Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel Page 20

  His eyes flicked over her for less than a second, taking in her blue hijab, jeans and USMC hoodie, then moving away. He didn’t have to say anything. She understood. She was the enemy. For several minutes, neither of them spoke. She made sure to sit still so the recording equipment and hidden miniature video camera she was wearing got a good image.

  “You know the hadith of Abu ’Isa al-Tirmidhi reporting of the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, who said, ‘The best of you is he who is best to his family,’ ” she said in Arabic.

  He twitched his head, but he never stopped watching her. His eyes blinked multiple times like a bird’s.

  “So, no electrics or waterboarding this time. You must be ‘the good policeman,’ ” he said in Iraqi Arabic.

  “Something like that.” She smiled. “I need your help, Assayid Walid Karim. I know you would rather die than do this, but think. A word from me—and you will be free of this place.” She waved vaguely at the walls.

  “I don’t believe you. Even if I did, I would rather die than help you. In fact, I think”—he twitched—“I prefer the electrics and waterboarding to your stupidity,” he said.

  “You will believe me, Walid Karim. That is your name, isn’t it?” Although he tried not to show it, she could see he was shocked that she knew his name.

  “I am Abu Ammar,” he said.

  “And what of poor Yasser Arafat, who wants his kunya back?” She grimaced sarcastically. “Listen, this will go much better if we tell the truth to each other. You are Walid Karim of the Abu Risha tribe and a commander in the Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, known to us poor American infidels as al-Qaeda in Iraq. You come from Ramadi, from al-Thaela’a al-Sharqiya, south of the river, near the hospital.”

  Karim stared intently at her, barely breathing, twitching. It had taken her and Warzer, using all his family and tribal connections, three difficult, secretive days hiding in Warzer’s uncle’s house in Ramadi, Carrie in a full abaya, her eyebrows colored brunette, wearing brown contact lenses and never breaking her disguise, to uncover Karim’s real name and the house where his family lived. Then she visited Karim’s family, bringing Warzer, who claimed to have been imprisoned in Abu Ghraib with Karim, so they would trust her.

  “I’ve been to your house,” she said. “I’ve spoken with your mother, Aasera. Your wife, Shada. I held your children, your daughter, Farah, your boy, Gabir, with these hands.” She held up her hands. With every word, she could see how appalled he was that she knew so much. “Your son, Gabir, is beautiful but too young to understand what it is to be a shahid, a martyr. He misses his father. Say the word, and I promise, you will be home and holding him yourself in a couple of hours.”

  “You lie,” he said. Twitch. “And even if not, I would rather see you kill them than help you.”

  “God is great. I would never kill them, ya Walid. But you will,” she said.

  His face twisted with disgust. “How do you say such a thing? What kind of a woman are you?”

  “Remember the hadith of Abu ’Isa. I’m trying to save your family.” She bit her lip. “I’m trying to save you, sadiqi.”

  “Don’t call me that. We’re not friends. We’ll never be friends,” he said, his eyes fierce like those of an Old Testament prophet.

  “No, but we’re both human. If you don’t help me, the Tanzim will cut off your children’s heads—and I won’t be able to stop it, may Allah forbid it,” she said, holding up her right hand.

  “My brothers would never—”

  “And what will they do to a traitor, a murtadd?” She spat out the word, “apostate,” into his horrified expression. “What would they do to his family? His poor mother? His wife and children?”

  “They won’t believe it,” he snapped.

  “They will.” She nodded. “They will when they see the American Marines bringing gifts, new big flat-screen televisions, and money, fixing and painting the house. When we have members of the Dulaimi and Abu Risha tribes whispering across the Anbar how you helped the Americans and are even thinking of becoming a Christian. They won’t want to believe, but they will see the gifts and the protection from the Americans and they will know. And then, one day, the Americans will suddenly be gone. Then the Taksim will come to administer justice.”

  “You whore,” he muttered.

