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The helicopter had deposited the three CIA agents on a hilly tongue of land extending between the Mediterranean and the brackish smash of lakes gathered in its lagoon. The location was a few miles west of Port Said, the city grown out of the Suez Canal laborers’ huts. There was a trailer there, which Lisa, Fabio, and Hector waited in until the Cardinal arrived.
And an hour later, the Cardinal alighted, escorted by a coterie of Muslim Brotherhood scouts.
But only Hector got to take a walk with him.
The spy and the master wandered away in silence. Then they came upon a promontory that overlooked the frothy waves of the Mediterranean. The Cardinal climbed a rock with his left foot and took in gulps of the warm sea air. He looked like The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog—Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting—with his dark green suit and rumpled white hair. The promontory wasn’t lofty. It stood barely twenty feet above sea level. Yet the horizon looked like the smooth edge of a flat earth. It was only by the mercy of a drilling platform on the sea-cusp, and two ships threading their way back, that the two men were spared the vertiginous shock of their minuteness before nature.
George Moore, the CIA director, was known in the dark corridors of espionage as “the Cardinal,” a sobriquet he didn’t so much like as begrudgingly accept. When he’d taken office last December, he’d said in a Washington Post interview that returning to Langley had been his “true calling.” It had made the spooks’ joke of the year.
The reason for this being that Moore had spent a year as a Jesuit monk novice before Langley had come into his life. Strangely, Moore would later divorce from religion and its three sisters: literature, art, and philosophy. He hated sophisticated memos, avoided unnecessary performances, and shut his spies up before they rationalized their mishaps and failures. He came off more as a fierce army general than a seasoned spook, and his dour demeanor emphasized this impression. He was so proud of being called a “jingo.”
Moore was the most esteemed CIA director since 9/11. He was a Company man. As if it were a magical vine, he’d climbed Langley’s ladder in less than three rushed decades—from the swamp of the Directorate of Operations analysts during the Cold War, to an operative then station chief of Riyadh, to head of the Near East and South Asia Division (shortly before the Second Gulf War), to director of Operations (which was later termed “The National Clandestine Service”) shortly after 9/11, then to director of the whole Company.
Moore was a good family man, too, father of four, grandfather of seven. Not a sloppy womanizer like his predecessor, or a Snepp-sympathizer like a certain director of Analysis who’d almost beat him to office (before the DA’s college diary, somehow, resurfaced on the Seventh Floor). He was a technocrat distingué, having served as special adviser to the president on terrorism for four years before retracing his steps back to Langley.
The only crime the Cardinal was guilty of, perhaps, was the “orange terror alert” he’d undersigned, among other hotheads, in the lead-up to the Iraq War. The media had used that against him when the Senate discussed his nomination for the directorship. He was called “The Mastermind of the Iraqi WMD Scandal,” and a “War Criminal.” Still, his nomination had passed with the necessary majority vote.
And here he was, five months later, steering the global ship without so much as moving a finger.
* * *
Hector was sweltering under the Egyptian sun. He’d left his jacket in the trailer and felt grateful for it. Now he put on his Predators. Those were the dark Ray-Ban sunglasses CIA men started wearing in the late ’90s as a spoof of the Men in Black franchise. Behind his Predators, Hector now shut his eyes and waited for the Cardinal’s revelation.
At length, the Cardinal landed his brown oxford on the sand and walked alongside the precipice.
Hector followed humbly.
“Look at the sea and take the measure of the stakes, Hector. Thirty trillion cubic feet of high-quality gas. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, but can’t for the life of me believe in it. The president is skeptic as well, and well he should be.”
Hector squinted at the sea. It was the bluest he’d ever seen. The sky was awfully clear, the sun hanging low like a glowing sauna stone. Who would think this natural beauty harbored the biggest abscess in the Mediterranean? The stuff for a new Opium War. Operation OIL Phase II.
The Cardinal stopped and pinned his eyes on the sea-cusp. “And the strangest thing is that this is only one third of their deal.”
Hector had to voice two enquiries into the nature of the other two thirds.
Of the first, the Cardinal said it was a naval base, a place near Alexandria. The ousted Mubarak regime had been adamant not to allow any foreign military bases on Egyptian soil. Obviously, this was about to change with the Muslim Brotherhood now in power.
“And the last piece of the puzzle, sir?”
The Cardinal was silent.
“Sir?”
“Syria,” the director said heavily. “They will clean up our mess in Syria.”
Hector jerked his head and scanned the two helicopters parked at either side of the trailer. In truth, this was a frightening scene. A squad of Egyptian soldiers carried Kalashnikovs and guarded the helicopters. And spattered close on the sand, emaciated bearded men bore M16s and smoked cheap Cleopatra cigarettes, glowering at the two Americans conspiring at the precipice.
Unlike the Salafi-Wahhabi ideal, Muslim-Brotherhood scouts grew their mustaches, trimmed their beards, accepted the pants and the T-shirt, shook hands with women and infidels, and wore a fixed grin on their mugs at all times. They told you they wanted to take over the world, kill unbelievers, enslave women, abolish the arts, all with kindly smiles and pats on the back.
