Damascus Station

by Unknown

  Sam shrugged. “I have no idea, Chief. She goes by Zelda. I don’t know about the Spanish, but she speaks passable Levantine Arabic.”

  Zelda Zaydan was the topic of conversation because she had arrived in Damascus on TDY, temporary duty, to exploit the intelligence from Bouthaina’s computer. The part about the name agitated Procter, for some reason. “That’s like me saying you can just call me Temis. I go by Temis from now on. Whatever.” She gave two thumbs down. Sam pressed on.

  “Zelda’s getting her TDY pack set up now,” Sam said, not taking the bait. “Techs say the exploitation computer arrived from Fort Meade this morning.” The machine, unconnected to any Agency network, would test if the Syrians had infected the USB stick with malware. The Diplomatic Security team had also scanned it for explosives and poisons. The odds were slim, but Hizballah had placed explosives in cell phones they knew would be captured, hoping to blow an officer to smithereens as the CIA tried to crack into it.

  “Perfect, just in time,” Procter said. “Girl’s got a ton of work to do.”

  ON THE FIRST AFTERNOON SAM noticed a thick stack of printed reports on Zelda’s desk. The top one, a DI assessment, was titled “Intelligence Assessment—Chemical Weapons Programs: Case Studies from the Soviet Union, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria.” She also had a book under the stack, Nerve Agent Precursors and Production Methods. Zelda saw him looking at the title. “That’s a good one,” she said. “Commissioned during the Reagan administration. It’s got the recipe for industrial sarin used in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Syrians use a very similar cookbook.”

  Zelda stood to stretch. Sam flipped open the book. “So, how are you going to do this?”

  “I start searching for every possible sarin precursor chemical, scouring every bill of materials on this computer,” she said. “Then we’ll have a list of suspected shell companies. From there, we can burrow back and follow the money into the Palace. Assuming most of the accounting is complete, we should be able to see the quantities.”

  She put her hands on her hips and blew a giant gum bubble. She spat out the gum and put on her headphones.

  IT WOULD TAKE TWO DAYS to get an answer, during which Zelda drank, Sam estimated, five gallons of bitter Station coffee and slept for a total of four hours. The lack of sleep was Procter’s fault. The Chief, anxious to peel the onion on the op, gave Zelda an absurd deadline to speed things along. “We make her earn her TDY per diem,” Procter had said. “All hundred and thirty-eight dollars of it.” So when Zelda beckoned Sam and Procter to her desk thirty-six hours later, the analyst looked run-down. This, he thought, seemed to please Procter’s managerial sensibilities. Zelda’s clothes were rumpled and there was a streak of labneh on her pants. But the analyst was smiling. Procter nodded at the wall. “Analyst brain aneurysm?” she said.

  The flaking plaster wall had transformed into a shotgun blast of dozens of Post-its. They were organized into a pyramid, the top of which read “Sarin.” Below that were two cards listing the binary components: methylphosphonic difluoride, or DF, and isopropyl alcohol, which Zelda abbreviated as IA. Cascading down were the building blocks of each, like a detonated periodic table: methylphosphonic dichloride, methyldichlorophosphine, hydrogen fluoride, among many more Sam could not read.

  Procter wheeled over a chair and sat. “Hit me.”

  Zelda nodded and positioned herself in front of the littered wall. “Bottom line is they’ve set up a network to boost their sarin stockpile, facilitated by the Palace, probably for the use of the Republican Guard. I’ve found evidence that Bouthaina has helped purchase most of the precursor chemicals. At least the ones they can’t fabricate in their own factories. Most of it is being shipped to fronts in Lebanon, some in Turkey. From there it’s likely smuggled into Syria.”

  “How much have they procured?” Sam asked.

  Zelda opened Excel on her Agency computer and looked at a table. “We’re probably missing pieces, but if you add up all the precursors you get something like two thousand metric tons.”

  “That sounds like a lot,” Sam said.

  “It is,” Zelda said. “Rough rule of thumb for industrial sarin production is inputs weigh eight times the output. So, assuming they cook it right, you get two hundred and fifty metric tons of sarin. Enough for a massive attack. Based on some of these purchase dates, I’d expect they’re well into production at this point.”

