Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel Page 28

  “Go back. What’s that coverall say?”

  Saunders rewound and froze the image, which, given the darkness and distance, was too fuzzy to get a clear glimpse of either the man’s face or the company name.

  “Can’t you digitally enhance the image?”

  “We did,” he said, opening another window and zeroing in on the patch. Although still indistinct, the patch read “Sadeco Conciergerie” in French and Arabic.

  “Looks like a janitorial service. I’m sure you checked the company,” she said.

  “Of course. It’s our janitorial service all right, but he’s not our regular janitor and according to Sadeco, no such person has ever worked there. We black-bagged their offices one night. Went through all their personnel files. They were telling the truth. Whoever he was, he wasn’t one of theirs.”

  “What do your assets tell you?”

  “Nothing. Not a damned thing.”

  “And the Lebanese ISF? Or the police?”

  “As soon as they realized who we were, they backed off and referred us to the Interior Minister, who happens to be from Hezbollah. We’re dead in the water. Do you have any ideas?”

  “Give me prints of the two images: the one of Fielding and the mystery janitor. Oh, and a head shot of Fielding, something easily identifiable.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “If this guy in the picture, whoever the hell he is, has got something to do with Rana or Hezbollah or Abu Nazir, I’ll find him,” she said, getting up, passing him her cell phone so he could add his cell number as a contact.

  That night, having a margarita at the bar in the Phoenicia Hotel, Carrie took out the print of Fielding’s body and tried to spot what was wrong with it. The image had been shot from above, from the hidden ceiling camera, and behind. A body and a gun. What was wrong with the image? For one thing, it wasn’t the way she was used to looking at Davis. How was she used to looking at him? She reoriented the image in her mind as it would be if she were facing him. And then she saw it.

  Idiot, she told herself. It was plain as the nose on your face. How was it that no one had caught it before? Of course, she told herself. After Fielding, they’d had to clean house at Beirut Station. No one who really knew Fielding had seen this image. She took her cell phone out of her handbag and called Saunders.

  “Snapdragon,” he answered. His code name.

  “Outlaw,” she said, still using the name because of Crimson. “Fielding was left-handed,” she said, and hung up.

  He would see it the instant he went back and looked at Fielding’s body with the pistol in his right hand, she thought. Proof positive, if they needed any more, that Fielding had been murdered. But by whom—and why?

  The answer, she hoped, was walking right toward her. Marielle Hilal, still redheaded, still pretty in tight Escada jeans and a low-cut top, with enough male eyes on her to give any girl’s ego an elevator ride to the penthouse suite.

  “What are you drinking?” Carrie asked.

  “Whatever you are,” Marielle said, sitting down at her table.

  A waiter came over.

  “Two Patrón margaritas,” Carrie told him, and motioned Marielle closer. “The man you knew as Mohammed Siddiqi is dead. Thought you ought to know.”

  “I heard Rana was killed too,” Marielle whispered back.

  Carrie nodded. “Also a Syrian named Taha al-Douni, who was running both Rana and Dima. Did you ever meet him?”

  “No, alhamdulillah”—thank God—Marielle said, checking her lipstick and the room to see if anyone was watching them in her compact makeup mirror. As she started to put the mirror back in her purse, Carrie slipped the photograph of the unknown janitor into Marielle’s purse as well. “Is anyone still after me?”

  “I’m not sure. I need you to do something for me,” Carrie said.

  “Why should I? I’m already taking a chance meeting you,” Marielle said, looking around nervously. There were at least half a dozen men checking them out. No way to know if it was normal male interest or something else, Carrie thought. Except for one. Ray Saunders, putting away his cell phone and nursing a Scotch at the bar.

  “Because I’m trying to help you. And because, well . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence, a reminder that she knew where Marielle lived.

  “I don’t like this,” Marielle said. “First Dima, then Rana. Their boyfriends. Who’s next? Me?”

  “Take a vacation till things blow over. Someplace nice. Someplace safe. Where would you like to go?”

