Saul's Game Read online

  “What’s going on?” Brody asked. First in English, then his clumsy Arabic.

  Issa didn’t answer and looked away.

  “I overheard them say something about Baquba,” Brody said. He remembered from his orientation when his Marine unit first got to Iraq; Baquba was a city about fifty kilometers north of Baghdad.

  “We mustn’t talk about such things,” Issa whispered.

  That evening, Abu Nazir came to him.

  “You know about Baquba?” he asked.

  Brody nodded. Of course Issa had told his father.

  “Are you with us, Nicholas?” Looking at him with those dark eyes. Brody understood if he said the wrong word now, he would die.

  “I will say nothing.”

  Abu Nazir nodded. “Of course. It is too soon. For now, just saying nothing is as much as can be expected.”

  He sat down across from Brody.

  “Listen, Nicholas, we are at war. It is jihad. The rest of the world, the Americans, they have their tanks and their F-15s and their cruise missiles and their CIA. And we, Nicholas, what do we have?” He smiled. “Only a few rifles, and our little brains, and Allah. And do you know, Nicholas? It is enough. We will win.”

  “And Baquba?”

  “The Americans are planning a Top Secret operation in Baquba called Iron Thunder. And look, Nicholas. Top Secret! Here we sit, in our wadi at the edge of the desert, and already I know. Who will win, Nicholas? Don’t you see? They have already lost.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

  22 April 2009

  “Look, I’ll tell Walden to shove it up his ass. You have priority,” Dar said as he finished throwing things into his carry-on.

  The room was on the fifteenth floor of the Hala Arjaan, a businessman’s hotel near the Abu Dhabi Mall. The window looked out at a long line of tall buildings and traffic on Tenth Street. Just going by the view, they could have been in New York or Chicago.

  “When’s the drone attack?” Saul asked.

  “Soon. We should’ve done it while the media was blabbing about that North Korean rocket. Now we’ll be in the news cycle instead of that crazy Kim Jong-il? What about Lebedenko? Did he get off anything about Iron Thunder?”

  Saul nodded. “The software found a deleted sent email.”

  “And the girl? Anything?”

  “Him and the girl. He was a regular. Same hotel. They’d meet in the room. Sex and a laptop. Love in the twenty-first century.”

  “We have a lead? Baghdad?”

  Saul nodded again.

  “So the lead in Baghdad has it. Want me to do something?” Dar said quietly.

  “Nobody does anything. Nothing.”

  Dar stared at him.

  “Is this one of your crazy-making Talmudic riddles?”

  “We don’t know what this is yet. Might be a bridge agent. Might be a false cutout. Might be Mary, Mary, quite contrary.”

  “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Saul. You worked the girl?”

  Saul nodded.

  “You should’ve been a damn therapist instead of a CIA division chief. So you know. The lead is either for real or it isn’t.”

  “It’s real,” Saul said.

  “So pull the trigger. You got a mole. End it. I’ll be happy to do it.”

  Saul got up and went to the window. He looked out at the buildings, one of them still under construction, then looked back.

  “The object of the game isn’t to capture a single piece. The object is to win the game. Moles are operatives. They work for someone. We need to know who.” He paused. “Walden needs you for the ISI?”

  “When the drone hits, the Pakistanis will go ballistic. They’ll close the passes to Afghanistan. As it is, our troops are barely hanging on by a thread. It’ll finish ’em.” Dar looked at Saul. “Lot of pieces in play. If you absolutely need me, I’ll stay.”

  Saul shook his head. He sat on the side of the bed.

  “You’ll handle Islamabad?”

  “General al-Kayani and I go back a ways. That son of a bitch owes me.”

  “Be careful. He might decide it’s cheaper to terminate you,” Saul said.

  Dar’s eyebrows went up. “Beirut style? I was born in the Chouf, remember? I’ve taken steps. He knows better than to play those games with me,” Dar said, zipping up the carry-on. “Let’s say good-bye here. I hate airport send-offs. Might as well hang out a neon sign. ‘I am a CIA agent. This person is my freaking contact!’”

  “See you back at Langley? Usual place? Walter’s?”

