by Unknown
Assad’s eyes flitted between the brothers.
Ali took a chance and continued. “What this spy has passed to the Americans, if true, is very sensitive. If I may ask, though, what is the operational timeline for the compartment mentioned in the CIA report? How much time do we have?”
“How much time do you need, Rustum?” Assad asked.
Rustum simmered. “A month would be ideal. The exposure of Jableh has shut down production. It is now just a matter of logistics. I cannot understand, though, Mr. President, why we do not just snatch the American and throttle the information from his head.”
Ali interjected, “It would be out of bounds,” instantly regretting the words as they left his mouth.
“Out of bounds?” Rustum’s voice quavered and he now shouted. “Are you insane? The CIA is shipping weapons to the irhabiun, the terrorists, that kill my soldiers every day. You sit in your office and play cop while my men are slaughtered. Your wife and your twin boys are safe in their apartment because I don’t play by the rules, I kill these savages however I can, whenever I can, wherever I can!” He was screaming now, spittle flying toward Ali. “I kill their elderly and their children and their livestock, and those that I let live are forced to eat grass to survive. I drop barrel bombs on them, launch missiles, and will gas them. Our government is still standing because I do what is necessary to live!”
Basil, expressionless during the monologue, stared at Ali’s scalp with the dispassionate interest of a livestock inspector.
“Enough,” Assad yelled. “Ali, you have a month to find the spy. If we don’t have the traitor by then, we arrest the American. I approve everything else in your memo.” Assad stood. The meeting was over.
“Mr. President, may I ask for more details on the operation?” Ali asked, risking the President’s irritation as he had already stood. “It will help my hunt for the spy.”
Rustum’s jaw was clenched in rage.
“The Americans have said that there will be consequences if gas is used,” Ali continued. “Obviously, none of us know what this foolishness really means. In fact, I bet the American President does not, either. If the SVR report is accurate, we’ve already crossed this red line without trouble, but . . .” He trailed off.
Rustum smiled and exhaled through his nose. Assad nodded at him.
“Little brother,” he said, emphasizing the first word. “We are going to conduct a counterattack against the rebels. We will gas their villages, their neighborhoods, their tunnel systems. We will win the war in a few months. It will be our salvation.”
Salvation. At that word the Palace walls crumbled in an avalanche around him and he was young again, a police investigator in Latakia, the twins in Layla’s belly.
And the phone has rung for you and you find the three crosses fashioned on telephone poles, three Alawi men crucified, hands and feet split open with railroad spikes in a mimicry of the Christian Bible. Blood at the base of each pole. And when you found the killer, he said he wanted to set Syria on fire, to turn the squares into butcher’s blocks and the buildings into burning coffins, to usher in the end of our world. That will be our salvation, he said.
“And Ali,” the President said, interrupting the memory as he furrowed his brows. “Your brother is correct that your plan to entrap the spy is very elegant. Just be careful, particularly with your operation against the American. There is potential for blowback and subterfuge, as you well know. I will call Putin and ask for his men.”
“Certainly, Mr. President,” Ali said.
Rustum huffed out, Basil behind, dishwater eyes reviewing Ali once more as he left. Ali touched his neck, scar throbbing. Before entering his car, he lit a Marlboro. He noticed with approval that his hands were not shaking.
33
BOUTHAINA WAS TEN YEARS YOUNGER THAN RUSTUM and, like him, lubricated by power. The regime’s gladiatorial combat was the couple’s primary topic of conversation and thunderclap aphrodisiac. They both typically enjoyed discussing their enemies, but Rustum that night had been too embarrassed to even discuss the meeting with Ali and the President. So he’d let Bouthaina go on the warpath about Jamil Atiyah, explaining how she planned to squeeze the old man by the balls. Rustum offered to have Basil surveil Atiyah to see what additional misdeeds could be discovered. This had frustrated Bouthaina. She wanted to overcome Atiyah herself and, further, did not want to take the risk. “Two sadists prowling around each other, one a pedophile, the other nicknamed for his scalp harvesting? No, habibi¸ no, thank you. Keep your Basil on his leash. I will handle Atiyah.”
