Gods and Fathers

by Lepore, James

  He had not met with the new president Assad on this trip, only the Oil and Resources Minister and several of his subordinates. Barrels per day—the statistic around which pivoted the country’s economic policy—was the only topic of the meeting. That and how to reverse the grim, steadily declining numbers. Conversion to natural-gas-fired electric plants and intensified production were discussed, as was the status of exploration licenses granted to companies from China, Russia, and the U.S., none of which had borne any fruit.

  At the meeting, as was required by unwritten but strictly enforced Syrian law, was a liaison to SMI, Syrian Military Intelligence. This man, Abdullah al-Haq, Basil had first heard of several years earlier via sources connected to the Mukhabarat, a murky figure who was said to actually be Iranian, and also said to have a very high body count as a free-roaming jihadist, protected by very powerful men—a human stinger missile launched by untouchable mullahs and presidents. Basil had first laid eyes on Haq at the Lebanese consulate in New York in the fall, at the same reception at which Michael DeMarco had met Yasmine Hayek. They had neither exchanged glances nor spoken that night, but Basil had remembered and taken note of this new face in a crowd that he knew from deep experience contained as many real diplomats as fake ones working clandestinely for various Syrian intelligence agencies. It was not, he realized, by coincidence that Haq appeared at the one Oil Ministry meeting in five that Basil was required to attend.

  After the meeting, al-Haq had approached Basil privately.

  “It is an honor to meet a war hero,” he had said. “And the discoverer of Deir ez-Zour.”

  Basil did not reply immediately. Al-Haq was not complimenting him.

  “And your service?” Basil said, ending his short silence. Haq was dressed in civilian clothes, a dark suit and tie, but Basil knew that all SMI operatives had military backgrounds. He also knew that to ask such a question was tantamount to an insult in the inbred and comingled Syrian military and intelligence cultures, which was his intention, his way of putting al-Haq on notice.

  “Hama.”

  “And your rank?”

  “Colonel.”

  “I thought you were stationed in New York?”

  “I am, but I have been called back for a few days.” Basil watched Haq’s eyes as he said this. Yes, colonel, I know who you are.

  “To attend this meeting?” Basil said.

  “I am a last minute substitute.”

  “Do you have any questions?” Basil had been through this drill many times. He never said anything to SMI that he had not said on the record at a minister-level meeting.

  “Is there no hope for Deir ez-Zour?” the Colonel asked.

  “You mean rebuilding the plutonium facility?” Yes, I am in that loop. Are you surprised, Colonel?

  “No, the oil field.”

  “None, it is played out.”

  “And the other fields? Are the foreigners optimistic?”

  “They would not be here if they did not think they could find oil in commercial quantities. They are spending a great deal of money.”

  “It takes a long time I suppose.”

  “They are not playing in the desert.”

  “Yes, I understand. By the way, I attended the funeral of Yasmine Hayek last month.”

  “You know the family?”

  “I went to pay our government’s respects.”

  “Very sad.”

  “I understand that you knew Pierre, during the war.”

  “We served together.”

  “He is a Christian, no? Maronite?”

  “I did not know it at the time.”

  “I see. And it is your wife’s son who stands accused of the girl’s murder. That must be difficult.”

  “We are managing.”

  “Your two young technicians, are they still with you?”

  “What two technicians? Do you mean the two young men that Mustafa sponsored?” Technician, Basil knew, was SMI-speak for a your-wish-is-my-command terrorist, usually young, from a poor or non-existent family, a serious fanatic, brainwashed into committing mass murder for the jihad. So, he thought, they are thinking of trying to pin the Hayek murder on me.

  “Who is Mustafa?” Haq asked.

  “My servant.” The person I saw you talking to at the Lebanese reception last fall as I was passing a room with its door slightly ajar, looking for a quiet place to make a phone call.

  “We understand they have disappeared, the two young men.”

  “That looks to be the case,” Basil replied, “but you are mistaken. I have no technicians, as you call them, no employees in New York.” Were Adnan and Ali Haq’s men? That would cast a different light on things.

  An Oil Ministry limousine had carried Basil the two hundred-plus miles from Damascus to Latakia, to his old house in the hills, cared for year-round by a family retainer and his wife. On the old winding road that descended into the city from the foothills in the east, Basil instructed the driver, a childhood friend who still lived in Latakia, to stop at a small stand of ancient cedars. Exiting the limousine, he made the short walk to the burial ground laid out in a small clearing beyond the tree line. Once there he tore a palm stalk from a nearby tree and placed it on the grave of his first wife and son, the only child he would ever have. Kneeling, he placed both hands on the freshly raked soil and then pressed them to his face. Rising, he faced Mecca and recited the Muslim prayers for the dead child and the dead adult.

  The brown earth was still on his face when he returned to the limousine. The driver, Gamal, a short hawk-faced man in a white shirt and black tie, stood stiffly while he opened the car’s rear door to let Basil in, saying nothing, not making eye contact, as if they were being watched, which was doubtful since no one had followed them and there were no cars or people on the hillside as far as the eye could see. But of course anything was possible in Syria, a Stalinist state as repressive as any in the Middle East.

