Saul's Game Page 13

  “And Lebedenko?”

  “He reconnected with me after Damascus. Business is business, old chap; you know the drill. I suppose it was his way of apologizing.”

  “Or more likely, his way of still using you,” she said.

  He got up on one elbow and looked at her.

  “You are good. Damned good.”

  “Lebedenko,” she said, touching him. “He’s ‘the Russian,’ right?”

  “Uh-huh . . . Last I heard, he was leaving Iraq. Told me something was going to blow there very soon. I’m giving you straight intel, Carrie. Everyone thinks the bloody war there is over. Focusing on the financial crisis and the politics in America. Lebedenko knows Iraq. Since the days of Saddam. But he says it’s all going to change very soon,” Gerry said.

  “Where’s he now?”

  “Can’t you guess? Oh yes! Oh, that’s good.”

  “Bahrain. And needing money? For her?” she said.

  “God, yes. Please, yes. Yes.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Manama, Bahrain

  21 April 2009

  The heat. And the humidity that wrapped itself around him like a hundred steamed towels the second he stepped out of the air-conditioned terminal. Saul and Dar looked at each other in the taxi coming in from the airport on the Prince Khalifah Causeway.

  “I always forget how hot it is,” Saul said, using a handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his glasses, checking his cell-phone app, which showed the local temperature at 112 degrees F.

  “Thank God it’s April, when it’s still cool. Glad we’re not doing this in July,” Dar said. He told the driver to turn off the causeway on Avenue 22, near the U.S. naval base. Bahrain was headquarters for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf.

  The taxi took them past the U.S. base. Sand-colored buildings surrounded by chicken-wire fences topped with barbed wire. It was nearing dusk. Lights and neon signs were coming on in buildings set against a purple-gold sky. Now they were going through backstreets in the Juffair district. Around them were cars and taxis full of sailors and Marines on a forty-eight-hour pass, Arabs in white flowing thaubs on motorcycles, and a passing minibus packed like sardines with migrant Indian workers. Evening in Bahrain.

  Turning onto Shabab Avenue, they saw a parade of prostitutes, mostly young Asian or Filipina girls in barely there miniskirts or skintight short-shorts, high heels, and bikini tops lining the street in front of the shops, buildings, and restaurants, interspersed with Gulf women in head-to-toe abayas, only their eyes showing, sailing by the prostitutes like black ghosts.

  “You picked a helluva spot. I thought Exhibition Avenue was the place for street whores in Manama,” Dar said.

  “I guess business is expanding,” Saul said, turning away.

  He wasn’t thinking about the prostitutes. Bahrain had become the Las Vegas of the Arab world, only instead of gambling and entertainment, it sold alcohol and whores. On the weekends, the King Fahd Causeway, a seventeen-mile bridge from the Saudi Arabian mainland to the small island kingdom, was jammed with traffic that made L.A.’s 405 at rush hour look like an empty country road. Every car and SUV was filled with young Saudi males flush with oil money, anxious for what they couldn’t get at home: all the booze they could drink, the music they could dance to, and the girls they could buy.

  The only problem was the competition: male tourists from other Arab countries, American sailors and Marines from the Fifth Fleet, and civilian contractors on TDY allowances. But the prostitutes triggered thoughts in Saul about the intel Carrie had sent him from Istanbul about Lebedenko and his infatuation with the girl, Alina. Maybe it was true. “The rose grows among thorns,” his father had taught him, quoting from the Talmud. He glanced over at Dar, busy checking for tails, eyes flicking at the taxi’s mirrors and the cars behind them. He was there, just in case.

  The taxi pulled up in front of a ten-story apartment building, set back behind a row of shops and a pizza restaurant on Road 4020. They got out with their suitcases. Dar looked up at the roof as they walked toward the entrance. The windows in the building were rectangles of gold from the sunset.

  “Did you rent this place by the hour?” Dar said.

  “Might as well’ve,” Saul said, pulling his suitcase behind him.

  They went up in the elevator. The apartment was on the top floor. As they got out, a young American woman, packing a baby in a BabyBjörn and pulling a two-wheeled shopping cart, smiled at them as she got in the elevator.

  “Navy wife,” Dar muttered as they went down the hallway to the apartment.

