#KillAydaKhoury

When You're Here, You're Home

A/N: An extra update, as an apology for being dead. Everything is still on fire, and someday I will be properly back.

Ayda Khoury

St. Marina Maronite Catholic Church

Bourj Hammoud, Beirut, Lebanon

I needed somewhere to run. All the churches back home in D.C. are kept locked, so I don't know what made me try the door of this one, a beautiful sprawling church with sky-blue minaret-like spires trying its hardest to fit into Maronite, Orthodox, Latin, Sunni, Twelver, Ismaili, Alawite, and Progressive Beirut. I've kind of always had a soft spot for St. Marina, the namesake of this church. She took a male identity and joined a monastery as a monk. Accused of a rape that impregnated an innkeeper's daughter, she confessed to the crime to protect her identity. I never understood until now, when I am a condemned domestic spy, defector, and collaborator.

The door is heavy but unlocked, and the host, the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ sits exposed in the gold monstrance on the altar, and I am not alone.

There's even free wifi from the public park next door, a real miracle. I tunnel back out by VPN to the Agency network. I need to know if Kolda was collaborating with Mossad to find out if I have any chance of going home. I can't bring my mom and Samir here, to Tita and Grandpa, and Dad's going to win in the States. But if Sacha and I can do this, if we can entrap the Party and Iran and bring Israel and the U.S. back from the brink, maybe I can go home, if I have someone to vouch that the whole thing was an American operation. I might be doxed back in the States, but I'll be a hero to the press, and the people who told me to kill myself will look like idiots. If I can get Kolda to tell everyone I was captured by Hezbollah in the course of an operation, I can even write off Bab al-Hawa as something that happened while I was their prisoner.

There's even proof I was really their prisoner. I said everything they told me to on their television channel, just like my predecessors in the Beirut Hostage Crisis. I'll be glamorous and scandalous like Kolda—I don't want to be famous, but I'll learn to live with it—and I'll go work in the tech sector anywhere but North Ridge Consulting and everything will go back to almost normal. As long as Kolda is on the U.S. side and he isn't so crazy about Farah that he was aiding her Mossad.

My login credentials stolen from Brooke are still working fine. No one changes their password often enough.

Sorry, Jasper. We were always reading your mail. Or at least collecting it. Your internal affairs would kill for what we've got.

Kolda's CIA account isn't actually terribly exciting, full of cryptonyms and codephrases, acronyms and unrecognizable agency jargon, whole conversations unintelligible from the outside. Nothing from North Ridge Consulting. There is an offer letter, from an account at Halliwell, post-dated for six months from now. Kolda's going to have one of those cushy retirements in oil consulting. Write a tell-all and make a killing. I guess it could be worse. He could have planned to be a Fox News anchor. Still, picture everything that's wrong with the CIA. Here it is, including the questionable tradecraft that lets this mail go to a cia.gov domain.

Halliwell has a formula for its email addresses, and it doesn't take too long to find Kolda's. The offer is postdated six months away, and the address already exists.

The Halliwell account is mostly formalities and paperwork. Still nothing from North Ridge Consulting and none of Farah's fluff-filled signoffs or pet names. But there's a lengthy conversation from an address at gov.ir. The government domain of Iran.