  “Why mess with perfection?” Dar said, leaving.

  “Waffle plain, no whipped butter,” Saul said as the door closed.

  He waited forty minutes, checking his watch, then went downstairs and took a taxi to a restaurant in the Abu Dhabi marina. Squinting against the sun glare, he went into the restaurant, nearly empty before the lunchtime crowd. The place had a blue-greenish tinge from sun-tinted glass windows. It was like entering an aquarium. The air-conditioning was turned up to arctic frigid. A young Filipina waitress started toward him, but Saul waved her off. He had spotted a Middle Eastern man with a trim beard sitting alone at a table, his back to the view of the boats in the marina, reading a copy of the Khaleej Times.

  Saul went over and sat down.

  CHAPTER 18

  Jadriya, Baghdad

  23 April 2009

  They were taking bets around the swimming pool at the Al-Hamra Hotel. Some of the journalists were in the water, playing a hard-edged version of water polo using a sealed empty Jim Beam bottle for a ball. A match that had, according to the old-timers, been going on at the Al-Hamra since Saddam’s days. Nearly all the reporters were stringers from smaller papers and magazines, who remained behind after the major metro journalists had left now that Iraq was no longer front-page news.

  The bet was on which hotel would get hit next with a car bomb. Right now top money, being wagered by a drunken Peruvian mercenary wearing nothing but a Speedo, who—after parking his FN submachine gun against a palm tree—kept yelling for “Pisco!,” was on the Palestine Hotel. The Al-Hamra was number three.

  Number two was the Sheraton Ishtar Hotel.

  “That’s not fair,” Carrie said, keeping her eyes on the big South African plowing his way through a double Johnnie Walker Gold that he’d poured into a glass of Guinness. He was the reason she had come back to Baghdad. “They’re both on Firdos Square. It’s the same thing.”

  “Ah, but the question is,” Marius de Bruin, the South African said, “which hotel sustains the most damage? Five thousand American on Palestine,” taking a thick wad of U.S. hundred-dollar bills out of his jeans pocket and banging it on the poolside table.

  Hanging on to the South African’s arm in a slinky black top and shorts was an auburn-haired Ukrainian with supermodel looks named Dasha. She looked bored, except for her red nostrils and dilated pupils. High on some kind of speed, Carrie thought. The kind of young woman who might do anything, no matter how insane, just to feel something.

  She wasn’t the only arm candy. There were a number of good-looking women, Iraqis, Asians, Europeans—and they weren’t there for the journalists. There were a few high-powered businessmen and politicians along with two low-level members of the Coalition Forces diplomatic corps. Nibbling like feeder fish around the edges of the pool were more than a dozen young Chinese prostitutes in bikinis pretending to drink from plastic cocktail glasses. Lanterns strung from palm trees around the pool area lit the scene with a party glow, creating shimmering reflections on the water.

  “How did Chinese girls end up in Baghdad?” Carrie had said to de Bruin earlier. One way or another, the mission had come down to getting close to him.

  “How does anyone? That’s an existential question,” he’d said, looking at her like she was next on the menu after the Ukrainian supermodel. By the way he looked at her, she wondered if maybe he wanted both at the same time.

  De Bruin was a big man. He oozed phy
sicality. His hair was shortish brown. He had a solid, boxer’s build and an oddly charming smile that reminded her a little of that actor, Russell Crowe, in the Roman gladiator movie. Carrie couldn’t take her eyes off him. “Be careful, Carrie. Ignore the charm, the smile,” Warzer had warned her. Although she took what he said with a grain of salt after they’d argued at her apartment. “Even powerful people in Baghdad are afraid of him. No one says anything. Not good, not bad. Nothing.”

  Carrie had sensed it too. No war stories. When you mentioned de Bruin’s name, people’s faces got a look that conveyed stay away and they changed the subject. His South African and Peruvian security guards were feared. There were whispers that not all the headless bodies with holes in them from power drills that turned up in the Baghdad morgue every day came from Sunnis and Shiites having at each other.

  “I’m not sure you going straight at him is a good idea. It’s too dangerous,” Warzer had said. Virgil, who was there, nodded his agreement.

