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  “Yes.”

  Abu Qasim slid one of Umar’s intelligence reports from his pocket and handed it to Jibril. “Do you still expect all of these men to join?”

  Jibril read the list. “The defense minister comes rarely, so maybe not. And this list is missing Ali’s brother, Rustum, commander of the Republican Guard.”

  Abu Qasim’s pulse jolted with excitement. “You are sure?”

  “Yes, he now comes to every meeting. Rumor has it that Ali initially did not invite him, but Rustum intervened with the President to secure a spot. The two brothers despise each other. Rustum makes a point of coming because it bothers his younger brother.”

  “That is excellent news,” Abu Qasim murmured. “Jibril, what type of screening will happen outside the building?”

  “Very little,” Jibril said. “There are no dogs and the metal detectors usually do not function. I bring in boxes this size each week loaded with tea supplies. They will not search me.”

  Abu Qasim nodded and stood to place the crate inside a box.

  “Qasim, you know that even if we succeed, they will just promote more men to take these positions,” Umar said. “This will not be enough to topple them.”

  “We may never overthrow this government,” Abu Qasim said as he closed the crate. “And I’ve never intended this bomb for that purpose.” He slid it toward Jibril.

  “The goal is simple. It is that they suffer.”

  THAT NIGHT, JIBRIL LUGGED THE box into his third-floor apartment. Though the package was not particularly heavy and the air-conditioning was blasting, he was still sweating profusely as he climbed the stairs. Inside his apartment, he packed more tea and sugar packets into the cardboard box, covering the wooden crate that made him want to vomit. He placed it in his closet, shut the door, then opened the closet again. He stared at the box, briefly imagining throwing it out and fleeing to Turkey as his brother had done. But then he remembered his father’s limp and his arms. “What are the little circles, Papa?” he had asked one day. His mother tried to shoo him away. His father had smiled. An eerie, knowing smile. “The disease of Saydnaya, my son.” Noting the black irony, Jibril lit a cigarette to calm himself down and again closed the closet door.

  THE ORANGE DIPLOMATIC POUCH HOLDING Paulina Jackson’s bomb arrived at Amman Station accompanied by a gruff CIA mechanic named Yates who had no idea what was in the Pajero door and did not want to know.

  Inside the emptied embassy motor pool Yates removed the front passenger door from a 2012 Mitsubishi Pajero. He took out the car battery and disconnected the fuses for the power windows and locks. He opened the door, hammered out the door pins, and pulled back the harness covering the wires. He cut them, being careful to leave enough length to attach them to the new door. He unbolted the hinges, and let the door fall to the concrete floor. No point in pussyfooting around. This vehicle was never coming back from Syria.

  He took a cigarette break outside in the blazing desert heat of the compound. More like a fortress, but holy shit, the heat. He tossed the butt aside before he burned into the filter because it was too hot to even smoke. His shirt was splotched with sweat stains by the time he returned to the motor pool. He took the new door from the orange pouch. He held it aloft for a moment, feeling its weight. Then he picked up the old door. The paint matched. Same weight. Whatever this door was, it wasn’t reinforced with armor, he knew that for damn sure. He went to work connecting the wires from the door to the car, and found the wire marked with yellow tape that he’d read about in the cable traffic. He made sure to wire this one into the door’s power system so that whatever they’d put in here would get a charge when the car was running. As he worked, he noticed that the feed for the sound system was absent. Out of habit, he pulled closer to see what the deal was and then caught himself. If they cared enough about a door to ship it to Jordan and replace a perfectly good door with it, they had a good reason.

  The wrench slid around in his hand, and he had to put it down a few times to wipe the sweat off his palms on his pants. When the bolts were tight, he put the battery back in. He looked at his watch. Forty-five minutes, smoke break included. Not bad for a free night at the Four Seasons. Though he didn’t care about the room itself, the bar was the kicker. He’d never seen people drink like that anywhere, let alone in a Muslim country or whatever this was, and no way he was gonna miss out on that, especially since he had about $150 of Uncle Sam’s per diem to spend. He gathered up his tools, then closed the door on the vehicle real careful, just to be sure.

