Saul's Game

by Andrew Kaplan

  “She’s with him! She’s one of them!” someone shouted in Arabic. She whirled and looked into the eyes of Abu Ghazawan, pointing, coming straight at her. He was the one who’d shouted. Without thinking, she turned and ran. Carrie, the 1,500-meter runner, raced down the street on bare feet faster than she’d ever run in her life.

  There was a small women’s clothing store near the corner. Dresses, chadors, hijabs in different colors. Some instinct made her run toward it. She didn’t know why. Maybe thinking these men never went into a women’s shop. Haram. Forbidden. She ran inside and raced to the back, ignoring the saleswoman’s “Salaam, al-Anesah” greeting her. Another woman, a customer in the shop, just stared at her.

  “I need help, O sister,” Carrie cried out in Arabic to both of them, not stopping.

  There was a tiny dressing room behind a curtain at the back of the shop. She opened the curtain, pulled it closed behind her, and squatted down, cowering.

  She had never been so terrified. They were coming and she had no doubt they were going to kill her. They would hang and burn her just like Warzer. She couldn’t get the image of him hanging there out of her mind.

  The same mouth she had kissed, she didn’t know how many times, now black ash, burned flesh and teeth. Or that it was going to happen to her too.

  She raised her Glock pistol and aimed it with both hands at the dressing room curtain. Even though she held the gun with both hands, it was shaking.

  She heard a man come into the shop. Demanding in Arabic, “Did she come in here?”

  “What are you doing? Stop! This is for women!” she heard the saleswoman say. The woman’s voice trembled with fear. She heard the man coming closer.

  “She came in. She must be here,” she heard him say in Arabic.

  “There’s no one,” the saleswoman said.

  “What’s back there?” the man said. His voice pinned her like a moth to a board. Abu Ghazawan. She recognized his voice.

  “Stop. This is for—” Then a tiny cry, “Ya,” from the saleswoman. A thud like a body falling to the floor—and nothing more from the woman. The bastard, Carrie thought, tensing, aiming.

  She could hear, almost feel him. He was close, within inches, on the other side of the curtain, though she couldn’t see his shoes. As soon as he opens the curtain, he’ll shoot, she thought, aiming at where his chest would be.

  She held her breath. She could hear him breathing and fired four shots into the center of the moving curtain. Two bullets were fired back, whizzing over her head. If she’d been standing, she’d be dead. Then she heard a body hit the floor and a hand with a pistol in it appeared at her feet.

  Screaming like a madwoman at the top of her lungs, she ripped open the curtain. Abu Ghazawan lay on the floor at her feet, crumpled, bleeding, still holding a pistol with a sound suppressor in his hand. He stared at her and tried to raise the gun. She fired again, the shot hitting him in the throat. He gagged, blinked, and went still, his eyes glaring. She shot him in the head.

  Almost collapsing, she tried to think of what to do. You’re a trained CIA ops officer, she told herself. Do something useful. She dropped to her knees and began searching his pockets, her hands shaking so much she could barely control them. She found a cell phone in his trousers and dropped it into her pocket.

  What am I thinking? she said to herself, and using her own cell-phone camera, took a trembling photograph of his face. No good, she thought, and pressed her hand against the wall to steady it and took another snapshot of his face.

  A mob of Shiite men, some wearing the black of pilgrims, burst into the shop. She wanted to run, but where? We might need DNA too, she thought, dipping the sleeve of her chador into Abu Ghazawan’s blood, pooling beneath his head and neck, then stood up to face them.

  The Shiite men stared, blocking any way out. Most were armed, with clubs or knives or guns.

  “She’s a blasphemer. A whore. Kill her,” one of them said.

  Five or six men, their faces twisted in fury, aimed their AK-47s directly at her.

  CHAPTER 35

  Al-Zainabia Souk, Karbala, Iraq

  29 April 2009

  “This man is al-Qaeda. He’s the one who attacked the holy shrine,” Ali shouted in Arabic from the back of the crowd of men. “Look!” he cried, pointing at Abu Ghazawan’s body. “Look at his shoes! His trousers! They are of the INP, the Iraqi National Police. They wore such uniforms when they attacked the shrine. He didn’t have time to change.”

