Damascus Station Read online

  Mariam wanted to say: I cannot understand where this rebellion ends, Fatimah. There is no government-in-waiting if Assad leaves. There is only fragmentation and incoherence. That is why I will not join you.

  Instead, she narrowed her eyes and said: “I see, a pitch of your own.”

  They rounded above a small pebbly beach. Topless sunbathers sprawled on the rocks like seals. Fatimah smiled. “I’m always amazed at how peaceful it is here. A war ravages our country, and just across the Mediterranean they sun themselves like little gods. I want Syria to be like this. I suspect you do, too.”

  She wanted to say: I do, okhti, sister. I want this more than anything.

  Mariam said: “Have you reconsidered my offer?”

  Fatimah ignored her. “Why not defect? Join us here in Europe.”

  She wanted to say: Because I am not a coward.

  Mariam said: “Fatimah, you are trying my patience.”

  Fatimah stopped and turned to Mariam. “Arrest my mother if you must, Mariam. But beware: You are midwifing the slaughter. I hope that your soul is prepared.”

  She wanted to say: And you are right. I am not prepared.

  Mariam said: “And you are midwifing jihad, Fatimah.”

  Fatimah stopped at the end of the trail and looked out toward the ocean. “You’ve made your choice, then?”

  Mariam did not answer the question and could not look at Fatimah anymore. She focused on the line where sea met sky. “You have two days to decide. Come home and we will not arrest your mother. If you stay here, I cannot help you.”

  Mariam turned and left in silence. Levantine paranoia in full bloom, she called Bouthaina to provide a full report and to recommend the immediate arrest of Fatimah’s geriatric mother given her ongoing support to enemies of the Syrian Arab Republic, both foreign and domestic. “She is stubborn, I told you,” Bouthaina said. “Hold out for a few more days, see if she comes around.”

  Mariam felt bone-tired as she arrived at her hotel. In her room she lay on the bed, mind racing with Fatimah’s questions and a phone number she should not dial. She got up, stripped to her underwear, and ran through the kicks, punches, and elbow and knee movements Beni had shown her in Paris long ago.

  Mariam then considered the loose threads that she had knit together on the train ride down to Villefranche: his fighting skills, the confidence, the suggestion of following her to the Riviera, the coy questions. She had met dozens of American diplomats. Sam was not one of them.

  Now Mariam realized that she hoped she was right.

  SAM’S FIRST THOUGHT UPON REACHING the safe house was that he’d signed up for the wrong CIA Division. The properties he’d used during his tours in Egypt and Iraq had been dusty, smelly, and typically lacked working plumbing and air-conditioning. At a safe house in Anbar a camel spider had once jumped from a shelf and bit one of his assets on the neck. In Cairo, he’d had to replace an inoperable toilet with an old twelve-gallon paint bucket.

  In this case safe house was a misnomer for a stone chateau in the medieval hilltop village of Èze, twenty minutes east of Villefranche. The town was perched more than one thousand feet above the Riviera’s beaches on an old Roman road. Now it was home to several dozen elderly natives and an equal number of fabulously wealthy Europeans and Americans, keen to sun themselves on the Riviera in privacy.

  Sam found the key, hidden in the flower beds by a Station support asset, and entered the chateau. He turned on the foyer lights. The walls were exposed stone, the furnishings French antiques. He made a mental note to avoid opening bottles on the tables here. There was a terrace with sweeping views of the Côte d’Azur, seven stately bedrooms, and two stocked kitchens, one of which had been for the servants. There were even beers in the fridge. He took an inventory of the food against the list he’d requested in Paris. He opened a beer and walked out onto the terrace, where he texted Elias to confirm the BANDITOs had assumed their watch outside Mariam’s hotel in Villefranche.

  MARIAM LAY ON THE BED watching the fan rotate lazily overhead like a clock counting down to a decision. What are you doing? You can still walk away from this. Get on a train for Paris and fly home. But now, if you call him, well . . .

  She donned a pair of tan espadrilles that laced up the ankles and a knee-length blue-and-white-striped poplin sundress she’d picked up in Paris.

