Saul's Game Read online

  Once the video was on the website, she sent an encrypted email to Saul’s private IP address. She sent her report in a file encrypted within photo JPEG files of the Aleppo Citadel castle that she attached to her email.

  The email ended: “Can you believe it? I think I saw an aardvark. Hope to see you soon. Hugs and kisses.” “Aardvark” was CIA code for Flash Critical; the highest possible urgency.

  After she pressed Send, she plugged in the separate NSA flash drive that deleted all traces of everything she had done, all evidence that she had even been there, not just on the Internet café’s computer, but on the servers it linked to across Syria. Once Saul read her report, he would retrieve the video file from the Vimeo-like website and then have the NSA delete it from the website without anyone ever knowing it had been there.

  She had gotten it to Saul, she thought, relieved, coming out of the café. Walking down the street with its palm trees, feeling the late-afternoon sunlight, smelling falafel from a street vendor, she felt lighter, better.

  Now Saul will take care of it, she thought. He would come up with a game plan and we would get the mole that prevented us from capturing Abu Nazir. Someone must know who this mysterious Russian was. Maybe the CIA’s Moscow Station had intel on him? Now she would go to ground and wait till she received instructions from Saul. Thank goodness he was there in Langley, putting all the pieces together.

  She had no way of knowing that at that moment, Saul was about to get fired.

  CHAPTER 7

  Hart Senate Building, Washington, D.C.

  28 July 2009

  23:42 hours

  “Wait a minute, Bill. This Saul, this genius master spy. This superstar. Mona Lisa and all that. You were going to fire him?”

  “I came close, Senator. Damn close. Look at what happened: Our Middle East operations had been in trouble for some time. Abu Nazir’s IPLA knew every damn thing we were going to do before we did. We took a humongous risk and invaded Syria with an SOG team and came up empty. An operation he pushed, that was strictly on his dime. Not only that, we had our top asset in Syria dead, tortured; our network in Syria completely blown to hell. Abu Nazir had disappeared, and after years of work we were back to square one. He’s our Middle East Division chief! The buck has to stop somewhere. What would you do? It was a complete and total balls-up. You know how it works around here. Somebody’s head had to roll.”

  “What about the girl, Bill? This female operations officer. He took a helluva risk with her.”

  “That’s another thing, Mr. President. He put a female CIA operations officer into a hostile red zone completely on her own. Alone, with no backup. To handle an unbelievably dangerous operation without any support. What if she had been killed—or worse, captured? He put all our operations in the Middle East at risk.”

  “What do you mean all?”

  “Carrie Mathison was out of our Beirut and Baghdad Stations. She knew everything. I mean everything. Our assets, networks, codes, contacts, every one of us. Everything. What if the Syrians had captured her? What if they had turned her over to Hezbollah or the Iranians? Or the Russians? Think what they could have squeezed out of her. It would have been . . . well, I’m not sure how we would have recovered, but one thing’s for damn sure. A lot of very good people would have died. And as far as the war in Iraq was concerned, we could’ve quit right there. Game over. Do you blame me?”

  “What did he say when you confronted him about her?”

  “You want to know, Senator? He said, ‘She’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.’ Like it was nothing. No big deal.”

  “I’m wondering, Bill, she’d come up with this lead about a Russian. Didn’t you factor that in?”

  “We didn’t know about it. Not then, Warren. I had called an emergency, early-morning meeting in my West Wing office. Me; the CIA director and deputy directors; David Estes, director of the Counterterrorism Center; Saul. But it was mostly me, yelling at him. And him, sitting there, looking like a rabbi who forgot his yarmulke.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That I was jumping the gun. That we had to wait for Mathison’s report.”

  “‘We don’t even know if she’s alive!’ I said. At that point we didn’t. The SOG team barely made it back to Rutba. ‘We’re losing assets,’ I said. To hell with firing him. I wanted to punch him in the nose. And him. Just sitting there like a bearded Yoda, blinking behind his glasses.

  “‘She’s operational,’ he said.

