Homeland: Saul’s Game

Homeland: Saul’s Game Andrew Kaplan The second, edge-of-your-seat prequel novel based on Showtime’s hit series, HOMELAND, ‘the best thriller on American television’ New York PostDamascus, Syria, 2009. Carrie Mathison is leading an operation to capture or kill al Qaeda terrorist, Abu Nazir. But arriving at the compound where he was supposed to be in hiding, they find it empty. Carrie is sure that someone is leaking CIA information to the enemy and has betrayed their operation, seriously threatening American interests in the Middle East. To expose the double agent, her boss, Saul Berenson, devises an elaborate ruse that will send her on the most dangerous mission of her life.This twisting tale of international intrigue takes fans deeper into the intense world of high-stakes espionage, and explores never-before-seen details of Carrie’s life as an operative in the Middle East, Saul’s past as an agent in Iran, Brody’s dark childhood and captivity, and events involving the trio—and other favourite characters, like Dar Adal—that will lead them to the present. Copyright (#ulink_dee005c8-3d20-50fd-8f9b-04787a42ce41) Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014 Homeland: Saul’s Game. Copyright © 2014 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved. Artwork/Photographs © 2014 Showtime Networks, Inc., a CBS Company. All rights reserved. Designed by Diahann Sturge Andrew Kaplan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007546039 Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007546046 Version: 2015-09-17 Dedication (#ulink_1c8e37db-8e7b-5972-ba01-e548fe8c0b53) For the real Anne, the love of my life Contents Cover (#ub783b387-f222-5a52-bcf6-481d7675d8a1) Title Page (#ufbdbee5e-6870-5c17-8694-0ec9b81b9917) Copyright (#uc63a7589-d864-5070-8fad-e5d9ec5780fd) Dedication (#ud3ebc673-3e64-54cf-8e0c-b030ad500b7d) Author’s Note (#ua486dfbb-cf32-56c9-8700-b93928d50f3c) 2009: One Year Before The Arab Spring (#u863e8e6c-a6a4-5a19-96a7-4ffebc2e6cd3) Chapter 1 (#u5281a40e-d53f-5adb-b9a1-862b63d08beb) Chapter 2 (#u17adde9d-136d-59b5-9b76-6fd5587453bf) Chapter 3 (#u7f40fbd5-53f9-5189-9bb3-a435af7d27f6) Chapter 4 (#ub9861cba-a0ae-5d86-b616-17084a061908) Chapter 5 (#u551155dd-4168-555f-b2f4-a539be404567) Chapter 6 (#u9490ef77-6003-55b6-a5e2-e49c97063488) Chapter 7 (#u26d5341d-c78b-5fcb-a4b8-f47a941604d3) Chapter 8 (#u0bd085c0-3b5d-57ad-8f56-6bb956440ba4) Chapter 9 (#ud3dce494-279d-580b-be11-2647ae129331) Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo) Characters (#litres_trial_promo) Glossary (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_eab4870c-c163-5c83-9564-c152ebccfe4c) For readers interested in additional useful information on the characters, CIA acronyms, terminology and slang, organizations, agencies, and other entities portrayed in this novel, a list of characters and a glossary are provided at the back of the book. TOP SECRET//X1: SPECIAL ACCESS CRITICAL//ORCON/NOFORN/FOR DIRECTOR CIA EYES ONLY/100X1 [Polygraph Transcript: CIA Community Security Center/For Middle East Division/National Clandestine Ser­vice/Baghdad Station; Date: 20090621] SUBJECT: Caroline Anne Mathison aka “Carrie”/Operations Officer/Baghdad Station/MED/NCS POLYGRAPH EXAMINER: [[Name redacted—­see comment at end]] NOTE: Includes Polygraph Examiner evaluations [[in double brackets]]. Polygraph audio transcript begins here: EXAMINER: Your name is Caroline Anne Mathison? MATHISON: Yes. EXAMINER: You were born April 5, 1979? MATHISON: Yes. EXAMINER: You are thirty years old? MATHISON: Yes. EXAMINER: You are a CIA operations officer currently assigned to Baghdad Station in Iraq? MATHISON: Yes. EXAMINER: Have you had sexual intercourse in the last week? MATHISON: … Yes. EXAMINER: Have you ever heard of a CIA operation code-­named “Operation Iron Thunder”? MATHISON: I … Yes. EXAMINER: Just yes or no. Have you ever heard of a CIA operation code-­named “Iron Thunder”? MATHISON: Yes. EXAMINER: Were you in fact, the lead operations officer for Operation Iron Thunder? MATHISON: Yes. EXAMINER: Did you terminate an Iraqi national named [[redacted]]? MATHISON: He was going to [[redacted]]. EXAMINER: Did you personally kill him? Yes or no? MATHISION: Yes. EXAMINER: What about [[redacted]]? Did you have sexual intercourse with him? MATHISON: Yes, but it was … [[redacted]]. EXAMINER: Were drugs, including ecstasy and/or Captagon, also known as Zero One, and multiple sexual partners also involved? MATHISON: No, I didn’t participate. [[False. Subject is lying.]]. EXAMINER: You were acquainted with Warzer Zafir, an Iraqi employee of the United States embassy who also acted as a CIA operative in Baghdad, were you not? MATHISON: Yes. We worked together. EXAMINER: You knew him better than that, didn’t you? You lived together and had repeated sexual relations with him. Is that correct? MATHISON: Yes. EXAMINER: Nevertheless, despite your relationship, were you also involved in the death of Warzer Zafir? MATHISON: Are you out of your mind? Absolutely not. No. [[False. Subject is lying]] EXAMINER: Miss Mathison, were you, as part of Operation Iron Thunder or otherwise, involved in any way, in a [[redacted]] that [[redacted]]? MATHISON: No. What the [[redacted]]? [[Evaluation redacted]] EXAMINER: Just to be absolutely clear, you have no knowledge whatsoever about [[redacted]]? MATHISON: [[Redacted]] EXAMINER: During Operation Iron Thunder, were you [[redacted]] and [[redacted]]? MATHISON: Yes. EXAMINER: And during that [[redacted]], did you reveal intelligence severely damaging to the security of the United States? MATHISON: I did not. No. [[False. Subject is lying]] EXAMINER: Are you a traitor to the United States of America? MATHISON: No, you son of a bitch! No. [[False. Subject is lying]] Remainder of examination redacted: FOR DIRECTOR CIA EYES ONLY. Examiner and all Human Resources Data/201 File/Aardvark HUMINT/Redacted pursuant DCIA/M–20090624–2. 2009 (#ulink_e9694265-3f55-5186-be6e-20953ebaa076) ONE YEAR BEFORE THE ARAB SPRING (#ulink_e9694265-3f55-5186-be6e-20953ebaa076) CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_c5150b39-4f78-5514-af43-a77527c04002) Hart Senate Building, Washington, D.C. 28 July 2009 22:19 hours “Mr. President. And Vice President William Walden too. I appreciate you both coming at this time of night.” “What is this place? It’s like a damn cave.” “Special chamber, Mr. President. We use it for secure meetings with spook types like the vice president back when he was director of the CIA. It’s right under the regular Senate hearing room. From an electronic eavesdropping point of view, it’s probably the most secure location in Washington. And with Marines guarding the tunnel from the Dirksen Building, no one will ever know you were here.” “Good, because this meeting never happened. Tim, my Secret Ser­vice guy isn’t thrilled about this.” “You have my word, Mr. President. Speaking of which …” “Let’s cut to the chase, Senator. You can’t hold your hearing.” “Hang on, Mr. President. We’re a coequal branch of government. The American ­people have a right to—­” “Bullshit. This is politics, pure and simple. Only I’m not a candidate anymore, Senator. I’m the president—­and I’m telling you, you can’t do this.” “Of course it’s politics. What the hell did you expect? This thing stinks to high heaven. You can’t cover this up.” “We sent you everything you asked for, Senator.” “You jumping in here, Bill? You sent us what my daddy used to call a giant wagonload of horse manure. The polygraph for this female agent, Mathison, for instance. You redacted damn near everything except her name. Surprised you didn’t do that. This ain’t gonna fly, gentlemen. We’re going to have this hearing—­in public. Full media, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the whole circus. And if it embarrasses you, Mr. President, or you, Bill … well, tough shit.” “Senator … Warren, let’s not pretend we like each other. I know you want to make political hay and see yourself on all the Sunday talk shows and maybe a stepping-­stone to something bigger, but trust me, this is one hearing that isn’t going to happen.” “You try to shut this down, sir, and as an old prosecutor, I warn you. Both you and the vice president are skating very close to articles of impeachment. I take this very seriously.” “So do I, Senator. That’s why I’m here. But this hearing cannot go forward.” “With all due respect, Mr. President, I’m the committee chair. How the hell are you gonna stop me?” “Because I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt, that under all the bullshit—­and yeah, we’re guilty of it too, there are no virgins here—­there’s a patriot. Somebody who actually gives a damn about this country. Listen to me, Warren. This isn’t politics. I am the president of the United States of America and I came here tonight for one reason only. This is critical for our national security. You can’t do this.” “You’re gonna have to give me a helluva lot more than that.” “That’s why I brought Vice President Walden. Bill?” “Senator, the president has ordered me to tell you everything. The whole truth and nothing but. Then you decide. I approved this operation. It was on my watch.” “What about this female agent? Mathison. Is she a traitor? I’m thinking seriously about dragging her in front of a FISA court, locking her up, and throwing away the key.” “We’ll let you decide. But you’re looking in the wrong direction. She’s not the story.” “Then in the name of sweet Jesus, Bill, what is the story?” “Funny you should say that. He isn’t even a Chris­tian. He’s an Orthodox Jew. An Orthodox Jew who doesn’t wear one of those yarmulkes on his head or follow any Orthodox Jewish practices. Go figure that one out, for starters. Let’s call him Saul.” “What about this Saul?” “You saw the docs we sent. It’s in there. Now that the president’s sitting here, I’ll admit it’s not full disclosure. We didn’t send even a third—­I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I couldn’t—­and maybe we fudged on what we did send, but, so help me, it’s there.” “What? This … operation? Iron Thunder? Looks like a damn train wreck to me.” “Wow, you really don’t get it. You are listening to Beethoven’s Ninth. You’re looking at the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel, and you don’t have a clue. Senator, this was maybe the most brilliant and successful operation in the history of the CIA—­a work of genius—­and you don’t see it. This saved the Iraq War. Maybe the whole Middle East. If we hadn’t done this, we were projecting more than ten thousand American casualties and a gigantic loss of American prestige around the world, and that was just for starters. We’re talking about a worse disaster than 9/11. You should be handing out medals.” “Stop right there, Bill. Since you and the president want to make me one of the bad guys, why don’t you walk me through it? Only let’s be clear, I’m not making any promises.Where do we start? With this operation?” “Well, since you brought her up, let’s begin with the girl.” CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_4c78ea10-8f8e-5be2-a121-e39e38e3c157) Eastern Syrian Desert 12 April 2009 01:32 hours The pair of Black Hawk helicopters flew low and fast over the desert. Skimming over sand and rock, less than seventy feet above the ground, barely forty meters apart in the darkness. The night sky was clouded over; only a single star and no horizon. For the pilots it was like flying blindfolded at nearly 160 knots and the only reason they didn’t crash was the AN/ASN-­128 Doppler radar that gave them the elevations of ground features: rock outcroppings, sand dunes, or buildings, although in theory, there weren’t supposed to be any habitations in this part of the desert. It would have been safer to fly at a higher altitude, but that would have been suicide. Within minutes, seconds even, they’d be picked up on antiaircraft radar. Once the Syrian fighter jets scrambled, they wouldn’t stand a chance. Strapped into the hatch seat, Carrie Mathison tried to control her hands from shaking. It had been two days since she’d taken her meds. Clozapine for her bipolar disorder. She got them from the little pharmacy on Haifa Street in Baghdad’s Green Zone, where if the owner, Samal, knew you, you could get any drug on the planet, no questions asked so long as you paid for it in cash. “American dollars, please, shokran very much, madam.” In the red glow of the helicopter’s interior combat lighting, she could just make out the silhouettes of the Special Ops Group team in full combat gear, humped with packs, cradling M4A1 carbines with sound suppressors. Ten of them plus her made up the Black Hawk’s normal complement of eleven. The distance to the target was inside the helicopter’s 368-­mile combat radius and the plan was to be back inside Iraq before daybreak. Through the window next to the hatch, where the door gunner stood manning his 7.62mm machine gun, there was only darkness and the roar of the helicopter’s rotor. They had crossed the border into Syrian airspace some fifteen minutes ago, taking off from Forward Operating Base Delta, a sandbagged slab of concrete in the middle of nowhere desert outside Rutba in western Iraq. Except for the occasional stop along Highway 10, much of the desert between Rutba and Otaibah was uninhabited but for a few smugglers’ camps. There had been smuggler routes in the region since before the Roman legions came tramping through these sands. When they had planned this mission, they’d figured that in theory, the local tribesmen were the last ­people on earth who would make a cell-­phone call to Syrian Security Forces. If the smugglers heard helicopters, they would assume they were Syrian army helicopters and hide. In theory. She couldn’t stop her hands from trembling. Shit. She had stopped taking her meds because she needed to be super-­sharp for this operation. Already she was starting to feel strange, like an early warning. Focus, Carrie, she told herself. How many years had she been chasing Abu Nazir, the leader of the IPLA, the Islamic ­People’s Liberation Army, an affiliate of al-­Qaeda in Iraq and the CIA’s most wanted man after Osama bin Laden? It had become very personal. Ever since U.S. Marine captain Ryan Dempsey was killed outside Fallujah three years ago. Someone she had cared about very much. She’d almost caught Abu Nazir back then, in Haditha, but he’d slipped away like some conjurer’s trick. The man was a ghost. Still, they worked it. Her, Perry Dryer, the CIA Baghdad Station chief, and Warzer Zafir, presumably a translator for the U.S. embassy, actually her operative, and of course, back in Langley, her boss, Saul Berenson, the CIA’s Middle East Division chief. A year and a half after Dempsey died, Warzer left his wife. He showed up with a single suitcase at Carrie’s apartment in the Green Zone. A tiny second-­floor flat with a window overlooking the traffic on Nasir Street: black-­market stalls under the palm trees on the street’s center divider selling car parts, plastic jugs of gasoline, guns, even condoms to passing cars. “I’m not Dempsey,” Warzer told her that first night, the smell of someone cooking masgouf, fried fish, coming through the open window of her apartment. Standing there, hands in his pockets, looking like a boy on his first date. “I don’t want you to be,” she said. She hadn’t been with a man since Dempsey. She knew then she didn’t love Warzer. But there was a gentleness in him, something she needed. “I’m Iraqi. Of the Dulaimi from Ramadi. What I’m doing is haram, you understand? Forbidden. My mother cried. She turned her back on me. My own mother. My wife said, ‘First finish with your American sharmuta. Even after, don’t speak to me. I don’t know if I can forgive. I don’t know if I want to.’ You understand, Carrie?” She nodded. Sharmuta. Arabic for whore. “All I know is I had to have you,” grabbing her in his arms, the first time he’d ever done that. “The two of us. Alone in this war. This insanity. And Abu Nazir, who shames me as a Muslim, sick at what he makes of us.” And then there was only the two of them, Warzer with her, inside her, the first man she’d been with in so long, because that’s what the hunt for Abu Nazir had done to them. The two of them like lost children in a storm, the sounds and smells of Baghdad coming through the open window of her apartment. “Up and over,” the pilot said, and the helicopter rose to clear an obstacle. They were flying dangerously low to the ground, but then, everything about this mission, three months in the making, was insanely dangerous. It was all on her. She was the one who had insisted on it, had forced the issue. Putting together a CIA Special Operation like this had required approvals all the way up to the vice president and the national security advisor to the president. When it got to his desk, Vice President William Walden himself had yanked her back to Washington from Baghdad. She had gone into Walden’s office in the West Wing with her boss, her mentor, the one person in the CIA she totally counted on, Saul Berenson; the first time she had ever been in the White House. “Are you out of your mind?” Walden had said. “This is the riskiest thing anyone’s ever brought to me. You realize if there’s a screw-­up, a single mistake, a helicopter malfunction, a barking dog, a neighbor calls the cops, some asshole fires a shot at the wrong time, we’re toast. The country, the Agency, everything. We’d be invading another country. What the hell, Saul, you don’t think anyone would notice?” “It’s Abu Nazir. It’s him. We’ve been chasing him for years. We got him,” she said. “How do you know? This Cadillac? I don’t trust it, Saul. I can’t go to Higgins with something this risky.” Mike Higgins was the president’s national security advisor. “It’s actionable, Bill. Ninety percent probability. You know she’s right,” Saul said. Cadillac was the code name they’d assigned to Lieutenant General Mosab Sabagh, second-­in-­command of the Syrian Army’s elite Presidential Guard Armored Division. Sabagh was a trusted Alawite clan relative of President Assad and a member of the ruling military inner circle in Damascus. Reeling him in had been Saul’s op. He had long ago identified Sabagh as a potential CIA asset. So when a watcher tracking Sabagh at the London Club in the Ramses Hilton in Cairo signaled that the Syrian had gotten in over his head at the tables, Saul made his move. Sabagh had gone to Cairo while his wife, Aminah, was off with President Assad’s wife, Asma, shopping on the rue du Faubourg Saint-­Honor? in Paris. Her trip was something a lieutenant-­general’s salary could never afford, so Sabagh had tried to win the money. “A dubious idea even in Las Vegas, much less at Egyptian tables,” Saul had remarked. When the watcher reported how much money Sabagh was losing, Saul needed someone to close him fast. He sent an emergency Flash Critical message via JWICS, ordering Carrie to grab the next flight from Baghdad to Cairo to make the approach. JWICS was the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, the CIA’s special Internet network designed for highly secure encrypted Top Secret communications. Carrie had walked into the private high-­stakes salon in a skintight dress, with eyes only for Sabagh, now Cadillac. She made brief eye contact with the target, Cadillac, in the gambling salon, then tracked him to his hotel room, where he tried to solve his money problems with a bottle of Russian vodka, a pretty Ukrainian prostitute, who later had to be whisked out of the country, and a Beretta 9mm pistol, that Carrie had to pry out of his hand, finger by finger, never knowing till the last second which of them he was going to shoot, her or himself. She packed Cadillac off back to Damascus the next day with his debts taken care of and $10,000 in American taxpayer money in his briefcase. In the six months since then, with his wife, Aminah, happy in Dior and, more importantly, in Asma, President Assad’s wife’s good graces, everything Cadillac had given them, every piece of intelligence, had been twenty-­four karat. He had become the CIA’s most important asset in Syria. Walden studied the file again, although he’d already read it. “Okay, so Cadillac says blah-­blah and the satellite shows a compound in Otaibah, a suburb east of Damascus. Could be Hezbollah? PFLP? Hamas? Could be President Assad’s grandmother? Could be anybody.” “We’ve been watching it for two months by satellite and a local team,” Carrie jumped in. “I was there two weeks ago myself at the makhbaz, the local bakery, pretending to be a Circassian. You’d be surprised what you can learn just standing there in an abaya, listening to other women buying bread. There are approximately fifteen to twenty men with families in that compound. Police don’t go on that street. Assad’s security goons never come by. This, in the most paranoid, security-­conscious dictatorship in the Middle East. Are you kidding me? Why is that?” she said. “Satellite infrared confirms the number of ­people inside,” Saul said. “Only nobody ever comes out of the compound except to go to the market or the mosque. There’s no telephone landline, no Internet, and they never make cell-­phone calls. Just whatever contacts they might have at the mosque or the market,” she said. “Still doesn’t make sense. Why would Assad, an Alawite allied with Hezbollah and Iran, give sanctuary to Abu Nazir? Head of IPLA. It’s Shiites versus Sunnis? They’re deadly enemies. They hate each other,” Walden said. “Abu Nazir’s doing it because it’s next to Iraq yet it’s the one place he knew we wouldn’t look for him—­and he had to get out of Anbar because we were getting too close. We suspect Assad’s doing it, because in exchange, Abu Nazir’s willing to keep the Sunnis in Syria from what they’re dying to do, which is assassinate him,” Carrie said. “How do you know this? Cadillac?” She nodded. “So forget the raid. Instead we go in with a drone. Low risk. Flatten the place. Complete deniability. End of Abu Nazir. Period,” Walden said. Saul leaned in on Walden’s desk. “We’ve had this conversation before, Bill. We can’t get intel from a corpse,” he said. “We need an SOG.” He meant a Special Operations Group. Only ever used for the highest-­risk missions. “If you blast him to smithereens with a drone, they’ll say he’s still alive. He could become more dangerous dead than alive. Last week he had a suicide bomber in Haditha lure children on their way to school with candy and then blow them up into a million pieces,” Carrie said. “Little children! We need an SOG to make sure it’s him and to get the intel to finish this filthy war. So do it, dammit. Before the son of a bitch moves and we lose him again.” “Twenty-­seven minutes to touchdown,” Chris Glenn, the SOG team commander said over the helicopter’s roar. They were going in light and tight, he thought. Possibly outnumbered by hostiles in the compound. Two UH-­60M helicopters with ten SOG team members each. Total twenty men plus the CIA woman, Carrie. The only advantage, the element of surprise, and after thirty seconds, that would be gone and all hell could break loose, unless they were able to eliminate the guards silently and take out the rest before they woke up. The key was planning. And Carrie being right about Abu Nazir and where he’d be in the compound. And one odd thing he wanted to check out himself. Something opaque that had shown itself in the spy satellite infrared images. An underground cave or vault. They were hiding something. Or someone. Or several someones, he thought. “Keep it tight, guys. Nothing gets out. No light, no sound. Not even a fart,” Glenn said, moving over to Carrie. “You good to go, Mingus?” Per her request, they’d code-­named her after jazz bassist Charles Mingus. Carrie and jazz. Everybody knew it was her passion. Back at FOB Delta, it became a team joke. “Hey, Mingus, what’s wrong with Chris Brown?” “Lil Wayne, yo.” “Katy Perry, dog!” “I’m fine. You watch your own ass, Jaybird,” she said to Glenn. His code name. She clenched her hands on her knees so no one could see them trembling. Just being off her meds for two days was doing it. The only reason she wasn’t flying either on a high or a low with her bipolar disorder was that her system was probably so hopped up on adrenaline from the mission, she decided, shaking her head to clear it. Glenn and the machine gunner opened the cabin door to a roar of wind. Through the open door, with the night-­vision goggles, she could make out scrub on the desert floor speeding beneath them; it looked almost close enough to touch with her feet. They were supposed to be in Syria one hour flying time in, maximum forty-­five minutes on the ground, one hour back to the Iraqi border. Total: two hours and forty-­five minutes. Hopefully finished before daybreak and before the Syrian Army knew they were in-­country and could react. Once they were back in Iraq, the administration in Washington could deny they had anything to do with it—­and nothing left behind but some dead bodies to prove otherwise. And they’d either have Abu Nazir in custody once and for all or he would be dead. If Cadillac’s intel was solid. And till now, he’d been a hundred percent. “Ten minutes. Everybody on night vision,” Glenn announced. One by one, the team members put on their night-­vision goggles and adjusted their helmets and communication gear. There was little talking among them. For weeks, they had trained on a mock-­up of the Otaibah compound in the desert near FOB Delta. Each team member had his specific assignment and every man had trained to back up the others in case they were hit. The keys to success were speed and silence in the middle of the night. Every one of them was a combat veteran, the elite of the elite, in incredible physical condition; hair-­trigger-­trained volunteers who had pushed themselves beyond what they ever thought they could do in order to do exactly this kind of mission. “Five minutes to target,” the pilot called back over the sound of the rotor. “Selectors to burst,” Glenn said as everyone moved their carbine safety selectors into firing position. Men started stretching their legs, getting ready to get up and move. Carrie leaned over to look out the open door. Through the greenish field of night vision, she could see scattered structures on the outskirts of Otaibah. Small farms and shacks. These were poor ­people. Tribesmen who minded their own business. ­People who didn’t make it in the wider Syrian society, who didn’t want visits from the GSD, the brutal Syrian secret internal Security Forces. If this was where Abu Nazir really was, he had chosen well. She checked her watch one last time: 1:56 A.M. local time. “Three minutes. Everybody ready for landing.” The men in the helicopter got ready to get up. They were seated in the order they would exit from each side of the chopper. Carrie peered intently into the darkness. And then she saw it. A pair of yellowish lights from a house on a street about a mile or two ahead. Was that the compound? What the hell were lights doing on at two in the morning? Then more lights. It looked like the compound was lit up. Oh God, she had led them into a trap! They were going in hot. And streetlights too. Oh no! The satellites had shown no streetlights at night in this part of Otaibah. As if the government had deliberately neglected this part of the city. The intel was bad. Cadillac must’ve lied. Or someone. It was all her fault. They would die because of her. She looked around wildly, trying to think of how to get the pilot to pull them out, to find some way out. But they were too low. They were coming in fast now. Too late to think about it as they passed over a fence topped with barbed wire and over the compound’s courtyard, bumping down in a cloud of dust. “Go! Go!” Glenn hissed, slapping her on the back as she stumbled out of the helicopter. Jumping out, she felt the team moving around her. Every nerve in her body was screaming, anticipating an IED going off or men wearing kaffiyehs letting loose with automatic rifles any second. Everything was a swirling green haze in the night goggles, the lights over the courtyard like something in a van Gogh painting. She ran behind Glenn, his M4A1 in firing position, toward the main building. CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_d867ede9-247e-51a5-a5c6-28e5dfd344ca) Otaibah, Syria 11 April 2009 23:31 hours (two hours earlier) Brody was dreaming of Bethlehem. That first time with Jessica. They were in high school; she a sophomore, he a junior on the football team. He was a jock. Never a choice about that. Because the son of Marine chief warrant officer 02 Marion Brody aka Gunner Brody was going to damn well be a tough-­as-­a-­mother-­son of a bitch jock or he’d beat the shit out of the little knobhead prick until he was. They were to meet outside the Brew on the corner of Broad and Main, the trees draped with lights for Christmas, the snowy streets toward Woolworth’s crowding up with ­people, everyone waiting for the lighting of the big electric Christmas star on South Mountain that could be seen across the Lehigh Valley. Jessica was the prettiest girl in school. The prettiest girl he had ever seen. But it was more than that. There was something about her. He wasn’t sure what it was—­he didn’t even know how to explain it or express it to himself because she wasn’t a slut or anything like that. Willing to explore. Curious. Willing. That was the word. He knew she liked him and somehow he knew that it was more than sex. Although all they’d ever done was kiss. She really liked to kiss, closing her eyes and sticking out her chest just that little bit that made you want to grab her breasts, but he didn’t. He held back, knowing somehow that although she wanted him to touch them, it was part of whatever high school Catholic girl thing it was for her that he not be like the other boys. So he waited. But that wasn’t the willing part. What he sensed was that she was the kind of crazy girl that if she loved you enough she would drive off a cliff in a car with you, which was something he thought about. A lot. Because there was one thing he knew above everything else in the world. Surer than God, surer than money, surer than anything. He’d have to leave home as soon as he could, because either he’d kill Gunner Brody or Gunner Brody would kill him. And then he saw her crunching through the dirt-­webbed snow on Broad Street with her friends Emma and Olivia. She wore a red scarf, her cheeks rosy with the December cold, everyone’s breath coming out in clouds, and the girls started grinning and nudging each other when they saw him and Mike. Yeah, Mike was there. His best friend, Mike Faber, had always been there since the day the Brody family had moved into the upper half of a duplex on Goepp Street. They had come to Bethlehem from California when he was seven, because his father had gotten a job at the steel mill; Gunner Brody apparently being the last man in the state of Pennsylvania who didn’t know that it was only a matter of another year or two before the plant closed and those jobs were gone forever. Except ex-­Marine lifer Marion Brody didn’t have that many choices after an official inquiry into the accidental death of an