Saul's Game Read online

  DEDICATION

  For the real Anne,

  the love of my life

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  For readers interested in additional useful information on the characters, CIA acronyms, terminology and slang, organizations, agencies, and other entities portrayed in this novel, a list of characters and a glossary are provided at the back of the book.

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  TOP SECRET//X1

  2009: ONE YEAR BEFORE THE ARAB SPRING

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHARACTERS

  GLOSSARY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ANDREW KAPLAN

  BACK ADS

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  TOP SECRET//X1: SPECIAL ACCESS CRITICAL//ORCON/NOFORN/FOR DIRECTOR CIA EYES ONLY/100X1

  [Polygraph Transcript: CIA Community Security Center/For Middle East Division/National Clandestine Service/Baghdad Station; Date: 20090621]

  SUBJECT: Caroline Anne Mathison aka “Carrie”/Operations Officer/Baghdad Station/MED/NCS

  POLYGRAPH EXAMINER: [[Name redacted—see comment at end]]

  NOTE: Includes Polygraph Examiner evaluations [[in double brackets]]. Polygraph audio transcript begins here:

  EXAMINER: Your name is Caroline Anne Mathison?

  MATHISON: Yes.

  EXAMINER: You were born April 5, 1979?

  MATHISON: Yes.

  EXAMINER: You are thirty years old?

  MATHISON: Yes.

  EXAMINER: You are a CIA operations officer currently assigned to Baghdad Station in Iraq?

  MATHISON: Yes.

  EXAMINER: Have you had sexual intercourse in the last week?

  MATHISON: . . . Yes.

  EXAMINER: Have you ever heard of a CIA operation code-named “Operation Iron Thunder”?

  MATHISON: I . . . Yes.

  EXAMINER: Just yes or no. Have you ever heard of a CIA operation code-named “Iron Thunder”?

  MATHISON: Yes.

  EXAMINER: Were you, in fact, the lead operations officer for Operation Iron Thunder?

  MATHISON: Yes.

  EXAMINER: Did you terminate an Iraqi national named [[redacted]]?

  MATHISON: He was going to [[redacted]].

  EXAMINER: Did you personally kill him? Yes or no?

  MATHISION: Yes.

  EXAMINER: What about [[redacted]]? Did you have sexual intercourse with him?

  MATHISON: Yes, but it was . . . [[redacted]].

  EXAMINER: Were drugs, including ecstasy and/or Captagon, also known as Zero One, and multiple sexual partners also involved?

  MATHISON: No, I didn’t participate. [[False. Subject is lying.]]

  EXAMINER: You were acquainted with Warzer Zafir, an Iraqi employee of the United States embassy who also acted as a CIA operative in Baghdad, were you not?

  MATHISON: Yes. We worked together.

  EXAMINER: You knew him better than that, didn’t you? You lived together and had repeated sexual relations with him. Is that correct?

  MATHISON: Yes.

  EXAMINER: Nevertheless, despite your relationship, were you also involved in the death of Warzer Zafir?

  MATHISON: Are you out of your mind? Absolutely not. No. [[False. Subject is lying.]]

  EXAMINER: Miss Mathison, were you, as part of Operation Iron Thunder or otherwise, involved in any way, in a [[redacted]] that [[redacted]]?

  MATHISON: No. What the [[redacted]]? [[Evaluation redacted.]]

  EXAMINER: Just to be absolutely clear, you have no knowledge whatsoever about [[redacted]]?

  MATHISON: [[Redacted.]]

  EXAMINER: During Operation Iron Thunder, were you [[redacted]] and [[redacted]]?

  MATHISON: Yes.

  EXAMINER: And during that [[redacted]], did you reveal intelligence severely damaging to the security of the United States?

  MATHISON: I did not. No. [[False. Subject is lying.]]

  EXAMINER: Are you a traitor to the United States of America?

  MATHISON: No, you son of a bitch! No. [[False. Subject is lying.]]

