Damascus Station Read online

  “Saydnaya,” Umm Abiha said.

  “What?” Razan said harshly. She was not reading the cues right. Probably the fatigue and the vodka.

  “The burn marks you noticed on my husband’s arms. He received those in prison. Saydnaya. He was there for three years.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mariam said. “We didn’t mean to stare.”

  Umm Abiha set the teapot on the burner and lit the flame. She sat back at the table. “They said he smuggled weapons,” Umm Abiha said, again as if reading Mariam’s thoughts. Then she shrugged as if to say, Who knows if it’s true? The teapot whistled and Umm Abiha poured three cups of bitter tea. Razan asked for sugar; Mariam kicked her under the table.

  Umm Abiha’s face flushed and she shook her head. “We don’t have any,” she said. The old woman sat down and stared at Mariam. The rest of her looked tired, Mariam thought, but the eyes were lively.

  Embarrassed by these Christian sharameet Mariam figured, Umm Abiha sat and sipped her tea like an instructor considering a punishing lesson. For a while no one spoke. A frail girl emerged from the back room and sat in Umm Abiha’s lap staring at Mariam and Razan.

  “Before prison my husband used to farm here in Douma,” she said. “Apricots, mostly. It was beautiful. Now there are more wells and less water and the mukhabarat check on him frequently. He works in the auto body shop with his brother.” Umm Abiha looked at Razan’s necklace, her earrings, and the dress hemline. Razan’s eyelids sagged, then rocketed upward, then fell. She had not touched her tea.

  “You live in the Old City?” Umm Abiha asked Mariam.

  “Yes,” Mariam said. “We’re at Damascus University now.”

  Umm Abiha nodded. “You are married?”

  “Not yet.”

  “A shame. You are beautiful.” Umm Abiha excused herself to put the child back to bed. Razan had fallen asleep seated at the table.

  Umm Abiha’s husband returned, walking briskly through the kitchen. He murmured a few words to Umm Abiha and handed her the keys. “He changed the tire,” Umm Abiha said.

  Mariam opened her purse, but Umm Abiha raised her hand. “No.” The final word. Mariam nodded and removed her hand from the purse.

  “Thank you.”

  She was about to wake Razan when Umm Abiha slid her chair toward her. She took Mariam’s hands in her own and stared at Mariam’s teeth, smiling with her own knobby set.

  Umm Abiha picked up Mariam’s hand and placed it on her own furrowed cheek, ran it down past the rotting teeth and the bony neck onto flattened breasts that had nurtured six lives. She held Mariam’s hand on her heart and Mariam could feel it beat and pulse.

  “Time to go, Mariam,” she said. “But you remember this. You remember me. A slave outside your gates.”

  INSTEAD, SHE HAD TRIED TO forget. But now Mariam looked back to catch another glimpse of the woman on the protest poster. “Donkeys,” the driver muttered as he managed to clear the crowd and accelerate the car. Mariam lost sight of the poster as the gates swung shut, still uncertain if it was Umm Abiha in the photo. She closed her eyes and sucked in a deep breath, then pushed it out as if expelling the memory.

  INSIDE THE EMBASSY, MARIAM KNOCKED on the door leading to the mukhabarat station. A sweaty Mohannad answered. She thought of the silly report she’d filed on her brief conversation with Sam from the reception earlier in the week. She wondered what he’d done with it.

  “I need the files I sent from Damascus,” Mariam said. Mohannad nodded and told her to wait there. He returned with a large stack. Mariam sorted them, then took the single sheet containing the list of Fatimah’s relatives. She folded it into an envelope and placed that in her purse.

  She returned to the embassy car in the motor pool, Mohannad in tow, trying to ignore the threatening chants of the crowd outside rising over the gates. As she stooped into the open door, it registered that she’d never even considered reporting to Mohannad her second, clandestine meeting with Sam. They drove through the gates. The driver honked, screamed, and flung obscene gestures to the mob as he forced the car back through the crowd.

