Damascus Station Read online

  She beseeched Allah for the end of the regime. He prayed the wind would die.

  It did.

  The prayers ended. The car slowed to a stop at an intersection five hundred yards away.

  Sarya slowly expelled the air from her lungs. She pressed the trigger.

  DAOUD HADDAD HEARD GLASS SHATTER and then warm liquid sprayed the left side of his face and neck. His eyes were on fire and he put his hands on his face and slumped into the window. He could not see. He heard a gurgle from his boss, Shalish, in the backseat, then something heavy and hot gulped the pressure from his left ear. Then the horn was blaring. He tried to get out but only crumpled to the floor in pain. Then he reached up—where was the door handle? There it is, but why won’t it move? He pawed at it and then realized that his hands were too slippery. Glass shattered again and sprinkled down on him. He heard the driver’s body slump between the front seats.

  The horn stopped.

  He tried to open his eyes but could not. He thought of Razan as a little girl in a yellow dress. He could not picture Mona.

  SARYA SLID THE BOLT ACTION to expel the third round and thanked Allah for the harvest. She sat up cross-legged. She folded up the rifle’s rear leg into the stock, the bipod into the rifle’s forearm, and unclipped the scope and ejected the magazine, placing them into the scabbard with the rifle. She removed her hijab and also put it inside. A head covering would draw attention in this neighborhood.

  “One hundred and forty-five,” Sarya said. He nodded.

  Abu Qasim stopped himself as he was closing the front door behind them.

  “What is it?” Sarya hissed. “We’ve got to go.”

  He walked back into the living room and closed the old man’s eyes as the sirens picked up in the distance.

  30

  UNCLE DAOUD WAS IN STABLE CONDITION BY THE TIME Mariam arrived at Tishreen Military Hospital to visit. He had his own antiseptic room soaked in harsh artificial light. The lone window opened into an alleyway teeming with feral cats. Razan sat in a flimsy folding chair next to the bed, reading a novel while Daoud slept. A nurse fiddled with the IV drip, smiling at Mariam as she stood in the doorway. Razan had been the first to call Mariam with the news, her voice so wobbly that Mariam could hardly understand what had happened. The second call, more measured, came after the doctors were certain Daoud’s injuries were not life-threatening.

  “How is he?” Mariam asked Razan as she entered the room.

  Razan stood and hugged her, clasping tight. “Good. Just tired. They removed the last of the glass this afternoon. He was lucky, they say. No bullets.” She tried to smile.

  Mariam sat in a chair next to Razan and watched Uncle Daoud’s chest move up and down with each breath. She dragged the chair next to Razan and put her head on her cousin’s shoulder. “Do they know who is responsible?” Mariam asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you apologized to him yet, Razan?” Mariam asked. “For the silent treatment.” A tear welled in Razan’s good eye and she pushed Mariam’s head aside to sit up straight. She sniffled.

  “Not now, please, Mariam,” Razan said.

  Mariam nodded and stood to look out the filthy window. A dumpster, cats, peeling macadam, more cats. When she turned around Daoud’s eyes were open. He had bandages wrapped around his cheeks and neck and head and hands like a mummy. Still, he smiled and said: “Mariam.”

  She kissed the lone unbandaged spot on his forehead and pulled her chair up to the right side of the bed. Razan held his left hand.

  He spoke quietly, taking breaths between words. “They say I will be fine,” Daoud wheezed. “The surgeries were successful. A lot of glass. Shalish, though . . .” He trailed off, staring into the glow of the ceiling’s fluorescent lights.

  Mariam had collected a few details from inside the Palace after receiving Razan’s panicked calls: Daoud, his boss Riyad Shalish, and another SSRC official had been traveling to the Security Office for a meeting when their chauffeured car took sniper fire. Uncle Daoud was the sole survivor. With Shalish dead, her uncle would be the likely choice to lead Branch 450. Sam and CIA, she knew, would welcome the promotion as an opportunity to learn more about the SSRC. Looking at her dear uncle, post-op and bandaged, Mariam agreed a promotion would be helpful, then swelled with shame at the thought.

  “How do you feel, Uncle?” Mariam asked.