  In 1980, the Muslim Brotherhood, angry at what it saw as Syria’s secular ways, attempted to assassinate Syrian President Hafez al-Assad at a state reception in Damascus. Two hours later, two thousand Muslim Brotherhood prisoners were massacred at Tadmor Prison. Two years later, the city of Hama, the center of Muslim Brotherhood opposition to Assad and his BAATH Party, was destroyed, over a period of three weeks, from the air, by artillery, and by ground troops going from house to house. The outside press reported twenty thousand dead, but the number was closer to thirty thousand, many of them women and children who were unable to get out in time. This is where Abdullah al-Haq, sent to today’s meeting to give him a warning, had seen “combat,” probably doing much of the door-to-door killing of innocents.

  Below, the row of palm trees along the beach was silhouetted by the light of the now risen moon. As Basil watched them swaying, their fronds like the hair of young girls blown gently by the cool night breeze, his thoughts returned to the framed photograph that he had placed on the dresser in his bedroom some thirty years ago, and that he had taken a long look at while washing and changing when he first arrived. In black and white, it was of Basil and Pierre Hayek in dust-covered and sweat-stained fatigues, their arms around each other, sitting on top of a tank in full sunlight in Beirut’s Karantina slum. Both were smiling broadly, as if to say that the heat and the dust and the sweat and the war itself were trifles compared to their friendship. Taken in early 1976 when Basil was twenty and Pierre nineteen, it seemed to Basil to not only capture him and his former friend at the height of their youthful beauty, but at the last moment of their human innocence. The next day the shelling began.

  We are even now, Pierre, he thought, on the verge of sleep. So be it.

  The vibrating of his cell phone in his shirt pocket interrupted Basil from his thoughts. He fished it out and looked at the screen. Mustafa. He pushed the off button, and returned the phone to
his pocket. He would call Mustafa later or tomorrow. His instincts, honed over long years of looking out for danger, told him the call had something to do with Colonel Haq. And Adnan and Ali. Surely Haq knew they were dead. And that they had killed Yasmine Hayek. One looks out for danger in Syria, no matter what one’s status, and Basil’s status had plummeted in recent years along with the failing yield of Dier ez-Zour. The fallen hero.

  In the morning, Gamal would arrive early to carry him to the airport in Damascus. Early enough to sit and sip thick espresso and chat with Gamal and three other childhood friends, who would arrive by foot before dawn. One of them, Mahmoud, was a technocrat who would scan the small house for bugs, so that they could talk freely. Quietly but freely.

  Chapter 19

  Manhattan,

  Monday, March 2, 2009,

  2:00PM

  Debra al-Hassan, the former Debra DeMarco of Manhattan and Pound Ridge, and before that Debra Rusillo of Arthur Avenue, the Bronx, had not always been a prisoner in her own palatial homes. In the beginning of her marriage she was free and even courageous, courageous enough to have Mustafa watched by a private detective agency. But what she learned, that his only deviation, if you could even call it that, from duty, was an occasional trip to an upstate prison, could not compare to a car-bomb killing of a New York detective. Not that he wasn’t capable of it, or wasn’t devious, an enemy inside her own house, but an overt killing? Of an NYPD cop? Why? In her room since Sunday morning, when she read about Detective Davila’s death in the Times, she had been feeling groggy and depressed for three days, unable to focus, not hungry, sleeping too much. Could she walk, could she drive? She did not know. Fresh air, she thought, putting on a robe and slippers.

  Outside her room, on a hand-carved Louis Quatorze tray trolley she had purchased in Paris, was her breakfast—juice and coffee—and a beaten-silver pill case containing her anti-depressant medication. She would take it later. The apartment had balconies and terraces on three sides, the widest facing the East River, where she used to like to look, on clear days, down to the harbor and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge shimmering at the horizon. Cutting through the kitchen, she noticed her reflection in one of the glass cabinets and stopped. Old, she thought, puffy, tired, haggard, dazed. Fuck. Before turning away, she noticed a prescription vial on the bottom shelf—had been staring at it, actually, while looking at her face. She had never even seen the bottle, content to let Basil control her medication schedule, and Mustafa the doling out of her daily pills.

  Curious, she opened the cabinet door and spun the vial until she could read it. “Debra al-Hassan-1 per day.” Yes, these were the blue tablets she had been swallowing, but Mustafa had been giving her two each morning and two again at night, along with her sleeping pills, telling her it was on Basil’s orders. Shaking her head, she shut the glass door. Had he said that? She could not remember.

  On the terrace, she was shocked at how cold and clear and bright the day was. She pulled her robe tight against the chill. Below, the city was in full stride. Basil had arrived home last night and had briefly stopped in her room. He had said he would be home all day today. She would tell him. But should she? Mustafa was a devoted servant, and perhaps more. Perhaps it was better to wait. If she could clear her head, she could spy on Mustafa, as she had done on Saturday, perhaps learn something…

  Behind her she heard a curtain rustle, and turned to look. Mustafa was standing in the open doorway, his arms folded against his chest, staring at her.