  RAMI KNEW BETTER THAN TO ask Sam what was in the car he’d just driven into Damascus from Amman. He’d brought the vehicle to his family’s dealership, removed the plates as instructed, and pulled a new, identical Pajero alongside. He scanned the two. They matched, thank god. He smoked and ate pizza in his office while he waited. The man who arrived at ten p.m. was squat, surly, and in possession of a permanently furrowed brow. Tariq was another Damascus Station support asset. He was polygraphed, trustworthy, and a stellar mechanic who did not ask questions. A rare combination anywhere in the world, let alone Damascus.

  Rami pointed to the door on the car he’d driven in from Jordan. “That one, to that one.”

  Tariq nodded and followed the same procedure as Yates had in Amman. He finished in an hour and left. Rami looked at the Pajero: Syrian plates and registration, CIA door. He drove it to the edge of the Kassab Motors lot, careful to avoid any bumps, and placed a Sold sign on the windshield

  Then he signaled Sam.

  29

  THE BOMB NOW IN THE HANDS OF ALLAH, ABU QASIM and Sarya sat in the safe house bedroom, arranging another man’s death as they pored over the intelligence reports collected by their network in Damascus. The information had been purchased at tremendous cost for very little money. Three of the volunteer informants had disappeared into Saydnaya and at least one had died under torture, according to one of the emir’s spies inside the prison. Much of the information, though, was an unstructured collection of random observations by an untrained intelligence apparatus: there was a log of Ali Hassan’s activity from a Monday through Wednesday, but then a gap for several weeks. The intelligence describing the meeting at which Jibril served tea had been notable for its specificity. As was the map of the route Riyad Shalish, the chief of the SSRC’s Branch 450, would take across the city the next day. It was the reason they’d brought Sarya and her rifle into Damascus.

  She tossed the papers on the floor. “I am done studying,” she said. “We are ready. As ready as we will be.”

  “There is something . . .” he began saying before he trailed off at the look of her darkening face. The anticipation of killing always made her quiet. Planning done, she would stop talking and did not want to hear his voice, either. He’d always been chatty before operations, talking to work out the nerves. This she could not abide. “My needs become animalistic, more basic,” she had told him once. “Before the hunt I want to eat, lie with my husband, sleep, and pray. The killing must happen, but once I know what to do, I do not want to discuss it anymore.” Abu Qasim had killed dozens—perhaps hundreds—of men, women, and children with his bombs, but he could not picture the faces. He found that comforting. Sarya, however, had looked into the eyes of her one hundred and forty-two victims just before they died. The intimacy, oddly, offered certainty that the men she killed were deserving of death: they were soldiers of the Republican Guard or shabiha or Persian mercenaries. “If I do not kill them, who will?” she would ask. This, he knew, gave her great peace. And so, again, she now sat in silence.

  He brought stale bread and lentils from the kitchen and they ate facing each other on the mattress. His faith, he thought, was weaker than hers. It must be, because he did not know if after tonight he would ever see her again, in this world or the next. Thoughts of another life danced through his mind, one where they grew old, children shrieking at play. And yet I am here. Life had run its course: businessman, outlaw, rebel commander, assassin, mass murderer. He wondered how
Allah would judge. The thought took him back to Aleppo, to the birth of the uprising before the war. Before the massacres, before the bombs, before he’d lost his soul.

  ALEPPO INITIALLY STUCK UP ITS nose at the rabble inconveniencing them with demands for the President’s ouster, for the protesters were worse than disloyal. They were poor.

  Many were university students. Others, in the provincial countryside, were underclass felaheen, hicks, who covered their women, wore long beards, and did not hide their gruesome teeth or filthy smells. Many had lived a half century of shattering humiliation and predation at the hands of the House of Assad. They had accounts to settle.

  In the beginning, none were like Abu Qasim’s family. His father, owner of a successful textile manufacturing operation, had sneered that the demonstrations were bad for business. “These idiots are going to cost us,” he’d said. He’d been right, of course. He just hadn’t known his son would instigate it all.

