by Fritz Galt
Her first impression made her slightly uncomfortable, not about him, but about herself. He seemed like the kind of man a woman could take advantage of. And she had the ever-so-slight impulse to do just that. He was what her girlfriends called a “Chuck,” someone to use for changing light bulbs, for a drink, for a long walk and a talk, and then to discard when no longer needed.
He gave a self-aware smile, like a boy caught stealing a glance at a girl, and put himself entirely at her disposal.
“Please, take a seat.” She indicated the sofa beside which he was standing.
She eased into a leather armchair opposite him and reviewed the arrangement of furniture in the room.
Some professional journals suggested right angles to deflect confrontation, whereas others preferred facing the subject head-on. She had chosen the direct approach.
The CIA had given her complete control over the wall decorations. For her, the more arbitrary, the better. Official photographs of presidents would have been just fine.
But no, she worked for an agency that believed in the ability to control human behavior. Not only should she be able to influence a patient’s behavior, but entire departments were devoted to changing the psychology of nations.
Her nomadic youth had taught her to take things in stride. Manipulating others was the complete opposite of her brand of therapy, which relied on observation, interpretation and guidance.
Needless to say, she had agonized over the examination rooms to the extent that when the wrong paint arrived and the agency had to make last minute substitutions to the furniture, it brought her great relief. Nobody could accuse her of being manipulative.
“So let me get this straight,” she began. “You were inside a bookstore in Syria when the owner got shot. And you weren’t packing a gun.”
He smiled. “For such work, carrying a gun would be counterproductive. As a negotiator, I must appear non-threatening.”
“You were there to negotiate?”
He nodded, but seemed reluctant to elaborate.
“So who shot the guy?”
“There was an altercation in the street. A car was trying to pass a truck on a narrow street and ended up wedged between a food stall and the book shop.”
“So how did you interpret the shot?”
He shrugged. “To be perfectly honest, the altercation was a distraction. My mind was on other things. I didn’t focus on what was going on outside.”
“Were they Syrians?”
“I can only assume. I remember the fruit vendor. He had a dark beard and a dark complexion. That’s all I noticed.”
“And the car’s driver?”
“I have no idea. I never even looked.”
“And you claim that one of them shot the gun?”
“I don’t claim anything,” he said, somewhat testily. “I guess I naturally assumed that one fired at the other.”
She nodded, then pulled the newspaper article out of the security file. “So how do you explain this appearing in the paper?”
Dean took the clipping that included a blurry telephoto picture of him with a smug smile on some unidentifiable street.
“This has me in my shirtsleeves,” he said. “But I was wearing this suit at the time.”
“Where was that picture taken?” she asked.
He looked confused. “I don’t know. I never saw it before. I suppose someone somewhere along the line had me under surveillance and took this photograph, but I can’t honestly say where or when.”
Ah, the proverbial Freudian slip.
“Why can’t you say so ‘honestly’?”
He looked perplexed. Then it dawned on him. “I forgot. You’re a shrink. It doesn’t mean anything. What I meant to say was ‘in all honesty,’ I can’t say where that picture was taken or when.’”
She let it go. Even if the spook had a few things to hide, that was attributable to his profession, not his psychological makeup. Nevertheless, the jab felt satisfying.
“I can’t read Arabic,” she said, “but the translation says five bystanders positively identified you as the assailant.”
He looked closer at the article. He read from right to left, working with admirable speed.
“Your translation is correct,” he informed her. “I can’t honestly say—I mean, I can honestly say that I have no idea why so many people would claim that I did it. In fact, I’m surprised that so many people saw me in the shop.”
She didn’t intend to conduct a police investigation, but she nodded for him to continue.
“All the action was on the sidewalk. I just walked into the bookshop and slipped out the back door.”
If her job were to determine guilt, his furtive actions would have spoken for themselves. But because she was at CIA headquarters, his actions seemed perfectly reasonable.
“So I take it your ‘negotiation’ was interrupted. You were unable to conclude your business.”
His eyes settled on her with unnerving directness. She fought the urge to look away. Perhaps he was considering how much of his operation to reveal, what her security clearance might be, or whether she had sufficient need to know.
At last, he said, “The shooting interrupted us before we could get started.”
That worked for her. A spy wouldn’t shoot someone he was trying to deal with before they could complete their business. As far as she was concerned, a lie-detector test would be unnecessary.
He didn’t have to explain the multiple witnesses. That was for someone else to investigate. She wasn’t taking down a statement for the police or performing a cross-examination in court. Nor did she have any idea about the larger political context.
Mass delusion was an interesting field, but she was in no position to make that diagnosis. Other factors may have contributed to the witnesses’ concurring testimonies.
As far as she was concerned, logic dictated that Dean Wells was innocent of the murder. Perhaps he was a victim of mistaken identity.
“I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time,” she said. “You must be jet-lagged.”
“No. I stay on Washington time when I go overseas.”
Then she remembered from scanning his personnel file that he was stationed in Washington.
“I guess this means good-bye,” he said, a preoccupied look taking over his face.
