Damascus Station

by Unknown

  THEY DROVE THROUGH BEAULIEU-SUR-MER AND parked on the northern tip of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. They dressed casually as if going for an afternoon stroll. Mariam wore jeans, a Breton-striped top, and white tennis shoes. He wore jeans and a gray T-shirt. The dusty paths circumnavigating the peninsula would be a reasonable proxy for a running-trail drop site in Damascus. It was late afternoon, the sky cloudless, the trails peopled but not full. A young couple, hands in each other’s back pockets, strolled past. Sam and Mariam spoke in Arabic.

  “You are not allowed to love your agents because it makes you less objective, no?” she asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “And what happens if CIA discovers our kiss?”

  “I would be okay. They would ask a lot of questions. Maybe give me a poly—”

  Sam stopped talking. A couple pushing a stroller turned a corner in front of them and walked past.

  He continued: “They might give me a polygraph. But I’d be fine. A kiss is different from—”

  She completed the sentence in English: “Sex.”

  The switch from Arabic threw him off. “Yes. For that they might fire me. Full-scale review, that kind of thing. I know a guy who slept with an agent. They benched him for two years.”

  “What is benching?”

  “It means he sat at a desk doing nothing.”

  “I see.”

  They continued walking and he shifted to a less arousing subject: dead drops.

  “A good site,” he explained, “harmoniously balances physical cover and flow. The former because it has to be hidden, the latter because the agent and the handling officer need to travel past, ideally at an unbroken speed, to retrieve the object. The two are always in tension. The more flow, the less hidden it will be. The more covered an object, the crummier the flow. I once used a taxidermied cat tossed near a construction site. The agent would stuff papers and messages in a compartment that had once held intestines. No one touched it. But it was too hidden: the area contained other roadkill and the agent could not locate the right animal, which broke his flow and eventually forced him to abandon the pickup.”

  She snorted. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am.”

  “No cats for me, please.”

  He shook his head. “No cats, I promise. I think we’ll use trash, maybe a can lined with adhesive to hold paper on the inside, with a top you can pull off.”

  He found a promising site on the western side of the peninsula: a trash can next to a short rock wall, garbage strewn about. He found a can and worked the top off with a pocketknife he’d brought along.

  “This is as good as any we’ll find,” he said as he rifled through the trash until he found a napkin. He shoved it inside the can and tossed the can into the pile. She wore a sour frown as she surveyed the trash.

  “This whole thing is less glamorous than people think,” he said. “It’s trash and dead cats more than anything else.”

  THEY PRACTICED FOR TWO HOURS, stopping whenever pedestrians approached. Sam took video on his phone as she repeated filling and retrieving contents from the can. She was a quick learner, and the Krav helped. She could move fluidly. She could move solidly. She could move with intention. He filmed on his phone from all angles and by the end of the afternoon her movements completed the cover: a jogger tying her shoe in about three seconds.

  At sunset she said she’d had enough, but he insisted on one more retrieval. He filmed from behind as if he were a mukhabarat tail. She jogged to the trash pile, slowing on her approach. When she reached it she bent at her waist, legs soldier-straight, body folding into a ninety-degree angle as her chest plunged toward the ground and her buns jutted out.

  The jeans were tight and majorly distracting from the dead drop evaluation. She looked back at him with a wicked smile. Then she straightened her back, stood erect, and pretended to take a sip from the can. She winked.

  “I think we’ll call it there,” he said.

  14

  THEY MADE THE SECOND RECIPE FROM HIS GRANDMOTHER, a cacio e pepe—bucatini lathered in twenty euros of melted pecorino dusted with ground black pepper. They lit some candle lanterns and scattered them across the terrace. Mariam wore a red floral-print sundress, sandals, and gold hoop earrings with her hair flopped halfway down her back, whorls untamed.

  She had discovered the wine cellar after they reviewed the videos of her dead-drop training and took a Tuscan red. Sam asked if it was expensive. She rolled her eyes. “That’s not the point,” she said. “We want to find something that will pair well with the pasta. This Sangiovese will be good.”

