.”

  “She is angry,” he finished. “As am I.” He pushed the champagne glass aside. “I wish she had come tonight, regardless. Thank you for letting her stay with you, Mariam. It means a great deal. She loves you. And with Mona gone—” He stopped himself. The mention of Aunt Mona’s name was still difficult, though she’d been dead for more than ten years.

  “I just mean that, with an empty house and a father consumed by work, it’s not a good place for her. I know she appreciates being in your apartment.”

  “We were always close, like sisters.”

  “I know. Your father and I were lucky to have daughters two months apart.”

  Mariam wanted to change the subject, but Uncle Daoud needed to speak. Mariam flagged a waiter and asked for whiskey. The waiter’s eyebrows arched in surprise. He shuffled off.

  “Tell her we’re continuing to search for the mukhabarat thug who did it. We have leads, but we do not have a name yet,” Uncle Daoud said.

  “I will. It means a lot to her that you and Father are searching.”

  He nodded. The waiter returned with a glass of whiskey. Mariam took his champagne flute, dumped the champagne, and replaced it with some of the liquor. He smiled.

  “You were always one of us, Mariam, since you were little.” He took a sip. “A member of the war councils.” He looked up as a couple swung through the dance floor, groups of onlookers hollering and whistling.

  “Your father and I took our positions to protect this,” he said, hand sweeping out toward the mobbed courtyard. “To keep a big, Christian family safe in Syria. Look at what we’ve done. Your father in the military, in Aleppo. Me . . .” He gave a weak smile as he trailed off.

  They never spoke of Daoud’s work. The Scientific Studies and Research Center, Branch 450. Chemical weapons security and transport.

  Daoud took more whiskey. “Our family did what was asked. We are loyal, silent, and complacent in exchange for safety. We are model Syrians. The regime broke its end of the deal. Look what happened to Razan. And we have no recourse. We are trapped.” He took a drink. Something glinted through Daoud’s eyes, like he knew he’d overshared. He looked off toward the dancing.

  “Razan has always been rebellious, Uncle,” Mariam said, hating herself for the words, as if her fiery cousin had deserved it. “She will come around.”

  He nodded toward the dance floor. “Shall we?”

  MARIAM ARRIVED AT HER APARTMENT near dawn to find Razan still awake, sprawled on the couch in rumpled silk pajamas watching an Al Jazeera anchor interview Fatimah Wael. Mariam turned off the television and slid her cousin’s legs aside to sit down beside her. An empty bottle of white wine sat on the table.

  “You smell nice,” Razan said, her left eye glued to the darkened television screen. The right one was still bandaged. Like a pirate, Razan had said in one of her lighter moments. The blow to her face had cratered her eye. It still had not flickered on. The doctors did not know if it ever would.

  “Your father misses you,” Mariam said. “For God’s sake, call him back. It’s not his fault.”r />
  “I know. Was it fun tonight?”

  “Yes.” Mariam told her about the family, the restaurant, the dancing. Razan’s eye made her feel guilty for all of it.

  “Why are you hiding from him?” Mariam asked.

  “From Papa?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you hate me, too? Mariam asked. “I work in the Palace. I am no better than your father.”

  Razan pulled into a ball. She looked down. “I don’t hate either of you.”

  A tear rolled from her left eye. She pawed at it. “I hate the man who did this. I hate our prison.” She slumped into Mariam’s shoulder, feathering her fingers on the skin below her bandage. She sniffled. “The doctor says I’m not supposed to cry. It slows the healing.”

  MARIAM LEFT RAZAN ON THE couch and went into her bedroom, leaving the lights off. She slid from her dress and stood next to the bed in her underwear. She breathed heavily, clenching her fingers into fists, releasing, repeating.

  She started with the front kicks, jumping to switch sides, moving quicker now, taking the rage inside and sweeping it away with each strike. She could hear the air crack as she moved, feel the sweaty moisture beading on her back and brow. She dropped to the floor for push-ups, stretching and straining her arms until the muscles burned. She stood and shifted to palm strikes, imagining the blows crushing the nose of Razan’s mukhabarat assailant. Faster, Mariam, faster, her Krav Maga instructor had said in Paris all those years ago, do not stop. Move.

