Saul's Game Page 18

  Inside the teahouse, men at bare wooden tables, some in Western clothes, some in thaubs and kaffiyehs fingering prayer beads, looked up at her. Mostly workingmen, she thought. An Iraqi in an apron came around from behind the counter.

  “What are you doing here, madam? No women here,” he said to her in Arabic.

  “Men fadlek, I’m looking for my husband, Hussam Abdul-Zahra. He’s a truck driver who comes here sometimes,” she replied in Arabic, looking around the room as if for her husband. She saw no man by himself. Certainly, no one who might have been at a level to meet with the aide to the vice prime minister. But that meant nothing, she reminded herself. He might be right in front of her. He might have left. He might be a figment of her imagination.

  “We don’t know this man, madam. You’re being here is haram. You must go,” the counterman said, hustling her toward the door. On the wall, she spotted a framed photograph of a mosque with small Arabic lettering on the bottom. It looked like the kind of souvenir sold at shrines all around the country. She squinted to see it better as she reached the door.

  The photograph was of a mosque with a gold gate, with a single gold minaret and dome. The Arabic lettering read IMAM REZA MOSQUE.

  “A thousand pardons, brother. I seek forgiveness from Allah,” she said to the man in the apron, and left, her head bent modestly, but her mind firing on all cylinders. She got into the van, motioning Virgil to go. As they drove off, she felt them being watched by a hundred eyes.

  There was something about that mosque, she told herself. She’d seen it before. Something from long ago, from college, majoring in Near East Studies. What was it? She racked her brain. Where was that mosque? She tried to picture the page of the book she’d read in the Princeton library on a cold New Jersey afternoon, then she had it. It wasn’t Iraq; it was Iran. That mosque was for a Shiite martyr, the eighth imam, Imam Reza. The men in the teahouse must be Twelvers, she thought.

  The “Twelfth Imam,” she remembered from her classes, was Muhammad al-Mahdi, the Mahdi, the Messiah. According to Shi‘a Muslim tradition, he was born in AD 869 and supposedly never died. Twelvers believe that when the Mahdi comes out of hiding, he will wield the Sword of God and kill all the unbelievers on Judgment Day. The most hardline true believers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the ones who were key in the Iranian power structure supporting Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army in Iraq, were Twelvers.

  That was the other piece, the thing Saul had figured out. De Bruin and Ali Hamsa. Getting intel right from the horse’s mouth, U.S. and Coalition leaders and the top of the Iraqi government, and feeding it to both sides: IPLA and the Iranians.

  She told Virgil to take them back to the Green Zone, pronto. If she was quick enough, she could watch it happen at the meeting where de Bruin and Ali Hamsa sat with the leaders of U.S. forces and the Iraqi government. She needed to let Saul know about this latest development ASAP.

  That bastard de Bruin, she thought. He had been inside her, aroused her sexually to heights she’d never experienced before. And he was fascinating, the way a beautiful, dangerous snake was fascinating. The hell of it was, she admitted to herself, she was both attracted and repelled by him. He was killing people. What the hell was wrong with her? Pull me out, Saul. I’m looney tunes.

  She tugged off her veil and pulled the hijab from her hair. Virgil drove on wide Thawra Street, eyes checking the side mirrors for tails. They headed toward the Al-Ahrar Bridge to cross back over to the Green Zone.

  They passed the checkpoint and started across the bridge, its surface rumbling under the tires, the hot sun shining on the green water of the Tigris River. Something that was still bothering her suddenly registered. She turned to Virgil. Thank goodness Virgil was there. Someone she could count on.

  “Who suggested the code name ‘Robespierre’ for de Bruin? It’s really odd,” she said.

  “Warzer,” Virgil said.

  “Did he say why Robespierre?”

  “He said he remembered a quote from him he learned in high school when they studied the French Revolution: ‘Pity is treason.’ That’s some quote,” Virgil said. He glanced at Carrie. “I think he meant it for you, Carrie. To warn you about de Bruin.”

  Pity is treason. Which side is everyone on? she wondered.

  CHAPTER 23

  Shatt al-Arab, Basra, Iraq

  26 April 2009

  “How is the fishing?” Saul asked.