  “They could just be sending it to the SSRC for production and storage, right, Jaggers? Procter said, pointing at Sam.

  “Jaggers?” Zelda asked.

  “GOLDJAGGER.” Procter rolled her eyes at Zelda. Sam had never communicated via email with the analyst, so she’d never seen his funnyname. “Joseph’s pseudo.”

  “Ah. Got it. That’s a terrible pseudo. Debman’s is Willy T. PECKER. He applied for a change. Anyways, on your question, they could be sending it to the SSRC, it’s true, but the SSRC production facilities and stockpile have been quiet for almost a year, according to the Israeli SIGINT and imagery. And the Syrians know they have a stockpile sufficient to deter the Israelis from taking out the regime.”

  Zelda had picked up a pencil and now tapped it on the wall like a metronome, metering her thoughts. “If the Syrians believe their deterrent is secure, why would they buy two thousand tons of precursor material, presumably adding to an already sufficient stockpile?”

  “Because they want to use it on the rebels,” Sam said softly.

  Zelda leaned against the wall, staring into the spackled ceiling tiles. “A lot of it.”

  “And they don’t think they can use the current stockpile because we and the Israelis would detect transport, mixing, and preparation,” Sam said.

  Procter had started nodding her head vigorously.

  “They’re right,” Zelda said. “Rustum Hassan is no dummy. He knows we’ve got the SSRC sites scoped for perpetual satellite coverage. We would see the stockpile moving or being prepared. If you want to use the stuff, in combat, right now, you separate it from the SSRC. Set up a compartmented program.”

  “Where the hell is all of it?” Procter said. “Two thousand tons of material means they have an industrial facility somewhere in-country that’s just churning sarin out.”

  Zelda smiled. “Bouthaina made a mistake in an email, told one of the brokers to send something to Jableh, then changed the location to another Republican Guard facility. I checked it out. NGA did a report on an ‘Enigmatic Facility’ ”—she wiggled her fingers in air quotes around the phrase—“that was located near Jableh. This is nine months ago. Said something was under construction. No flybys since. We should check it out again.”

  Sam pointed a finger gun at the Assad wall poster and pulled the trigger.

  ARTEMIS APHRODITE PROCTER HAD A complicated reputation inside the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. There had been some unpleasantness back in Kabul when an argument had concluded with the shoving of two satellite imagery analysts down a flight of stairs in the middle of a Predator op against the Pakistani Taliban. “Accidental,” Procter always said. “Unfortunate.”

  The drama had made it challenging for Procter to conduct resource negotiations with representatives of either agency.

  So she called Ed Bradley to grease the skids. “Ed, can you get those nerds to give me a bird?”

  BRADLEY CALLED THE CIA’S NATIONAL Reconnaissance Office liaison with the coordinates for the Jableh facility. The liaison scanned a real-time feed depicting the NRO’s available orbits, a view so highly classified that his grandchildren would not live to see its public release. The liaison thought the Misty-3 satellite platform might work and called the Mission Manager to provide Jableh’s coordinates.

  “Well, shit,” the NRO Mission Manager said at the morning meeting, sniffing at his coffee cup, itself probably classified, shaped as it was like Misty’s balloon and inscribed with the words Smile, you’re on camera. “We don’t have an unlimited supply of these damn birds.” By evening the Mis
sion Manager, cranking through his sixth cup of Misty balloon coffee, stood twitching over a greaseball technician who fired Misty’s ion thrusters at the satellite’s orbital apogee, settling her into a path that would cross Jableh the next morning, local time.

  Misty crossed over at precisely 6:43 a.m. local time and snapped seven pictures of the complex with its nine-foot panoramic camera. The images, sent to Washington via an encrypted link, revealed three large warehouses, a collection of tractor-trailers, parked cars—including several marked with the insignia of the Republican Guard—and a small barracks nestled into a mountain valley. The kicker, though, was a cargo truck with a visible license plate. The imagery was distributed to NGA’s Middle East and North Africa Analysis Division, where an analyst listening to Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A minor on noise-canceling headphones drafted a report eventually disseminated under the title: “15 JUNE: JABLEH COMPLEX ACTIVITY INDICATES REPUBLICAN GUARD AND SSRC AFFILIATION.” The analyst’s commentary boxes were verbose, but he was a stickler and had run the traps, including typing the truck’s license plate number into numerous NGA databases.

