Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel Read online

  “mary L thinks she’s baggy, not cutter.” Hoping he would catch that she meant Marielle thought Siddiqi was an Iraqi from Baghdad, “baggy,” and not from Qatar, which Saul pronounced “Cutter.” That plus the fact Nightingale wanted Rana to get intel on Iraq was pointing everything that had happened in Beirut and New York like a compass needle right at Abu Nazir.

  “shes looking at a boo n friends,” Saul typed back, showing he got it. They were looking at “a boo n,” Abu Nazir.

  “r u coming to c me?” she responded.

  “c u soon. what about our lil birdie?” So Saul was on his way to Beirut. Thank God. The little birdie was Nightingale.

  “big date 2nite. ok use fls?”

  There was a pause so long, she wasn’t sure Saul was still there. And she had to remember the time difference, she thought, checking her watch. It was 2:47 P.M. in Beirut, before 8:00 A.M. in Langley.

  “only if u have 2. Be crful,” he sent. He obviously didn’t like it. Well, she wasn’t crazy about it herself. All this dancing around, she thought, because Fielding was having an affair with a double agent he wasn’t even screwing.

  “bye,” she replied, and logged off.

  Which had led her and Virgil and Ziad here to the Hippodrome and the meet she’d had Rana set with Nightingale in the grandstand of the race track. Races were only run once a week, on Sundays, so today, Thursday, and at this hour, the grandstand would be empty. Hopefully, it would make Nightingale confident about coming and would give her FLs a clear field of fire if things went south.

  “Where will they be coming from?” she asked in Arabic.

  “There.” Ziad pointed. “From Avenue Abdallah El Yafi into the parking area. I can put two men in the trees near the French embassy compound to take care of whoever is with the car.”

  Carrie turned to the two men he indicated. The other two were already in position in the stables, from which they could get to the grandstand within thirty seconds.

  “You understand, we need this man, Taha al-Douni, alive? Even if they start shooting. Dead he’s of no use to us.”

  “He’s a hatha neek Hezbollah piece of khara,” one of them cursed.

  “This is no good.” She turned to Virgil. These crazy guys would just start shooting. “We need to abort.”

  “Too late,” he said, pointing. “There’s Rana’s BMW.” She saw the blue sedan stopped at the gate. The Hippodrome was closed, but Rana had bribed the gatekeeper in advance so they could meet here.

  Carrie raised her binoculars and saw it was Rana, alone, in the BMW. She watched it drive into the parking area, then turned to the two FL men.

  “If shooting starts, take out the SUVs so they can’t leave. Take out the guards for the SUVs. But don’t kill anyone else, understood?” she said.

  “Okay, la mashkilah.” He shrugged. No problem.

  She didn’t believe him, watching as the two men moved through the trees toward the parking area.

  “Let’s go,” Virgil said, his eyes scanning the grandstand. He started to jog toward it, his M4 held ready. Carrie and Ziad followed, every cell in her body screaming that this was all wrong.

  She had told Rana she would be running her until further notice. There would be money and she was to say nothing to either Davis Fielding or al-Douni or anyone else, and she might not be seeing Fielding much anymore.

  Her first instruction to Rana had been to set up the meet with Nightingale/al-Douni by telling him she had urgent intel on American actions against al-Qaeda in Iraq. As expected, al-Douni had agreed immediately. As Carrie listened in on Rana’s call, he was the one who set the RDV at the Hippodrome.

  “What are you really after?” Rana had asked her.

  “For you to feed al-Douni what I want him to know, not what he wants to know,” Carrie said. “And find out where it goes after he gets it.”

  “You mean, who is he really working for? You don’t believe it’s the Syrians?” Rana said.

  “He’s working more than one side.”

  “Aren’t we all? This is Beirut,” Rana said.

  The way she said it, that fatalism, reminded Carrie of Marielle as she ran into the grandstand and hid, lying flat behind the seats, in the fourth row. The other two FLs were waiting, hidden in the jockeys’ restroom near the passageway from the stables to the track. Were they all like that? Doomed? Was that Beirut?