  SHE WOULD MEET FATIMAH AT a small apartment owned by the Syrian Embassy. The Paris real estate was expensive, but the apartment, like most Syrian government property, was dingy. The heavy wooden furniture, musty rugs and drapes, and portraits of Hafez al-Assad gave it a dated look. Mohannad entered, swept the apartment for listening devices, then went to the hallway door, outside of which he would stand watch. Mariam sat in the apartment’s cramped drawing room on a weathered burgundy sofa with grease splatters on one of the pillows. She waited.

  After a few minutes Fatimah entered, Mohannad behind. She had short, curly, reddish hair, her face plump like a cherub’s. Fatimah’s fighting eyes were still there, gazing into Mariam as they shook hands. Fatimah wore a black pantsuit and a frilly blouse with white polka dots. Around her neck she wore a scarf emblazoned with the tristar flag of the rebellion. She sat across from Mariam. Mohannad decamped for the hallway. An embassy attendant entered with cardamom tea.

  “Thank you for meeting me,” Mariam said.

  “Where is Bouthaina?” Fatimah said.

  “On pressing business. I am empowered to speak on her behalf.”

  Fatimah nodded as she stirred sugar into her tea. She pulled aside her scarf and unfurled it on the couch so Mariam could see the triplet stars. “You are General Georges Haddad’s daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  Fatimah sighed as the stirring spoon clinked onto the plate. “Do you know how many of these discussions I have had? They all follow the same script: tea, pleasantries, then a reminder of the futility of my position, a lecture on the jihadi underpinnings of the rebellion. Then, finally, the offer, its price, the accompanying threats.” She took a sip of tea. “I cannot, though, remember a messenger as elegant as you, Mariam. I do give them points for that. You are a credit to the regime’s creativity and the image-conscious nature of our venal President. But unless you are not following the script I described, I would suggest you move straight to the offer, what it will cost me, and what you will do if I do not comply.” She put her teacup down and regarded Mariam.

  “The offer: you come home. The price: descriptions of the rebellion in several European newspapers as a jihadi front, and silence upon your return. You live out your days in your childhood home.” Mariam sipped tea, the hot liquid flowing past the ache in her gut. She removed the envelope from her purse and put it on the table.

  Fatimah blinked at Mariam. “The threat?”

  “Yes.”

  The oppositionist opened the envelope and scanned the list of twenty-two names. At the top: An elderly mother. Eighty years old. She looked up at Mariam.

  “When I was young, I could not comprehend how anyone could support the government. I hated those who did. I would not speak to them. But as I’ve aged I realize that we are born into a world, a family, and there are constraints. There is a system. Some people—the French, the Americans—are born into worlds that offer immense freedom. But we were not. We are Syrians. We are caged from birth, for reasons deep in history. I do not hate you, though you’ve just threatened my mother. You are doing what you should to keep your family safe, to afford nice things, to eat well. But do not be deceived, you still have a choice. It is just a difficult one.”

  Mariam finished her tea and set down the cup with a clatter. Her chest felt heavy again.

  Fatimah folded the paper and slid it back to Mariam. “The answer is no. I am a free woman. I intend to stay free.”

  THAT AFTERNOON IT RAINED, AND the clouds hung thick over the city. Mariam returned to the embassy to draft the readout of the meeting. Bouthaina had departed for Syria. The official talks were in disarray and the President was preparing to give a speech announcing their end in front of the rubber-stamp parliament in Damascus.

  After she finished the report and sent it to Bouthaina’s secure Palace email, Mariam went to a café around the corner from her hotel. She opened a notebook to j
ournal but could not put a single line on the page. She closed it, pulled out her phone, and, after hesitating for a moment, called Bouthaina.

  “Have you read my email?” she asked.

  “Yes. To be expected. She needs to think on it. You need to take another pass at her. She’ll spend the rest of the day debating the decision. Excuse me one second.” There were muffled noises in the background as her boss spoke to someone else. Mariam put her pen on the paper but it did not move.

  “Are you still there?” Bouthaina said.

  “Still here.” Mariam was looking down at the blank page in her notebook, which seemed to be taunting her.

