Saul's Game

by Andrew Kaplan

  She whispered an imaginary conversation in French into her phone, counting seconds, then peered from around the pillar. De Bruin had entered the elevator. As soon as the doors closed, she came out.

  The elevator went down. Why down? she wondered. Unless he was going to the swimming pool or the spa? Wait, the hotel had a hammam, a public hot bath. Men only, that sneaky bastard. That’s where he was having his meeting.

  She couldn’t go into the men’s hammam and she couldn’t hang around outside its door without being spotted. Not without being invisible, she thought. How was she to find out who he was meeting with?

  But there are people who are invisible, aren’t there? People no one ever really looks at, she thought, like a hotel maid. She went floor to floor, looking for one. On the third floor, she found a door open and a cleaning maid inside. The young Iranian woman—she wore a gray hotel uniform tunic over jeans and a black rusari head scarf—was cleaning the room. Carrie went in.

  “Bebakhshid, I must have the wrong room,” Carrie said.

  “No problem, madam,” the maid said.

  Carrie told her a quick story about a philandering husband, then asked how much she made.

  “Four hundred thousand rials, khanoum,” the woman said, calling her missus. About forty dollars, Carrie calculated.

  “I’ll give you a million rials if you’ll lend me a uniform, so I can catch that lying son of two fathers,” Carrie said. About a hundred dollars.

  Twenty minutes later, she was in uniform, pushing a mop in the hallway near the door to the hammam.

  Waiting. Pushing the mop and a pail up and back the same corridor. She was right about one thing. No one looked twice at her. Invisible. Cell phone in her hand, its camera ready. She would only have a second, if that, she thought.

  Finally, de Bruin came out of the hammam, dressed in the same shirt and slacks he had worn going in, skin a touch redder. He glanced left and right as he walked toward the elevator.

  She kept her eyes down at her mopping. She didn’t need his picture. It was who he was meeting that was of interest.

  Ten minutes went by. Still no one came out. Then a small Iranian man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a suit, no tie, emerged. He glanced at her, then the instant he turned away, she snapped the photo. And a second snapshot, from the side rear as he walked to the elevator.

  She stayed with her mop till he was in the elevator, then ran back to the small supply-utility room, where she disposed of the mop and uniform and quickly changed into jeans and a top, with a black rusari to cover her head. Now all she needed to do was get the photos to Saul and her job in Iran was done.

  Previously, she’d located an Internet café on Taleghani Street, near the Bab Al-Rahmat mosque. It was only a twenty-minute walk away. Send it off and she could head for the airport, she thought, taking the elevator to her room. After getting her backpack ready, she wiped down any surface she might have touched and checked that she hadn’t left anything.

  When finished, she took the spiral staircase down instead of the elevator, to ensure she didn’t run into anyone who might be interested in her. Pausing for a second to catch her breath, she headed from the elevator to the hotel’s front entrance, where she caught a taxi, getting out at a bus stop a block from the Internet café.

  She went inside the café, and a couple minutes later, the photo images were on their way to Saul via the CIA freight-forwarding-cover-company website server in Hamburg. She logged off, then plugged in the NSA thumb drive to cover her tracks, and was about to leave the café, when she heard the sounds of people coming in and turned around.

  Two big men, one with round button eyes, wearing a suit, followed by two blue-jacketed Iranian policemen carrying batons came into the Internet café, which instantly grew silent. She looked away, back at the computer, ready to reboot it.

  It didn’t work. The two policemen grabbed her and pulled her to her feet.

  “Komak!” Carrie screamed. Help! She looked around desperately, but the other people in the café, mostly young men, just stared at her as the man with button eyes—she didn’t doubt for a second he was VEVAK, Iranian security—ordered the policemen to put her in the van at the curb.

  One of the policemen handcuffed her hands behind her. The other hit her in the thigh with his baton, causing her to cry out and crumple to the pavement before they tossed her into the van.