An angry monologue ensued that aroused him, and when she got up to open a second bottle of wine, he had actually picked her up and thrown her onto the bed. It had been a pleasant distraction from Ali’s victory at the Palace earlier in the day.
Rustum was not introspective, but even he, in the comedown of morning, could examine his expansive gut, could finger the hair that had sprouted in his ears, and wonder how Bouthaina could tolerate such sloppiness. He scratched his hairy chest and ran his eyes over Bouthaina’s body, her stomach still flat and her face taut and bronzed. Rustum had paid for the plastic surgery. It had been a good investment.
He got up from bed, put on a robe, and walked into his office. The palatial room had for its throne a walnut desk fabricated from fragments of an ancient noria, a water wheel, from the Orontes River in Hama. He sat down and began reviewing reports from the mukhabarat guards at the U.S. Embassy. When he had finished the first few pages, he leaned back and looked at the desk as he sipped his tea. The inscription on the piece of wood fashioned into the right leg indicated that this noria had been built in 1361 to supply water to the city’s Grand Mosque. There was a small groove nearby that reminded him of the violent winter of 1982, during the last civil war, when he had been a young lieutenant. That day a rebel detachment, the Muslim Brothers, the Ikhwan, had holed up in an apartment directly behind the noria. Their sniper fire claimed ten soldiers before his commander, the old President’s brother, had ordered Rustum’s platoon to take the building. They fought through the morning, inching closer, until both sides volleyed through the wheel, fragments splintering through the air.
By the time they reached the apartment, Rustum had already killed seventeen Ikhwan. Inside, he notched six more, including the women and children, inexplicably still huddling with the fighters. When they had taken the apartment, he and Basil smoked cigarettes before harvesting the noria’s wreckage from the pool of shell casings. Then they took one Ikhwan scalp for each of their thirty-two dead comrades, cutting and bagging deep into the night. That night Rustum had regained a brother in Basil. A replacement for the one who’d murdered his father and two mothers.
Rustum put his right hand on the top of the desk and gently ran his fingers over the wood. Finally, he found the name he wanted on the fifth page of the report, the one with the pictures of every U.S. official working in the embassy.
He picked up the phone.
“Get me Basil,” Rustum said to another aide.
Rustum soon heard Basil’s familiar scratch, the voice of a man whose trachea had been ripped by shell fragments in Hama, three days after they’d gathered the noria wood.
“I have a job for some of your boys. Not the Guard. The Defense Committees, the militia. Keep it unofficial. I want to send a message to the Americans. A mob to cause chaos at their embassy for a few hours. No violence.”
Basil grunted affirmingly.
Remembering Basil’s eyes as he scalped one of the Ikhwan alive in that apartment, Rustum decided to be more specific with his blood brother.
“No Americans die, Basil. No accidents. Understood?”
“Yes, Commander.”
“Use your best men.”
“How soon?”
“As soon as possible.”
SAM WAS WALKING INTO PROCTER’S office when one of the State Diplomatic Security officers called the Chief and said there was a demonstration outside. A couple hundred people, all waving pro
-Assad banners and the presidential portrait like zealots. “Did you say buses?” Procter said. “What are the mukhabarat goons outside doing? Nothing? Figured. Okay, I’m coming up.” She emerged from her office and began barking at the Station officers. “We’re in Destruction Phase One. We have exactly two minutes to shred all the paper.”
Phase 1 was based on the time it would take for a team of hostiles to breach the perimeter and reach the Station. Sam thought it would be more like three minutes here, but Procter was a stickler.
Procter snapped at the Station support officer to turn on the acid-boosted shredders, capable of crunching through hard drives and up to fifty pages of classified material in a single bite. A commo tech hustled over with a large stack of technical manuals—inexplicably printed—and began tossing them into the shredders as if feeding a wood chipper.
