Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel Page 29

  At a signal from Saunders, Carrie went to Mohamad’s apartment door—there were only two apartments on the entire floor—and, taking out her Beretta, knocked.

  There was no answer. She knocked again, harder. And again. Nothing. All this and nobody home, she thought, annoyed. She put her ear to the door and listened but heard nothing. Then the faint whirr of something electric, like a razor. Looking back at the doorway to the stairwell, which was cracked slightly open, she couldn’t see Saunders or Chandler, but she was glad they were there. She took a deep breath and, taking out her lock pick, began working on the lock, trying to remember her training at the Farm.

  There was a click; she turned the handle and opened the door, the Beretta ready. She stepped into a large, luxurious main room, brightly lit and with a panoramic glass view of the marina and the sea. The whirring electric sound was louder. It sounded like it was coming from the bedroom. Leaving the apartment door open a crack for Saunders and Chandler, she moved in a shooting stance toward the bedroom. Pushing the bedroom door open with her toe, she stepped in and stopped at the bizarre sight of a boyish-looking man, muscular, presumably Bilal Mohamad, his hair bleached pure blond-white and his body draped in a black plastic garbage bag with his head sticking out, with a gun with a silencer aimed directly at her.

  They stood there, frozen. Neither moved a muscle. The oddest thought occurred to Carrie: he was like a male Marilyn Monroe, sexy and lost. And then it struck her that the whirring sound had stopped.

  “Ya Allah, this is awkward,” Bilal said finally in Arabic. “Should we kill each other or see if there’s a way for us both to survive?”

  “Put your gun down and, inshallah, we’ll talk,” Carrie replied in Arabic.

  “Okay, but if you kill me I’m going to kick myself in hell for trusting a CIA agent. You are CIA, aren’t you? Idiotic question. Of course you are,” he said in English. “American, female, gun. Some idiot’s finally figured out that Davis Fielding didn’t kill himself. Was it you? Of course it was. They don’t take women as seriously as they should, do they?” he said, tossing his gun onto the bed. Now that she was able to pay attention, she noticed that his hands were covered with blood. He caught her looking at his hands. “You came at a bad moment. Another half hour and I’d have been gone,” he added.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “See for yourself,” he said, gesturing at the bathroom. “I hope you don’t have a weak stomach.”

  “Don’t move. Keep your hands where I can see them,” she said, edging toward the bathroom door.

  “Of course. You’re already nervous. Why wouldn’t you be? I don’t want you to shoot me by accident.”

  She risked a quick glance at the bathroom. There was a man’s naked body in the bathtub. Its head and hands had been cut off, the head sitting neatly atop the hands at the foot of the tub. The whirring sound she had heard was an electric carving knife, still plugged in to the bathroom shaving outlet. Feeling nauseous, she sensed motion behind her and whirled back, ready to fire. Bilal had moved slightly, but only to wipe his bloodstained hands on the bedspread.

  “Don’t move!” she snapped. “Who was he?”

  “Daleel Ismail. He always fancied me. You understand. You’re an attractive woman. People like us, we can’t help it if men fancy us. Poor Daleel. He thought he was finally going to do me. That’s the thing about life. You can never be sure if you’re going to be the one doing the screwing or getting screwed,” he said.

  “Why’d you kill him?” she asked.

  “Can’t you guess? Listen, can I take this plastic off?” He tugged at the garbage bag he was wearing. “It’s hot and the idea of dying while wearing this is disgusting. Unless you’ll let me continue what I was doing? No?” he said, looking at her. “Well, I’m taking it off then.”

  He pulled the plastic covering over his head and tossed it onto the bed.

  “We don’t have to stand here. Shall we have a drink and talk about it like the civilized murderers we are?” he said, walking to the bedroom door and into the main room. “I know you don’t trust me. You can watch as I wash my hands. The human body really is a messy thing, isn’t it? Amazing that we manage to idealize and sexually fantasize about it as much as we do.”

  She followed him to the bar, where she held the Beretta on him while he washed his hands in the bar’s sink. He dried his hands on a towel.

  “What are you drinking?” he asked.

  “Tequila if you’ve got it. If not, Scotch,” she said.

