Damascus Station

by Unknown

  “I got him in the ass, Z,” Procter said as she edged back into the Station. “Right in the butt. You hold on, dear.”

  A rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the ruined bathroom outside the Station. Procter turned away from the heat, then stood tall, all five feet of her.

  In Arabic she yelled that she had seen her own demise, and this was not it.

  That she, Artemis Aphrodite Procter, was the Angel of Death.

  54

  SAM DID NOT REMEMBER MUCH OF THE DRIVE TO THE embassy except that Ali sat next to him in the backseat barking orders to his men over a radio. Sam could no longer feel his foot, and his vision was still wobbly and blurred: shapes and colors flocked in orbiting dots, occasionally punctured by fleeting moments of clarity soon obscured as the fog rolled back in.

  He realized something was wrong when they reached the embassy: shouts in the distance, the choking fumes, Ali’s admonition to wait in the car. Sam couldn’t walk anyway. There was more crackling from the radio and Ali gave orders to a group of his commandos outside the vehicle. In the Security Office basement, Ali had explained that his second display of goodwill would be safe passage to the embassy. And that it would be unwise for anyone but Ali to accompany him.

  Now Sam tried to sit up and look out the window into the sunshine. Which entrance was this? The circle. He saw buses. A crowd. He heard the clatter of machine gun fire inside the embassy compound. Then a shot from a handgun. Nearby, in the circle. More yelling. Is this how it ends? Picked apart by a mob outside the embassy. He tried to sit up, but he couldn’t move his foot, couldn’t get the leverage. Another shot from a handgun, closer this time.

  A raised voice. Gunfire. More shouting.

  Ali opened the door. Sam felt pressure on his shoulder, then multiple hands underneath his arms, lifting him out of his seat. Someone—maybe the doctor? Sam whiffed the familiar smell of ammonia—jabbed a needle into his side. Sharp at first, then nice and warm in his veins. He was moving, they were carrying him inside. He could see the ground underneath, stones and gravel and pavement in motion. Then wood-patterned floors raced by. He craned his head to the left and saw Ali. Sam had the sensation of falling through an abyss, like in a fever dream. He wanted the warm sun on his face. He wanted Mariam here.

  He closed his eyes to imagine hers. When he opened them, a shape stood over him. Gradually, he made out the black frazzle of hair jutting out wildly, the shape clutching a stick or a gun or something. He tried to move but could not.

  The shape knelt down and spoke to him.

  “Jaggers. About time you showed.”

  55

  SIX WEEKS LATER

  The night-vision camera slowly focused on a Pajero parked up on the sidewalk. The street was empty, save for a young couple out for an evening stroll.

  The man operating the camera coughed, rocking the lens. He turned it back to the dirty stone building. Four guards doused in harsh sodium light milled around a gatehouse, laughing. “Wonder if he’s spending the night,” someone said. Another cough from the quiet camera operator.

  A beep. “This is Gartner from the Office of General Counsel. Still waiting?”

  “Yep. Slumber party in there,” Procter said.

  “Shut up, Procter,” said Bradley.

  “We’ve just checked MOLLY again using the video collection from last week and the photo library. Algorithm working now. Don’t know why she was glitchy earlier.”

  “Copy.”

  The camera focused on the Security Office’s entrance.

  “Someone’s coming out,” the camera operator said. The video feed focused on a figure emerging from the entrance.

  THE WEEKS SINCE THE DESTRUCTION of the U.S. Embassy had sent Langley into full crisis tilt. The Director established a Syria task force and pulled in, Sam had heard, more than two hundred analysts, operators, techies, linguists, and targeters. The loss of the Station in Damascus midwifed the creation of a Syria-focused CIA cell in Amman with Procter in command. While recuperating from the operation on his foot in Germany, Sam had heard through the CIA rumor mill that Procter’s team had been charged with finding the parties responsible for the mayhem in Damascus. Bradley provided the grim accounting to Sam during a clipped phone call. Fourteen Americans were dead, including six Marines, the Defense attaché, and seven State Department officials. Twelve Syrian Foreign Service Nationals had also perished. Another twenty-six Americans were hospitalized across Landstuhl, including four CIA officers, Zelda among them. It was, Sam realized as he did the mental math, the deadliest day for America’s overseas presence since the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut back in ’83. “Do we know yet who led the attack?” Sam had asked.

