Damascus Station

by Unknown

Ali had studied English for a few months in Moscow. Not under the best tutors, he would be the first to admit, but he’d developed a familiarity with the language and considered himself proficient. The call he had just received—been subjected to, really—had been conducted primarily in Arabic, but at a few points had detoured into a street English that he did not understand. Kanaan had studied at the University of North Dakota in the nineties, when the peace negotiations between Syria and Israel had created some measure of goodwill between the Syrian and American governments. Kanaan’s family had taken advantage and packed him off to study in America. He returned speaking fluently, albeit with an inexplicable lilt that was nothing like the American accents Ali had heard.

  Ali pressed stop on the recorder and turned away from the table to sneeze. Kanaan sat across the table. Ali lit a cigarette and walked to the window. Kanaan had been slightly amused listening to the call, but now he stared into the middle distance as he worked through the implications. Ali looked out the window, burning down the cigarette in silence. A helicopter operated above Douma. He watched something, probably a barrel bomb, drop from its hulk to the ground. He turned away.

  “Rewind it,” Ali said. “I want to hear it again.”

  BG ALI HASSAN: Who is this?

  UNKNOWN CALLER: Doesn’t matter. We know you are holding Valerie Owens. We want her released today and returned to the American Embassy.

  BG ALI HASSAN: Who is this?

  UNKNOWN CALLER: Already told you, it doesn’t matter. And let me be clear: We know you have her inside the Security Office, General. We hold you responsible for her safety.

  [Sound of a cigarette lighter clicking]

  UNKNOWN CALLER: Hello?

  BG ALI HASSAN: I do not know a Valerie Owens. You are CIA?

  UNKNOWN CALLER: I thought you’d say that, douchebag.

  “Pause it,” Ali said. He looked at Kanaan, who swallowed hard.

  “What was the English word spoken at the end?”

  Kanaan’s eyes narrowed in contemplation. “It is vulgar American slang for a man who is an idiot but does not know it.”

  “Why is it a bag?”

  “The first part of the word is a reference to feminine products.”

  “Put into a bag?”

  “Yes.”

  Ali frowned. “Start it again.”

  BG ALI HASSAN: This is the CIA, yes? I will be reporting this call to the President.

  UNKNOWN CALLER: We hold you personally responsible, General, understand? Release her now.

  BG ALI HASSAN: I told you I do not know what you are talking about. Goodbye.”

  UNKNOWN CALLER: Don’t you hang up.[Inaudible muttering and yelling] You are responsible. And if she is harmed I am going to personally deal with you, Ali. If you touch a single hair on her head I will remove your nut sack and feed it to you. I will—

  [BG Ali Hassan ends call]

  “The last bit there,” Ali said. “I suspect it is all in English because this person became very angry. I understand that they told me not to hang up, but I missed the rest. They were speaking very quickly.”

  Kanaan summarized.

  “My own balls? This is what they said?”

  Kanaan nodded.

  “And the part about her hair?”

  “It is an expression that means if we hurt her even a little bit they will punish us. If we touch a hair on her head.” Kanaan pulled at a tuft of his own for emphasis.

  Ali frowned again, stood to collect another Marlboro from the desk, and lit it facing the window. “Thank you, that’s all for now.”

  Kanaan stopped in the doorway. “General, an aide from your brother’s office called and asked when the final report on the CIA woman would be finished. He said your brother is expecting his copy today.”

  Ali nodded. “Let me read it one more time. Wait here.”

  He picked up the brief report he had drafted for the President describing the events that had taken place in his interrogation chamber two days earlier. He and Rustum had come to blows over who should draft it. The Comanche had put a knife against Kanaan’s throat and made the choice simple. “You write it, little brother,” Rustum had said. Ali opened the manila folder and read it again. He set it down and looked at the second page, which included the photograph.

  He waved Kanaan over and handed him the folder. “Make copies, then submit them. We keep the originals.” Kanaan did so and returned the packet to Ali’s office.