  The truck, it turned out, was owned by the SSRC’s Branch 450: chemical weapons security and transport.

  23

  AS THE SHELLING PICKED UP AND THE REGIME’S CONTROL of the capital weakened, Damascenes increasingly stayed indoors: the glances furtive, the café sidewalks empty, the neighborhoods insular and vigilant, the restaurants shuttered at random. The electricity was erratic, the darkness like a plague that had even spread to the rich quarters.

  So when Uncle Daoud asked to see Mariam and Razan, instead of going to a restaurant the cousins strolled four blocks to Daoud’s apartment for a home-cooked meal of dawood basha. They had gathered in the dining room when Aunt Mona had been alive, but no one enjoyed staring at the seat she’d occupied since the family had moved into the apartment in the eighties. Daoud had removed her chair, but that almost made it worse. So, without acknowledging why, they ate huddled around a small table in the kitchen.

  Daoud asked questions about the doctor’s assessment of Razan’s eye, about what she had been reading, about her friends. He was trying to be a good father. Razan was not interested. She sat in her chair picking at the meatballs, wine untouched, eyes—patch still there—focused on the refrigerator behind her father. Mariam wanted to slap Razan for being such an ungrateful sharmoota, a petulant child. Give your father a break, we all serve a government you despise—and he’s done what he’s done so you can eat. Worried that the inner monologue might escape, Mariam took a large sip of the Lebanese wine.

  “When do you think you will go back to work?” Daoud asked Razan, who was presently staring down at her plate with her one good eye.

  “I don’t know.” She set down her fork and excused herself for a few minutes.

  Daoud smiled at Mariam with exhausted eyes. She scanned his face, suspecting this might be the night. You’re not asking him to spy for CIA, Sam had coached, you’re asking him to cross a line with you and you only. To share something he knows he should not. He can suspect you work for an intelligence service, but you never mention that. Sometimes CIA may fully recruit a subsource, but often the relationship remains between source and subsource. Am I recruited? Mariam had asked. He’d not wanted to answer that question. It made him uncomfortable, she could tell, and she had felt the same way.

  Daoud’s back was hunched and his sagging belly made him appear fifteen pounds heavier than he’d been at her cousin’s engagement party. His chestnut hair was wispier and thinner than she remembered. He looked like a rumpled scientist who’d just learned an experiment had failed. To her, he mostly just looked sad.

  Razan returned to the table with mottled cheeks and wild eyes, ready to spar. She’d made decisions in the bathroom and looked like she wanted to have it out with her father. Mariam was now a bystander.

  “I need to speak with you as my father,” Razan said. “Not as an employee of the SSRC.” He nodded, but his face said he did not want to hear it. “I want to work again with the Coordination Committees,” she said as if she was taking a job at a bank. As if middle-fingering the all-powerful Assad were a normal profession.

  Daoud was angry now, jaw set, back upright. “Razan, oh, God, no—”

  “Stop, Papa, let me finish. I cannot sit by and let our country be destroyed. The protesters are weak, but they are right. I want to be on the right side. The moral side. God’s side.”

  Daoud rubbed his hands through his thinning hair and pushed his chair back from the table. He stared angrily at Razan. “God is not in Syria now, Razan, in case you have not noticed. We’ve been abandoned to the chaos. There is nothing to do but keep our heads down and ride it out. And if you must bring God into this, what good will come of joining the opposition, eh? You want to help them bring their bloodthirsty jihadi Allah to our country, to kill all of us?”

  Now he pointed at the eye and he was crying, and Mariam felt shame at being here in this kitchen, as her uncle came to pieces. “I’ve already lost your mother,” he said. “Don’t leave me alone here, in this hell. I can’t lose you, too, Razan,” he whispered.

  There was more to say, but it would have to wait, because someone knocked at the door.

  Mariam had the dizzying sensation of watching her body from outside herself. The knock. Syrians knew the knock. Daoud and Razan’s eyes confirmed it. Mariam thought of Bouthaina’s computer. I didn’t make it very far. Short run, even for a spy. She stupidly remembered asking Sam how long most spies served. It depends, he’d said. On what?