  Through the gap between the seats, she saw Rana walk toward the paddock to wait by the railing. The sun was setting over the racetrack, the sky pink and gold, really lovely, she thought, the shadows lengthening, making it harder to see. In a little while, it would be dark.

  A few minutes later, her cell phone buzzed. A signal from the FLs near the parking area. Nightingale had arrived.

  Carrie waited, every nerve ending screaming as if an electrical current was surging through them. Any second now, Nightingale would be coming up to Rana. It was critical that she hear what he said before they moved. Whatever happened, they shouldn’t move too soon. They had wired Rana and set it to a receiver connected with Carrie’s earbud.

  She spotted Nightingale through the gap in the seats. He was accompanied by three of his Hezbollah guards. The son of a bitch really never went anywhere unprotected. She’d had no choice but to bring the extra firepower.

  “Salaam. We just met. This better be good,” she heard him say to Rana.

  “Judge for yourself. I was with the American yesterday when I came back from Baalbek,” she said.

  “In his bed?”

  “Of course. When he was asleep, I got to his computer. Here are the files,” she said, handing him a flash drive that Carrie had given her.

  “Is that all?”

  She shook her head. “There’s more. It’s about the Americans doing something in Iraq.”

  “Tell me,” he demanded.

  “Mohammed Siddiqi. They’ve learned about him. They know he’s Iraqi, not Qatari,” Rana said.

  Carrie strained to hear; every syllable was critical.

  “Khara,” Nightingale cursed. “What else?”

  “They know about you too. They think—” she started to say, but never finished because at that instant, the two FLs from the passageway emerged, one of them firing at Nightingale’s men. One of the Hezbollah guards toppled face-forward; the second swiveled and returned fire.

  Oh God, no, Carrie thought. Before she could say or do anything, Nightingale had pulled a pistol from his jacket. Don’t! Not Rana! her mind screamed. Don’t!

  “You whore!” he shouted, firing the gun point-blank into Rana’s face.

  Suddenly, there was an explosion from the parking area. The grenade launcher, Carrie thought, cringing as she half-stood and shouted in Arabic: “Don’t kill him!”

  Near her, Virgil and Ziad rose up, firing their M4s into the darkness, streaked with flashes of gunfire.

  CHAPTER 24

  Basta Tahta, Beirut, Lebanon

  She and Virgil split up by the French embassy next to the racetrack to ensure one of them would make it back. Taking buses and Services back and forth across the northern part of the city to make sure she was clean, she headed for Iroquois, the safe-house apartment on Avenue Independence in the Basta Tahta quarter. When she knocked on the apartment door using the code, three knocks, then two, Davis Fielding opened it, a Beretta pistol pointed at her.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Fielding said.

  “Have you got any tequila? I need a drink,” she said.

  “Just vodka. Belvedere,” he said, gesturing at a cupboard.

  She went over and poured herself a glass of vodka and took a gulp, then flopped into an armchair. It didn’t feel like there was anyone else in the apartment, which surprised her. Fielding rarely went anywhere without a couple of CIA operations personnel with him. And he never went to the safe house except for interrogations. So why was he here? she wondered.

  Fielding sat on a sofa, framed by a curtain that completely covered the window behind him. He was still holding
the gun, she noticed.

  “Planning on shooting me, Davis?” she asked.

  “Might not be the worst idea in the world. How many did you kill this time, Mathison?” he said, making a face.

  “That’s right, Davis,” she said, taking another drink, feeling it burn going down and thinking, Thank God for the alcohol, at this moment not caring how it reacted with her meds. “People die. Tonight it was your girlfriend, Rana. Nightingale shot her in the face. She’s not pretty anymore. Cheers,” she said, and took another sip.

  The blood drained from his face. She could see how shocked he was. His hand clenched the pistol so tightly his knuckles turned white. She wondered if he really was going to shoot her.

  “This time you’re finished. Saul’s little pinup girl,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Before I’m done with you, you’ll be in a federal prison.” He stood up and began pacing as he talked. “I’ve been onto you all along. Did you really think you could come to my station, my city, and me not know about it? You stupid amateur. I was matching wits in Moscow with the real professionals, the KGB, while you were still crapping in your diapers.”