  She sat handcuffed on a bench inside the van between the two policemen, facing the VEVAK man in the suit. Her thigh throbbing, she watched the street recede through the van’s rear window. They passed a vast public plaza and a domed blue-tiled mosque.

  This is how my life ends, she thought. Screaming under torture, because that’s where this was going. Who had spotted her? she wondered. Was it de Bruin? Had he recognized her despite the maid uniform and the rusari? Did he give her up after all?

  Or had someone in the VEVAK, going over everyone who’d checked into a hotel yesterday, discovered her false ID? She remembered something Saul said once. “In every operation, there are thousands of variables. It only takes one to go wrong for the train to leave the tracks. Perfect isn’t a goal. Perfect is survival.”

  Through the rear window, a wide boulevard and light traffic. The van was moving fast, siren blaring. You don’t have to hurry, she thought. My life’s over. She was a CIA spy in a country where they hated nothing more and the punishment for far lesser crimes was death. Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.

  Wherever it was they were going was a long way. It took almost an hour to get there. In a far northern suburb, if she could judge by the afternoon shadows. The van stopped, then drove a bit farther and stopped again. A heavy steel gate set in high stone and concrete walls closed behind them.

  It’s a prison, she thought, heart sinking, catching a last glimpse of blue sky as they took her out of the van. Sucking it in, thinking, I’ll never see sky again. Oh God, Saul, Maggie, Dad.

  They brought her into a massive building. It was old, with peeling walls, smelling of bad plumbing and despair. There was discussion with someone behind a desk, after which she was brought through a series of steel doors, each of which had to be unlocked by hand, into what she assumed was a women’s section of the prison, because she was handed over to four female guards, all wearing the same shapeless gray uniform and black rusaris on their heads.

  The female guards screamed at her in Farsi, slapping her into a small room, where she was stripped and searched. They dressed her in a white rusari and coverall, shapeless as a sheet, manacled her hand and foot, and brought her into a room with only two chairs, both bolted to the floor, facing each other. Near the wall was a wooden table, with a couple of towels and a metal bucket. As they put her in the chair, she spotted at least one hidden video camera and a microphone in the ceiling corner.

  Oh God, she thought, her heart beating wildly. She hadn’t taken her meds in at least thirty-six hours. Already, her skin felt like it was burning with a bad sunburn. I can’t do this, she thought. Not this, Saul.

  An Iranian man, one she had never seen before, came in. He was vaguely attractive, in a good suit, white shirt, no tie—which seemed to be a kind of uniform for government agents—with a close-cropped graying beard and well-groomed graying hair. Clearly, the senior person. For a long moment, he just stared at her.

  CIA protocol when captured by the enemy: sooner or later, everyone talks. But you don’t have to make it easy for them. Agency trainers emphasized the onion approach. Force them to make you reveal things by peeling off layers. The real stuff is hidden deep under the other layers. Her Iranian cover would go quickly. Next was her fake cover ID: Nancy Williams, a stringer for the L.A. Times based in Kuwait. Then her ID from Syria: Jane Meyerhof, travel agent from Cincinnati. Don’t give them that for as long as possible.

  If you can.

  “Salam,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “You are in Dastgerd Prison. I am an officer of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security. Some call us the MO
IS,” he continued in English.

  “Khahesh mikonam,” she whispered. Please. “There’s been a mistake.”

  “The mistake was yours. You are a CIA spy. You must understand, the penalty for this in the Islamic Republic is death. There is no reprieve. The fact that you are a woman will not save you. You will die.”

  Her heart sank. Although she knew it was coming, hearing it out loud made it real. Saul, she thought. What am I doing here? Why did we have to go the extra mile? Why was it so important? Dammit, Saul, I don’t see it. If I have to die, why?

  “Nothing here is in your control,” the Iranian went on calmly. “Except one thing. You have a single choice: die by hanging without . . . great discomfort.” He exhaled a thin stream of smoke. “Or die in agony, a broken . . . animal. But make no mistake, madam—you will die. Very soon.”

  “I’m an American diplomat with immunity. I demand you contact the Swiss embassy in Tehran,” she said, feeling like she was playing a deuce in a high-stakes poker game where everyone was showing higher cards.