  Then, after ten more minutes of staring at the ceiling, her mouth chalky, she used her room phone to dial the number Sam had provided.

  THE BANDITOS, EATING PIZZA AND holding watch outside the hotel, said she was black, so he picked her up in the rental car. A restaurant in Villefranche would be natural, but he wanted to get her comfortable meeting in discreet locations. The safe house was perfect. He wondered if she would parry, maybe suggest a cozy place in town.

  “I thought we could cook dinner,” Sam said as she hopped into the car and smoothed her dress over her tan legs. As he kissed her cheek, he noticed little sun freckles below her eyes. “What do you think about going back to my villa? Twenty minutes east, in Èze, beautiful place. Little medieval village.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” she said.

  They took the Moyenne Corniche, the Roman road that carved the ridgeline of the cliffs along the sea. The lights of Nice and Villefranche filled the western horizon, and Monaco twinkled to the east.

  “I got word today on my next tour,” he said. “Damascus.”

  She rolled down her window and put her face into the evening breeze until it whipped back her hair. “That is wonderful news, Sam,” she said, still looking out the window. “Maybe we will get to see each other again.”

  “I would like that,” Sam said. He now lowered his window and took in the sea air. “I’ll never get used to this.”

  She smiled and said nothing.

  Inside the chateau, she asked the inevitable question, albeit tactfully, in intentional Arabic so she could be sure of his answer: “How did you find this place?”

  “I had a good weekend in Vegas a few weeks back,” he said. “And found the right local agent.” She ignored the answer, instead stepping into one of the bedrooms to take in the ocean view, now a black wall on the horizon. Sam followed slowly. She knew it was a lie and was tolerating it for now, he thought.

  “What are we going to cook?” she asked, nodding toward the kitchen.

  He smiled. “I thought we could cook spaghetti.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Spaghetti? You?”

  “I’ve got a couple good dishes. This is one.”

  He guided her into the kitchen and laid the ingredients on the counter. He asked her to chop the onions and carrots and celery.

  “You trust me with the knife after . . .” She put a hand on her hip and pointed at the bruise on his forehead with the blade. “Your accident.” She laughed.

  He touched his forehead and smiled. “That’s why I’m across the kitchen, keeping my distance.”

  Sam put a baguette on the counter and sliced it, then pooled olive oil and balsamic on a plate and sprinkled coarse salt on top. He presented a bottle of wine—Shipley had recommended it—and she laughed and nodded, but he decanted a glass for her to taste anyway. She couldn’t hide her surprise. “Maybe, like fighting, you know more about wine than you let on?”

  “I wish. Good recommendation at a shop in Villefranche, though the guy selling it clearly did not care for my French.”

  He mounded flour and egg to make the dough for noodles.

  “How difficult are the politics at the Department of State?” she asked as she chopped.

  He laughed. “What do you mean?”

  She wiped her eyes from the onion, then her face flushed. “Well, I’ll give you an example.” She stared at him with a look that said, Listen to me, right now. “My team at the Palace controls the file on the foreign-based opposition and the government’s media profile,” she continued. “Ali Hassan’s Security Office is the central hub for Syria’s security services and mukhabarat. He spies on the spies, so to spea
k. If the President wants a traitor found, he uses Ali.”

  Sam, hands crusted in dough as he worked the flour and eggs together, took a sip of wine and looked at Mariam as if this were a perfectly normal conversation, though his mind was already writing the cable to Langley. He didn’t notice the bits of dough and flour he left on the wineglass.

  “The other large group in the Palace is commanded by Jamil Atiyah. He and my boss, Bouthaina, detest each other. He is also a pedophile.”

  Sam stopped working the dough and looked up with a grimace. “A pedophile?”

  “Yes. It is well known.”

  “Well, I can’t say I have to deal with any pedophiles in my office, so I may not be able to help you there. But there are plenty of assholes where I work.”

  “I’m done chopping,” she said.

  He poured a generous amount of olive oil into a pot and scraped in the onions. Once they were translucent, he dropped in the carrots and celery.

  “Now we have to squeeze these tomatoes,” he said.