  “What of the hadith of the Prophet of Allah on that day? Or you can go free of this terrible place today. Go home, Walid. Be a husband to your wife and a father to Farah and Gabir and never worry about money or safety again for as long as you live. You need to choose,” she said, looking at her watch. “In a little while I’ll leave—and whatever you decide, there’s no going back.”

  For a long time, he didn’t speak. She looked around at the bare walls and thought about the things that had been done in this room. Perhaps he did too, she thought.

  “This is evil,” he said finally, twitching.

  “For a greater good. You cut off innocent people’s heads, Walid. Don’t talk to me about evil,” she said.

  He looked at her, his eyes narrowed. “There are no innocent people,” he said. “Not me. You?”

  She hesitated, then shook her head no.

  He twitched his head and exhaled. “What do you want, woman?”

  Carrie took a photograph of Dima’s boyfriend Mohammed Siddiqi, a.k.a. Abu Ubaida, out of her pocket.

  “You know this man?” she asked. By the expression on his face, she could see that he did.

  “Abu Ubaida.” He nodded. “You must know or you wouldn’t ask me.”

  “What’s his real name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

  “La, truly. I don’t know.”

  “What do you know about him? You must know something. Someone must’ve called him something.”

  “He is not Anbari, not even Iraqi. Once I heard someone call him ‘Kaden.’ ”

  “Where’s he from?”

  His face hardened, and he looked at her suspiciously. “You will let me go? Today?”

  “But secretly, you will work for me,” she said. “Where did he come from?”

  “Palestine, like—” He stopped suddenly.

  He had slipped. She jumped at it. “Like whom? Like Abu Nazir? Both Palestinians?” When he didn’t answer, she added, “Your son Gabir’s life hangs by a thread, Walid.”

  “As do we all. We are all in Allah’s hands,” he said.

  “And in your own. Tell me, they’re Palestinians? Both of them? Is that why they’re so close?”

  He twitched and nodded, then: “Maybe not so close anymore.”

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know. How could I? I’m locked up in here like an animal,” he snapped.

  “Then go free. Where is Abu Nazir now?”

  “I don’t know. He moves all the time anyway. They say he never spends two nights in the same bed. Like Saddam.” He grinned, showing yellowing teeth.

  “And Abu Ubaida? Where is he? Ramadi?”

  He nodded, almost imperceptibly. “But not for long,” he said.

  “Why? Where is he going?”

  He shook his head. For a moment she was afraid he was done talking. Walid was the best shot they had. If she couldn’t get him to commit now—with a major battle for Ramadi coming, according to Dempsey—they would fail. Roll the damn dice, Carrie, she told herself, and stood up.

  “Stay or go, Walid. This is the moment,” she said, holding her breath. From somewhere in the prison came the faint sound of someone screaming, but she couldn’t make out the words. Walid must be hearing it, she thought.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  CHAPTER 29

  Ramadi, Anbar Province, Iraq

  They drove into Ramadi in a Humvee behind a Marine LAV armored personnel carrier, going on the bridge over the Euphrates River to the checkpoint by the electrical power station, the four of them, Carrie, Virgil, Warzer
and Dempsey, in U.S. Marine desert combat utility uniforms. The sun was high, the day hot; the temperature was in the nineties, with a fine grit in the air from the desert wind.

  They stopped at the checkpoint, a pile of sandbags and concrete. Dempsey got out and briefly talked with the Marines manning it. He came back and slid in behind the wheel.

  “Not good,” he told them. “Two police stations got hit last night. Jarheads on IED Avenue got plastered with heavy mortars. Bet they didn’t tell you that at Langley, that AQI has hundred-and-twenty-millimeter mortars and Russian AT-13 Saxhorn missiles? Serious shit. And the hajis have upped the ante. They’re offering two months’ wages to anyone who plants an IED on Route Michigan, the main drag in the city. Three months if it kills any Americans.”

  “What do we do?” Carrie asked.

  “Have to use RPG Alley,” he grimaced and started driving.

  On the way in from Abu Ghraib, Warzer and Dempsey had briefed them. Ramadi was, Warzer had explained, a city of a half million under siege, caught between three forces: al-Qaeda, the Sunni insurgents, and the Marines. A hundred kilometers west of Baghdad on the main highway across the desert, it was, in Dempsey’s words, “easily the most dangerous place on the planet.”

