Damascus Station

by Unknown

  “Yeah. She overheard Bouthaina mention Wadi Barada, knew we needed that information, and came running. Then I got jumped. Oh, and Bouthaina is dead,” he added. “Shot at Rustum’s villa. Happened this morning.”

  “Fuck. You sure?”

  “Mariam told me.”

  “So maybe not.”

  “She was borderline hysterical when she called. Asked what we did with the intel she passed on Wadi Barada.”

  “Girl’s clearly an actress.”

  “No, she’s not, Chief, I could read her in Italy. I knew—and I told you, if you remember—that something was wrong.”

  “She could be playing us man, playing you. Have you thought it through? Maybe the Syrians wanted us to think they were moving the goods to Wadi Barada?”

  “Makes no sense, Chief. Think about it. Two big things are true. One, Mariam stalks me outside the embassy to provide the Wadi Barada intel in person. Two, she kills three militiamen, saving my life.”

  “And you’re just holding your wang through all this, Jaggers?” Procter asked, clearly not expecting a response. The Chief looked again toward the bedroom, and Sam could tell she was rummaging through her imagination for details on what had transpired there. Her left eyelid shut halfway. She nodded at him to continue.

  “If Mariam is really turned, she doesn’t act like this,” Sam continued. “And if Ali is smart, which he is, he doesn’t run the op this way. First, they wouldn’t send Mariam in person with the Wadi Barada intel. That would, and has, raised massive red flags. No, they would send the info via covcom. Simple and easy. Second, if Mariam is bad, she doesn’t murder the militiamen. She lets them make the arrest.”

  Procter ignored the logic, meaning she agreed, and instead went back to fighting: “So why the fuck is Bouthaina dead?”

  “I bet Ali is trying to flush out the mole. They must have narrowed down the list of suspects to a manageable number. And they don’t know that Mariam passed us the original intel on the sarin test. Ali provided them with something he knew would come back to Damascus. We got our hands on Bouthaina’s bait. Somehow the Syrians saw it. Now she’s dead.”

  “Bullshit,” said without conviction.

  “Is it, though? We passed the information on Jableh, and within days the Republican Guard started evacuating. Very few people inside the regime knew about that site. They got intel—from somewhere, how many people in D.C. read our stuff anyways, thousands?—then moved the sarin. The leak narrowed the list of suspects, so they passed false information. One of those people had to have been Bouthaina. Someone told Bouthaina about Wadi Barada, Mariam overheard, told me, I told you, it got distributed in D.C., funneled to a faceless mole, then somehow got back to Ali. I’d bet Rustum killed her. Not Ali’s style, I think. Mariam had no idea the intel was fake, she just knew it seemed important, so she passed it to me, risking everything to fucking do so.”

  Procter was with him now. “Her info on the five deployment sites is probably accurate, then, if they think Bouthaina was the mole. With her out of the picture, the Syrians would feel free to move forward with the sarin attack. Mole is gone.”

  He’d reached the top of the climb with Procter. It was time to jump. If he won the argument, he would again be in mortal danger. If he lost, Mariam would probably die. He stood tall and straight for the coup de grâce.

  “Yes,” he said. “Unless we bomb the sites, of course. Then Ali takes stock. He’ll know Bouthaina wasn’t the mole. Even if he suspects satellite imagery tipped us off, they’ll dig deep to be sure. Ali will do two things, guaranteed. They will bring Mariam in. Ali will know that someone passed the Wadi Barada site, and that it probably wasn’t Bouthaina, because lo and behold the attack failed hours after her death, posthumously exonerating her. Ali will shift his gaze to the woman in Bouthaina’s office, who may have heard about the Wadi Barada site, whose loyalty was apparently sufficiently suspect that they arrested her cousin as leverage. They will torture her until she breaks.”

  Procter had pulled the knife from her bag, unsheathed it, and was now twirling its point into the table, lost in thought, as it cut a pinpoint divot. “What is the ops proposal?” she said at last.

  “I think I know how to protect our agent and keep her in place. I give Ali what he wants, personally.”

  “Tell me how.”

