Homeland: Saul’s Game. Andrew Kaplan

And they had only missed by a ­couple of hours.

      How was that possible? How could Abu Nazir have known?

      She watched Glenn signal his team to get ready to pull out. Covering each other, they began to move outside and back to the choppers, their rotors still slowly turning. She ran to a dark corner to strip off her clothes, changing out of her combat gear and into a full-­length black abaya, complete with the hijab head scarf and veil.

      Time to initiate the fallback plan she and Saul had worked out; the worst-­case scenario. She wasn’t going back with them.

      She racked her brain. Who had tipped Abu Nazir off? Because it had to be a tip-­off, and very recent. No one walks out of a compound they’ve been living in for a ­couple of years in the middle of the night just hours before a CIA raid from another country unless they’ve been tipped by a source they considered pretty damn solid.

      Cadillac? Was he a double?

      Possible. True, Cadillac had given her the lead, but he hadn’t been told about the SOG raid on Otaibah. Zero. He had no knowledge of any kind about what they might do with his intel about the compound or anything else. Certainly not how or when. He couldn’t possibly have known. If someone had tipped Abu Nazir, it wasn’t Cadillac. Not to mention that it wasn’t in his interest to do so.

      Because it wouldn’t have been hard for Carrie to burn him to the Syrian GSD. And then it would have been Cadillac screaming his guts out in some prison torture cell, and Assad’s bully boys would do it whether his wife, Aminah, was a shopping girlfriend of President Assad’s wife or not. So if not Cadillac, who the hell was it? And how could they have possibly known that the raid was set for tonight?

      Who knew? Could it have been someone in Rutba? FOB Delta? Could one of the SOG team … ?

      Unlikely. None of them knew the target before they arrived at FOBD—­and once they did, standard protocol was no talking about the mission with outsiders, or even among themselves, except as necessary. They were isolated. Out in the desert, in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t believe it. Not the SOG team. Once at FOB Delta, there was no interaction with the locals. That was part of the protocol, although she was sure Saul and Perry would have analysts go over every second of security camera footage of their time at Delta just to make sure.

      She’d have to try to figure it out later, she realized. Hurry, Carrie. Change and get moving, she told herself, putting her combat outfit and gear into her assault backpack.

      That left either Langley or Baghdad Station, she thought, heading outside. They had kept it tight at Baghdad Station. Perry had strictly limited who had knowledge of the raid. Still, you couldn’t run an op like this without some coordination. But it had been very closely held. Maybe ten ­people. Mostly Americans. But a ­couple of Iraqis. Including Warzer. God, she didn’t want to put Warzer under any suspicion. He was having a tough enough time as it was, working both sides as a Sunni double for her and dealing with an increasingly hostile Iraqi government.

      Standing in the courtyard, her abaya flapping under the draft from the rotors, she handed Glenn her assault backpack. At the last second, she handwrote a quick note for him to send via JWICS when he got back to Rutba. A number quartet and just four words. The number was the private IP address of a computer at Langley whose location was untraceable—­if a hacker tried, each time he would find a different inaccurate location in the world. The computer belonged to Saul and the four words, with letters scrambled in a way that only Saul would know how to unscramble, read:

      “We have a leak.”

      Carrie hid in the shadows of a house a block away, watching as the Black Hawks rose up over the compound. First one, then the other. No flying lights, their dark shapes barely skimming over the roofs of the houses, they headed east toward the desert, watched by one or two cautious heads peeking out from nearby open windows.

      The sound of the helicopters faded, lost in the dark, starless sky. Carrie stood frozen, waiting, till one by one the curious windows closed.

      She was alone.

      She waited, counting minutes, until, certain no one would see or hear her, she began to walk, her footsteps sounding faintly in the dark, empty streets. She walked till she was well away from the compound, and then found a place to hide behind a shed at the back of a house with a yard and a chicken coop.

      She was tired, but knew she couldn’t sleep. She waited silently, not moving, till even the chickens that she’d heard clucking got accustomed to her presence. In the gray light before dawn, she used a compact mirror to put on brown contact lenses and used a brown tint to color her eyebrows. During her time in Rutba, she’d used enough sunscreen to get a slight tan beyond her normal reaction to sun: beet red. Enough for her face and hands, the only things that would show.

      A little after dawn, roosters crowing, the streets started to stir. Wearing her veil, she walked to a nearby souk and bought a basket of fruit from a farmer just opening his stall. Carrying the basket and looking like a local Arab woman, she caught a servee, a battered microbus from the souk to the bus station. There she sat with several other women and a few students to wait for the morning bus. To the world, she was just another Arab woman running errands in the city. She boarded the bus, which took about an hour and a half to do the twenty miles to the central bus station in Damascus.

      She was running the backup plan. What she and Saul had talked about and hoped they’d never have to do, because it meant something had gone very wrong.

      From the bus station she caught a taxi to Martyrs Square, with its Ottoman pillar, palm trees, and cheap hotels bordering the square. Walking as quickly as she could without attracting attention, she doubled back, then went around several other blocks in opposite directions to flush any tails. When she was sure she was clean, she went to the safe house, a top-­floor apartment on Al Nasr Street, a block from the Palace of Justice.

      There she finally cleaned up and changed into jeans and a top—­got rid of the contact lenses; no more abaya and veil, thank God—­and took out her new cover ID from a book safe and went over the paperwork. It was all there: driver’s license, passport, visas, entry stamps—­which, if anyone checked, would be in the Syrian immigration and security computers; the Company, as they called the CIA, was always very good about that—­were in order.

      She was now Jane Meyerhof, a travel agent for Midwest Continental Travel, out of Cincinnati. She called and booked a room at the Cham Palace Hotel, then used the drop to contact Cadillac.

      It was a dual-­contact approach. First she called his work from a pay phone at a tobacco kiosk. She left a message from a Captain Maher Dowayih asking him to call, but gave no return phone number. That was the emergency signal to Cadillac to urgently check the drop within two hours.

      The drop itself was a rug shop in the maze of the Al-­Hamidiya Souk, the immense iron-­roofed market that bordered the legendary Umayyad mosque. The shop was owned by an asset Saul had pinched from the Israeli Mossad, a one-­legged Syrian Kurd, Orhan Barsani, who sat in his shop all day, smoking an apple-­tobacco shisha and playing tawla, a form of backgammon, with his fellow merchants, and anyone else he could sucker into playing, because, as rumor had it, he never lost.

      Now, as she sat in a Damascus café on a sunny afternoon, sipping coffee, nibbling a slice of baklava and watching ­people walking by and the honking cars on Al Nasr Street, one thing was becoming crystal clear: a leak like this, that involves a Top Secret SOG mission that suddenly gets delivered to AQI, doesn’t happen by accident. Either somebody talked out of turn, or something far worse.

      They had a mole.

      She took a taxi to the Al-­Hamidiya Souk, first walking past the rug shop to make sure it was clear to approach, then coming back. Orhan had an antique Persian-­Kurdish yellow rug thrown on a chair; the signal it was clear to approach. She went in and poked around.

      Orhan was playing tawla with a cigarette-­smoking Syrian businessman in sunglasses and a mustache. Orhan threw the dice, made his move, then stood up and said to Carrie in accented English, pointing at the yellow rug:

      “Please, madam,