She offered her hand, which he shook briefly, then dropped in favor of his attaché case.
“Nice meeting you,” he said.
As he stepped out of the examination room, she was overcome with a disturbing feeling of pleasure. She had enjoyed the encounter, hadn’t felt the least bit intimidated by him, and took delight in his discomfort, but was perfectly happy to see him go.
Chapter 4
Dean Wells had some business to conduct at Langley before he would go home, feed his cat, take a shower and finally crash.
He hadn’t slept well on the flight and was feeling slightly off. Maybe it was because of the five-hour layover in Cairo, or the fact that his mission had failed. Or maybe it was the experience of a man bleeding to death before his very eyes.
He would have to drop off the pages of Hebrew script with the Language Department. They could make out the text and decipher where the shop owner wanted him to go to find Abdul Aziz. In the process, they might also study the artifact for its historic value.
But first, he had sweets to deliver. He would stop by his boss’s office at the National Clandestine Service, the former Directorate of Operations, deliver the baklava his boss had requested, and explain what had gone wrong in Aleppo. He hoped the sweets would have the effect he desired.
His boss was José Gomez, an awkward, angular Cuban-American who didn’t play by the rules. He played by his own rules, and Dean was forever trying to figure them out.
Gomez’s office walls were covered with diplomas, certificates and awards. The man was hard at work studying a report.
“Your baklava, sir, with red Aleppo pistachios.” Dean said. He laid the gift-wrapped
sweets on Gomez’s desk.
Gomez looked up and focused on the gift. His nostrils flared as he unwrapped the package.
He took a delight in every morsel and didn’t offer Dean a bite. That was okay. Let him enjoy it before he upbraided Dean for the bungling in Aleppo.
Without bothering to thank Dean for hand delivering his dessert all the way from Syria, Gomez returned to his report.
“Will you look at these numbers?” he gloated.
He thumped the sheet with a red-stained finger and promptly licked the tip of each finger.
“Our region has the most promotions at every rank. Europe is dead, the East Asia desk missed the mark and South America is virtually comatose. The only place to give us some competition is South Asia, which beat us in entry-level promotions. But look at the senior-level positions. We rock! Fifty percent of promotions came from our office! And see how low our time-in-class is? Nobody rots away in the Near East and North Africa Bureau.”
Dean wasn’t among those zooming ahead. He did his job in a methodical manner that earned few kudos. He worked largely in the field, which didn’t register in Washington, and the fact that he was nominally a State Department officer left him largely overlooked.
Then came the Aleppo fiasco.
“So what went wrong over there, buddy?” Gomez said, and dropped the promotion list on his desk.
“Someone killed the shop owner before I could negotiate with him.”
“You weren’t talking to Abdul Aziz?”
“Definitely not.” He wasn’t a young militant, and he didn’t look like the mug shot Dean had seen at the National Counterterrorism Center. “This guy was an intermediary.”
“So who whacked him?”
Dean reflexively rubbed his chest. “I have no idea who shot him.”
“Could have been an al-Qaeda hack trying to prevent the deal from going down,” Gomez speculated. “What a shame. Al-Qaeda is crawling all over our territory now.”
“Could mean a bundle of promotions,” Dean said, trying to tap into his boss’s thought process.
“There’ll be no promotions if we continue to screw up like this.”
Naturally, the whole purpose of achieving success in the field was to reflect well on Gomez. One didn’t run a successful area office without some reward. Dean could see his boss angling for a deputy director position.
“I’m just not sure this is the correct approach,” Gomez said. “Seems too dovish.”
“You mean my buying off the faction?”
“Yeah. How far can money get you these days? We’ve already traced funds from Rashid direct to Aziz. We’ll just start a bidding war with al-Qaeda.”
Gomez was referring to Rashid al-Qasimi, a scurrilous businessman from the United Arab Emirates who sent large portions of his personal fortune through conduits into Gaza and the West Bank. His intention was clear: to support al-Qaeda’s growing presence in the region.
“Show me some other way and I’m willing to try it,” Dean said. “One way or another, we’re gonna keep al-Qaeda at bay.”
All he could see in Gomez’s eyes was that promotion dangling just out of reach.
There could be no greater boost to the area’s visibility than the recent transfer of al-Qaeda funding and activity from Central Asia into Palestinian enclaves in the Near East.
Initially, al-Qaeda had tried to apply the same brutal methods it used in Iraq to the Palestinian dispute with Israel.
They inspired jihadists to revolt in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and activated Palestinian cells in Syria to step up the pace of militancy against the Jewish state. In the end, hundreds of Palestinians ended up dead with no political effect.
When Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, al-Qaeda moved in there. Although Hamas was originally formed as an Islamist movement, its broader political aims resulted in the neglect of jihad and fundamentalist principles. A heavily armed clan affiliated with al-Qaeda attempted to set up an Islamic emirate in the Gaza Strip, but failed spectacularly when Hamas troops attacked their mosque, killing a dozen of them and causing their leader to blow himself up.
