Damascus Station Read online

  “Very hard, or impossible?” Mariam asked.

  Procter caught the hand grenade before he could respond. “We won’t bullshit you and say it’s impossible. But the opposition has to know exactly where the device is, where the transmission is headed, and at what time it’s headed there. If they don’t have all three, it’s impossible to intercept.”

  “The longer the message, the longer the burst, and the easier it is to detect,” Sam said. “So this platform restricts character count and won’t let you send a stream of messages all at once from the same location. This platform will allow you to send short messages to us, and we can send them back. We don’t need to use the drop site to schedule meetings.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Mariam said.

  “Exactly,” Sam said. “Let me show you how to talk to us. We’ll create a distinct swiping motion over the screen as your passcode. For now, it’s programmed for me, so I’ll open it.”

  He swung around the table and sat next to her. He could feel Procter’s eyes on him, as he had on the safe house veranda. She could sense something was up.

  Sam made a series of squiggly swipes over the screen to open a program resembling Gmail. “The platform creates a fake in-box, behind a firewall, in case anyone comes up behind you and sees the screen while you’re typing. You then type us an email, just like you would in Gmail, and hit send. You can enter any address, any subject line, it doesn’t matter. It can only go one place.” He pointed to the sky. “To us.”

  “This part of the device is completely firewalled from the rest,” Procter said. “The phony email program does not even live on the iPad permanently, meaning that if the mukhabarat gets it and tries to find what’s here, they won’t, because it’s not.”

  “Your swipe brings up the program, you type, hit send—that initiates the burst—then you put the iPad to sleep. Boom. It’s done. Next time you open it normally, and all your apps, movies, songs will all be there.”

  Sam reached into his bag and took out a small black sphere with cords dangling from its top and bottom. Each cord linked to a USB connector. One was red, the other green. A single button, like a navel, was implanted in the sphere’s midsection.

  “This will transfer everything from your old iPad in just a few minutes. Then we put the new one in your old case and we take the old one with us,” Sam said.

  Mariam was staring at the PLATYPUS. “It makes me nervous,” she said without looking up. “I am not sure I want it.”

  It was classic covcom paranoia. Sam knew there was a fair chance Mariam would be uncomfortable with the device. He’d run a Saudi general who’d refused one even though his tradecraft was sloppy and the methods he preferred—moving car drops, brush passes, dead drops, chalk marks—were more vulnerable to detection. Sam told him all this and emphasized the consequences, but it didn’t matter. The man wanted what he knew. Other agents did not like the devices because they were a constant reminder of treason. A device sat in your bedroom, taunting you.

  He shot an all-but-imperceptible glance at Procter, who took the baton. “Can you tell us why?” Procter asked.

  “I know that these systems have been compromised in other places,” she said. “China. Iran. There is an Iranian contingent in Syria now, as you know, helping the mukhabarat target the opposition. Having a device like this, in my home. It makes me feel . . . vulnerable.”

  Sam nodded. “I get it. But no one has ever hacked into one of these. Ever. The compromise in Iran happened on a temporary, web-based system. The Iranians found agents who visited particular sites. The Chinese went a step further, they actually used that system to break through a firewall into another one, and then found those agents as well. But no one has been able to get into one of these.”

  “I’m sure that’s what the CIA told their agents in China, too.” Procter opened her mouth, presumably to counter, but Mariam didn’t give her the chance. “I do not want to pass much information over this device,” Mariam said. “I’d prefer to meet in person if we have a lot to cover.”

  “So do we,” Procter said. “We can use this to arrange meetings, work out logistics, and you can pass us any urgent intel on it. Just the highlights. Then we talk about all of it when we meet in person.”

  Mariam stared at the cords and iPad and asked Sam to transfer everything into the PLATYPUS. Ten minutes later she said she should be going. “I have to call Bouthaina in thirty minutes.”

  Iona appeared at the breakfast table holding the briefcase, now in its original cloth Ferragamo bag with the tags attached. She handed Mariam the receipt. “In case anyone asks,” Iona said. “A souvenir from Italy, for someone you love.” Sam saw her wince and her jaw set, as it had at dinner the night before.

