Brad Taylor - Enemy of Mine

She started walking again. “The Umayyad Mosque is one of the holiest shrines of Islam. It’s a huge tourist attraction. Yeah, we can’t get into the inner workings, but we can get to the courtyard, which is enormous. Big enough to get the signal we need with a plausible reason for being there.”

She looked back at me. “Unlike a simple soccer field.”

The comment was meant to convey she understood the mission and was thinking about how to do it given our operational cover.

We reached the end of the souk and circled around to the tourist gate entrance of the mosque. After buying our tickets, we went through a doorway labeled “putting on special clothes room.” We were given hooded cloaks to wear, me because short-sleeved shirts were frowned upon and Jennifer because, well, she was a woman.

“What’s up with this place?”

“It’s the first great mosque.”

“Great is right. It looks like a crib from MTV with all the marble and gold.”

She was scowling at my verbal history slight when I saw a mausoleum off to the right, a small, white building with a red roof.

She said, “Saladin’s last resting place.”

“Saladin? The Saladin? For real?”

I saw a little grin seep out because I was enjoying the same thing she did. Old dead people and pottery shards.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get to the courtyard and get this God-almighty-important message.”

“Hey, let’s look around a little bit. Work the cover some. We’re tourists.”

She smiled for real. “If it’s got something to do with bloodshed, you get interested. Okay, you want me to tell you about Saladin?”

Jennifer was famous in the Taskforce for her history lessons. Not in a bad way, as if she was always spouting off, but in a good way, because she knew more about the history of the world than any knuckle-dragger in the command. In this case, I didn’t need the lesson. Saladin was a Kurd who’d smoked the European crusaders, giving them fits with his military skills. A leader of the first order. I knew all about him, but had no idea he’d been entombed in Syria.

“I’m good on this one. I’ll just go take a peek. Why don’t you take the GPS into the courtyard? I’ll catch up.”

She disappeared through a door, and I entered the mausoleum. There wasn’t much to see inside, and I realized that I was itching to know what the Taskforce wanted. I wished I hadn’t given the GPS to Jennifer, allowing her to see the message first. I glanced around for a few seconds, then took off at a fast walk to find her. I entered into the courtyard, which was as large as Jennifer said it would be. I saw her sitting down, looking at the screen.

“Did you get it?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I did.”

Her demeanor gave me no clue if it was going to be good or bad. “Well?”

She stood up and dusted off her pants. “It’s instructions for a PM.”

Whew. PM stood for personal meet and was spy-talk for a clandestine meeting between a controller and his asset, which in this case would be us. Nothing more than an hour out of our life.

“See. All that crying over nothing. We’ll do the meet and continue on once this visa mess gets sorted out. Kurt probably just wants to pass us instructions to check something out here in Damascus before we head north. More than likely it was just too much data to send using the GPS.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why?”

She handed me the GPS, the smile from earlier long gone.

“The PM’s in Beirut.”

Two days later, Jennifer walked into a cafe in the Hamra section of western Beirut, just down the street from the American University. She saw a hodgepodge of tourists and students, with the right wall lined by twentysomethings smoking water pipes and discussing political opinions, one of the few areas where such discussion wouldn’t end in gunfire.

She crossed the threshold at precisely twelve minutes past one o’clock, as the GPS message had stipulated. She was wearing a shirt that buttoned in the front and was carrying a map in her right hand, per the instructions.

She knew she was being watched, but made no attempt to look around. Instead, she went to the hostess and asked for a menu, getting redirected to the menu on the wall.

While pretending to look at it, she sensed someone gazing over her shoulder.

A man said, “This place is supposed to have the best breakfast in town, but I don’t know about lunch.”

She turned and saw a fiftysomething executive in a business suit, swarthy, maybe Mediterranean, maybe Latino, with a large gut protruding over his belt.

She said, “Lunch is probably just as good.”

The man smiled at the correct response. “Join me, if you want.”

She followed him to the back of the cafe, beyond the prying ears of the students and tourists, sitting at the last small table in the restaurant.

He immediately began giving her instructions, a mad minute of information on why they were meeting and what they were discussing, should she be asked later. A facade to cover the conversation and protect both of them.

She said nothing, memorizing everything that came out of his mouth. When he stopped, his serious demeanor left, replaced by a cocky smile.

“My name is Louis Britt, and I guess I’m supposed to help you out.”

“Louis Britt? You’re kidding. Not ‘Abdullah Mohammed’?”

“Unfortunately, no. Trust me, this damn name has caused nothing but trouble over here. I’m sure the idiot who gave me my documents is laughing.”

He picked up the menu and said, “I thought they would be sending me an operator. No offense.”

She smiled back, taking a liking to him for some reason. “They did.”

“No, I don’t mean another case officer, I mean a Taskforce operator. Someone who can act on my information. Kurt contacted me and gave me a dump on a hit in Tunisia, then directed this meeting. I’ve been deep so long, I was shocked when it happened. I thought the world was ending. And now I’m meeting you. You CIA? DIA?”

“Look, I’m just an overeager anthropologist with a liking for Middle Eastern historical sights. I’m supposed to be in Syria on a dig. Unfortunately for me, I also have some other unique skills. So does the man who watched you enter the restaurant. I don’t know what a true ‘operator’ is, since I’ve never been in the military, and it seems like everyone who’s ever held a gun says that’s what they are nowadays, but I do know I’m the one they sent for this meeting. What do you have?”

He leaned back. “Wow. I have been gone too long. The world is just not right.” He said it with a smile, breaking off when the waitress approached to take their order. Watching her walk back to the kitchen, he said, “Man, to be young again. These Lebanese women are friggin’ hot .” He winked. “Not that my age has stopped me any.”

Jennifer gave a tentative smile, wondering where this was going. Is he coming on to me? Really?

She’d never done an operational link-up with a deep asset and was unsure what to make of the guy. On the one hand, when they’d met, he was as professional as anyone in the Taskforce, executing the operating procedures like a robot. Now, he was acting like a drunk businessman who’d come to Beirut for a convention.

He saw her draw back and took her hand. The act sent her instincts into the red zone, until she felt something in her palm.

“Don’t worry. I’m not trying to get in your pants. Unless you’d like it, that is.”

He grinned again and pulled his hand away.

“That’s an SD card with a complete rundown on a hit that happened in Tunisia three days ago. Taskforce took down a guy that was financing an assassination here in Lebanon. Originally, we didn’t care because all the indicators pointed to a simple sectarian hit against some other faction in this fucked-up country. Taskforce now thinks it may be directed against Western interests. Meaning the U.S.”