  Picking up the folder, Ali descended the stairs into the basement. He lit a cigarette as he moved through the darkness toward a particular filing cabinet. Ali kept a safe in his office, as did every senior official in the regime, but this was typically the first thing taken in a political or anticorruption raid. His home could also be ransacked, and he did not have the foreign access to manage a Swiss bank account, at least not yet. For now, he used the agricultural filing cabinets as his safe-deposit box. It was into the folder he now opened, labeled “Lake Assad Water Level, Reports and Analysis, 1988–1992,” that he placed the picture, nestling it next to the videotape of the interrogation. He shut the filing cabinet.

  Back in his office, Ali lit another cigarette as he called home. He checked his watch. “Habibti, have you and the boys eaten yet?”

  IN THE APARTMENT ALI TOSSED Sami into the nest of pillows on the bed. The boy shrieked joyfully as he flew through the air. Then Ali howled like a wolf and chased Bassam out of the bedroom into the living room. He caught him near the kitchen, where Layla was preparing a late dinner. Snatching him up, Ali pressed his lips into his stomach and pretended to blow bubbles. The boy giggled and then Ali felt Sami clutch his legs as he mounted his shoes to join Ali as he walked. They collapsed into the couch. Sticky hands covered his eyes, and Sami said: “Who is it, Papa, who is it?” Ali tousled Sami’s hair before swinging him around to his front and tickling his big toddler belly. The boy collapsed into the sofa, squealing in delight. Ali chased Bassam into the boys’ bedroom and, capturing him, swung him over a shoulder to return the boy to the couch with his twin brother. The boys jumped together on the couch and Ali joined Layla in the kitchen to help finish the meal.

  “It is a nice surprise to have you home early,” she said. He stopped in the doorway and did not answer as he watched her cut peppers. She sliced cleanly but forcefully, driving the knife blade into the cutting board. She chopped quickly, working through a long orange pepper, setting the slices aside, and moving on to a green one. Hack, hack, hack on the wood. She slid more pepper slices onto the boys’ plates, then scooped hummus alongside.

  “I will make you some, before you go back to the office.” She took another orange pepper from the package and began slicing. She severed the stem with a final smack of the blade and set the knife aside with a flourish.

  Ali steadied himself on the doorframe and smiled at Layla. She handed him two plates. He put them on the kitchen table, then collected two of the little Toy Story cups and began filling them with water. Layla hugged him from behind as he stood at the sink. “I’m glad you’re home,” she said. He felt her hair gently gliding over his shoulder as she kissed his neck.

  If you touch a single hair on her head . . .

  Water ran down shaky fingers as the first cup overflowed. He swore softly, dumped some of the water, and dried his hands.

  “Are you okay?” Layla said.

  “Of course, habibti.” He turned to kiss her on the forehead.

  Then he turned to the living room. “Boys, dinner is ready,” he called out.

  PART II

  Recruitment

  7

  THE COUNTERSURVEILLANCE OPERATION ON MARIAM Haddad had taken shape over two days of planning in the living room of a Paris Station safe house near the Place des Vosges in the trendy Marais district. Sam, accustomed to grimier NE Division real estate, was surprised to find that it was an elegant pied-à-terre set behind a thick wooden door on the fifth floor of a creamy stone building. The windows opened onto the square below. The view was all r
oofs and chimneys: a canopy of slates, ambers, and ochers. But now the elegant living room was littered with maps, satellite imagery, pizza boxes, and discarded cartons of Chinese food.

  At night they drove the routes and rehearsed the dance of trading places as choreographer, the person on the surveillance team who would keep eyes on Mariam. The BANDITOs—the Kassab triplets—had earned their cryptonym on the streets of Beirut running similar ops to determine if Hizballah was watching the CIA Station’s assets. But the French had not invested in surveillance cameras like the Brits. And budget cuts in the French security services, according to one report Sam had read, had led to wholesale cancellations of domestic surveillance for anything other than counterterrorism concerns. The odds of the French embarrassing them on the streets were low. “Really, Sam, c’mon,” Rami said. “This op, Paris, the whole thing is like a nice vacation.” The trio had been hunched over a satellite image of the streets around the Syrian delegation’s hotel, each delicately blowing on a carton of Peking duck. Sam laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Rami had said. All three brothers looked up at Sam.

  “You guys may not look much like brothers,” Sam said. “But you’ve got the same tics.”

