“Billie …” The cover name she had used with him—for jazz singer Billie Holiday. “I think I’m discovered. I got your captain message and the Cousin Abdulkader emergency message. I will try meeting you at the café tonight, but I have to tell you, I think I am done. Today, I saw my commander, Tariq. He and I go back many years. But this time, instead of the normal way he usually looks at me, or nods, he looked away.
“I have never in my life felt as I felt at that moment. My whole body began to sweat. We say in Arabic, as if someone is crying on my grave.
“So I said something to him about ‘those idiots in the petrol depot. They got the amounts wrong again.’ This is something we both always complain about. But instead of agreeing, or calling them ‘asses’ as usual, he just looked at me. Such a look, Billie. It turned my blood to ice. He said nothing, just walked on. This man is my friend, Billie.
“Then in my office. Not a single phone call. No new emails. Nothing. No junior officers. No colleagues stopping by. It is like the word has gone out. I am haram. Forbidden. I left work early. I will try to get this to the drop in the souk now if I can. I will come to the café tonight, but I feel it coming. The noose is closing around me. Please, if you get this, help my family. Get them out of Syria. Don’t let them be refugees, Billie. You can do this. I know you can do this. Allahu akhbar, Billie.”
God is great, she translated numbly to herself as the video ended.
Damn, damn, damn, she thought. And then Cadillac had led them right to Orhan. A shiver went down her spine. And they almost got me … closing the laptop and sliding the pistol under her pillow as she got into bed.
She woke up sweating in the middle of the night. In the darkness, she had no idea where she was. A sense of panic closed in. Then she remembered. Her hotel room. Still in Damascus.
She went to the window and peeked out from behind the curtain at the city, the strangely yellow streetlights and the minarets of mosques. Her mission sense was prickling all over her skin like a terrible itch. I have to get out of here, she thought.
Aleppo, Syria
13 April 2009
In the year 1123, Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem, made what was for him a rare tactical error and was captured in battle by the Seljuk Turk Belek, who held him prisoner for two years in the Citadel castle in Aleppo. The massive white-stone castle still gleamed in the afternoon sun on its acropolis, an outcropping of rock over the Aintab plateau that had been used as a fortress since long before history. But it held little interest for Carrie, except for a few cell-phone snapshot photos that she would need.
Coming from the bus station, her only real interest in Aleppo was the Internet café someone on the bus had mentioned. They said it was on Noureddin Zinki, a street that radiated north from the Citadel castle that could be seen from all over the city.
Once in the café, she sat next to a young Syrian college student. She got online, plugged in the flash drive, and uploaded Cadillac’s video file via a CIA cover website. The site, presumably for a freight forwarding company, was actually a server in Hamburg used to bounce files to a Vimeo-like international video website.
Once the video was on the website, she sent an encrypted email to Saul’s private IP address. She sent her report in a file encrypted within photo JPEG files of the Aleppo Citadel castle that she attached to her email.
The email ended: “Can you believe it? I think I saw an aardvark. Hope to see you soon. Hugs and kisses.” “Aardvark” was CIA code for Flash Critical; the highest possible urgency.
After she pressed Send, she plugged in the separate NSA flash drive that deleted all traces of everything she had done, all evidence that she had even been there, not just on the Internet café’s computer, but on the servers it linked to across Syria. Once Saul read her report, he would retrieve the video file from the Vimeo-like website and then have the NSA delete it from the website without anyone ever knowing it had been there.
She had gotten it to Saul, she thought, relieved, coming out of the café. Walking down the street with its palm trees, feeling the late-afternoon sunlight, smelling falafel from a street vendor, she felt lighter, better.
Now Saul will take care of it, she thought. He would come up with a game plan and we would get the mole that prevented us from capturing Abu Nazir. Someone must know who this mysterious Russian was. Maybe the CIA’s Moscow Station had intel on him? Now she would go to ground and wait till she received instructions from Saul. Thank goodness he was there in Langley, putting all the pieces together.
She had no way of knowing that at that moment, Saul was about to get fired.
Hart Senate Building, Washington, D.C.
28 July 2009
23:42 hours
“Wait a minute, Bill. This Saul, this genius master spy. This superstar. Mona Lisa and all that. You were going to fire him?”
“I came close, Senator. Damn close. Look at what happened: Our Middle East operations had been in trouble for some time. Abu Nazir’s IPLA knew every damn thing we were going to do before we did. We took a humongous risk and invaded Syria with a SOG team and came up empty. An operation he pushed, that was strictly on his dime. Not only that, we had our top asset in Syria dead, tortured; our network in Syria completely blown to hell. Abu Nazir had disappeared, and after years of work we were back to square one. He’s our Middle East Division chief! The buck has to stop somewhere. What would you do? It was a complete and total balls-up. You know how it works around here. Somebody’s head had to roll.”
“What about the girl, Bill? This female operations officer. He took a helluva risk with her.”
“That’s another thing, Mr. President. He put a female CIA operations officer into a hostile red zone completely on her own. Alone, with no backup. To handle an unbelievably dangerous operation without any support. What if she had been killed—or worse, captured? He put all our operations in the Middle East at risk.”
“What do you mean all?”
“Carrie Mathison was out of our Beirut and Baghdad Stations. She knew everything. I mean everything. Our assets, networks, codes, contacts, every one of us. Everything. What if the Syrians had captured her? What if they had turned her over to Hezbollah or the Iranians? Or the Russians? Think what they could have squeezed out of her. It would have been … well, I’m not sure how we would have recovered, but one thing’s for damn sure. A lot of very good people would have died. And as far as the war in Iraq was concerned, we could’ve quit right there. Game over. Do you blame me?”
“What did he say when you confronted him about her?”
“You want to know, Senator? He said, ‘She’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.’ Like it was nothing. No big deal.”
“I’m wondering, Bill, she’d come up with this lead about a Russian. Didn’t you factor that in?”
“We didn’t know about it. Not then, Warren. I had called an emergency, early-morning meeting in my West Wing office. Me; the CIA director and deputy directors; David Estes, director of the Counterterrorism Center; Saul. But it was mostly me, yelling at him. And him, sitting there, looking like a rabbi who forgot his yarmulka.”
“What did he say?”
“That I was jumping the gun. That we had to wait for Mathison’s report.”
“ ‘We don’t even know if she’s alive!’ I said. At that point we didn’t. The SOG team barely made it back to Rutba. ‘We’re losing assets,’ I said. To hell with firing him. I wanted to punch him in