The Syrian Sunset, page 13
To her left, vinyl cushioned chairs circled small square tables. A kind of despair weighed on her as she waited not knowing what had happened. She adored this cafe but so much of Damascus pretended the country was not being ripped apart like a fine garment.
She approached a waiter, ordered black coffee and asked, “What does Pop-One mean?”
“It is inspired by the English word popular. It means the popular one.”
She smiled. “That’s why I’m here. My boyfriend heard from friends this place was something to see.”
Shai had told her, “Plain sight is the ticket. Don’t sneak around. Meet him in public. You want to hold hands, I’m sure he won’t complain. Nobody will pick up this signal the way it’s configured but don’t send from the apartment as a precaution.”
Afra eased into one of the corner soft leather chairs, gracefully tucked her legs under her, and set up shop, first the books and then a pad and pen to dash off a student’s thoughts. She logged into the Wi-Fi to tap into the antenna array in Herzlia on the coast north of Tel-Aviv.
Just then Kassem hurried in, distraught, even a bit disheveled she realized. Though not known to cafe goers, to appraised watchers he was certainly a face in their files, Shai had warned, and there’s no shortage on their payroll of watchers.
As he reached her, which was soon given his velocity and long stride, she rose, threw her arms around his neck and had to pull herself up to reach his ear. “We’ll handle it. Whatever it is.” She kissed his neck and ruffled his hair giving its disarray provenance.
At that instant, he saw her flashing warning lights and pictured how a young Fuad would have entered to greet a contact. He laughed out loud at himself. “I’m just excited to see you again,” he said by way of cover and newfound courage, placed both hands on her waist, lifted her and kissed her. She circled arms around his neck, pulled herself tighter to him and found herself shaking a little against him, her lips remaining on his.
He set her back in her chair without her feet landing. “I’ll order,” he said, meaning before I tell you, I see now.
“I have coffee coming.”
“Something else?”
“Whatever you choose.”
While he ordered, she opened a book. Soon he returned with a tray bearing a kanafeh, a cheese pastry with lines of rose scented syrup back and forth across it. His mouth was dry and he didn’t think he could eat. She set the book upside down; pages open like a fan. She had loved kanafeh as a child. She often inhaled sweets when off-center, which was often, and the next day ran long distances outside to destroy the calories. While sprinting, she often shouted out loud at herself.
Afra reached across the table, lifted his fork and stabbed into the square pastry. The akawi cheese came away in strings, smooth and chewy. They truly were one region, cleaved only by the machinations of men; akawi was named for the port city of Akko in northern Israel. A little salty, not overly sweet, a bit like her, Shai might have said. It was heavenly though she doubted he’d go that far in any comparison, though maybe he would.
“I can share,” she said.
“No, please. I don’t want to deny a moment of your pleasure.”
“Good choice.”
He watched her demolish the dessert. Her coffee arrived and she made no move for it. He had never met a girl, a woman, he reminded himself, like her before. She was less afraid than he, did as she pleased without concern for how it looked, and even less for what he and others thought. He wondered if what he was feeling for her, the excitement, was real, or a fantasy flight from all the horror, danger and now increased isolation.
When she was done, she drained the coffee, which had cooled, in one long pull.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” she said. She slid her notebook and pen towards him, and he understood he should write it to circumvent any unlikely electronic ears here.
When she returned, she said, “Just let me send a quick email to my partner on this paper.” She pushed a book towards him on the importance of education in the medieval philosophy of Al-Jahiz, Al-Farabi and Avicenna. She launched the email to her workmate first.