eighteen-­year-­old private at the Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, involving an M224 mortar, revealed Gunner Brody with a blood alcohol level of 0.29. The finding put the Corps in the questionable position of either a highly visible court-­martial of a Marine chief warrant officer with a chestful of medals or the Marine gunner’s early honorable discharge, but without the full pension he’d been banking on. So they had moved from the Mohave Desert, where Nick had been born, to Pennsylvania. But if nothing else, Marines know reconnaissance. From the minute they moved in, it took Gunner Brody less than twelve minutes to scope out the liquor store on the corner of Goepp and Linden. An hour later, Mike found Nick Brody squatting under the wooden stairs in the backyard of the duplex, his nose broken, lip split, ribs aching, and said, “I’m Mike. I live across the street. You want to come over, man? I got a Nintendo. You play Super Mario Brothers?” Nick Brody looked at him like he was from another planet. “Your lip’s bleeding,” Mike said. “I fell.” “Sure.” Mike nodded, tapping him on the shoulder with his fist, and just like that they were friends. “There’s this girl,” Mike had said that first day as they headed across the street. “Her name’s Roxanne, but everyone calls her Rio Rita. Sometimes she leaves the curtains open. When she turns around to put her bra on, you can see her ass.” “Gosh, I can’t believe it’s almost Christmas,” Jessica’s friend Olivia said, the girls joining them at the corner for the Christmas star lighting. They wound up at Olivia’s house. Olivia produced a bottle of her parent’s J&B scotch, the music was Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson, and somehow it was just the two of them, Jessica and Brody, in Olivia’s sister’s bedroom, on a tiny single bed, kissing so hard it was as if kissing was the only known form of sexual expression, and then she pulled off her skirt, telling him: “I’m not wearing any panties.” She handed him a Trojan still in its wrapper from her purse. And all he could think was, she had thought it all out, this was her idea. He remembered how excited they had been on that narrow bed, how beautiful she was in the slanting light coming through the venetian blinds from the streetlight outside, the exquisite feel of her—­when suddenly blinding light and someone shaking him hard. For an instant, he thought he was back in the house on Goepp Street and it was Gunner Brody, shaking him awake, shouting at him, “Thought you could sneak your report card past me, you little maggot jarhead.” But it was his guard, Afsal Hamid, shaking him awake, hissing, “Wake up, you American piece of shit! Do you know what’s happened? Of course you know. Because of you we have to go. Because of you, you motherless bastard.” “What’s going on?” Brody asked. “You know why, you dog. We have to leave because of you,” unchaining Brody and throwing clothes at him. “You pig-­faced son of a whore!” Afsal kept saying. For a minute it was like six years ago when they first captured him. That time they kept beating him until they nearly killed him. And Brody remembered at one point in those first weeks screaming back at Afsal through bloody teeth, “You think you hit hard, you raghead prick? The Marine gunner used to hit me harder with his ser­vice belt every freaking time he got drunk, just because he wanted to make sure I didn’t grow up to be a pussy. Harder than that every day, you son of a bitch. I’m immune to you, you bastard. So hit me harder! Harder! Harder! Harder!” “What are you doing?” Daleel, one of the others, said to Afsal. “We have to leave. Get him ready.” By now, Brody had learned enough Arabic to understand some of what was said, though not all the nuances. “This isn’t over,” Afsal hissed, pulling Brody close. “First we leave. But today, I promise. Today is the day you die, American.” He quickly dressed and washed, hurried along every minute by Afsal saying, “You fool the others, pretending to be a Muslim, Nicholas Brody. But you don’t fool me. This will be the last time you will be a problem for us.” What had gone wrong? he wondered. All around him, everyone was moving, stripping away everything they owned down to the walls—­clothes, furniture, pots, bedding, laptop computers, weapons, explosives—­and packing them away into a caravan of pickup trucks and SUVs lined up in the street outside the compound. All the lights were on and Brody didn’t know why they were leaving so suddenly and in the middle of the night. “Ahjilah! Ahjilah!” Hurry! Hurry! Everyone kept telling each other; all of them, men, women, even the children, moving with purpose. At the last minute, Abu Nazir himself came in and everyone had a quick communal breakfast. Only hot tea and pita bread. When someone started to clear the breakfast dishes, Abu Nazir told them to leave it and headed out to the lead SUV. Afsal and Daleel stayed with Brody. When they got to the SUV, its engine running, Afsal took out a pistol and put it to Brody’s head. He ordered Brody to turn around so Daleel could tie his hands with plastic cuffs. Although it was the middle of the night, the street was bright from the headlights of the vehicles lined up and Brody could see the heads of ­people watching from the windows of nearby buildings. “Is this really necessary, Afsal? I don’t even know where I am,” Brody said over his shoulder. Afsal didn’t answer, but instead pulled a black hood over his head so he couldn’t see. “Somebody help me with this infidel,” Afsal said, and Brody felt himself being heaved up and shoved on his side. They squeezed him into the back of the SUV, the compressed air pressing the hood against his face as they slammed the hatchback shut, banging his skull. It made his ears ring and he was felt dizzy, maybe concussed. And blind inside the hood. For a second or two, he might have blacked out. Then the SUV started up. He could smell the exhaust. They were moving through the streets. Through it all, something told him, this time they weren’t going to hold Afsal back. Why? What had changed? Why did they have to leave? Wherever they were going, he had the sudden realization that he was extra baggage, deadweight they could no longer afford to carry. This time, they would kill him. But it had always been that way with him. Living on a bayonet edge with Gunner Brody, the worst of it, knowing he was a coward. He had known that ever since one night when he was twelve. Something he had never told anyone except Jessica—­and she couldn’t see it. But he could. And nothing could fix it. Not becoming a Marine, not Parris Island and Iraq. Not combat. Nothing. That night. The night he learned who he was. It was three days after his twelfth birthday. Gunner Brody had bought him a BMX bike, and for a few minutes, it was almost like they were a real family. “Who’s the best dad in the world?” Gunner Brody had said when he gave him the bike. “You are, Dad,” Nick had said, wanting it to be true. Then, seeing a sudden dangerous glint in his father’s eyes because his father always insisted on being treated like a Marine officer, added, “Sir.” Three nights later, Gunner Brody had fallen dead drunk asleep, his .45 ser­vice automatic just sitting there on the kitchen table next to the cleaning kit he hadn’t even started to use before he’d fallen asleep, head on the table, mouth open, spittle drooling from the corner of his mouth. Brody’s mother, Sibeal, was doing what she always did; keeping the bedroom door closed. She slept curled to make herself tiny as a snail in a corner of the bed, as far away from her husband as she could get. Gunner Brody had been celebrating the six-­week anniversary of his unemployment benefit checks running out after he got his pink slip from the steel mill. (“They promised me I’d have a job no matter what,” he roared to his best friend, one hundred-­proof Old Grand-­Dad. “I got the Silver Star. What’d they ever do, those jerk-­offs? They promised me!”) Before he’d passed out, he’d used Sibeal for a punching bag, telling her if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with the little jarhead shit, he wouldn’t be in this stupid fix. And Nick finally couldn’t take any more. He grabbed his Little League bat from the closet and, coming from behind, swung it at his father, hitting him across the shoulder. Gunner Brody staggered, howling in pain. He turned around and rushed Nick, kicking him in the groin, followed by an elbow jab to the face and a leg takedown. “Hit your father, you little maggot!” he screamed. “Hit an officer, you little jarhead prick! I’ll teach you!” Banging Brody’s head by his hair against the floor, again and again. “Gunner, stop it! You’ll kill him! Stop! You’ll kill him. Your own son!” his mother screamed. “Marion, they’ll put you in prison. Is that what you want? For the love of God, stop. Sweet Mary, Mother of God, stop!” “You don’t get it, you little maggot,” Gunner Brody said, leaning close and whispering in Nick’s ear as he lay there on the floor, helpless, utterly beaten. “When I hit her, she likes it.” Later that night, something told him to wake up. Wincing, he tiptoed on bare feet to the kitchen, where he found Gunner Brody dead drunk asleep, the loaded .45 and the cleaning kit on the table in front of him, and for more than nine minutes, as he later told Jessica, he stood there in his underwear, holding the gun with both hands less than three inches from Gunner Brody’s head, trying to get up the guts to squeeze the trigger. “Because I hate him enough,” he told Jessica years later, the two of them walking together after class, walking down Center Street, in a quiet tree-­lined neighborhood once you got away from the high school. “I don’t hate anybody in the whole world like I hate that son of a bitch. I want him dead. It’s the only way out for my mom and me. I came close, Jess. I started to squeeze the trigger. I swear to God. My hand was shaking and I squeezed. Another fraction of an ounce of pressure and it would have gone off. Only I couldn’t do it. And I don’t know why!” he screamed, running down the street as hard as he could toward the river, Jessica running after him, yelling, “Brody, wait! Wait!” A block or two later, he just stopped, standing on the sidewalk outside somebody’s house. A real house with a lawn and white columns like it had been plunked down there from a different world, but he wouldn’t look at her. “I’m a coward,” he said, knowing it was true. He should have pulled the trigger. A chance like that wouldn’t come again. “It’s because you’re a good person, Brody. Because you didn’t want to ruin your life. You were only twelve. A kid,” she said, holding him close. She took his hand and they walked down toward the tree-­lined path beside the Lehigh River. He loved that she thought he was good, but he knew it wasn’t true. What was true were the nine minutes. But Afsal Hamid, that al-­Qaeda piece of shit, he knew, Brody thought, lying there, his hands tied, head covered with the hood in the back of the SUV. Dizzy from the ride and being hit, for a moment it was as if he had lost all sense of reality because he heard a distant sound of helicopters, and for one crazy second, he could’ve sworn they sounded like U.S. Black Hawks. But that was impossible. He must be hallucinating, Brody thought inside his hood in the SUV. He tried to think. They’re on the move. Why? Had to get out of Dodge. Must be a long trip, though. It seemed like it was taking forever. He froze. They were talking about him. “What about the American, Afsal?” “Shut up, brother.” “He’s a Muslim. He prays with us.” “Your mother! He’s an American. A Chris­tian crusader. He only pretends to be a Muslim.” “Why’d we keep him so long?” “He has his reasons,” Afsal said, and Brody knew they meant Abu Nazir. “He always has his reasons.” Now he understood. Afsal meant what he said. This time they were going to kill him. So why did they take him with them? Because they didn’t want to leave the body behind. Not with his red hair and pale white skin and Made in America face. Might raise too many questions. Better to bury the body out in the desert where it would never be found. Like Tom Walker. His Marine Corps buddy, his scout sniper teammate. Oh God, Tom. I didn’t mean it. At first, they just said, “Hit him!” Hit him again. And again. And again. Crying as he did it, shouting, “I’m sorry, Tom. I’m sorry. Jesus. Help me, Jesus.” Until his hands felt like they were broken and he couldn’t hit anymore and Tom Walker was dead. Now finally, they were going to kill him too, Brody thought, lying there in the back of the SUV. Something else he learned on that ride, along with the endless bumping and heat and smell of gasoline. You can doze off, even in your last few precious hours on earth. Because he only woke up when they stopped moving. His last thought as he heard them open the back of the SUV was: I’m sorry, Jess. I tried. Six years a prisoner of war. I really tried. “Get out!” Afsal barked. Hands grabbed him and Brody stumbled out. He fell to his knees and they lifted him up and pulled off his hood. He was blinded by the light and had to squint to see. It was no longer night. The SUV had pulled about two hundred yards off a concrete road through a sandy desert. The convoy was gone; their SUV the only vehicle in sight. Afsal pushed Brody to his knees and took out his pistol. “Now we finish. Finally,” he said. “Can I say the shahadah?” Brody said, looking up. The desert was utterly empty. The early-­morning sun was just rising over a distant dune, turning the sand and everything to gold, even the faces of the men who were about to kill him. O Allah, this world is so beautiful, he thought. “Let him. It is required,” Daleel said as Afsal stepped behind Brody and pointed the pistol at the back of his head. “Ash-­hadu an laa ilaaha illallah.” I bear witness there is no God but Allah. “Wa ash-­hadu anna Muhammadan rasulullah,” Brody said. I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. He braced for the shot, his eyes open, aching to see the beauty of the sunrise till the last instant. CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_86ee70f9-fbd4-5da9-9765-b082c97b29ba) Damascus, Syria 12 April 2009 02:09 hours The compound in Otaibah was deserted. As the SOG team searched, it was clear that athough it had been recently occupied, everyone was gone. Left behind were the odds and ends of hasty departure: bits of food, crumpled clothes, empty AK-­47 magazines. “Mingus, look,” Little D, a six-­foot-­four Texan, said, leading Carrie to what looked like the main dining room, with two long wooden tables. He handed her a crumpled Arabic newspaper they found on the floor. Although most of them could speak some Arabic, she was the only one on the team who could read it. She held it up to the light. Al Bawaba, a Damascus newspaper that only came out in the afternoon, she remembered. It had yesterday’s date. So at a minimum, Abu Nazir or at least some of his ­people had still been here as of yesterday afternoon. Glenn came out of the kitchen. “Check this out,” he told her, and touched her hand to the teapot. It was still a little warm, as was the kitchen stove. “We just missed them.” “By how much?” “Two, three hours.” “Of course. It was dark. They left the damn lights on,” she said. “Let’s get airborne. There’s at least fifteen, twenty of them, plus women and children. There has to be cars, SUVs, pickup trucks. They’d stay together. A convoy. Maybe we could spot them from the air.” “We can’t,” Glenn said, shaking his head. “For all I know, somebody in a house across the street is on the phone calling the