  There were murmurs, but none of the men in the Shiite crowd moved. Ali fired a shot from his M4 in the air, then pushed his way through, Big Mohammed beside him. Thank God, he was alive too, Carrie thought. The two men stood protectively in front of her, facing the crowd, weapons ready.

  “What about the woman? We don’t know her. She’s not one of us,” an older man said. He held an old shotgun that he kept aimed toward them. Carrie put her pistol on the floor next to the body and raised her hands over her head.

  “Why is she wearing a chador?” someone shouted.

  “Truth! What is she doing here?” said another, a heavyset man. He came forward, a pistol in his hand aimed at Carrie. “Who is she?”

  “Don’t touch her!” Big Mohammed warned, pointing his M4 at the man with the pistol.

  “You want killing? In the name of Allah—” the heavyset man shouted.

  “Wait!” Ali cried. “She’s American. She came to try to stop the attack. The tomb is secure. No harm has come to the tomb of the holy imam.”

  “We hate Americans,” the heavyset man said. “Imam al-Sadr has said they are our enemies.”

  “Use your heads, you fools!” Ali shouted. “The Americans are leaving. The last thing they want is to have a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis now. That’s what this attack was meant to provoke. Think. Why else would an American come? A woman?”

  More murmurs in the crowd.

  “She’s not an American. She’s a Sunni spy!” someone yelled out.

  “Kill the whore!” someone else shouted.

  Two more men aimed their AK-47s at Carrie.

  “Pull off your hijab!” Ali cried to Carrie.

  Carrie pulled the hijab off her head. The men stared at her long blond hair.

  “You know us, brothers! Everyone knows nearly all the Iraqi Security Forces are Shiites. We are of you,” Ali lied. “We saved the shrine. She warned us.”

  Ali didn’t wait for the Shiites to react. He and Big Mohammed began muscling their way back through the crowd, Carrie stumbling between them. All eyes were on her. And now, without the hijab, on her obvious American face.

  Inside, she was wondering if her bipolar had finally pushed her over the edge, if any of it was real. This is insanity. My life saved because I’m a blonde?

  Outside, in the bright sun, she nearly collapsed. Ali and Big Mohammed had to hold her up. From the street, they could see the open plaza around the shrine wall. People were running toward the shrine while others fled. There were a number of police cars and two fire engines. Scattered around the plaza were bodies and the smoking wreck of what was left of an SUV. The klaxons of ambulances and Iraqi Security Forces vehicles sounded over the cries of people calling for help.

  She could see smoke billowing from behind the shrine wall. A woman came stumbling toward them, her face covered with blood. In the center of the open space, near the vendor stall Carrie had hidden behind, the same small boy still stood beside the body of his mother.

  Warzer’s dead, she thought, unable to make herself look in the direction of the street and the pedestrian bridge. Then she couldn’t help herself. His blackened body was still hanging from the bridge. She tried to think of something else, but couldn’t. The image of him was burned in her mind. She was going down into a dark place. Don’t, she told herself. There’s more to think about. The others. Little Mohammed, Emad, Younis. Iron Thunder. Perry. De Bruin. Saul. Somehow, none of it mattered.

  “Warzer’s dead,” she said numbly.

&n
bsp; “Cover your head,” Ali said, shoving the black hijab into her hand. “We have to get out of here.”

  A large mob of men, brandishing weapons and waving their fists, shouting “Death to Sunnis!” in Arabic, came from the direction of the souk.

  “Long live Imam Hussein!” and “Death to blasphemers!” they cried as they marched toward the plaza, where people were still running outside the walls.

  “Death!” they chanted, their numbers growing as they neared the Qabla gate.

  “More killings,” Ali muttered as the three of them headed toward the long promenade between the shrines. They made it to the promenade, walking between the double row of trees toward the Abbas mosque, which was untouched.

  “You came back for me,” Carrie said.

  “I gave Sha‘wela my word,” Ali said, walking quickly.