  Mariam hugged everyone, then slipped the new briefcase into her suitcase and asked if Sam and Procter could walk her to the car. In the parking lot, Mariam looked sad again. “I love you both,” she said. Then she closed the door, started the engine, and left.

  Procter and Sam watched the car throw up a cloud of dust along the ridgeline before it vanished behind a wall of cypresses and vines and descended into the valley.

  “You get an answer last night?” Procter said, turning to Sam.

  “She’s afraid. And something’s going on with her family.”

  “She tell you that?”

  “She might as well have.”

  39

  THE BANDITOS HAD GONE THROUGH THE SAME MOTIONS four times in as many days: drive the bomb-laden Pajero to the road outside the Security Office, park it on the curb, and load the safe house with the video equipment Langley would use to confirm the target was indeed Ali Hassan. Each time, something different had caused the abort: the encrypted video link did not function, Sam was bumper-locked, Ali did not take a walk (twice).

  “We try again tomorrow,” Procter said as they watched Ali walk past the car next to a woman pushing a baby stroller. “Like every day.”

  SAM AND PROCTER SPENT SIX hours designing the SDR. The lethal finding stipulated that a CIA officer have physical eyes on the target before they pulled the trigger. The BANDITOs could support the op, but Sam would have to direct it from the safe house alone. He had to get black.

  The Chief’s office was littered with cans of Diet Coke and chewing gum wrappers. She did not appear fatigued. The opposite, in fact, and Sam was also wired. He was occupying himself with the Mossberg, aiming it at one of the cans while Procter played the plan back aloud. They were debating Sam just disappearing, kicking active surveillance as if he were in Moscow or a denied-area operating environment.

  “Not yet,” Procter said. “It would confirm you as Agency, piss them off, and who knows what they do? Maybe beat the hell out of you for fun. Russkies would pull that crap in Moscow when we got black aggressively. Or maybe they catch you and kill you like Val. You read the SIGINT on the Russian team that arrived from Moscow?”

  He had. The report was the passenger manifest from a Moscow-Damascus cargo flight that had arrived before he went to Italy. The name traces indicated it contained seven FSB and five SVR officers. No one knew why they’d come. “The composition of the Russian team is odd,” he said, lowering the Mossberg for a moment. “It’s like someone asked for help against us.”

  She nodded. “Look, the Russians put some of their best people on us in Moscow, so the request could have been for Russian help, and they sent the A-team. But yes, yes, yes, of course it’s unsettling,” she said, her chin swinging up and down.

  “It’s like the Syrians know we’re running a big fish,” he said. He pointed the Mossberg at the trash can and pretended to pull the trigger.

  THE NEXT MORNING SAM SAT in his kitchen drinking coffee, reviewing his mental map of the SDR. He poured a second cup and Skyped his mom. He told her he was going shopping today and asked what she wanted. They talked about furniture and jewelry and she finally settled on a rug. She said there’d been a deluge of newspaper articles arguing for U.S. military intervention in Syria. Sam shrugged i
t off and said he was safe in Damascus. They said they loved each other and then hung up.

  He closed the laptop, picked up his phone, and padded to the bathroom. He texted Stapp, the Station techie, to confirm drinks in the Old City. He showered and shaved and took stock. Dressed in jeans, dark blue tennis shoes, and a wrinkled white linen shirt, he set out from his apartment into the Malki neighborhood carrying a small shoulder-slung satchel with a digital camera. The routine at the apartment, the camera, the attire—all of it was designed to fit his pattern of life and lull an active surveillance team into thinking he was preparing for a normal weekend day in Damascus: shopping, seeing friends, wandering the tourist sites.

  The streets already teemed with pedestrians and the AK-laden soldiers and the stray cats scratching in the alleys. He walked to a store to buy water. He drank it walking down Jawaher Lal Nahro Street along the hypotenuse of Tishreen Park. The fixed surveillance he spotted matched his mental map. The solo surveillance operator riding his tail had also become commonplace. The stocky mukhabarat foot soldier was not trying to hide his presence. He followed about forty yards back. Sam hailed a cab in the blender bowl of the traffic on Umayyad Square and asked to go to Abbassin.