  “There’s no other way,” she said. Saul had told her she had to get in close. Lebedenko’s last call had been to a cell phone linked to de Bruin. It would be a tightrope walk. But with the timing, Abu Nazir and Iron Thunder all happening, at this point, he told her, do whatever it takes. It was on her. She knew what it cost Saul to say that to her. Only she couldn’t tell either Warzer or Virgil; those orders were strictly for her from Saul.

  Another secret. They all lived with secrets from each other, even the people they were closest to. “As for danger,” she had told Warzer and Virgil, “where the hell do you think we are?”

  Baghdad. The war had wound down but the desperation stayed, she thought. Part of the landscape like the palm trees.

  The Al-Hamra Hotel had become the watering hole of choice after the Baghdad Country Club in the Green Zone had closed and the Palestine Hotel had been badly damaged by a car bomb. The Al-Hamra was in the Jadriya section of the Karada, a peninsula that stuck out like a thumb from the east bank of the Tigris River, forcing the river to make a sharp loop around it.

  Although Carrie couldn’t see him, she knew Warzer was sitting there near the pool, watching her. At that moment, the argument they’d had earlier came back.

  “You can’t go, Carrie. I forbid it,” Warzer had said when they were alone in the apartment on Nasir Street.

  “Forbid,” Carrie said. “You’re telling me ‘forbid’ in my own apartment? You can leave anytime you want.” Waving her finger at him. “You forbid nothing.”

  “And if it means him having you like one of his whores? And drugs, Carrie? He’s a dealer. Zero One. Heroin. Guns. Women. Everything. Everyone knows. And I’m supposed to watch?”

  “Then don’t watch,” she had snapped back.

  “What does that make you, Carrie? A sharmuta? How different from any street whore? How?”

  “No different. Is that what you want to hear? I’m a whore, all right? That’s what you left your wife for. A whore. You can go back now.”

  “And if I let you, Carrie? If I just watch? What does that make me? Who am I?”

  “A pimp. You’re a pimp and I’m a whore,” she said, sinking to the kitchen floor, her face in her hands.

  When she’d first come back to Baghdad from Istanbul after getting the lead on Lebedenko from Gerry Hoad, which led her back to Baghdad and de Bruin, she’d been so happy to see him. Warzer, with his puppy-dog eyes and shy smile. Like when they first started their affair. Then a silly dinner. Laughing and talking and bad Chinese food at the Freedom Café and sex late that night. And when she couldn’t fall asleep, knowing she was lying to Warzer, that she liked him but she didn’t love him, until finally, she fell asleep to the distant loudspeaker sound of the dawn call to prayer

  Then the argument before leaving the next evening for the Al-Hamra.

  “Stop. Please. This is pointless,” she had said, getting dressed.

  “Why?” he asked, coming closer.

  “Because if I don’t do this, bad things will happen.”

  “We do bad things too, sometimes.”

  “Yeah, well, we don’t kill little children, okay? So if you’re not going to be on my side, leave. Just leave,” she said, getting up.

  Now she watched de Bruin work his magic on two men, one an Iraqi, with a Saddam-like mustache, she thought was a senior Iraqi government official smoking a water pipe, and the other, a man in a black T-shirt who looked like a Turk, or more probably a Kurd.

  Two attractive young women in low-cut cocktail dresses, one an Iraqi who looked like she’d had a nose job, a good one; the other, Vietnamese, very sexy, hovered close by. Ready to move in the second de Bruin signaled to them to attach to the Iraqi and the Kurd. He’s always selling, she thought. Well, don’t we all?

  De Bruin was head of Atalaxus Executive, one of the top two PMCs, private military companies, still in Iraq, now that many of the American companies had scaled back. Atalaxus brought in heavy-duty military TCNs, third-country nationals, ex–South African Special Forces and former Peruvian NIS officers who’d honed their brutal skills against Shining Path guerrillas, at a third the cost of the American companies. The Peruvians were said to be so ruthless that even hardened al-Qaeda jihadis recoiled at some of their tactics. “The rest,” as Warzer had overheard de Bruin say to someone in a suite Virgil had bugged at the Al-Rasheed Hotel, “is profit.”