No one had foreseen that those utopian crazies would one day rule the Kingdom of the Nile—no one except the toppled President Mubarak, a veteran of a three-decade reign of tyranny. It took a tyrant to spot another that far away.
The Brotherhood borrowed their brand from Turkey. If Turkey’s Islamists were Justice & Development, the Brotherhood were Freedom & Justice. This copycat rhyme had a name in poetry. Epanalepsis: when one clause ended with the first word of another. The king is dead, long live the king!
Politicians are lucky people, Hector mused. They kill using mere words. Pretty, rhyming words.
“Sir, we can’t,” he hissed. “We’ve danced with so many devils already, we can’t afford Satan himself. And if you want my honest opinion, sir, I won’t touch a Muslim-Brotherhood deal with a ten-foot pole. These folks don’t honor anything!”
“Calm down, son,” the Cardinal said.
But Hector was more ireful than the sauna stone above. “Things are moving quickly in Syria, sir. The rebels are making progress. Soon Assad and his buddies will be out of the way. The Qatari pipeline should reach Bulgaria in under a year, and cheap gas will flood Europe. The Russians will bite the dust! No more Cold War nostalgia or multipolar bickering. World peace, sir. World peace! If Langley is making a U-turn, please don’t let me stand here and watch it, sir.”
“Things are moving quickly in Syria,” the Cardinal echoed his takeaway from the rant. “Hector, I’ll be honest with you. I made a big mistake when I recruited you.”
Hector was silent.
The Cardinal turned and walked closer to the edge. His toecaps towered over the crashing waves twenty feet below. He sucked his upper left molars. “You had a lot of gusto. Tragedy, too. Both make for a perfect spy. But in your case, your emotions took a life of their own. Did you ever wonder why we laid you off just before the Arab Spring?”
“Is it because of my thing with the Nomans?”
“It’s because you were a fool once, and we couldn’t afford fools anymore.” The Cardinal looked at his feet, the frothy waves below, and he breathed deeply. “So you’ll practice self-control this time around, Hector. No runaway emotions. And whatever comes your way, let your brain deal with it first. Am I making myself clear?”
The Cardinal was clarity incarnate.
“Now let’s get back to the trailer,” the Cardinal said. “We’ve seen enough of the heartrending outdoors.”
* * *
In the trailer, the Cardinal pointed him to the one empty booth, where Hector’s abandoned jacket hung from the sill of a small window. Lisa and Fabio had taken liberties with the generous Egyptian stocks to create the atmosphere of a cozy living room. There was Arabic pop music, biscuits and coffee, and macaroni béchamel in the oven.
Once Hector was seated, Lisa handed her mitt to her deputy and came to sit across from Hector. The Cardinal sat beside her. Something about Lisa’s demeanor, at this exact moment, reminded Hector of Judge Judy—if Ms Judy had a bubblegum problem, and if she had a seedy, despondent view of the opposite sex, as Lisa did. Before Cairo, Hector had met her only once. Back in 2005, Lisa had come to guest-lecture Farm cadets on the new security challenges of the Arab world in the post-9/11 era. She had been an operative in Baghdad then, and her lecture had been incoherent at best. But make no mistake. Even with all Hector knew about her, Lisa wouldn’t have made it to station chief of Cairo without some sort of talent, something which Hector had yet to see.
She took a red paper file from her Banana Republic bag and opened it on the enameled table. The file hosted multiple satellite shots of warships that Hector recognized as belonging to the Russian Navy. Comment bubbles denoted each ship’s class and description.
“The Russians are doing a navy workout in the Mediterranean,” Lisa said, blowing a blue gum bubble. “The biggest since the end of the Cold War. Their ships are patrolling the Syrian coast as of right now. Tartus is back in business, baby, and it’s not looking good.”
“So the Russians are keeping their property in shape,” Hector said. “So what? Tartus is a junkyard, pretty much. Four piers tops. I don’t see the Russians being that stupid. They won’t afford another war on top of the Ukraine and North Caucasus. This”—he moved his forefinger over the first photo—“this is a waste of time.”
Fabio came with the béchamel and laid a heavy, steaming lump in Hector’s plate. “We love to keep our agents healthy,” he said with an unhealthy grin.
Fabio had always reminded Hector of Mikhail Bulgakov’s cat, the one in The Master and Margarita. Behemoth. If Behemoth had an actual mustache and if he were, perhaps, a tad slicker.
The Cardinal spoke softly. “We know for a fact the Russians are coming, Hector. In a few months, they’ll be sending Admiral Kuznetsov back. That’s their only aircraft carrier, so they’re taking this utterly seriously.”
Hector decided not to ask however the Cardinal had access to this information. The Cardinal turned to his Cairo chief and gave her a nod.
While Fabio pushed Hector in and Hector crawled till his jacket brushed his left ear, Lisa rooted out a photo a few layers down in her file. “Waste of your Highness’s time, huh? Take a good look at this.”
Hector examined this new photo and a few more Lisa dealt to him one by one. This series of photos was different. Some were a bit grainy, some shiny, but they were all taken in the same location. A warehouse of sorts. Photo One showed a pale finger—or what Hector mistook for a finger—up the left corner. Photos Two and Three zoomed in on this finger.