  “Mustafa,” Debra said. “What? What is it? You frightened me.”

  “It is cold, madam. You need to take your pills.”

  “How long were you standing there?”

  Mustafa remained silent. She leaned against the railing behind her. The drop down was thirty stories.

  “I will bring you your pills, madam,” he said finally. “And an overcoat.”

  Chapter 20

  Manhattan,

  Monday, March 2, 2009,

  6:00PM

  Erhard Fuchs stood at the long and high window of his office on the twentieth floor of the United Nations Headquarters, looking at the lights of the city reflecting on the black surface of the East River. The UN’s promenade along the river, lit by a row of gracefully curved lanterns on stainless steel poles, was empty, as it was on most nights, especially in winter. To his left the Queensboro Bridge stretched over the south end of Roosevelt Island as it reached for the river’s far side before inserting itself there like a probe into the heart of the tumultuous and very un-Manhattan-like outer boroughs. To his right he could see the lights of the three other East River bridges, the traffic on them never-ending. The beauty and the vulnerability of these bridges, the majestic Brooklyn Bridge in particular, never ceased to amaze him, and to make his heart ache.

  After twenty-five years in his home country’s military intelligence and counterterrorism services, he was among the relatively few people on the planet who knew of the thousands of acts of terrorism, successful and unsuccessful, perpetrated every year for the past thirty years around the world, the vast majority by Muslims bent on violent jihad. And this did not include the Middle East, where the numbers and the success rate were much higher, staggeringly higher, and where the ratio of Muslim-to-non-Muslim perpetrators was 100-to-zero. And where ninety-nine percent of the victims were also Muslim. Irony, he had long ago learned, not being in the Koran, was not in Islam’s lexicon.

  Behind Fuchs, a door opened and closed. He waited a few seconds, then turned and saw Alec Mason, the newest member of his team, an Englishman with a murky relationship to MI6, Britain’s covert intelligence service, taking his coat off and draping it over one of the conference table’s high-backed, cushioned chairs.

  “Where is everyone?” Mason asked, still standing, facing Fuchs.

  “Have a seat,” the Dutchman said.

  “Sure.” Mason, extremely thin, in his forties, his three-days’ growth of beard an affectation—of what exactly Fuchs was not sure, hip youth perhaps—sat. “Where is everybody?” he said. “Am I early?”

  “No, you’re on time,” Fuchs replied. “I’ve been meeting with people one by one.”

  “Why?”

  “We are to disband on Wednesday. I am giving people the option of leaving early, taking a couple of days leave.”

  “Yes, I understand,” Mason said, nodding slightly. The reasons for disbanding—the death of Farah and al-Najjar—would be obvious to him, Fuchs knew.

  “I need your help with one last item,” Fuchs said.

  Mason, in his choice of clothes—jeans, a black suede sport coat and expensive loafers tonight—as well as his scruffy face and long hair, also affected a studied casualness, as if to say he had other things to do besides bring down the Syrian government for the killing of Rafik Hariri. “What is it?” he said. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Our young bomb maker, Farah, is alive.”

  “Alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In a safe house.”

  “How did you pull this off?”

  Fuchs studied Mason’s face before answering. No tells, as was the case last Wednesday night when he took the long way to the Piping Rock Road house, giving the so-called home invaders time to kill both men inside, or so he believed until now.

  “We thought he was dead from his wounds. He woke up on the way to the hospital.”

  “Where is the safe house?”

  “If I told you and you were tortured, we would lose Farah.”

  “Tortured?”

  “Yes. There is a mole on the team.”

  “A mole? Working for whom?”

  “I don’t know, but not a friend. The Syrians probably.”

  “What is it you want me
to do?”

  “I would like you to close the Glen Cove command post, gather up our equipment and paperwork. Bring everything here tomorrow morning. I am meeting here with two NYPD detectives.”

  “NYPD? Why?”

  “I am transferring Farah to them.”

  “Is this related to the two dead detectives?”

  “Yes, they want to know who gave Farah his orders as much as we do. And the Hayek murder occurred here in Manhattan.”

  “Has Farah talked?”

  “Not yet, but he will.”

  “You have NYPD’s cooperation?”

  “Yes, they will charge Adnan here with killing Yasmine Hayek. They will interrogate him themselves, and then protect him until he can be transferred to The Hague, to testify.”

  “Why are you doing this, involving an outside agency?”

  “Because no one will try to kill Farah while he is in the custody of the New York police. The Syrians will be checkmated.”

  “Why me? Anyone could do this.”

  “I would have asked Sylvana, but she’s in Los Angeles, as you know. Her nephew is very sick. The others all seemed anxious to leave. They have not been home in four months. You just came on board.”

  “And the others, do they know?”

  “No. The less that know, the better. I mistrust everyone. The NYPD will bring Farah to The Hague. You will accompany them as Monteverde’s representative.”