  “We are not going to do anything. You are going to do it,” she said, sipping more wine. “I don’t want sauce all over my dress.” He smiled, and for a moment forgot he was trying to recruit her to work for CIA.

  He dumped the tomatoes into a bowl and squeezed them between his palms until they were liquid. Dumping them into the pot, he added water, red pepper flakes, and salt.

  “Where did you learn this recipe?” she asked. She sat on the counter drinking the wine, watching him work.

  “My grandma. She was Italian and grew up in New York.”

  “But you only learned one dish?”

  “Just two, actually. She was a really mean old lady.”

  Mariam snorted and tossed a rag at him.

  As the sauce simmered, they worked the dough through the hand-rolling machine Sam had found in a cupboard, laughing as they tried to manage the ever-thinning sheets. His hands stuck to the dough and she threw flour on him. He tossed some back and she dodged it. “I forgot how quick you are,” he said. “And I should be careful, because this time I don’t have any protection.” He pointed to his groin.

  She laughed. They rolled out the noodles and placed them on sheets of wax paper, waiting for the sauce to thicken. He poured more wine for both of them, against his better judgment.

  “You were saying?” he said.

  “Oh yes. Bouthaina and Atiyah despise each other. Bouthaina, as everyone knows, is the Republican Guard commander’s girlfriend.” She stared again, eyes saying, Listen carefully, American. I am explaining how things work.

  Sam knew this would be news to CIA. During their late-night run to the Langley hot dog machine, Zelda, the analyst, had indulged Sam with salacious gossip on Assad’s mistresses and which senior officials were faithful to their wives and husbands. But this had not come up. Sam believed that so far he’d elicited sufficient information for maybe three intelligence reports, all of which would make the analysts salivate.

  Mariam continued: “Bouthaina and Rustum want to destroy Atiyah by assembling evidence of his corruption. And he of course is fighting back, creating problems for our office. Do you have politics like this?”

  He found a large pot in one of the cabinets and began filling it with water. “Depends on what you mean by politics. We have officials—”

  “At the State Department.” Said with intention, to see how he confirmed it, to sense if he was lying.

  “Yes, at the State Department.”

  She held his eyes for a beat, but he kept talking as though he did not notice.

  “We have competitions for influence all the time,” Sam continued. “One official gets in the secretary’s good graces, another is on the outs.”

  “Yes, of course, but our politics are more. What is the word in English? Savage. More savage.” She had switched to English. “For example, Bouthaina presented the President with more evidence of Atiyah’s predilection for underage girls. When Atiyah discovered this, he sent people to assault a young man in our office. Nearly killed him, to send a message to Bouthaina: Don’t fuck with me.” She jumped down from the counter to stir the sauce.

  “How is Bouthaina fighting back?” Sam asked in Arabic.

  “Bouthaina has already found accounts previously unknown to the President. For baksheesh. Corruption money. Everyone in the regime has them, but she found his. She’s also assembled the lists of underage girl he has bedded. It is extensive.”

  “Pedophilia isn’t enough to take him down?”

  “I don’t think so. It sullies him, but Bouthaina will need more. The relationships with girls were already well known inside the Palace. The President trusts Bouthaina, he trusts Rustum. But he also trusts Atiyah, as his father did. He has hesitated to make a decision. And so the combat continues.” She shrugged.

  They boiled the pasta, then strained it and placed it in bowls. He poured sauce on top, then a dollop of ricotta. Mariam plucked basil leaves from a plant in the kitchen and sprinkled them on top. They brought the bowls, another bottle of wine, and the bread to the terrace. A gentle breeze curled their hair and clothes as they ate. He brought his chair around to her side of the table, and when they’d finished eating she asked what would happen in Damascus.

  “I’d like to continue seeing you,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  “It will be different there,” he said. “More restrictions.”

  She ignored this. He poured more wine. They were sitting very close.

  Then their heads drew closer and they kissed, long and wet and slow. He ran his hands through her hair. Soon they stood together, still locked, and began sliding toward one of the couches. Hands moved to unbuckle, slide, unzip. Somehow, at just the moment he’d begun slipping his hands beneath Mariam’s sundress, he summoned the self-control to realize that if this happened at all, it would be cause for his dismissal and, also, that if it happened before the recruitment he would never be able to separate the romantic pull from the motivation to spy for CIA.

