Damascus Station

by Unknown

She checked to be sure she was alone. She went into the alley and left the mark on the wall.

  26

  SAM AND PROCTER READ MARIAM’S MESSAGE IN THE Station. “Woof,” Procter said. “A face-to-face with a newly minted asset in this slaughterhouse? I hate it.”

  “I don’t like it, either,” Sam said, then read the message again:

  BOUTHAINA. AND I MET WITH ATIYAH. PALACE TURF WAR ONGOING. ATIYAH USING MY FAILURE WITH FATIMAH TO SQUEEZE BOUTHAINA. PHYSICAL THREAT MADE AGAINST ME AT END OF MEETING, INCLUDING HINTS AT ATTACK IN FRANCE. ATIYAH SAID: “BE VIGILANT. THERE IS MUCH TO FEAR.”

  BOUTHAINA SENDING ME TO MONTALCINO, ITALY, ON 6 JULY TO MEET AGAIN WITH FATIMAH. WILL HAVE TIME TO MEET IN PERSON.

  The period after the first word indicated Mariam had not planted the message under duress. Procter was reading the message over his shoulder. “Woof,” she said again, shaking her head. “Badness, Jaggers.”

  “But we really have no choice, do we?” he said. “They already tried to kidnap her in France.”

  “You have an idea of how to help her out?”

  Sam tapped a pen on the table. “Why do you keep that Mossberg there, Chief? Not like the armory is far.”

  “I find the presence of guns comforting.”

  He tapped the pen again, then doodled ATHENA into a notepad. He had nothing but an idea he remembered hearing from Bradley over beers in Cairo Station. It was insane, but Bradley insisted it had saved his asset’s life. What the hell, it was worth a shot. He had to protect her.

  “All right, crazy thought, but I remember Bradley telling me about an op he ran back in Algiers to protect an asset in a similar situation.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah, but full disclosure: it involves a subminiature camera and a necklace.”

  “Damn. Usually you have to pay double for that one.”

  PROCTER LIKED THE IDEA AND raised hell in cable traffic. (The words “dogshit bureaucratic red tape” were used in a cable read by most of NE Division and Science and Technology leadership.) Forty-eight hours later they sat in her office, well past midnight, as a very tired-looking techie from the CIA’s Office of Technical Services on the secure video teleconference, the SVTC screen, held up a sapphire necklace matching one from a Paris surveillance photo snapped by the BANDITOs before Mariam’s recruitment. Sam remembered it glittering as she drank a glass of wine on the terrace in Èze. Then, it had been the only thing she wore.

  Procter was feeling loose at this late hour and now swilled a can of Coors Light—likely smuggled into Syria by a friend in Diplomatic Security—as she pointed at the techie dangling a necklace on the SVTC screen. “It’s like fucking QVC in here. How many minutes left to order, Jaggers?”

  The techie took an admirable swing, running his hand along the necklace and explaining that she had twenty minutes and it could be Procter’s for “ten installments of just nineteen ninety-five.” Sam laughed. Procter mumbled something unintelligible and the techie ran his hand along the necklace again. “Explain how it works, man,” the Chief said.

  The techie showed the single power button and how the asset would stick a needle or a hairpin inside to turn it on or off. He said it could be dunked in water, dead-dropped, no problem, it was all-weather. “A plastic bag around it wouldn’t hurt, though.” The techie saw Procter raise an eyebrow, but before she could say anything he blurted out that its memory could hold about thirty hours of footage, a minor miracle he called it. Then he gave a technical explanation of the camera’s strontium power source.

  “Now, hold on,” Procter said raising her hand. “Our asset here is a chick, and she is going to wear this thing around her neck, like right on the skin, man.” Procter pointed to her chest in case the techie had problems with the anatomical vocabulary. “We have a breast cancer risk here, with some voodoo radioactive battery?”

  Sam could not tell if the techie wanted to laugh or cry. Probably both. His face had been vacuumed of color.

  “No, no risk. No risk to the asset,” the techie said. “Completely harmless.”

  “How soon can you get it here?” Sam asked.

  “We can pouch it overnight,” the techie said, relieved the call appeared to be ending.

  Procter hung up.