  PROCTER’S FURY AT BAY, SHE continued spinning the knife and listened without interruption. When he’d finished, she sheathed it and walked toward the bedroom, scanning inside, poring over the mattress lumps. The walls rumbled. Plaster flaked off the walls in dusty clouds. They heard the screech of a jet overhead. Procter was close now, looking up at him from her standing perch a full foot below his head. A political Chief of Station or a self-serving bureaucrat would have rejected the plan outright, maybe would have hustled the embassy Marines to the safe house to haul him back for exfil. But not Procter, though she had everything to lose. If the Langley mandarins demanded heads, hers would be the first piled into the basket under the guillotine. But Artemis Aphrodite Procter played the game according to only two rules: Collect the intelligence and protect your agent. Nothing else mattered. Sam had offered a way to satisfy both. It was a weighty trade, though.

  “You thought about what happens if they aren’t satisfied with the name?” she said. “If the White House doesn’t go to the mats? If the Syrians just keep turning the crank? If they treat you like Val?”

  “Then we end up where are now. Mariam on the chopping block. But if we try my way, we get a shot at keeping her safe, in harness.”

  The Chief nodded, then Procter’s eyes shot to the bedroom before landing on him.

  She spat on the floor and said nothing.

  She knew.

  Bradley in Cairo, a lifetime ago: You are permitted one fuckup, Mr. Joseph, provided that you come clean. The hiding, the lies, these are worse than the fuckups, by the way. Fuckups happen to good officers. Deception does not. You can lie to your wife, your girlfriend, your kids. But not to CIA.

  Sam looked at the Chief. It occurred to him that months earlier he would have considered the professional repercussions of his plan and confession. Now he did not care. Protect your agent. It’s all that matters. And he couldn’t lie to Procter. They were operationally wed, and he’d forsaken his vows. He wanted forgiveness.

  He had locked eyes with her, but he didn’t see her. He saw his body talking to her from a roost on top of the refrigerator, like an observer. It made the confession easier. “I’m in love with her, Chief,” he said.

  Procter’s eyes narrowed. She took a step toward Sam.

  Then she hit him, a solid hook from below that landed with a pop on the underside of his jaw. He fell, and Procter stood over him, just a wild spray of blurry black hair because he couldn’t see straight. She knelt down, eyes at his level. He tried to move his jaw. He winced and put his hand over the bone.

  “I could say you’re a fuckup,” she said. “And I’d be right on some accounts. Wrong on others. But you have a job to do now, one that transcends your dick-fueled indiscretion. You and I will have our reckoning later, on the other side of this horror show.”

  She pulled him up from the floor and propped him against the counter. Then she turned around and pulled her gray blouse up over her shoulders, revealing her back: the seven-starred tattoo, the straps of a weird orange bra speckled with palm trees. Sam wondered if he was hallucinating from the force of the blow. Then she tucked in the blouse and turned to face him.

  “Seven stars. One for each officer killed in the attack on Khost Base back in ’09. I got the tattoos when we finished killing the responsible parties. I led the hit squad, I was the Angel of Death. And nothing has been more joyful. Probably nothing ever will. This is my tribe. I’ve picked my side, and you, for now, are on it. But know this: If you fail, I will hold you personally responsible. If I have to put a star on my back for you, I’ll hunt you even on the other side of this life.”

  Procter put the knife in her purse and zipped i
t inside. She swung the bag over her shoulder and looked back at Sam. “I’ll put the mark down and send the message in the next hour. Then you tell her we’re a go.”

  Procter left amid the din of another mortar volley without so much as a glance back.

  48

  ALI FELT HIS PHONE BUZZ IN HIS POCKET. IT WAS MARIAM.

  “What do you have?”

  “He’s signaled. Emergency meeting. The safe house.”

  “When?”

  “The marking was for an emergency, but the time was not specific. I’m sure they’ve sent something to the device, too.”

  “Thank you. I assure you that your cousin will be free soon.” He hung up.

  The gamble of running Mariam at the Americans had borne fruit. She had performed, Ali had to admit. She’d secured the device and provided the safe house. She had done her part, and her cousin was in his Security Office prison, unharmed and well fed. Mariam was untested. Ali had required leverage. Harmless leverage. It had worked.