  “Triplets running surveillance, you nuts, Sam?” Bradley had said when he heard Sam wanted to recruit them. “Whole point of a surveillance op is to avoid getting spotted, not to have three chances to spot the same guy.” Sam included pictures in his next cable to make the point. Rami: squatty and jowly. Yusuf: long and lean. Elias: right in the middle.

  Rami took a bite of the duck and rolled his eyes.

  “Anyways,” Sam said. “Might be a vacation for you guys, but I’m the one who has to warm-pitch a Syrian woman on the street.” The pitch—warm, not cold, because the CIA had background information on Haddad—was arguably the toughest and most uncertain recruitment act in the trade. Sam would approach her on the street and, in a matter of seconds, attempt to convince her to meet him in a discreet location. CIA could never be certain how the target would respond. A case officer Sam knew in Istanbul had been pushed down a flight of stairs after pitching a Russian GRU official at the top of the metro. Always pitch ’em on flat ground, he had said.

  Sam stood over the map and pointed at a stone staircase on the banks of the Seine, a few blocks from Mariam’s hotel. One of the brothers had circled it with a red marker. “Let’s not do it here.”

  MORNING BROUGHT BRILLIANT SPRINGTIME LIGHT and the monotony of the waiting, the first, essential, and most mind-numbing act of any surveillance operation. Sam had already downed two coffees and was a little jittery from the caffeine when the hotel’s double doors swung open and Mariam Haddad emerged onto the street just off the Rue de Rivoli, which was brimming with luxury shops, breezy awninged cafés, and high-end boutiques.

  “She’s out,” Sam said into the encrypted earpiece radio. From the bakery across the street, he finished his third cup of coffee and took the last bite of a pain au chocolat.

  He left a stack of small coins on the table and stood up. It was time to begin the dance. Would the Syrians stick close to her, bumper-lock her all day, just to check? Would the boys at La Piscine, the DGSE, the French external service, try to recruit her? A day of watching, of beating the pavement, would provide an early answer.

  “Copy,” said the Kassab triplets in unison, from their positions scattered around the neighborhood’s arteries, the team positioned to pick her up whichever way she’d ventured.

  “She’s in athletic gear, looks like a morning run,” Sam said. “We got lucky.”

  A run would almost certainly occur along a route unknown to all but Mariam herself. This meant that any opposing surveillance teams would be forced to rely heavily on mobile assets—people, cars, motorcycles—trailing Mariam, dropping clues for Sam and the BANDITOs. The fixed positions—parked cars, prearranged cameras, people at cafés—would be tricky for Sam and his team to detect on foreign ground. Mobile teams would move. The movement could be spotted.

  She stood on the sidewalk outside the hotel stretching, taking in the spring air.

  She still resembled the single stolen photo CIA possessed. And, as he had with the photo, Sam looked for a beat longer than was professionally necessary. She had chestnut hair that descended halfway down her back, well-defined cheekbones, and a rounded, natural nose. She must have passed on the plastic surgery common among so many upper-class Syrian women.

  She tied her hair up into a ponytail and looked around, as if debating her route.

  A young businessman walking past broke Parisian custom and smiled at her, and she responded with an easy, toothy smile that brought out the dimples in her cheeks.

  She ran toward the Tuileries at a steady clip.

  “Your direction, Rami,” Sam said. “South on Castiglione.” He went to collect the Vespa rental he had parked on the sidewalk.

  “Copy. Heading to intersection.” Rami would mark her path and either follow or lead Sam or one of his brothers in the right direction. They had to follow but not spook her, which meant constantly rotating roles so their presence remained undetected.

  Sam drove the Vespa until he reached the Place de la Concorde, where he would take up Rami’s position. He motored past Concorde’s obelisk centerpiece and hit a red light near the bridge just before the Seine.

  “She’s, uh, not the typical surveillance target, Sam,” Rami said. “She’s more, what’s the word . . .”

  “Beautiful?” Sam said. Yusuf chuckled over the radio.

  “I was going to say buxom,” Rami said.

  “Just like the target we watched in Istanbul,” Sam said. “Except in this case it’s a woman, not a Saudi general, and she appears well below three hundred pounds. Consider yourselves lucky.”