  SAM WAS THE FIRST TO arrive at the safe house, which was tucked into a quiet side street of the Christian Quarter. He was bone-tired. The SDR had required twelve exhausting hours, though he’d been certain he was black by hour six.

  The safe house had a small kitchen with a fully stocked refrigerator and pantry. It led into a sitting area stacked with modern furniture. The walls were bare. A bedroom and bathroom lay beyond the sitting room. A tech from the Station had swept the room for listening devices earlier in the day.

  Sam started the coffee and pulled the trays of catered mezze from the fridge. As Sam opened pantry drawers and foraged through the crispers and freezer, he felt rising guilt. There was a food shortage across Syria, not to mention skyrocketing inflation happening outside the bubble of central Damascus. The starvation was so bad in Douma that people were eating grass to survive, according to the intelligence reports. What little food they had was hoarded by the rebel commanders. The regime called it “Kneel or Starve.” He picked out a bottle of olive oil (prewar per liter price: two hundred Syrian pounds; now: eleven hundred) and set it on the counter.

  He surveyed the food and saw the spread of olives, makdous, tabbouleh, and yalanji stuffed grape leaves. He started the warmer and put four skewers of lamb kebab inside. He went back to the fridge and found cousa, a southern Syrian dish of small zucchinis, their insides scooped out and filled with lamb and rice seasoned with cumin, mint, coriander, and baharat.

  He poured himself a cup of coffee. He had thirty minutes until she arrived. He had to do something to cut the nerves, to stop thinking about Mariam running an SDR, now, in Damascus. He drank the coffee alone in the sitting room, looking uneasily into the inviting bedroom. He had not seen Mariam since the brush pass in the spice market, and even then it had not been more than a passing glance. He wondered if she would look different. If he would be able to control himself. If Washington would bomb and the Station would evacuate and he would never see her again.

  Damascus was on edge, like someone about to jump off a building. There was the sarin test and the reports about a regime counterattack, but even more vivid was the daily grind of life itself: the suicide bombings, the mortar volleys, the bread lines, the power outages, the bare grocery shelves. The journalists and UN officials holed up at the Four Seasons reminded him of places like Mogadishu or civil war Beirut: so hopelessly smashed that foreigners lounge at one safe watering hole, working their sources and stringers poolside, not because they wanted luxury but because it was too dangerous to go anywhere else.

  Damascus did not feel safe. And not just for him, for his tribe: Procter, the Station. And, of course, Mariam. He dared to imagine Mariam outside Syria. The possibility of an actual, human relationship. What had started as a physical magnetism had matured into something more complete, somehow without losing any of the spark. Mariam was street-smart, playful, courageous, hopeful. He knew how he felt. Could not bring himself to say it, though, even to himself.

  He got up to pour himself more coffee and leaned against the counter.

  The door clicked and Mariam walked in. She wore dark jeans, a blue blazer that slimmed into her wide hips, and a clingy gray T-shirt. She entered the kitchen and he pulled her in for a hug. She pressed her head into his shoulder and said, “Hello, habibi, I have missed you so much.” Sam, in his suit and white dress shirt, thought the scene probably looked like any couple greeting each other after separate days at the office. He kissed her, closing his eyes to inhale the lavender.

  “How much time do you have?” he asked. The first question for any asset.

  “Two hours.”

  He’d planned to start with the operation against Atiyah, but then they were kissing again in the kitchen and her hands were in his
hair and he was leading her into the bedroom. She bit his chin and pushed him onto a small sofa. He started unbuttoning his shirt. They smiled at each other and she giggled and stood and glanced toward the bed. His world narrowed to Mariam, now playfully kicking her ankle-slung jeans across the marbled calligraphy on the floor. They unbuttoned and unsnapped and slid off and pulled down until they reached the bed’s edge and fell in.

  AFTERWARD, HE LOOKED AT THE trail on the floor. Shoes at the beginning, near the couch. Her jeans, then his slacks, her gray shirt, a black bra, his white collared shirt, the black lacy underwear, ending with his boxers. A slow-motion rapture into the bed.

  Rising, they scrunched into the single sink bathroom to reassemble for the outside world. He fixed his hair and she hip-checked him as she dawdled with her jewelry.

  She leaned into the counter. The flush on her cheeks had subsided. Her hair was combed back and drawn up, her lipstick reapplied. This close, he could catch the slight tinge of sweat and the lavender.