  “Dar, nobody gets hurt here,” Saul said, and knocked twice, then twice again. Virgil, gun in hand, opened the door.

  “How are we doing?” Saul asked, coming in and looking around.

  “We’re good. JWICS set. Computers. Cameras. Bugs. Cell phones. I’ve already programmed them for us.” Passing out prepaid cell phones to them for local use. They would be disposed of quickly so they couldn’t be easily tracked. “I set up a small dish on the roof with a wire drilled through to the apartment. It’s pretty well hidden. I don’t think anyone’ll spot it. If they do, we’ll be gone.”

  While Dar checked the rest of the apartment, Virgil spread out on the table two SIG Sauer 9mm pistols with sound suppressors, an H&K MP5 submachine gun, magazines of ammunition, and an H&K FP6 short-barreled shotgun and a box of shells.

  “A shotgun? Is that necessary?” Saul asked Dar, coming back into the room.

  “Better for close work,” Dar said, loading it with twelve-gauge shells.

  “Where’d we get these?” Saul asked.

  “Courtesy of the Navy,” Virgil said, nodding in the direction of the navy base.

  “How’d you manage that?” Saul asked.

  “Well, I didn’t ask.” Virgil smiled. He went to the refrigerator and came back with three bottles of Stella beer. They sat around the table, sucking down the cold beer.

  “What do you think?” Saul asked them.

  Virgil shrugged. “What does Carrie say?”

  Dar looked at him sharply. “You value her opinion that much?”

  He’s never met her, Saul thought, deciding he wanted to keep it that way. Virgil nodded.

  “Fifty-fifty,” Saul said. “Maybe it started as an infatuation, but five years as a sex slave is a long time. And we’re getting this from a KGB, now SVR spy who sells poison gas for a living as told by a soggy Brit who’s hanging on by his fingernails. She likes this Gerry Hoad. Thinks he’s worth more than he’s being given credit for, but she also thinks maybe he wants to believe because it keeps him in the game. On the other hand, the story about MI6 hiding him from us because of the screw-up on 9/11 rings true.”

  “Because . . . ?” Dar said.

  “Because they bury their mistakes the same way we do. That’s what intelligence services are for. To lie to each other whenever needed,” Saul said, wiping foam from his lips. He pointed his beer bottle at Dar.

  “I hope you’re not planning on using that thing,” indicating the shotgun. “We don’t want a bloodbath. This isn’t the O.K. Corral.”

  “No. This is for emergencies only. For security I have someone special,” Dar said.

  “Good,” Saul said, picking up the SIG Sauer and awkwardly loading the magazine. “Because I haven’t fired one of these since the firing range during training. Probably blow my damn foot off.”

  In the evening, Saul sat uncomfortably on the chair in the hotel room, waiting. The cash he had brought, $22,000 in hundreds, was in a paper bag on the coffee table in front of him. He was aware he was being watched. He had spotted two hidden cameras, one at an angle to the bed, as well as a bug, before he sat down. He was also wired for sound. Dar, with a mobile listening device and an FP6 shotgun, was listening in the room directly across the corridor. Virgil, also listening, was in an SUV, parked across the street to cover the hotel entrance.

  The room was on the top floor of a ten-story hotel two blocks from “American Alley,” the st
reet leading from the main gate of the U.S. naval base. It was lined with Burger King, McDonald’s, Avis, Chili’s, and other American franchises. The first two floors of the hotel were filled with nightclubs and bars that throbbed with clashing types of music on loudspeakers: Filipino Pinoy, Arabic, and throbbing American hip-hop blasting so loud it could be heard even on the top floor.

  When they finished wiring him up and doing a sound check, just before he had gone into the room, Saul stuck a stick of Black Jack gum, soft from the heat, into his mouth.

  “You still do that for luck?” Dar said.

  Saul nodded.

  “Where’d that start?”

  “Can’t remember.”

  Dammit, Dar, did you have to bring that up, Saul thought. Now he couldn’t help thinking about it. “Little Saul, all by himself on the playground,” Mira had said. If she only knew. At home, Jewish ritual and silence, his parents always listening to the news on the TV. “Did you hear? The Syrians shelled Israel again, those momsers. Wait, it’ll be war again.”