  Ali walked to the iPad and opened it with the flourish Mariam had demonstrated. Sure enough, the Americans had tried to contact her:

  1.REQUEST EMERGENCY MEETING AT REGULAR LOCATION ASAP. PRESENT BY 10PM.

  2.NEED TO MODIFY EXFIL GIVEN VIOLENCE IN CAPITAL.

  3.BRING PASSPORT AND HANDBAG.

  4.EXFIL WILL PROCEED DIRECTLY FROM MEETING.

  Ali looked at his watch: eight-thirty p.m. He walked downstairs to the Russian command center and found Volkov, sipping at his cup.

  “He’s signaled for a meeting with Mariam.”

  Volkov’s face remained placid. “Exfil? It’s shit out there.”

  “Yes. They need to modify the route and want to talk through details in person, then get her out tonight.”

  Volkov grunted. “We’ve had a countersurveillance team watching the house in the Christian Quarter for the past day. They’ve seen nothing. It is clean.”

  “Good. Tonight, we end this madness.”

  49

  ON SAM’S SDR TO THE SAFE HOUSE HE DODGED MAIN thoroughfares to avoid checkpoints, he zigzagged closer and closer to the Christian Quarter, he checked for repeat faces and cars, he thinned crowds as best he could. None of it mattered now, but he did it on instinct and because if they were watching his trip, he had to appear as they would expect: a CIA officer heading to meet a prized asset in the heart of war-torn Syria.

  He climbed the stairs inside the white stone building. When he reached the top landing, he paused and closed his eyes and thought of his last time here with Mariam, before Italy. He sighed. To anyone watching on a video feed, likely tucked into the hallway lights or the smoke detectors, it would have been almost imperceptible.

  But in that moment, between the short sigh and the opening of his eyes, he saw his kid brother, he saw Val, the lives his mistakes had interrupted. He saw Mariam in that red dress from Paris.

  He opened the door to the safe house and heard the muffled steps on the stairs behind: hurried, growing louder with each footfall. Sam had expected them.

  Ali stood in the kitchen, smoking. Unsmiling, he gazed at Sam. “Nice kitchen here, my friend.” He tossed the butt on the marble floor and stubbed it out with his shoe.

  Then, from behind, over the top of Sam’s head: The rush of displaced air. Darkness.

  50

  PRESIDENT ASSAD, ARMS AND CHEST STILL WRAPPED in bandages, summoned Rustum and Ali to the Palace early the next morning. The Russian President had an urgent message, and Assad wanted the brothers to listen to the call.

  Now, seated on the presidential couches, earpieces inserted, Ali heard the wobbly English of the Russian President say good morning to the President of the Syrian Arab Republic, offering his sincere concern for Assad’s safety following the attack and his hope that the Syrian security forces would defeat the scourge of terrorism wherever it be found. Rustum pressed his palms into his forehead as if willing the English words into his brain.

  Then Ali heard the fateful, heavily accented words: “We have received credible intelligence from Washington just this hour, from a well-placed SVR source, indicating the Americans plan to bomb you. Our source received this directly from a senior CIA official who participated in deliberations yesterday at the White House.” There was a pause for dramatic effect. “Our sources indicate the intelligence comes from the highly placed asset the Americans recently recruited.”

  Putin continued. “We expect the Americans to leverage the USS Abraham Lincoln and Carrier Strike Group Twelve, now in the eastern Mediterranean. We have tasked imagery and SIGINT resources for more information, as well as worldwide SVR rezidentura. We of course will provide more details as they come available.”

  “Did your source indicate the timing?” Assad asked.

  “Imminently,” said the czar. “It is my assessment that the American strike is designed to prevent the use of what they allege to be chemical weapons, not to unseat your government. Even so, it has been my experience dealing with the Americans that they only respond to force. A bombing, even a set of one-off strikes, must be met with a stiff-necked response.”

  Assad murmured his agreement, trumpeting his father’s adages about resistance. Putin appropriately and resolutely concurred.