✽✽✽
Shai sat in his office watching a recorded replay of CNN broadcast ten days before, August 20, 2012, worked up for him by the burrowers in Mossad headquarters in Herzlia. Obama was answering reporters’ questions in the press briefing room, a superfluous American flag as always at his side. In a non-scripted answer Obama spoke with offhand elegance:
“We cannot have a situation where chemical and biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people. We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons being moved around or used. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”
Kassem’s warning had bounded across the globe from Damascus to Herzlia to McE in Washington and emerged from Obama. Shai could not have scripted Obama’s words better and marveled at the majesty behind the restrained threat. Shai saw the seismic pressures bearing on the American president, how his conscience wrestled with the daily slaughter in Syria, while bearing the burden of the continuing war in Iraq and American boys exploded in IEDs. Shai felt Obama’s frustration as he absorbed the clarion call from his closest European allies not to involve them in another U.S. led adventure in the Middle East. Previous failed forays in the region, the only kind Washington ever launched, had yanked the teeth from Obama’s tiger. Yet standing still in full view of the carnage challenged everything Obama believed in.
Shai walked into the Mossad chief, Levi Goodman’s Jerusalem office, to share McE’s phone conversation of an hour before. The discomfort in Shai’s frontal lobe was more like an unwanted guest than a headache, not shouting but someone often in his house he could not easily dislodge. He reluctantly admitted Tami’s breathing exercises helped. In Shai’s long sojourn in the Service, Goodman was his third chief and not much younger than Shai himself. Born in Johannesburg, Goodman had skied down Tiffindell, the highest peak in Cape Province, and plowed up the intelligence ranks with backroom deals across the variously hospitable Maghreb—literally “West” as the Arabs referred to their own in North Africa. With word whispered to the sheiks, Goodman landed in the Gulf to barter security technology for unannounced trade accommodations. He spoke Arabic, French and a guttural English that always required the Emir of Qatar to summon a translator, despite his graduating Britain’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Short and bald, clean shaven with expensive cologne, Goodman exercised even less than Shai other than carrying his skis to the Mount Hermon lifts.
“If possible, you look even worse than usual,” Goodman said, as Shai unleashed his large bulk into the small chair opposite Goodman. “Your eyes are swollen. And don’t tell me you’re up late reading.”
“I am up late reading.”
“Of course you are. But the thing is, you always are. So, what’s this?”
“Don’t know. The doctors aren’t worried so I’m staying away from any tests that could change that.”
Goodman lit a pungent, unfiltered Gauloises. He was a French Resistance aficionado. In the early years of the State with every neighbor eager to set Tel-Aviv ablaze, for starters, he felt common cause with the French Resistance pluck.
“Why don’t you tell me, if and when I should worry?” Goodman said, stomping his fresh cigarette into an ashtray with restrained vehemence.
To shift the subject, Shai nodded at the legendary Gauloises pack smoked by Camus, Sartre, and even Picasso. “Hard to believe they’re made in Poland. God bless the fall of Communism that made this possible.”
“Just in time,” Goodman said. “Couldn’t get enough of the dark Syrian tobacco for them now. Refugees clogging up the trade routes, not to mention farmers busy chasing the army with their scythes.” Goodman lifted matches and slowly lit another small cigarette. “Shai, Bashar’s not building gas chambers.”
“Exactly. He’s going to do it without the bother of herding them into fake showers. Get them at home, right in their own.”
Goodman smoked and waited always interested in what Shai’s volcano bubbled up.
“There are options,” Shai said. “There’s a Council of Elders. They meet in twos and threes, so they won’t be carted away for conspiracy. Most were in power under Assad, the father. They look to a model of a Confederacy, religious power sharing like in Lebanon. There’s a future there. The Council of Elders studied Iraq after the Americans swept all the Ba’athists into the gutter like dried leaves, and then stomped on them. In science, in a vacuum all the sparks are invisible. The free Syrian northern alliance is very strong around Idlib, Aleppo. Their political classes are camped out in Istanbul waiting to go back if Bashar’s cleared out. If the fifty or so crazies around Bashar went somewhere, like the Black Sea, they’d be happy to live with another military leader. Only so much tradition one can defy—successfully.”
“Not our patch, regime change,” Goodman breathed. “Fell on our face when we tried to redraw Lebanon, didn’t we? Twice, as it were. Talk to your buddies, the Americans. Maybe they can get it right, this time. This would seem to be the time and place. If we can help here and there, my ears are listening to whatever music everyone else is playing. Ready to blend in unheard where we can. Right now, the sarin is project one.”