  Now, driving onto the main street behind the LAV, Carrie could see what he meant. The street was bordered by rubble from where buildings used to be; the few buildings and power-line poles left standing were Swiss-cheesed with bullet holes. Except for a few mosques and rusted water towers still upright, the city looked like photographs of Germany after World War II, she thought. They passed a deep bomb crater in the road and Virgil glanced at Carrie over the Humvee’s center console, then went back to scanning the street, his M4 ready.

  In the distance off to the right, in the direction of a mosque about a quarter of a mile away, its minaret poking up over the buildings, they heard the sound of automatic-weapon fire, followed by staccato bursts from a heavy machine gun. Dempsey turned off the main street, no longer following the LAV.

  “He’s going to the Glass Factory,” he explained. A Marine FOB—forward operating base—had been set up there. They on the other hand were headed for a police station in al-Andalus district, where they could set up. As they drove down a narrow street, two Iraqi men dressed in white thaub robes and kaffiyehs and holding AK-47s came out of a café doorway, then sat at a metal table outside over thimble-sized coffee cups and watched the Americans drive by. Dempsey started to speed up, then almost immediately slowed down.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “What?” Virgil asked.

  “Pile of stones on the sidewalk by that corner ahead,” he said.

  “What about it?”

  “I don’t know. IED maybe.” Dempsey looked left, right, then behind them. “No good way around. Hold on to your favorite body parts, people,” he said, gunning the engine as he raced toward the corner, aiming the Humvee so it would be scraping against the building on the opposite side of the street, as far away as they could get from the pile of stones.

  Carrie held her breath, unable to take her eyes from the pile of stones, expecting an explosion as they raced by it. They made the turn onto the next street, where, incredibly, a handful of young boys were kicking a bundle of rags fashioned into a soccer ball in the dusty street.

  “Wow,” she said, exhaling.

  Unlike children elsewhere in Iraq, none of the boys waved at them or even stopped playing, though the sudden stopping of chatter among them let Carrie know they were aware of the Humvee. After they passed the boys, Dempsey gunned the engine, raising a storm of dust.

  Finally, they pulled up to the police station, surrounded by sandbags and manned by Iraqi policemen with AKM assault rifles. Carrie spotted another Iraqi on the roof behind a light machine gun. They got out of the Humvee and went inside, where Dempsey introduced them to Hakim Gassid, the police commander.

  “Have you been hit yet?” Dempsey asked him. Police stations were a prime al-Qaeda target, since the Iraqi police and the U.S. Marines were the only forces standing between al-Qaeda and complete control of the city. Not a day went by that policemen weren’t killed and stations attacked, typically with mortars, RPGs and IEDs, and sometimes with attempts to overrun them.

  “Twice, but nothing this week, thanks to Allah,” Gassid said.

  A few minutes later, Carrie, in full black abaya, and Warzer, wearing a white thaub and a kaffiyeh with the checked pattern of the Dulaimi tribe, left the police station by the back door, taking a motor scooter to Warzer’s cousin’s house on the other side of the river.

  The problem was how to run Walid Karim, to whom they’d assigned the code name “Romeo,” in a city under siege. Normal tradecraft like dead drops, coded messages, hidden radios and disposable cell phones wouldn’t work in a place where al-Qaeda checked every cell phone, even those of people they supposedly trusted, and you could get killed crossing any street in the city at the wrong time. Especially someone so embedded within al-Qaeda as Romeo.

  The solution she and Warzer came up with was a teahouse in the souk, the downtown market near the central bus station, and a staggered set of prearranged days and times when Romeo would be there. The teahouse belonged to Falah Khadim, the uncle of a cousin of Warzer’s. For ten thousand American dollars cash and no questions asked, he was willing to risk it. Abu Nazir had cut people’s heads off for doing a lot less.

