“Who the hell was that?”
“I told you, I had someone special. A protégé, if you like,” Dar said, going over to Lebedenko. He had stopped breathing. His eyes were open. Dar put his fingers to the Russian’s neck to feel a pulse and shook his head.
“Who’s the shooter?”
“One of mine, Saul. Not yours,” Dar said, pulling on a pair of latex surgical gloves. He took the pistol from Lebedenko’s hand, put on a sound suppressor, and went to the room window. He stuck the pistol through the circular hole, pointed it up at an angle toward the sky and fired two shots, then put the pistol with the sound suppressor back in Lebedenko’s hand.
“Is that supposed to fool ballistics?” Saul said.
“Ballistics?” Dar said. “Where the hell do you think you are? Downtown Manhattan? Trust me, this gun will never see a lab.”
“I told you no bloodbaths. Look at this.” Pointing at the three bodies. “Not to mention the idea was to get intel. Tell me,” pointing at Lebedenko’s staring eyes, “how much are we going to get from him now?”
Dar pushed the girl at him and began gathering up the money and throwing it into Lebedenko’s satchel.
“They were going to kill you. There was no other option,” Dar said, going through the pockets of the two Thai pimps, pulling out a thick roll of dinars from the back pocket of the half-mustached one and throwing that into the satchel as well.
“And all this mess?” Saul said, holding Alina. She was trembling.
“Leave it. Three pimps fighting over whores. In this place? No one will care.” Dar stood up. “No passport,” he said, walking over to Alina.
“Where’s your pimp’s room? And Lebedenko’s?” Dar asked her.
She pressed her face against Saul’s chest.
“All right, you be the good cop,” Dar said.
“We better get going,” Saul said. “Somebody might’ve heard.”
“Are you shitting me? With all this freaking Pinoy music and hip-hop bullshit? Everybody’s too busy humping. I could set off a bomb.”
Dar went over to Lebedenko’s body and started going through his pockets and putting everything into the satchel.
“Take everything,” Saul said.
“Don’t worry,” Dar said. “We’ll find something.”
“I hope so,” Saul said.
CHAPTER 15
Hart Senate Building, Washington, D.C.
29 July 2009
00:16 hours
“Let’s get this straight, Mr. Vice President. We had this so-called brilliant undercover operation that frankly looks to me like a total balls-up. It happens in the territory of a Persian Gulf ally, Bahrain, practically next door to our own damn naval base. We have a bloody shoot-up with three people dead, one of them a Russian SVR agent—which often has, as you know, repercussions—and the only notation you sent us is . . . wait, let me find it. Quote: ‘Ancilliary op in Manama derived from operative Mathison’s Istanbul contact resulted in a critical lead. Also termination in Manama of an agent from an unfriendly power with associated collateral damage, two local nonnational criminals.’ That’s it?”
“Terse, Senator. But accurate. And technically, Lebedenko was Byelorussian, not Russian.”
“What difference does it make?”
“To the Kremlin, a lot, apparently. Look, begging your pardon for the language, Mr. President, but while the exchange took place in what some might call a hotel, for all practical purposes, it was a whorehouse. As far as the local Bahraini cops were concerned, the bodies were a trio of pimps fighting over who owned some whores. Good riddance, as far as they were concerned. And since Bahrain advertises itself as ‘fun in the sun,’ the last thing in the world they wanted to do was to call attention to the seamier side of the real business they’re in. So they buried it. As for the Russians, it was one less embarrassing reminder of where their president came from, so good riddance and the less said the better for them too.”
“Still, a screw-up.”
“Really, Warren? Saul and his Black Ops partner, whom we didn’t name, but who is a senior CIA officer, were faced with two double crosses and imminent threat to their lives. The Byelorussian, Lebedenko, tried to honey-trap Saul and the Thais tried to kill them both and keep the money and the girl. It could have been a serious blow. Instead, our people came out clean as a whistle. No blowback on the U.S. No harm except for some dead criminals no one will miss, no foul.”
