Cover Blown? Or Just Being Paranoid?

As many of you know, I spend a lot of time playing poker. You could say that it's my other job, and being a professional poker player has been my cover on many missions in the past. It's the perfect excuse for travelling to many exotic locales, without having to give too much explanation about your personal situation if pressed. Of course, it helps that I'm a world-class player who makes almost as much at the tables as I do in my intelligence work.

So I spend a lot of time at one of the local casinos, both because I enjoy it and because I need to maintain appearances and make contacts in the poker world for my cover to appear more legitimate. Also, as I mentioned in one of the previous posts, I've got an upcoming assignment in the Middle East, and have been practicing my Arabic for it. So today I'm over at the casino playing in a rather wild pot-limit omaha game. I'm up about 2 grand; the game's pretty easy and I'm watching CNN more than I am the players. Then a seat opens up and they call for 'Nassar', which immediately gets my attention because there are not too many middle eastern people in our area.

He's a rather scruffy fellow with an intense stare, and he sits down two seats to my right. Despite looking rather squalid, he buys in for 5 grand, all in crisp, clean hundreds, a much larger than usual buy-in for this particular game. He announces his buy-in, and from his short sentence I think I detect a Syrian accent. But a part of it might be that he closely resembles Bashar al-Assad, and I'm making that connection. He's got that same kind of ratty smile. He's also wearing a rather conspicuous cross on a necklace dangling outside his shirt, and it's definitely incongruous if you know Syrians like I do. So right away this guy has gotten my full attention, though no one watching could possibly have known it. I'm wearing my shades and studying this guy from the corner of my eye.

A few minutes later, Nassar and I are involved in a pot, and he rivers a gutshot straight to take a 500 dollar pot off of me. He's been in almost every pot, and it could just be my heightened alertness, but I feel like he was looking for a reason to talk to me. He apologizes to me after he wins the pot, and I am convinced his accent is Syrian. I tell him it's perfectly all right, that's poker. Then he asks me my name, and the back of my spine is tingling, because he hasn't talked to anyone else at the table since he sat down, and after a slight pause I tell him. My name has a middle-eastern biblical origin, and Nassar asks me if my full name is this middle-eastern variant on my name, which is a really strange question to ask because I'm obviously caucasian and American; it'd be like asking an African pygmie whom you just met if his full name was Theodore. Well, probably not that strange, but you get the gist.

So I tell him that my name is the more common English variant, and he tells me that he's from Turkey, and that he's just visiting for a few weeks. Doesn't say what he's doing over here or anything, but makes some weird jokes about his family owning 'olive oil wells' in Turkey and Syria, which he laughs at but no one else does. It's definitely a very strange situation, as no one else at the table is talking and everyone's attention is focused on Nassar and I. But I have to play along, so I ask him what he's in the States for.

"Some friends of mine are looking at real estate deals," he says, and starts to talk about investing in America, because things are so much more stable over here than where he comes from. "Business is booming over here, isn't it?" he says, and again he uses my name.

At this point, I figure this guy must know something about me, because the whole situation's just too weird to be coincidental, and I'm checking out the rest of the room for anything out of the ordinary. My flight or fight instincts are in high gear.

"Where are you staying in town while you're here, Nassar?" I ask. I figure this is the perfect question to ask, because how he answers it will tell me everything I need to know about him.

"At the Embassy Suites," he says. "Very nice place. Very attractive women are there." And now I am back to square one, because I'm reading him as being very open, and his comment about the women makes me think that he's just a very strange cat, and I'm blowing this situation out of proportion.

So to add to the strangeness, he receives a phone call in the middle of a hand a few minutes later, and despite being invested more than 200 dollars already and looking like he's going to keep playing, he immediately folds and answers the phone. Then, in Arabic, he says into the phone, "Okay. Yes, I'm done." And he puts his chips into racks, says 'Goodbye, my friend' to me, and is gone. I follow him, and he's got a Cadillac, a rental, already waiting for him at the valet station. I get the license plate number as he drives off.

Now I'm thinking I need to go check out the Embassy Suites tomorrow to really set myself at ease about this whole thing. It's not often I get these feelings on my home turf. Anyone think I'm just being a little paranoid?