  Marielle raised her eyebrows cynically. “I’ve had men try to buy me. This is the first time by a woman.”

  Carrie put her hand on Marielle’s arm. “Listen, if I can solve this, you’ll be safe. In the meantime, what’s wrong with getting away? Where would you go?” she asked.

  “Paris,” Marielle said. “I’ve always wanted to go.”

  “I’ll give you five thousand dollars American,” Carrie said. Money she’d gotten from Saunders for this meet. “You can be sipping wine on the Champs-Élysées tomorrow.”

  “Just like that? Five thousand American? You must like me better than I thought.”

  “Too many have died over this,” she said, a pang going through her at the thought of Dempsey. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “Makes two of us. So that’s it? We’re done?” Marielle said, reaching for her purse.

  “There is one thing.”

  “Now it comes. Do you know, habibi, I almost believed you. Almost,” she said, wrinkling her nose as if something smelled bad.

  “I just need one thing. But it has to be the truth.”

  “And the five thousand American?”

  “Put your hand under the table.”

  Carrie reached into her handbag under the level of the table, took out the wad of hundred-dollar bills and passed it to the other woman.

  “I need to count it,” Marielle said. Carrie nodded. Marielle added, “How will you know if I’m lying?”

  “Because I’ll know,” Carrie said, and leaned closer. “Go into the ladies’ room; make sure no one sees you. Count the money, then take a good look at the photograph I put in your purse. I need you to confirm for me who that man is.”

  “What makes you think I know this man?”

  “Because you do,” Carrie said with a lot more conviction than she felt. She didn’t have much time in Beirut, and Marielle was the best shot she had. All or nothing, she thought, taking a deep breath. All or nothing.

  “I just tell you and then I leave? That’s it?” Marielle asked.

  “And bon voyage.” Carrie nodded.

  Marielle got up and said something to the waiter, who pointed the way to the salle des dames. Carrie sat there at the edge of her chair, thinking that this was such a long shot. But if she was right, Marielle had to know the unknown janitor.

  That night, after the shootout at the Hippodrome and after she and Fielding and Saul had had it out at the safe house, when Fielding had gone back to his Rue Maarad office, he’d had his Beretta with him. Say what you would about Davis Fielding—and God knew she could say plenty—he knew his basic tradecraft. Under ordinary circumstances, he never would have let a stranger into the Rue Maarad office at night.

  But that night, with everything that was going on and with him under suspicion from Langley, sitting there on edge, waiting for Saul and the ax to drop, never in a million years would he have let someone in unless he knew them very well, much less let them get the drop on him and kill him with his own gun. Which meant Davis not only knew his killer, he knew him well. And if he knew him, then Rana knew him—and that meant it was possible, even likely, that Dima and Marielle did too.

  If not—and with the Beirut police out of it—they truly were at a dead end, she thought, gulping down the rest of her drink. Where the hell was Marielle? What was taking her so long? How long did it take to look at a photograph? She wouldn’t try to make a run for it, would she? No, she knew Carrie knew where she lived in Bourj
Hammoud with her aunt or whomever the older woman was. Saunders, glancing over, caught her eye. She tried to look more confident than she felt. All or nothing. All at once, she breathed a sigh of relief when Marielle came walking back to the table.

  She knows, Carrie thought excitedly. From her eyes, she could tell Marielle had recognized the unknown janitor in the photograph.

  “It’s very strange,” Marielle said, handing her the photo and sitting back down. “Why is he dressed that way? Like a bawaab?” The Arabic word for “janitor.”

  “Who is he?” Carrie asked, holding her breath. Come on, she thought. Come on.

  “It’s Bilal. Bilal Mohamad. I’m surprised you didn’t know,” she said, looking curiously at Carrie.

  “Why should I?”

  “Everyone knows Bilal,” she said, tweaking her nose with her fingers in a sign for cocaine. “He’s a pédé. A friend of Rana’s. Also her American papa gâteau certainly knew him. Dima too. You’re not just testing me? You really don’t know him?”