  “Scotch. Highland Park,” he said, checking the bottles behind the bar. He poured them both glasses and gestured for her to join him on twin ultramodern armchairs in the main room.

  “What are we drinking to?” she asked.

  “To us both still being alive—for the moment,” he said, and drank. She did too.

  “This Daleel whatever-his-name-is, why’d you kill him?”

  “He looked like me. Same size, height, musculature. People sometimes mistook him for me. I don’t know why he couldn’t understand my not wanting to do him. It would have been too much like masturbation.”

  Suddenly, she understood.

  “You were faking your own death. That’s why the head and hands. To make it hard to identify the body. They would assume it was you. What were you going to do with the head and hands? Dump them in the Mediterranean?”

  “You see, you are a clever girl. All right if I smoke?” he said, reaching for a cigarette in an ivory-inlaid box on the glass coffee table. “I know what ridiculous Puritans you Americans are about these things. It’s okay to be a murderer, but one mustn’t smoke.” He lit the cigarette, took a deep drag and exhaled.

  “What about DNA? They’d find out it wasn’t you.”

  “Seriously?” He looked at her as if she’d suggested that a caveman program a computer. “This is the Levant, not Manhattan. There’s no database, no science. The purpose of police work here is to destroy your political enemies, not solve crime.”

  “Where were you going?” she asked.

  “Actually, it was a ridiculous choice. Death or living in New Zealand. Those two are virtually indistinguishable.”

  “Who were you running from? Us?”

  “There really is no limit to American arrogance, is there? Why be afraid of you? Become infamous with Americans and the worst that can happen is you get your own reality TV show. Can’t you figure it out? You don’t look stupid; still, people can fool you.” He exhaled a stream of smoke at her.

  “What about Davis Fielding? You were lovers?”

  “He called me. Can you imagine? All those years, using Rana to pretend he was straight, and him thinking he was running her, when in fact, between Rana and I, we milked him for every piece of intelligence in the Middle East. He called to say good-bye, the sentimental idiot. He was as bad a spy as he was a lover.”

  Looking at him, with his oddly boyish face and white-blond hair, she suddenly understood.

  “Abu Nazir. That’s why you killed Fielding. He’s shutting things down. That’s why you’re running,” she said.

  “So,” he said, exhaling a stream of smoke at her. “Not entirely stupid. So what’s it to be—Carrie, isn’t it?” He smiled nastily, sending a bolt of fear through her at the thought that he knew her real identity. She was seeing the real man. Worse, whatever he was going to do, he had made his mind up. She needed to get her people in here now. “You see, I did get everything out of Fielding. So, Carrie, are you going to let me get back to what I was doing and let me disappear? Or are you going to do something ridiculous, like putting me in a cell with those imbecile jihadis at Guantánamo Bay?”

  “Neither. You’re going to work for us now,” she said, and, looking around, spoke into the air: “You know, flowers would do wonders for this place.”

  Bilal sat up straight. “Who am I to spy on? Abu Nazir?” he asked.

  She just stared at him. The sounds of Saunders and Chandler running in were combined with the sight of Boyc
e rappelling down onto the balcony.

  “Ya Allah, you don’t know Abu Nazir at all, do you?” he said.

  Reaching under the seat cushion of his chair, he pulled out a nine-millimeter pistol. Before she could react or say or do anything, he raised it and fired a bullet into his head.

  CHAPTER 38

  Amman, Jordan

  “The Roman Theater was built, as you might guess, in Roman times during the reign of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, in years 138 to 161 of the Common Era. In those days, the city of Amman was being called ‘Philadelphia.’ So you see, the city in America gets his name from our city, Amman,” the tour guide, a curly-haired young Jordanian in Oakley sunglasses, told the half dozen tourists clustered around him. They were standing in the highest row of an ancient semicircular stone amphitheater gouged into the side of a hill in the middle of bustling downtown Amman.

  Seated by herself in a row about halfway down, Carrie watched as one of the tourists, a bearded American wearing sunglasses and a trilby hat against the hot sun, which would’ve looked ridiculous on anyone else but on him seemed exactly right, detached himself from the little group and made his way down the stone aisle to where she was sitting.