  He pulled his lips back from hers. “Maybe we should call it a night,” he said.

  Her hair was tousled, lipstick smeared, dress pulled sideways or up or down depending on what it covered. His belt was unbuckled, pants unbuttoned, shirt in process. She leaned back, darkened face reflecting a brew of disbelief and queenly wrath. She stomped to the bathroom to repair herself and reappeared in the kitchen, bathed in dark energy, as he set the dishes into the sink.

  “I need a ride back,” she said.

  “Mariam, I —”

  She held up a hand. “I need a ride back,” she repeated.

  They drove to Villefranche in silence and Sam realized he may have just shit the bed, as Bradley liked to say. He took some comfort in knowing that if she’d required his love to work for CIA, the recruitment would have been doomed from the start. But as he looked at Mariam, pressed into the passenger door as if trying to maintain maximum distance from him, he realized turning her out had been a mistake.

  When they arrived at the hotel, he asked if he could walk her upstairs.

  “You are not getting a second chance tonight, you understand?” she said, staring out the windshield.

  “Yes.”

  He followed behind her through the lobby and up a winding staircase to her third-floor room, hoping for an opening to set up another meeting.

  “This is my room,” she said, turning around and planting her back against the door to signal end of the line.

  “Can I see you tomorrow?”

  “Maybe. I will text you.”

  “Can I come in, just for a few minutes?” he asked. “To explain.”

  She nodded and put the key in the lock and turned the doorknob. He took a step farther, toward the open door. She walked inside. That’s when he noticed the scratch marks on the doorknob and the flakes of chipped blue paint on the wood. The room was dark. Mariam fumbled for the light switch, saying again that she was tired and that he had exactly one minute to explain things.

&n
bsp; She flicked on the lights.

  And there they were, the three Syrian watchers from Paris.

  The thick one wearing jeans and a Pink Floyd T-shirt holding a baton and handcuffs, the other two with pistols fitted with suppressors, flanking him in hoodies and slacks. One entirely in gray, the other in black. Everyone was surprised to see each other. Sam did a double-take at Pink Floyd, who yelled at him in Arabic, demanding identification. Sam looked around for a weapon, saw a lamp on the desk, and quickly ran the scenario: A kidnapping, not an assassination, because we’d already be dead. If they take her who knows what happens?

  Sam put his hands up. Mariam did the same. She was telling them that she’d met Sam in town when he stepped forward and said in Arabic that this was a big mistake, he would cooperate. Pink Floyd approached Sam and said turn around. He gestured with shaky hands. Sam took a step forward with his hands up and Pink Floyd came toward him. Sam head-butted, driving his forehead into the man’s nose. He heard the crunch and then he tore the baton from Pink Floyd’s hand as he drove a knee into his groin. He swung the baton down on the man’s skull, ripped the marble desk lamp from the socket, and threw it at the guy in the black hoodie, who had not yet managed to raise his gun. The lamp struck him in the chest, sending him back on the bed.

  Now Mariam was moving, sundress flapping behind, as Gray Hoodie watched his comrade collapse onto the bed. Her quick front kick sent the man’s pistol skittering across the floor, but he blocked her first hammer-fist and pushed her back, creating vulnerable distance. He dove to the floor for the gun, but Sam was already grasping for the weapon from Black Hoodie, who was sprawled on the bed.

  Finally feeling his fingers tighten around sweaty gunmetal, Sam fired twice, and Gray Hoodie fell back into the desk. Black Hoodie was on the bed, holding his stomach where the lamp had struck him. He tried to sit up while drawing a knife from its sheath. He lunged at Mariam. Sam fired three times, striking the man’s neck, head, and shoulder, until he collapsed back onto the bed and lay buns-down on the sheets, lifeless eyes watching the rotating fan. Sam walked over to Pink Floyd to see if he was alive. He wanted to ask questions. But Sam’s blow had shattered his skull and his body was slumped on the floor. He had no pulse.