Saul's Game

by Andrew Kaplan

  De Bruin sent a car for her. He was waiting in his villa in the Khafat district. The little Peruvian, Estrella, opened the door, her dark eyes unreadable. As always, Carrie wasn’t sure how to play him, but the second she saw de Bruin standing in the living room, big and solid as a Babylonian monument, they came together like oppositely charged magnets. Afterward, she told herself as she kissed him. Because one way or another, everything would be decided tonight. Pillow talk is when he’s at his weakest, she thought, knowing she was lying to herself.

  She kissed him deeply, pressing herself against him. She wanted this as much as he did, feeling him pressing back, then picking her up and they were on the bed, taking off their clothes, his lips touching her.

  Later, he lit a cigarette as they lay naked, spent, like castaways on a beach.

  “Where’s Dasha?” she asked finally.

  “She’s gone. Why? Do you miss her?” he said, with a faint wicked smile.

  “What happened?”

  “You,” he said, taking a puff and exhaling smoke. “I sent her away, but I wouldn’t worry about Dasha. I gave her a nice chunk of money. She’s probably taking over half of Kiev and seducing the country’s president.”

  “No,” Carrie said.

  “No what?”

  She put her hand on him and felt him stir. What game am I playing now? she wondered.

  “No, I don’t miss her,” she said.

  Estrella came in with two drinks topped with white foam in martini glasses. She stood there for a moment looking at their naked bodies, then served the drinks without expression and left.

  “What’s this?” Carrie asked.

  “Pisco sours. Estrella makes them.”

  “I’ll bet she poisoned mine.”

  “Entirely possible, cheers,” he said, drinking.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Carrie drank hers. It was the most refreshing drink she’d ever had after sex.

  “Cheers. If it doesn’t kill me, this could be habit forming,” she said.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you for a couple of days. Where were you?” he said.

  “Where were you?”

  “Touché.” He grinned. “I guess neither of us wants to talk about what we do. I thought about you.”

  “Likewise,” she said. “What do you want to do about it?”

  “We could go away maybe. Someplace where the palm trees don’t come with IEDs. Mallorca. Bali. Why not? I have money.”

  “Bali sounds . . . unbelievable,” wondering, What game were they playing now? What life would be like if they were completely different people. Maybe he’d reveal something useful, she thought.

  “There’s this place in Bali by Mengiat Beach, the water bluer and clearer than anything you’ve ever seen. White sand, green trees, and except for the Balinese who take care of the place, not another living soul. You’d like it, bokkie.” He finished his drink and wiped the foam off his lips. “We’re never going anywhere, are we?”

  She shook her head. Playtime was over.

  “Who gave you the information about the raid on Otaibah?” she asked. An image of the party here at the villa the night they met flashed into her mind. The amazing guests, the artist, the archaeologist . . . Then it hit her. Shit, it had been right in front of her all along. There weren’t only Iraqis at the party. There was an American official too, sucking at the teat of de Bruin’s money. “Was it Sanderson?” Eric Sanderson, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy. Was he the mole? “You two meeting at embassy gatherings, taking a sidebar at meetings, stepping out for a smoke. Maybe parties with Ukrainian and Chinese girls and nice fat deposits into a Zurich bank account for him, was that it, bokkie?”

  “Sod off, Lady Anne. We’re not doing that. Come on, get dressed,” he said angrily, standing and tossing her clothes at her. He started pulling on his own clothes, stopping only to take out his SIG Sauer pistol from a hidden drawer that pulled out from under the bed frame.

  She stared at the gun. They’d made love on top of it. As she pulled on her clothes, Estrella appeared in the doorway. Carrie could swear the little imp had a faint smile on her face as de Bruin grabbed Carrie’s arm and marched her outside to his Mercedes parked in the driveway. The Peruvian she’d seen the first night and the time they’d picked her up from outside the Republican Palace now stood beside the car, his gun drawn.

  Carrie got in the back with de Bruin, the Peruvian with the gun in the front passenger seat. Estrella and another Peruvian bodyguard got into a compact sedan behind the Mercedes. Carrie realized that wherever they would’ve gone, even Bali, Estrella and the Peruvian bodyguards would have gone too.