In light of such failures, al-Qaeda took a new approach. They soft-pedaled their influence, with noteworthy success. It took root in an armed clan in Gaza that called itself al-Qaeda in Palestine and the Army of Islam. Their kidnapping and bombing campaign elicited drone attacks from Israel, killing their top leaders. More groups of a similar nature were forming in the West Bank. Such indigenous groups were the chief concern of Gomez and the Mossad, Israel’s counterpart to the CIA.
Gomez’s primary goal was to prevent al-Qaeda from radicalizing such groups in Palestinian territories and across the Near East.
“Did your contact tell you anything before he died?” Gomez asked. “Did he give any indication that Abdul Aziz was receptive to your offer?”
“We never got that far,” Dean said. “I had the money and student visa approvals in my hand when the bookshop owner got shot. I can’t tell if the guy was receptive to the offer or not. If anything, he seemed like a salesman trying to drive a hard bargain. He wasn’t exactly warm.”
“That’s to be expected, considering he was helping Aziz sell out his people to a foreigner, in public.”
Dean relived the shooting incident briefly. “It’s what happened after the shot that sticks most in my mind.”
Gomez frowned. “The authorities spotted you?”
“No, they didn’t. The guy was lying there, barely able to get a word out. He seemed aware of his impending death. But before he succumbed, he gave me this.” He pulled the parchment papers from his attaché case.
Gomez reached out with a mixture of curiosity and disapproval. He handled the pages as if they were too soiled to touch. “What is this?”
“I have no idea. I’m taking it over to the lab now. But while dying, my contact told me that it was a symbol of their good faith, and that I should read the first page to find Abdul Aziz.”
Finally, a smile appeared on Gomez’s thin lips. “That’s encouraging. Why didn’t you read the first page?”
“Boss, I had the Syrian authorities after me. I had to concentrate on getting out of there.”
Gomez considered this. “Maybe I should send someone else.”
“I’m sorry, but there is no one else.” For decades, the CIA had neglected on-the-ground intelligence in favor of electronic surveillance. Contacts on the Arab street were few and far between. The CIA was still scrambling to hire Arabic speakers. “I’m the only one who has the contacts and knows the terrain well enough to pull this off.”
Gomez thought some more. “Maybe we could change your identity.”
“What? Put on a mustache?” The whole thrust of his career had been to build up personal recognition as a trusted friend among those who were normally dubious of American diplomats.
“No. I mean change your name. Falsify your papers. All the standard stuff.”
“Sir, I’m a State Department employee in good standing around the Arab world. You don’t have to smuggle me anywhere.”
“But the Syrians have considerable reach…”
“Not that much. Hell, I flew through Cairo with no problem.”
“Fine then. Get some sleep. Before you know it, you’ll be back on your flying carpet.” He returned the ancient pages to Dean. “Get a language analyst to look this old shit over.”
Dean held up the yellowed parchment for Gomez to read. Words were hand-printed neatly on both sides, with references to YHWH, the mysterious tetragrammaton Jews pronounced as Yahweh. “This is about God. It’s the Bible.”
“Whatever.”
“Don’t you read Hebrew?”
Gomez sat back with a bored look on his face.
Dean put the parchment away in his attaché case and stood to leave. “I’ll have the language experts tell me where Abdul Aziz is.”
Gomez leaned across the desk. This time his dark eyes were intense. “Tell me what they say. I want to know your full itinerary
.”
Dean gave a half-nod, surprised that his boss even cared.
Chapter 5
Dean held the attaché case with newfound respect. Inside were parchment pages of an old Hebrew Bible. It was a relic that might have academic, if not monetary, value.
He stopped by the sun-drenched cafeteria for a quick bite, having missed breakfast that morning in his hurry to get to Langley. Hunched over a plate of donuts and a cup of tea, he took a moment to reflect on where things stood in al-Qaeda’s war of terror.
Hostilities in Iraq were reduced to blatant attempts by suicide bombers to rekindle the sectarian conflict. Afghanistan and Pakistan were proving dangerous for al-Qaeda’s leadership.
The television in the corner of the cafeteria reported on a string of bombings in Yemen. Al-Qaeda was getting desperate. They hadn’t been able recently to strike in Europe or the United States, and had been thwarted by democratic uprisings from pursuing their original mission, that of replacing sectarian Arab dictators with Islamic states.
Their early success at inflaming Arabs’ longstanding hatred of Israel no longer brought in huge donations. With the Palestinian leadership taking an accommodating line toward Israel despite the many firebrands, it became harder for al-Qaeda to hijack the Palestinian cause. Logistically, they couldn’t even undermine the peace talks.
Instead, the Islamist group would have to focus on the future. A new, secular Arab country would soon be born. Palestine would have a weak government in a poor country. Its people would be receptive to a pro-Sharia government, one that promoted religious over secular law.
José Gomez’s job was to weed out al-Qaeda in the entire region, and Dean was to focus primarily on Palestinian lands. Nobody wanted to see a Mullah beheading citizens in Palestine and raising an army of holy warriors to strike at Israel. As much as Dean sympathized with the Palestinian’s plight, such a religious move would only hurt their cause and bring further violence to the region, if not the broader Arab world.