  “So is it expensive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Another eye roll.

  “Thank you for coming to the hotel room,” she said after they sat down and clinked glasses. “For saving me. I realized this afternoon I had not said that.”

  “You would have done the same for me.”

  “I know. But still.”

  They ate for a few moments in silence, then she set down her silverware. “I am scared. Scared to go back. To take the first real step.”

  “We’ll do this together,” he said. “I will protect you.”

  MARIAM STARED INTO THOSE EYES and realized at that moment why she wanted him. In some strange world this was now one of her most intimate relationships. He knew everything about her, they’d shed blood together, and he knew her darkest secret. In Paris she’d felt the chemistry, but now it was more: a raw and unconsummated emotional intimacy. She wanted more. She wanted it all.

  “I know you will protect me,” she said. “This is your job, no? Recruiting spies, obtaining their secrets. But what happens if I am caught?”

  “Mariam, don’t—”

  “Let me finish. If I am caught they will torture, then murder me. You get to go home. I am putting it all on the line. You are not. This is a fact.”

  “It bothers you.”

  “Of course. Our relationship—our partnership—is special. I don’t really know how to describe it. It just is.” She leaned forward, pointing at her heart. “So I want more than the typical agent gets.”

  He shifted in his chair and looked down the cliff toward the moonlit sea. He absentmindedly swirled the last of the wine around in his glass and she noticed as he gazed, hypnotized, into the ink that for a moment he’d traveled elsewhere. He ran both hands through his hair, then put them back on the table. Mariam could see the sweat dappled on the cloth. He looked into her eyes to check for the trust before he began speaking.

  “I will tell you something no one else knows. Would that help?” She said she wanted to hear.

  “I have three brothers. But once there was a fourth, Charlie. He was the baby. Four years younger. Crazy funny kiddo, my parents say so now, I knew it even then. Blond hair, big blue eyes, easy smile. He would make crazy faces and dance around to music. Life of the party. Charlie and I always got along. We had fun together. I was old enough to take care of him, he was old enough we could have fun.”

  She saw his jaw cement in place, just like she did when she wanted to cry but forced herself to soldier on. She said nothing.

  “I remember this one time. Charlie’s four, four and a half. I’m eight or so. Our oldest brother Danny is studying for a math test and not getting it. He’s crying as my dad tries to help him work through the problems. My dad suggests he cool off a little, take a break, and he leaves the kitchen. Anyways, Danny is sitting there at the table crying. Charlie sidles up next to him, scans over the textbook like he can make sense of it. He closes the book and puts his arm around Danny and tells him it will be okay, you’ll get it eventually. This four-year-old kid comforting him. Danny puts his head on Charlie’s shoulder.”

  Sam laughed, wiped the right corner of an eye, and took a sip of wine. “Charlie puts his right finger in his mouth and licks it, nice and juicy, then shoves it in Danny’s ear, telling him the math problems are easy, he’ll figure it out.”

  Mariam lau
ghed and almost coughed up wine. “What did Danny do?”

  “He yelled and ran after Charlie. Failed the math test, if I recall.”

  She saw his jaw clench again. They passed several seconds in silence. Insects were humming on the hillside and murmurs of a crowd floated upward from the narrow medieval streets.

  “It was a few months after that,” Sam said, “me and Charlie are the only ones at home. Mom needs eggs from the store. Ten-minute walk, we did it all the time. She says you go with Charlie. We take a baseball with us. We’re tossing it around, Charlie demanding I throw a couple fly balls, wanting me to run ahead, then throw it high. This road is never busy. Still, I know it’s a bad idea. But there’s Charlie, making the pouty face, yelling. Finally I give in, run about twenty feet ahead. We’ve come up a hill at this point, beyond Charlie it crests down. We’re on the shoulder and it’s flanked by these big pines. I toss it very high, kind of angry because Charlie’s been a brat. It glances off a tree branch and toward the road. I never saw the car coming. Black pickup, running at a nice clip up the hill. It was clean, docs said he didn’t suffer. I lay there with him on the road, for how long I have no idea. His eyes were open, like he was still locked on the ball. The idiot driver holding his head in his hands, pacing, muttering. No one ever found the baseball. I left it there, never told anyone about it.”