  “Where are we going now?” she asked.

  “The racetrack. Not far, on Basra Street.”

  “Is that what we’re doing? Betting on horses?”

  “There’s no race, bokkie. Just a big open space for a helicopter. I’m leaving.”

  “What about me?”

  He shook his head.

  “Sorry, not this time. What was that line from Seinfeld? ‘No soup for you.’”

  “Don’t,” Carrie said, playing for time. “Not like this. I’ll take Bali. I will.”

  “Can’t, bokkie,” de Bruin said, motioning to the driver to go. “The thing is, we’re two of a kind, you and me. Business has to trump pleasure for us, doesn’t it?”

  The car moved down the short driveway, stopping to let the automatic steel gate in the blast wall open. As they started out into the street, a big black GM SUV moved right in front of them, blocking their way. The driver, muttering Arab curses, started to honk. Suddenly the Mercedes was lit by bright lights, flashlights shining on the windows, blinding them.

  A dozen U.S. soldiers in Kevlar vests and helmets surrounded the car, shouting “Hands up,” their carbines pointed at de Bruin and the Peruvian through the windows. Virgil, dressed like the others in a Kevlar helmet and vest, rapped on the window next to de Bruin with a Colt .45 pistol.

  “Open up,” Virgil said.

  De Bruin looked at Carrie. Again, she couldn’t read his face, but for the first time in the glare of the flashlights, she noticed tiny webs of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He was getting older. So was she, she thought. She had turned thirty, her birthday three days before they hit Otaibah. She felt him tense, about to do something.

  “De Bruin, don’t!” she said. “I don’t want you to die.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Baghdad International Airport

  2 May 2009

  “Caracas? What the hell is in Caracas?” Carrie said.

  Saul and Virgil had picked her up at her apartment on Nasir Street in the SUV that morning. When Saul wasn’t looking, she slipped her supply of clozapine pills in with her underwear and laptop in her carry-on, taking one of the pills without water. Maybe it would make her feel more normal, because right now she felt numb. Out of body, as if watching herself from another place. See Carrie talk. See Carrie run. See Carrie extraordinary-rendition de Bruin to interrogation in some third-world country.

  She’d been up all night, figuring it out. This whole thing started with Abu Nazir, and that’s where it had to end. Now was the wrong time to leave Iraq.

  “Change of scenery is good. You need a break,” Saul said.

  “I’m staying, Saul. We have a lead to Abu Nazir.”

  “What are you talking about? We’ve been checking the cell phone you took from Abu Ghazawan in Karbala, but nothing definite so far.”

  “What about northern Iraq?”

  “There was one call in the north we knew about, which is an outlier,” Saul said from the backseat, eyes flicking over at Virgil driving.

  They were on the Qadisaya Expressway on the way to Baghdad Airport. Three lanes in each direction, land flat as a table, and nothing to be seen along the sides of the road but palm trees.

  “The hell it is. Remember the first location we ever got on Abu Ghazawan was up north? In the Kurdish-controlled area of Iraq? Of course we dismissed th
e idea because why would Abu Nazir go from Syria to Kurdistan, but last night it hit me.”

  “You stayed up all night?” Saul said, exchanging a worried look with Virgil in the rearview mirror that Carrie caught.

  “I’m fine, Saul. Listen to me, Kurdistan. It’s pure Abu Nazir. He does the unexpected; that’s what he always does. You have to let me follow up. I need to finish this. You owe me.”

  “For what? Doing your job? You’re a CIA field operative, and right now you’re going through a bit of post-traumatic stress, which, given everything you’ve been through and the fact that de Bruin was on the verge of killing you, doesn’t seem out of order.”

  “Saul,” she said, twisting her body to face him. “Let me do this.”

  “Carrie, you listen. You’ve just been through a war. We’ve taken casualties. And there are going to be repercussions. I’m doing you a favor. If I sent you back to Langley now, that’s a different kind of war. Bureaucratic bullshit that’ll drown you. And frankly, questions you’d be asked that I really don’t want answered.”