Shai did not say what was on his mind, that this time regime change in Syria was imperative, and not only for the Syrians.
Goodman stood, paced to his window, and inhaling hard on the crackling cigarette, looked out at the park of roses next to the Supreme Court without seeing either. With the present sarin threat, he leaned his forehead against the warm glass his mind hurtling back to January and February 1991, when Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles dropped into the heart of Israel. Forty-two of them, for starters. Saddam boasted that he would exchange the explosives for chemical weapons if the Americans were near banging on his door. Every Israeli apartment erected a “gas room” with impermeable plastic sheeting. People hauled their gas masks everywhere, he remembered angrily.
Goodman turned. “Let me tell you a story. During the Gulf War my grandson broke his arm.” Goodman continued as evenly as he could though his voice trembled. “I took him to the hospital and as we’re walking in, the sirens sounded. I had to fit his gas mask over him. Not only was my grandmother gassed in Auschwitz but now I’m putting a gas mask on my grandchild, so he won’t be. It was wrenching. I was emotional, felt it personally.”
“It doesn’t matter that he never launched sarin,” Shai whispered. “When it comes to gas, it’s in the gut. Here we go again.”
“Shai, I’ll tell you something that I’m going to shout to the newspapers when my time here is up. The concentration camps did something to us as a people. Entered our consciousness, genes, psychology, bloodstream. Look who we’ve become. Settlers uproot Palestinian olive groves, and the army stands by and checks their Instagram. Or they watch. Or silently applaud. The Hilltop youth when they’re done with their daily prayers, attack and bloody those Jews trying to help with the Palestinian olive harvest. Old women draw knives at checkpoints, our boys shoot them. Not long ago in generally peaceful Husan, they shot a woman in the thigh when she wouldn’t stop, hit an artery and she died while they attempted first-aid. She was unarmed. We cannot manage to equip these too young soldiers with tasers, a chemical irritant, anything so as not to continue to kill old women? Then we blow up the family house and charge them for the demolition. Charge them our cost for destroying a family’s life. Deterrence? My arse. When did ratcheting up more rage ever do anything but help it run over. Our soldier kills a shackled prisoner on the ground and launches a national movement. Not for accountability but for leniency for our killer. This is what marching a people into the gas wrought. It’s shut our eyes. Hardened us. Anybody protests what we do, we bark anti-Semitism. We’re the only democracy around here, even support LGBTQ rights we say, to do a Three-card Monte to hide what we are doing.” Tears crept down Goodman’s wrinkled face, plunged off his chin and disappeared into his dark plaid shirt.
He continued suddenly quieter. “How many people are we holding in administrative detention with no trial now or ever? With our long history of being locked up and the key tossed in the sea.”
“Three hundred give or take,” Shai said uncomfortably.
“If only the Palestinians had taken the Oslo Accords and gotten their state. We gave them everything and the kitchen sink and they wanted to keep stockpiling weapons under that sink and put anyone who attacked us on a revolving prison sentence. They’re taking compromise seriously; would have saved us from ourselves.” Goodman’s tears were running full stream now and he made no move to swipe them away.
“Never again,” Shai said, his face tight. “Should be for the Syrian suburbs not just us.”
“Of course. But what can we do that won’t cause him to rain sarin on us?” Goodman lit another cigarette, set it down and smoke rose from two in his ashtray. “Shai, right now, we’re presented with this unique opportunity. Greatly because of handiwork getting the murdering gas out of Syria. For us, for their suburbs, and maybe for some American kids mostly minding their own business on the Washington metro.” Goodman collapsed in his chair like a rag doll. “So where are we with our kids?”
What they had taken to calling Kassem and Afra.