  “‘How the hell do you know?’ Estes asked him. You know what he said?

  “‘She’s good.’

  “That was his answer. She’s good. Like it was a mantra. Do you believe this shit? We all looked at each other. I was on the verge of firing him on the spot. I swear I almost did it right there and then.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Two things, Warren. Two things every one of us should never forget. Remember Congressman Jimmy Longworth?”

  “Longworth of Missouri. Who could forget Jimmy Longworth? You should’ve known him, Mr. President. Unbelievable character. What about him?”

  “When I first came to Washington, I got into a pissing contest with one of the agencies. Jimmy stopped by my office with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two glasses and said, ‘Billy Boy, in Washington, if you learn nothing else, remember one thing. You can make life miserable for an Old Hand, but you never ever want to fire him.’ When I asked, ‘Why not?’ he said, ‘Because Old Hands know where the bodies are buried. You fire one of them, they’ll go. They won’t say a word. They’ll make damn sure they got their pensions nice and clear. Then six months later, you’ll find yourself talking to some smart-ass reporter from the Washington Post or maybe a grand jury on something that’ll bring down the whole administration including you. And you’re done for the rest of your life. That’s why.’”

  “What’s the second reason?”

  “My predecessor as CIA director. He told me something I never forgot. ‘Saul’s biggest problem is morality; but he’s not only ten times smarter than you think you are, Warren, with all your Harvard Phi Beta bullshit and all, he’s also the smartest Jew son of a bitch you’ll ever meet. So after you finish yelling at him—and believe me, sooner or later everybody wants to—listen to what he says. Carefully.’

  “So I stood up at the meeting and told Saul that he was going on administrative leave, effective immediately. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “He just looked at me, Warren, with those glasses, and said he thought that was a good idea and just got up and left. We all sat there scratching our heads wondering what the hell just happened.”

  “So that’s it? Then how on earth did we come to this mess?”

  “Really, Bill. What happened?”

  “Simple, Mr. President. He got the Aardvark report from the girl, Carrie. Twenty minutes later, he walked into my office. Then I got to meet the real Saul.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Tampa, Florida

  14 April 2009

  That morning, Saul Berenson, CIA Middle East Division chief, publicly reprimanded at a meeting the previous day by the vice president of the United States, William Walden, and on official administrative leave, woke from a dream he hadn’t had since childhood. He was alone; the house silent, empty.

  His wife, Mira, was gone. Back to Mumbai, India, two days earlier. If anyone asked, it was because of her mother’s illness, and to deal with the issues of Human Rights Watch, the charitable organization chapter her family ran. In reality, it was because she and Saul barely spoke anymore. There’s the official and the unofficial story in marriages like everything else, Saul thought as he dressed and packed for the airport.

  Sandy Gornik, an angular, curly-haired up-and-comer from the Iranian desk, took time from the office to drive him to the airport. During the drive, Saul let it slip that he was going to Mumbai to spend some time with his wife and her family.

  “Have you been there before? India?” Gornik aske
d. He had heard about Saul almost getting fired. Nearly everyone in the NCS (National Clandestine Services), certainly everyone on the fourth floor at Langley, had heard about it. The story was topic A in the cafeteria. In fact, Sandy suspected he was probably not doing himself any good, careerwise, driving Saul to the airport.

  But Gornik was one of Saul’s Save-the-Dead-Drop band, a tiny group, some four or five wise-ass, mostly single-rotation ops officers who picked up crumbs of tradecraft Saul dropped as he scurried through Langley’s anonymous corridors going from what he called “one moronic meeting to those where the Washington art form of wasting time reaches absolute mind-destroying perfection.”

  “Once,” Saul said to Gornick. “Indian families are . . . well, it’s like getting into bed with a tribe of octopuses. No matter which way you turn, there are arms everywhere. Trust me, it isn’t simple.”

  “I’m sure your wife and her family will be glad to finally spend some time with you,” Gornik said, hoping that came out right, that he didn’t sound patronizing or like he knew Saul had been involuntarily pushed out to pasture.

