“So he came to you because you’re both Kurds? Or maybe because you both cheat at tawla? What do you import-export?”
He hesitated. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On who’s asking.”
Strange why people do things, thinking of what it must have been like for Orhan in those last few minutes, making his choice about who to trust with whatever was in the brooch.
“I’m beginning to understand, Monsieur Tayfouri.” She leaned closer to whisper. “The sooner I leave Damascus the better for both of us. Can you be of assistance?”
He thought for a moment. “Do you know Aleppo?”
After leaving Tayfouri’s shop in the souk, she took three taxis and a servee microbus all going in opposite directions so that she had to run from one vehicle to another to make sure no one had followed her from the souk before she risked going back to her room at the Cham Palace.
Back at the hotel, there were the usual low-level GSD watchers sitting and looking bored in the lavish lobby and atrium, but no one seemed particularly interested in Jane Meyerhof, she thought. She went over to the concierge’s desk and asked him to make arrangements for a bus trip to Aleppo.
“You will like Aleppo, madam. It is famous for its mother-of-pearl inlaid boxes. Many important sights, although not like Damascus, of course,” the concierge said.
“Of course. Thank you,” she said, paying him for the tickets and heading for the elevator.
Once in her room, she locked the door and took her time going over the room and bathroom, checking for bugs and hidden cameras. The room was clean except for the normal GSD bug in the room telephone, which she left alone. She used that phone to call room service to order a sandwich and a mint lemonade and got to work on her laptop.
Inside the amber brooch was a compartment containing a thumb drive. She hefted it grimly in her palm. Orhan—and maybe Cadillac too—had died to get this to her. She plugged the drive into her laptop, turned on the sound, and suddenly she was watching people dancing at a wedding led by the young couple, the bride in white, swaying in front of a multitiered cake.
She lurched to turn down the sound and close the laptop, because right then there came a knock at the door. She grabbed her pistol, holding it behind her back, and moved to the door.
It was a waiter with her sandwich and drink. He brought it in. She waited till he had gone, then started the video again, this time with the sound turned low. Whose wedding? she wondered. Then she saw Cadillac and his wife among the guests. They had taught Cadillac well, she thought wryly. Looking at this video, the GSD would assume it was just an ordinary wedding video. They’d watch it, but never see it for what it really was.
Next, she ran the NSA software that parsed out a file hidden in the video. The software pulled millions of bits together to create an .avi file, that she titled “Damascus sights.” She put in her earplug and, placing her pistol beside her on the bed, sat down to run the file.
The video lasted less than a minute and thirty seconds. After she ran it, she sat there, stunned. It changed everything. A whole new ball game. All she could think was, I have to get this to Saul ASAP.
Her instincts had been screaming for her to leave Damascus. With the SOG team incursion and the deaths of both Cadillac and Orhan, right now she was in the bull’s-eye of the red zone. She couldn’t risk trying to communicate with Saul from here. Her only chance was to get out of town and send the intel to Saul from Aleppo.
The video had been taken with a hidden camera. In all likelihood, the one concealed in the sunglasses Carrie had personally given to Cadillac at their second meeting in Beirut. It had to have been taken by Cadillac himself.
It was in two parts. The first locale was obvious. One of the restaurants clustered on the ridge of Mount Qasioun, the mountain that loomed over Damascus. In this most ancient of cities, it was said that it was on these slopes that Cain killed Abel.
She could tell it had been shot close to sunset, the lights just coming on in the city spread out below and the lamps of the restaurant on, but despite the shadows, still enough sunlight to see, although not clearly. It showed two men talking at a table, with a breathless voice-over by Cadillac. One of the men was an Arab in an expensive suit. Because of the angle from which the footage was shot, she could only see the Arab’s back and, just for one second when he turned, part of the side of his face. My God, Carrie thought. Could it be him? Abu Nazir? Was it possible this was an actual sighting? There was no way to tell who the Arab really was. Nothing definite; a man’s back. But still, something told her Cadillac had delivered something important. A shiver went through her. Seated at the table with him was a European in a striped shirt worn outside checked wool trousers, talking while he ate a slice of pizza.
The voice-over was by Cadillac. Added later, she thought.
“The man in the suit is Abu Nazir,” Cadillac’s voice said in Arabic. It could be him, Carrie thought. It absolutely could be him. “I don’t know the name of the man he is with, but I’ve heard him referred to as ‘the Russian.’ But here’s something interesting. Seated at the table next to them.” As Cadillac spoke, the video moved to the next table, where three Syrian men were sitting, all wearing white shirts and ties.
The three men were eating little dishes of mezze. One of them was smoking a shisha water pipe and watching the next table with great interest.
“I know the one smoking the shisha,” Cadillac said on the voice-over. “His name is Omar al-Mawasi. He is definitely GSD. All these guys are GSD. They’re calling the guy with Abu Nazir ‘the Russian.’ ”
And then Cadillac must’ve pointed the pen with the hidden microphone at Abu Nazir’s table. It caught a jumble of voices in Arabic and a bit of the man Cadillac said was Abu Nazir and the Russian speaking in English.
“ … will change the course of the war,” Abu Nazir said. The voice, even with the poor quality of the recording and the noise of conversations, was somehow familiar. She stopped the video and played it again. And again. She’d heard the voice before somewhere, searching her memory for where. She played more of the video.
“Your action will change everyth …” the Russian said, the rest drowned out by someone at another table saying something in Arabic about a car accident on Al Katheeb Road.
“ … regret the necessity of having to leave …” the Russian said amid a jumble of voices, including one of the GSD men at the next table talking about getting reimbursed.
“An inconvenience. We always planned for such a …” Abu Nazir said, the rest lost in background noise. And then she had it. Back in 2006. The ruins of the porcelain factory in Ramadi and the recorded conversation and the voice of the man who had interrogated her agent, Walid Karim, code-named Romeo. It was him! Abu Nazir! It was his voice. She was certain of it.
That section of the video ended and it left Carrie’s mind reeling. It confirmed—at least tentatively—that Abu Nazir had been hiding in Syria, and for some time, with the connivance of the Syrian government. The Syrians were playing both ends against the middle. But who was the European, the Russian? What did he have to do with it? Or with AQI? More important, what was Abu Nazir planning that would change the course of the war in Iraq?
The date of the recording had been automatically imprinted on it by the camera. Two days ago. Two days! Could the Russian have been warning Abu Nazir about the SOG team op? My God, was that it? Did Cadillac actually see it happen without knowing it? Because the timing was unbelievable.
It was a breakthrough! Proof positive of a leak. And even better, a lead. The Russian. Saul would go nuts over this, she thought, racing to finish the video. That was a mistake.
The second part of the video was gut-wrenching. It was jerky footage shot by Cadillac while walking on