  “Yes, we found your passport in your pack, madam. Nancy Williams. A journalist from Los Angeles, a classic CIA cover ruse, using an Iranian woman’s ID card? And of course, your country has no diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic, so you have no diplomatic recourse. All of which is irrelevant. You are a spy,” he said. “What is your real name?”

  Here we go, she thought.

  “Nancy Williams.”

  “As you wish.” He shrugged, getting up.

  Almost instantly, the door opened and three male guards rushed in. They lifted her onto the table. As two of them held her down, the third put a towel over her face. When she tried to turn her face away, someone pulled her hair through the rusari so tight she screamed. They held her head immobile under the towel. She couldn’t move.

  “Waterboarding,” she heard the MOIS man say. “You Americans taught us this trick. They say it feels exactly like drowning. Of course, most people don’t drown over and over. So terrible.”

  She heard a metal scraping sound and water sloshing. Someone had picked up the water pail.

  “First question,” the MOIS man’s voice said. “What’s your name, you filthy whore? Your real name.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Kuwait City, Kuwait

  28 April 2009

  At that moment, Saul was sitting in the tea lounge in the Sheraton Kuwait Hotel. The hotel was located in a Manhattan-like area of skyscrapers near the First Ring Road beside the waters of the bay.

  The lounge was clubby English; mahogany-paneled walls, stuffed armchairs, roses in small flowered vases on the tables. He was looking at his Go board, set up on his table beside a Wedgwood china teapot and scones, but he wasn’t thinking about the game. He was thinking about Carrie.

  She hadn’t touched the dead drop in Isfahan. A flower bed in the formal garden of the Chehel Sotun Palace. She was supposed to check in every twenty-four hours, leaving a thumb drive or a note or something in a box under the dirt, three bordering bricks to the right of a chalk mark. Not checking the drop meant she’d been arrested. She was probably being interrogated, tortured, right this second, while he sat there in air-conditioned comfort over tea and scones, he thought disgustedly.

  It all hung on her. It always had. The last piece in his strategy: the entire Iraq War for a war-weary American public and maybe the entire Middle East. Not to mention the bloodiest retreat in American history if she didn’t pull it off. Hard to imagine what she was going through. Harder than any combat soldier who gets his chest covered with medals, because she was on her own, utterly alone. And he had done it to her.

  I’d do it again, he thought. What choice do we have? Otherwise the whole war, the lives of those American soldiers, the money, will have been for nothing. Worse, the bloodbath to come in Iraq if she didn’t do it. What was one life against that?

  Don’t quote Talmud to me, Dad, because the image of his father—wearing his suit and tallit, the way he looked, Saul’s last view of him, before they closed the coffin—popped into his mind. Not now. How a single life is the equivalent of the entire universe. Mira was right. He should’ve quit the CIA back in Tehran all those years ago. God, this spy game, this life is hard, looking around at the empty lounge.

  A waiter came over to freshen his tea. Saul waved him away.

  Lieutenant Colonel Larson, wearing civilian clothes, came into the lounge. As Larson passed Saul’s table, he murmured, “Room 1605,” and sat at another table, well away.

  Saul took another sip of tea, waited a minute or two, then put the Go board and stones inside his messenger case that also held his laptop, got up. and went out to the hotel lobby. He took the elevator to the fifteenth floor, walked up one flight to the sixteenth, and checking the corridor to make sure it was clear, knocked at the door of room 1605.

  General Demetrius, in civilian clothes, opened the door. He had a Go board on a table in his junior suite, Saul noticed.

  They sat down across the board from each other.

  “They say mathematically there are more moves in Go than there are atoms in the universe,” General Demetrius said, placing a black stone.

  “I’ve heard that,” Saul said, placing a white stone.

  They played for a few minutes.

  “Your female operations officer, she’s in Iran?” General Demetrius asked.

  Saul nodded.

  “Has she been arrested? Be careful, you’re in atari. Next move, that stone will be captured,” General Demetrius said.