  It was getting late in the day, after the loudspeaker call of the muezzin from a nearby minaret for the afternoon Asr prayer. Riding on the scooter to the souk on streets that were crowded despite the sound of gunfire and explosions coming from al-Thuba’t district near the Euphrates Canal, the waterway that branched from the main Euphrates River on the western side of the city, they went to meet the uncle, Falah.

  Warzer went into the teahouse to get Falah, because as a woman, Carrie could not enter. In conservative Ramadi, the teahouse was where men went to drink strong Iraqi tea, smoke shisha hubble-bubble pipes and play dominos or tawla.

  A group of men came walking toward her as she stood outside a shop selling hijabs and other women’s clothes. They were moving quickly, all of them with AKM assault rifles, and before she could move aside—thinking she needed to take cover and warn Warzer there was about to be shooting—one of them bumped into her.

  “Alma’derah,” he apologized.

  “La mashkila,” she said—It’s nothing—and then her heart stopped.

  It was Abu Ubaida himself. She recognized him instantly from the photograph. He was attractive in an Arab male way and she could see why Dima had been drawn to him. He looked at her strangely and she turned away, pulling the edge of her hijab modestly across her face. Despite her dyed eyebrows and brown contact lenses, she could tell she looked odd to him. He was starting to say something when one of his men called and they ran off.

  A moment later, she understood when there was the sound of an IED explosion near the entrance to the souk, followed a minute later by the roar of an American F/A-18 fighter jet overhead, making the awnings and the goods in the souk vendors’ stands rattle.

  He’s here, she thought, hardly breathing as she moved to find Warzer. People were running everywhere. Some to get away from the blast scene, others to go to help. She ran to the teahouse just as Warzer and a short, fat Iraqi with a Saddam-style mustache came outside.

  “I saw him,” she told them. “Abu Ubaida. He’s here.”

  “Come inside, quick,” Warzer said, looking around. “It’s not good to talk out here.”

  “I thought I couldn’t,” she said.

  “There’s a storage room with a back door. Come,” the uncle said in Arabic, looking at her the same way Abu Ubaida just had. Her disguise wasn’t worth shit, she warned herself. They went around and into the storage room through a back door that had a padlock that the uncle, Falah, unlocked.

  The room was small and piled high with boxes of tea and sugar and weapons of every kind.

  “Salaam. You sell guns?” Carrie ask
ed Falah.

  “Every teahouse and half the shops in Ramadi sell guns,” Falah said, looking at her as though he had never seen anyone like her. The disguise wasn’t working, but what the hell was she supposed to do? Walk around in a miniskirt and halter top? “You’re American, yes?”

  “I appreciate you doing this,” she told him.

  “Just give me the money and don’t tell anyone,” Falah said. She opened the plastic bag she was carrying and handed him the money from a stash of hundred-dollar bills Dempsey had in a safe in the USAID office. “When is he coming, this man?”

  Carrie checked her watch. “In about twenty minutes. Can I meet him back here?”

  “I don’t like to sell guns in front of my customers. Usually, I do it in back, but we can’t have a woman in a teahouse. You hide here. If someone wants to buy, I’ll tell him to come back later.”

  “How’s business?” Carrie asked him.

  “Not too bad, thanks to Allah,” Falah said. “Even though the supply is good, the prices keep going up. It’s cutting into my margins. If you’re interested”—he looked at her—“I can get you anything you want.”

  “What are the ordinary guns going for?” she asked.

  “Depends.” He shrugged. “For a brand-new American Glock 19, four hundred fifty dollars. For an AKM, Kalashnikov, never used, one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty dollars.” He studied her, then asked, “Will they execute Saddam?” Saddam Hussein, now in Abu Ghraib prison, had just been charged with war crimes against the Kurds and Shiites.

  “I don’t know. It’s up to the Iraqis,” she said.

  “Nothing is up to the Iraqis,” he said, motioning to Warzer.

  The two men left, Falah back to his business and Warzer to keep watch while she waited for Romeo to show. The storage area was hot, claustrophobic; a thin blade of sunlight came from a crack between the back door and the sagging lintel.