“We’re not in Destruction Phase Two”—electronic media—“but remove all your hard drives and put them in the safe as a precaution.”
The Station kept a small armory of M4 carbines, tactical shotguns, and Beretta pistols in case, as Procter liked to say, things got spicy (Destruction Phase 3—personnel exfil and officer self-defense). “I’m headed upstairs and will be back in a sec—no one touch the fucking weapons!”
“Should you take one, Chief?” Zelda asked.
“Oh, Z,” Procter said, shaking her head. “Sweet, sweet Z.” She blew the analyst a kiss and marched off.
Sam and Zelda removed their hard drives and put them in the safe. Then he motioned toward the door. She nodded.
Sam closed the Station’s vault door behind them. As they climbed the steps to the chancery’s second floor, he began to register the chants and screams of the mob outside.
Zelda did not look well. Sam pulled alongside her and explained: “No guns in a situation like this. If we killed anyone, the mob would go nuts. And even with our weapons we’d eventually be overrun. We’d have another Tehran on our hands.”
At the second floor they punched the code and entered. The offices and cubicles for the State officers had emptied. Everyone was at the windows, scanning the scene in the circle below.
The mob began hurling garbage onto the compound. A tomato slumped into the glass. One of the State Political officers jumped back from the window, startled. A brownish head of lettuce was next. Soon a volley of old fruit and vegetables pummeled the windows like a hailstorm. A rancid smell wafted through the chancery.
The ambassador grimaced at the window. He had recently drawn the regime’s ire by making an unauthorized trip to join a protest in Hama. The ambassador, like Sam and Procter, spoke Arabic fluently, so he knew that the mob had begun a chant calling him a dog. Procter smiled.
One of the Diplomatic Security officers pointed to the fence around the embassy. “That is a climb-resistant fence. Top-of-the-line.”
“So it just resists the climbing, puts up a good fight? Perfect,” Procter said, her head bobbing around the sludge-flocked window for a clean view of the street.
Sam saw two men start climbing the fence. Several Marines spilled into the courtyard, urging the climbers to stop. They kept coming. Then another jumped onto the fence. Then another.
Sam noticed that one of the climbers carried a Syrian flag. Zelda shuffled toward him. “They aren’t going to come in the building, are they?”
Sam shook his head. “Don’t think so. See that flag? They’re just sending in a few people to take down ours. If they wanted to storm the embassy they’d send more in.”
All four men were in the courtyard. They began making obscene gestures toward the Americans upstairs.
“The fence didn’t resist very well,” Procter said.
No one else tried to climb and the Marines lost the argument and shuffled inside. A crowbar was catapulted over the fence to one of the men. They began climbing the chancery building.
One reached the roof and shimmied up the flagpole, pulling the American flag down and replacing it with that of the Syrian Arab Republic. He held up the stars and stripes, victorious, to a crescendo of supportive hoots from the mob. Then he shoved it down his pants.
“The guy with the crowbar is up on the roof now,” one of the State Department political officers said.
The Syrian’s position on the roof allowed him to look at the Americans across a narrow courtyard. He made more obscene gestures, then started smashing the air conditioner, stopping once or twice to whoop toward the mob in the street. Sam heard the fans shut off.
“That shabiha shithead,” Procter said. “It’s a hundred and five degrees out.”
PART IV
Hunted
34
ALI WATCHED THE HEAT RISE OFF THE TARMAC asphalt at Mezzeh Military Airport on the western outskirts of Damascus. He smoked a Marlboro, but the heat had burned away any of the pleasure of it. He checked his watch. The band was soaked in sweat. Half past twelve. The Russian team should be arriving any moment. Kanaan removed his suit jacket and slung it over his shoulder. “Maybe we wait inside, boss?” Kanaan said.
Ali shook his head and scanned the sky. “No. We greet them personally.” He pulled his sunglasses lower on his nose for an unobstructed view as a metal glint appeared in the sky.
