The Peacock and the Sparrow (eBook)

1

I hated the smell of Rashid’s cigarettes. He always lit up in my car, a beat-up Mitsubishi Lancer with just enough space to breathe. I hated the smell of his cigarettes, but I always took one when he offered. It was the ability to please that you learned as a spy: smoking a cigarette, offering compliments you didn’t mean, falling down drunk from having accepted too many vodkas.

His cigarettes were Canary Kingdom, a cheap Middle East brand that claimed to import its tobacco from Virginia. Virginia: That’s where CIA Headquarters is, I would inform Rashid casually. Link his source of pleasure to his source of risk, another trick of the manipulation trade. I’d offered to get him real American cigarettes with my ration cards on the naval base, but he’d refused, said he liked his native carcinogens. Anyway, he insisted on green apple, a flavor I’d never find in any of Uncle Sam’s packs. It was my misfortune that cigarettes were Rashid’s only vice; he was too pious to drink and I was never able to expense alcohol during our meetings.

Green apple had begun to mix with the odor from a nearby dumpster and our stationary car smelled like a rotting orchard. ‘We will not negotiate until they release Junaid,’ Rashid was saying, shaking his head and looking out the window. The slums stared back at us, brown and uneven and stunted, as though they’d grown tired over the years, further from notions of a legitimate city. Late afternoon sun turned the car windows, caked with dust, to tarnished copper. I’d convinced myself that the car didn’t need a washing, that the dirt helped hide my informants.

Rashid’s eyes narrowed, his black pupils reflecting the dying rays of sun like rusty steel blades. He was getting self-righteous and indignant as he always did when talking about Junaid, the dissident poet who’d been rotting in a Bahrain jail since the early days of the uprising.

‘Someday the king will answer to Allah for what he has done!’ Spittle flew through Rashid’s crooked brown teeth. His youngish skin was dark and pockmarked, his curly hair greasy, undoubtedly styled with the cheap gel sold at every corner cold store. He looked leaner than usual – maybe the lingering effects of fasting for Ramadan – the concavity of his chest visible beneath his thin shirt. I never allowed him to wear his preferred white thobe when he met me – too conspicuous.

‘If not to Allah, at least Al-Hakim will answer to the international community.’ I smiled.

Rashid’s face turned conciliatory. ‘I forget you Americans do not believe in Allah. Yes, even the international community has con-demned the meritless detention of Junaid.’ His English was perfect, the product of four years at Oxford – or was it Cambridge? I could never remember.

‘And Junaid is not the only unjust detention,’ he continued. ‘Four doctors imprisoned last week for treating protesters. Simply providing medical care. Following Hippocrates—’

‘Yeah, I heard about it.’

‘Your country’s arms embargo is the only thing that keeps us alive.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

Rashid took a drag, blew a cloud of smoke into my face. ‘Anyway… you understand our position.’

I opened the window a crack, threw out my cigarette, returned the pen flashlight to my mouth. ‘So what about Fourteen February? What’s your plan? Continue the war?’

‘Yes.’ Rashid tapped my notebook with his knobby finger. ‘Write that down. Inshallah, we will continue the struggle.’

————

Rashid’s silhouette disappeared behind Diraz Cemetery, a dirty ghost among the burial mounds. He was a decent source and an easy one. Help America learn more about the Opposition, I’d proffered, and he’d dived in, clothes still on. Pathetically eager to make his case and fund his revolution in the process. A planning officer within Fourteen February, he wasn’t perched on the highest echelon, but was good enough to provide the CIA its daily bread.

From the dashboard I removed the safety signal, a pack of cigarettes, took a gulp from my flask, turned my Lancer toward Juffair. The lampless streets were shedding their bulk, becoming paper-thin. I stopped for a soda at a cold store on Avenue 54, one of many Manama streets too nondescript and uninspired to warrant a name. Headquarters liked to remind us to run surveillance detection routes following meetings with informants, but after two decades in the business I could confirm their futility. Fine for younger, fresher case officers who needed the practice. Fine when you were going to a meeting and risked dragging the local intelligence service to your source. But useless after the fact.