local cops right this second. Clock’s ticking, Mingus. We go airborne to look for these guys, I’ve got to get high enough to spot them. We light up the radar—­we’re just sitting ducks for the Syrian Air Force. They scramble jets, and in a ­couple of minutes, bam, every last one of us is dead. And Washington has to pick up the pieces.” Carrie didn’t say anything. The mission had failed. She felt nauseous. “Anybody find anything?” she asked. “Just some clothes and stuff. Ammo magazines. What looks like Muslim Brotherhood and al-­Qaeda propaganda.” “Take all of it.” “Already taken care of. We’ll fine-­tooth-­comb it,” Glenn said. Time was becoming critical, so he didn’t mention the underground concrete cell he’d found. The spot from the satellite recon. A six-­foot enclosure with an iron door and chain shackles where they had obviously kept a prisoner. He’d make a note in his report. At the moment, all he could think about was getting his men out of Syria. “Time to perform the classic military maneuver of getting the hell out of here,” he added. Lousy way to end my career, Carrie thought, standing there in a dimly lit al-­Qaeda kitchen, feeling like she’d been kicked in the stomach, her brain ping-­ponging a million miles all over the place. She wasn’t sure whether it was because of what was happening in front of her or because she hadn’t taken her meds, but this was a game changer. No way to paper this one over. It was total mission failure. And they had only missed by a ­couple of hours. How was that possible? How could Abu Nazir have known? She watched Glenn signal his team to get ready to pull out. Covering each other, they began to move outside and back to the choppers, their rotors still slowly turning. She ran to a dark corner to strip off her clothes, changing out of her combat gear and into a full-­length black abaya, complete with the hijab head scarf and veil. Time to initiate the fallback plan she and Saul had worked out; the worst-­case scenario. She wasn’t going back with them. She racked her brain. Who had tipped Abu Nazir off? Because it had to be a tip-­off, and very recent. No one walks out of a compound they’ve been living in for a ­couple of years in the middle of the night just hours before a CIA raid from another country unless they’ve been tipped by a source they considered pretty damn solid. Cadillac? Was he a double? Possible. True, Cadillac had given her the lead, but he hadn’t been told about the SOG raid on Otaibah. Zero. He had no knowledge of any kind about what they might do with his intel about the compound or anything else. Certainly not how or when. He couldn’t possibly have known. If someone had tipped Abu Nazir, it wasn’t Cadillac. Not to mention that it wasn’t in his interest to do so. Because it wouldn’t have been hard for Carrie to burn him to the Syrian GSD. And then it would have been Cadillac screaming his guts out in some prison torture cell, and Assad’s bully boys would do it whether his wife, Aminah, was a shopping girlfriend of President Assad’s wife or not. So if not Cadillac, who the hell was it? And how could they have possibly known that the raid was set for tonight? Who knew? Could it have been someone in Rutba? FOB Delta? Could one of the SOG team … ? Unlikely. None of them knew the target before they arrived at FOBD—­and once they did, standard protocol was no talking about the mission with outsiders, or even among themselves, except as necessary. They were isolated. Out in the desert, in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t believe it. Not the SOG team. Once at FOB Delta, there was no interaction with the locals. That was part of the protocol, although she was sure Saul and Perry would have analysts go over every second of security camera footage of their time at Delta just to make sure. She’d have to try to figure it out later, she realized. Hurry, Carrie. Change and get moving, she told herself, putting her combat outfit and gear into her assault backpack. That left either Langley or Baghdad Station, she thought, heading outside. They had kept it tight at Baghdad Station. Perry had strictly limited who had knowledge of the raid. Still, you couldn’t run an op like this without some coordination. But it had been very closely held. Maybe ten ­people. Mostly Americans. But a ­couple of Iraqis. Including Warzer. God, she didn’t want to put Warzer under any suspicion. He was having a tough enough time as it was, working both sides as a Sunni double for her and dealing with an increasingly hostile Iraqi government. Standing in the courtyard, her abaya flapping under the draft from the rotors, she handed Glenn her assault backpack. At the last second, she handwrote a quick note for him to send via JWICS when he got back to Rutba. A number quartet and just four words. The number was the private IP address of a computer at Langley whose location was untraceable—­if a hacker tried, each time he would find a different inaccurate location in the world. The computer belonged to Saul and the four words, with letters scrambled in a way that only Saul would know how to unscramble, read: “We have a leak.” Carrie hid in the shadows of a house a block away, watching as the Black Hawks rose up over the compound. First one, then the other. No flying lights, their dark shapes barely skimming over the roofs of the houses, they headed east toward the desert, watched by one or two cautious heads peeking out from nearby open windows. The sound of the helicopters faded, lost in the dark, starless sky. Carrie stood frozen, waiting, till one by one the curious windows closed. She was alone. She waited, counting minutes, until, certain no one would see or hear her, she began to walk, her footsteps sounding faintly in the dark, empty streets. She walked till she was well away from the compound, and then found a place to hide behind a shed at the back of a house with a yard and a chicken coop. She was tired, but knew she couldn’t sleep. She waited silently, not moving, till even the chickens that she’d heard clucking got accustomed to her presence. In the gray light before dawn, she used a compact mirror to put on brown contact lenses and used a brown tint to color her eyebrows. During her time in Rutba, she’d used enough sunscreen to get a slight tan beyond her normal reaction to sun: beet red. Enough for her face and hands, the only things that would show. A little after dawn, roosters crowing, the streets started to stir. Wearing her veil, she walked to a nearby souk and bought a basket of fruit from a farmer just opening his stall. Carrying the basket and looking like a local Arab woman, she caught a servee, a battered microbus from the souk to the bus station. There she sat with several other women and a few students to wait for the morning bus. To the world, she was just another Arab woman running errands in the city. She boarded the bus, which took about an hour and a half to do the twenty miles to the central bus station in Damascus. She was running the backup plan. What she and Saul had talked about and hoped they’d never have to do, because it meant something had gone very wrong. From the bus station she caught a taxi to Martyrs Square, with its Ottoman pillar, palm trees, and cheap hotels bordering the square. Walking as quickly as she could without attracting attention, she doubled back, then went around several other blocks in opposite directions to flush any tails. When she was sure she was clean, she went to the safe house, a top-­floor apartment on Al Nasr Street, a block from the Palace of Justice. There she finally cleaned up and changed into jeans and a top—­got rid of the contact lenses; no more abaya and veil, thank God—­and took out her new cover ID from a book safe and went over the paperwork. It was all there: driver’s license, passport, visas, entry stamps—­which, if anyone checked, would be in the Syrian immigration and security computers; the Company, as they called the CIA, was always very good about that—­were in order. She was now Jane Meyerhof, a travel agent for Midwest Continental Travel, out of Cincinnati. She called and booked a room at the Cham Palace Hotel, then used the drop to contact Cadillac. It was a dual-­contact approach. First she called his work from a pay phone at a tobacco kiosk. She left a message from a Captain Maher Dowayih asking him to call, but gave no return phone number. That was the emergency signal to Cadillac to urgently check the drop within two hours. The drop itself was a rug shop in the maze of the Al-­Hamidiya Souk, the immense iron-­roofed market that bordered the legendary Umayyad mosque. The shop was owned by an asset Saul had pinched from the Israeli Mossad, a one-­legged Syrian Kurd, Orhan Barsani, who sat in his shop all day, smoking an apple-­tobacco shisha and playing tawla, a form of backgammon, with his fellow merchants, and anyone else he could sucker into playing, because, as rumor had it, he never lost. Now, as she sat in a Damascus caf? on a sunny afternoon, sipping coffee, nibbling a slice of baklava and watching ­people walking by and the honking cars on Al Nasr Street, one thing was becoming crystal clear: a leak like this, that involves a Top Secret SOG mission that suddenly gets delivered to AQI, doesn’t happen by accident. Either somebody talked out of turn, or something far worse. They had a mole. She took a taxi to the Al-­Hamidiya Souk, first walking past the rug shop to make sure it was clear to approach, then coming back. Orhan had an antique Persian-­Kurdish yellow rug thrown on a chair; the signal it was clear to approach. She went in and poked around. Orhan was playing tawla with a cigarette-­smoking Syrian businessman in sunglasses and a mustache. Orhan threw the dice, made his move, then stood up and said to Carrie in accented English, pointing at the yellow rug: “Please, madam, so beautiful lady. It is of the genuine Kurdish-­Persian antique. This is tribal and handmade, of very finest of the Bidjar quality. Here, let me turn it over for you to see the knots of handmade, madam.” Showing her. “Very nice,” she said. “I have a friend who likes such things.” Hoping he understood she was talking about Cadillac. With his eyes, Orhan indicated that Cadillac hadn’t come in. Not yet. “Please sit”—­he gestured—­“dearest beautiful lady madam. Would you like tea? Caf?? Perhaps a cold gazooza, yes?” She sat, her back to the businessman, her back blocking his view. Checking the front of the shop to make sure no one was watching, she slipped the black flash drive into the brass pot under the table Two minutes later, despite Orhan’s entreaties—­“We have many, many carpets, dearest lady, of finest Isfahan, so many”—­she left the shop. With a shrug to his businessman friend, Orhan went back to his game. That evening, back at the apartment on Al Nasr Street with all the lights out, Carrie stood, peering from behind the edge of the heavy drapes with binoculars at the sidewalk caf? across the street. At this point, she was ready to pull the emergency eject handle on this one. The black flash drive she had left at the drop at Orhan’s shop in the Al-­Hamidiya Souk contained a bunch of videos, cute stuff about dogs and children. Anyone who looked at it would see nothing unusual. But inside one of the videos, she had embedded a Word file that only the CIA software she’d given Cadillac would find. On the Word file were instructions to meet her at the sidewalk caf?, which was, although Cadillac didn’t know it, directly across the street from the safe house. She had arranged to meet Cadillac at the caf? at 7:15 tonight, and included the sentence “I saw your cousin Abdulkader at the Jaish versus Horriya football game,” the code words “cousin Abdulkader” meaning “extreme urgency.” Just in case, she had also sent him an email about the soccer match supposedly coming from the same mythical cousin Abdulkader, using code to give him the name of the caf? on Al Nasr Street. She’d picked that caf? so she could watch it herself from the relative safety of the safe house before she went there, because operating in Syria was always dangerous and that was even before the mission failure at Otaibah. Take it easy, Carrie, she told herself as she watched ­people going inside the caf? or sitting at one of the outside tables. Whatever was going on, she was alone, deep in the red zone. She checked her watch one last time: 8:21 P.M. Cadillac wasn’t coming. And she had no way of knowing if he was still operational. Game over, she thought. She should report to Saul and get back to the hotel, the posh Cham Palace. But even that wasn’t simple. Nothing in Syria ever was, she thought, grabbing her jacket and shoulder bag. On an impulse, she decided to give it one more try. She would go to the caf? herself, on the off chance that Cadillac had sent someone else. It nearly cost her her life. She walked up the long block to the corner by the Palace of Justice and crossed over to the other side of Al Nasr. She started coming back down the street toward the caf?, when suddenly two black Toyota SUVs raced past her. Instinctively, Carrie froze, then, looking around, went over to a shop window, where she pretended to examine the display. Men’s shoes. The Toyotas screeched to a halt in front of the caf?. A man’s body was thrown from the front vehicle onto the street. A woman screamed. The doors of the second SUV opened and four men in suits came rushing out. The men ran to the sidewalk caf? and began grabbing customers, shouting and demanding to see their identity cards. One young man—­he looked like a student in a windbreaker—­began to run and one of the men took out a pistol and shot him in the leg. The young man went down. They grabbed both him and the young woman he had been sitting with and hustled them into the lead vehicle. The two SUVs drove off into the night. No one said a word. This was Syria. Everyone who had been sitting in the caf? hurriedly left. The owner of the caf? had his employees take the chairs and tables inside and closed up the place. No one approached the dead man lying in the street. Cars slowed down and drove around the body. No one stopped. Carrie walked carefully down the street toward the caf?, scanning the buildings and cars for security cameras and watchers. She was taking a huge chance, but there was no choice. The needle was way over the red line on this one. Langley would have to know. She had to know the dead man’s identity. Just a few feet closer, she thought. If she could just get a look at his face, her eyes darting everywhere, because there were sure to be watchers. The body was lying on its side, a hand outstretched as if asking for something. It was difficult to see clearly in the dark. Then the headlights of an approaching taxi lit the man’s face for an instant and there was no mistake. Cadillac. Mosab Sabagh. Her agent. There were cigarette burns on his face and something funny about the fingers of his hand. Was that nail polish? Jesus! They had cut off the ends of his fingers. She wanted to throw up, but kept walking. She had to get away, fast. The lights and shadows of the street around her were a blur. She wanted to look around, but didn’t dare. If there were GSD agents nearby, they might take her into custody any second. As the taxi slowed to go around the body, she signaled for it to stop. It was all so surreal. ­People were acting normally a few feet from a dead man. Everyone was afraid. Neither she nor the driver acknowledged that there was anything unusual even though he had deliberately slowed to circle his taxi around the body. She got in and told the driver to take her to