  “He’s right, Carrie. You go back to Langley now . . . I give you two weeks, you’ll wish you were back in the Sand Pile,” Virgil said.

  “This is nuts. Why Caracas?” She watched the procession of palm trees go by as they drove along the Airport Road, the highway shimmering in the morning heat like a mirage. Leaving Iraq, bad as it was, was like leaving a piece of herself. So much had happened here. What part of her was left to leave?

  “Think of it as a break. Something different. You’ll touch base with the station chief, Alvin Gladwell, but you’ll report directly to me. Take some time off. Go to Macuto Beach.”

  “I don’t need a freaking break, Saul. Listen to me, I finally figured it out last night. Just me and a map and my last bottle of tequila. Abu Nazir is in northern Iraq. But he’s not in Mosul.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Are you kidding? The Kurds are there. We’re there. He’d have to be in hiding and disguise himself every time he went out for a cup of tea. That’s not his style. He likes a place to himself, where he can have his inner circle with him. When we hit Otaibah, I saw with my own eyes. There must have been at least twenty, thirty people, men, women, children, living in that compound. Trust me, he’d want someplace he can make himself at home, but where we wouldn’t look. And the original reading came from a Korek Telecom cell-phone tower north of Mosul, which eliminates places like Kirkuk and Tal Afar.”

  “So where is he?”

  “You have to think like him. A lot of the area north of Mosul is desert and mountains. Pretty barren. There’s only one place where he wouldn’t be hunted by the Kurds, because there are Sunnis who have started moving into some of the local mosques and madrassas: Aqrah.”

  “All right, I’ll bite. Why Aqrah?”

  “Think about it. Aqrah’s out of the way. Sunnis, Kurds, Assyrians mostly leave each other alone there. And Abu Nazir always needs a way to escape. Otaibah taught us that. If he had to escape from Aqrah, he could either go up into the mountains by the Turkish border, where it would be murder to find him, or worst case, he could make a quick run down the road to Mosul.”

  “We’ll check it out. I promise,” Saul said as they pulled up to the airport checkpoint. After their vehicle and IDs were checked, they were allowed to proceed to the drop-off at the terminal.

  “Take it easy, Carrie,” Virgil said as she got out, Saul with her. For a moment, the two of them stood awkwardly on the sidewalk outside the terminal building in the blazing heat.

  “About de Bruin,” he started uneasily, unable to see her eyes because she had put on her sunglasses. “Did you have feelings for him?”

  She shrugged.

  “Let’s not make this a Valentine card. He liked sex and the illusion of being an intellectual, a warrior poet. I just liked the sex.” She hesitated. “If push came to shove, he’d have sold me out for a dollar and given you change.”

  “But you liked him?”

  “He was sexy. Women think about these things too, you know.”

  “Why? You like bad boys?”

  She half smiled. “That sounds funny coming from you. You know why girls like bad boys, Saul? Because it gives us an excuse to be bad all the while convincing ourselves we’re saving them. Will he be all right?”

  “We’ll extract intel from him first. Afterward . . .” He shrugged. He helped her with her one roll-on suitcase and she pulled the carry-on inside the terminal, where the air-conditioning hit them with a wall of cold air.

  “What about Abu Nazir?” she asked.

  “Perry will be on it. And you’ll be back yourself in a few weeks to follow up. What you did . . . I won’t forget,” he said.

  “I’m all right, Saul,” she said.

  “I know.” As she turned to go to the security gate, he said: “Give my regards to El Niño.”

  “You’re shitting me? That’s his name?”

  She handed her passport and boarding pass to the Iraqi security official.

  Going through the metal detector, she felt lucky to have Saul. In a strange way, he was closer to her than anyone. Saul Berenson, the Rabbi Pirate.

  As she waited in the Baghdad International Airport terminal for her flight to be called, she wondered, Now what would the sisters at Holy Trinity, her Catholic high school, think of that?

  CHAPTER 38

  Aqrah, Iraq

  9 June 2009

  It was a perfect day. Two days earlier, Brody had gone with Issa and some of his classmates up to Musa Laka, high in the mountains. They had driven up the winding mountain road out of the desert.