When I reached the naval base in Juffair, the white of early evening had darkened to gray. The sky here was never blue. Always hazy and colorless, laden with dust so thick and constant you forgot it existed in the first place. I parked in a dirt lot sandwiched between opulent gated villas. Two-plus months in-country and I still didn’t qualify for a parking permit on base; you needed to hold an important position or learn the secret handshake, and I couldn’t seem to master either one.

The station was in a small annex at the rear of the base labeled OFFICE OF MIDDLE EAST ANALYSIS. It had the air of hasty and halfhearted officialdom – cheap cubicle walls, clean but shabby furniture, everything unoffensively decorated and slightly dusty, most things in acceptable working order – typical indecisive midpoint between peacetime and war-time operations. A frayed rattan ceiling fan attempted to cool the desert-infested space, buzzing like a dying mosquito.

Rashid’s information was thin and it only took a few minutes to type a report. Headquarters had been demanding new dirt, but there wasn’t much left. Almost autumn of 2012 and Bahrain had been stuck in a messy attempt at revolution for nearly two years, stalled in an advanced percolation stage: violent but not particularly deadly, a few casualties on either side, recycled rhetoric and sporadic material destruction. International newspapers had stopped reporting on the uprising, relegating it to the bin of petty civil wars. Bahrain’s Arab Spring, like its neighbors’, was doomed to the annals of inconsequentiality.

The cipher uttered its metallic click and the vault door swung open. Whitney put down his leather satchel, greeted me with a ‘Hey, Collins.’ Like nearly everyone else, Whitney discarded my first name, Shane, although coming from his mouth it invariably sounded stilted and unnatural, like a high school boy unsure how to refer to a girl he’s dating. Whitney Alden Mitchell had the distinction of being the youngest station chief in CIA history, and if that weren’t fodder enough for ridicule, he looked even more juvenile than his twenty-eight years.

‘What are you doing here?’ Whitney asked as though it were the first time I’d worked past five o’clock.

‘Writing up intel from SCROOP.’ Rashid had the misfortune of receiving one of Langley’s uglier code names.

Unbuttoning the top of his shirt, Whitney glanced at my computer screen. He was softly bulging and short and had to lean forward to see what I’d written. ‘Anything good from our friends on the other side?’ Friends on the other side. That’s what he called the Opposition.

‘Not really. Same old shit. Continued protests, demands to release Junaid.’

Whitney’s blue eyes, framed by girlish lashes, sat eagerly in a round doughy face. Freckles on his neck, cement brown like his hair, quivered behind his starched collar. Every day he wore buttoned white shirts and khakis and penny loafers, and he still had the near-maniacal enthusiasm of a first-tour officer, his smiles uncomfortably close to genuine and his handshakes firm and compulsive. His parents were State Department diplomats, he liked to tell people as though explaining the polish and poise he’d acquired. Then he would make a joke and punch you in the arm, convincing you he had enough grit and humor to be spook material.

‘What about Iran?’

I shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘Collins.’ Whitney’s penny loafers shifted. ‘We need details on the weapons and money. Where they’re coming from. How they’re getting here. H.Q. is going to be all over us.’ He pronounced ‘H.Q.’ as two letters, cozily, the way one would say a friend’s nickname.

‘Understood, Chief.’ (At my use of the vocative he blinked rapidly, feigned his usual discomfort.) ‘Nothing so far. But I’ll keep my eyes open.’

He smiled confidently. ‘It’s there. You just need to find it.’

Whitney had arrived a few weeks after me wearing a cheap heavy wool suit in the scorching June heat. Even before attaining station chief status in Bahrain, he’d been dubbed a ‘rising star,’ the coveted term bandied about Headquarters, a title he wore with aspirational dignity like a Brooks Brothers jacket that didn’t quite fit or that he couldn’t quite afford. A lively contrast with me – twenty-five years a case officer, never a station chief. My prior tour in Baghdad had been the latest in a multiyear descent, a descent made worse by the disappearance of a few hundred bucks from my operational revolving funds and an official diagnosis of early-stage liver deterioration. With only a few miles left, I’d been assigned to Manama as the resident Iran Referent, tasked with uncovering the vast Persian conspiracy behind the Shiite uprising against the Sunni monarchy, putting flesh on our fears of Tehran’s regional domination. A suitable assignment before I exited the shadows...