Saul's Game

by Andrew Kaplan

  “Yeah, Lady Anne,” staring at her. “You did.”

  Neither spoke. They were driving past the vast open space around the massive Al-Rahman mosque, with its giant unfinished dome, a construction crane left there from Saddam’s reign, surrounded by smaller domes that looked like missile silos. Every time she passed it, it reminded her of that poem by Shelley from high school, “Ozymandias.” “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  De Bruin shook his head. “Not that it matters now, bokkie, but for what it’s worth, I thought you liked me.”

  She turned to him.

  “I like you, de Bruin. I’d like to screw your brains out right now. And without Dasha, although I like her too. More important, I’d like to actually—” She stopped. Took a breath. Make it good, Carrie. If you want to live, you better make him believe it’s more than just sex for you, she thought. “Do you have any conception of what it’s like to be a single woman in this testosterone-fueled Middle Eastern lunatic asylum? I wish we had met . . . But not like this.” Was it enough? Would he let her live? she wondered, and gestured at the Peruvian with the pistol, still watching her. “Not this.”

  He was looking at her oddly. She wished she could read him better.

  “What I built here, I’m not giving it up. Not for a piece of . . .”

  She put her hand on his arm, swaying against him as they made the turn on Ramadan. They were in the Mansour district, she saw, heading toward the Abu Ghraib Expressway. So that’s where they were going? she thought. His place. Or if you stayed on the Abu Ghraib long enough, Fallujah. Where Dempsey died, she remembered, and for a second she couldn’t breathe. It could go either way, she thought. At least try to make him believe you’re a little on his side.

  “I know. Sometimes you feel if you don’t have someone to talk to, you’ll go insane,” she said.

  “Well, we’re all balls-out insane here,” he said, motioning to the driver.

  CHAPTER 25

  Hart Senate Building, Washington, D.C.

  29 July 2009

  01:27 hours

  “Are you shitting me? Really? The story about this colonel—what’s his name?”

  “Colonel, later General Namir Fahmadi, Mr. President.”

  “I don’t believe it. It defies all medical science. It’s impossible, isn’t it?”

  “Honestly, I have no idea. I’m not a doctor or a scientist. All I know is what was in Carrie Mathison’s report. We take in data, Mr. President. We collect, we analyze, we cross-check, distill as best we can. We’re like archaeologists, picking over bits and pieces, making educated guesses about what the hell we’re looking at and giving you our best estimate in your daily PDB. Absolute truth, one hundred percent certainty, Mr. President, never happens in intelligence work. Never.”

  “Mine too, Bill. President of the United States or not.”

  “Maybe it’s apocryphal, this colonel story. I’m not sure, in this case, that what is scientifically true matters in the least.”

  “What do you mean, Warren?”

  “The point, gentlemen, is not whether or not the story’s true in some pure scientific sense. The point is, these people believe it. No wonder they hate us.”

  “Wait a damn minute, Warren. We had diddly-squat to do with the excesses under the shah, and God knows, we’ve had no control over what happens in Iran in what—thirty, thirty-five years? Are you telling me the ayatollahs are better? Blaming us is what these people do so they can duck taking responsibility for what they’ve done to themselves.”

  “But it does bring up something else, Bill, which we haven’t answered.”

  “What’s that, Warren?”

  “Why didn’t this de Bruin fellow kill Carrie? She was his Achilles’ heel. Presumably, given the way things are done in Baghdad, he’d probably be able to ‘prove’ he had nothing to do with it. So why didn’t he simply eliminate her? Did she sell out? Is she really a traitor, like the polygraph suggested?”

  “You know what Saul said, Warren? He said, ‘De Bruin was like any man who couldn’t stop thinking about a woman. Killing her wouldn’t have solved his problem.’”

  “Are you saying it was love, Bill? Really?”

  “Who the hell knows? Look, for a field operative, the spy game is like being a soldier lost in a fog in the middle of no-man’s-land. Sometimes you might encounter an enemy soldier and, if you don’t kill each other, discover you have more in common with him than with some of the bozos on your own side.”

  “Seems a bit far-fetched, Bill.”