  “I’m not so sure,” Saul said.

  It caught Sandy Gornick, who always knew what to say to catch the female GS-8s and -9s trolling in Georgetown pubs, but not the real thing to someone who until yesterday had been not only his boss’s boss, but something of a force, if not yet a legend, in the Company, off guard.

  “Sorry,” he said, face reddening.

  “So am I,” Saul said, looking out the window at the traffic on the I-395, and that was that.

  Cover established.

  Saul thought he would prep for his next meeting during the two-hour flight from Reagan International to Tampa, but instead he kept his laptop closed. Officially, he was on leave. Officially, I don’t exist, he thought, looking out the plane’s window. Below, there were only wisps of clouds, and far below, the rolling green and brown hills of North Carolina.

  Suspended in midair. Disconnected. A perfect metaphor.

  He wondered if he would ever see his wife, Mira, again, because he certainly wasn’t going to India. He wasn’t even sure he would ever see Langley again. None of that mattered now. All that mattered was Carrie’s intel. It had changed the equation. It was about to change everything the United States was involved with in the Middle East.

  The dream.

  It had come back. For years, he’d had it almost every night as a child. And then one day it stopped. The day after he told his father he didn’t want to go to the old Orthodox synagogue in South Bend, the nearest to Calliope, anymore. He didn’t want to be Bar Mitzvahed. And his father just looked at him, took his mother in the car, and, leaving him standing there, they drove off to the shul in South Bend without a word. Nothing. As if to say, Have your own war with God, Shaulele. You think because you say so, this is the end of the matter? You think God has nothing to say too?

  Not a dream. A nightmare. He was a little boy in a ghetto somewhere in Europe. It was like some old black-and-white World War II movie, only it didn’t feel like a movie. He was there. It was night and he was hiding in an attic. The Nazis, the Gestapo, were hunting him. He had heard someone talking, and even though he didn’t understand the language, he understood they were informing on him. The Nazis knew he was there.

  They were searching the lower floors of the house, coming closer. He could hear their dogs, German shepherds, panting, coming closer. Closer. He didn’t know where his parents were. In the concentration camps. Gone. Alive? Dead? He didn’t know. He didn’t know where anybody was. All the Jews were gone. He had been alone for days, weeks, without food. Living like a rat. Scavenging food from trash in the alleys at night; licking water from dirty pipes in the coal cellar. But now somebody had told on him and they were coming for him.

  The Nazis were talking in German, a language he didn’t know, although it was close enough to Yiddish that he got a sense of it. He was so afraid he couldn’t move. One of the dogs barked twice, very loud. It was close. Too close, just on the other side of the closet door. Suddenl, the door opened and light spilled in.

  “Heraus!” one of the soldiers shouted. The soldiers had rifles, but the ones he truly feared were two men who wore black leather overcoats with swastika armbands and death’s-head insignias on their caps. The soldiers yanked him out and smacked his face so hard he saw flashes of light and the room spun. They were shouting and yelling at others as they hauled him down the stairs.

  When they got outside in the street, they kicked him and stood him facing a brick building with two others, a young woman with blond Veronica Lake peekaboo bangs, wearing a jacket with a yellow Jewish star on the pocket over a nightdress. She was shivering. Next to her was a little girl. The young woman and the little girl held hands. The little girl was crying.

  The three of them stood in the only light, the headlights of an army truck. A stream of exhaust came from the tailpipe of the truck.

  One of the Gestapo men in a black leather overcoat came over to the young woman. Saul noticed for the first time how pretty, no, much more, stunning, she was. Like a movie star. The German took out a Luger pistol.

  “I’m pretty. I’ll do anything you want,” the young woman said.

  “Yes,” he said, and shot her in the head. The little girl screamed. He shot her too, but it seemed to Saul that her scream didn’t stop. Although she was dead—he knew she was dead. She had to be; he could see the blood streaming from her head on the cobblestones—her screaming went on in the dark street.