  “What do they say about mad dogs and Englishmen?” Saul said, sitting next to her.

  “Why’d he do it, Saul?” she asked. “Fielding. What was the big deal about being gay? I mean, who gives a shit? And why’d he go to such lengths to hide it? A phony mistress, an expensive one, who opened him to moles, blackmail? It makes no sense.”

  “You’re too young. Davis Fielding went back to the old KGB days, the Cold War, when gays were considered serious security risks. Remember, those Brits from Cambridge who turned out to be KGB spies—Philby, Burgess, Maclean—were all gay. The stuff of John le Carré novels. Back then, the prevailing view was that gays were more susceptible to being blackmailed. There was even a big court case about it. Bottom line, in those days you couldn’t be in the CIA if you were gay. It would have been the end of his career. Fielding knew that.”

  “Come on, Saul. Look at the connections. Rana, Bilal Mohamad, Dima, Nightingale and finally, Abu Nazir. That’s some crew. Look how close he let them get. I mean, look at Bilal. How could he?”

  Saul smiled.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “Something my father used to say: ‘When a man’s penis is erect, his brain is in the ground.’ It’s a lot funnier in Yiddish.” He shrugged.

  “So he betrayed his country for a piece of ass? Literally.”

  “Oldest story in the world. And to be fair, it was unwittingly. He was a fool, not a traitor.”

  “What about the missing database records? Ours and the NSA’s? He wasn’t alone.”

  “Don’t go there, Carrie,” he said, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand to look at her.

  She had to take a breath on that one.

  “Really Saul,” she whispered. “It goes up that high? Is that what this is about?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “It’s about friendship, not some gay cabal. Returning favors that go back decades. It’s over. Davis is dead.”

  “So that’s it? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “What do you want, Carrie? You plugged the leak. And you even got the son of a bitch who killed him. That’s all that matters.”

  “Except Abu Nazir’s been reading our mail for who knows how long. How bad is it?”

  “We’re still assessing. But after you left Beirut the first time, without telling anyone, Estes and I shut down everything critical going through Beirut Station. When it came to intelligence, Fielding was on a starvation diet—and he knew it, Carrie. He suspected. That’s why until you proved otherwise, the idea that he committed suicide was a real possibility. And don’t forget the plus side.”

  “There’s a plus side?” she said, raising her eyebrows as she watched the tour guide lead the little group down to the stage’s side entrance, where there was a small museum. Except for a pair of tourists on the stage, she and Saul were alone in the amphitheater. So odd to be sitting there in that ancient site within a few meters of traffic and the modern city, she thought.

  “Very much so. Right now, Abu Nazir is the most dangerous enemy we have. And you got us the first solid lead we’ve ever had to getting him. We’re still going through Bilal Mohamad’s cell phones and other things, but we’ve confirmed calls to Haditha in Iraq. It wasn’t just Nightingale and Romeo. That confirms the intel you provided before; Abu Nazir is in Haditha.”

  “He may not be there any longer.”

  “It’s a place to start, which is more than we ever had.” He turned to her. “We need you to go back to Iraq, Carrie.”

  She bit her lip. “I lost people there, Saul. Dempsey, Romeo. Virgil wounded, also Crimson. How’s Virgil?”

  “He’s good. He had a chance to see his daughter. He said to say hi. He’s anxious to get back. As for Warrant Officer Blazell, a.k.a. Crimson, he’s got one of those fancy new prosthesis legs. He’s adjusting,” Saul said, hesitating.

  “What is it?” she asked. She could always tell when Saul was holding back. He’d make a lousy poker player, she thought.

  “I’m not supposed to tell you, but you might want to get used to the idea.”

  “What idea?”

  “What you’ve done, Carrie, is—well, you’re in line for a promotion. When Perry Dreyer moves on, we’re going to recommend you to be Baghdad station chief. You’ll be the youngest station chief ever—and the first woman.”

  She was stunned. Of all the things she’d thought he was going to say, she hadn’t expected that.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Well, that’s a first.” He grinned. “Anyway, Perry’s still there. And he wants you back ASAP. So do we. If you can nail Abu Nazir, we can break al-Qaeda’s back.”