  “Yeah, Warren? Well, Romeo and Juliet were supposed to be enemies too.”

  “Wait a minute, Bill. Whatever his feelings were, are you suggesting that she, a trained CIA agent, loved him?”

  “Love’s a strong word, Mr. President. She admitted she was sexually attracted to him and maybe she liked him. Saul says it may be harder to kill someone you like than someone you love. Whatever else, it’s clear de Bruin was attracted to her. Everything that happened afterward came from that.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Borazjan, Iran

  27 April 2009

  “What happened between you and Robespierre?” Saul asked her. He’d called her via JWICS Skype from the U.S. embassy in Kuwait before she left Baghdad.

  “Nothing. He knows we’re onto him, but hasn’t decided what to do,” Carrie replied.

  “Wants to see which way the wind blows?”

  “I think so.”

  “What about you? Any problem with him?”

  She thought about telling him how scared she’d been, then changed her mind.

  “I can handle him,” she said, wondering if that was true. With de Bruin, nothing was simple.

  “Well, we figured Virgil and Perry were there and we knew his location at all times—” Saul said, then stopped. “Why didn’t he . . . try to do something?” Kill her.

  She took a deep breath and let it out. The Question of the Day, boys and girls.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Yes, you do.” Eyes blinking behind his glasses, patient, waiting. Saul.

  “I think he likes me. Is that enough?”

  Saul looked away, then back at the camera over the monitor.

  “Do you like him?”

  “If you mean, do I find him sexually attractive, yes. We’re playing each other, Saul. I don’t know who’s going to win. He likes me enough not to kill me. For now,” she said, feeling awkward, naked. This business was worse than being a stripper. You have to bare everything.

  “Good,” Saul said, scratching his beard. “We can use that.”

  She didn’t tell Saul about what happened that last night in Baghdad with de Bruin, when he decided to tell the driver to turn the car around and they wound up spending the night, the two of them, in a suite at the Al-Rasheed Hotel.

  She had hesitated at the front entrance of the Al-Rasheed, the sight of the high white stone lobby bringing it all back. The last time she’d been in the Al-Rasheed it’d been with Dempsey, a man she’d really cared about.

  De Bruin saw it. For all that he was a big man, he possessed a sensitivity to women’s moods that was almost female. Odd, but in a way she couldn’t explain, sexy.

  “What is it?” de Bruin said. “You don’t like the al-Rasheed?”

  Time to exorcise Dempsey’s ghost? It’s been three years since he died. Get a life, Carrie. That’s what I’m trying to do, dammit. The fact that it was with de Bruin, whom she couldn’t figure out, an aspect of him that reminded her of Dempsey, made it seem like if she couldn’t do it now, she might never, she thought.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  Still, it was strange seeing it again. The white hallways, the arched doorways of the Al-Rasheed. And then it didn’t matter. The two of them were in a suite, undressing each other in the shower.

  Afterward, the two of them drying off, both wearing only towels on the balcony, watching as the sun set blood red over the Tigris River, reminding her again of Dempsey. O
nly now, somehow, the memory was bittersweet.

  After dark, they talked and watched the lights of the city in the districts that had electricity, while from a nearby mosque came the loudspeaker call of the muezzin for the Maghrib prayer. They downed Zero One capsules with vodka martinis and moved to the bed, trying all kinds of positions till she had to bite her lips to keep from crying out. She would remember this night for a long time.

  Later, she watched him smoke a cigarette, his arm around her, and thought, He’s the enemy, and yet he’s been as intimate with me as anyone I’ve ever known. Damn, this is a crazy business. Good thing I have bipolar. I was born to it; they ought to make being mentally ill a CIA job requirement.

  “Why’d you change your mind?” she asked. Unsaid, that when he had picked her up outside the Republican Palace, he had intended to kill her—her body a hairsbreadth away from being one of so many headless things found floating in the Tigris River or laid in rows like ears of corn on the floor of the Baghdad morgue—and for some reason, decided not to.

  “Interesting things are happening. We’ll have to see how it plays out,” he said.

  “Meaning you want to be on the winning side, no matter what? I’m a bargaining chip.”