  “What of the others? Your friends?” she asked, trying to think. But there was only Warzer’s body hanging in her mind. I did it, she thought. If I hadn’t treated him the way I did, he wouldn’t have gone alone, so deep undercover, looking for Abu Ghazawan on his own. I drove him to it. I killed him.

  “Dead,” Big Mohammed said. “All of them.”

  Although she’d seen them get shot, his saying it hit her again.

  They hurried her along, half carrying her as they turned away from the crowds and headed down Abbas Street, filled with small shops and people coming out of their houses onto the sidewalks, Iraqi Security Forces vehicles and trucks carrying armed Shiite militiamen, honking their horns nonstop as they rushed down the crowded street toward the shrine.

  In all the turmoil, the two armed men half carrying a blond woman in a chador seemed almost normal.

  “You can turn on your cell phone now,” Ali told her, when they got to a quieter side street. They stopped at a small stand for fruit drinks. The vendor handed Carrie a glass of date juice, but although her throat was parched, she couldn’t drink. Her legs were trembling. She wasn’t sure how she managed to remain standing.

  “Did you come from the holy Imam Hussein Shrine?” the vendor, a bearded man wearing a white kaffiyeh, asked them in Arabic.

  “Yes, thanks be to Allah,” Ali answered.

  “You saw the attack? You were there?”

  Ali nodded. The vendor looked at them curiously.

  “Some say it was the Americans. Others the Sunnis,” the vendor said, looking at Carrie.

  “It was al-Qaeda. The Sunnis,” Ali said. Nothing about the way he said it gave away that he was a Sunni.

  “Now there is only killing. They are caught in this like we are, poor devils. In this city, once we were neighbors with Sunnis. Allah willing, different fish may eat each other, but all are caught in the fisherman’s net,” the vendor said, looking at Carrie.

  “Yes,” she murmured. “All of us.”

  “Ma‘a salaama. May Allah go with you, brothers,” the vendor said as they paid and left.

  They moved on, but wherever they walked, people were peering out of shop doors and women in windows watched the street. The entire city was on edge.

  “The sooner we leave this place, the better,” Big Mohammed muttered.

  “We must get our little sister away from here. Our friend Sha‘wela has been trying to reach you,” Ali said to her. “He says to tell you it is from Alabama.”

  The code word they had agreed on for an emergency. Except she couldn’t think about anything anymore, except Warzer’s smoldering body, hanging over the street. What bigger emergency was there than that? No more, Saul, she thought.

  She nodded at Ali and they moved to another street, working their way to where they had left the SUV. People who saw them saw only victims from the attack. Two ISF soldiers, one wounded, and a woman in a chador, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, their faces blackened and bloody from the attack.

  Go to hell, Saul, she thought. Except she now had critical intel. Abu Ghazawan’s cell phone and his blood, his DNA. Maybe with that they could finally locate Abu Nazir.

  But it would be too late for Warzer. The question is, Carrie, some devil inside her whispered, is it too late for you?

  CHAPTER 36

  Khafat, Baghdad

  30 April 2009

  Back in her apartment on Nasir Street in the Green Zone, Carrie opened the window and breathed in Baghdad. A smell composed of diesel fumes, fried fish, death, and the river. If she were blindfolded for a thousand years, she thought, she could breathe in that smell and know where she was in an instant.

  Saul was in Baghdad too. Ali and Big Mohammed had dropped her off outside the base in Karbala. From there, she’d flown back to Baghdad on the same Black Hawk helicopter she’d come to Karbala in, the entire way not saying a word to anyone, holding the cell phones and the bloody hijab in her hands.

  She went directly from the helicopter pad in Camp Victory to the CIA station headquarters in the Republican Palace. Saul and Perry started to debrief her in Perry’s office—and the second he saw how she was sitting there, vibrating like a tuning fork, Saul stopped it. With a look at Perry, who excused himself and left, he went over to the console and took out a bottle of Glenlivet and poured them both a stiff drink.

  They sat drinking, not talking, occasionally glancing at the office-window view of the grounds: the columned swimming pool with its fountain, the manicured lawns and palm trees at the back of the Republican Palace. Babylon, she thought vaguely. Saddam was a kind of king. We’ve been living in the Bible and didn’t know it. Maybe when they were living it, the people in the Bible didn’t know it either.