  Upper-class Sunni families like Abu Qasim’s stayed on the sidelines when the protests started. At the time he worked for his father and traveled frequently to Turkey on business. There he kept a mistress, drank, and smoked. Sarya primarily socialized back in Aleppo. She did not wear the hijab then. They did not pray, he attended mosque infrequently. He had resented her: the quasi-arranged marriage, her barren womb.

  As with many others’ entrance into the rebellion, his invitation had been delivered by a mukhabarat club. He did not feel the blow himself; that had been borne by a university friend during a protest at their alma mater. Abu Qasim had not been there himself. But he had seen the corpse: a body so swollen, bruised, and bloodied that he did not recognize his friend.

  The next Friday, he attended a protest organized by the tansiqiyas, the local committees then fueling the resistance. They chanted in a carnival atmosphere, banners fluttering in the wind, dancing, cheering, savoring freedom. More than ten thousand marched. The size of the crowd convinced him that the protest movement would grow, the streets and squares would fill, and Assad would eventually step down like Mubarak of Egypt or Ben Ali of Tunisia. The next week he brought Sarya and saw in this new world a chance at redemption, at meaning, at something more than the life his father had given him. That week, he and Sarya secretly joined the tansiqiya.

  An informant gave him up. The mukhabarat visited. It went poorly. Ten men decamped to his father’s factory to deliver a warning to stop protesting or there would be consequences. They arrived during a party as one hundred employees gathered around listening to his father applaud a retiree. The squad leader interrupted, demanding Abu Qasim and his father join him for a private conversation.

  His father’s cheeks reddened with rage. Then someone threw a hammer at one of the mukhabarat, striking his forehead. The room fell silent, the man convulsing and frothing on the floor until he died. Ya allah, Abu Qasim’s father yelled. My god.

  A retaliatory shot into the crowd killed one of the ladies who swept the floor, and initiated the fateful melee. In the end, the workers killed six of the mukhabarat. The mukhabarat tossed his father from his second-floor office, butchered thirty-one employees, and set the factory ablaze. Abu Qasim had managed to escape, but that night he and Sarya fled Aleppo to find the emir, a man Abu Qasim had known at Aleppo University and who had just been released from prison. He would protect them.

  They discovered Sarya’s remarkable gift by accident on the shooting ranges of the emir’s encampment. Instead of giving babies to the world, the emir said, this woman has been sent to harvest the kuffar’s children. And harvest she would, under the banners of jihad. One month later they returned to Aleppo, Abu Qasim now in the emir’s army, to take the countryside’s fight to the great city, to settle the old accounts. There, in the pulverizing trench warfare, he established the bomb works, lost his finger, redeemed his marriage, absorbed two nails from a barrel bomb, nearly died from typhus, skinned rats for sustenance, stood watch for the Black Death’s plague, and, in the end, lost all hope.

  HE SET DOWN THE EMPTIED bowl and wiped his hands on the side of the mattress. Sarya looked toward the closed door, then the sheets. He smiled thinly and stood. As he slipped from his pants, stiff and well grown, he watched Sarya slide from hers and they fell together onto the mattress, making love silently as each one’s mouth captured the other’s noise. She fell asleep splayed out above the sheets to escape the sticky heat. But he lay awake until dawn broke outside, watching her stomach move up and down as she breathed. He felt gratitude once more for her barren womb. That no children would spring from their love to live through this hell.

  HE’D JUST DRIFTED OFF WHEN he awoke to Sarya’s fluttering recitation of the suras describing the first battle ever fought by the armies of Islam. Then, the Prophet himself had commanded.

  “Remember thy Lord inspired the angels with this message,” Sarya whispered, her eyes closed. “I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instill fear into the hearts of the Unbelievers. Therefore, strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip.”

  “Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar,” said Abu Qasim. He slid his hand onto Sarya’s belly. She squeezed his fingers.

  “This is because they acted adversely to Allah and His Messenger,” she continued. “And whoever acts adversely to Allah and His Messenger—then surely Allah is severe in requiting evil.”

  “Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.”

  “Thus it will be said: so taste it, for those who resist Allah receive the penalty of the Fire.”