  “Like you said, bokkie,” turning on his side and grinning at her. “I’m the king of Baghdad, right? Somebody’s probably looking for you right now. Probably right outside the door with a brassed-off Navy SEAL team or something.”

  More likely just Virgil with a 9mm pistol, she thought. Except Virgil’s smarter than that. He’d wait.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, and kissed him. “I’ll protect you.”

  “No, you won’t. And I won’t either, Lady Anne. If push comes to shove, I won’t lift a finger. But I’d regret it,” stroking her breast. “I would.”

  “Likewise. I wish you were on my side.” She pressed the length of her naked body against his. “Can I go in the morning?”

  “Not before we do this again,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette and grabbing her.

  When she woke up in the hotel room in the morning, he was gone. Just a handwritten note on hotel stationery: “Gone. Business. Don’t leave Oz, Lady Anne. Pls.”

  Oz. The Emerald City. The Green Zone in Baghdad. Don’t leave Oz. He was saying, ‘Stay put. There’s a shit storm coming.’ Pls. Please. He’s going out of town and wants me here for the grand finale, whatever it is, she thought.

  Thirty minutes later, she was cleaned up, dressed, and back with Virgil, who had done exactly as they’d planned when she disappeared. They knew de Bruin might do something and programmed the what-if.

  The first thing Virgil had done was alert Perry Dryer, back at the CIA Station HQ in the sectioned-off portion of the Republican Palace that was the U.S. embassy until the new fortresslike embassy building was completed. The key was that Perry and Virgil could track de Bruin because of the NSA software she’d loaded on his cell phone and laptop that night.

  The real open issue was Ali Hamsa, Arrowhead, and who his contacts were. As they had decided, instead of trying to follow her, Virgil had tailed Arrowhead, who had gone back to the Umal Street teahouse in the Habibiya section of Baghdad, near Sadr City. That nailed it.

  Through one of Perry’s Shiite agents, they’d already learned that the owner’s son, the man who had shooed Carrie out the door, was a courier for Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army. Al-Sadr was closely tied to Iran.

  Circle closed.

  As for de Bruin, after their night at the Al-Rasheed, the software told them he had gone to Baghdad International Airport, but by the time she, Virgil, and Perry had reconnected and checked the airlines’ passenger rosters, de Bruin’s flight via Emirates Airlines to Tehran had already taken off.

  That’s when Carrie debriefed on JWICS with Saul and he gave her the go-ahead for the next phase in their plan.

  Iran.

  Before she left, he gave her an update on Warzer. He had gone to Karbala to locate and track Abu Nazir’s key operative, Abu Ghazawan, who they believed to be the IPLA point man for both de Bruin and Abu Nazir on the Sunni side.

  According to Perry, Warzer had linked to a local IPLA cell in Karbala. He spent a lot of time hanging out near the Imam Hussein Shrine. The local cell knew of Abu Ghazawan, but so far as Perry knew, Warzer hadn’t spotted him, or any IPLA jihadis Abu Ghazawan might have brought with him to attack the shrine.

  “Except for one thing,” Perry said. “A rumor in the teahouses that the Grand Ayatollah Ali Mohammed al-Janabi, the marja‘, or leader of the Shiite authority in Iraq, is coming himself to speak at prayers this Friday at the shrine mosque.”

  “Only four days,” Virgil said. “Should I go down to Karbala?”

  Perry shook his head.

  “Leave it to Warzer. You’d stick out there like a sore thumb.” He looked at Carrie. “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Iran,” she said.

  “With any luck, no one will ever know you were there,” Perry said.

  She caught an Air Force helicopter flight from Baghdad to Basra, then a taxi to a warehouse on the Shatt al-Arab in the pounding heat.

  That night, two Arab men led her from the warehouse to the dock. They took her belowdecks on a motor trawler and locked her in a small cabin.

  After a long while, at least several hours, the motion of the boat changed. She felt waves, bumping, the boat moving and lurching through swells. They must be out in the Persian Gulf.

  “You come now,” a young Arab said, unlocking the door and leading her up the ladder, out on deck, a hood over her head. They led her stumbling, passed along hand to hand, onto another boat or ship. No way to tell anything with the hood on.