  At school, he was not only the only kid who wore a yarmulke, he was the only boy the other kids had ever seen wearing one. The white-bread Indiana kids treated him like someone from another galaxy. The only thing he knew was that he was alone and that evil, unspeakable things had not only happened, they were lurking somewhere just out of sight, waiting to rise again like Godzilla.

  1961. The year Roger Maris went for sixty-one homers, Mickey Mantle right behind. He was eight, and like everyone else that year, it was all about baseball. He hung around the Little League field until they finally let him shag flies or field grounders, one hand holding on to the yarmulke on his head, the other going after the ball, but he couldn’t play. They started every game with a prayer that ended “in the name of Jesus Christ, Our Lord, amen.” His father would never sign the form to let him play.

  One day, he went to the batting cages on Highway 933. A bunch of kids chased him, calling him “kike” and “Jew boy.” They caught him and pulled his pants down. Three of them held him down while a fourth kid, a big bully who everyone called “Gull” and whose father sold cartons of illegal cigarettes out of the back of his pickup in the lot behind the drugstore, raised a brick and said he was going to smash Saul’s face in, but an older kid, freckle-faced, with wild red hair, a popular kid named Terry, stepped in and stopped them. “Leave him alone. I seen him at the Little League,” Terry said.

  And when they wouldn’t stop, Terry said, balling his fists, “If you hit him, you’re gonna have to hit me.”

  The next day, Saul forged his father’s signature on the release. The first three games, they sat him on the bench. The last inning, the score tied, two men on, two out, the kid who was supposed to bat had to go home. Saul was the only boy left on the bench. They had to put him up. As he was about to bat, Terry came over and handed him a stick of Black Jack gum.

  “Chew it. Helps you relax. I seen you at the cage,” Terry said, rapping his shoulder with his fist. “I know you can hit.”

  Saul hit the second pitch into left field for a triple.

  Black Jack.

  Terry O’Leary became the best friend he ever had. Terry’s family had moved to Calliope from Cincinnati. Terry was a rabid Cincinnati Reds fan, so Saul rooted for the Reds too. His idol, of course, was Frank Robinson. Incredibly, the Reds beat the Dodgers to make it to the Series, Saul and Terry yelling and jumping up and down like crazy people. But that year—with Mantle, Maris, Berra, Howard, Kubek, and Whitey Ford—nobody was going to beat the Yankees. Saul was a junior in high school when Terry was killed in Binh Dinh Province, Vietnam.

  Someone was blasting loud Arab music from a nightclub loudspeaker. Something that sounded a lot like “Habibi, habibi, habibi,” Saul thought, waiting. Young prostitutes, Chinese, Thais, Filipinas, Russians, wobbled on high heels down the hotel corridor with slips of paper in their hands, knocking on doors. Two had mistakenly knocked on Saul’s door and he sent them away. A stained piece of paper inside clear plastic by the phone in his room explained the slips of paper: a price list, listing girls by nationality, the price in Bahraini dinars, and an in-house phone number.

  The third time there was a knock at the door, when Saul opened it, he saw her. Alina. Absolutely Alina.

  He recognized her from the photo Carrie had sent him that she had gotten from Gerry Hoad. She looked younger than he expected and he had to remind himself she was barely twenty-two. Long dark hair, mouth lipsticked fire-engine red, long legs, pretty, with sea-blue eyes that showed nothing. She was dressed in high heels and a pink see-through baby-doll nightie that concealed nothing.

  “You Mr. Smith?” she asked in English with an Eastern European accent.

  Saul nodded. Credit me with originality, he thought.

  “Where’s Lebedenko?” he asked.

  “He’s coming, baby. First we make good time, you and me,” she said, sitting on his lap and reaching for his crotch.

  Saul stiffened.

  “What is this?” he said. “Where’s Lebedenko?”

  “Please, baby,” she whispered in his ear. “I have to do this for my pimp. I don’t, he hurt me.” Showing him a bruise on her thigh as she slid off him. Kneeling in front of him, she tried to part his knees and open his fly. “Just quickie suck, baby. One hundred BD,” she said. A hundred Bahraini dinars. About $250.

  “I mean it. Where’s Lebedenko?” Saul said, pushing her back and standing up.

  “You got cigarette?” she asked, sitting on the side of the bed.