  Tal‘at al-Wasi laughed. He was a small, middle-aged Arab in a white thaub and kaffiyeh, with a darker skin than most Arabs in Baghdad, a ragged Vandyke beard, and a belly. If his beard were longer, he’d look like an Arab Santa Claus.

  “Nobody fishes anymore. Too much money in smuggling,” Tal‘at said.

  They were sitting on the veranda of al-Wasi’s villa overlooking the Shatt al-Arab waterway from an inlet shaded by a dense palm grove. The sun was brilliant on the coffee-and-cream-colored water, the heat intense, although it was still April. The temperature, according to a weather website on Saul’s laptop, about 46 degrees Celsius, 115 degrees Farenheit. Out on the waterway, commercial steamers, motor launches, and the occasional patrol boat from the Basra Border Guard left V-shaped wakes that rippled past the rusting hulk of a half-sunken five-hundred-foot freighter.

  The Shatt waterway, formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was littered with wreckage left over from the Iran-Iraq War in the eighties. In the distance, a flame from a gas flare stack at a Basra oil facility was visible against the bright sky.

  “What do they smuggle?” Saul said, careful to say “they,” knowing full well that as a leader in the powerful Bani Assad tribe in the Shatt al-Arab, Tal‘at had to be at the center of the smuggling himself.

  “Oil, weapons, cars, consumer goods, even people. I can get you a beautiful young girl now,” Tal‘at said, glancing over at Saul, who imperceptibly shook his head. “Of course not,” Tal‘at continued. “Oil is best. Most money.”

  “Who buys? The Iranians?”

  “The Revolutionary Guards are making a fortune, those sons of pigs and whores.” He shrugged.

  “How? In barges?”

  “How you Americans say, ‘easy-peasy,’ yes? They cut hole in the pipeline. Run big hose to the barge. Barge has many open tanks.” He pointed to the sky. “No need for to close tanks. There is no rain. Barges go out into Gulf waters. The Iranians come. Pay money on the water.” He slapped his hand. “Money first.”

  “How much?”

  “Every day we get world price per barrel from Kuwait. They pay half world price, tow barges to Bushehr, load on tankers from different countries. Malta, Panama, who can say? They sell same day two dollars fifty per barrel under world price. We do maybe three, four barges a day. Half-million-dollar profit each barge. Everybody getting rich.”

  “What about Iraqi patrols?”

  Tal‘at laughed.

  “Is joke, right? The ones who are not my tribe, Bani Assad, we bribe. Also, some die,” he said, fingering his prayer beads. “The Shatt”—he sighed—“can be treacherous place.”

  “What about the Iranians? Don’t they worry about pirates?”

  “Those flea-bitten dogs?” Tal‘at shook his head. “Once you are in the Gulf, Iranians come with missile torpedo boats. Peykaap class, very dangerous. Protect barges. For Iranians, in Gulf, anything within forty, maybe thirty kilometers from Kuwait, they say is Iran. Tomorrow, their border maybe twenty kilometers from Kuwait.” He grinned like an impish schoolboy. “But drink, eat, my friend.” He gestured at the tray of dates and almonds and glasses of chilled rose sharbat, each with a rose petal floating on the top.

  Saul took a sip of the sweet rose sharbat, although even in the shade, the heat was so intense nothing was going to help.

  “Where is your friend? The Lebanese?” Tal‘at asked. Dar Adal.

  “On other business,” Saul said carefully.

  “Hard, your friend, like pine nut,” Tal‘at said approvingly. “Where did you meet?”

&
nbsp; “Somalia, 1987. The country was falling into civil war. We tried to do something,” Saul said.

  Saul and Dar met for the first time as they boarded a Black Hawk helicopter on the way to Galkayo in Somalia’s central highlands. They were going to meet General Mohamed Farrah Aidid, leader of the United Somali Congress faction, formed after the military dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, had massacred civilians of the Hawiye tribe.

  They were considering offering American military support and training to help Aidid oppose the other rebel factions, which were all communist dominated, and see if they could establish a stable government in Somalia. After meeting Aidid, Saul decided not to do it. Something told him Aidid might be even worse than Barre. Years later, his fears were confirmed when this same Aidid became the warlord behind the deliberate starvation of tens of thousands of women and children and the killing of Americans in the Black Hawk Down incident.

