“Nothing. Walden’s got two teams back at Langley on it. One’s headed by your old boss, Alan Yerushenko. The other by David Estes. Also Chase Jennings.”
“Who’s he?”
“The new Moscow Station chief.”
He turned to face her. The sea swells had started to ease. The sun glittered on the water so that he had to squint behind his glasses. “Officially, I’m on administrative leave. Unofficially, everybody back at Langley thinks my career’s over. I’m history. RIP,” he explained, smiling, but his eyes weren’t smiling.
For a time the only sound was the slap of the waves on the hull. “If anybody can find out about this Russian, it’s Alan and his people,” she said, then burst out: “It’s impossible, dammit. Human beings don’t have meetings with important terrorists out of nowhere. The Russian’s our only lead. With all these people looking, are you saying nobody has anything?”
He shook his head.
“Are you kidding? The whole CIA? Nothing?”
“One thing,” Saul said. He dropped his head and closed his eyes. Shit, she thought. It was a habit of Saul’s when it was something bad. It was coming now. Why he had tried to talk her out of staying on this operation.
He pulled the messenger bag off his shoulder, opened it, and took out his laptop computer. After it fired up, he entered the password and found what he was looking for. It was a photo image of two men meeting at a waterside restaurant. It was shot at a ninety-degree angle so the person taking the photo caught two men at a small table in profile, the water with a part of a boat or a launch with people on it behind them. Carrie recognized one of the men instantly. The Russian.
“Where was this taken?” she asked.
“We’ve nailed it down with ninety percent probability. It’s one of the waterfront restaurants in Istanbul. Probably in Büyükada. It wasn’t taken that long ago either.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“It didn’t. The source was Israeli. Mossad. The NSA poached it from them electronically. Someone on Alan’s team found it in an NSA intercept. The Israelis have no idea we have it.”
“Who’s the other man? Have you been able to identify him?”
He nodded, his glasses reflecting the glare of the sun. “Abd al Ali Nasser.”
“Who is he?”
“You won’t like this.”
“Saul, stop trying to protect me. Who is he?”
“He’s the head of the Syrian Mukhabarat.” The ruthless Syrian intelligence service, she thought, feeling queasy. Head of the Mukhabarat; probably the most dangerous man in the Syrian government. That’s why Saul had given her the song and dance about the job back in Langley.
Saul turned so he could look at her without squinting into the sun. Behind him in the distance, she could see a distant brown finger of land on the line of the sea. The northwest tip of Cyprus. They would be getting in soon. Not a long trip, but at least she was out of Syria. The red zone.
“Carrie, we don’t have a lot of time. I’m not sure whether your raid on Otaibah forced Abu Nazir’s hand or whether what he was planning was already in motion, but General Demetrius and I are agreed. The Iraq War is hanging by a thread and Abu Nazir is about to cut it.”
They heard a loud clunk from below in the ship’s hold. Something with the cargo. Unexpected things happen, she thought. It felt like a warning.
“And the Russian? Operation Iron Thunder?”
He frowned. Her skin went prickly like a million needles all over. It was her bipolar. Even with her having taken the clozapine, something inside her was arching its back like a frightened cat. “You have to go back to Damascus.”
“They’ll arrest me for sure. They almost got me last time. It’s Syria, Saul. You know what they do,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
CHAPTER 11
Bloudan, Syria
18 April 2009
They sat over drinks on the terrace of the Bloudan Grand Hotel. The sun was shining, but because of the altitude, the air was cool and clear. The view looked out over the manicured grounds and the swimming pool, on down the slope to the red-roofed houses and trees, the orchards and vineyards of the Zabadani plain.
“I’m not sure why I’m here,” Carrie said, pulling her jacket around her.
“You would prefer a cell in Adra Prison? Handcuffs and leg irons?” Abd al Ali Nasser, head of the Syrian Mukhabarat, said with a half smile in clipped Oxbridge English. “A war story to tell your CIA colleagues, if you survived.”