  Saul shook his head.

  “You gonna be sorry, baby. These guys, not nice guys.” Shaking her head.

  “What makes you think I am?” he asked, glancing at the door. They would come any second.

  “You got good eyes. You know how many got good eyes, not just want stick something in me? Zero,” she said, making a circle with her thumb and forefinger.

  The hotel room door opened. Saul recognized the man who entered from the video in Damascus and the photo from Istanbul as he stepped quietly inside, a satchel in one hand, a pistol in the other. Lebedenko. Where was the girl’s Thai pimp? Lebedenko was supposed to have set up the meet. Was he trying a double cross?

  “I thought you two would be in bed,” he said with a thick Russian accent. No wonder Cadillac had called him “the Russian,” Saul thought.

  “He don’t want,” Alina said, swinging her crossed legs from the edge of the bed like a schoolgirl.

  “You’re supposed to make him want,” Lebedenko said. “That’s your job.”

  “I thought you wanted her out of this. I thought that’s what this was about,” Saul said. Then he glanced at the girl and got it.

  “Look, make simple. She get undressed. You get undressed. One photo. Everybody happy,” Lebedenko said, motioning with the pistol at the paper bag. “Otherwise I take money anyway.”

  “A honey trap for a CIA officer, is that it?” Saul said. “A little leverage? A double cross? Plus you get Alina away from her pimp and some intel at the same time. Is that the game?” Thinking, okay, Dar. You can show up anytime, now. We can just reverse this. Except where’s the damn pimp?

  He barely had time to complete the thought when he heard the sound of the door lock opening again—they must mass-produce the master card key—and two men with guns, both Thais, burst into the room. Lebedenko turned, gun in hand.

  The first Thai, a muscled man with an odd half mustache, the middle part missing, in jeans and a Florida Marlins T-shirt, motioned for Lebedenko to drop the gun. Lebedenko looked at the two of them, both aiming their guns at him and carefully put his down on the floor. The second Thai was bigger, more menacing. The muscle. He had a mashed boxer’s nose and his pistol never wavered from Lebedenko.

  The half-mustached Thai went over to Alina.

  “You suck him?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” she said, wincing.

  He punched her in the stomach, then turned to Lebedenko and Saul.

  “You got my mon
ey? Forty thousand?”

  Saul pointed to the paper bag.

  “There’s twenty-two thousand there. He,” indicating Lebedenko, “has the rest. You have her passport?”

  “I got everything.” The Thai slapped his jeans pocket. They watched as Lebedenko started pulling stacks of U.S. bills from a satchel he’d brought with him. He put the money on the table next to Saul’s paper bag. The Thai moved to take it.

  “First her passport,” Saul said, and indicating Lebedenko, “Give it to him.”

  Lebedenko stepped forward and held out his hand.

  “Passport,” he said.

  While the big Thai aimed his gun at Saul, the pimp grabbed Alina by her hair and dragged her toward the door.

  “Kos emek,” the half-mustached Thai said to Lebedenko, using the Arabic curse involving the Russian’s mother. “This whore bring me one thousand dinar a day. You think I sell that for forty thousand American, you suck dick, you neek Russian? And where you find stupid American?”

  Lebedenko reached to the floor for his pistol. Before Saul could react, the half-mustached Thai shot Lebedenko in the chest. Alina screamed as Lebedenko collapsed onto the floor, bleeding, gasping.

  The big Thai aimed his pistol at Saul. At that moment, Saul had no doubt he was about to die. He heard a faint clink of glass and two quick thunks from the direction of the room window. The two Thais collapsed to the floor; each of them with a bullet hole in the forehead.

  Alina screamed again. She ran for the door, but Saul grabbed her arm. A second later, Dar was there in the doorway with his shotgun. He slapped Alina across the face, then put the shotgun under her chin and walked her back into the room.

  “Don’t move,” he told her.

  Saul ran to the window. He just caught a glimpse of a shadow going up a climber’s rope to the roof. There was a neat circular hole in the window through which the shooter had fired. The window glass had been cut earlier and pushed through just before the shooter fired. The shooter must have hung on a belay from the rope from the roof, watching from the outside of the building until the time came to shoot. Unbelievable, Saul thought. He turned to Dar.