  Closing pleasantries, vague offers of mutual assistance, and vows of brotherly affection exchanged, Assad clicked the secure phone back into the receiver on his desk. Ya allah. Al-Amyrikan Al-Malaeen Al Sharameet! Haywanaat! Hameer! Shayateen! American fucking bitches, animals, donkeys, demons, he screamed to the Hassan brothers. It had been a rough twenty-four hours for the President, Ali thought, now recovering from an assassination attempt, contemplating the widespread use of sarin gas against his own people, and wrangling with the possibility of a retaliatory American strike. A lot to handle, for anyone.

  “Rustum, how much longer until you can begin?” Assad asked, calming himself.

  “We started mixing the product and loading munitions yesterday evening. We can begin now with some of it, if you wish.”

  “Do it.”

  Assad pushed a button on his desk and barked at his personal secretary for tea, wincing from the burns as he yelled. Ali glanced toward the ceiling, wondering if the American strike package would include the presidential residence.

  “Now,” the President said, “the mole. I thought that Bouthaina had been identified as such.”

  “It is possible they have another,” Rustum countered, vocal volume oddly high, uncalibrated, like a radio dial cranked up. Rustum did not look well. His hair was mussed, eyes hounded and bloodshot, uniform rumpled. Ali saw blood splatter on one of his brother’s socks, as if he’d begun changing clothes after Bouthaina’s murder, become distracted, then given up.

  “I suppose so,” Assad said. “But even so, we must assume the worst. Ali, have you managed to exploit the device your agent procured?”

  “We are reading the traffic but have not yet been able to positively identify any spies yet. It will take time. The messages are cryptic. But the Iranians believe they will be able to help.”

  “You have the American in custody now, correct?”

  “Yes, Mr. President, we entrapped him last night on his way to meet with our agent. He is in custody.”

  “Put him under interrogation today. I want to be sure we find the Americans’ spies. He has killed three Syrians, the Americans are going to bomb, any violence done to him will be easily explained or lost in the shuffle. Just get the information quickly.”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Ali said. “I will interrogate him personally, until we have names.”

  “Now, Rustum.” Assad turned to Ali’s older brother, a smile settling on his face. “The Russian President is correct that if the Americans bomb we must deliver a strong response. What is your recommendation?”

  Rustum ran his hands through his hair, furrowed his brows, and wiped something translucent from his mustache. “We’ve played with the CIA presence in this country for the past few months like a cat batting a toy m
ouse. We have run elegant operations to capture a device, to entrap their officers. All wise in their time. But now they are coming for us on the morning of our greatest victory, after their terrorist allies attempted to murder us all, Mr. President. No, once the bombs drop, the teasing must end. If they bomb as the Russians say, I suggest we send the militia to overrun the embassy and take hostages. In their patriotic fervor they swept into the embassy, we will say, to protest the American-Zionist bombing of humble Syria.”

  Rustum coughed up phlegm into his hands and wiped it on his uniform. “And in so doing,” he continued, “we cut off their ability to spy on us in the future. They will close the embassy, their CIA Station. We send Basil and his militia, to send them a message.”

  Assad picked at the top of his head and fussed with his bandages. Then he asked Ali what he thought.

  “If we do that, the Americans will apply yet more pressure. More bombings, targeted killings, who can say? It will spiral the conflict further downward.”

  Assad regarded him, considering the options, and Ali knew he’d lost. “You would have been right, Ali, under the old rules. But now I am afraid your brother is correct. The Americans must be taught a lesson.”

  The President pointed to his bandages. “They do not play by the rules. Neither shall we.”

  PART V

  Freedom

  51

  SAM LAY BOUND IN THE CELL SHIVERING IN THE COLD, stony gloom. They had taken his clothes after a light beating. Nothing serious, just a few blows to the ribs and face. He was sore, but it was manageable. No one had offered food or water. He had spent long hours awake as unidentifiable music—sounds, really—blared through unseen speakers. Not that he would have slept anyhow: there was much to do.

  Sam had toiled for hours, arranging his mind for the coming assault, putting items in appropriate cranial boxes, rooms, and safes. He did not know what methods Ali would employ, but the pattern and flow would be similar to his long-ago training at the Farm: a climb toward the summit of pain. At the base camp Ali would expect stonewalling, lies, and half-truths. As they climbed—onward to electricity, perhaps—the Syrian would expect breakage: more truth, some inconsistency, fewer lies. At the summit he would expect a name. Then he would verify everything.