The Mulberry Bush

by Charles McCarry

  7

  Two weeks after my meeting with Amzi in the Bavarian Alps I found myself walking in blistering midday heat down a narrow street in Sana’a as the dhuhr prayer was being called from the minarets. The sun was a blister on a pallid sky. The street was crowded, but no one paid any particular attention to me. My coloring is dark, made darker by the sun, and my face, thanks to the nose, could be mistaken for one of the many typical ones seen in the Near East. I had lived in Islam long enough to have acquired the local gestures and walk, and I spoke Arabic well enough to be mistaken for someone who had learned it at his mother’s knee.

  I was being followed by a tall Arab in Western clothes. His reflection, which I glimpsed in shop windows, was unthreatening. The man’s posture was not the usual one for this part of the world. He carried himself like an American, so I decided to consider the possibility that he probably was the station type I had come to Yemen to meet and introduce to a local asset. This was a risky supposition. He could just as well have been an assassin who had traveled all the way from Dearborn or Los Angeles or New Jersey to wage jihad and had been ordered to demonstrate his sincerity by murdering an American on his lunch hour along with twenty other good Muslim souls who had never done anyone harm and just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  In the next shop window—there weren’t many of those in this neighborhood—I watched my shadow take a cell phone out of his pocket and punch a single key. My own phone rang. This wasn’t part of the contact plan I had made with the Headquarters man who set up this meeting, but the American voice on the line was the same.

  He said, “Hey, how’d the game come out last night?”

  I replied, “Five–four Yankees. Walk-off double by Texeira.”

  The voice said, “Great. So let’s get together.”

  This was shoddy tradecraft. Foreigner places call. Second foreigner, who is fifty feet away, answers on the first ring. Both speak English into their phones. At the next corner I crossed the street and plunged into a knot of jostling Yemenis. As a centipede in dishdasha they plunged into the seething traffic. I went with them. Horns blared, curses were shouted, fists were shaken. The tall Arab elbowed his way to me and passed me a canvas shopping bag containing, among other items, the carbon-black, one-of-a-kind snub-nosed .45-caliber revolver I pouched from station to station.

  My firearms instructor at Moonshine Manor had sworn by the good old reliable .45: “Shoot a man five times in the chest with a nine-millimeter popgun and the bullet goes right through him and he keeps on coming. Fire one .45 slug into his big toe and he’s immobilized by pain and shock.” He had recommended the master gunsmith in Tennessee who built my .45 to order.

  In the shopping bag were other essentials: spare loads of ammunition, a first aid kit, and aerosol cans of pepper spray and wasp and hornet killer that could project a stream of poison that would blind and suffocate a human being at a distance of fifteen feet. Also an envelope stuffed with euros for the asset I was on my way to meet.

  The asset, who was barely old enough to shave, awaited me in a darkened house at the end of a blind alley. The alley was the only way in—and more importantly, the only way out. We had met here before, a foolhardy risk I countenanced because the asset was an exceptionally good source, and because he said he felt safe here as nowhere else. The empty house had belonged to his late grandparents. No one in his cell but he knew it existed. As a child he had spent happy hours playing in the streets. He knew the neighborhood’s secret shortcuts, its good hiding places.

  He opened the door when I knocked in a certain sequence known only to him and me and shouted in Arabic, It’s me, Aashiq Muhammad, which means “adorer of the Prophet.” The single room was small and shadowy. It had no windows. A weak lightbulb hung on a frayed wire from the ceiling. On the floor lay a rumpled sleeping pallet and two cushions to sit upon, and between them a low table with a bottle of water. On a shelf stood a small-screen television set tuned at maximum volume to Al Jazeera. The usual anti-U.S. slogans were painted in Arabic script on one of the whitewashed walls. Against the opposite wall stood an electric hot plate for cooking, a sink with a dripping cold-water tap and beneath it, the necessary bucket, covered with a towel.