  “I’ll call Ali Hassan now, but I think we tell Fatimah that her mama will be brought in by the end of the week if she does not comply.”

  “Agreed.” Mariam clenched her jaw.

  “Good. You stay for the follow-up. ’Bye.”

  Mariam ended the call, then looked around the café. The woman at the counter was flirting with a college student ordering a coffee. Mariam opened her wallet, removed the napkin, and spread it on the table. She looked at the phone number and remembered the feel of his hand.

  She dialed the number.

  10

  CIA PREFERRED TO PICK THE MEETING SPOTS, BUT SAM had stressed in his cables to Langley and Damascus that proposing an alternative would spook Mariam. So a rapid investigation took shape. CIA ran the address through dozens of databases to check for any mentions in intercepted terrorist communications. EUR Division, using a cover company to make the inquiry, confirmed the validity of the address and business with the French tax authorities. The BANDITOs staked out the entrance and did not spot any hostile surveillance. Rami even toured the studio, noting a single security camera outside. The place checked out.

  Now Rami and Elias waited outside Mariam’s hotel. Sam and Yusuf were in an alley two blocks from the address Mariam had provided. There had been more rain and the city streets were now cool.

  “She just left the hotel,” Rami said over the encrypted radio.

  Mariam had instructed him to wear athletic clothes and arrive at six. She’d told him to expect a private lesson from one of her old friends. “She’s going to kick your ass,” Yusuf whispered to Sam with a wide grin. Probably true. CIA officer incapacitated by Syrian developmental during Israeli martial arts exercise. Now, that would be an embarrassing cable.

  “She’s doing something interesting,” Elias said on the radio. “She’s on foot headed toward Saint-Germain but she’s traveling in a zigzag route. Plus a few turns and reversals that we didn’t expect. Pretty simple but threw us off.”

  “Sad if you get spotted by an amateur,” Yusuf said.

  “We’re better than the mukhabarat,” Rami said. “We’ll be fine.”

  “What nationality was the instructor who gave you the tour of the studio?” Sam asked into the radio.

  “Israeli.”

  Sam smiled and thought of a young Mariam, seventeen years old, sneaking out of her parents’ apartment with a bag of workout gear slung over her shoulder to train under an Israeli.

  “She doesn’t want the mukhabarat to see her,” Sam said. “She’s running a surveillance detection route.”

  APPROACHING THE BUILDING, SAM SAW the worn, handwritten label, “Krav Maga-Paris,” and buzzed the adjoining button.

  “Oui?” came a scratchy, metallic voice out of the tiny speaker.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French,” Sam said in butchered French. Sam’s only experience with the language had been when he spent two weeks running an operation in Morocco during his Cairo tour. He served in the Sandbox where Arabic, not French, was the language of the asset recruiters.

  A laugh. “You are right. Sam Joseph?”

  “Yes.”

  The door clicked and Sam jogged up the winding cement staircase to the third floor.

  He found Mariam inside, stretching on the padded floor. She smiled at Sam. She wore stretchy tight black pants, scuffed tennis shoes, and a black racerback top. The instructor shook Sam’s hand and introduced himself as Beni. “I’m always honored to have one of my old students come back,” he said. “And it’s even better when they bring a sparring partner.” Beni had the physique of a man in his mid-thirties but his weathered face and shaggy gray eyebrows put him closer to sixty. He spoke English with a mutt accent blending French and Hebrew.

  “Have you sparred before, Sam?” Beni asked.

  “Yes. Karate lessons when I was a kid.” He omitted the hand-to-hand combat at the Farm and the refresher lessons before Baghdad.

  Beni laughed—a big, guttural laugh that was impossible not to like. “We’ll make sure you are well protected from Mariam. She was one of my more, how do you say, enthusiastic students.”

  At that, Mariam grinned and then tossed Sam a helmet, vest, and a pair of gloves. “I thought we could start with some light sparring,” she said. “You can help me dust off the cobwebs from Damascus.”