  “Fine. They have me on a nice medication.” He nudged his chin in the direction of the IV bag. He closed his eyes.

  “Do they have any leads?” Mariam asked.

  Daoud’s eyes opened, searching for Razan. “Rebels, of course. The opposition.” Mariam could feel Razan’s face heat up at the word, the insinuation that Razan’s friends in the tansiqiya bore some cosmic responsibility for his injuries. Of course, he knew as well as Mariam that the protest groups had not done this to him.

  Razan grimaced but said nothing and held tightly to his hand.

  Mariam gave her a grateful look for the silence. “Which rebels?” she asked.

  “They do not know for sure,” Daoud said. “But we have picked up chatter recently that Zahran Alloush’s Douma militia has sent teams into the city center to kill government officials and incite mayhem.” Daoud closed his eyes again and sucked in a heavy, raspy breath.

  Douma. The word transported Mariam to that night with Umm Abiha. Now, looking at her beloved uncle, Mariam knew the gap between them had become an unbridgeable chasm. It was the demonic thing about this conflict. Flocks of decent people who had gotten along before the war were now murdering each other. The old woman and her husband had looked after Mariam and Razan in Douma, though they had not deserved the kindness. Now a rebel hit squad from Douma had almost murdered her uncle in the street, though surely he— She broke off at the thought, remembering his visit to the tunnel. Instead, she thought of Fatimah, and the ache returned because she knew she was involved, perpetuating the cycle. It would have taken millions of idealists like Razan to overcome the forces now binding families and sects and ethnicities together in opposition to everyone else. Mariam looked at Razan’s eye patch and Daoud’s bandaged face and wanted to cry.

  She kissed her uncle’s forehead and hugged Razan tight and they both cried as Daoud lapsed back to sleep. Mariam held Razan and let the tears roll down onto her cousin’s back and she heard nothing but their sniffling and shuddering and the reassuring beep of the EKG in the far corner of the room.

  BACK AT HOME, HAIRPIN IN hand, Mariam stood in her closet and reached into her jewelry drawer. She removed the necklace Sam had given her in the safe house and gazed at the sapphire. She found the little hole on the back that Sam had shown her and stuck the pin inside until she heard a click. Mariam put on the necklace and stood for a moment, eyes closed, breath deep, ballooning air into her lungs. She put on a sensible black dress with three-quarter-length sleeves that smothered her bust, necklace sitting atop the acetate fabric on the cleft of her breasts. Atiyah had made good on his threat for a follow-up meeting. She did not want him to gaze at the necklace, though she suspected he would. She left her apartment and scanned for the signal graffiti, a daily ritual. There wasn’t any today, and she walked on to her office, running the moves from France to determine if they were watching and wondering if—and when—Atiyah would decide, again, that she should die.

  AS MARIAM APPROACHED HIS OFFICE, she fought the terror by imagining the pedophile’s death by her hand. His brain splattering from her club. If she and Sam succeeded, though, Atiyah’s demise would occur off-screen, in the hideous basements of the Security Office before a quick trip to the hangman to finish it off.

  Now, though: a one-on-one with Atiyah to review her work against the National Council. Her chance to scan his entire office with the necklace camera, as Sam had said. Today Atiyah wore a jet-black suit—Italian manufacture, she thought—white shirt tight against his muscular frame, and a lime-green tie that she knew Sam would describe as douchey. She fought back a smile.

  Atiyah wav
ed her in, eyes locked on her chest. Undeterred by this ritual of retinal undressing, Mariam merely smiled. If her curves distracted him, it meant that the little camera got some nice footage of him, his desk, and his sitting area. She had never really studied his office until this moment, but now she realized it was quite minimalistic. There were few natural hiding spots. The desk—no drawers—a couch with thin cushions, a table and three chairs, and a bookshelf, which looked promising.