Hector did not need a bubble to comment on this finger, nor tell him what it meant for the war in Syria.
* * *
Eight years ago, in 2005, while still a junior operations officer fresh off the Farm, Hector had listened to Ozgur Alexopolous—his supervisor and, later on, his friend—poke fun at this exact same finger.
It was the first operation Hector had taken part in, a Russian secrets deal taking place in Paris. Two weeks earlier, a man had walked into the US Embassy in Paris claiming to be a starshy leytenant in the Russian Ground Forces with invaluable secrets to sell. It was a dubious affair from the getgo, and later on would turn out to be no more than a booby trap, but the Cardinal—then-director of Operations—had deemed it a valid opportunity to train one of his best recruits: Hector Kane.
So for two weeks, Ozgur showed up at Hector’s 18th Arrondissement hotel at six p.m. sharp, to guide him through their nightly surveillance of this “defector.” And on this particular day, Ozgur had come carrying a paper bag with a heap of clothes in it—a floral tunic, a beaded necklace, a pair of dusky harems, rainbow sunglasses, and sandals—and asked Hector to put them on.
“You’re kidding me. Right?”
“Nope.”
Ozgur was in his stellar Armani suit as usual, bleeding Tom Ford’s Neroli Portofino unto the air, no disguise heeded: It simply didn’t work with Ozgur’s persona. Ozgur had the looks, slyness, and ostentation of a fox. In comparison, Hector paled big time.
But now this hippie outfit promised to make him glow. Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
Besides the clothes, Ozgur had also brought a teaching material: the latest issue of National Defense.
“Here, look at this smoking gadget.” Ozgur had opened the glossy pages to a featured story, reclining on Hector’s bed. “Yakhont. Like in ruby. You see a pattern there? Same thing with the ‘secrets’ our leytenant is feeding us. Take a good look, buddy. What’d you see? A bulldog!” He boomed. “Huh huh huh. I might wanna patent that. The Bulldog Rocket. Hey, you should get the Russkies better than I do. You’re Canadian. When you live in minus twenty all your dreary life, good taste becomes like fine wine. You hear about it, you lie about it, but you don’t really get it. And when you get it, you don’t like it. And you don’t want others to like it, either. So what’d you do? You make the ugliest rocket in the history of warfare, and you make it so good that even your enemies will line up at your doorstep to get a piece. That, mon ami, is the Russian secret, how they win. They make things so ugly you can’t even resist.”
How about the tunic and harems, Ozzie? What’s their secret?
“Oh, those. Just to demonstrate. Found ’em in a flea market at Clignancourt. Nice Jewish gal. She said they were ugly enough, and I took her word for it. And, oh boy, who can resist you right now!”
Vain, snarky, and suicidal: Ozgur, may you rest in peace, wherever you are.
* * *
“But, sir...” Hector’s larynx jammed.
“The Stooge is on board, Hector,” said the Cardinal. “The Tsar has fed the Lion.”
The Yakhont was a thirty-foot monster with a dipped ramjet engine that looked—verily—like a bulldog’s nose. And this was the pale finger Hector had seen in the first photo.
Earlier this year, there had been reports of a Russian “sample” sent to the Syrian Army as part of a marketing campaign. Most CIA analysts believed this was a bluff. The Russians wanted the West to take them seriously and, maybe, they promoted their stocks of ugly missiles, too.
Photos Two and Three had already corroborated this conclusion. A Yakhont missile—the “Bulldog Rocket”—had been sent to al-Assad’s camp. But Photos Four, Five, and Six backed a different theory, confirming the director’s ominous metaphor.
The Americans were sordidly naïve, Hector realized, drunk on their fine homegrown wine. Not only were there more missiles than you could count in the photos, but these missiles were loaded onto TELAR vehicles, the Syrian flag in red, white, and black—doubly, greenly starred—stamped on the vehicles. This meant that the Russians had handed the Syrian Lion—the literal meaning of Assad’s name in Arabic—their comprehensive K-300-P Bastion-P (which NATO reclassified as SS-C-5 Stooge), one of the mightiest anti-ship missile systems in the world.
And this... changed everything.
Eyes glued to the bulldog rockets, Hector said, “I need more info.”
“That’s not gonna happen,” said Lisa. “We’re only showing you this to make you see what’s at stake.”
“Then what do you want me to do?”
“It’s more a matter of where we want you to go,” Fabio said.
“Are you familiar with the nation of Pulau?” Lisa asked.
“Southeast Asia? What’s that to do with the Arab Spring or Syria or anything?”
“You’ll know everything once you get there,” the Cardinal said. “But first, let’s talk family. Does your wife know you’re a CIA agent?”
“She thinks I’m retired.”
“Good. Let’s keep it at that,” the Cardinal said. “Ignorance, in her case, is bliss.”
“She’s Asian,” Fabio had said. “Is she not?”
“Yes, Fabio. My wife is Asian. Is that going to be a problem?”
The Cairo deputy had shrugged innocently. “Never crossed my mind, man. I was just thinking. You’re going to Asia, and she might be helpful there.”