  She now clenched her own jaw. “It is not your fault, you know. You did not run him over.”

  He took a deep breath and refilled his wineglass. The pasta was cold. “We should probably put this back on the stove,” he said.

  Standing in the kitchen, she kissed him. “Thank you for telling me,” she said.

  They were ravenous and ate from the pot, joking about their fight in Paris and her suggestive dead drop and something she had spotted as she’d tried to remove his shirt the other night.

  “Let me see,” she said, pointing at Sam’s left shoulder blade. “I could not get a good look the other night. This is still a secret.”

  Sam lifted the shirt up his back, exposing the word Clarity tattooed on the left blade.

  “What does it mean?” she asked. “And why is everything behind the i all discolored and shitty?” she said in English.

  “You mean shoddy?”

  “No,” she said with a half smile.

  His shifty body language said he had given this speech before and hated it. She ran a hand along his back. It was nice and strong. Except for this tattoo, which she did not like.

  “Clare was my high school girlfriend,” he said. “One night we got drunk. We went to a tattoo parlor and got each other’s names on our backs. When we broke up, I couldn’t afford to get the whole thing removed, so I had a guy try to remove the e in her name, then finish the word into Clarity. At the time, it seemed profound.”

  She cackled, then snorted. A whip of bucatini almost escaped from her mouth, splattering a few flecks of cheese on her dress. She wiped them off, laughing. “I paid to have my Assad tattoo removed from my bottom. Worth every Syrian pound.” She winked. He laughed and kissed her, his confidence and looseness returning, she could tell, as his mind distanced itself from his brother.

  Laughing, they went into the cellar to find more wine.

  WHEN THEY’D ALMOST FINISHED THE next bottle, Mariam asked how frequently they would see each other in Damascus. “It really depends,” he said. “But ideally only when necessary. It is obviously dangerous to meet face-to-face there. For your safety we should communicate as much as possible through the drop site. Eventually, we’ll get you a device.”

  “And the training you are giving me tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Surveillance detection routes. SDRs. How to ensure the mukhabarat is not watching you before we meet. We’ll also do brush passes. There is a lot to cover.” Sam did not describe the nausea he felt at her going back inside.

  “So we have two days, then who knows,” she said, not asking a question.

  They sat on the terrace couch and melted into a sweet silence, facing the coastline as they emptied their glasses and nestled into each other. It felt for a moment like they were a normal couple. They stayed there for a while, soaking in the vast black night, until he kissed her and she kissed back, and soon the very natural feeling of leading Mariam toward the master bedroom of a CIA safe house took hold, their mouths locked, lips moving to laugh or kiss or gently bite, and they were standing by the bed when she slipped from her sundress and her underwear and he was catching up, almost tripping like an idiot over his jeans, and he heard that snort and felt soft hands grip him as he drew her body close and they fell onto the bed, laughing like friends who’d just discovered they could somehow be closer to each other, had just found the secret, couldn’t believe it had escaped them this long.

  Oh fuck, she said in English, fuck habibi, her head back on the pillow, once he was inside. He pressed his forehead on hers and kissed her. Her skin glistened and her thick hair, wet at the forehead, stuck onto her face and the pillow, her body seesawing underneath, everything in rhythm, that lipstick everywhere, a crime scene. He felt warm and could smell nothing but the lavender, hear the clink of her earrings as they found a rhythm. He escaped from the moment just once, to realize it seemed right and normal to now be with Syrian Palace official and recruited CIA asset Mariam Haddad, cryptonym ATHENA, in violation of the CIA’s code of conduct and probably a half dozen federal laws. But Mariam was straddling him, her head tossed back, their hands white and clasped together, and the thought evaporated.

  She fell asleep first, as the dawn light reached through the windows. Instead of sleeping, Sam worried. He thought of his agent servicing a dead drop. Eliciting information. Running an SDR. In Damascus. Sam’s eyes caught Mariam’s discarded bra, now twisted on the floor. What in the hell have I done?