  All at once de Bruin got up from his table and came over to her.

  “Your drink needs refreshing,” he said, pouring in enough Johnnie Walker to float a destroyer.

  “What about your deal? Who are those men?” she asked.

  “The Iraqi is Mustafa Abdul-Karim, deputy minister of roads and transportation. The Kurd is, well, let’s call him Bayar, from the PDK. Cheers,” he said, clinking his glass against hers and drinking. She did the same.

  “And what are you selling them tonight?” she asked.

  “The same thing I always sell,” he said, touching his finger to her shoulder and letting it slide down her arm. “The chance to make a lot of money.” He came very close. She could smell his aftershave. Cartier? Mingled with the smell of Johnnie Walker.

  “Zero One? Heroin? Guns?” she whispered.

  “Even you, if the price is right.” He winked, his hand going around her waist, slipping down to her buttocks and pulling her tight against him. She could feel his erection.

  “What about your Ukrainian girl?” Carrie said, looking right at Dasha. She was watching the two of them, her eyes unmoving, like a hawk.

  “She’s very open-minded. She’d like you almost as much as I would,” he said.

  When Carrie tried to move away, he twisted her arm behind her and pulled her tight. He was not only a big man, he had strong oversized hands, like a miner or a boxer, but without the bruises. With her free hand, she slapped his face.

  Just as quickly, he slapped her face back.

  “So?” he said.

  They stood there, looking at each other, as if both were surprised at the turn things had taken. He was swaying slightly from the drinking. He let her go.

  “I didn’t mean to offend. I know you’re interested,” he said. “That’s the one thing I know in this life,” retrieving his drink. “When someone is interested in me. The rest isn’t worth knowing.”

  He started to weave away, back toward his table. There goes the mission, the war, she thought, her face burning. Warzer was, she knew, watching her with binoculars from a hotel room overlooking the pool area. She hoped, as she stood in a lantern’s shadow, he couldn’t see her face.

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t interested. I’m not a slut,” she said.

  De Bruin turned around and came back halfway.

  “That’s just where you’re wrong, dear Anne, of the American embassy, is it? You are a slut. I’m a slut.” Pointing at himself. Waving his arms. Now he had everyone around the pool’s attention. “Everyone here is a slut. Why the hell else are we in Baghdad? If not to raise our skirts to make money?”

  “
What do you want, de Bruin?” she said.

  “You know what I want.” Looking at her breasts, her face. His glance flicked over at Dasha. “Say the word, I’ll send her away. But I prefer not. You know why?”

  Carrie shook her head.

  “She has a gift. She never says no. No matter what I tell her to do.” Coming close again. “A girl in a million.”

  “She’s very pretty. What do you need me for?”

  “Besides sex?” he said. “To talk. You’ve got a brain. Sex and a brain in”—gesturing at the night—“. . . this anus of the world.” A touch of an Afrikaans accent slipping into his English. He came closer again. Noise and lanterns around the pool behind him. “Can you believe civilization started here? In this shithole? What does that say about humanity? Something, doesn’t it? Come, I’ll show you a Baghdad you didn’t know existed.”

  “You’ll show me a bed and drugs. I’ve seen it before, King of Baghdad,” she said, giving it what she hoped was the right touch of derision.

  He nodded. Touché. “I’ll show you more than that, American girl from the embassy who’s been seen in the company of a certain Iraqi translator named Warzer Zafir, known to have worked with the CIA.”

  He held out his hand. She hesitated.

  From somewhere close by in the darkness came the sound of a single gunshot. For a moment, everyone stopped and listened. When there were no further shots they went back to their conversations. Baghdad.

  “If you want to tango, Lady Anne, you have to get up when the music plays,” he said.

  CHAPTER 19

  Khafat, Baghdad

  23 April 2009

  De Bruin’s house was a fortified villa in the Khafat district of west Baghdad, south of the Abu Ghraib Expressway. The villa was contemporary in design, white with cantilevered levels. It was surrounded by twelve-foot blast walls, zigzag car-bomb barriers, a steel gate, and had at least twenty or more heavily armed Peruvians on round-the-clock shifts.