  “I wanted this because I didn’t know if we’d ever have the chance again,” she said. “Maybe never. But here we are, and who knows how many times we have left? Maybe we end up like so many Syrians. Alive one minute, gone the next. Maybe you go home again and I never see you. We grow old separately. I know there are rules, I’ll do my job, but there is something between us. It matters to me.”

  He put his hands on her hips. “It means something to me, too, Mariam. I care for you.”

  He loved her, but he hated himself because he but could not, would not, say it.

  They kissed, and she pulled back and nodded to him. “I know how you feel. It’s how I feel, too.”

  THEY TOOK PLATES INTO THE living room and she walked him through the meeting with Atiyah. He asked for every word, every detail. When she finished, he told her about his plan and showed her the necklace.

  She gave a wan smile. “How did you re-create it perfectly? Kind of creepy, no?”

  He coughed. “Some pictures from Paris.”

  Thankfully, she let it go. She tried it on. He’d brought an aluminum can and she practiced dropping the necklace inside, as she would on the mountain after she took the video of Atiyah’s office.

  “Do you think anyone is following you?” he asked as they refilled their plates in the kitchen.

  She shook her head. “I’ve been careful. I do not believe he is following me. Now—”

  That was when a mortar landed on the roof of the building across the street. The safe house rattled and groaned. Mariam, accustomed to the sounds, put her plate down on the table and went to the window, brushing aside the drapes. He knew this was the last place in the apartment they should stand but his curiosity briefly overpowered the training. The windows on the building’s top floor had fractured outward, and Sam could see chunks of limestone and plaster and glass fragments on the street below. Sirens bayed in the distance.

  Another mortar struck a building a few blocks south. Then a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth in staccato succession. The walls rumbled with each impact.

  They stepped back from the window.

  “They like to shell the Christian Quarter, if they can,” she said. “Filled with Christians and mukhabarat buildings. If they miss the mukhabarat they might kill a few of us as a bonus.”

  Sam scanned the apartment to find the space farthest from the window. They couldn’t leave now, especially with police and fire and probably mukhabarat arriving to investigate.

  They stepped back into the bedroom. Standing next to the bed, she smoothed her hand over the rumpled sheets. “Will we be alone in Italy, habibi?”

  “Procter will join us. We’ll have the same surveillance team follow you to make sure Atiyah doesn’t try anything while you’re out of Syria.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Hmm,” she said. “A crowd.”

  He sat down on the bed and ran his hands through his hair. He was in deep, and he had no plan to get out. If he told Procter, CIA would fire him. And if he stopped seeing Mariam? He wasn’t sure he could.

  She pushed him back onto the sheets and climbed on top to straddle him. The sirens wailed outside.

  27

  GRATITUDE FOR HIS WIFE’S BARREN WOMB WAS A strange thought upon reviewing the dead wrapped in kaffan, the burial shrouds, like a hundred cotton cocoons. Strange, but not rare, for this gratitude had become a frequent companion since Abu Qasim had started fighting Assad’s siege works in Aleppo.

  Last Friday: the boy bringing water to the trench, killed by shellfire.

  On Saturday: the jaundiced girl who died of typhus in her mother’s ruined apartment, then serving as a sniper nest.

  On Sunday: a boy, sixteen, poking his head out from behind a street corner, AK-47 clattering wildly, missing everything downrange as a bullet tore into his throat.

  On Monday: a barrel bomb dropped on the field hospital, killing a ten-year-old with leukemia and two girls on the street outside.

  And now, in this village called Houla, hours away from Aleppo’s rubble, the gratitude had returned as one of the elders, weeping, explained what had transpired. As he reviewed the dead, heads pointed toward Mecca, Abu Qasim looked down at the body of a small child wrapped in the kaffan, noticing that the head appeared to be missing. He drew his wife, Sarya, close and prayed over her stomach, thanking Allah for her fallow womb as he always did when he saw dead children. Giving thanks that Abu Qasim was only his kunya, his nom de guerre, and that there had never been a child, nor would there ever be.

  The old man did not notice. He was hysterical.

