“And I accept that,” Dom said. “I just don’t want it for you.”
“What about what I want?” she asked.
Dom said, “The training op on Friday went bad because I wasn’t looking at you as a hostage. I was looking at you as my girlfriend. I felt weird about holding a gun on you and checking you for traps in front of the guys, I got distracted, and it kept me from checking the dead space on my left. How do I know that working a real-world op with you won’t have me acting the same way, in ways that will compromise lives?”
Adara simply said, “You make decisions about your life, and you get to do the same to my life? What if I told you to leave The Campus? Would you do it?”
“No.”
“Exactly. Who put you in charge of me?”
“It’s not that. It’s just—”
“It is that. I realize you care. I realize your heart is in the right place. You don’t want to see me get hurt. But if you care about me, you will let me pursue something that’s important to me.”
Angrily, Dom said, “You don’t need me to recommend you to Clark. You can just tell him yourself.”
“I want your blessing.”
“Why?”
“Because I care about you. And I care about what you think.”
Dom looked down at the street below. “Don’t make me do this.”
“I’m not making you. I’m asking you.”
He stood now.
“Where are you going?” Dom could hear anger welling in her voice.
“To the refrigerator. We’re out of wine.”
“Oh… well. That’s okay.”
The discussion moved to the sofa, and it also moved away from an argument, and into a conversation. Adara and Dom both began to put themselves in the other’s place and understand the reasons behind the other’s entrenched viewpoint.
After a half-hour of back-and-forth Adara said, “I understand the position I’m putting you in, I’m just asking you to help me. Look, even if you say no, I’ll go to Gerry and talk to him. If you will feel better about yourself, I’ll do that. But I just want to know you believe in me, and that you want me there with you, when you need someone you trust.”
He said, “I do believe in you. I think you would be great in the job.”
“Do you know someone who would be better?”
There and then, he knew she’d won. Dom realized he didn’t feel any different from the way he did when they began discussing this more than a half-hour ago, but he had no other arguments to employ. He could be obstinate, or he could be reasonable, even if reason went against his wishes. He said, “No. I don’t know anyone more qualified. I’ll put your name in the hat. It’s up to Gerry and John.”
“Of course.” She kissed him. “I know that wasn’t easy for you. None of this will be.”
He noticed Adara looking at him expectantly. Like there was something more. “What?” he asked.
“Are we finished talking about this?”
“I really hope so. Why?”
She smiled. “Please tell me you made your tiramisu.”
Despite his dark mood, Dom smiled as well. “I did.”
Adara pumped her fists in the air. “Hell, yes!”
Dom smiled. “Do you come over here because of me, or because of my tiramisu?”
“Mostly you, but you’re not the only sweet, good-looking guy in D.C. There are one or two others. You are, however, the only sweet, good-looking guy in D.C. who makes unbelievable scratch tiramisu.”
Dom raised his eyebrows. “You’ve tried all the others, have you?”
Adara laughed and climbed over onto his lap to kiss him.
7
The narrow, hilly street was full of women and children, all of whom had to move into alleyways and open doorways to let the convoy of big SUVs through. When the vehicles parked by the building at the top of the hill, dozens of women and girls converged around them and stared at the spectacle. Women on rooftops looked on, eyes wide, softly chattering to one another in amazement.
Six black SUVs were parked here on this narrow street in suburban Sulaymaniyah, in eastern Iraqi Kurdistan. Some dozen or more Westerners poured out of the vehicles, big men with guns, tactical wear, and expensive-looking sunglasses and watches, followed by another dozen Westerners in business attire. There were females in the group, all wearing chadors, even though these were clearly American women.
But that wasn’t the part that had all the Yazidi women and girls here utterly transfixed.
No, they were amazed that the person who seemed to be the one in charge of this entire entourage was herself a woman.
Mary Pat Foley climbed out of a Land Rover and a group of attendants and protectors coalesced around her. She was the director of national intelligence, head of the sixteen-member U.S. intelligence community, and she warranted the high security and the large number of assistants.
There was no mistaking that the American woman was, indeed, in charge.
Following her out of the vehicle was her chief of staff, an active-duty Air Force colonel, who straightened his blue service dress uniform upon standing. A young assistant stepped up to her from another vehicle, clipboard in hand, and Mary Pat’s interpreter for the day, a forty-five-year-old Kurdish woman who worked for the United Nations, motioned toward a whitewashed stone building close by.
This part of Sulaymaniyah had taken the name “Little Sinjar” because it served as an encampment for many of the Yazidi internally displaced persons who had fled their community on and around Mount Sinjar in the west. The Islamic State had overtaken Sinjar three years earlier, and since then the IDP camps in various parts of Iraq housed virtually all of the world’s Yazidi population.
Yazidis were an ethnically Kurdish people, but their different belief system had separated them from the Kurdish population. Still, they spoke Kurmanji, the language of the Kurds here in Iraq, so Kurdistan was the logical location for the IDP camps.
The front door to the whitewashed building stood open, and Kurdish and Yazidi officials stood around it, waiting for Foley and her entourage. Quick introductions were made. Mary Pat had met some of these men this morning at the U.S. consulate in Erbil before helicoptering east here to Sulaymaniyah, so the meet and greet took little time.
She then stepped inside, into the cooler, dark room. Here a young woman stood alone, wearing a chador and clean, simple robes. She looked nervous, completely bemused by all the attention that had been directed toward her since first thing this morning when she was awoken from her sleeping rug on the floor by a relief worker, asked her name, and shown a handwritten document she had signed a month earlier when she came to the camp. She swore everything on the page was true, and then she was taken from the room full of girls, moved to this building, and told some people from America were on their way in a helicopter to speak with her.
Mary Pat and most every one of the intelligence organizations under the umbrella of the DNI had been hunting for one man above all others in their never-ending quest to keep America safe from Islamic radical terrorism, and the hunt had led her and her people here to Kurdistan. The Kurds were good friends to America and they were helpful in the manhunt, but to say they had a full plate at the moment would have been a dramatic understatement. The Kurds were at war, fighting for their lives against the Islamic State, so it took a personal visit by the U.S. director of national intelligence this week to get their political leadership’s full attention.