“They got to us just in time,” Shai said, emotional, worried, and irrationally hopeful. “Obama launched his own preemptive strike, Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns. Struck a direct hit on Syrian foreign minister, Walid Muallem. Then Hillary and Obama, a tag team as passionate as “the kids,” with significantly greater field time, hit the airways and didn’t bother to merely hint at the doom coming from the skies if the sarin did not scurry back into its rat holes post haste. The trucks have turned around, the poison back in its lair,” Shai continued. “Confirmed by a few pictures McE’s satellites took once the kids told us where to point them.”
“Seems enough of it was headed to Hezbollah. So, we have a finger in the dike,” Goodman said lifting the fresher cigarette. “Not overly reassuring.”
“Bashar blinked, this time. Obama’s red line speech was extraordinarily helpful. Without knowing, it’s what I’ve been waiting for to get the sarin out. As things get worse for Herr Bashar, and what doesn’t get worse in this world, he will feel the lack of options.”
“You’re convinced he’ll hit Ghouta or Dariyya? One or the other. Both?”
“Yes. It’s the easiest way to clear out those neighborhoods, fill them with his backers. And feel powerful.”
“If he does, you really think you can get Bashar to give up all his sarin? That’s a tall order. Even for us who have counted on miracles.”
“If I can get the Russians and Americans to play doubles on the same side of net, I think I can make it happen,” Shai said too loudly, his head throbbing. “I’m counting on a sarin attack of muscle to get everybody to the court.”
Goodman collapsed back in his chair. Now a headache tormented him, pounding at the back at his eyes. “Want to whisper what’s eating you? I won’t repeat it to a soul. Promise.”
“There’s the matter of the barrel bombs, the secret prisons, the tens of thousands disappearing. Maybe I get the sarin out and everybody says, ‘Great tournament. Help the poor Syrian people? We just did, mission accomplished. Lot on our plates. Don’t call us again. In fact, lose our phone numbers.’ Maybe I ensure uninterrupted slaughter by lesser means?”
“What, by chance, did we just see? Sarin rolling out to military bases far and wide. Convinced me he could let it loose from everywhere. Shai, just get the fucking sarin rendered inert will you, please,” Goodman said, elbows on his desk, propping his head in both hands, smoking curling from one. “I’m letting you run with that and only that. You’re on a very short rope. Smallest misstep and you’re sure to get mauled. If not by something in the savanna, by me. There are too many loose ends, the Wassaf woman in Jaffa, to commence a long list.”
The magnitude of the potential results had propelled Shai to mobilize the unwashed. He could not be certain how Kassem or Afra would behave in the eye of a hurricane of death spinning around them, or what Lilia, torn from her family and her cause, might abruptly try. The service ironed out sentimentality like creases from a shirt. Though over time, Shai knew, his own shirts had wrinkled and remained that way.
“Afra trusts her. So do I. She’s a hero.”
“She should be under lock and key. Too many goddamn ways in this new world to call Mommy and say, ‘I’m fine and this very nice girl is running around Damascus as me. But you mustn’t tell.’ Fuad told us what we already knew. The Iranians are showing the Syrians their bag of tricks. I presume you saw Damascus hacked into the 60 Minutes Twitter feed to enlighten the world that: Obama’s in bed with al-Qaeda.”
Shai said, “It showed a reach that caught my attention.”
To slap down the uprising, the Syrian Electronic Army had risen openly like a sub breaking the surface. They defaced websites. They released Blackworm to crawl into and eat antivirus programs, and on the third day of each month spawn a grumble of maggots. With the nimblest of mall shoplifters, they did grab and goes in U.S. defense contractors’ systems.
Shai sucked in a breath. “She’s happier in Jaffa, sea air, lot of Arabic about. Set up in a small apartment where she can cook for herself. Even though she won’t stay, she wanted a Hebrew tutor. She’s followed around the clock. She even approaches an internet cafe, anywhere that sells phones, we grab her. Back to the safe house here. Let’s let her breathe. Please, Levi.”
“I’d say you were going soft. Except you’ve always been too flabby. And I don’t give a damn how much your teams like you. I don’t want a necktie party in Damascus. I never sleep well. Now I don’t sleep at all.”
“You’ve told me you sleep easily in the worst of times. I admire it.”