  Abu Qasim told him he would appreciate a full report, and could he please take a few moments to compose himself? “Yes, yes, Commander, of course,” the elder said. He wiped his eyes. “I will fetch tea and return.”

  Abu Qasim stared out into the shrubland, away from the line of bodies, as Sarya stretched and doffed her hijab, using the elder’s absence to rearrange her long hair, once oily black but now striated with grays and whites. Her belly fat, once peeking gently over her jeans, had been replaced with lean muscle, and her face was now creased where it had once been smooth. Her breasts had shrunk from the hunger and she walked and sat with a slight stoop, as if hunched over a gun, which she often was.

  Despite it all, she was still beautiful. The smile remained wide, her long hair was thick, her eyes still alive, her appetite for him undiminished. He felt his own face, now gaunt and sallow, and thought of his wispy hair, his bony legs and arms, his left hand with its four fingers. He’d lost twenty-five pounds since he went to war.

  They had to keep moving. They’d received reports of the massacre yesterday and detoured on impulse. The trip from Aleppo would have required four hours before the war. Instead it took four days winding through a maze of highways, checkpoints, and back roads. At government checkpoints, they’d used doctored ID cards stolen from dead Alawis to pose as military couriers. At those stops Sarya wore fatigues and spoke directly to the government men.

  At rebel checkpoints, it had varied. They always used their true ID cards, but at some checkpoints Sarya donned a niqab in the back of the van, while at others the hijab sufficed. She never spoke at the rebel checkpoints. When they had passed through, she always let out her frustration, for she had killed more soldiers with her sniper rifle than the young men running the checkpoints. Why should she answer to them? She was up to one hundred and forty-two kills. The rifle, a Russian-made SV-98, had been acquired when Sarya killed its owner and upgraded from her Dragunov, another Russian weapon, which she’d taken from an earlier victim on the Aleppo front lines. The SV-98 was stashed in the false bottom of the van’s trunk. They would need it in Damascus.

  The old man returned with tea no one drank. “We have one hundred and two dead now,” he said. “All yesterday. Five or six more are likely to die today. The doctor is not optimistic. More than fifty are from a single clan.” He rubbed his eyes. “My own clan lost eighteen.”

  Abu Qasim said nothing. He needed the man to sp
eak. He could mourn when they had left. The old man got the message, apologized, and regained his composure. “The men of the village had gathered for a demonstration in the morning. Then the shelling started and continued for two or three hours. The men could not get back to their homes. Several tried, and they are dead now. In the afternoon, the mortars stopped. Some military, some mukhabarat, some shabiha militia gathered near the water plant, they kept us pinned down. The shabiha came from the Alawi villages.”

  The old man jabbed his finger toward the villages and his chin quivered.

  “They had guns but also cleavers, machetes, meat hooks,” he said. “They started the slaughter. Forty-seven children, many of them babies, toddlers. Shot, stabbed, throats slit. Thirty-four women, too.” Now he was yelling, standing and pointing outside toward the lines of the dead in the burial shrouds. Abu Qasim now saw that many were just bedsheets. They’d apparently run out of cloth.

  Abu Qasim took pictures of the dead, ritual washing and burial preparation under way, and sent those to his commander. They loaded into the van for the voyage to Douma, which the rebels had already liberated but was now choking under siege.

  They did not speak of the massacre on the drive. They’d seen the same in Aleppo and there was nothing to say anymore.

  THEY ENTERED DOUMA THROUGH ONE of the pedestrian tunnels after nightfall.

  Zahran Alloush, Douma’s warlord, greeted them in a command headquarters, which was bunkered under an abandoned electronics store and was thick with the smell of sewage. The floor was covered in crusted carpets. Beads of moisture collected on the ceiling, and pipes and electrical cords snaked up the walls. Flat-screen television monitors showing the tunnel network, Al Jazeera, and several Saudi satellite stations sat cluttered on a row of card tables. The room, usually bustling with activity, had been emptied for the meeting.

  Though the food shortages now forced inhabitants of his fiefdom to eat weeds and old leather, Alloush had prepared a meal of bread and chicken for his visitor. Abu Qasim stared at the glistening skewers and licked his lips without realizing it. He could not remember the last time he’d eaten meat that was not from a rat. He wished he could share the meal with Sarya, but Alloush would not allow a woman’s presence at his war table.