Ali stubbed out the cigarette as the cargo plane cut through the clouds, and lit another as it landed. “Here we go,” he said to Kanaan. The taxiing plane carried a team of twelve officers of the SVR and the Federal Security Service, the FSB, Russia’s internal security service. All had experience operating against the CIA in either Moscow or Washington. The Russians, under the command of an SVR general named Volkov, would partner with Ali to track and entrap CIA officer Samuel Joseph. Ali held a hand over his face to shield the sun as the plane’s turboprops stopped whirring and the cargo bay opened.
Volkov—Ali recognized him from the mukhabarat files—was the first to descend the ramp into the stifling heat. His men shuffled behind, dragging large crates of equipment from the belly of the plane. Volkov wore aviator glasses and a brown bomber jacket. Ali, who had quickly wiped his sweaty hand on his pants when he saw the man approach, now extended it and shook Volkov’s mallet hand. “Welcome to Syria, General,” Ali said in English.
“It is a pleasure to be here on such important business,” Volkov replied, then turned and gestured toward his men, who were wheeling boxes and crates from the aircraft.
“Only half is vodka,” Volkov said. He laughed, as did Ali.
A surveillance van drove down out of the plane onto the tarmac. Then more crates, followed by two more surveillance vans.
“We are going to up-fuck this American,” Volkov said, relishing his loose command of vulgar English. “I’ve done two tours in Washington working against them. This will be a great honor.”
“We will track him together,” Ali said, already liking this Russian.
Another van emerged from the plane.
“Where are we going to put all of this stuff?” Kanaan asked Ali in Arabic.
KANAAN TOOK THE LOSS OF his offices better than Ali expected. By late afternoon, the Russian surveillance gurus had settled in and had wasted no time in getting to work.
They established a command center decked out with maps, real-time video and audio feeds, pictures of Samuel Joseph and his known or suspected CIA associates.
“It looks like we’re going to get drunk and kill the American,” Ali had joked to Volkov, pointing to the crates of vodka and the omnipresent photos of the CIA officer. “Not a bad idea, General,” the Russian said without any hint of jest. “Not a bad idea.”
Together, the teams traced Samuel’s known routes through Damascus. The Russians walked them with Ali and his men to understand how Samuel Joseph thought about the street. Though the rest of his team opted for short sleeves, Volkov continued to wear his leather jacket in the midsummer heat.
They monitored Samuel’s phone and Skype calls and one of Kanaan’s men broke into his apartment to implant listening devices. The report said that the apartment was sparsel
y furnished except for the refrigerator, which was stocked with an ample supply of smuggled Coors Light.
They organized into seven teams—four Russian, three Syrian—that could operate in cars, on foot, in fixed positions.
The Russians coached them on the particulars of CIA denied-area operations: how the Americans operated in Moscow, how they behaved on the street, the mechanics of CIA SDRs. (“They are long, General, up to fifteen hours in some cases. Exhausting to watch.”)
The Russians showed surveillance footage from Moscow. They ran the Syrians through the surveillance detection and countersurveillance training provided to fresh SVR and FSB recruits. Kanaan took notes like the over-eager student he was.
They drilled. One of the Russians, an SVR operations officer, role-played as Samuel in these simulations. They watched as he tried to shake them through Damascus or convince them he was, as the CIA said, “black.” In the beginning, he won. But soon they were sticking him, making the correct assessments, watching him role-play at a safe house, video feeds running, monitoring the exits and entrances to spot his asset when the fake meeting ended.
They followed Samuel every moment of the day. Volkov knew how to keep watch while stretching the distance between the target and their teams. He had an inspired taste for where to place the fixed positions. His attention to detail never seemed to flag—despite the fact that he drank vodka like water.
Over cigarettes and vodka—Ali was trying to cultivate a taste, or at the very least a stomach for the stuff—Ali told Volkov about the plan he had proposed to Assad to entrap Samuel Joseph and find another spy.