  “Missed a few beats since then though, haven’t you?” she said. “Like how your prize pigeon, Dima Hamdan, came to New York to kill the Vice-President of the United States and blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, and not a peep out of Beirut Station. Or that she was Sunni, not Christian. Or that your mistress was a double agent for Nightingale, who was himself doubling for both Hezbollah and al-Qaeda in Iraq, and nothing, not one word, from the great Davis Fielding, King of Beirut, just a great big pile of nothing!”

  He stopped pacing and stared at her, his mouth working like he was trying to swallow but couldn’t.

  “We looked for Dima. She disappeared,” he said.

  “Is that so?” she said. “She filed a DS-160 using the cover name Jihan Miradi, right through your own lousy embassy, and you didn’t catch it. Not to mention that your mistress was passing on everything you touched via Nightingale to Abu Nazir in Iraq. So the only question is, are you totally incompetent or a traitor, you son of a bitch?”

  He looked at the pistol in his hand like it was some kind of alien object he had never seen before. His finger, she noticed, was on the trigger.

  “Rana wasn’t my girlfriend,” he said finally. “I barely knew her.”

  “Bullshit!” she snapped. “You telephoned her multiple times a week for months. Then you had the messages deleted from Company files and the NSA database. It was done the same day you ordered me out of Beirut—and by the way, I’d really like to know how you managed that little trick.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Sure you do, Davis. You didn’t think anybody would ever find out, did you? Well guess what, asshole? I know. And I’m not the only one.”

  He looked at her strangely, with a sick little smile. She wondered if he was mentally stable. Funny, coming from me, she thought.

  “You think you know something, Mathison, but you don’t. There are things going on; you don’t have a clue,” he said, straightening. “Tell me about your latest screwup. How did Rana die?”

  “We were going to snatch Nightingale. He was both a double and a bridge agent between Hezbollah and, we think, al-Qaeda in Iraq. He’s linked with Abu Ubaida and possibly Abu Nazir. We especially wanted to know about Dima’s boyfriend, Mohammed Siddiqi, who, by the way, you also never mentioned to anyone back at Langley and who may have been the link. Only the Forces Libanaises jumped the gun. Nightingale shot her.”

  He looked bleakly at the window curtain, as if he could see through it. It made the room feel closed, like a prison cell.

  “Poor Rana,” he said, letting the gun hang by his side. He went back to the sofa and sat down. “She was such a beautiful woman. Smart. When you were with her, people noticed you.”

  “She was your mistress?”

  “She was a contact. We may have had sex a few times, but . . .” He hesitated.

  “What’s the matter, Davis? She wouldn’t let you have any? Or was it you who couldn’t get it up?”

  He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time.

  “You really are a bitch, aren’t you?”

  “But not a traitor,” she said, looking around. “There’s nobody here. Just between us girls, you didn’t have a clue what she was? Who she was working for?”

  He almost imperceptibly shook his head. “What about Nightingale?” he asked.

  “He’s dead too. Damned FLs. Two of his Hezbollah guards got away. We had one wounded FL.”

  “So you got nothing?”

  “Not exactly,” she said, taking a cell phone out of her pocket. “This is Nightingale’s.”

  He held out his free hand. “Let me see it,” he said.

  She shook her head no, her blond hair swaying. “I’m curious, Davis. How did you know about tonight’s meet? Who told you? It wasn’t me and it wasn’t Virgil. Was it Ziad? One of the FL guys? Did they jump the gun because of you?”

  He pointed the pistol at her.

  “You seem to be confused, Mathison. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m the station chief, not you. If I can give the cell phone to Langley, maybe the mess you’ve made won’t be a total fiasco. Give it here.” He held out his free hand.

  She put the cell phone back into her pocket. “What are you going to do, Davis? Shoot me?” she said.

