And virtually every time Charlie suggested something imaginative he could do out beyond the wire, she’d launch chaff. Nicola’s First (and only) Law of Intelligence Physics went:
Operations = Risks = Problems
Zero ops therefore equaled zero problems. That philosophy was why Charlie was fond of saying that what CIA needed most these days was a 500-psi enema, starting with the director of central intelligence and ending with Nicola and all like her.
What kept Charlie going was that despite BGAlbatross, which was the CIA-style digraph code name by which he referred to Nicola, he’d had a number of successes. In fact, over the past couple of months Charlie and his seven-man Archangel paramilitary team had made a sizable dent in AQI, intel shorthand for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq terror organization of pro-Saddam Sunni insurgents, fanatic Islamist beheaders, and common dirtbag criminals.
In April he’d disrupted a Sunni network bringing foreign AQI fighters from Syria, killing six and capturing three. In May he’d ID’d an AQI mole working in the Green Zone, captured him, and flipped him. Made him a penetration agent-who led Team Archangel to a safe house where they killed five of AQI’s top-tier support cell personnel. And over the past three weeks he’d intercepted and waxed four of Zarqawi’s couriers. Even better, he’d seized their laptops, pen drives, and cell phones intact.
It’s amazing, Charlie thought, how much information bad guys keep that they shouldn’t.
Tonight he’d score again. Happy Father’s Day. Six days ago, a Sunni calling himself Tariq Zubaydi the grocer had shown up in the Green Zone bearing a DVD.
Tariq, who hadn’t bathed in a while and smelled strongly of garlic, told the Blackwater gunsel working the security desk that the disc had been brought to his store by a stranger who’d told him, “There are those who know you speak English, and you will cooperate and take this to the Americans in the Green Zone or you will disappear.”
It took two hours until Tariq was finally passed down the food chain to Nicola.
BGAlbatross locked Tariq in an interrogation room and slipped the DVD onto her laptop-a stupid thing to do Charlie thought, given the fact it could have been virus-rich-started to screen it, got physically ill after about thirty seconds, and summoned Charlie. “You watch. You like this kind of stuff.”
The Iraqi had delivered an AQI snuff video. A thirteen-minute compilation of the beheadings of Fabrizio Quattrocchi, the Italian national killed on April 14, and Nick Berg, an American murdered on May 11. But there was new material, too: the bloody execution of Hussein Ali Alyan, a Shia Lebanese national, killed June 12, only forty-eight hours earlier. It hadn’t even made Al Jazeera yet.
Nicola insisted on grilling Tariq herself. Charlie was relegated to watching from behind two-way glass. She got nowhere of course, because (a) she didn’t know a fricking thing about interrogation, and (b) she was noticeably turned off by Tariq’s BO.
Charlie, who’d graduated not only the Army’s interrogation school at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, but also the FBI’s advanced interrogation techniques and criminal profiling courses at Quantico, Virginia, fumed and made detailed notes. He also did a quick wash of Tariq Zubaydi’s name through Baghdad Station’s insurgent database and came up dry. But dry meant nothing. Baghdad Station’s files were notoriously incomplete and-more to the point-Tariq was good.
Charlie focused. The Iraqi’d obviously had tradecraft training. He was careful about his body language. And when Nicola pressed him, he did what any good operator would do when challenged: He deflected, redirected, flattered. His grocery was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was so dangerous to come here. He admired the Americans.
BGAlbatross’s head bobbed up and down like one of those rear-window doggy dolls. Charlie watched Tariq read her like the proverbial book. And when her doe eyes finally told Tariq I feel your pain, Tariq set the hook. He explained his only son was a cripple-he’d lost his leg in a bombing-and his wife had cancer.
Tears welling, he asked for three thousand dollars and ten cartons of French cigarettes so he could send his family to safety in Amman. He’d use the cigarettes to bribe the border guards.
Nicola rummaged for a Kleenex.
Charlie: Oh, fuck me.
And so, ignoring her dagger looks, Charlie stepped into the interrogation room and took over. He told Tariq in the passable Arabic he’d learned at language school in Monterey and polished during a fourteen-month tour training Special Forces in Qatar, “Read my lips, habibi, no name, no money.”
In fifteen minutes Charlie bargained the cash down to one hundred dollars and the cigarettes to two cartons. That accomplished, he insisted on the name of the messenger who’d delivered the video.
Tariq looked past Charlie’s Saddam Hussein mustache deep into his cold blue eyes, factored in the scars on Charlie’s face and his knuckles, understood he was dealing with a pro, and coughed up the name Abu Hadidi and a physical description. Yes, it was a war name and a probably phony description. But small victories are small victories. More important, it set a quid pro quo precedent for future meetings.
Through it all, Nicola sat dumbstruck. She’d never known Charlie was the only Ground Branch operator in Baghdad fluent in Arabic, because she’d never bothered to ask him anything about himself.
Tariq’s gaze passed slowly from Charlie to Nicola and back to Charlie, and when Charlie caught the Iraqi’s subtle yet unmistakable contempt, he almost laughed out loud. The Iraqi was obviously thinking the same thought as Charlie: Had this worthless woman learned nothing in spy school?
Charlie kept everybody waiting while he collected the cash and doctored one of the cartons, affixing a Radio Frequency ID transponder (RFID) that CIA’s techno-wizards concealed within an inventory sticker. So when Tariq departed the Green Zone, Charlie, the well-worn galabia he referred to as a man-dress over his body armor, was waiting with Jose, who could pass for Egyptian, in one of Archangel’s battered Toyota pickup trucks. The RFID’s transmissions allowed him to trail Tariq’s filthy Nissan across the river, through the Sunni market on Karada Kharidge, then along a leisurely, meandering course-Charlie and Jose decided Tariq was running an SDR, or surveillance detection route-that ultimately led southwest into the Sunni Triangle of Death to the squalid city of Mahmudiyah.
But not Mahmudiyah itself. Tariq turned off Highway 8 north of the big canal, near a cluster of villas marked on Charlie’s maps as Insurgent Central. The development had been built in 1991 for Republican Guard officers and their families, and Charlie had long suspected it was a transit zone for AQI kidnap victims.
Jose gave Tariq about a klik’s lead, while Charlie surreptitiously shot video with his cell phone. One point eight kliks past a walled cluster of villas that had once housed top Baath Party officials, Tariq pulled onto a rutted dirt road, drove east over a fetid, yardwide canal, and two hundred meters later pulled up next to a two-story, stone-faced villa with a clothesline on its flat roof, the easternmost structure of a three-house compound. Between the houses, the canal, and the Baath Party villas sat tilled fields of desiccated sunflowers. From one thousand meters away, Charlie squinted through binoculars as Tariq unlocked a heavy wrought-iron grille door and disappeared.
“If I was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that’s exactly the kind of place I’d stash people,” Charlie told BGAlbatross when he got back. “I should check this guy out.”
She gave Charlie a nasty look. “You already did.” Hell, she was pissed he’d even trailed Tariq in the first place (although she downloaded his photos fast enough).