  The cabbie shot into the chaos of Damascene traffic. Driving here was the worst. The drivers ignored everything save for the nose of their own vehicle. They honked like crazy, frequently bumped into each other, and irregularly stopped for pedestrians.

  Sam snuck a glance in the car’s rearview mirror and saw the solo tail pull a radio from his pocket. Sam knew they wouldn’t let him off the hook this easily. The call was almost certainly to a mobile team that would follow the cab. It was also extremely obvious.

  The SDR would occur in the pocket of central Damascus, but he and Procter had developed a new route and extended the duration beyond the Station baseline of ten hours. It started on the eastern rim of the Old City and worked westward in a zigzag pattern until he reached the Kafr Sousa safe house, down the street from the Security Office.

  It was now eight a.m. He snapped pictures as he decamped from the cab. Mobile teams had picked him up again. A black sedan and a yellow vehicle that looked like it had once been a cab idled outside a parking lot.

  He walked toward Abbassin. The surveillance cars eventually disappeared but the solo operator was back, strolling behind. They could shovel resources at him all day. The key was to draw this out for hours. Make it so unbearably boring for the surveillance team that they would decide to surge resources elsewhere. Sam finished logging the people around him and pulled the tightness into his chest.

  ALI AND VOLKOV SAT IN the Russian command center. A faint body odor hung in the air. Discarded cigarette butts clotted the ashtrays. A bank of television monitors illuminated live footage of the American arriving at a restaurant, courtesy of a car parked outside. The Syrian and Russian surveillance teams had arrived at the restaurant with Samuel Joseph.

  Kanaan and two of the Russians were hunched over a detailed map of the Christian Quarter, debating the American’s next move.

  “What do you think, General?” Volkov asked Ali. “Is today the day?”

  STAPP GREETED SAM OUTSIDE AT noon, grinning and explaining that the trendy Abu George Café served booze earlier than any other establishment in Damascus.

  The place was empty. Stapp shook hands with the bartender and ordered two pints of Stella. They sat at a table near the window so Sam could see the street. Stapp had no idea Sam was operational and spoke without interruption. He was explaining that someone had been stealing his booze from the fridge at the office when Sam saw the same solo tail walk past the front of the café and stare conspicuously into the window, puffed up like a gorilla wearing a white shirt and cheap black slacks. He logged others. A guy in blue jeans, scuffed brown shoes, and an Adidas shirt: Seems tense, a possible tail. Keep the profile. Another one in gray slacks and a plain black T-shirt giggling into a phone: Head and shoulders relaxed, laughter genuine, unlikely surveillant. Discard.

  Sam kept updating the catalog as Stapp droned on. They finished their beers—Stapp ordered another for himself, Sam declined—and the tech started crushing shelled pistachios. One-thirty. Time to cut across the Old City.

  SAM BEGGED OUT OF THE restaurant, telling Stapp that he had to do some shopping for his mother. “Whatever, man,” the tech said, slapping his back as he glugged down more beer.

  Sam walked westward down the Street Called Straight, the ancient east-west Roman road bisecting the Old City. He neared a cluster of merchant houses selling custom furniture and hand-woven rugs. He strolled for thirty minutes, stopping to take pictures, to look up at a fighter jet soaring overhead, to send his mother a text message. Pedestrian traffic on the street was thin.

  The solo tail had disappeared. Had they backed off? He had not observed the subtle, snap movements of a surveillance team trying to operate clandestinely: no quick duck-backs into side streets, no repeat sightings from earlier in the day, no pedestrians maintaining a steady, consistent distance. It was promising.