Leila’s. “Yes, madam,” the driver said. Leila’s was a popular restaurant in the Old City that overlooked the famous Umayyad mosque. At the moment, Carrie didn’t give a damn about Leila’s, but she desperately needed to call Saul and figured it would take the driver some time to negotiate the traffic and crowds in the narrow streets of the Old City. Although the ride might take twenty-­five minutes, once she started the call, she probably had only three or four minutes before the Syrian GSD and military security would start GSP-­tracking the cell phone call. After that, she would have only another two or three minutes before they took her into custody. The Syrian Security Forces, the army, the Mukhabarat, and the GSD monitored all calls, land and cell phone, and Internet in Syria, especially those to places out of the country. This one would certainly raise red flags all over the place for them, especially once they realized that it originated near Cadillac’s body, that it was being scrambled, and that they couldn’t decipher it with their normal decryption tools. They would quickly understand that it was a foreign intelligence ser­vice—­automatically jump to the conclusion it was either CIA or the Israeli Mossad, because that’s how their minds worked—­and there would be teams of GSD agents racing toward her cell phone’s location as fast as they could go. The only question was how long it would take for them to latch on to it. The trick was to keep the call short and sweet, use no names, and get rid of the cell phone’s SIM card as fast as she could, before she arrived at the restaurant. She dialed Saul’s number, thinking, Please pick up. Please. Please. She checked her watch. It would be around 2:45 in the afternoon on the East Coast. Saul should be in his office in Langley. Someone picked up. “Hi, it’s me,” she said. There was no time for passwords. This was all about recognizing voices. “I got your message. Are you okay?” Saul’s voice, flooding her with relief. Thank God. Just hearing him made her feel a little safer for the first time since the Black Hawk had lifted off from FOB Delta. He was letting her know he’d gotten the note about the leak from Glenn. “I’m okay. I’m in Damascus. I love it,” she said, nearly choking on that last bit. Make it fast, she told herself. The Syrians will be onto this sooner than you think. We don’t know what they got out of Cadillac or how much. And she hadn’t even had a chance to check on Orhan yet. Oh God, Orhan. “I’m a little worried about the car,” Saul said. Cadillac. “You should be. It’s pretty bad. I don’t think it’s going to make it,” she said. “How bad?” She could hear in his voice just how bad this news was. First the failed SOG mission, now Cadillac down. This was shaping up as a total disaster. Was the network blown? How to let him know in such a way so that the Syrians—­if they managed to decipher their conversation—­wouldn’t understand? “Remember last Christmas?” she asked. Saul had flown into Baghdad. They’d all gotten together, her, Perry, Warzer, some of the other key CIA personnel, in his room at the Al-­Rasheed Hotel in the Green Zone, everyone getting plastered and telling stories over Scotch and Russian Standard martinis and Mrs. Fields cookies. When it was his turn, Saul had told them about growing up in the only Orthodox Jewish family in Calliope, Indiana, and how when he was a kid, on Christmas Eve, when his parents were asleep, theirs the only house without a tree or lights or presents in the whole town, he would sneak down and watch the black-­and-­white movie A Christmas Carol on TV. “The one you told us. Do you remember the first line of that story?” Come on, Saul. The first line of the Charles Dickens story: “Marley was dead.” “That’s how bad,” she said, hoping to God he’d get her meaning. For a moment, he didn’t answer. Please say something, she thought, the seconds ticking. Please. With every second, she could feel the GSD closing in on her, imagining Toyota SUVs, tires screeching as they closed in around the taxi, blocking off the street any second now. “Are you absolutely sure?” He got it. God, he was smart. She loved that about him. “A thousand percent,” she said grimly, trying not to think of Cadillac’s body, what they had done to him, what they might do to her. “Any idea what might have caused it?” he asked. She had nothing, only speculation. He wanted to know if she’d spotted something, someone. But in her heart, she knew. Cadillac, the deserted compound, just missing by a few hours. None of it was a coincidence and it wasn’t the SOG team. They’d had nothing to do with Damascus. There could be only one possible explanation. “I’m thinking maybe it was an animal.” Come on, Saul. I’m all alone and we’re getting killed out here. What the hell do you think it is? Because I’m thinking a mole. A small furry animal that likes to dig, doesn’t he, the miserable worm-­eating son of a bitch? “I’m thinking the same. You’d better get going,” he said. She was right, she thought, exhaling, not realizing she’d been holding her breath. Saul agreed with her. They had a mole. And he was also telling her to get the hell out of Syria. Now. “I will. Just have to check on something,” she said. Orhan. “Take care,” he said, and hung up. She checked her watch. Four minutes. Too damn long. The GSD would be onto her. They would be closing in on her taxi any minute. She opened the cell phone and, with her fingers fumbling and sweating, took three tries to take the stupid SIM card out of the cell phone. Come on, Carrie. Come on, she told herself. The taxi’s back window was half open. She checked the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He was watching her. “Keep your eyes on the road, please,” she told him, and waited to see that he did. She looked to see where she was. All around were the older buildings of the Old City, TV satellite dishes sprouting on the roofs like mushrooms. Still plenty of traffic despite the hour. When she was sure the driver wasn’t watching, she tossed the SIM card out the window. Ahead, she could see the dome and minarets of the Umayyad mosque. “I changed my mind,” she told the taxi driver. “I want to go to Naranj, not Leila’s.” “Naranj, madam? On Straight Street?” Naranj was a famous restaurant. As for Straight Street, it was the oldest street in Damascus, maybe in the world. It was mentioned in the Bible. “Yes,” she said. “Go around the mosque.” “It’s better if I turn around and go back, madam,” he said. Yes, and get stopped by the GSD, she thought, her nerves drawing tight as a violin string. God, was her bipolar kicking in? Not now, please, feeling her heart rate skyrocket. Take it easy, Carrie. She had taken a clozapine. It just had to kick in. “I’m not in a hurry. Go the back way,” she said, waiting till they had gone four or five blocks before she dropped the empty cell phone—­minus its SIM card—­out the window, hearing the faint plastic click as it hit the cobblestone street. Now there was nothing to connect her to the call except the driver, she thought as they drove behind the Umayyad mosque, which supposedly contained the head of John the Baptist, as well as the tomb of Saladin, the great Muslim warrior, who defeated the Crusaders. They zigzagged around the outside of the mosque to Al Sagha Street then over to Straight Street. Somewhere behind them, she heard the sound of police sirens. She didn’t like the way the taxi driver looked at her when he dropped her off in front of Naranj, a platoon of Mercedes and Porsches parked in front of its high arched windows. If questioned, that taxi driver would remember her. Maybe because of Cadillac’s body. Not good. She had to get away from here as quickly as possible, she thought as Naranj’s doorman bowed and opened the door and she went inside. Damascus was becoming too dangerous. But she had to find out if Cadillac ever made it to the drop. And if he had left something for her. And what had happened to Orhan. Because if the GSD had finished with Cadillac, there was a good chance that Orhan was next. And the clock was ticking. As always, Naranj was crowded and noisy, the two-­story, high-­ceilinged restaurant filled with the most important ­people in Syria, from political leaders to TV stars. At first, the ma?tre d’ looked at her oddly, a woman alone, just standing there, but then, taking a good look: an attractive American woman, long blond hair, not wearing evening clothes, but still, borderline, perhaps somebody important’s mistress, best not to offend till one was sure. “Are you meeting someone, miss?” “Yes, but I just saw his wife’s Mercedes, that lying son of a whore! Is there a back way out?” Carrie whispered, slipping him a twenty-­dollar bill. “Of course.” The ma?tre d’ smiled, pocketing the bill smoothly as he motioned to a waiter and whispered instructions. He gestured for Carrie to follow the waiter, who led her to a corner of the crowded atrium toward the back of the dining room, the thick smell of kebabs wafting from the kitchen. The waiter led her to a side door and outside to a sidwalk terrace and the street. She had gotten turned around, but now she realized where she was. They were on a side street opposite the big St. Mary’s Greek Orthodox Church, lit up a bright white in the night behind an arched facade. She tried to tip the waiter, but he refused any money. He stepped out into the middle of the street and refused to leave until he had waved down a yellow taxi. The waiter opened the taxi door for her. “God willing, all will be good, madam,” he said, as if he knew she was in trouble. “God willing,” she murmured back. “Where to, madam?” the driver asked. Time to decide, she thought, her throat dry, unable to swallow. It was incredibly high risk. Every second she stayed in Syria, the danger increased exponentially. By now the Syrians had to know about the Black Hawk incursion into their airspace. Plus Cadillac had been tortured and killed. There was a damn good chance he had told them about the drop location, in which case the GSD would be sitting there, waiting for whoever showed up. A female CIA agent would be an unbelievable catch for them. What was in her head could blow everything Langley had going in the Middle East wide open. The downside risk was enormous. If they got their hands on her, the GSD would open her like a can of tuna. What a coup it would be—­not just for them, but also for their patrons: the Iranians and the Russians. And what a disaster for the CIA, for the United States, for Saul. On the other hand, there was a chance that before he was picked up, Cadillac left something for her at the drop. If she could do a quick in and out before the GSD got to Orhan’s shop, she might be able to salvage some intel out of this whole mess. And what about Orhan? If Cadillac hadn’t revealed the location of the drop under torture before he died, she could warn Orhan, maybe save him. Time to bet. Only the stakes weren’t just her life, she was risking her country too. “Where to, madam?” the driver asked again, his finger tapping impatiently on the wheel. “The Al-­Hamidiya Souk. Hurry,” she said. CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_fc116600-6173-55d0-a86c-ed534f5f78d6) Al-­Hamidiya Souk Damascus, Syria 12 April 2009 19:14 hours “This amber necklace is made for you, madam. It brings out the gold of your hair, the blue-­green of your eyes, like the sea,” the merchant said, his hand tracing the curve of Carrie’s hair in the air. He was the same mustached businessman in sunglasses she had seen playing tawla with Orhan earlier in the day. There was a good chance he had just saved her life. “How do I know it’s real amber?” she said. “Many ways.” He smiled. “Feel it grow warm in your hand. Real amber is alive. Rub it with a piece of soft cloth or fur. It will become charged with static electricity and attract lint and dust. Did you know the ancient Greeks called amber ‘electron’? The word ‘electricity’ comes from amber.” Again he smiled. “There are simple tests for true amber. Put it in salt water. Real amber floats. The fakes, plastic, glass, they all sink. Or rub a drop of alcohol or nail polish on it; doesn’t bother real amber, but the fakes turn nasty. Hold it in a flame. Real amber burns nicely with a wonderful pine aroma.” “I wouldn’t want to burn this,” she said. “No, miss. Allah forbid. Not this necklace.” They were in his shop in the Al-­Hamidiya Souk, an Aladdin’s cave of jewelry and expensive handicrafts, handmade gold, silver, and amber jewelry, Damascene silk brocades hanging from racks, copper engraved pots and vessels, mother-­of-­pearl-­inlaid tables. “One of fourteen shops I own,” he told her. Carrie had been walking fast toward Orhan’s shop in the souk, checking for watchers, but seeing nothing out of the ordinary. Despite the late hour, there were still plenty of shoppers and a few tourists wandering the lanes of the souk; some young ­people gathered at an ice cream stand. Most of the shops were open, but strangely, many of the shopkeepers were not at the front, beckoning ­people inside as they normally did. True, it was late, nearly time to close, but still, not normal. Internal alarm bells began to go off. Her skin began to prickle all over, like before one of her descents into depression, the opposite of her bipolar “flights,” when she wasn’t on either lithium or clozapine. The black times when she could barely move, when she would sit for hours, days even, catatonic; the only ray of light, the terrible beckoning seduction of the small Glock 26 pistol in her handbag. Lift me out, it seemed to call to her. Why go through it all when you can end it with a little squeeze of the trigger? Trying to tell herself, it’s not me, it’s the bipolar talking. It’s not you, Daddy, because sometimes it was the voice of her father, Frank. And it’s not me. Something was happening. The souk seemed normal enough. The strolling water vendors, the side streets open to the night, the women in hijabs with plastic shopping bags. But was it her imagination, or were two shopkeepers talking furtively to each other as she approached the turn that led to Orhan’s shop? And there was a man in a suit jacket talking into a Bluetooth headset while standing next to a shop selling women’s shoes. Shit, she thought. The question now was whether they had arrested Orhan already. The needle was off the chart on this approach. She decided to get near enough to see if his shop was open and then leave by a side street. “Do you remember me, lovely miss?” The merchant who had been with Orhan earlier in the day had stepped out of his shop into the passageway. Then coming closer, he whispered: “The rug dealer is dead. Come inside.” “You were playing with Orhan,” she said, stunned, as though she’d walked into a wall. She stepped into the merchant’s shop and looked around. Delayed reaction, she told herself. Like when you just miss getting hit by a truck. For the moment, they appeared to be alone. She said the first thing that came into her head. “You know he cheats.” “So do I,” he said, offering her a seat on a chair with an intricate inlay of mother-­of-­pearl. Clapping his hands, the merchant told a teenage boy who suddenly materialized from the back to bring them tea. “Bring baklawa and ghraybeh cookies too,” he added. As the boy left, he introduced himself. “Aref Tayfouri, miss. Businessman; also import export.” “And what game are we playing now, Mr. Tayfouri?” she asked, exhaling. Suddenly realizing she’d been holding her breath all that time. He leaned closer. “Listen, miss. I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what Orhan’s done. I don’t know you. I don’t