  He kissed her forehead. She kissed his cheek, then stood to put on her shirt.

  THEY NEEDED THE STRANGER’S APARTMENT, but Abu Qasim had still felt a tinge of regret at killing the old man. Fahd, one of the defectors, had knocked on the door wearing his Republican Guard uniform. An old man answered. “A fellow soldier? Come in. Come in,” he said. Instead, Fahd put his Makarov pistol to the old man’s head and explained he would die if there was noise. The old man gave a thin, knowing smile and waved them inside. Abu Qasim and Sarya shuffled in behind Fahd. Abu Qasim closed the door and Fahd backed the man into his living room. A parakeet chirped from a cage hanging above a chair. Abu Qasim raised his Makarov.

  “Do it quickly, boy,” the old man said as he sat. “I’ve got no secrets for you, and no money.”

  Abu Qasim’s eyes darted around the cramped apartment. “Are you alone?” Fahd disappeared to search the bedroom.

  “I am,” the old man said. “In fact, I have been for some time.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “I always knew it would end this way, you know? I was in Air Force Intelligence for almost thirty years. I’ve done my share. Now it’s my turn.” The parakeet squawked. Abu Qasim shot him in the forehead as the old man looked up toward the bird.

  Now the body lay at rest in the chair. Sarya sat next to the dead man behind a table, using the open balcony door as her keyhole onto the street below. She pulled off the hijab to take advantage of some air in the sweltering heat. The Russian rifle balanced on the table, peeking through the window out toward the jammed boulevard below.

  Abu Qasim scanned the road approaching the Security Office through his binoculars. The wind picked up from the north. Sand clipped through the air, flicking against the windowpanes. Sarya looked back. “The gusts are erratic,” she said.

  Abu Qasim’s cell phone buzzed. “Commander, he’s left the building. Vehicle description and license plate match the intelligence reports.”

  “Understood.” He hung up.

  “Twenty minutes,” he told Sarya.

  She nodded and looked again at the anemometer, a Kestrel she’d taken from a dead Russian, who’d himself probably taken it from a dead rebel. “Ten clicks,” she said, shaking her head. What she really wanted to know, however, was the wind speed at point of impact. She glassed the intersection and spotted laundry, hung on a nearby building, flapping in the breeze. “About six clicks down there,” she said. She then consulted the ballistic chart on her phone to calculate the bullet drop based on the d
istance, wind, and elevation. Sand and dust whipped about. She tested the bolt action, pretended to press the trigger, then popped the bolt open and closed. She withdrew from her scabbard a mixture of bore cleaner and oil and lapped it through the bolt for several minutes.

  Then the Black Death of Aleppo, reaper of one hundred and forty-two souls, put the hijab over her head. She began to pray for the one hundred and forty-third.

  ABU QASIM’S PHONE BUZZED AGAIN as he watched the anemometer tally another gust.

  “Commander, they just passed my position. The window tinting is quite severe, but I think there are four in the car. Driver included. I cannot tell which is the target.” Abu Qasim swore.

  Sarya pulled back the hijab and wiped her watering eyes. “We will need two clean shots to have certainty. One into each front-seat occupant through the seats into the back passengers.”

  Abu Qasim looked for the car through the binoculars. Still praying, beseeching Allah for vengeance for the souls of fallen martyrs, Sarya clicked a full magazine into the rifle—though they expected she would have time for three shots at most—and increased the scope magnification to see farther down the road. Her tongue fluttered with singsong praises for Aleppo’s dead and curses on the kafir, the infidel, as she adjusted the cheek plate. She glanced at the anemometer and the laundry. Abu Qasim joined in the prayers, not knowing where they traveled but understanding their gravity in this moment.

  She dialed down the magnification as the car approached.

  A gust of wind clipped through as the car turned into view, still more than a kilometer away. A jet-black Lexus sedan, license plate 9760112. The yellow stripes on the plate identified it as a government vehicle.

  “It is them,” he said. Abu Qasim watched her back’s movement slow as Sarya regulated her breathing in advance of the shot, taking full breaths then exhaling to find the natural pause as her lungs emptied.