  She looked down at the ancient stage. The two tourists had moved on; it was empty. What plays, what public agonies must have happened here two thousand years ago? A station chief with bipolar disorder, she thought. She would be hiding something that could backfire on them just as much as Fielding had.

  “Saul, there’s just one problem. We missed something.”

  “Oh?”

  “Walid Karim. Romeo. When Abu Ubaida was interrogating him in the factory he said something I haven’t been able to get out of my mind. Romeo told him to get Abu Nazir to confirm that what he was saying was true.”

  “And?”

  “Except Abu Ubaida wasn’t buying it. Like he didn’t trust what Abu Nazir would tell him. He told Romeo that whatever he needed to hear about us had to come from Romeo. Why? Okay, they were rivals, but Abu Nazir and Abu Ubaida were the leaders of AQI. They were supposed to be working together. So why would he say that and why did he kill Romeo? He didn’t have to do it to trap us. The recording alone would have been enough. He didn’t have to kill him, but he did. Why?”

  “Good. Very good,” Saul said, standing up. “Now we’re getting to it. But first, let’s take a walk, I’m thirsty.”

  They went down the aisle to the orchestra section of the amphitheater and out to the street, past men in red-checked kaffiyehs and honking cars to a juice stand with mesh bags of oranges, lemons and carrots dangling from an overhead beam. Saul ordered a cold orange juice, squeezed in front of him. Carrie got a bottle of Petra beer from the refrigerated glass cabinet.

  They walked on the shady side of the street, sipping their cold drinks. Out of habit, Carrie checked for tails, but they were clear.

  “It bothered me too,” Saul said. “Especially why Abu Ubaida killed Romeo. I came to a conclusion, but it’s not a pretty one.”

  Carrie stopped and looked at him. A young woman in a pink hijab walked by. They waited till she was out of earshot.

  “He was a triple agent, Romeo, wasn’t he? No one in this whole thing, not Nightingale, not Rana, not Dima, not Fielding, no one was what they seemed.”

  Saul nodded. “We’re spooks. We lie for a
living.”

  “Romeo was a double agent for AQI and for me, but all the while he was really working for Abu Nazir against Abu Ubaida. Abu Nazir used Romeo to get me, the idiot, to eliminate Abu Ubaida for him. He couldn’t lose. If Abu Ubaida’s attack on the Green Zone and assassination of al-Waliki had succeeded, he would have had his civil war and made it impossible for the American effort in Iraq to succeed. If Abu Ubaida’s attack failed, no problem. There would have been some damage to us and Abu Nazir would have eliminated his only rival within AQI. Either way he wins,” she said.

  “That’s about it.” Saul nodded. “But you’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Taking out Abu Ubaida was a good thing. You saved thousands of lives, Carrie. American casualties alone would have been horrendous.”

  “He used us, me.”

  “We use each other. Crabs in a basket. Sometimes we eat each other,” Saul said.

  CHAPTER 39

  Green Zone, Baghdad, Iraq

  Back at Baghdad International Airport. Heat, flies and Demon giving his Route Irish spiel, telling them it was only six miles from the airport to the Green Zone. He recognized Carrie from the last time.

  “I see we have a repeat customer. Wasn’t it a nice ride in last time, miss?” he called out to her.

  “I’ve been in Ramadi, Demon. Route Irish is pussy,” she shouted back to raucous male laughter and a few good-natured catcalls and cheers.

  They got into a convoy of SUVs and Blackwater Mambas. Leaving the airport, driving past the “Condition Red” sign and onto Airport Road, riding on the highway into Baghdad, past the blasted palm trees and burned-out wrecks of cars and trucks, she had the oddest sensation.

  I’m home, she thought. All my life I’ve been looking for a place to belong, never felt at home anywhere. Growing up with her father and mother had been like living in a foreign country—how else could her mother have left like that without saying a word?—and incredibly, home had turned out to be here. Iraq. The Middle East. In the middle of a war. As their convoy drove under overpasses, gunners swiveling in unison like dancers to cover them against anyone who might drop a grenade or IED onto one of their vehicles, past Iraqis in cars who had stopped on the shoulder to let their convoy pass by, staring at them unblinking, she realized it was the risk, the game, that she was addicted to.