  Someone, a man, his breath smelling of onions, led her down iron steps, She banged her head on something. Carrie shook her head inside the sack.

  “Bebakhshid,” the man said. Sorry in Farsi. The man led her down, one hand guiding her head. He sat her in a chair, where she sat rocking with the motion of the boat or whatever she was on. Sometime later—she had dozed off—she woke. The boat had stopped, no throb of the engine. They were tied up somewhere, she thought.

  Someone led her up on deck, her backpack slung over one shoulder. They were outside. She could smell the change of air. Hands guided her off the boat and onto a dock. For the first time in hours, she was on land. A few minutes later, they put her into a vehicle, and as it began to move, someone pulled off the hood.

  Although it had felt like days had passed, it was still night. She checked her watch. Four A.M. She was in an SUV with two men. One of them, with bronzed skin and speaking bad English, told her to lie down on the floor of the backseat. They drove through the port and stopped. She assumed they were at a customs gate, because the driver spoke Farsi to someone, probably a guard.

  Two or three endless minutes later, Carrie holding her breath while someone shined a flashlight on the interior of the SUV, they started to move again. The man who spoke some English told her she could sit up.

  Now she could see where she was. They were driving along a coast road, the dark waters of the Persian Gulf on one side, the lights of the city on the other. She was certain now it was Bushehr. In the far distance on the coast, she could see the lit-up dome and the tall smokestack of what had to be the nuclear plant. Iran.

  Soon they were speeding on a two-lane highway past outlying houses and a lone billboard advertising Zam Zam Cola, out into the desert.

  “Sun will be up soon,” the man who spoke some English said. “Will be hot. You have the sunglasses?”

  She nodded.

  “Good. Is hot, white on eyes, salt flats of Borazjan,” he said.

  “Thank you for doing this,” Carrie said. “It’s dangerous, even for Persians, bale?”

  “I piss on the heads of Persians,” the driver said. Carrie knew just enough Farsi to catch it.

  “Be quiet,” the man who spoke English said to the driver in Farsi. Then to Carrie: “We are Lurs. Between us and the Persians is
no good.” He made a motion indicating separation.

  That’s why Saul chose them, she realized. They hated Persians and, if captured by the VEVAK or the Revolutionary Guards, would tell them nothing. Not these men.

  “Why do you hate them so much?” she asked.

  The driver laughed.

  “Namir Fahmadi,” he said, and spat out the open window.

  The sun was coming up. She watched it turn the sky gold, then blue. The desert was empty.

  “Who’s Namir Fahmadi?” she asked, the sound of her voice surprising her. Just something to say to fill the emptiness.

  The man who spoke English shook his head.

  “A name to frighten children,” he said.

  The two men glanced at each other and said nothing. For some reason, she had touched a nerve. The only sound came from the tires on the road. Around them, the land was flat and blinding white. Salt, she thought, putting on sunglasses.

  “Where’d all this salt come from?” she asked.

  “Long ago, in time of fathers’ fathers, sea was here,” the man who spoke English said. “Now only desert.” Up ahead was a road sign with a city’s name in Farsi and the flag of the Islamic Republic.

  Borazjan. A small city filled, it seemed, with young men on motorbikes.

  The road became a wide dusty main city street. It was late morning and the market was crowded with women shopping, vendors hawking their wares, and dozens more motorbikes. There was a big crowd in a square on the main street. Some men were shouting, but most of the crowd was silent. They stopped the SUV to see what was going on.

  Carrie saw a young man stripped to the waist, standing in the bed of a pickup truck, his hands tied to a steel roll bar, being savagely whipped by a big man wearing a balaclava on his head. Everyone watched as the camel whip landed with a loud whack, again and again, on the young man’s back, till it was striped red and bleeding. The young man screamed at each crack of the lash.

  They got out of the SUV. Time for her to change into a black chador that would cover her from head to foot. The joy of being a woman in a part of the world where if you showed someone any part of your arm above the wrist, even accidently, you were a whore. But the public whipping that was still going on stunned her. She turned to the man who spoke English.