want to be involved,” he whispered, at the same time showing her an exquisite honey-­amber necklace with a gesture that would not have been out of place from a courtier presenting a crown to a queen. “Lovely, isn’t it, miss?” “Why are you helping me?” she asked, her eyes darting to check out passersby then looking at the necklace. It looked very expensive. If Orhan had been arrested, the souk must be thick with GSD agents, she thought. “I don’t know. Here.” He handed her a copper-­and-­honey-­amber brooch. “A gift.” “I can’t,” she said, pushing it away. “Please,” he insisted, pushing it back to her. “It’s from your friend. For you, lovely miss. Perhaps to match the beautiful necklace, if you would like to buy,” he said loudly, then whispered urgently: “Truly, I thought of throwing it away. But what if they traced it to me? Ah, good, the chai,” as the boy brought the tea and pastries on a copper tray. “Please,” gesturing for her to enjoy. Carrie took a sip of the tea and a bite of baklawa. She wasn’t sure how far to trust this Tayfouri; clearly he was scared and out of his depth. Or pretending to be. Making sure no one was watching, she pinned the brooch on her blouse based on the theory of hiding in plain sight. But first she needed to confirm that it had come from Orhan and when. She fingered the amber necklace. It looked expensive. “Lovely,” she murmured. “When did he give it to you?” “The brooch is mine, madam. It has a clasp that opens. I thought it best, understand?” he whispered back. She nodded. There was something concealed inside. “Barsani came to me barely an hour before they came for him,” he went on. “How he knew they were coming, I have no idea. The rumor in the souk is that when the security police came for him, they found him wrapped in his favorite yellow Bidjar rug. The rug was soaked red with blood. He had cut his own throat, the knife still sticking in it. Can you imagine?” He took out a pack of Marlboros and lit one, his hand shaking. He angrily snapped the lighter shut. “I have a wife and three children, miss. I don’t need this.” Two Syrian policemen armed with submachine guns walked by the entrance to the shop and looked inside. Carrie had to grab her teacup with both hands to keep it from spilling. After a moment, the two policemen walked on. Now that she thought about it, the souk had grown suddenly empty. Her nerves, never her strong suit, were screaming. She had to get away from here soon. But she was a trained operations officer. She couldn’t take this at face value. She had to know why Orhan, no matter how desperate, would risk giving something for the CIA to Tayfouri. “Why did he come to you?” she asked. “I don’t know. We’re both Kurds. Do you know what that’s like in this country?” “No.” She looked at him. “Tell me.” “Like walking barefoot on broken glass, miss. Carefully. Only you smile. And smile. And smile,” gritting his teeth. “So he came to you because you’re both Kurds? Or maybe because you both cheat at tawla? What do you import-­export?” He hesitated. “That depends.” “On what?” “On who’s asking.” Strange why ­people do things, thinking of what it must have been like for Orhan in those last few minutes, making his choice about who to trust with whatever was in the brooch. “I’m beginning to understand, Monsieur Tayfouri.” She leaned closer to whisper. “The sooner I leave Damascus the better for both of us. Can you be of assistance?” He thought for a moment. “Do you know Aleppo?” After leaving Tayfouri’s shop in the souk, she took three taxis and a servee microbus all going in opposite directions so that she had to run from one vehicle to another to make sure no one had followed her from the souk before she risked going back to her room at the Cham Palace. Back at the hotel, there were the usual low-­level GSD watchers sitting and looking bored in the lavish lobby and atrium, but no one seemed particularly interested in Jane Meyerhof, she thought. She went over to the concierge’s desk and asked him to make arrangements for a bus trip to Aleppo. “You will like Aleppo, madam. It is famous for its mother-­of-­pearl inlaid boxes. Many important sights, although not like Damascus, of course,” the concierge said. “Of course. Thank you,” she said, paying him for the tickets and heading for the elevator. Once in her room, she locked the door and took her time going over the room and bathroom, checking for bugs and hidden cameras. The room was clean except for the normal GSD bug in the room telephone, which she left alone. She used that phone to call room ser­vice to order a sandwich and a mint lemonade and got to work on her laptop. Inside the amber brooch was a compartment containing a thumb drive. She hefted it grimly in her palm. Orhan—­and maybe Cadillac too—­had died to get this to her. She plugged the drive into her laptop, turned on the sound, and suddenly she was watching ­people dancing at a wedding led by the young ­couple, the bride in white, swaying in front of a multitiered cake. She lurched to turn down the sound and close the laptop, because right then there came a knock at the door. She grabbed her pistol, holding it behind her back, and moved to the door. It was a waiter with her sandwich and drink. He brought it in. She waited till he had gone, then started the video again, this time with the sound turned low. Whose wedding? she wondered. Then she saw Cadillac and his wife among the guests. They had taught Cadillac well, she thought wryly. Looking at this video, the GSD would assume it was just an ordinary wedding video. They’d watch it, but never see it for what it really was. Next, she ran the NSA software that parsed out a file hidden in the video. The software pulled millions of bits together to create an .avi file, that she titled “Damascus sights.” She put in her earplug and, placing her pistol beside her on the bed, sat down to run the file. The video lasted less than a minute and thirty seconds. After she ran it, she sat there, stunned. It changed everything. A whole new ball game. All she could think was, I have to get this to Saul ASAP. Her instincts had been screaming for her to leave Damascus. With the SOG team incursion and the deaths of both Cadillac and Orhan, right now she was in the bull’s-­eye of the red zone. She couldn’t risk trying to communicate with Saul from here. Her only chance was to get out of town and send the intel to Saul from Aleppo. The video had been taken with a hidden camera. In all likelihood, the one concealed in the sunglasses Carrie had personally given to Cadillac at their second meeting in Beirut. It had to have been taken by Cadillac himself. It was in two parts. The first locale was obvious. One of the restaurants clustered on the ridge of Mount Qasioun, the mountain that loomed over Damascus. In this most ancient of cities, it was said that it was on these slopes that Cain killed Abel. She could tell it had been shot close to sunset, the lights just coming on in the city spread out below and the lamps of the restaurant on, but despite the shadows, still enough sunlight to see, although not clearly. It showed two men talking at a table, with a breathless voice-­over by Cadillac. One of the men was an Arab in an expensive suit. Because of the angle from which the footage was shot, she could only see the Arab’s back and, just for one second when he turned, part of the side of his face. My God, Carrie thought. Could it be him? Abu Nazir? Was it possible this was an actual sighting? There was no way to tell who the Arab really was. Nothing definite; a man’s back. But still, something told her Cadillac had delivered something important. A shiver went through her. Seated at the table with him was a European in a striped shirt worn outside checked wool trousers, talking while he ate a slice of pizza. The voice-­over was by Cadillac. Added later, she thought. “The man in the suit is Abu Nazir,” Cadillac’s voice said in Arabic. It could be him, Carrie thought. It absolutely could be him. “I don’t know the name of the man he is with, but I’ve heard him referred to as ‘the Russian.’ But here’s something interesting. Seated at the table next to them.” As Cadillac spoke, the video moved to the next table, where three Syrian men were sitting, all wearing white shirts and ties. The three men were eating little dishes of mezze. One of them was smoking a shisha water pipe and watching the next table with great interest. “I know the one smoking the shisha,” Cadillac said on the voice-­over. “His name is Omar al-­Mawasi. He is definitely GSD. All these guys are GSD. They’re calling the guy with Abu Nazir ‘the Russian.’ ” And then Cadillac must’ve pointed the pen with the hidden microphone at Abu Nazir’s table. It caught a jumble of voices in Arabic and a bit of the man Cadillac said was Abu Nazir and the Russian speaking in English. “ … will change the course of the war,” Abu Nazir said. The voice, even with the poor quality of the recording and the noise of conversations, was somehow familiar. She stopped the video and played it again. And again. She’d heard the voice before somewhere, searching her memory for where. She played more of the video. “Your action will change everyth …” the Russian said, the rest drowned out by someone at another table saying something in Arabic about a car accident on Al Katheeb Road. “ … regret the necessity of having to leave …” the Russian said amid a jumble of voices, including one of the GSD men at the next table talking about getting reimbursed. “An inconvenience. We always planned for such a …” Abu Nazir said, the rest lost in background noise. And then she had it. Back in 2006. The ruins of the porcelain factory in Ramadi and the recorded conversation and the voice of the man who had interrogated her agent, Walid Karim, code-­named Romeo. It was him! Abu Nazir! It was his voice. She was certain of it. That section of the video ended and it left Carrie’s mind reeling. It confirmed—­at least tentatively—­that Abu Nazir had been hiding in Syria, and for some time, with the connivance of the Syrian government. The Syrians were playing both ends against the middle. But who was the European, the Russian? What did he have to do with it? Or with AQI? More important, what was Abu Nazir planning that would change the course of the war in Iraq? The date of the recording had been automatically imprinted on it by the camera. Two days ago. Two days! Could the Russian have been warning Abu Nazir about the SOG team op? My God, was that it? Did Cadillac actually see it happen without knowing it? Because the timing was unbelievable. It was a breakthrough! Proof positive of a leak. And even better, a lead. The Russian. Saul would go nuts over this, she thought, racing to finish the video. That was a mistake. The second part of the video was gut-­wrenching. It was jerky footage shot by Cadillac while walking on a wide, busy Damascus street, probably 17th of April Street, near his office. The video was nothing special; ­people and cars going by. The part that killed her was Cadillac’s voice-­over. “Billie …” The cover name she had used with him—­for jazz singer Billie Holiday. “I think I’m discovered. I got your captain message and the Cousin Abdulkader emergency message. I will try meeting you at the caf? tonight, but I have to tell you, I think I am done. Today, I saw my commander, Tariq. He and I go back many years. But this time, instead of the normal way he usually looks at me, or nods, he looked away. “I have never in my life felt as I felt at that moment. My whole body began to sweat. We say in Arabic, as if someone is crying on my grave. “So I said something to him about ‘those idiots in the petrol depot. They got the amounts wrong again.’ This is something we both always complain about. But instead of agreeing, or calling them ‘asses’ as usual, he just looked at me. Such a look, Billie. It turned my blood to ice. He said nothing, just walked on. This man is my friend, Billie. “Then in my office. Not a single phone call. No new emails. Nothing. No junior officers. No colleagues stopping by. It is like the word has gone out. I am haram. Forbidden. I left work early. I will try to get this to the drop in the souk now if I can. I will come to the caf? tonight, but I feel it coming. The noose is closing around me. Please, if you get this, help my family. Get them out of Syria. Don’t let them be refugees, Billie. You can do this. I know you can do this. Allahu akhbar, Billie.” God is great, she translated numbly to herself as the video ended. Damn, damn, damn, she thought. And then Cadillac had led them right to Orhan. A shiver went down her spine. And they almost got me … closing the laptop and sliding the pistol under her pillow as she got into bed. She woke up sweating in the middle of the night. In the darkness, she had no idea where she was. A sense of panic closed in. Then she remembered. Her hotel room. Still in Damascus. She went to the window and peeked out from behind the curtain at the city, the strangely yellow streetlights and the minarets of mosques. Her mission sense was prickling all over her skin like a terrible itch. I have to get out of here, she thought. CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_5163a3aa-f834-5bf6-a51f-09822fefce91) Aleppo, Syria 13 April 2009 In the year 1123, Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem, made what was for him a rare tactical error and was captured in battle by the Seljuk Turk Belek, who held him prisoner for two years in the Citadel castle in Aleppo. The massive white-­stone castle still gleamed in the afternoon sun on its acropolis, an outcropping of rock over the Aintab plateau that had been used as a fortress since long before history. But it held little interest for Carrie, except for a few cell-­phone snapshot photos that she would need. Coming from the bus station, her only real interest in Aleppo was the Internet caf? someone on the bus had mentioned. They said it was on Noureddin Zinki, a street that radiated north from the Citadel castle that could be seen from all over the city. Once in the caf?, she sat next to a young Syrian college student. She got online, plugged in the flash drive, and uploaded Cadillac’s video file via a CIA cover website. The site, presumably for a freight forwarding company, was actually a server in Hamburg used to bounce files to a Vimeo-­like international video website. Once the video was on the website, she sent an encrypted email to Saul’s private IP address. She sent her report in a file encrypted within photo JPEG files of the Aleppo Citadel castle that she attached to her email. The email ended: “Can you believe it? I think I saw an aardvark. Hope to see you soon. Hugs and kisses.” “Aardvark” was CIA code for Flash Critical; the highest possible urgency. After she pressed Send, she plugged in the separate NSA flash drive that deleted all traces of everything she had done, all evidence that she had even been there, not just on the Internet caf?’s computer, but on the servers it linked to across Syria. Once Saul read her report, he would retrieve the video file from the Vimeo-­like website and then have the NSA delete it from the website without anyone ever knowing it had been there. She had gotten it to Saul, she thought, relieved, coming out of the caf?. Walking down the street with its palm trees, feeling the late-­afternoon sunlight, smelling falafel from a street vendor, she felt lighter, better. Now Saul will take care of it, she thought. He would come up with a game plan and we would get the mole that prevented us from capturing Abu Nazir. Someone must know who this mysterious Russian