“You know, Bill. I never fully realized till now what a dirty business you people are in.”
“With all due respect, sir, to protect ourselves from our enemies, who the hell do you think our people have to deal with? The Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela? Only when we have to kill, usually, as in this case, in self-defense, it’s one at a time and close up, in a room or a dark alley. When you or the senator do it, thousands die. You know what Saul says? The reason he does what he does?”
“No. What?”
“To keep our brave politicians, who never go into combat themselves, from pulling the trigger on much bigger killings.”
“Get down off your soapbox, Bill. Let’s get back to Iron Thunder. With Lebedenko dead, where could they go?”
“Funny thing, there are people who think Saul is soft. Some kind of fuzzy liberal. Boy, do they not get him at all. Saul is stainless steel. For him what mattered was the intel Lebedenko left behind.”
“Which was what?”
“Solid gold, Senator. What we were looking for. It wasn’t just Lebedenko’s laptop and cell phone and his room at the Intercontinental. It was the girl. Alina.”
“What about her?”
“He got every last ounce out of her. Every bit. Saul is good at that.”
“Are you saying it was a romance, Bill?”
“Lebedenko and Alina? Who the hell knows, Warren? The day you figure women out, I wish you’d let me in on it. I don’t think she loved him, because apparently in addition to everything else, Lebedenko was running her. When she belonged to this sex-fanatic Saudi princeling, it turned out the prince was high up in the RSSMF food chain. She was Lebedenko’s pigeon, feeding him stuff on the Saudi missile bases, which he passed along to the Russians.”
“A whore and a spy. Basically a slut.”
“That’s not how Saul saw it, Warren. Or how he got intel out of her. And this is the thing about Saul that will drive you bananas—and at the same time makes him the best—let’s call him for what he is, ‘spymaster’ in the business. He said that in spite of the age difference and that he had screwed her and used her, Alina cried for Lebedenko. You know why? He was the only man who ever gave a shit about her.
“And when I said, ‘So she cried. So what?’ Saul just looked at me in that infuriating way of his and quoted some damn thing from the Talmud, this Jewish stuff that, believe me, once it’s in your head, you can’t get it out. He said: ‘Do not make woman weep, God counts her tears.’”
“And our agent, this Carrie? What about her?”
“That’s just it, Warren. Things were about to explode in Baghdad.”
CHAPTER 16
Aqrah, Iraq
22 April 2009
It began with a single boy, Kasim, looking flushed and listless and complaining of a sore throat. Within two weeks, more than a hundred of the boys at the madrassa had come down with chicken pox. One of them was Abu Nazir’s son, Issa.
They brought Brody into Abu Nazir’s house to help with the chores, because, as he had assured them, he had already had chicken pox and was immune. The house was in Abu Nazir’s compound, a cluster of stone houses surrounded by a high wall topped with broken glass. The compound was in a wadi outside the town of Aqrah, whose square stone-and-concrete houses climbed up the steep face of the mountain. The wadi was green with trees and scrub. There was water from wells and a brook that ran over rocks and eventually went underground to become part of a tributary feeding the Great Zab River to the east. There were houses and trees along the narrow wadi road, its infinity point disap
pearing into the barren plain of the northern desert.
This was Kurdish territory. Mostly KDP. And many of the houses on the mountainside put blue tarps on their roofs or painted the roofs blue to ward off evil. But in the wadi, there were Christian Assyrians, with small stone chapels with crosses, set amid the trees. So because they were Sunni Muslims, Abu Nazir’s people had to be careful.
Strung out at the very end of the wadi, stretching into the desert, were the houses of the Sunnis. Here, every man carried an AK-47, even to go to the outhouse to relieve himself. And women wore abayas. Along the Baradash Road, a paved two-lane, there were shops, even a gas station, and the madrassa with a playground for the children in an old stone building that hundreds of years earlier had been a synagogue, a Star of David carved into the stone over the door that somehow still survived.