  Beni coughed and looked at Sam. “I assume you did not bring protection for the, uh, how do you say politely?” He pointed at Sam’s groin. Mariam snorted.

  Sam smiled. “I did not.”

  “I have a rental. Lightly used.”

  SAM RETURNED FROM THE BATHROOM, fiddling with the plastic that would protect him from this wildling Syrian woman.

  Beni gave him an imploring look of unspoken yet clear concern for the well-being of Sam’s groin, so Sam nodded once to signal it would be fine. Beni nodded back and then turned to Mariam. “Let’s start with some light contact.”

  Sam and Mariam tapped gloves. She circled. Beni watched from the sidelines. “Krav Maga is not about forms or beauty,” he explained to Sam. “It is about destroying an opponent using any means necessary. You do not just defend yourself, you become the attacker to destroy the threat.”

  Mariam came at him first with a few straight punches that he dodged. When she was in close she threw a knee into his vest, scoring a direct hit. She thrust it in again, then backed off, circling once more. The strikes were sharp and quick. She stared him down, eyes narrowing from inside the helmet. He could feel her energy and tried to sense her next move.

  She came in with more straight punches and fast footwork. He stepped back and blocked two strikes with his forearms.

  She circled. The case danced through his mind.

  She agreed to have drinks.

  She shared secrets.

  She is sympathetic to the protesters, even if she denies it.

  She called back after saying no the first time.

  She brought him to an intimate place, one she knew would be devoid of hostile surveillance.

  She is trying to physically harm me.

  She wants to fight.

  He jumped back as she came in with a kick at the groin. “Turn the attack around, Sam,” she said. “Come at me.” He’d wanted to avoid an actual fight to keep his cover intact. The State Department guys didn’t get this kind of training.

  Screw it. He landed three quick jabs into her vest and helmet, she kicked him in the stomach, then stepped in and struck his head with the tip of her elbow as her knee connected with his groin. He grunted. He hit her vest with a fist, then kicked at her legs to get some distance. “Come on, come at me,” she said, clapping the gloves together.

  He did.

  But now they were reading each other. She blocked each jab, he blocked the kick, ducked an elbow, then she tried to drive him into the wall with a choke. Beni whistled. Sam smacked her arms down like they’d taught him at the Farm, she threw a fist at his helmet, and he dodged it. She cursed in Arabic and came at him again. He ducked and went for a jab into the area above those lovely hips. She stepped back, smiled like the devil, and returned with a groin kick that he caught. He twisted her leg and she collapsed faceup but scuttled backward, right knee folded up like a scorpion tail. When he stepped forward she thrust it into his shin. He tried to get closer, but she kept scuttling away as she kicked from her back. He stopped, she jumpe
d up, knocked her gloves together, cursed, and came right back for more.

  But instead of kicks or punches, she lowered her shoulder and bowled into him, knocking him off balance, her body weight taking them both to the floor. Then she was on top, her legs pinning his arms and raining blows down. He was cursing, wincing. Beni whistled, said, Arret, arret. Sam smiled as her eyes flickered inside her helmet, like she wanted to bed him or kill him, maybe both, he couldn’t tell.

  She dismounted and strutted to the corner for water. He watched her bob away and heard the sound of Beni’s voice asking if he was all right. The instructor offered a hand to help him up.

  HE FIGHTS WELL, MARIAM THOUGHT. He has been trained. Karate when he was young? Please. He moves like someone who has been taught. She wanted more of this, of him. It took her back, away from Fatimah and the war, toward the Paris of her youth and the lightness of breath, which she felt now, though her lungs burned hard and her muscles were sore.

  “The weapons, Beni?” Mariam said.

  The Israeli nodded and turned to Sam, who had barely gotten off the floor.

  “Sparring is helpful, but Krav is really about training for practical, real-life situations,” he said. He arched a bushy eyebrow. “You said only karate when you were younger? Nothing more?”

  “That’s right. And a few street fights, I guess. Poker games gone bad, that kind of thing.”

  “I see,” Beni said, intonation hinting that he in fact did not. Mariam did not, either.