  Mariam rolled closer to him, still asleep, breathing deep and peacefully.

  15

  THEY SHUFFLED AROUND THE SAFE HOUSE COLLECTING clothes, tidying the bedroom, scraping congealed pasta from pots. Of the lovemaking they said nothing. It had been natural, fun, normal, in a bizarre way. He made eggs and toast and they drank coffee on the terrace, watching waves crash into the rocks as the heat climbed up the hilltop.

  Sam reviewed Procter’s maps of Damascus on his tablet while Mariam showered. She emerged in the living room toweling off her wet hair and asked what time they were going into Nice. She smiled at him as she wrapped the towel around her wet hair. He said, “We’ve got about ten days of work to do in two, time to get dressed, habibti.” He didn’t realize he’d called her habibti—dear, baby, my love—it just slipped out but did not go unnoticed. She smiled at him for a moment, then walked off to change.

  They spent the morning drinking coffee as they tore through the classroom segment of surveillance detection. She was a star pupil—attentive, curious, eager to learn. The coffee, however, was treated with disdain. “It is black tar, Sam,” she said, wrinkling her face as she took small sips. “This is a drink for savages.”

  He taught her everything: the basic setup, the moves, spotting repeats, how to build the SDR into your pattern of life. The classroom lecture, he knew from the Farm, could only do so much. You had to get on the street. She was close enough that he could smell her hair and see the outline of her breasts under the clingy shirt and— Stop it, idiot, this is her preparation for Damascus. Time to focus. You get one chance at this.

  “Some of these ideas we’ll just have to practice out there, just so you know,” he said, pointing down the coastline toward Nice. She nodded and scanned the maps, knees bouncing, ready for action. “Time to go,” he said.

  His phone rang as she packed her purse and changed into tennis shoes in her bedroom. He did not recognize the number.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “It’s Procter.”

  “Chief, what’s up?”

  “I just landed in Nice. Spur-of-the-moment thing, so don’t think I don’t trust you, I just want to meet our girl myself before she disappears
into Damascus. Your cable said SDR training today. Put me in, Coach.”

  SAM HAD DESIGNED SEVERAL RUNS crisscrossing Nice’s Vielle Ville, a warren of medieval streets that resembled the terrain in the Syrian capital, the gelato boutiques, fedora-clad tourists, and watercolor buildings standing in for Damascus’s bombings, militias, and general mayhem. The BANDITOs and Procter would play the opposition. Damascus would be hellacious; they would be demons here. They brought out the heavy weapons: encrypted earpieces designed to look like Apple AirPods, several rented Vespas, disguises—mustaches, fake guts, new clothes and shoes, makeup—a nearly silent microdrone—unpermitted for aerial operation in France, but screw it—decked out with high-def and thermal imaging feeds, subminiature cameras embedded in sunglasses, messenger bags, and fedoras connected to an encrypted satellite link that beamed everything to the mother ship: a delivery van manned by Procter. Sam and Mariam sat at a brasserie on the city’s far western edge reviewing a tourist map of the city, debating the route.

  They drew one up. Long, exhausting, just like Damascus would be.

  He decided not to tell her about the drone. Evil, indecent, really.

  MARIAM NOTICED AS THEY PLANNED the routes that she loved this, wanted more of it even though she feared returning home. Twenty minutes in, she spotted one of the watchers dressed like a bum—shoes were clean and new, not a bum, she said later in the debrief—in a fixed position outside a Best Western, then successfully forced a couple tails into a wagon train on the way up the hill to the castle. She had the instinct for this, she knew. She could feel the opposition at work. Maybe the fruits of Syrian paranoia, of living in a place where you could always be under surveillance. The tingle again, a jolt down her spine. Her scans for surveillance turned up nothing. Three stops, a half dozen turns, she wound through the cramped little streets and decided she needed to quiet things down. Off the Cours Saleya she passed a sunny yellow baroque church covered in ornate sculptures. She was certain the tails had disappeared, but the tingle remained. She stepped into an Italian restaurant at the foot of the church and went into the back courtyard.