  She wanted to talk about it with Warzer, feeling a pain like a knife at the thought of him, because she immediately saw him in her mind, hanging from that iron structure. Warzer would have understood.

  It felt strange, him not being there. First Dempsey, now Warzer. Everyone she touched, every man she’d been attracted to, gone. She looked at her hands. What was happening? There’s only a few of us left, realizing even as she thought it that she was teetering on the brink of a deep black hole, the downside of her bipolar. Don’t, don’t fall into it, she told herself. Step back from the edge, Carrie.

  “I pushed you too far,” Saul said finally. “‘Sorry’ is such a feeble word.” He shook his head. “I know it doesn’t mean anything this minute, but maybe later . . . About Karbala, your instincts were right.”

  “Warzer’s dead,” she said.

  “I know,” Saul said. “There was no one else, you know. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of American families who won’t be grieving for their loved ones, and tens of thousands of Iraqis. More than this stinking war has already cost. They’ll live, Carrie. They’ll never even know how close they came. No one will, except you and me. That’s the game.”

  “If I died, you would have found someone, Saul. You always do,” she said, looking away.

  “We would’ve failed. You knew Warzer. You could identify him no matter what the disguise, knew his every glance, every gesture, better than anyone. If that shrine had been blown up . . .” He paused. “You didn’t just go for Warzer, Carrie. You knew. Subconsciously, you understood. Warzer had to get in deep with IPLA and Abu Ghazawan for the same reason. He knew it too, Carrie. Because otherwise we were totally screwed.”

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his mouth and beard. “But after Iran, I saw how it was,” he went on. “Listen, I’ve seen tough men, Navy SEALs, Delta guys, you wouldn’t believe, destroyed for life, empty shells of the men they were, who didn’t do half of what you did. I should’ve made you go back to Langley, but you insisted on Karbala. You’re right. I used you. And if you’re crazy enough to go on, I’ll do it again.”

  For a time they didn’t speak. She finished her drink. He went over to the console and picked up the bottle of scotch.

  “Should we get drunk? Poor Perry,” he said, coming over and freshening both their glasses. “Drinking all his scotch. Single malt is hard to come by in these parts.”

  Neither spoke. They sat list
ening to the hum of the air conditioner. Outside, the air was blisteringly hot. It was going to be another killer summer in Iraq, she thought.

  “What about Abu Ghazawan’s cell phone? His blood?” she asked.

  “We’re working both. Walden’s got Langley on it. We’ll have something shortly. Maybe help us learn his real identity. Fill in the missing pieces. Like who told de Bruin—sorry, Robespierre, about the upcoming raid on Otaibah.” He took a breath. “What about Robespierre? Has he contacted you since he got back from Isfahan?”

  She nodded. “I got a couple of voice-mail messages marked urgent. Texts too. Once I turned my regular cell phone back on.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” he said. “What happens now with Robespierre, with Arrowhead/Ali Hamsa, all that; it doesn’t have to involve you.”

  “I’m already involved, Saul,” she said, swallowing more scotch. “I like him, okay?” She clapped her hand to her mouth. “My God, must be the scotch. I can’t believe I said that out loud.”

  “I’m glad you did,” he said, glancing at the window, the afternoon shadows of the trees lengthening on the grounds where U.S. Marines guarded the building, then at her. “If you stay, you might save his life.”

  “And if I go?”

  He didn’t say anything. She stared at him.

  “God, you can be a bastard. No wonder Mira left you,” she said. As with Warzer, the instant the words were out of her mouth, she wished she could pull them back. She had never seen his face like that. He looked lost, like a little boy without a mother. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s true,” he said softly. “I shouldn’t have asked. Go back to Langley, Carrie. Take the promotion, see your family. You deserve it.”

  “I can’t,” she whispered.

  “I know,” he said, coming over and putting a hand on her shoulder.

  Back in her apartment, she was eating a cup of ramen noodles, gazing out the window at Nasir Street, dusted gold by the setting sun, when de Bruin called.