  My host was a young man I called Faraj. He was a member of a terrorist cell composed of two other postadolescents and a slightly older man. Though in theory everyone in the cell was equal, the grown-up was actually in charge. Until a few months before, when I found Faraj through his ex-girlfriend, he had had three cousins in the cell. Now there were only two. The third and youngest one had been turned into a suicide bomber by a stern jihadist introduced by the older terrorist.

  The jihadist had assured him that he would be made whole again by an angel after he blew himself up and would be awakened from death by houris he could pleasure without interruption for eternity, one after another or all at once. They would turn back into innocent virgins, hymens mended, ready for a new deflowering, each time he used them. The absurdity, the blasphemous cynicism of it, broke the spell of jihad for Faraj.

  After greetings that involved the usual references to Allah and his Prophet—for the purposes of our relationship Faraj thought or pretended to think I was a Muslim, though I had never told him any such thing—we sat down on the cushions. As I had been advised to do at Moonshine Manor, I took the cushion that put my back to the wall. Faraj didn’t like having his back to the door, but I was the one with the euros, so he sat where I asked him to sit. He leaned closer and because the television was blaring, delivered his report into my ear. His hot breath, heavy with moisture, was unpleasant.

  He had something important to tell me: Faraj and his surviving cousins and another boy who had just joined the cell had been ordered to carry out simultaneous suicide bombing attacks on the American ambassador and the chief of station. They would pull up beside their cars on motorbikes and blow themselves and the Americans up. Special, very powerful suicide vests were being prepared. There would be nothing left of the Americans or of the boys, either, except in the case of the Muslims, their immortal souls, but the angels would know the boys and the houris would be waiting for them, wet between their legs.

  When was this going to happen?

  Faraj told me the date and hour and location.

  As he uttered the last syllable of the last word of his report, the door was blown open. I had been watching the door while I listened to Faraj, and I was still listening when I saw it expand slightly and for a tiny fraction of a second become plumper, as if it were being pumped full of liquid. Then it leaped off its hinges as if weightless, flew across the tiny room, and smashed into the wall inches from my head. Had I been a little taller, it would have killed me.

  A large man with a curved butcher knife in his hand rushed out of the flash and the dust made by the explosion and cut Faraj’s throat. The knife was sharp, the man was strong. The cut was deep, halfway to the bone, severing the jugular and the carotid artery. Faraj’s strong, young heart pumped out plumes of blood that splashed on the wall and soaked the assassin and me.

  All the time I had been listening to Faraj I had been holding the .45 in my hand inside the shopping bag. Now I lifted it, shopping bag and all, and because the man with the knife was no threat to me for the moment, shot the first man who followed him through the space where the door used to be. The .45-caliber hollow-point round hit this fellow in the center of the forehead. His skull exploded. Blood and brains splashed into the face of the man behind him, who was pointing an AK-47 at me and screaming curses. He looked a little like Faraj and I thought, That must be one of the cousins and shot him twice in the chest. The impact knocked him over backward.

  By now the man with the knife had cut Faraj’s neck all the way to the spine and was trying to twist off the head. The sound of the shots—a .45 makes a lot of noise when it goes off in a confined space—woke this psychopath from the ecstasy in which he appeared to be lost. His eyes fastened onto me. He let go of Faraj’s head, which fell
onto the dead man’s chest where, attached by a length of neck bone and a strip of skin, it dangled upside down, mouth agape and tongue hanging out, eyes staring, as if taking one last look at the world. Could it be that Faraj’s brain might not yet be dead and he could still see me? In my state of shock, I thought this was possible.

  His murderer uttered a roar and lifted his knife. I shot him in the left eye—I could hardly miss because it was no more than twelve inches away. Through all this I had remained sitting on the floor. He fell on top of me. His dead weight pinned me against the wall. The Arabic graffiti, like everything else in the room, were splashed with gore. I wriggled free, subduing panic but only just. I reloaded the .45 without knowing I was doing this. I did not fear for my life. There are worse things than sudden death. Whoever came through the door, and there would be more than one attacker, would not kill me. Instead, if I didn’t kill them first, they would capture me and torture me until I told them lies they were willing to believe and the time came to decapitate me on camera.