  As she approached his desk, Mariam noticed an elegant black briefcase at his feet. Atiyah waved her toward one of the chairs and joined her at the table. He grabbed one of the binders and began flipping through the pages in silence. Mariam started to speak, but he put his hand in the air for her to stop and kept reading. She imagined kicking him in the groin, then driving her knee into his face before tossing him into the bookshelf. As he lay in a pile, she could strangle him with the necklace, surely the world’s most expensive garrote. Assuming it didn’t break . . . in which case, sorry, Sam—collateral damage. She smiled pleasantly and scanned the room as he read. She shifted her body position slightly to capture the right side of his desk, where he kept a small wooden cigar box. But Mariam really wanted a clear shot of the document bag. Atiyah’s eyes focused as he read, and she nudged her pen to slide off the table onto the floor toward his desk. She stood up to fetch it and as she knelt down, she tilted the dangling necklace toward the bag, holding it there for a beat. When she stood up, she kept her body pointed toward the bag. She could feel the heat of his eyes on her backside and swung around to return to her chair. Gazing at her, he set down the documents. He leaned back in the chair, rubbing his eyes as though he were trying to wake up.

  “I am still puzzled, Mariam. I cannot figure out how you killed all three of them. And where are the bodies? Not a trace. They simply vanished. Remarkable.” Atiyah whistled and clapped his hands together.

  She kept painting the smile, wondering if she should deny the charge. She let the silence hang, though every instinct in her now said run, run far away.

  “They were not the most skilled,” he continued. “But there were three, and I imagine they maintained the advantage of surprise. Perhaps someone was with you in Villefranche?” Atiyah stared through her now, into the wall, as if considering the possibilities.

  She imagined saying: I was with my CIA lover and we murdered them before the Americans disposed of the bodies.

  Instead she folded up her notebook. “I do not know what you are talking about,” she said. She stood to leave—getting another nice angle on the document bag—but he clutched her arm. She looked at his hand, and instinct drew her eyes to the clump of nerves between the thumb and forefinger. She could sever the grip in an instant. But instead she stood silently.

  “I have eyes everywhere, Mariam. Everywhere. Eventually, all will be known. You tell Bouthaina, too. Be a good girl and tell her for me.” He released Mariam and smacked her on the bottom as she turned to walk away. It took all of her mental strength to not hit him, to instead focus on the little camera and a few wide-angle shots of the office on the way out. As she walked, she imagined the camera one day capturing Atiyah’s body as it swung from the gallows, his feet twisting in a late summer breeze.

  31

  BRIAN HANLEY CHUGGED HIS DUNKIN’ DONUTS COFFEE and grimaced as he saw the message hit his Lotus Notes in-box. Fricking Lotus Notes. What is this, 1995? FDT, the CIA team that released information to foreign intelligence services, had been a pain in the ass for the past few days, stripping and editing the talking points and published intelligence reports that would be passed to the Israeli Mossad during the regular liaison exchange on Syria. The “REL ISR” stamp they would bestow was a necessary but maddening hurdle to climb, even though the Israelis were NE Division’s closest regional partner.

  But Hanley was pleased to see that the FDT trolls had come around in the end. They’d cleared for hard-copy passage the imagery of the SSRC activity at Jableh, and an interesting report on a small-scale sarin test. Mossad’s Syria reporting was usually quite good—better than CIA’s, in fact—but the Israelis had recently lost some of their primo SIGINT access. They would like this. He printed the Jableh imagery in color, which he thought was a nice touch. Copies made and placed into his black lock bag, Hanley spent the rest of the morning reading articles recapping the baseball All-Star game before driving to an unlabeled annex in Tysons Corner, distinguishable only by the carbine-wielding security guards checking for blue badges outside. The CIA preferred to keep the Israelis off-campus. There had been an unpleasant incident a few years back, when a Mossad liaison officer snuck around headquarters unsupervised for a day.

  DANNY DAYAN, MOSSAD’S OWLISH WASHINGTON Deputy Chief of Station, led the Israeli delegation that week. Dayan listened carefully as the CIA officers prattled on, reviewing the hard-copy material between bites of a gigantic scone from Corner Bakery. After more than sixty liaison meetings with the Americans, he’d come to wonder if the restaurant was actually owned by the CIA. No matter, he thought midbite, he could see that the girls and boys at Langley had some interesting cases cooking right now. After the briefing, on his way to the parking garage, he pulled the Hanley kid aside.

  “Great stuff this month. My best to the team in Damascus,” Dayan said.

  “Joseph will be pleased to hear it, he’s got the kick-ass case out there,” Hanley said, before his face flushed at the indiscretion. Dayan nodded and half smiled as the young officer ducked into his Toyota Prius and sped off.