  Even then, he and Dar recognized the skills of the other. Even then, they argued over methods.

  “Killing isn’t always the answer,” he remembered telling Dar, after they left Mogadishu following a car bombing that failed to kill the dictator, Barre. Saul had discovered the bombing had been carried out on the orders of someone from a militia faction Dar had connections to, only he hadn’t warned Saul about it.

  “Sometimes killing is the only answer,” Dar had said.

  “Did it work?” Tal‘at asked.

  “Nothing worked there.” Saul looked up. “It was a long time ago.”

  “And we are older, my friend,” Tal‘at said, brushing a fly away from his sharbat. “Are we any wiser?”

  “More cautious, maybe. No, not cautious. More careful,” Saul said. He looked at the inlet, the palms overhanging the water. “Everything is precious.”

  “Here we say, the caravan passes. You and I, my friend . . .” Tal‘at shrugged. “Only shadows on the sand.”

  Saul nodded. His cue. Time for business. Tuchas affen tisch, ass on the table, as his father used to say in Yiddish.

  “About moving the woman into Iran, these people, can they be trusted?” he said.

  “Who can be trusted?” Tal‘at said, hesitating. A matter of delicacy. “Is this of importance?”

  Saul nodded. “Very.” What did the old buzzard want? he wondered and decided to preempt. “As you know, America doesn’t interfere, although the Iraqi ISF has asked us to,” gesturing out at the Shatt, where a barge carrying steel racks filled with new Toyota cars five stories high was passing by as it churned south toward the Persian Gulf, some twenty-five miles away. Ten to one destined illegally for Iran, Saul thought.

  He was bluffing about interfering. The United States Navy was stretched to the hilt policing the Persian Gulf as it was. They weren’t about to start tackling the smuggling trade too, which would involve their being shot at from both sides, Iraq and Iran. Of course, Tal‘at probably knew that, but Saul was betting the old boy wasn’t going to risk the sweet business he had going to test it.

  Tal‘at sighed and ate a date.

  “On our side of the Shatt and as far as Bushehr, there will be Bani Assad. On this, my friend, Saul”—he touched his chest—“there is no fear. Once in Iran and on to the mountains and the flats of Borazjan, of the people to be used, some are Lurs, some Muhaisin of the Bani Kaab. Of these”—he brushed his hands together twice, a sign he took no responsibility for them—“who can say? The woman? Does she speak Farsi?”

  “A little. She speaks good Arabic, also French, English,” Saul said.

  “And you, my sadeeq, do you know Iran?”

  “Does anyone?” Saul said.

  Tal‘at studied him, the American with his glasses fogged from the heat and the sweat rolling down into his beard, clearly wondering, How far can he be trusted?

  “Nothing is simple there,” Tal‘at said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Saul said.

  “Have you been?”

  Saul nodded. Don’t think about that now, he told himself.

  “So you know.” Tal‘at raised both his hands as if to say, This is the world. We are in it. What can we do? He stroked his mustache and beard for a moment, deciding whether to say something. “We sent someone before. An Eenglizi.” An Englishman.

  Saul was instantly alert. Tal‘at was trying to tell him something.

  “How’d he do?”

  “He was stopped by the VEVAK in Isfahan. After that . . .” Tal‘at shrugged.

  “Weren’t you afraid he would lead the Revolutionary Guards to you?” Saul asked.

  Tal‘at shook his head.

  “He was blindfolded. Knew no one’s name who took him. Certainly not mine. Knew nothing of clans. For the woman, it must be the same or there is nothing, yes?”

  “Of course. Shokran,” Saul said. Thank you.

  “Good. Understanding is good, my friend. That no one knows of the involvement of the Bani Assad is everything,” Tal‘at said, brushing away the fly again.

  Saul stood up. He was being dismissed.

  “Ma‘a salaama,” he said. Good-bye. One of the few Arabic phrases he knew.

  “Allah yasalmak,” Tal‘at said. Allah keep you safe.

  Saul rode in a Land Rover driven by a Brit paratrooper from the last British forces in Basra. He was on his way to the airport for a flight from Basra to Kuwait on Al-Naser Airlines, a private U.S. contractor.

  “Bleeding hot, sir, isn’t it?” the soldier said.