  Bradley, he could tell, did not want to talk. Sam heard the phone shift between Bradley’s ears. The old operator coughed. Sam let the silence sit.

  “The psychopathic fuck who killed Val,” Bradley finally said. “General Basil Mahkluf. He scalped a few of our people during the embassy overrun. Procter says he was also the one who shot Zelda. We’re working to find the bastard. All I can say for now, you get it.”

  Bradley coughed again. And it was then, in that strained second of silence before Bradley graciously changed the subject, that Sam’s brain finally began to process the deep hole he was now in.

  In the end, they gave him a week to stew in the hospital at Landstuhl before the bureaucratic onslaught began. Bradley greeted him fresh off the air bridge, offering a furnished apartment in Tysons Corner for the next few months. He also explained that Sam had been placed on administrative leave, all accesses temporarily forfeited. Ed was not angry, just sad, as if he had to put down a beloved dog who’d bitten the neighbor kid.

  The investigators built an exhaustive case file for the Peer Review Board hearing—unscheduled, looming—at which a panel of Agency brass would decide his fate. Best-case: cleared of counterintelligence concerns and strapped to a desk at Langley for six to twenty-four months. Worst-case: severed from the service, blue badge confiscated, security clearance forfeited, pack your box and prepare for the crushing boredom of civilian life.

  The weeks at Langley were unpleasant. Four psychological exams. Daily check-ins with the OMS medical team. Three formal physicals. A raucous three-day interview with a rotating team of increasingly rabid interrogators bent on constructing an exhaustive chronology of his last week in Damascus. He surrendered every communications device he owned, personal and professional. They questioned him about every SDR. They offered a deep-tissue massage of every cable and asset assessment he’d drafted since Cairo.

  The polygraphs were extensions of the myriad “interviews” and interrogations. They were aggressive, loud, coercive. But to each gaggle of cement-eyed security investigators he offered the same story: the truth. The polygraphers framed each question so he could answer with a simple yes or no. They asked for intimate, graphic, chronological detail about his romantic liaisons with Mariam. He told them everything. (“Did you have a sexual relationship with your asset, Mariam Haddad, in France, Damascus, and Italy?”) They asked for the circumstances of his release from Ali’s custody and subsequent appearance at the shattered embassy. (“Did you provide classified information to General Ali Hassan beyond the name, drop sites, and safe houses already specified?”) They asked about the triple homicide. (“Did Mariam Haddad tell you that she arrived outside the embassy to provide you with intelligence outside her channel with Ali Hassan?” “Did Mariam Haddad kill the three militia?”)

  Two weeks in, Zelda died.

  She’d been on life support in Landstuhl. CIA airlifted her back to D.C. for the funeral and Counterintelligence graciously paused the bureaucratic beatings to let Sam attend. Bradley and Procter were there. Sam remembered the analyst hopping into the Chief’s car at Damascus International, full of energy, ready to unroll the Palace procurement network. Nausea lingered as he thought of the cable in which he and Procter had prolonged Zelda’s TDY. “STATION REQUESTS THREE-MONTH EXTENSION TO SUPPORT ONGOING,
CRITICAL INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS.” Antiseptic garbage. He had helped kill her. And Val.

  He tried to catch Procter after the service, but the Chief left before he could pull her aside.

  That night, Bradley invited Sam to dinner at his farmhouse. “First dinner at home in three weeks and I’m choosing to spend it with you, like a jackass,” Bradley said. Angela helped him out of Ed’s car, gave him a teary bear hug, grilled burgers, and left them with a six-pack of Coors on the porch. They watched late summer light streak across the Blue Ridge Mountains and finished the first round in silence.

  Bradley cracked open his second beer and took a sip. Sam thought Ed looked about four years older than he had before Damascus. “This conversation did not happen, understand? Security will toast my ass if they find out.”

  Sam gulped down the remnant of his first beer and nodded.