  “Yes,” Saul said, placing a white stone to create an “eye” in a different group. “The game isn’t about capturing; it’s about who wins at the end.”

  “What she’s doing . . . if she were in my command, she’d get a medal,” the general said.

  “We don’t get medals. Just a black star on a wall inside Langley, no name, if we die.”

  “Will it work?” General Demetrius asked, putting down another stone.

  “Maybe. If she can hold out a bit,” Saul said. “Most can’t.”

  “Do we know who’s running this?”

  “Not yet. Before she was arrested—I believe that’s what’s happened—she was able to send me a photo of who Robespierre met with in Isfahan. I immediately passed it to Bill Walden. We’ll know something soon. But that’s big picture. Right now, apart from her, the most immediate fire is your war.”

  “How much time do we have before the attacks?”

  “Two days.”

  “Hell of a way to fight a war,” the general said, placing a stone.

  “It’s not your kind of war.”

  “No, it isn’t. When do you leave?”

  “As soon as I win this game,” Saul said, putting a white stone down to complete the encirclement of the general’s biggest group on the board.

  Later, pretending to inspect accessories in the Harley-Davidson shop at Kuwait International Airport while waiting for his flight, Saul thought about Carrie. And Mira. Unbidden, something she’d said at the airport before she left Tehran, all those years ago.

  “Saul, that’s such a biblical name.”

  “My parents.” He shrugged, thinking the intel he was getting from Javadi had trapped him. It was too important or he’d quit the damn CIA and be leaving Tehran too, every fiber of him wanting to get on the plane with her.

  “He was a king, wasn’t he? A failed king,” she said, her eyes boring into him. That too, he thought. The king who wasn’t good enough. Who was so jealous he hunted the king God wanted: David. Do you have to throw that at me too? he thought.

  “You can’t make me feel worse than I already do,” he’d said.

  “Did it ever occur to you that I need you too?” she said, turning to go.

  “Do you?” he said, but she was already handing her boarding pass to the attendant.

  Just hang on a little, Carrie, then let go. Please stay alive, he thought, and used the prepaid cell phone he’d just bought at the airport to text Mira in Mumbai.
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  “miss, need you,” he texted. Please answer, he thought. Don’t leave me.

  Just before he boarded his flight, she texted back: “Me 2. When?”

  “soon,” he texted, breathing again. He shut off the phone as he boarded the plane. All he could do now was hope Carrie was still alive and that his plan would work.

  CHAPTER 30

  Dastgerd, Isfahan, Iran

  29 April 2009

  She was sentenced to death. Out there in the courtyard, where they had a scaffold. Or maybe in a small room with a bullet in the back of the head. The MOIS man had let her know. His superiors had given the final word. She would be dead within the hour.

  They had gotten it out of her. All of it. Her ID, Saul, the CIA, Iron Thunder. The plan for an attack on Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Mahdi Army elements in Baquba, possibly the last American action of the war. Because—and this was the deepest secret they had pulled out of her, gasping for air while vomiting out water—attacking Baquba and blocking Iranian support for the Shiite Mahdi Army wasn’t the object of the exercise.

  She had lost count of how many times they’d drowned her. Impossible to hold her breath. Almost the instant they began pouring water on the cloth, her gag reflex kicked in, and she knew she was drowning, dying. She struggled against the men holding her down, but it was impossible. She was breathing in the water, and just as she was blacking out, they stopped. Gasping and coughing, vomiting water on herself, urinating because she had lost all control of her body. Until she caught her breath for a second.

  At which point, they put the cloth back on her face, even as she screamed, “Wait! I’ll tell!” But it was too late. The water was pouring, she was gagging and screaming for air, inhaling more water as the cloth sucked into her mouth and nose.

  They did it a third time, before he asked her again for her real name.

  This time she told him. Jane Meyerhof. And yes, she worked for the CIA. Kuwait Station.

  “Who is your station chief?” the MOIS man asked.

  “Charley Brown,” she said.