  Daoud got up to answer the door. There were two mukhabarat, and they flashed badges from Political Security. One was barrel-gutted and jowly, carrying fifty pounds more than Daoud. He had a cauliflower nose and a droopy mustache. The other, his subordinate, was short and mousy with a turned-up nose and timorous eyes that appeared glued to the floor. As she had since childhood, Mariam gave the mukhabarat officers silent nicknames to calm her fear.

  Cauliflower and the Mouse, she pronounced them.

  Her heart rate slowed when Cauliflower asked if Razan was at home, and could everyone please show identification. The Mouse collected the state ID cards and Cauliflower, understanding this to be the home of a well-respected colonel in the SSRC, said they would not be long but had to ask Ms. Razan a few questions about her arrest. They offered identification as well, which Mariam thought was polite and decent, since the mukhabarat would sometimes just show up in the leather jackets and demand to have a conversation with you. Cauliflower was a colonel. The Mouse a lieutenant.

  “Can we do this another time?” Daoud said in annoyance.

  The Mouse kept eyeballing the floor, but Cauliflower held firm. “We’ve been asked by General Qudsiyah to have a private chat with Ms. Razan. A follow-up, I’m sure you understand. These must occur frequently, given the, hmmm, I would say unusual terms of her release.” The Mouse coughed. He looked at a lamp.

  Qudsiyah was the director of Political Security. He was untouchable, and the mere mention of his name was the end of the argument.

  “Last week it was Military Intelligence,” Razan said. “The week before, State Security.” How many of these will there be? Mariam saw her nostrils flare, her voice was pinched and throaty.

  Cauliflower looked at Daoud, then back to Razan. “You committed offenses punishable by—”

  “Stop,” Daoud said. “Stop, Colonel, it is unnecessary. Razan, speak to these men. How long do you need?”

  Razan’s cheeks flushed. She folded her arms across her chest. Stay quiet, girl, Mariam thought, just talk to them and get it over with.

  “Ten, fifteen minutes,” Cauliflower said.

  MARIAM AND DAOUD SMOKED CIGARETTES on his balcony. He still tended a small garden of potted plants and flowers, as Mona had liked: white jasmine now in summer bloom, damask rose, towering hibiscus flanking the sliding doors. She remembered planting jasmine with Aunt Mona, Razan toddling around, Daoud cooking something inside and laugh
ing with Papa.

  There was no laughter inside now. Mariam knew that the visit happening in the kitchen between Cauliflower, the Mouse, and Razan was both civil and debasing, bureaucratic and savage. It was not the knock-down-the-door-and-snatch-you-up varietal. There was no violence, no assault. That had already happened. This was a reminder that you were owned.

  The men would ask what Razan had been doing, had anyone from the Coordination Committees contacted her, how are the doctor’s visits? They would write it up into a report that Qudsiyah would probably never read. Then it would go into a file. Military Intelligence had one, so did State Security, and the Security Office probably did, too. They would not share the reports. Paper would sit in filing cabinets in basements. Representatives of the mukhabarat would continue to visit Razan for the next few decades. They would come into her home uninvited. Watch her children play, if she ever got around to having them. Some would coyly demand bribes. Others would accuse, probe, and threaten. They would ask the same questions, already knowing the answers.

  This time, the conversation took twelve minutes. Cauliflower thanked Razan for cooperating and apologized again to Daoud for the intrusion. He nodded at Mariam and then left with the Mouse in tow.

  “Were they decent to you?” Mariam asked.

  “Yes. But I can’t take any more talk tonight. Papa, can I sleep here? I need to lie down.”

  “Of course, habibti, but don’t you want to finish dinner?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Razan hugged her father and Mariam and padded back to her childhood bedroom, closing the door.

  “I need a whiskey,” Daoud said.

  HE POURED A FAT FINGER of Johnnie Walker Blue Label—she recognized it as the bottle her father had given Daoud for his last birthday—into two glasses and met Mariam on the balcony. Mariam had always liked this place. The balcony looked directly into another family’s apartment and on weekends you could hear the din of Bab Touma’s nightlife: partygoers, couples out on dates, women in tight jeans and some in hijabs all dancing in the Old City’s bars and restaurants. Now it was eerily quiet and the apartment across the street was black. Daoud drank half his whiskey in the first gulp.