  “You really don’t have a clue, do you?” He smiled. “This is a midterm election year. No one is going to screw with the Agency. You’re done here. We’re doing extraordinary renditions of Islamist extremists. You’re being reassigned. You can interrogate bad guys in northeastern Poland, middle of piss-all nowhere. I suggest you dress warm, Mathison. I hear it’s cold there this time of year.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. And you’ll have to take this from me,” she said, tapping the pocket where she’d put the cell phone.

  “I have people coming. When they get here, they’ll take you to the airport,” he said, leaning back. “Before that’s done, you’ll of course give me the cell phone.”

  “I won’t go.”

  “In that case, you’re done,” he said, looking as smug as a fraternity president watching a pledge make a fool of himself. “Your career’s over. And I will press charges, Carrie. I guarantee we’ll get something to stick. Truth is, it’s impossible to be in this business and not break some law or congressional rule or other.”

  They sat not speaking, Carrie thinking that shits like him always got away with it, but she’d nail him somehow if it was the last thing she did. The apartment was silent, not even the sounds of Beirut evening traffic breaking through. She wondered if her career really was over. It would end when Fielding’s people came. Just like her father, she thought.

  There was a knock at the door.

  CHAPTER 25

  Ouzai, Beirut, Lebanon

  Fielding answered the door, gun in hand. It was Saul Berenson, pulling a wheeled suitcase, obviously having come straight from the airport. Virgil was with him, carrying his assault rifle in a rigid plastic gun case.

  “Hello, Davis. Expecting an invasion?” Saul asked, coming in, eyes on the gun. Virgil followed.

  “Mathison blew Achilles, our last safe house. I wouldn’t put it past her to blow this one,” Fielding said, putting the gun into his pocket.

  Saul took off his jacket and sat opposite Carrie. He looked at Fielding, who, after a moment, put the gun away.

  “I understand Nightingale’s dead,” he said to Carrie.

  “Rana too,” she muttered, looking away. “Fielding says she was just a contact.”

  Saul rubbed his hands as if it were cold. “Pity we couldn’t interrogate him. Might’ve nailed it down a thousand percent.”

  “What did you expect?” Fielding said. “I told you she’s too new to run an op like this. You should have given it to me.”

  Saul looked at Fielding. “What would you have done differently, Davis? For the re
cord,” he said quietly.

  “I would’ve used our people, not Forces Libanaises. And I would’ve picked the spot,” Fielding said.

  “There wasn’t time—and he was already susp—” Carrie started to say, but Saul held his hand up to stop her.

  “She had my authorization,” he said.

  “Look, Saul, I know she’s your protégé, but this is my station. Do you want me to run it or don’t you?” Fielding said.

  “Wait,” Carrie said, taking the cell phone out and handing it to Saul. “It wasn’t a total loss. This is Nightingale’s.”

  Saul tossed it to Virgil.

  “I want every damn nitpicky little thing that’s ever been on that phone,” he told Virgil, who nodded; then he turned to Fielding. “I need to talk to Carrie alone, Davis. But you’ll be glad to know she’s leaving Beirut.”

  “But, Saul—” she said, then stopped at a look from him.

  Saul turned to Fielding, who was smiling broadly.

  “You’re doing the right th—” Fielding started to say, but Saul interrupted.

  “You’re leaving too, Davis. I need to talk to you too. I’ll meet you at your office, the one on Rue Maarad, in”—he glanced at his watch—“about an hour.”

  “What are you talking about? Leaving?” Fielding said, standing up.

  “Langley. We need you back there.” Saul smiled. “It’s all fine. I’ll explain everything. Now I need to straighten Carrie out first, okay?” He looked at Carrie. “What are you drinking?”

  “Vodka. Belvedere.”

  “May I?” he said, reaching for her glass. “It’s been a hell of a long flight.”

  Fielding looked at Carrie grimly and got his jacket. He watched Saul finish the vodka in the glass.

  “What about the station? Who’s going to be in charge?” Fielding asked.

  “We’re bringing in Saunders from Ankara. Don’t worry. It’s just temporary,” Saul said reassuringly, making a gesture like it was no big deal.