was. Maybe the CIA’s Moscow Station had intel on him? Now she would go to ground and wait till she received instructions from Saul. Thank goodness he was there in Langley, putting all the pieces together. She had no way of knowing that at that moment, Saul was about to get fired. CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_46350f74-c0b8-5fe0-8678-5a1576f79842) Hart Senate Building, Washington, D.C. 28 July 2009 23:42 hours “Wait a minute, Bill. This Saul, this genius master spy. This superstar. Mona Lisa and all that. You were going to fire him?” “I came close, Senator. Damn close. Look at what happened: Our Middle East operations had been in trouble for some time. Abu Nazir’s IPLA knew every damn thing we were going to do before we did. We took a humongous risk and invaded Syria with a SOG team and came up empty. An operation he pushed, that was strictly on his dime. Not only that, we had our top asset in Syria dead, tortured; our network in Syria completely blown to hell. Abu Nazir had disappeared, and after years of work we were back to square one. He’s our Middle East Division chief! The buck has to stop somewhere. What would you do? It was a complete and total balls-­up. You know how it works around here. Somebody’s head had to roll.” “What about the girl, Bill? This female operations officer. He took a helluva risk with her.” “That’s another thing, Mr. President. He put a female CIA operations officer into a hostile red zone completely on her own. Alone, with no backup. To handle an unbelievably dangerous operation without any support. What if she had been killed—­or worse, captured? He put all our operations in the Middle East at risk.” “What do you mean all?” “Carrie Mathison was out of our Beirut and Baghdad Stations. She knew everything. I mean everything. Our assets, networks, codes, contacts, every one of us. Everything. What if the Syrians had captured her? What if they had turned her over to Hezbollah or the Iranians? Or the Russians? Think what they could have squeezed out of her. It would have been … well, I’m not sure how we would have recovered, but one thing’s for damn sure. A lot of very good ­people would have died. And as far as the war in Iraq was concerned, we could’ve quit right there. Game over. Do you blame me?” “What did he say when you confronted him about her?” “You want to know, Senator? He said, ‘She’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.’ Like it was nothing. No big deal.” “I’m wondering, Bill, she’d come up with this lead about a Russian. Didn’t you factor that in?” “We didn’t know about it. Not then, Warren. I had called an emergency, early-­morning meeting in my West Wing office. Me; the CIA director and deputy directors; David Estes, director of the Counterterrorism Center; Saul. But it was mostly me, yelling at him. And him, sitting there, looking like a rabbi who forgot his yarmulka.” “What did he say?” “That I was jumping the gun. That we had to wait for Mathison’s report.” “ ‘We don’t even know if she’s alive!’ I said. At that point we didn’t. The SOG team barely made it back to Rutba. ‘We’re losing assets,’ I said. To hell with firing him. I wanted to punch him in the nose. And him. Just sitting there like a bearded Yoda, blinking behind his glasses. “ ‘She’s operational,’ he said. “ ‘How the hell do you know?’ Estes asked him. You know what he said? “ ‘She’s good.’ “That was his answer. She’s good. Like it was a mantra. Do you believe this shit? We all looked at each other. I was on the verge of firing him on the spot. I swear I almost did it right there and then.” “Why didn’t you?” “Two things, Warren. Two things every one of us should never forget. Remember Congressman Jimmy Longworth?” “Longworth of Missouri. Who could forget Jimmy Longworth? You should’ve known him, Mr. President. Unbelievable character. What about him?” “When I first came to Washington, I got into a pissing contest with one of the agencies. Jimmy stopped by my office with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two glasses and said, ‘Billy Boy, in Washington, if you learn nothing else, remember one thing. You can make life miserable for an Old Hand, but you never ever want to fire him.’ When I asked, ‘Why not?’ he said, ‘Because Old Hands know where the bodies are buried. You fire one of them, they’ll go. They won’t say a word. They’ll make damn sure they got their pensions nice and clear. Then six months later, you’ll find yourself talking to some smart-­ass reporter from the Washington Post or maybe a grand jury on something that’ll bring down the whole administration including you. And you’re done for the rest of your life. That’s why.’ ” “What’s the second reason?” “My predecessor as CIA director. He told me something I never forgot. ‘Saul’s biggest problem is morality; but he’s not only ten times smarter than you think you are, Warren, with all your Harvard Phi Beta Bullshit and all, he’s also the smartest Jew son of a bitch you’ll ever meet. So after you finish yelling at him—­and believe me, sooner or later everybody wants to—­listen to what he says. Carefully.’ “So I stood up at the meeting and told Saul that he was going on administrative leave, effective immediately. And you know what?” “What?” “He just looked at me, Warren, with those glasses, and said he thought that was a good idea and just got up and left. We all sat there scratching our heads wondering what the hell just happened.” “So that’s it? Then how on earth did we come to this mess?” “Really, Bill. What happened?” “Simple, Mr. President. He got the Aardvark report from the girl, Carrie. Twenty minutes later, he walked into my office. Then I got to meet the real Saul.” CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_09d4acf3-a8ed-5c8b-a176-e94f3eca33bc) Tampa, Florida 14 April 2009 That morning, Saul Berenson, CIA Middle East Division chief, publicly reprimanded at a meeting the previous day by the vice president of the United States, William Walden, and on official administrative leave, woke from a dream he hadn’t had since childhood. He was alone; the house silent, empty. His wife, Mira, was gone. Back to Mumbai, India, two days earlier. If anyone asked, it was because of her mother’s illness, and to deal with the issues of Human Rights Watch, the charitable organization chapter her family ran. In reality, it was because she and Saul barely spoke anymore. There’s the official and the unofficial story in marriages like everything else, Saul thought as he dressed and packed for the airport. Sandy Gornik, an angular, curly-­haired up-­and-­comer from the Iranian desk, took time from the office to drive him to the airport. During the drive, Saul let it slip that he was going to Mumbai to spend some time with his wife and her family. “Have you been there before? India?” Gornik asked. He had heard about Saul nearly getting fired. Nearly everyone in the NCS (National Clandestine Ser­vices), certainly everyone on the fourth floor at Langley, had heard about it. The story was topic A in the cafeteria. In fact, Sandy suspected he was probably not doing himself any good, careerwise, driving Saul to the airport. But Gornik was one of Saul’s Save-­the-­Dead-­Drop band, a tiny group, some four or five wise-­ass, mostly single-­rotation ops officers who picked up crumbs of tradecraft Saul dropped as he scurried through Langley’s anonymous corridors going from what he called “one moronic meeting to those where the Washington art form of wasting time reaches absolute mind-­destroying perfection.” “Once,” Saul said to Gornick. “Indian families are … well, it’s like getting into bed with a tribe of octopuses. No matter which way you turn, there are arms everywhere. Trust me, it isn’t simple.” “I’m sure your wife and her family will be glad to finally spend some time with you,” Gornik said, hoping that came out right, that he didn’t sound patronizing or like he knew Saul had been involuntarily pushed out to pasture. “I’m not so sure,” Saul said. It caught Sandy Gornick, who always knew what to say to catch the female GS-­8s and -­9s trolling in Georgetown pubs, but not the real thing to someone who until yesterday had been not only his boss’s boss, but something of a force, if not yet a legend, in the Company, off guard. “Sorry,” he said, face reddening. “So am I,” Saul said, looking out the window at the traffic on the I-­395, and that was that. Cover established. Saul thought he would prep for his next meeting during the two-­hour flight from Reagan International to Tampa, but instead he kept his laptop closed. Officially, he was on leave. Officially, I don’t exist, he thought, looking out the plane’s window. Below, there were only wisps of clouds, and far below, the rolling green and brown hills of North Carolina. Suspended in midair. Disconnected. A perfect metaphor. He wondered if he would ever see his wife, Mira, again, because he certainly wasn’t going to India. He wasn’t even sure he would ever see Langley again. None of that mattered now. All that mattered was Carrie’s intel. It had changed the equation. It was about to change everything the United States was involved with in the Middle East. The dream. It had come back. For years, he’d had it almost every night as a child. And then one day it stopped. The day after he told his father he didn’t want to go to the old Orthodox synagogue in South Bend, the nearest to Calliope, anymore. He didn’t want to be Bar Mitzvah. And his father just looked at him, took his mother in the car, and, leaving him standing there, they drove off to the shul in South Bend without a word. Nothing. As if to say, Have your own war with God, Shaulele. You think because you say so, this is the end of the matter? You think God has nothing to say too? Not a dream. A nightmare. He was a little boy in a ghetto somewhere in Europe. It was like some old black-­and-­white World War II movie, only it didn’t feel like a movie. He was there. It was night and he was hiding in an attic. The Nazis, the Gestapo, were hunting him. He had heard someone talking, and even though he didn’t understand the language, he understood they were informing on him. The Nazis knew he was there. They were searching the lower floors of the house, coming closer. He could hear their dogs, German shepherds, panting, coming closer. Closer. He didn’t know where his parents were. In the concentration camps. Gone. Alive? Dead? He didn’t know. He didn’t know where anybody was. All the Jews were gone. He had been alone for days, weeks, without food. Living like a rat. Scavenging food from trash in the alleys at night; licking water from dirty pipes in the coal cellar. But now somebody had told on him and they were coming for him. The Nazis were talking in German, a language he didn’t know, although it was close enough to Yiddish that he got a sense of it. He was so afraid he couldn’t move. One of the dogs barked twice, very loud. It was close. Too close, just on the other side of the closet door. Suddenl, the door opened and light spilled in. “Heraus!” one of the soldiers shouted. The soldiers had rifles, but the ones he truly feared were two men who wore black leather overcoats with swastika armbands and death’s-­head insignias on their caps. The soldiers yanked him out and smacked his face so hard he saw flashes of light and the room spun. They were shouting and yelling at others as they hauled him down the stairs. When they got outside in the street, they kicked him and stood him facing a brick building with two others, a young woman with blond Veronica Lake peekaboo bangs, wearing a jacket with a yellow Jewish star on the pocket over a nightdress. She was shivering. Next to her was a little girl. The young woman and the little girl held hands. The little girl was crying. The three of them stood in the only light, the headlights of an army truck. A stream of exhaust came from the tailpipe of the truck. One of the Gestapo men in a black leather overcoat came over to the young woman. Saul noticed for the first time how pretty, no, much more, stunning, she was. Like a movie star. The German took out a Luger pistol. “I’m pretty. I’ll do anything you want,” the young woman said. “Yes,” he said, and shot her in the head. The little girl screamed. He shot her too, but it seemed to Saul that her scream didn’t stop. Although she was dead—­he knew she was dead. She had to be; he could see the blood streaming from her head on the cobblestones—­her screaming went on in the dark street. The German came to Saul and pointed the pistol at his head. Saul could feel the muzzle just touching his hair. The German started to squeeze the trigger. Saul couldn’t help himself. He began to pee. It was always at that moment that he would wake up, the bed wet, smelling of urine. He never told anyone about his dream. Not his parents, not even when they scolded him about the bed-­wetting. His parents never spoke about the war, the Holocaust. Once, when he was eleven, he started to ask. His mother just turned away. His father pretended not to hear. The second time he asked, his father told him to come with him. They were going on a trip. They drove all the way to Gary, Indiana, to the big steel mill on the shore of Lake Michigan. There was a platform where visitors were allowed to stand and watch the molten steel being poured from the giant bucket. They watched the fiery display of sparks and felt the heat of the blast furnace on their skin. His father held his arm tight like a vise. “You see that fire, Shaulele? First you stand in that fire. That fire. Then you ask me about the camps, farshtaysht? Because in that place, Shaulele, the place you’re asking, there was no God.” They drove home in silence and never spoke of it again. So he didn’t tell them about the dream. He never told anyone. Except Mira. He told her the night when, as a young CIA operations officer in Tehran in 1978, the Revolution turning too dangerous for her to stay in Iran any longer, he sent her back to the States. They argued. She didn’t want to go. She accused him of wanting to be apart from her, of wanting her to go. She knew better. It was all around them. Even their friends talked about what was happening every day. What Saul couldn’t tell her was that his friend and best intel source, a former SAVAK officer, Majid Javadi, had warned him, that it was time for all foreigners, especially Americans, to get out of Iran. Still she refused to go. That night in Tehran in 1978, for the first time since he’d been a child, the dream, the nightmare, came again. He had been moaning in his sleep, Mira said. That’s when he told her. “I forgot. You were the only Jews in this little town in Indiana, surrounded by Chris­tians. Were they mean to you?” she asked, putting her hand on his arm. “Sometimes. Sometimes kids called me ‘dirty Jew’ and ‘Christ killer’ or they would look at me funny. One of the teachers said something and they left me alone. I spent a lot of time alone.” “Little Saul, by himself on the playground,” she said. “Look, it’s not like Hindus and Muslims in India, Mira. The Chris­tians didn’t try to run us out or burn crosses on our lawn. I was an American kid. That’s all I ever wanted to be. The fear came from someplace else. My parents never spoke about what happened to them in the Holocaust. Never,” he said. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked. “Because last night, for the first time since I was a child, I had that dream,” he said. “What does it mean?” “You have to go now. It’s a warning. Something terrible is coming,” he said. As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he knew it was true. Barely speaking to him, she got on the plane. A month later, it was Javadi himself who would teach him how terrible—­and how true. A very fit-­looking African-­American in his early forties in pressed slacks and a well-­fitted casual shirt, hair cut short in a military high-­and-­tight, stood waiting in Tampa Airport by the luggage carousel. He was dressed as a civilian, as Saul had requested. “Mr. Berenson, sir?” he asked. “You are?” Saul asked. “Lieutenant Colonel Chris Larson, sir. Can I take your bag?” “I’ll take it. They told you to look for the guy with the beard?” he asked as they walked to the parking lot. “Something like that, sir.” Larson smiled. As they got into the car and drove on the airport road, Saul asked: “Will it take us long?” “It’s not far. You’ll be sitting in the general’s office in nine and a half minutes, sir.” “The general likes it precise, does he?” “He does, sir.” They drove to the gate at MacDill Air Force Base, and nine and a half minutes, almost to the second, later, Saul was able to park his suitcase in the outer office and was sitting next to his carry-­on in the office of four-­star General Arthur Demetrius, CENTCOM commander, famous for having implemented the surge in Iraq, the current commander of all U.S. military forces in the Middle East, and in charge of all military-­related activities and negotiations including the Status of Forces Agreement and the military resolution of the war in Iraq. Demetrius was about Saul’s height, six feet. Lean, very fit, about fifty, with an intelligent horsey face, tanned from spending time outdoors. Not just West Point, Saul reminded himself. He had an M.P.A. from Columbia and a Ph.D. in political science from Prince­ton. He remembered Bill Walden’s description of General Demetrius. “He’s not just some military hard-­ass. He listens.” “So, Mr. Berenson, you know my problem?” Demetrius began, leaning forward on his desk, fiddling with a ballpoint pen. Behind him, Saul could see a bit of the air force base and a palm tree through the office window’s partially closed venetian blinds. “Your problem is that Abu Nazir, IPLA, knows everything your troops or the Iraqis are going to do before you do. So do the Shiites and the Iranians. They’re always one step ahead of you. Your problem is that the U.S. is on the verge of an economic meltdown and the Congress and the country think the war in Iraq is over, only nobody told the enemy. Meanwhile, we, the CIA, have been playing Whac-­A-­Mole with IPLA and AQI, al-­Qaeda in Iraq, not to mention the Shiites, and have been of little or no use to you. That’s your problem. Oh, call me Saul, General,” he said. “Finally.” Demetrius smiled, putting down the pen. “Somebody from Langley capable of telling something that resembles the truth.” “There’s more,” Saul said, and told him about the SOG mission to Otaibah and Carrie’s intel. When he talked about the SOG mission, Demetrius went to a wall map and they followed the mission on the map and then Carrie’s route in Damascus and to Aleppo. “So the Syrians gave sanctuary to Abu Nazir?” General Demetrius asked. “Why?” “So that Sunnis in Damascus don’t start strapping on suicide vests or RPGs with President Assad and his generals as the target,” Saul said. “Anyway, Abu Nazir’s gone. He’s not in Syria anymore.” “So where is he?” “Probably back in Iraq.” “Any idea where?” “Could be anywhere, could be south, even north.” “Why? The Kurds’d have him for breakfast.” “Hard to say. The one thing we’ve learned is not to underestimate him.” “But you’ll find him?” “Eventually. Right now that’s not my priority,” Saul said, moving his chair closer to the general’s desk. “Or yours either. You’re leaving very shortly, aren’t you?” General Demetrius nodded, looking at him sharply. “How did you know that?” Saul pointed to himself. “CIA, remember? Listen, I came to you because it’s vital.” Demetrius put down the ballpoint pen and leaned forward, his chin resting on hands clasped together as if he were praying. “I’m listening.” “I’ve been suspicious of something for a long time. Our ops officer in Otaibah and Damascus came through with intel that confirms beyond the shadow of a doubt that we have a mole. The likelihood is that it’s a very high placed mole somewhere within the Coalition Forces or top echelons of the Iraqi government. But I need to be absolutely honest and clear. It could also be inside the CIA’s Baghdad Station or even at Langley. It could even be inside your own command, General. It is one hundred percent actionable intelligence.” “Inside my command?” “Or mine, General. I don’t think it’s likely that a CIA agent or an American soldier would do such a thing, and none of us likes to think it’s possible, but you and I both know, sir, it’s been known to happen.” General Demetrius stood up. He began pacing up and back in his office, then turned to Saul. “What the hell am I supposed to do? We’re on the verge of making critical decisions to finish this war. I have to trust the ­people I work with, that I give orders to.” “It’s worse than that. The same actionable intel also indicates that Abu Nazir is planning a major ‘action,’ something that may finally trigger the civil war you have been doing everything in your power to prevent, General,” Saul said, rubbing his beard. “Do you know what it is?” “Not yet. But I will. Very soon.” General Demetrius glanced at his watch. “We have three and a half minutes, Saul. Then I have to go.” He leaned against his desk. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?” Saul smiled. “They said you were good, General. I have to get going too,” he added, standing up and lifting the handle on his carry-­on. “I need a favor.” “And that is?” “A counteroperation to block Abu Nazir’s action is being set up. I may—­repeat may—­have to come to you at some point for some Special Forces–type resources. Not sure if and not sure how much. Anyway, just in case, the name for this counteroperation is ‘Operation Iron Thunder,’ ” Saul said. “And flushing the mole is part of this operation?” Demetrius asked, heading for the door. “You could say so,” Saul said, following him to the outer office, where a half-­dozen officers stood ready for the general. “You could definitely say so.” General Demetrius stopped. “And do you know where I’m going now?” Saul smiled. “You’re flying, along with some additional resources, on your specially fitted C-­17 to CENTCOM HQ in Doha, Qatar. Actually, I’m headed to the Middle East myself. Only not to Qatar.” “Would you like a lift? I think we need to continue this conversation,” General Demetrius said. “I was hoping you’d ask,” Saul said as a master sergeant grabbed the handle of his suitcase and pulled it after them outside the office toward the general’s waiting staff car. The C-­17 was bigger than any aircraft Saul had ever flown in. Both sides of its cabin aisle were fitted with rows of screens and electronics, which enabled the dozens of officers and men working at their stations to track the latest data from land, sea, and air operations from all parts of General Demetrius’s widespread command across the entire Middle East and South Asia. For several hours out of MacDill, an F-­16 fighter jet flew escort, then peeled off when they were well out over the Atlantic. Saul sat toward the rear, in an area of seats that were set in rows like business-­class seats in a normal passenger jet. He worked on his laptop, doing tradecraft, setting up basic drops, codes, locations, for Operation Iron Thunder. He used special CIA encryption software that was unique to CIA Top Secret Special Access files; it could not be decoded by standard NSA, DIA, or other agency decryption software, not even by other CIA decryption software. Two hours out, Lieutenant Colonel Larson, looking much more in his element in a Class-­A uniform, came and asked if Saul would like to join the general for coffee. Saul followed him forward past the men and women working at their screens, talking through headsets to their counterparts in various commands, to the general’s office. It was completely closed off. Inside was an office with a desk, conference table, armchairs, and a lounge area with a stocked bar, all of it modernistic and made of stainless steel; it had the odd feel of a men’s club for robots. General Demetrius was sitting in a swivel armchair, sipping coffee and reading a copy of the Economist, which he put down when Saul came in. He poured Saul a cup of coffee. “How do you take it?” “Milk and sugar; you take yours black, thanks.” General Demetrius swiveled toward him, hands on his knees like a sumo wrestler about to pounce. “You’re setting up a separate operation outside Langley, aren’t you? That’s what this little trip is all about, isn’t it?” Saul sipped his coffee. “Good coffee. I’m here so you could ask me that.” He looked around the partitioned office. “No bugs I hope.” General Demetrius shook his head. “You are worried. Who else knows about this?” “The director of the CIA; the vice president, Bill Walden. Took him by surprise, but he finally agreed. Facts are facts. The national security advisor, Mike Higgins. The president. Now you.” “Where are you going to run it from?” “I’ll be moving around. But I’ll have something in Bahrain,” he said. “The capital, Manama. For obvious reasons.” “Middle of the Persian Gulf. Not that far from Iraq. Or CENTCOM. Or Iran, for that matter. Like the real estate ­people say: location, location, location. Or do you have some thing or some one particular in mind, Saul?” “Both maybe. Manama’s a crossroads. A place where ­people come to do business, clean and dirty. And close enough to your headquarters in Doha, General, although I suspect you won’t be there that often.” He put down his coffee. “You know damn well I won’t be sitting on my ass there,” General Demetrius growled. “There’s a battle shaping up in Basra right this minute—­and we don’t have shit there.” “It’s not just IPLA. The Kurds, the Shiites, the Mahdi Army, the Iranians …” Saul ticked them off. “Abu Nazir is trying to light a match. There’s plenty of tinder lying around.” “How soon and where?” “I’ll let you know very soon,” Saul said, looking at the map of Iraq on the general’s laptop screen. “There are some things I have to do first.” General Demetrius looked at him. “Operation Iron Thunder?” Saul nodded. “Where do you start?” Stand in the fire of a blast furnace to get the answer in a place where there is no God, Saul thought, for some bizarre reason thinking of his father. “By sending my best operations officer into the enemy’s camp with a big fat target painted on her back,” he said. “What?” “Sorry. A stupid metaphor. We don’t just know we have a mole who’s feeding AQI, General. For the first time, we also have a lead that might help us nail who it is. There’s more. The Iranians. They may be also be getting intel.” “You’ve been reading my DIA reports. There’s something going on with the Iranians. The Shiites in Iraq have suddenly gone quiet. Too quiet. If our withdrawal from Iraq were to come under heavy enemy attack, it could be a bloodbath,” General Demetrius said grimly. “What if we were to come under attack from both sides, the Sunnis and the Shiites at the same time—­and they know everything you’re going to do in advance?” “You must be a mind reader. What the hell do you think has been keeping me up at night?” “I have a plan,” Saul said. “Iron Thunder.” “Exactly. I understand you play Go. Something of a fanatic, they say,” Saul said, taking a board and a box of black and white stones out of his carry-­on. “You can be black. If you like, I’ll take a modified komidashi.” General Demetrius studied him. “Are you hustling me, Saul?” He glanced at his watch. “Are you sure? The game’ll take at least a ­couple of hours.” “No,” Saul said, waiting for the general to play his first stone. “Not that long.” CHAPTER 9 (#ulink_1a3869c4-b1e2-53fa-b53a-ed89a8fecb29) Tal Afar, Iraq 15 April 2009 It was raining, gray clouds bundled over the city. Brody followed Daleel and five of the others, weapons concealed beneath their robes, in a single file through the narrow street. They were going to the mosque for the noon Dhuhr prayer. The street was muddy, the pavement cracked and rutted. Every shop and building was battered, shot through with bullet holes from the heavy fighting that had taken place there two years earlier between Abu Nazir’s IPLA joined by elements of AQI and the U.S. 82nd Airborne. Although Tal Afar had been officially proclaimed a “Coalition success” and it was a majority Turkmen, not Arab, city, you could still hear the sounds of one or two rocket attacks and IEDs almost every day. But Brody wasn’t thinking about any of these things. He had a decision to make. His life depended on it. The young Turkmen woman in the makhbaz, the bakery shop where he bought the flat bread for some of the group, spoke English. One morning, three weeks ago, when Afsal had walked outside to talk privately with Mahdi and, for a moment, they were alone in the shop, she looked at him and asked, “What is an American doing with these Sunnis?” For some reason, maybe because it was the first time a woman had spoken to him in English in six years, or because she wore a braided female Turkmen’s cap that meant she wasn’t an Arab, wasn’t in any way like his captors, or maybe her black eyes held a hint, though it was hard for him to believe, that she looked at him the way a woman looks at a man, he told her: “I’m a prisoner, an American Marine. They captured me.” Then, louder, “Bikam haadha?” How much is that? Because Afsal and Mahdi had just come back in. After that, each time he went into the makhbaz, she glanced at him. Even Mahdi noticed. “What’s going on with you and that Turkmen girl?” he said. “Nothing. We say salaam, hello, that’s all, and I buy the bread, thanks be to Allah,” Brody said. “You think she likes you? A foreigner? You think she’ll be like American girls, who all you do is look at them and they spread their legs?” “I’m a married man. I have a wife and two children,” Brody said. “But you want the Turkmen girl too?” “No. Why? Do you want her?” “Pah! Turkmen women grow mustaches on their upper lips. Too bad you can’t have a soft Arab woman, American,” Mahdi said. “I told you, I’m married,” Brody said as they took their shoes off at the entrance to the mosque. But even here, one of them, Afsal, who had been next to him all along, stayed behind with his AK-­47, scanning the street for IEDs or any cars or carts that might come along with a bomb, or worse for IPLA, an Iraqi army patrol—­more dangerous now because recruits in the new Iraqi Army were nearly all Shiites. So they watched him even closer, Brody thought as he bowed his head to the floor in unison with the others in prayer. Except ten days ago, it happened again. Abu Nazir himself had driven by and called Afsal and Mahdi out to his car, leaving Brody and the Turkmen girl—­her name was Akjemal—­alone in the bakery. She motioned him to the side of the counter and spoke quickly, showing him a beautiful round bread with star patterns baked on the top. “My uncle Jeyhun is the sheikh of our neighborhood,” she whispered quickly. “He doesn’t want to risk anything here in Tal Afar, but he is willing to smuggle you to Mosul under sacks of flour in his truck. Mosul is not far, maybe sixty kilometers. He knows American soldiers there. He says you can be turned over to the U.S. First Cavalry in one hour. Will you come?” “They watch me closely. If they catch me, they’ll kill me. You and your uncle too,” he said, glancing at the shop window. Afsal and Mahdi were still talking by the car. 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