  “She’s cutting through the garden toward the river,” Rami said into the radio, huffing. “There is a younger guy, maybe six feet tall, black athletic shirt and shorts, running behind her. Probably nothing. But he looks Levantine.”

  “Copy,” said everyone.

  “Rami, I’m stuck at a light outside of Concorde,” Sam said. “Can you get far enough into the garden to see which way she turns when she hits the river?”

  “Yes,” Rami said, breathing heavy. Sam waited a beat. “She’s heading your way. That dude turned with her. About twenty yards back.”

  One turn. Nothing to worry about yet. Countersurveillance required time. Two hours of watching would be inconclusive. But ten, twelve, a full day—then you knew, usually. The light held red. He popped a piece of gum into his mouth. The watching made him fidgety. Five cars in front lay the pedestrian crossing. Sam saw Mariam run through quickly. The male runner kept his eyes locked on her.

  Something felt off. Sam banked right to follow the river tucked below. He lost sight of Mariam from the road. He heard the horn from one of the Bateaux Mouches riverboats. A flock of pigeons dispersed overhead as he swept along.

  Sam wanted a closer look at the other runner, whose presence now tingled his neck. The sensation was an old friend since the Farm, the signal that watchers lurked nearby. It required skill for a solo tail to maintain a clandestine presence for a long period of time. Even those untrained in surveillance and countersurveillance tended to notice, eventually. And the French DGSE—they wouldn’t use an obvious guy like this for the ground team. Sam accelerated the bike, pulling it onto the sidewalk when he reached the next stone staircase that descended to the riverside walkway.

  “I’m going to follow on foot.” He ran down the stairwell, arriving at the bottom forty yards behind the man tailing Mariam. Sam ran behind him. Now he could watch for details: pace, line of sight, subtle signals to a hidden team like working an ear-fitted radio, as Sam now was. Mariam’s pace accelerated. She had a motor. Sam’s jeans and T-shirt were starting to cling to his sweaty body, and he knew he would not be able to jog unnoticed for long.

  “Guy’s tracking with her,” Sam said. “I’m going up to the road. I’ll keep running from there. Yu
suf, you take them if I get spread out.”

  “Copy.”

  Sam ascended a stone staircase at the next bridge into a leafy park littered with glass bottles and cigarettes. He jogged along the river, dodging idle clumps of pedestrians, strollers, and the Parisian dog walkers, leashes crisscrossing the path like trip wire. An old man walking a pudgy bulldog gasped as Sam jumped over the leash.

  When he reached the Alma Bridge, he thought he had the answer: the black-clad runner ascended the steps behind Mariam, reached the top, and exchanged words with another young man wearing workout gear. The fresh runner, this one in baggy red shorts, took off behind her, tracing her path.

  “She’s covered, guys,” Sam said. “The runner just passed the baton to a fresh set of legs.”

  NOW CERTAIN THAT MARIAM WAS COVERED, Sam and the BANDITOs set about discovering their identity. They backed off Mariam and focused on what they soon determined was a three-man team. All Syrian or Lebanese, the BANDITOs agreed. The two younger men, both athletic, and a third, an older heavyset man—“Definitely Syrian,” Elias said, “he’s got that mukhabarat look, the troglodyte sensibility, the throwback mustache”—who revealed himself by communicating with Red Shorts through a clunky hand signal from a bookstore window.

  The Syrian watchers tracked Mariam until she returned to her hotel, then reappeared to follow her on a shopping trip to Les Galeries Lafayette. At no point did they attempt to detect or draw out surveillance.

  The watch continued until she joined her Palace comrades for a dinner on Saint Honoré. Later, with Mariam safely snug in her hotel room, Sam and the BANDITOs decamped to debrief at the Marais safe house. To this elegance Yusuf brought two Pizza Hut pepperoni pizzas and twelve bottles of cheap French beer.

  Sam scowled. “What the hell, man, we’re in the food capital of the world and you insist that we eat this crap? Two days of nothing but lousy takeout.”

  Yusuf shrugged. “We watch, we eat Pizza Hut.”

  “If it ain’t broken,” Elias said.