  Remainder of examination redacted: FOR DIRECTOR CIA EYES ONLY. Examiner and all Human Resources Data/201 File/Aardvark HUMINT/Redacted pursuant DCIA/M–20090624–2.

  2009

  ONE YEAR BEFORE THE ARAB SPRING

  CHAPTER 1

  Hart Senate Building, Washington, D.C.

  28 July 2009

  22:19 hours

  “Mr. President. And Vice President William Walden too. I appreciate you both coming at this time of night.”

  “What is this place? It’s like a damn cave.”

  “Special chamber, Mr. President. We use it for secure meetings with spook types like the vice president back when he was director of the CIA. It’s right under the regular Senate hearing room. From an electronic eavesdropping point of view, it’s probably the most secure location in Washington. And with Marines guarding the tunnel from the Dirksen Building, no one will ever know you were here.”

  “Good, because this meeting never happened. Tim, my Secret Service guy, isn’t thrilled about this.”

  “You have my word, Mr. President. Speaking of which . . .”

  “Let’s cut to the chase, Senator. You can’t hold your hearing.”

  “Hang on, Mr. President. We’re a coequal branch of government. The American people have a right to—”

  “Bullshit. This is politics, pure and simple. Only I’m not a candidate anymore, Senator. I’m the president—and I’m telling you, you can’t do this.”

  “Of course it’s politics. What the hell did you expect? This thing stinks to high heaven. You can’t cover this up.”

  “We sent you everything you asked for, Senator.”

  “You jumping in here, Bill? You sent us what my daddy used to call a giant wagonload of horse manure. The polygraph for this female agent, Mathison, for instance. You redacted damn near everything except her name. Surprised you didn’t do that. This ain’t gonna fly, gentlemen. We’re going to have this hearing—in public. Full media, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the whole circus. And if it embarrasses you, Mr. President, or you, Bill . . . well, tough shit.”

  “Senator . . . Warren, let’s not pretend we like each other. I know you want to make political hay and see yourself on all the Sunday talk shows and maybe a stepping-stone to something bigger, but trust me, this is one hearing that isn’t going to happen.”

  “You try to shut this down, sir, and as an old prosecutor, I warn you. Both you and the vice president are skating very close to articles of impeachment. I take this very seriously.”

  “So do I, Senator. That’s why I’m here. But this hearing cannot go forward.”

 
; “With all due respect, Mr. President, I’m the committee chair. How the hell are you gonna stop me?”

  “Because I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt, that under all the bullshit—and yeah, we’re guilty of it too, there are no virgins here—there’s a patriot. Somebody who actually gives a damn about this country. Listen to me, Warren. This isn’t politics. I am the president of the United States of America and I came here tonight for one reason only. This is critical for our national security. You can’t do this.”

  “You’re gonna have to give me a helluva lot more than that.”

  “That’s why I brought Vice President Walden. Bill?”

  “Senator, the president has ordered me to tell you everything. The whole truth and nothing but. Then you decide. I approved this operation. It was on my watch.”

  “What about this female agent? Mathison. Is she a traitor? I’m thinking seriously about dragging her in front of a FISA court, locking her up, and throwing away the key.”

  “We’ll let you decide. But you’re looking in the wrong direction. She’s not the story.”

  “Then in the name of sweet Jesus, Bill, what is the story?”

  “Funny you should say that. He isn’t even a Christian. He’s an Orthodox Jew. An Orthodox Jew who doesn’t wear one of those yarmulkes on his head or follow any Orthodox Jewish practices. Go figure that one out, for starters. Let’s call him Saul.”

  “What about this Saul?”

  “You saw the docs we sent. It’s in there. Now that the president’s sitting here, I’ll admit it’s not full disclosure. We didn’t send even a third—I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I couldn’t—and maybe we fudged on what we did send, but, so help me, it’s there.”

  “What? This . . . operation? Iron Thunder? Looks like a damn train wreck to me.”