He was a big man, trim, attractive. The kind who looked after himself at a gym, she thought. Salt-and-pepper hair cut short and a neat mustache that was virtually a requirement in the higher echelons of the Assad regime. He wore a polo shirt under an expensive suit, dark sunglasses, a black-faced Rolex on his left wrist, and seemed perfectly comfortable despite the cool temperature. He didn’t try to conceal that he considered himself attractive to women; part of her wondered if this was some bizarre kind of seduction.
“I can’t tell if you’re joking,” she said.
“I have the same problem,” he said, signaling to the waiter for another Bombay Sapphire martini. For a moment, neither of them said anything. She toyed with the lime wedge on her margarita.
“I often come here in summer to get away from the heat of the city. Now in spring, it’s not so crowded, but believe me, a couple of months ago, people were skiing on that slope over there. Pretty, isn’t it?” he asked. His gesture encompassed not just the slope behind the hotel but the orange-yellow hotel itself with its commanding view of the mountains on one side and on the other, the green plain below, stretching into the distance.
Beautiful, she thought, if you could forget the dozen or so armed Mukhabarat agents hovering just out of sight. Or the room upstairs, where other Mukhabarat thugs were holding Cadillac’s—Mosab Sabagh’s—wife, Aminah, and her ten-year-old son, Jameel.
The only thing keeping all three of them—herself included—from the Adra torture cells was the slim thread Saul had given her to play.
“It’s lovely,” she said. It was. The hotel, with its marble-and-polished-brass colonial lobby and porters in white uniforms, was from another time. One might expect to see Lawrence of Arabia or Winston Churchill strolling out of the bar.
“The hotel is historic,” he said, lighting a cigarette for himself after she declined one. “Did you know the Arab League held its first meeting here in ’42?”
“Fascinating,” she said, because if this was a tennis match, it was her turn to hit the ball. She leaned in sexily, showing him as much cleavage as she could, motioning him closer. “But to tell you the truth, Assayed Abd al Ali Nasser, I don’t give a shit who met who here or how pretty it is. I only have one question: did you bring me here to fuck me, interrogate me, or are we going to do serious business?”
The smile disappeared from his face as if it had never been there, and for a second, Carrie thought she had gone over the line. She saw the real man, his face like a skull with Oakleys instead of eyes, who could, she knew, murder her brutally without a second thought and never have to answer to anyone. Either way, she thought, the moment balanced like a spinning ball on the tip of a basketball player’s finger. It could go either way.
Then the skull disappeared. The smile was back.
“It seems I have the same problem. I can’t tell when you’re joking.” Putting it back in her court.
“Trust me,” she said, nudging aside her margarita, which they’d made too sour, “I’m not joking.”
You better be damn right, Saul, she thought, because she was about to play the only card she had.
She and Saul had talked it over in her cabin on the Turkish freighter before they docked in Famagusta. On the small cabin bed was a Tumi roller carry-on. Inside was a brand-new cover identity, complete with clothes, papers, credit cards, and passport to match. And a Glock 26 pistol.
She was Anne McGarvey, a State Department cultural attaché on temporary assignment at the U.S. embassy in Damas
cus. Classic cover for a CIA agent and both she and Saul fully expected the Mukhabarat and the GSD to be all over her every move from the instant she landed at Damascus International Airport.
She checked in at the U.S. embassy on Mansour Street, a white concrete compound, outer buildings facing the street surmounted by a wrought-iron fence on the roof. Although she was ostensibly there to arrange a cultural exchange program, the only cultural thing she did was a ten-minute “Don’t expect to see me, but I’ll be borrowing an apartment and a car” with Dale Crosby, the deputy chief of mission. Her next meeting was with Lieutenant Robert Anderson, the officer overseeing the U.S. Marines guarding the embassy, to set up the call-in procedure.
If she failed to make a one- or two-sentence call-in every four hours to either of two embassy phone numbers, the Cultural Center or the emergency number, and use the code word “Alabama,” the Marine on duty was to send a blank JWICS email to a CIA front company in Zurich with the subject “The San Francisco ballet company can’t change the schedule.” If she was arrested, captured, or under duress but still able to make the call-in, she would use the word “complain,” as in “This is Anne. Everything’s fine. Can’t complain.”