  5

  GENERAL ALI HASSAN WAS WELL ACQUAINTED WITH death, having killed his own mother his first hours in the world and many others in the four decades since. And now, in the high heat of Syria’s civil war, he again courted death as he worked a blade under the skin of CIA spy Marwan Ghazali’s left thumb. The man screamed as Ali removed the knife, wiped it with a rag, and returned it to his shirt pocket.

  “Inconsistencies cannot be tolerated,” Ali said, taking a seat in front of the prisoner. “I explained this to you.”

  Ghazali sat nude, bound to a rickety chair beside a table. Floodlights glared behind him. Colonel Saleh Kanaan, one of Ali’s lieutenants, fanned several pieces of paper out on the table for effect. Ali already knew what they said.

  “On the third draft, Marwan, you said you met your CIA handler, Valerie Owens, only in Damascus,” Ali said. He reached for another paper and slid it to the prisoner, who tried blinking at it but could only seem to focus on the ruins of his thumb.

  “I will read it for you,” Ali said. “On your fourth testimonial, you mention a meeting with Owens in Abu Dhabi.” He flipped to another page. “But on your fifth draft the Abu Dhabi meeting is gone. Just Damascus.”

  Ali lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. “Now, please tell me: What happened in Abu Dhabi?”

  “I made a mistake,” Ghazali pleaded. “I had not slept in days, I was delirious. I explained this to your man.” Ghazali motioned to Kanaan. His teeth clattered in the cold.

  “You are lying,” Ali said, dragging his chair closer. “Tell me the truth and we can avoid more trouble. What happened in Abu Dhabi?”

  Ghazali hung his head and began whimpering. “I never met anyone there.”

  Ali sighed. He had been a criminal investigator before he joined the mukhabarat. He had investigated murders, robberies, and, once, a gruesome crucifixion that he could still see on the back side of his eyes. Physical pain alone was not the most effective way to elicit the truth: best to wear down a spy over months of isolation and constant testimonial. Eventually the disoriented prisoner would lose the will or the ability to maintain their cover and they would break. Then they would reveal everything.

  But there had to be consequences when a prisoner lied. It was one of his rules.

  Ali removed the knife from his shirt pocket. Ghazali screamed.

  ALI RINSED OFF HIS SHIRT and cleaned the blade in one of the basement’s bathroom sinks. He dried it and slipped it back into his breast pocket, then lit another Marlboro. Smoke hung in the unventilated room as he wrung out the shirt.

  As he’d expected, Ghazali had met Owens once in Abu Dhabi. He had provided stolen documents at the meeting.

  Ali stubbed out the cigarette and walked upstairs to his office, eyes slitting against the morning light seeping through the windows. He wandered to the window to watch a Syrian fighter jet, a MiG purchased from the Russians, wind through the predawn and drop its payload on a rebel-held suburb. The glass panes shuddered, and smoke poured over the rubble of what used to be apartment buildings.

  He lit another cigarette and looked up at the portrait of President Bashar al-Assad hanging above his door. Every bureaucrat and security official had one.

  Ali was slightly framed but with a tube of belly fat, the fruit of nearly two decades of late nights and the residual stress of criminal investigations, intelligence work, and, now, civil war. A helmet of black hair was smoothed backward over a skull set with intense eyes, a nose bent rightward at the halfway mark, and a sharp jawline. A textured scar wound up the left side of his neck and ended at the bottom of his cheek. Sometimes it itched.

  He looked down at the maze of concrete berms outside the ten-story building. A flaking sign read Syrian Arab Republic Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform. A lie, but it was not intentional. It was just that no one had bothered to take it down.