  “Wow, you really don’t get it. You are listening to Beethoven’s Ninth. You’re looking at the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel, and you don’t have a clue. Senator, this was maybe the most brilliant and successful operation in the history of the CIA—a work of genius—and you don’t see it. This saved the Iraq War. Maybe the whole Middle East. If we hadn’t done this, we were projecting more than ten thousand American casualties and a gigantic loss of American prestige around the world, and that was just for starters. We’re talking about a worse disaster than 9/11. You should be handing out medals.”

  “Stop right there, Bill. Since you and the president want to make me one of the bad guys, why don’t you walk me through it? Only let’s be clear, I’m not making any promises. Where do we start? With this operation?”

  “Well, since you brought her up, let’s begin with the girl.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Eastern Syrian Desert

  12 April 2009

  01:32 hours

  The pair of Black Hawk helicopters flew low and fast over the desert. Skimming over sand and rock, less than seventy feet above the ground, barely forty meters apart in the darkness. The night sky was clouded over; only a single star and no horizon. For the pilots it was like flying blindfolded at nearly 160 knots and the only reason they didn’t crash was the AN/ASN-128 Doppler radar that gave them the elevations of ground features: rock outcroppings, sand dunes, or buildings, although in theory, there weren’t supposed to be any habitations in this part of the desert. It would have been safer to fly at a higher altitude, but that would have been suicide. Within minutes, seconds even, they’d be picked up on antiaircraft radar. Once the Syrian fighter jets scrambled, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Strapped into the hatch seat, Carrie Mathison tried to control her hands from shaking. It had been two days since she’d taken her meds. Clozapine for her bipolar disorder. She got them from the little pharmacy on Haifa Street in Baghdad’s Green Zone, where if the owner, Samal, knew you, you could get any drug on the planet, no questions asked so long as you paid for it in cash. “American dollars, please, shokran very much, madam.”

  In the red glow of the helicopter’s interior combat lighting, she could just make out the silhouettes of the Special Ops Group team in full combat gear, humped with packs, cradling M4A1 carbines with sound suppressors. Ten of them plus her made up the Black Hawk’s normal complement of eleven. The distance to the target was inside the helicopter’s 368-mile combat radius and the plan was to be back inside Iraq before daybreak. Through the window next to the hatch, where the door gunner stood manning his 7.62mm machine gun, there was only darkness and the roar of the helicopter’s rotor.

  They had crossed the border into Syrian airspace some fifteen minutes ago, taking off from Forward Operating Base Delta, a sandbagged slab of concrete in the middle of nowhere desert outside Rutba in western Iraq. Except for the occasional stop along Highway 10, much of the desert between Rutba and Otaibah was uninhabited but for a few smugglers’ camps.

  There had been smuggler routes in the region since before the Roman legions came tramping through these sands. When they had planned this mission, they’d figured that, in theory, the local tribesmen were the last people on earth who would make a cell-phone call to Syrian Security Forces. If the smugglers heard helicopters, they would assume they were Syrian army helicopters and hide. In theory.

  She couldn’t stop her hands from trembling. Shit. She had stopped taking her meds because she needed to be super-sharp for this operation. Already she was starting to feel strange, like an early warning. Focus, Carrie, she told herself.

  How many years had she been chasing Abu Nazir, the leader of the IPLA, the Islamic People’s Liberation Army, an affiliate of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the CIA’s most wanted man after Osama bin Laden? It had become very personal. Ever since U.S. Marine Captain Ryan Dempsey was killed outside Fallujah three years ago. Someone she had cared about very much.

  She’d almost caught Abu Nazir back then, in Haditha, but he’d slipped away like some conjurer’s trick. The man was a ghost. Still, they worked it. Her, Perry Dryer, the CIA Baghdad Station chief, and Warzer Zafir, presumably a translator for the U.S. embassy, actually her operative, and of course, back in Langley, her boss, Saul Berenson, the CIA’s Middle East Division chief.