The call desk in Zurich was a CIA freight-forwarding front company, manned 24/7 by personnel whose appearance and cover were so good that not even other companies on the same floor of the office building they were located in or walk-in customers had any inkling of their real activity.
Once the call was received, the person on duty would forward it via the company’s ultrasecure phone-switching technology that would bounce it a dozen different ways around the world to make it untraceable before forwarding the message to a cell phone Saul kept on him at all times strictly for that purpose. A tenuous safety line, but as long as it existed, Carrie felt in some way connected to Saul.
It had been the most harrowing twenty-four hours of her life.
Step one, as Saul laid it out in the Turkish freighter cabin, involved two problems. Had Cadillac left anything behind? The only person who would know was his wife, Aminah, who would be closely watched. The second, how to make the approach to the Syrians convincing?
Soon after arriving, she called Aminah and set up a meet, introducing herself by way of telling her that her company had done business with her husband, General Sabagh, and there was bonus money due him. On the phone, Aminah sounded frightened, cautious, but by the way she responded, Carrie got the impression that she was desperate for money. That wasn’t a surprise. The Assad regime had discovered her husband was a CIA spy; they weren’t about to pay a pension to the wife.
Using a borrowed embassy Ford sedan, Carrie headed for the address. In less than a minute, she had company. Two white Toyota sedans in the rearview mirror, and up ahead, a black Renault with four men inside. Front and back tail. GSD, she thought grimly.
She drove down Beirut Road, the greenery of Tishreen Park on her left. The objective was to lose the GSD tails, but not entirely. She would need as much time inside Cadillac’s apartment as she could get; although she had to assume it was under surveillance. At that moment, there were just the three cars, though there might be more. Impossible with all this traffic and possible distance and GPS surveillance to know for sure.
She kept the two Toyotas in the rearview mirror as she pushed the Ford harder, weaving in and out of traffic. They stayed with her till she came to the big Umayyad Square traffic circle. Four lanes of dense Damascus traffic swirling around the water fountains in the big center island. Perfect, she thought, cutting in front of a red car, nearly denting its fender, then swerving back in front of a Citroën, causing its driver to slam on his brakes and raise his fist to curse her and her offspring for a hundred generations. She made a sudden right turn onto Ibn Barakeh Avenue, one of the main avenue spokes emanating from the big traffic circle, losing the black Renault, which had gone too far and had no choice but to continue around the circle.
She gunned the car up Ibn Barakeh, honking like a maniac Damascus taxi driver, then made another sudden sharp right for one block and right again, headed back to the Umayyad traffic circle.
In the rearview mirror, only one of the white Toyotas was still with her, about a half-dozen cars behind. The black Renault was gone, presumably following on Ibn Barakeh Avenue. This time, she went around the circle three times, switching lanes with each revolution. On the third go-round, she cut in front of a car to her right, then turned off the circle and onto the exit road that ran by the Sheraton Damascus Hotel. The white Toyota, caught in an inner lane, was unable to make the exit. Hopefully, it would give her the minute or two she needed.
She drove to the hotel parking lot and parked in a long row of cars. Looking around, she didn’t see any watchers as she walked to the hotel entrance and caught a taxi just pulling up.
So far, no Toyotas, black Renaults, or anyone else she could spot following her. She told the taxi driver to take her to the Fardoss Tower Hotel. When they got there, she told him to go around to the back entrance because the Fardoss was close to the Cham Palace, where she was afraid someone might recognize her.
For the moment, she was clean. She walked as calmly as she could through the Fardoss Hotel lobby to the front entrance and took another taxi to Aminah Sabagh’s apartment.
The building was a six-story apartment house in the upscale Malki district in north Damascus, with balconies that looked out on other elegant high-rises on tree-shaded streets. The kind of neighborhood where nannies pushed Bugaboo strollers past parked Lexuses and Mercedes.