  Carrie’s mind was bouncing all over the place like a pinball. She had a name. Bilal Mohamad. A gay man who knew Rana—and according to Marielle, he also knew Rana’s American sugar daddy, her papa gâteau, Davis Fielding. It struck her like a bolt of lightning. Suddenly everything made sense.

  What was it Rana had said about her sexual relationship with Davis when she’d interrogated her after Baalbek? “At first we did, but now I’m mostly just for show.” It had puzzled her at the time, but now it fit perfectly. Was this what Davis Fielding had been hiding? That he was gay? But why hide? Who gave a shit? Why would he need a beautiful mistress like Rana as a cover so people would think he wasn’t gay? And what about this Bilal Mohamad? Why did he kill him? Was Bilal Davis’s lover? Because if he was, it would explain why Davis had let him into the office that night.

  Davis knew he was leaving Beirut. Probably forever. That was the other dangling thread that had been nagging at her, threatening her theory about the murder. How was it that the very night he faced ruin and the end of his career, his last night in Beirut, was the night that coincidentally someone just happened to drop by to murder him? Before Saul, who was on his way, showed up? Coincidences like that don’t happen. Not in real life, they don’t.

  So Bilal hadn’t just shown up. Davis had called him. Probably told him it was urgent, that he was leaving. If they were lovers, Davis had wanted to say good-bye.

  Bilal must have dropped what he was doing and hurried right over. It would have been his last chance to silence Fielding before he spilled everything to the Company, before he, Bilal, was in the CIA’s crosshairs. Nothing coincidental about it. She needed to get Ray Saunders and Saul to check Fielding’s landline and cell phone records.

  The pieces finally fit. Once they started digging, she was confident they would find Bilal connected to both Nightingale and Abu Nazir.

  “I’ve been away. What’s he do, this Bilal Mohamad?” she asked.

  “This and that.” Marielle shrugged. “It’s Beirut,” she said, making a sign for someone sticking cocaine up their nose.

  “Where can I find him?”

  “Where do you think? Most nights, Wolf,” Marielle said. Of course, Carrie thought. A gay bar. “So I should just leave?”

  “The sooner the better. Take a few weeks. Enjoy Paris,” Carrie said, getting up to leave. “Everyone does.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Minet al-Hosn, Beirut, Lebanon

  The gay bar Wolf was on a side street in the Hamra district, close to the American University. By eleven at night, the sidewalk outside was crowded with men in shirts open to their navels with cocktails or bottles of 961 beer in hand. Carrie squeezed through and walked past the bouncer, a big shaved-headed man who stared at her quizzically.

  Inside, the club was jammed, hip-hop music blasting, laser lights flashing across a sea of men, some talking, some kissing and groping each other. Along the walls were leatherette benches where slim young men in tight short-shorts gave lap dances to older men with money to spend. Carrie threaded her way through the crowd to the bar. She was the only woman there. Although she spent time looking, she didn’t see Bilal Mohamad anywhere.

  “What’ll you have?” the bartender asked her in Arabic. He was a slim, baby-faced thirtysomething who could have passed for twenty, topless except for a pair of red suspenders holding up tight leather pants.

  “Tequila, Patrón Silver,” she said, nearly shouting to be heard over the noise.

  “Are you lost?” the bartender said when he came back with her drink.

  “No, but he is,” she said, showing him the photograph of Bilal Mohamad on her cell phone. “Where I can find him?”

  “Haven’t seen him,” the bartender said, moving down the bar to help someone else.

  “You looking for Bilal?” a man crowded in next to her said.

  “Bilal Mohamad.” She nodded. “Any idea where he might be?”

  “Who wants to know?” he asked.

  “Benjamin Franklin,” she said, showing him a hundred-dollar bill.

  “You’re not Bilal’s type, habibi,” the man said. “Actually, you’re no one’s type around here.”

  “Don’t be so sure. There are some really sick sluts in Beirut, habibi. I might even be one of them.” She grinned.

  “You are a bad girl,” he said, tapping her shoulder with catty delight. “The key question, my darling habibi, is, does Assayid Franklin have a brother?”