  The building now housed the Security Office, an intelligence agency attached to the Presidential Palace. It was one of Syria’s many security services. By Ali’s count, there were seventeen different security organizations in wartime Syria. The world of the secret police—the mukhabarat, as these institutions were collectively known—was a byzantine jumble of overlapping agencies, competing egos, and unseen patronage networks. Even senior officials like Ali had difficulty understanding the boundaries and jurisdictions that separated them. The President, like his father, had purposely fashioned it that way—the easier to play each institution off the other. But as the civil war burned and the rebels, the irhabiun, the terrorists, became entrenched, the President established the Security Office to carry out the government’s most sensitive spy hunting. He put Ali in charge of it.

  Ali put out the cigarette and checked his watch. It was time to speak with Valerie Owens. He took his pack of Marlboros and descended back into the basement.

  THE SECURITY OFFICE’S BASEMENT WAS filled with dank rooms, stacks of filing cabinets, and boxes brimming with agricultural studies from the 1970s. Ali and his team had converted the space into a warren of cells and interrogation rooms. It had been soundproofed, wired with cameras and microphones, and outfitted with concrete-slab beds and toilet buckets. Several of the floors had been tiled and fitted with small drains to collect the residue from interrogations.

  Kanaan opened the cell door and Ali walked in. Owens lay on her slab passing the time staring at the ceiling. She still wore a bandage on her head to cover the fractures from the violence during her arrest. He had provided direct orders that she was not to be harmed, and in a rage had suspended the idiot officer who struck her.

  Ali sat by Owens’s feet. They spoke in Arabic.

  “General, I asked you not to smoke in here.”

  “Of course, Ms. Owens,” Ali said, stubbing it out on the floor. Then, smiling, he lit another and expelled the first drag in a cloud over her slab bed. She scowled. “I wanted to ask again about how you communicated with Marwan Ghazali here in Damascus.” He reviewed her eyes to check for a flicker of recognition and instead saw hatred. This one was well trained. Two weeks of cold and discomfort, and she’d provided nothing of value.

  Owens sat up and ran her hands through her blond hair, matted and greasy from her stay in the cell. The end of the slab where her hair had been was shiny with oil. “We’ve covered this before, General. I do not know this Marwan Ghazali. I am a second—”

  “Yes, yes,” Ali said. “A second secretary at the U.S. Embassy. I know. Shall I perhaps play again the surve
illance footage of your car—with your diplomatic plates—driving past the location Ghazali told us had been arranged for his exfiltration? Maybe we watch it again, Ms. Owens?”

  Valerie stood and stretched her lithe frame. Skinnier now, he could see as her shirt hiked up to expose her lower ribs.

  “We’ve been over the tape, General,” she said. “I was running errands. I’ve shown you the stores I visited on your nice maps. Now please let me speak with the embassy. My detention here is illegal.”

  Ali ignored this request, just as he had done every day for the past two weeks. “Ghazali has told us many things. In fact, we just learned about a meeting in Abu Dhabi. Quite interesting, the documents Ghazali stole. But, Ms. Owens, what I really want to know about are his communication methods with you. Was there a device? Maybe if you tell me about the device and where it is, I will let you call the embassy? A reasonable offer, no?”

  Owens lay back down on the slab bed. “I do not know a Marwan Ghazali. I am a U.S. diplomat, a second secretary—”

  Ali cut her off with a wave and stood, closing the door behind him and leaving her in darkness.

  IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK WHEN Ali’s driver left him outside his apartment. The twins were asleep. Layla was reclined on the sofa reading and drinking wine. Following their custom, she asked no questions about his day, and he offered nothing in return. He poured himself a steep glass and sat down beside her feet, which he began rubbing. She put the book down and shut her eyes.

  “What did you and the boys do today?” he said.

  “Shut up and just keep rubbing,” she said.

  He complied, nurturing his well-honed instinct to follow orders.

  After several minutes Ali had earned her answer: “We got groceries—the lines were horrendous and there was very little meat this week, by the way—then played around here. Fine day. Ah . . . a bit lighter.” She winced as he worked a pressure point near her right heel.