While cleaning dishes and sweeping the floors, Brody thought about his own childhood chicken pox. He’d had a severe case with blisters over his entire body, his palms, his eyelids, even his penis. It burned intensely and his mother had put mittens on his hands so he wouldn’t scratch the blisters and make them worse. His father brought him a present: a Marine M7 bayonet.
“Thanks, Dad, sir,” Brody had whispered, eyes feverish.
“Maybe you’ll use it when we go camping,” Gunner Brody had said, smiling, and that night Brody fell into a fitful sleep, trying to ignore the pain all over his body and thinking maybe Gunner Brody had changed, imagining camping and roasting marshmallows around a fire with his dad. Except not long after the boy had gotten better, Gunner Brody had gotten drunk and nearly killed him and his mother with the M7 bayonet. The next day, Brody buried the weapon in the backyard where Gunner Brody wouldn’t find it. He and his father never did go camping.
In a way it was strange that illness had come to this place, because Aqrah, isolated from the rest of the world by the desert, was like no place he had ever been. The town was magical, with its green wadi and stone houses on the mountain, like a town in a fairy tale. There were times when Brody imagined he would not have been surprised if birds began to talk or people were to greet dead ancestors in the market.
One night, while he was reading his Quran in the kitchen, Abu Nazir’s wife, Nassrin, came in.
“How is the boy?” Brody asked.
“Better, thanks be to Allah,” she said, wearily rubbing her eyes. She hadn’t left her son’s bedside for days.
“I admire how you watch over him, tend him.”
She looked at him oddly.
“Who doesn’t love their child?” she said.
My father, Brody thought.
Everything was different here, Brody thought. For the first time they were treating him almost like he was one of them. He had his own room in a separate structure in the compound. The only person who hadn’t changed was Afsal, who watched him constantly.
“Did you think we didn’t see you with that Turkmen woman?” Afsal told him. “Did you really imagine you could fool us? As if a Turkmen whore could outsmart an Arab!”
During the day, when he wasn’t doing chores, he was allowed to read his Quran, picking his way through the Arabic lettering, and wander around the compound grounds and in Abu Nazir’s garden, always with Afsal watching, his AK7 ready. Something was going to happen here, Brody thought. He just didn’t know what.
At night, Brody dreamed. Aqrah was a place for dreaming. One night, he saw Jessica, as real as if she were there in his room.
The way she looked in her negligee that night on their honeymoon. Two nights in that B&B in Albrightsville in the Poconos, little hearts quilted on the comforter, the old lady proprietor, Mrs. Jenson, smiling over breakfast and turning off the a/c the minute they left the room. Or Jessica sitting up in bed after Dana was born in the hospital, looking at him with wonder, little Dana in her arms, him commuting from a miserable forklift job at that warehouse in Allentown.
And the worst, the look on her face in their tiny apartment when he told her what he had done, Mike there, hanging back the way he always did, because they’d done it without telling her. He and Mike had been going over it again and again over Budweisers the previous night at Woody’s Tavern.
The dot-com recession had killed what few jobs were left. Brody couldn’t afford to go to community college anymore and what was the damn point? Nobody was hiring anyway.
Except the military. For Brody, son of Marine chief warrant officer 02 Marion Brody, the choice about which service branch was nonexistent.
“So it’s the Marines?” Mike had said.
“Semper fi.” Brody raised his brew and drank.
“Well, shit, you’re not going without me, bro’,” Mike said, hitting him in the arm. “The only question is, how do we tell our wives?” Because by that time, Mike had married Megan.
Jessica standing there after they had come from the recruiter. She was crying.
“Without asking me, Brody? You did it without even asking me?”
“It’s a paycheck, Jess. And health coverage.” Holding her as she sobbed. “Bethlehem’s dead. Everything here is dead. There was nothing else, Jess. Nothing.”
And her pulling back, her eyes wet, her nose red. Even then, still the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.
“The military takes care of its own, Jess,” he told her, looking to Mike and Megan for confirmation.
“And if you’re dead, Brody. Who takes care of us?” Then a loud shriek and they all turned to little Dana, she must have been five, screaming and crying in the doorway.