  “No word from ATHENA. Not a peep since Ali’s basement. There is, however, growing agreement that ATHENA did not play us, at least not for long. Story on her cousin was corroborated by some stolen documents. They let her out, by the way.”

  Sam gave a thin smile at the news, then turned to Bradley, the father he had failed. Or betrayed. He didn’t know how to think about it, exactly, but it didn’t matter. He was ashamed. “I’m sorry, Ed. I screwed up with her. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  Bradley nodded. “I can. I have. I’m not going to flog you for it. You’ve made your confession. You’ve owned the mistake.”

  Sam reached down into the cooler for his second beer. He winced, gasping lightly, and sat back up as he cracked it open.

  They again drank in silence as the sun dipped below the ridgeline.

  “The covcom system we provided ATHENA continues to puzzle,” Bradley said. “NRO scrubbed the satellite platform and found something odd, like malware. Details are sketchy, but we’ve transitioned all assets and are watching it closely. It’s possible Ali and the Iranian techies stole a few weeks of covcom traffic. Counterintelligence is red-teaming the information to figure out if they’ll be able to determine anyone’s identity from the traffic. We may need to exfil a few if we think they’ve been burned.”

  “How many assets on the platform?”

  “Four. Not including ATHENA.”

  “A mess,” Sam mumbled.

  “Yep. I wish she had told you in Italy. We could have gotten her out.”

  Sam set down the can and placed his forehead in his hands. Bradley put a hand on his back. They again sat in silence. After a few minutes Sam lifted his head to stare at the mountains. Bradley held his shoulder and took another sip of beer.

  “PRB probably scheduled around the holidays. Polys have gone well, but there will be more. All I can say about that piece, you get it. I think they’ll drop the counterintelligence angle. They don’t think you are lying, which bodes well for your ability to remain in the service. I’ve seen enough PRB proceedings to know that there is always a ledger. On the one hand, they have your romantic indiscretion with an asset and her subsequent decision to provide a covcom device to a hostile service. On the other, they have her confession, subsequent truthfulness and cooperation, and your collective actions in Damascus on the eighteenth and nineteenth of July.”

  Bradley polished off his beer and tossed the can. “Here is how I see it, by the way. Your management of the ATHENA case led to a U.S. military operation that stopped a devastating attack. You two saved thousands of lives. That’s going to be crystal clear to the PRB. Black-and-white. A jewel in your crown. No, the controversy will be the decision to turn yourself in. And of course your relationship with her. Did that put you and our assets in more danger and create counterintelligence headaches because maybe you don’t remember everything you said to Ali?”

  “If I’d fled and Mariam had turned in Atiyah, Ali never would have bought her story about the Wadi Barada intel. They would have dug and tortured until she admitted everything.”

  Bradley nodded. “I hear you. I have no idea how the PRB is going to go, though.”

  “You’ve seen a lot of these, though. What’s your gut?”

  “Two-year probationary period at Headquarters. But I’m probably fifty-fifty on that.”

  “What’s the other side of the coin?”

  “They fire you.”

  Sam nodded, finished his second beer in a long gulp, and registered that he did not care, as long as Mariam made it out alive.

  “There is one more thing. Wait here.” Bradley walked inside, padding downstairs to the Box. He returned with a scrap of paper and sat. Bradley cracked open another beer, rubbed a bristly chin, and started to speak before abruptly stopping, as if reconsidering the wisdom of what he was about to say. Or saying anything at all.

  “You’re on administrative leave, so this is of course not kosher,” he said. “But fuck it. I need your help.” He held out his hand, offering a folded piece of paper.

  Sam took the paper, turned it over, and inhaled the scent of smoke and ash. He’d been on a thick sedative drip in Ali’s basement prison the last time he’d seen it. It made him sick to see it again.

  Bradley’s mouth upturned in a wry smile. “You may not remember, but Ali slipped this into the videotape he passed you before he returned you to the embassy. The video, by the way, confirms his story. General Basil Mahkluf, under the watchful eye of the recently deceased Rustum Hassan, murdered Val and Marwan Ghazali during an interrogation.” Bradley grimaced and stared at his shoes.

  “What was Ali doing while it happened?”