  Sam went into a store and ducked into a back room rimmed with stacks of rugs. There was a patch of concrete in the middle where the merchant would display the rugs. The proprietor, a gregarious character named Amin, barked at a prepubescent teenage boy to fetch tea and began showing product to Sam with gusto. His mom did genuinely want a carpet, so he took thirty minutes to evaluate the inventory and finally settled on a Baluchi rug, muddy red and embroidered with lively birds and floral patterns. He haggled with Amin, but not as much as he should have—it was time to leave. Sam snapped a picture of another rug and left his digital camera and satchel on one of the stacks of carpet. He departed westward again toward Souq Midhat Basha.

  Ten minutes later, he felt confident the solo tail was gone. Time for a reversal. He made a show of patting at his sides, where the camera bag would have been, and then abruptly turned back down the street in the direction of the rug shop. He kept his head pointed forward while his eyes swiveled to take everything in: the heat, the people, the movement, the energy. He started to feel clean. He pushed his gut back down and listened to his body for the tingle. His heart thumped and his blood coursed hot.

  Sam retrieved the camera and satchel from Amin and set off eastward, back toward Abu George.

  Four o’clock. Time to stair-step back across town: multiple changes of direction, reversals, a half dozen stops. He would use the Old City’s hairpin switchbacks. A street pro had dozens of opportunities to test a surveillance team by losing them, however briefly and with good reason, in the medieval warren. Stretch them out, force the hostiles to reestablish their perimeter, where even solid teams would make mistakes.

  He snaked past the Mariamite Cathedral, past Naranj—examining the posted menu and snapping a picture—then cut to a pharmacy. The large Band-Aid he bought for his blistered foot was not part of the plan, but he needed the relief and an extra stop could only help draw out the opposition. He slithered into crowds and then out again, alternating the density to lure the opposition into the open. The masses grew as he approached the Umayyad Mosque, but instead of joining them he crossed the old Roman road toward Bab Al Saghir.

  Seven o’clock. The air felt charged, though whether it was the war or his own tension, he did not know. He felt black. Sam stopped at a souvenir stall hawking pro-Assad swag. Then he heard his stomach and realized he needed to eat.

  HE WAS MIDWAY THROUGH A cup of booza, an elastic Levantine ice cream, and nursing a bottle of water when the mind games started. He’d executed the tradecraft perfectly, he thought. Or had he? Had the woman buying ice cream been the same woman from the jewelry store? Had the quick peripheral movement outside the pharmacy actually been a teenager kicking a soccer ball? As he marched on to the train station, his fatigue surged, his calves ached, and he tugged at his dampened shirt.

  He thought of Benson, who’d seen ghosts during every role-play SDR, washed out of the Farm, and eventually left the service after ten months, riding a
desk into the sunset.

  Trust the tradecraft, he told himself. Almost there. It felt quiet, but the air crackled. Mortar fire began somewhere east. The sun’s sugary pinks and reds fired their last volleys. He reached the square in front of the Hijaz train station and stopped. He took a picture. Then he saw a darting motion in the southwestern corner of the square. In the eerie silence a crackle, maybe a radio, maybe a footfall on crumpled foil. His spine tingled and he considered how a team could have evaded detection for almost twelve hours. He sat down on a bench.

  He felt hunted.

  The word dredged up a memory. An officer, a guy named Sanders, was going to meet with a Russian asset in Ankara. He’d executed the SDR and had the meet. The next day the Russian was sent home, put against a wall in the Lubyanka, and shot. The postmortem found that Sanders had been hunted by a multi-team, combo fixed/mobile SVR squad, who suspected he was running Russian assets based on his use of the language at a diplomatic event three weeks earlier. They also suspected a leak in Turkey. Sanders was a thread to pull. The Russians had bubbled him, staying far enough back to evade notice, but keeping him in sight at all times. He’d never seen it coming. Bradley, then Chief of Station Cairo, had forced every Station officer to read the post-mortem. Sam knew that he would have done exactly as Sanders did, and the report scared the shit out of him.

  And now there was a Russian team here, in Damascus, doing god knows what. He thought back to that report. One of the authors, an old-timer from Russia House, had written that the only way to guarantee you’re not in a bubble is to travel quickly in a direction perpendicular to your existing route, busting the bubble and forcing hostile redeployment. Was it possible that all of his moves earlier had happened inside the bubble?