The Peacock and the Sparrow

Set during the Arab Spring in Bahrain, a small island kingdom off the coast of Saudi Arabia ruled by a Sunni monarchy over a majority Shiite population, the story follows Shane Collins, a 52-year-old, divorced CIA case officer with an alcohol addiction on what he expects to be his final, uneventful tour.

Collins is stationed at the U.S. naval base in Manama, tasked with uncovering Iranian involvement in the Shiite uprising against King Jassim's government. His informant is Rashid (code name SCROOP), a planning officer within Fourteen February, the main Shiite opposition group, who provides routine intelligence about protests and demands to free Junaid, a dissident poet imprisoned since the uprising began. Collins's station chief, Whitney Alden Mitchell, whose ambition contrasts with Collins's cynicism, is the youngest station chief in CIA history at 28. Jimmy Bakowski, a former Marine who handles counterintelligence, rounds out the station. The Admiral, commander of the Fifth Fleet, pressures Collins to find evidence of Iranian meddling. Collins carries on a hollow affair with Poppy Johnson, the neglected wife of the Admiral's senior political advisor.

Everything shifts when bombings hit Adliya, an upscale expat neighborhood, killing three foreign laborers. At the scene, Collins meets Walid Al Zain, a Ministry of Interior officer who states there were five bombs, though the base recorded only four. Collins notices a purple residue at the blast site. Whitney places Rashid on probation for failing to warn them. Rashid offers a counter-narrative: The king's own men planted the bombs to frame the Opposition and justify a crackdown. Within days, an Opposition leader is arrested and Junaid receives 250 floggings, exactly as Rashid predicted. Collins withholds Rashid's accusation from Whitney. A military contact identifies the purple residue as potassium permanganate, a chemical fire-starter. When Collins visits Walid at the Ministry, the evidence is suspiciously tidy: a blurry surveillance video of a suspect and a conveniently planted cache of ammonium nitrate.

At an art exhibition, Collins meets Almaisa, a mosaic artist roughly 20 years his junior with a long scar from chin to eye and translucent green eyes. Her mosaic depicts the Tree of Life, a solitary 400-year-old tree growing without water in Bahrain's southern desert. He buys the piece and begins pursuing her. On their first date at the actual tree, Almaisa reveals she was orphaned at 12 when Iraqi intelligence officers took her parents as political prisoners. Raised by her uncle in Bahrain's slums, she grew up watching oil wealth concentrate among the royal family, an account that mirrors Rashid's stories of monarchical oppression.

Collins applies the techniques of espionage to romance, gradually drawing Almaisa into his world. She takes him to Bedayat Jadidah (New Beginnings), an orphanage where she teaches art to children orphaned by the revolution. Among them is Sanaa, a seven-year-old who lost an arm to shrapnel, the girl from a photograph in Almaisa's studio. Meanwhile, Rashid provides advance warning of a car bomb, which local teams interdict. Collins receives his first-ever performance award.

At the Marine Corps Ball, Whitney dances with Almaisa, and Collins watches with jealous fury. That night, Collins takes Almaisa home and forces himself on her in a rough, aggressive encounter. Weeks of silence follow before she returns, attributing his behavior to alcohol and asking him to stop drinking. Collins tapers his consumption but hides bottles in the unused maid's quarters.

Tensions escalate. Rashid gives Collins the name of an Opposition mole inside Bahraini intelligence, but Collins burns the paper rather than let Whitney share it with the Bahraini service. Whitney arranges a meeting with Qasim, a supposed double agent within Fourteen February, who claims Iran is funding the rebellion and provides a detailed weapons list. Collins is skeptical, but Whitney sends urgent cables to Headquarters. When Headquarters denies Collins permission to continue seeing Almaisa, citing her uncle's suspected dissident ties, Collins punches Whitney and rents a secret safe house to continue the relationship.

Collins manipulates Rashid into revealing the Opposition's true arsenal: an underground factory beneath a carpentry shop containing homemade Molotov cocktails, improvised explosives, and crude pressure plates. Nothing from Iran. On the drive back, Rashid shoots a policeman at a checkpoint; Collins fires a second shot. They dump the body in the Gulf. The dead officer is a high-ranking military aide, and Junaid is blamed for ordering his assassination and sentenced to death.

Authorities raid the factory, announcing an arsenal matching Qasim's list. The U.S. lifts human rights conditions on arms sales. Rashid reveals that Qasim is actually a triple agent working for the Opposition, and the weapons list was fabricated by Bahraini and Saudi intelligence. He also exposes the Admiral's corruption: bribes from the monarchy in exchange for weapons deliveries, which Collins confirms independently.

The decisive betrayal comes when Collins returns to the safe house and hears Almaisa inside with another man. He watches from hiding as Whitney emerges after midnight. Subsequent surveillance confirms Whitney visiting Almaisa's flat. Collins begins aiding the Opposition directly. He visits Junaid in prison under cover of a recruitment meeting and passes the name of a bribed guard along with a breakout signal provided by Rashid.

Whitney sends Collins to Phnom Penh to meet Sven, a Swedish gunrunner, for encoded intelligence about an Iranian weapons shipment. Collins simultaneously executes a parallel mission for the Opposition: collecting a sealed packet from a Russian contact and purchasing a blank Swiss passport. He smuggles everything back in a diplomatic pouch, narrowly surviving a secondary screening at Brussels airport.

In Bahrain, Collins and Whitney decode Sven's intelligence, revealing a shipment date. Collins opens the Russian's packet, five small dropper bottles of liquid, and tells himself they seem benign. He delivers the bottles to Oasis Persian Carpets, a rug shop serving as an Opposition cutout, or covert intermediary. Whitney informs Collins that Headquarters has ordered his early retirement. In a final meeting at the Tree of Life, Rashid reveals that Sven's intelligence was deliberately false, fed to the gunrunner by Iran, and warns Collins to leave Bahrain immediately.

On June 25, 2013, the revolution erupts. Junaid leads a prison break from Dry Dock, aided by the guard and signal Collins provided. King Jassim is poisoned at breakfast, along with most of the royal family. Saraya Al-Mukhtar, the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, seizes control, and Tehran declares Manama the capital of Greater Iran. Collins searches the slums for Almaisa. At her flat he finds surveillance photographs of himself and Whitney, and a vintage KGB manual on recruiting Americans with passages about exploiting drinking and infidelity highlighted.

At the embassy, Collins spots a lone woman in a black abaya among the evacuees. After he clears the gates, a massive explosion kills 312 people. Television footage shows Whitney captured and executed on Almaisa's street, where assassins waited. Collins realizes the woman was Almaisa: a suicide bomber and Opposition operative who manipulated both men from the beginning.

Collins escapes on the last commercial flight using his Swiss passport. Six months later, he lives in Zurich under the alias Julian Schmid, having arranged a death certificate to erase Shane Collins. Rashid is now a senior official in Bahrain's atomic energy organization. The Admiral has been court-martialed and has hanged himself. Whitney is memorialized on the CIA's memorial wall at its headquarters in Langley. Collins pieces together that the dropper bottles contained Gelsemium elegans, or heartbreak grass, the poison used to kill the king. He recognizes that Almaisa used a humanitarian charity called Global Society to smuggle weapons through the orphanage, and that the Adliya bombings were likely Rashid's work all along, recalling the blurry figure in Walid's surveillance video with the same slight frame as Rashid. Every reassurance Rashid offered was constructed to lead Collins exactly where the Opposition needed him.