Getting out of the taxi, she saw no obvious watchers in the street. No parked vans with someone sitting in them. The roof lines were clear. Then she saw it as she glanced back one last time from the entrance to the building. The movement of a drape at a window on the third floor of the building across the street. She took a deep breath. The clock had started. God, Saul, you better be right, she thought, pushing the buzzer for Aminah’s apartment. She had ten, fifteen minutes at most. And ten to one every word she said in the apartment would be listened to and recorded.
Aminah let her in and offered her tea. Her son, Jameel, came in, said the obligatory “Aleikem es salaam” to Carrie’s “Salaam aleikem,” and went back to playing video games in his room. Aminah was an attractive, dark-haired woman in her late thirties, early forties, who looked like she was trying to hold it together. But there was a spot on her blouse that Carrie suspected she never would have allowed when she was buddies with President Assad’s wife, Asma. She had gained weight since her glory days shopping on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Carrie thought. She was the wife of a traitor now.
After the usual preliminaries about the weather and “Where did you know my husband from?” Aminah tiptoed around to the the subject of the money.
“If it’s permissible, God willing, you mentioned something about bonus money that was due for my deceased husband, Mosab?” she asked.
“Please,” Carrie said, looking at the phone on the coffee table, where there was almost certainly a bug, and God knows how many cameras and other bugs were on her this second. “We don’t have much time. Your late husband, General Sabagh, asked us, me, that if anything ever happened to him, we help his family. I’m from the American embassy,” taking her diplomatic passport from her handbag and showing it to her. “I have one question: do you want to come to the United States? If you do, I can arrange it for you,” she said, glancing at her watch. Not much time, she thought. Please let me have a few minutes in the apartment.
“I don’t know,” Aminah started, and began sobbing, her face in her hands, rocking back and forth. “I’m so sorry, miss . . .” she sobbed. “Since Mosab . . . You don’t know . . . Jameel and I, even at his school, we don’t exist.”
“I know,” Carrie said, sitting next to her and putting her hand on her shoulder. She glanced at her watch again. “Listen, when Mosab worked at home, where was it? Did he ever keep anything private? Something maybe he didn’t want anyone to know about?” Of co
urse, it was a million to one. The Security Forces would have gone over the apartment, Sabagh’s safety deposit box, every relative’s house, everywhere, with a fine-tooth comb, especially this apartment.
Carrie stood up and went to the window and looked down at the street, four stories below. There were two white Toyotas—she couldn’t tell if they were the same two—and a black Mercedes double-parked in front of the building. They would be at the apartment any second. She grabbed Aminah’s arms.
“They’re coming. Do you know anyone he might have gone to?”
Aminah shook her head wildly. She looked terrified. She’d probably been interrogated by the Mukhabarat and the GSD before. She clutched at Carrie, her fingernails digging into her arms.
“Save us!” she cried. “For the sake of Allah, save us!”
There was a loud pounding of fists at the door and men shouting in Arabic to open up.
“Open up! Shurtat!” Police! “Security Forces! Open up at once or we’ll break it in and shoot!”
“Don’t! Please! I’m coming!” Aminah said, running to the door and opening it. As she did, Carrie slipped her passport back into her handbag and slung the bag over her shoulder, holding it tight under her arm.
The door flew open. Six men rushed in. Two of them grabbed Aminah, threw her to the floor, and handcuffed her.
“I’m an American State Department official! I have diplomatic immun—” Carrie started to shout, when she was knocked to the floor and handcuffed. “I have diplomatic immunity!” she shouted. Someone kicked her in the stomach. She felt a hand between her legs, poking, prying.
A man with garlic breath whispered: “Shut up, you American sharmuta!” Whore! They dragged her and Aminah down the elevator to the cars. She couldn’t see what happened to the boy.
A half hour later, she was alone, sitting on a stool in a concrete interrogation room, her hands still handcuffed behind her. Her handbag was on a metal table. Something was wrong, she thought, getting a bad feeling. They hadn’t taken her to the Al-Jehad police headquarters, but instead to an unmarked building near the old Al-Hijaz train station.
Saul's Game Page 9