  In his apartment that evening, Dayan drank three glasses of wine as he jotted down notes and took pictures of the CIA documents using a subminiature camera. He removed the film and placed the tiny roll in a sealed dime bag like a drug dealer. He folded up his notes and did the same. They had given him a leather messenger bag with a hidden compartment but he despised the clunky thing, so Dayan stuffed the bags into his underwear. He put on a Washington Nationals baseball cap and set out for Rock Creek Park.

  Yekaterina waited for him on their bench. Dayan grinned and she frowned as he pulled the bags from his underwear, shoved them in her lap, and sat.

  “Your gambling habits got you in trouble in Moscow, Danny,” she said. “Why do you insist on gambling with your life here?”

  He refused to take the bait. An argument might prevent him from catching the last few innings of the Nats game. “You’ll see some interesting hard-copy reporting in there,” he said. “Syria-related. SSRC, chemical weapons. All gold.”

  “General Volkov will be pleased,” Yekaterina said, referring to the head of SVR’s Middle East Department and Dayan’s recruiting officer in Moscow.

  Dayan nodded. “There is something else. After the exchange, I spoke with one of their junior officers. Apparently someone named Joseph is running the case that generated these hard-copy reports. He’s in Damascus.”

  “Joseph what?” Yekaterina asked.

  “Not sure, but I actually think it was his last name,” Dayan said. “Traces should pick him up.”

  Dayan pulled the cap snug on his head, stood, and left.

  32

  RUSTUM SET ASIDE THE SVR REPORTS AND RAN A HAND over his mustache as he finished his tea. Following his own strict security protocols for document handling, he put the stolen CIA satellite imagery of his Jableh complex and the rest of the SVR reporting into the safe. How had the Americans found it? No one had left the Jableh compound in months. They’d produced two hundred tons of sarin, and now they had to evacuate. Who had told CIA? Another fucking spy inside the SSRC, like Marwan Ghazali? His little brother apparently could not do his job. Thinking he had the rage under control, Rustum put his hand on the doorknob to leave his office and join Bouthaina for lunch. Then he remembered Shalish. Deeply involved in the chemical operation, ultimately replaceable, but, still, a man in a role. Rustum required Branch 450’s sarin expertise for his attack. Shalish had managed that portfolio and now he was dead, shot by a sniper in central Damascus. Now who to elevate? Rustum paused and t
ook a long, slow breath during which he realized he was not yet ready for the outside world. It had been a bad few days.

  He could not remember picking it up, but when his mind returned to the present Rustum was slicing a letter opener deep into one of the couch cushions. He’d gutted the two cushions and three of the pillows by the time his aide arrived asking what is wrong, Commander? The aide looked around. Tufts of stuffing floated through the office while the commander of Syria’s Republican Guard knelt on the floor eviscerating a faux-silk pillow. Rustum cursed, for he did not know he’d been yelling. “What was I saying?” he whispered to the aide.

  “The same story, Commander.” He paused. “Hama.”

  Rustum stood, picked a piece of stuffing from his linen shirt, and shooed the aide out. Bouthaina said he sometimes told the story while he slept, similar to what the psychologist said Basil would do.

  He had retreated to his villa in the mountains near Lebanon for a few days of cooler weather and nubile frolicking with Bouthaina. He stepped outside. The terrace was nestled into a copse of almond trees just above Bloudan, a mountain getaway for the Syrian elite. A place in which, as a child, he could only have dreamed of waiting tables. Now he was its lord. Rustum saw Bouthaina sunbathing, a half-drunk bottle of white wine chilling in a bucket nearby. She was bug-eyed in her gigantic Chanel sunglasses, soaking in the sun. She smiled when she saw him. He could still hear the beating in his chest and wondered if a fuck might calm him down. Then his phone rang. He looked down at the screen with a strange mixture of annoyance, rage, and anxiety. It was the President.

  THE SVR REPORTS HAD VINDICATED Ali’s instincts about the American, Samuel Joseph. He had concrete information that, if leveraged properly, would lead to a spy’s capture. He reread the SVR’s commentary again, just to be sure: