Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel Page 4

  “What are you talking about? Does anybody know what you’re talking about? What are we going to do? How are we going to live?”

  “For God’s sakes, Emma. You think they can run those servers without me? Trust me, they’ll call me back any time now. They’ll be begging for me to come back.”

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God! What are we going to do?”

  And now she’d been fired. Just like her father.

  Saul Berenson, Middle East Division chief, NCS, was expecting her in his office on the fourth floor. She took a deep breath, knocked and went in.

  Saul, big rumpled bearded teddy bear of a man, was working on his computer. Rabbi Saul, as she sometimes thought of him. He’d been the one who’d first recruited her for the CIA, on a cold March day in her senior year at the Career Center at Princeton.

  The office was the usual messy disorder that only Saul could find his way through. As always, a stuffed Winnie the Pooh sat slumped on a shelf next to two photographs: one of Saul with the first President Bush, the one they’d named the building after; the second of Saul with CIA director James Woolsey and President Clinton.

  Saul looked up from the computer as she sat down.

  “You found someplace?” he asked, tilting his glasses so he could see her better.

  “A one-bedroom in Reston,” she said.

  “Convenient?”

  “It’s not far from the Dulles Toll Road. Is that what we’re going to talk about?”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “You saw the information from Julia. You need to send me back to Beirut.”

  “Not gonna happen, Carrie. I don’t think you realize how many people you’ve pissed off or how high it goes.”

  “I escaped a Hezbollah trap, Saul. Would you have preferred that they captured me, paraded me on al-Jazeera as a CIA spy? Because the way I’ve been treated, I’m beginning to think that’s what you and Davis wanted.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. It’s not that simple,” he said, scratching his beard. “It’s never that simple.”

  “You’re wrong. It’s exactly that simple. I was set up—and now Beirut Station’s security is compromised and you’ve got a dick for a station chief who only wants to kill the messenger.”

  Saul took off his glasses. Without them, his eyes were softer, less focused.

  “You’re not making this easy, Carrie,” he said. He wiped his glasses on his shirt and put them back on.

  “Did I ever?” she said.

  “No.” He smiled wryly. “I’ll give you that. You were a pain in the ass right from the beginning.”

  “So why did you hire me? I’m not the only woman in America who speaks Arabic,” she said, leaning back in her chair and looking at his Winnie the Pooh in its red “Pooh” shirt. He had once told her Pooh was a perfect metaphor for the human condition. All it took was a single letter change to describe our obsession; just change “honey” to “money.”

  “Look, Carrie, a CIA station chief is like the captain of a ship. It’s one of the last pure dictatorships on earth. If he doesn’t think he can trust you, your judgment, there isn’t a lot I can do.”

  She sat straight up in her chair, tense, knees tightly together, as if it were a job interview. “You’re his boss. Fire him, not me.” Please, she thought. Please Saul. Please believe me. Saul was the only one she could trust, the only one who believed in her. If he turned against her, she had nothing; was nothing.

  “I can’t,” he said. “Think about it. My job’s like being the admiral of a fleet. If I start firing captains for using their judgment, they’ll be second-guessing themselves all over the place. They’ll be of no use to me or anyone else. I have to look at the bigger picture.”

  “Bullshit!” she said, standing up, thinking, why couldn’t he understand? It was Saul. He was supposed to be on her side. “This is total bullshit. This isn’t about morale or security or some other bullshit. This is politics. And it stinks.” She stared at him. “When did you become one of them, Saul? The people who are ready to sell this country out in the interest of their own pathetic careers?”

  Saul slammed his hand hard on the desk, making her jump.

  “Don’t you dare talk to me that way! You know me better than that. If that’s the way you spoke to Fielding, it’s no wonder he threw your sorry ass out of Beirut. And you know the worst part, Carrie? You know the worst? The intel you just brought back from your little jaybird, Julia, is so critical that I was trying to think of a way to send you back to Beirut before you walked in here.”

  Wonderful, thank you, she thought, relief flooding through her. Saul still believed in her. He knew she was right. He was on her side. It was just a matter of trying to find a way to maneuver the bureaucracy. All she had to do was show him she was still Carrie; she still knew how to mix it up with anyone, including him.

  “Are you taking it to the Director? Are we going to act on it?”

  “I’ve sent it upstairs,” he said, glancing at the ceiling. “But it’s not up to me. We get threats like this every day.”

  “Her stuff has always been grade A. You know it. Remember what she gave us on the Hariri assassination? This is actionable, Saul.”

  “Is it? Is it really? Your Julia gave us no particulars. Nothing. An attack soon. We don’t know where. We don’t know how. We don’t know when. We don’t know the target. We don’t even know if it’s Hezbollah or maybe somebody who just passed it along to Hezbollah to distract us from something else. What the hell are we supposed to do with it?”

  “So that’s it? We just pass it along and hope for the best? That’s how we protect the country these days?”

  “Don’t give me crap, Carrie. I told both Estes and the deputy director that we had a very high degree of confidence this is actionable intel. The ball’s in their court. I’ve also alerted Fielding in Beirut to keep digging.”

  “Fielding,” she said disgustedly. She got up and walked over to the window and looked out over the green lawn and the back parking lot. “We have a security crisis in Beirut. What about Achilles?”

  “Fielding says you led them to it.” He clicked his mouse till he found what he was looking for on his computer and read out loud: “ ‘Mathison displayed amateurish tradecraft in resorting in desperation to an unknown, unvetted female Lebanese contact, who—if this case officer is to be believed—out of the presumed goodness of her heart gave her car to a complete stranger. Then, after leaving the car in highly public parking venue, Mathison failed to lose her presumed pursuers, leading them directly to the safe house location on Rue Adonis, which in turn led to the elimination of this safe house and the total breach of security at that location and compromise of our operations.’ ”

  Saul looked at her over his glasses.

  “What am I supposed to do with that?”

  He couldn’t believe that about her, she thought. Not Saul.

  “Tell Fielding to wipe his ass with it,” Carrie snapped. “I was clean. I was clean in Hamra and I was sure as hell clean on foot in Ras Beirut. There was no one there, inside or out. Then all of a sudden they’re breaking in like they’ve known about the location all along. Someone set me up.”

  “Who?” Saul said, raising a hand. “Where do you start?”

  “Nightingale for openers,” Carrie said, leaning forward on his desk with both hands like a runner getting set. “Dima too. Let me go back, Saul. I’ll nail them both. And I’ll find the leak.”

  He shook his head.

  “Impossible. Look, Carrie, even if I believed you’re right and assumed that Fielding is a hundred percent wrong, I can’t.”

  “Why not? What’s he got on you?” This wasn’t like Saul, she thought.

  “He’s connected, okay?” Saul said disgustedly. “He and David Estes, director of the Counterterrorism Center, are both protégés of Bill Walden.”

  “The DCIA?”

  “The big man himself. It’s the old-boy network right down the line. And Walden has political amb
itions. He’s no one to mess with. You? You’re just a female officer in a compromising situation. For the people upstairs, that’s not a hard decision. Not to mention, we’ve reorganized for the four millionth time. Nowadays, I’ve got a dotted line reporting to Estes. It’s not so simple.”

  “What do we do?”

  Saul nodded. “Fielding put it on you and for the time being, I have to leave it there. You try to fight this, and I won’t be able to help you. That’s how it is,” he said, raising his hands.

  “So I’m supposed to be the good little girl. Shut up, bend over and let ’em do whatever they want?”

  “And live to fight another day.” Saul nodded. “Look, for what it’s worth, I agree with you about one thing. This whole thing with Nightingale smells fishy as hell. At a minimum, Fielding should’ve sent you in there with a support team. I’m not going to let you sit around wasted.” He got up and came around the desk; the two of them were side by side, leaning back on it. He believed her. He was still behind her, she thought, breathing a sigh of relief.

  “So?” she said.

  “Do you remember what I told you when I pulled you early from your training at the Farm? My beautiful golden girl with a brain like Stephen Hawking.” He smiled. “Do you remember what I said?”

  “About how I could learn the rest of tradecraft in the field—and the pond?”

  “That you were too big a fish for this pond. We needed you in the ocean.”

  “But that sometimes the only way to swim with the sharks is to be a shark. I remember. What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to get Nightingale. And find out about this attack. But we’re going to do it here.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’ll be liaising between us, the Middle East Division and the Counterterrorism Center. They’re unofficially absorbing Alec Station.” Alec Station was CIA-speak for the only CIA station assigned not a locale but a specific target: the al-Qaeda terrorist network. “You’ll report to Estes.” He leaned close and she could smell his aftershave. Polo, Ralph Lauren. “But you’ll work for me.”

  “So now we’re spying on ourselves?”

  “Who better? It’s what we do,” he said.

  “What about Julia’s intel? There’s an attack coming, Saul. Something big, and we both know it.”

  He took a breath and exhaled.

  “How much time have we got?” he asked.

  “A couple of weeks maybe. Julia’s husband said soon. His exact words were ‘khaliban zhada.’ Very soon.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Georgetown, Washington, DC

  It was the song that brought it back. Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One.” 1998. Her junior year at Princeton. The year of Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love, and her first big sexual relationship—beyond fumbling when your parents and sister weren’t home and getting your thighs sticky wet in high school—an almost-crush on John, her tall, unbelievably bright poly sci professor, who introduced her to tequila shots, oral sex and jazz music.

  “When I was a kid it was all Madonna, Mariah, Luther Vandross, Boyz II Men. The closest to jazz was my dad once in a while maybe listening to a little Dave Brubeck.”

  “You’re joking, right? You don’t know jazz? Miles Davis, Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Coltrane, Louis Armstrong? The greatest music ever invented or that ever will be. The one truly original thing we Americans gave the world, and you don’t know? In a way, I envy you.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve got a whole new continent to explore, better than anything you can imagine.”

  “Better than sex?”

  “That’s the beauty of it, gorgeous. We can do both at the same time.”

  Nineteen ninety-eight: the last time she ever ran the fifteen hundred. A long time ago, she thought.

  She was sitting in a pub on M Street in Georgetown, downing her third Patrón Silver margarita, when the Shania video came on the TV perched behind the bar.

  “Remember this? Nineteen ninety-eight. I was in college,” she said, indicating the song to Dave, the guy nursing a Heineken on the bar stool next to her. He was a curly-haired early-forties DOJ attorney in an off-the-rack suit and a Rolex watch that he made sure you caught a glimpse of, his finger brushing her forearm as though neither of them knew it was there or what he was thinking. There was a white band of skin on his ring finger where he’d taken off his wedding ring, so he was either divorced or out trolling, she thought.

  “I was a law intern. For me it was Puff Daddy. Been around the world, uh-huh, uh-huh,” he half-sang, moving his shoulders in a manner that was midway between hopeless and semisexy. He wasn’t terrible looking. She hadn’t decided whether to let him get her into bed or not.

  She had to force herself not to think about work. That was why she had gone out. Her inquiries were going nowhere. If anything, instead of finding answers, the questions were multiplying and getting more troubling.

  For three days straight, she’d been working the computer. Going nonstop. Sleeping at her desk, living on crackers from the vending machine. She went over everything the Counterterrorism Center had on contacts between the Syrian GSD and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Reported contacts. Sightings. Cell phone and e-mail records. Most of it pure data, the everyday sludge of intelligence work. Saul had once compared it to mining for diamonds. “You have to go through tons of debris to every once in a while spot something that glitters. Something that might actually be useful.”

  Interestingly, some of the best of it was intel that she herself had supplied, obtained from her source, Julia.

  Other than the lead from Dima, there wasn’t much on Nightingale, a.k.a. Taha al-Douni. A graduate of Damascus University in mechanical engineering, he’d first attracted attention from Moscow Station, nine years ago, trying to do business with the big Russian arms company Rosoboronexport. She studied the surveillance photo. It had been taken on a wide snowy street in Moscow, lots of traffic, maybe Tverskaya Street, she thought. Although he was younger, thinner and in an overcoat and big floppy-eared fur hat, it was Nightingale all right, the man who had beckoned to her from the café across the street in Beirut.

  No information on where he lived, wife, kids, his work in the GSD. Talk to me, Nightingale, she thought. Where do you work? How high up are you? Where do you fit between the GSD and Hezbollah? Who do you care about? Who do you put your dick in? But combing through everything at CTC, there was just the Moscow surveillance.

  And nothing on a possible major terrorist attack on the U.S. What Julia had told her was a lone indicator, completely unsubstantiated. Otherwise nothing. No wonder no one had gotten back to her on it.

  And then on the third day, late, she found something. A single photo the NSA had lifted from an Israeli spy satellite download stream, showing Nightingale sitting at a shisha café table. There was a partial tile wall sign in Arabic. She magnified it on the computer screen, then popped it into Photoshop to try to clarify the writing on the sign. It looked like the image could have been taken in either Amman or Cairo, she thought. In a souk, maybe.

  Much more important than where the photo was taken was the man Nightingale was sitting with. She didn’t need the identification the Israelis had attached to tell her who it was. It was someone that everyone at Beirut Station, including her, had had in their sights for a long time but almost never actually sighted: Ahmed Haidar, a member of al-Majlis al-Markazis, the Hezbollah Central Council, their inner circle.

  So Nightingale, a.k.a. al-Douni, was real. Dima had at least given them solid intel. A bona fide link between the GSD and Hezbollah. She wished she were back in Beirut so she could talk to Julia about Nightingale. Had her husband, Abbas, ever met him? Did he know anything about him? Was he involved in the Hariri assassination?

  And then there was another unanswered question: Where was Dima? The link between Nightingale and Ahmed Haidar made that even more critical. This was insane. And there was piss-all from Beirut Station. Just a
cryptic note from Fielding to Saul that he had followed up and no one had seen Dima since the break-in at Achilles. And nothing about a terrorist attack in the United States. If he was doing any further follow-up, he didn’t say. Asshole, she thought.

  She began tearing through every record from Damascus Station on the GSD. Every reference. Like Saul said, most of it was garbage.

  Then she came across something interesting. In the 1990s, a senior CIA case officer, Dar Adal, had run a mole, Nabeel Abdul-Amir, code-named Pineapple, who was supposedly midlevel GSD. Adal had supposedly confirmed the mole’s bona fides. Pineapple was Alawite, Ba’athist, and related to the Assad clan. For more than forty years, the Assads—the father, Hafez al-Assad, and son, Bashar—members of the small minority Alawite Shiite Muslim sect and the pan-Arab nationalistic Ba’athist party, had ruthlessly ruled Syria. Pineapple, a distant cousin, also Alawite and Ba’athist, seemed a perfect choice for a mole. Too perfect, maybe, she mused.

  Adal had fed Pineapple tidbits about Israel’s negotiating position on the Golan Heights from a supposed Israeli mole with whom he would have clandestine meetings in Cyprus but who was actually a Hebrew-speaking New York Jew, all in order to get Pineapple promoted within the GSD. When Pineapple tried to expand his Israeli contacts on his own and was about to expose the CIA operation to the Israeli Shin Bet, Adal had apparently—here the record was redacted and got pretty murky—arranged to feed Pineapple to either the Mossad or an outside contractor, who assassinated him, along with his mistress and her child. The three bodies were found on a boat tied to a slip in the Limassol Marina in Cyprus.

  Carrie sat up straight, staring at nothing. Who redacted all this? she wondered. How and why? This was old intel. What was going on?

  If it came to that, why was there so little on the GSD? Damascus Station was apparently pretty useless, but Fielding had been running Beirut Station for a long time. At least since the early 1990s. Yet, everyone knew the GSD was linked to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Rafik Hariri assassination last year and the Israeli photograph of Nightingale with Ahmed Haidar proved it. What the hell was going on at Beirut Station? It didn’t add up.