He woke up shivering. He was in Aqrah; he understood now he would never go home. He would never see Jessica or his children again. He was an utter failure: as a man, as a husband, as a father, as a Marine. Surviving all this time as a prisoner—for what? Who was he? What had he become?
He fell to his knees, then bowed his head to the stone floor in prayer. O Allah, I can’t do this anymore, he prayed. I don’t know if you’re there. I don’t care. Then he remembered. There was a way out. The last time he’d been walking around the compound he’d spotted something on the ground and picked it up.
A piece of barbed wire.
He had it now and scraped it across his wrist, ripping at his veins as hard as he could. He immediately felt pain and the wetness of the blood. He switched hands and used the barb, sawing back and forth at his other hand, crying out at the pain, to cut the other wrist.
That’s all, he thought. Let me go, Allah. I can’t do this anymore. I was born in the desert, the Mojave. I’ll die here in the desert. My whole life has been a desert. He started to feel dizzy, hazy.
He was remembering Jessica in that print dress at the base, the last time he saw her, when they shipped out. He was in his MCCUU cammies, the two of them clutching at each other like they knew it was the last time. The Marine Corps band was playing “Halls of Montezuma,” Dana and Chris holding hands, Chris all twisty and crying. A two-year-old not liking any of it, and his little girl, Dana, looking at him, eyes sadder than anything he’d ever seen and he didn’t know what to say to her, so he just said good-bye. The last thing you ever said to your daughter. Good-bye, like you were going to work and you’d see her in a few hours. And then running to join his company to board the plane, because the truth was, that’s where he wanted to be. Looking back just once at the three of them near the buses. Jessica. Dana. The toddler, Chris, he barely knew.
They brought him, bleeding, to Abu Nazir, who bound his wounds, telling him, “Oh, Nicholas, you must not do this. Self-murder is the worst of all sins for a Muslim. It is haram. Forbidden. Nicholas, you cannot do this.” Abu Nazir put him to bed in his own house, despite bloodying the sheets. Holding him.
“I can’t take it anymore,” Brody mumbled. “Let me go. Please.”
“No, Allah wants you to live. You have submitted to him. Don’t you see? That is Islam. This isn’t the end. It is the beginning. Allah has not abandoned you. But you must never do this again, Nicholas. Now it begins. Your new life,” Abu Nazir said, h
olding him in his arms, rocking him like a child while Brody cried.
When he woke, he was looking at Nassrin. She was a beautiful woman. Older, with a strong nose and brown eyes, wearing a hijab even though she was inside the house.
“You will stay here now,” she said, helping him sit up. She served him hot tea from a cup. “You have been through much.”
“Why are you helping me?” he asked.
Her eyes searched his face.
“We must learn each other, you and I.”
“Why?” He looked around the room. Simply furnished, but he was clearly in a house, Abu Nazir’s house.
“Because I must know if I can trust you,” she said.
That evening, she brought him dinner and they talked. She asked about his family.
“Your wife? Is she beautiful?”
“Very.”
“Do you fear she has gone to other men in this time?”
He nodded. “She probably thinks I’m dead.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I am sure of it.”
“How could you possibly know?”
“Nicholas, things of the heart, a woman knows.”
The next day, Abu Nazir asked him if he would teach his son, Issa, English.
“I can’t,” Brody said. “I don’t know how. I’m not a teacher.”
“You can do this, Nicholas. This is the way back. And, Nicholas, you must never do that other to yourself again. It is the one thing Allah, who is merciful, Nicholas . . . but self-murder, even Allah cannot forgive.”
That night, Nassrin served them dinner. Brody sat with Abu Nazir and the boy, Issa. Near the end of the meal, Nassrin whispered to Brody, “I am trusting you with what is most precious in all the world to me, Nicholas.”
The next day, he began with Issa. He pointed at things and said what to call them in English. The boy was ten, and although introverted and shy, he was very smart, picking up on the words almost immediately. As Brody was pointing at a lamp, three men and Abu Nazir walked by, in tense conversation.
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