  “That’s the odd thing. Tape’s not conclusive, but it looks like he tried to stop Basil. His brother, Rustum, got in his way, let Basil slice off Val’s fucking scalp.”

  Sam nodded. “What do you want me to do?” He opened the paper and saw the numbers, recognized it as a Syrian phone number. There was a phrase scrawled in Arabic. He folded it up.

  “We do not yet have a lethal finding to kill Basil, but I expect we will within the week,” Bradley said. “He’s drenched in blood. He’s responsible for the deaths of fifteen Americans, including Zelda and Val. But here’s the problem. I can’t find him.”

  “POTUS doesn’t want to bomb Damascus again?”

  “Basil’s gone dark. No comms, no visits to the office, abandoned his villa. He’s a ghost. We wouldn’t even know where to bomb.”

  “I would hide, too, if I’d murdered a bunch of Americans,” Sam said.

  “Look, at this point you know Ali better than anyone in the U.S. government.”

  “And you want to know if I think he’ll help us find Basil.”

  “Yes. What’s your take? You said Ali was ambivalent about the regime. Hell, he passed you a videotape that put a giant target on Basil’s back.”

  Sam grunted. “Ali told me he wanted consideration from our government when future bombing targets are chosen.”

  “Do you think he would help us to get that consideration? If you make the ask?”

  Ali. Sam looked down at his limp foot, thought of the electricity frying him as Ali dug for a name. Then he remembered Ali’s smile that night with Zelda at the restaurant. Decent, halfway kind. Sam recalled Ali’s words about the regime before releasing him, the hate flushing his eyes as he had spoken Basil Mahkluf’s name. “Ali’s a complicated guy,” was all Sam could mumble.

  “That he is,” Ed said with a glance at Sam’s foot. Mosquitoes dive-bombed the porchlights while Bradley waited for him to continue.

  “Did you trace the number on this paper?” Sam asked.

  “Yes. It’s Ali’s office.”

  “What about my admin leave? My access is gone.”

  “I want you to work the op with Procter, administrative leave be damned. Procter is fine with it. We won’t tell anyone else. I’ll handle restoring your access. Temporarily, of course. You’d start from Langley, then close it out in Procter’s new shop in Amman. That is, assuming POTUS signs a new finding.” Bradley’s eyes veered back to the foot.

  “Ed, I appreciate that and all, b
ut please, for god’s sake, stop looking at the damn hoof. I’ll be fine. I would love nothing more than to finish this one. I’m in.” Sam finished his third beer, crushed the can, and threw Bradley a stony stare. He wanted the op, but doubted it would help him find Mariam. The woman he loved more than anything had disappeared into the heart of Damascus: Dead, captured, or silent. Last seen on a gurney with a knife in her ribs. And, as always when this image floated through his mind, a vacuum followed behind, wrenching him from his own body.

  He let it pass. “When do I start?” he asked.

  SAM AND PROCTER SETTLED INTO the operational planning like an old married couple after a fight: they ignored his indiscretions, assumed their old roles, and marched on, chins up. Sam brought up Mariam once, but Procter, reading his hangdog expression even over the videoconference from Amman, had thrust a tiny pixilated hand toward the screen. As she lowered it, Sam saw the angry eyes and redirected their collective attention to a recent run of satellite imagery of the Security Office, noting that the number of cars parked on the adjacent street had increased considerably in recent weeks. Procter nodded and took a generous bite of what appeared to be a Payday bar (king-sized). “Next photo,” she said.

  So he let it drop.

  The most pressing operational challenge was the White House and Seventh Floor’s continued insistence that the CIA authenticate the target’s identity with MOLLY, the algorithm, and Susan, the facial recognition specialist. The CIA had no one left in Damascus. Who to run the cameras? On this front there was spirited debate among the operational team, culminating in a volley of cable traffic in which Procter lobbed a response to Sam’s half-serious suggestion that they test the MOLLY software on board a surveillance drone. Procter cabled back a one-paragraph response judging Sam’s idea to be operational dogshit. Sam interpreted the vulgarity as Procter’s twisted form of forgiveness. For her enemies, she offered only silence.