  No one came through the door. I didn’t expect this state of things to endure. I could not go into the alley covered in blood. With my cell phone, as robotically as I had reloaded the .45, I took photographs of myself, of the shopping bag and its contents, of the corpses, of the knife used by Faraj’s executioner, of the terrorists’ weapons, of the blood-splashed walls, of the jagged hole in the wall where the door used to be. I washed the blood off my face and rinsed my hair under the tap and soaked and wrung out the black T-shirt I had been wearing until the rinse water was no longer pink, then put it back on.

  I walked out into the teeming street. No one followed me. No one gave me a second look. I was breathing as if I had just run the mile, and as I walked I fought to control this. Within minutes my hair and the T-shirt were dried by the sun. It seemed unwise to return to my hotel. I had cash in my pocket and in the shopping bag along with genuine-false credit cards and the Venezuelan passport I was using for this trip. I found a taxi and went to the airport, and with Faraj’s euros bought the last business-class ticket to Zurich and a new shirt with a replica of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe silk-screened on it. In the men’s room I sat in a stall and, using the app supplied by Headquarters, composed and encrypted a text message describing the day’s events. I wiped the .45 clean of blood and my fingerprints, and put it back into the shopping bag with everything else except the euros, then dropped it into the trash can and covered it with used paper towels.

  At the gate, hoping that it would be read in time to warn the ambassador and the chief of station to stay home on the date Faraj had supplied with his final breath, I texted the encrypted message to the number in Chicago.

  Through all this I fought back nausea. As the wheels of the Swissair airbus lifted, I grabbed a vomit bag, but though I heaved and choked, I brought up nothing but the sour taste of what I couldn’t get rid of.

  8

  Amzi Strange said, “You’ve got five years’ worth of unused vacation time and money in the bank, and considering what you’ve been up to, you’ve gotta want to recharge the battery, so why don’t you take some time off? Two months, say.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “To get away from it all.”

  “I’ve been away from it all for five years.”

  “So?”

  “I’m tired of being alone.”

  “You don’t have to be alone. Take a woman along.”

  “I don’t know any women.”

  “Find one when you get where you’re going. You can hire a good-looking hooker in the prime of life anywhere in the world for maybe three hundred a pop, so if you get laid every other day, sixty days would cost you ten grand, max.”

  It was hard not to be amused by this brute.

  I said, “That’s not a low estimate?”

  “Double it. It’s still the price of two months of marriage with five times as much sex, more variety, and a lot less grief.”

  “So what do you and Headquarters get out of that?”

  “Time to think. Like I told you, nobody knows what to do with you.”

  I said, “It’s obvious what to do with me. You know what I can do. Find a way for me to do more of it.”

  “Send you back to the Land of Nod? You’d be dead in a week.”

  “To quote you, Islamists are not the only terrorists in the world. If I can penetrate the jihad, I can penetrate other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Russians. Or whoever except maybe North Koreans. Name it. But as part of the whole. Inside. Not as a singleton.”

  “Why not? Working alone with your ass hanging out is what you’re good at. You just said so yourself.”

  “It’s too limiting. I belong inside and you know it. You’d be remiss if you let me go to waste, and I won’t stand in the corner because you guys are too insular to see what you’ve got and make use of it.”

  Amzi mimed a smile.

  He said, “I’m fucking stunned. Such modesty.”

  I said, “Let me ask you a question. Is the problem that you don’t have a slot for me and can’t invent one, or that somebody doesn’t want the competition?”

  No reply, but I had expected none.

  Amzi said, “Do you speak Russian?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But next week you will?”

  The answer to Amzi’s question was no. I’d have to study and listen a little longer than that. Amzi spoke Russian, and I guessed from the way he spoke English that learning it hadn’t been easy for him. But actually it was easy for me to learn languages. I soaked up strange tongues and remembered them the way other people memorize a Gershwin tune after hearing it once. This ear for gibberish was my only natural aptitude.