  It was a place like no other in Iraq. Fertile fields in the wadis and in the mountains, green trees and clear, rushing streams, waterfalls cascading over sheer rock faces, shepherds with flocks of sheep and goats on the steep slopes. A land time forgot.

  Best of all, Musa Laka, a town perched on the top of a sheer flat-top mountain. The village was its own world, a Middle Eastern Shangri-la. Once a refuge for Jews and Assyrians, its heights perfect for defense, now there was a mosque, where Brody, along with two of the teachers and the boys from the madrassa, performed wudū, washing themselves before prayer in a clear mountain pool.

  They recited the Durood, “O Allah, let your Blessings come upon Mohammed and the family of Mohammed,” and the Ayatul Kursi prayer, “His throne includes the heavens and the earth,” then prayed in the mosque.

  From this place, Musa Laka, it was said the Magi, the three kings who came bearing gifts to witness the birth of Jesus, had come. The town, perched atop its mountain midway between heaven and earth, was holy ground. From its gardens, they looked out over the green mountains and wadis, an eagle soaring in a clear blue sky, birds in trees singing against the backdrop of a stream tumbling over the rocks.

  Thank you, Allah, Brody prayed. At last, I understand your promise. Why I had to make this journey. I am yours. Use me.

  Now, two days later. He walked Issa to the madrassa in the perfect morning. They were close, he and the boy. The wadi was green with life. Small birds twittered in the trees and it felt good to breathe and talk, to feel alive.

  “Sometimes I can tell you things I can’t say to my father, Nicholas,” Issa said as they walked along the side of the road. They spoke in English, better than Brody’s still limited Arabic.

  “Your father can be fierce. Sometimes fathers have to be,” Brody said, feeling a twinge, because the conversation reminded him of his own children. Dana and Chris. Had he been fierce with them? Most of the time he’d ignored them, left it up to Jessica. What a fool he’d been. If he ever got out of this, he vowed, he would do better. Pay more attention, be more understanding, more patient with them.

  He breathed in the clear air, felt the warm sun on his face. He was going to get out of this. He was certain of it. Allah wouldn’t have brought him all this way for nothing. Allah loved his creation.

  “We’re at war. That’s why. My father has had a setback,” Is
sa confided. “I don’t know what it is. He tries not to show it, but I can see.”

  “You’ll be close with him. The war won’t last forever,” Brody said.

  “You’re wrong, Nicholas. There are so many infidels. They hate us.” He looked at Brody. “I hope we’ll be warriors together, Nicholas. You’re a good friend.”

  Brody felt the twinge again. He was the enemy, his family, his country. Semper fi. Ya Allah, how foreign that world seemed. How superficial. Especially after Musa Laka, where he felt surrounded by Allah’s peace.

  A big black crow flew by, cawing loudly. Brody felt Issa flinch beside him. The crow landed on a tree close by and cawed again.

  “Do you still fear them?” Brody asked about the crows.

  “Not since I killed one with the slingshot. You remember?” Issa said. But Brody heard the quaver in his voice.

  “Yahhhh!” Brody screamed at the crow, waving his arms. But the bird sat there, turning its head to eye them. Something bad’s going to happen, Brody thought, unable to suppress a shiver down his spine. “Stupid bird,” he told Issa, and the boy laughed.

  They came to the entrance of the madrassa. Brody told him he’d pick him up after school, patting his shoulder. As he did so, he felt the boy tremble.

  “The crow is nothing,” Brody said.

  “Ma‘a salaama,” the boy said, touching his chest. “I know, Nicholas.”

  He went inside. For a long moment after Issa was gone, Brody stood there, staring at the old stone building, the garden, and the Jewish star over the doorway, though he didn’t know why.

  That day, he tried to keep busy working in the garden. When it got too hot, he came in and Nassrin gave him a glass of date juice.

  He decided he would ask for a rifle. He would teach Issa to shoot like a Marine. They would kill the crows once and for all. It would make Issa proud for his father. He spoke about it with Nassrin.

  “It is coming,” she said. “To be the mother of a son is to face the day he must become a soldier for Allah. I fear it, Nicholas, though I know it is needed.”