  “Yes, very,” Saul replied, not wanting to talk.

  They motored past groves of palm trees. They seemed endless around Basra. Saul tried to concentrate on the road, or failing that, on all the different pieces of Iron Thunder in play. He couldn’t stop his mind from thinking about Iran, now that Ta’lat had brought it up. Don’t think about it, he told himself, because it was all tied up with Mira and Africa and Javadi and the Iranian Revolution.

  Focus. Take your mind off it. Say a blessing. Because thanks to Carrie, we’ve gotten very far. We’ve almost got this done. Don’t screw it up now. “Blessed are you, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this occasion,” he prayed, but they were just words. It wasn’t working. In his mind, he wasn’t seeing the palm trees, but Africa. And Tehran.

  It was a football game that changed everything.

  He hadn’t wanted to bring Mira to Tehran. It wasn’t what they had planned. He was a young CIA operations officer, recruited out of the Peace Corps in Africa. When he had told his parents he was joining the Peace Corps soon after he graduated from college, his father took him aside.

  “You want to save the black people, Shaulele? That’s a noble thing. But it won’t help you save yourself.”

  “I just want to help people, Pop,” he had said.

  “Zei gezunt. I’ll give you money to go to Africa. People need help. But listen, Saul, even in Africa, no matter what happens, Ha Shem, Blessed is His name,” he said, pointing at the sky. “God is watching. You think your battle with Him is over? Believe me, it isn’t.”

  “What about yours, Pop? The camp! What about yours?” he had shouted back.

  “Also,” his father said. “Why else do we exist?”

  Mira saved him. Right from the beginning, seeing her in his mind the way she looked the first time he ever saw her, standing alone by some tall papyrus, looking out at the brown water of Lake Rweru, part of the border between Burundi and Rwanda. Dangerous water in many ways, and that wasn’t counting the hippos. The lake was vast. It was surrounded by marshes, with flocks of birds, meadows of lily pads, and floating islands covered with hyacinth. There was something about her. She stood there, slim as a reed in khaki slacks and a white shirt, dark flowing hair, and then she turned around and he knew.

  “What’s a mzungu doing here?” she asked, using the Swahili slang word for a white man, rare in these parts.

  “There’s been a coup in Bujumbura. Micombero’s out,” he said.

  “Thank God,” she said. “He was a bu
tcher. He was a drunk and a filthy murdering bastard. Are they going to massacre Hutus again?”

  “I don’t know. We need to get your people out,” he said.

  Later, because he was CIA, he was able to stabilize things with Colonel Bagaza of the new regime. To celebrate, he and Mira had a picnic by the rock outside the capital, Bujumbura, near Lake Tanganyika, where Stanley met Livingstone. You could see where Stanley himself had carved the date, “25-XI–1871,” on the rock. They sat on a blanket, just the two of them, in the midst of green hills and meadows, clinking bottles of Primus beer.

  And that night, the best night of his life, finally he discovered joy, and inside her, home. And it was her.

  Africa was what they wanted. Then Tehran came, Saul reflected in the stifling-hot, airless terminal at Basra Airport, waiting for the flight to Kuwait. Maybe it was fate, he thought. A chance encounter. A thousand people go by on a street. One stops for a minute to buy a soda and wins the lottery. Another comes by a minute later and gets hit by a bus. Here in the Middle East, they were all fatalists. “If you’re fated to drown, a cupped hand of water is enough” was an Arab proverb.

  Officially, he was the assistant cultural affairs attaché at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Unofficially, he was the ops guy and whipping boy for Barlow, an old-hand CIA station chief, and his smarmy deputy, Whitman, an aging Yalie with compadres in the SAVAK, the secret police, and a taste for the good life as dispensed at the shah’s palace parties. I should’ve quit then, Saul thought. It would have saved me and Mira, our marriage.

  Or would it?

  He and Mira talked about it in the tiny garden behind their apartment building in the Farmanieh district at night. Whispering, because they couldn’t be sure that their building wasn’t being bugged by either the SAVAK or their own people. Not anymore.

  “Working to help this brutal regime against their own people. This isn’t us, Saul. What about Africa?” she had said. He was ready to quit the CIA. They were agreed. He would submit his resignation.