  The German came to Saul and pointed the pistol at his head. Saul could feel the muzzle just touching his hair. The German started to squeeze the trigger. Saul couldn’t help himself. He began to pee. It was always at that moment that he would wake up, the bed wet, smelling of urine.

  He never told anyone about his dream. Not his parents, not even when they scolded him about the bed-wetting. His parents never spoke about the war, the Holocaust. Once, when he was eleven, he started to ask. His mother just turned away. His father pretended not to hear.

  The second time he asked, his father told him to come with him. They were going on a trip.

  They drove all the way to Gary, Indiana, to the big steel mill on the shore of Lake Michigan. There was a platform where visitors were allowed to stand and watch the molten steel being poured from the giant bucket. They watched the fiery display of sparks and felt the heat of the blast furnace on their skin. His father held his arm tight like a vise.

  “You see that fire, Shaulele? First you stand in that fire. That fire. Then you ask me about the camps, farshtaysht? Because in that place, Shaulele, the place you’re asking, there was no God.” They drove home in silence and never spoke of it again.

  So he didn’t tell them about the dream. He never told anyone. Except Mira.

  He told her the night when, as a young CIA operations officer in Tehran in 1978, the Revolution turning too dangerous for her to stay in Iran any longer, he sent her back to the States.

  They argued. She didn’t want to go. She accused him of wanting to be apart from her, of wanting her to go. She knew better. It was all around them. Even their friends talked about what was happening every day. What Saul couldn’t tell her was that his friend and best intel source, a former SAVAK officer, Majid Javadi, had warned him that it was time for all foreigners, especially Americans, to get out of Iran. Still she refused to go.

  That night in Tehran in 1978, for the first time since he’d been a child, the dream, the nightmare, came again. He had been moaning in his sleep, Mira said. That’s when he told her.

  “I forgot. You were the only Jews in this little town in Indiana, surrounded by Christians. Were they mean to you?” she asked, putting her hand on his arm.

  “Sometimes. Sometimes kids called me ‘dirty Jew’ and ‘Christ killer’ or they would look at me funny. One of the teachers said something and they left me alone. I spent a lot of time alone.”

  “Little Saul, by himself on the playground,” she said.

&
nbsp; “Look, it’s not like Hindus and Muslims in India, Mira. The Christians didn’t try to run us out or burn crosses on our lawn. I was an American kid. That’s all I ever wanted to be. The fear came from someplace else. My parents never spoke about what happened to them in the Holocaust. Never,” he said.

  “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

  “Because last night, for the first time since I was a child, I had that dream,” he said.

  “What does it mean?”

  “You have to go now. It’s a warning. Something terrible is coming,” he said. As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he knew it was true.

  Barely speaking to him, she got on the plane. A month later, it was Javadi himself who would teach him how terrible—and how true.

  A very fit-looking African-American in his early forties in pressed slacks and a well-fitted casual shirt, hair cut short in a military high-and-tight, stood waiting in Tampa Airport by the luggage carousel. He was dressed as a civilian, as Saul had requested.

  “Mr. Berenson, sir?” he asked.

  “You are?” Saul asked.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Chris Larson, sir. Can I take your bag?”

  “I’ll take it. They told you to look for the guy with the beard?” he asked as they walked to the parking lot.

  “Something like that, sir.” Larson smiled.

  As they got into the car and drove on the airport road, Saul asked:

  “Will it take us long?”

  “It’s not far. You’ll be sitting in the general’s office in nine and a half minutes, sir.”

  “The general likes it precise, does he?”

  “He does, sir.”

  They drove to the gate at MacDill Air Force Base, and nine and a half minutes, almost to the second, later, Saul was able to park his suitcase in the outer office and was sitting next to his carry-on in the office of four-star General Arthur Demetrius, CENTCOM commander, famous for having implemented the surge in Iraq, the current commander of all U.S. military forces in the Middle East, and in charge of all military-related activities and negotiations including the Status of Forces Agreement and the military resolution of the war in Iraq.