  A year and a half after Dempsey died, Warzer left his wife. He showed up with a single suitcase at Carrie’s apartment in the Green Zone. A tiny second-floor flat with a window overlooking the traffic on Nasir Street: black-market stalls under the palm trees on the street’s center divider selling car parts, plastic jugs of gasoline, guns, even condoms to passing cars.

  “I’m not Dempsey,” Warzer told her that first night, the smell of someone cooking masgouf, fried fish, coming through the open window of her apartment. Standing there, hands in his pockets, looking like a boy on his first date.

  “I don’t want you to be,” she said. She hadn’t been with a man since Dempsey. She knew then she didn’t love Warzer. But there was a gentleness in him, something she needed.

  “I’m Iraqi. Of the Dulaimi from Ramadi. What I’m doing is haram, you understand? Forbidden. My mother cried. She turned her back on me. My own mother. My wife said, ‘First finish with your American sharmuta. Even after, don’t speak to me. I don’t know if I can forgive. I don’t know if I want to.’ You understand, Carrie?”

  She nodded. Sharmuta. Arabic for whore.

  “All I know is I had to have you,” grabbing her in his arms, the first time he’d ever done that. “The two of us. Alone in this war. This insanity. And Abu Nazir, who shames me as a Muslim, sick at what he makes of us.”

  And then there was only the two of them, Warzer with her, inside her, the first man she’d been with in so long, because that’s what the hunt for Abu Nazir had done to them. The two of them like lost children in a storm, the sounds and smells of Baghdad coming through the open window of her apartment.

  “Up and over,” the pilot said, and the helicopter rose to clear an obstacle. They were flying dangerously low to the ground, but then, everything about this mission, three months in the making, was insanely dangerous. It was all on her. She was t
he one who had insisted on it, had forced the issue.

  Putting together a CIA Special Operation like this had required approvals all the way up to the vice president and the national security advisor to the president. When it got to his desk, Vice President William Walden himself had yanked her back to Washington from Baghdad. She had gone into Walden’s office in the West Wing with her boss, her mentor, the one person in the CIA she totally counted on, Saul Berenson; the first time she had ever been in the White House.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Walden had said. “This is the riskiest thing anyone’s ever brought to me. You realize if there’s a screw-up, a single mistake, a helicopter malfunction, a barking dog, a neighbor calls the cops, some asshole fires a shot at the wrong time, we’re toast. The country, the Agency, everything. We’d be invading another country. What the hell, Saul, you don’t think anyone would notice?”

  “It’s Abu Nazir. It’s him. We’ve been chasing him for years. We got him,” she said.

  “How do you know? This Cadillac? I don’t trust it, Saul. I can’t go to Higgins with something this risky.” Mike Higgins was the president’s national security advisor.

  “It’s actionable, Bill. Ninety percent probability. You know she’s right,” Saul said.

  Cadillac was the code name they’d assigned to Lieutenant General Mosab Sabagh, second-in-command of the Syrian Army’s elite Presidential Guard Armored Division. Sabagh was a trusted Alawite clan relative of President Assad and a member of the ruling military inner circle in Damascus.

  Reeling him in had been Saul’s op. He had long ago identified Sabagh as a potential CIA asset. So when a watcher tracking Sabagh at the London Club in the Ramses Hilton in Cairo signaled that the Syrian had gotten in over his head at the tables, Saul made his move. Sabagh had gone to Cairo while his wife, Aminah, was off with President Assad’s wife, Asma, shopping on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. Her trip was something a lieutenant general’s salary could never afford, so Sabagh had tried to win the money. “A dubious idea even in Las Vegas, much less at Egyptian tables,” Saul had remarked.

  When the watcher reported how much money Sabagh was losing, Saul needed someone to close him fast. He sent an emergency Flash Critical message via JWICS, ordering Carrie to grab the next flight from Baghdad to Cairo to make the approach. JWICS was the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, the CIA’s special Internet network designed for highly secure encrypted Top Secret communications.