  I said, “You’re interested in Russia?”

  “You could say that,” Amzi replied. “Everybody’s interested in the Russians. Fuckers just won’t quit.”

  Amzi’s demeanor changed. He had kidded around long enough. He said, “Are you serious about Russia?”

  “Yes.”

  Amzi glanced at the row of clocks on his office wall that told him what time it was in half a dozen foreign capitals. He waved his hand, as if shooing a fly, and perched his reading glasses on his nose. He picked up a file, put his feet on his desk, and began to read. He paid no further attention to me. I left.

  Despite Amzi’s history with my father, despite his foul mouth and his insulting manner, I found it difficult to dislike this man. His was one of the first names on the short list of people I intended to destroy if he gave me the start I needed, and I felt no guilt or regret about that. However, I could like him in spite of myself and still not forget what he was and what he had done and what he deserved.

  Hate the sin, love the sinner.

  I was given an office whose size befitted my rank, a telephone, a computer, a safe, a burn basket, but no assistant or guide who knew the ropes, so my contact with my fellow spooks was limited. I was as isolated and as different in this hive of spies as I had been in the crowds of shouting Muslims in which I had lately lived. In a way this was an affirmation—you have to be noticed to be ignored. Once in a while someone nodded to me in the cafeteria or gazed at me through the glass walls of my office as if I were a tropical fish. Few ventured to speak to me. I did not hunger for company but I wondered what it all meant. Was this an organized shunning? Was I reliving Father’s last days in this building? I saw him in my mind as I had seen him in our final moment together: the rags, the backpack, the jaunty wave good-bye, the wry half smile on his dirty face.

  I asked Amzi for an explanation.

  He said, “Relax. There’s no fucking conspiracy. You’re a legend, I already told you that, so the troops don’t know whether to genuflect or wash your feet when they run into you in the hallways. Sooner or later they’ll realize what a wonderful person you really are and you’ll have more friends than you need. It would spoil everything if I ordered everybody to be nice to you. Give it time. They’ll wo
rk up their courage and make the moves.”

  I would have felt better if it had been a conspiracy. Apart from Amzi, who was too busy hoodwinking the rest of mankind to spend much time manipulating me, I had no superior between me and Amzi and no subordinates. Therefore I had nothing to do.

  I bought a home study course in Russian and spent most of my days listening to stilted conversations over earphones and repeating what I heard or listening to audiobooks in Russian. At night I watched Russian movies from Netflix. After a month or so I understood about half the dialogue unless there was a lot of slang.

  One day while I was listening to a Chekhov short story with my eyes closed, my telephone rang. When I picked up, a female voice, lifting half an octave as she spoke her name, said, “This is Rosemary?”

  From me, silence. I didn’t remember anybody named Rosemary.

  The voice said, “In Mr. Strange’s office?”

  “Yes?”

  “You are to report to the director’s reception room at zero eight-fifteen tomorrow morning. Mr. Strange will meet you five minutes earlier, outside the door.”

  “Why?”

  “Zero eight-ten, outside the door,” Rosemary said, and hung up.

  I called her back. “Where is the director’s reception room?”

  She gave me directions.

  At 8:10 Amzi appeared and ushered me into the sanctum sanctorum. Half a dozen self-confident men and women including, inevitably, a couple of faces I vaguely remembered from childhood, were bunched up on the large Persian carpet. A bottle of champagne stood in an ice bucket on a side table. Conversation was muted.

  At precisely 8:15, a second door was opened by a short man, not quite a midget. The Director, who looked like the high-powered Wall Street lawyer he used to be and would be again, and then some, after he had served his hitch as a not-so-public servant, strode briskly into the room. He took up a position in front of the flags, and while a photographer took pictures, read a citation in a mellifluous baritone. The short man produced a leather box embossed in gold with the Headquarters seal. The Director removed a medal from the box, shook out the ribbon, and hung it around my neck.