  “If he does, how do I know you’ll tell me the truth?” Carrie said, taking out a second hundred-dollar bill and sliding both bills toward him on the bar top.

  “He’s in the Marina Tower. Sixteenth floor. You don’t believe me, ask Abdullah Abdullah,” the man said, pocketing the money and flicking his finger at the bartender, who came over.

  “Are you really Abdullah Abdullah?” Carrie asked the bartender.

  “No, but it’s what they call me.” The bartender shrugged. He motioned her closer. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, mademoiselle?”

  “Does anyone?” she asked.

  “Bilal has dangerous friends,” the bartender muttered.

  “So do I.”

  “No, mademoiselle. There’s dangerous and then there’s Bilal. He’s a psychopath. Trust me, you don’t want to go there. If you want coke, hashish, heroin, let me get it for you. Safer. Better quality. Better price too.”

  “Is he at the Marina Tower?”

  “You know the saying ‘The only way to get an apartment in Minet al-Hosn is for someone to die’? They’re not just talking about availability and money. They’re talking about what people are willing to do for such wealth—and what they’ll do to protect it,” the bartender said.

  “I’m a big girl, sadiqi. Is he there?”

  “I haven’t seen him in days. If you’re lucky, you won’t either,” he said, crushing mint leaves for a mojito.

  The Marina Tower was a crescent-shaped white high-rise overlooking the waterfront, the lights from the building reflected on the water of the Marina. The lobby was ultramodern and expensive, an advertisement for the tenants who could afford the millions that an apartment here cost. She’d had to argue with Saunders to get him to let her go in on her own.

  “We already know that he killed Davis Fielding—and probably others. And that was even before the bartender’s warning. And nobody makes that much money in Beirut without either being very dangerous himself or having very dangerous friends,” Saunders said in the BMW SUV on the way over. With them were two new Beirut Station operatives, Chandler and Boyce, two short-haired hard-as-nails transfers from the CIA’s Special Operations Group, both ex–Navy SEALs, whom Saunders had brought with him from Ankara to help him clean up Beirut Station.

  “Chandler and Boyce. They sound like a law firm, don’t they?” Saunders had said, introducing them to Carrie.

  “More like antique dealers,” she’d said, shaking their hands. “Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m glad they’re here. But we don’t
want a shoot-out. We want to know who sent him to kill Davis.”

  “I think we already know. Abu Nazir,” Saunders said.

  “No, we think we know. That’s not the same thing,” she said.

  “I should do it. Or Chandler or Boyce.”

  “Better me. I’m a woman. Less threatening, less likely to escalate. And I speak Arabic better than anyone here.”

  “All the same, the only way you’re going in is wired up like crazy. The second I hear something that even smells like trouble, my antique dealers here—and me too—will be blasting in, shooting first and taking names later. That son of a bitch is dead, understood?”

  “I get it. I just want to see what I can get out of him first,” she said as they parked the SUV on a side street and walked to the Marina Tower parking lot, the building lit up at night with horizontal lines of white light along the balconies, like a stack of curved neon blades.

  “I don’t think you do, Carrie. Get it, I mean,” he said as they approached the parking lot. “If anything happened to you, Saul would crucify me. Possibly literally.”

  “I know.” She looked at Chandler and Boyce. “If you think I’m in trouble, guys, come get me, please.” The two men nodded.

  Kneeling beside a Mercedes sedan, they did a voice check on her wire setup and readied their weapons and equipment. When they were set, they walked, one at a time, to the back service entrance from the parking lot.

  One of the men, Boyce, picked the service-door lock. They went inside to the elevator and took it up to the sixteenth floor. Three of them exited, one of them, Boyce, going up one more floor. He would set up to make an entrance onto Bilal Mohamad’s balcony from the balcony of the apartment on the floor above. The other two, Saunders and Chandler, would wait and monitor Carrie from the hallway stairwell, ready to break in to Bilal’s apartment at a moment’s notice. Her emergency code was anything to do with flowers. The instant she mentioned it, they would come running.