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

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Estes said. “Are you completely out of your mind?”

  “Thinking about what? What are we talking about?” she said.

  “Don’t pretend you didn’t go to the NSA. On your own. Without authorization. Do you have any idea how many procedures you broke?” Estes snapped.

  “I told you not to, Carrie,” Saul said softly.

  “How’d you find out?” she asked Estes.

  “I had a very nice e-mail from some midlevel manager named Jerry Bishop over there. He appreciated you coming over, bridging the interagency-rivalry thing and all that. Just letting me know—nicely—that it happened despite the rules. Thinks it’s a good idea. We should do more of it. The only thing missing was a suggestion that we toast marshmallows around the old campfire together. Except I don’t want to do more of it, Carrie. We are consumers of theirs, nothing more. And we don’t have the time or resources to sort through their shit as it is. I can’t have it. More importantly”—he gestured vaguely at the ceiling—“neither can our masters upstairs.”

  “Even when it’s productive? I came up with something. The tribesmen in Sinai. You said you wanted everything. I sent you an e-mail,” she said to Estes, afraid to look over at Saul.

  “Terrific. Tribesmen in Sinai. I’ll alert Lawrence of Arabia. What the hell were you thinking, Carrie? Do you have any idea where we are in terms of budget? Do you know that the Senate is dying to cut our balls off if they see a spark of redundancy—and here you go, traipsing up to Fort Meade, violating understandings it’s taken us years to come up with.” He shook his head. “Beirut Station said you were out of control, but Saul convinced me otherwise. I can’t have this.”

  “What about the Sawarka?” she said. It was on the tip of her tongue to raise the missing NSA database records and the redacted CTC material, but something told her not to. Just stick to the jihadis.

  “Saul gave a heads-up to the Egyptian SSI. They said they’d look into it. Also the Israelis. That’s not the issue.”

  “Then you tell me what the issue is, David,” she said, standing up to confront him. “Because I got pulled from Beirut in the middle of an op, where we’ve got a female agent who’s disappeared off the face of the earth after Hezbollah and the GSD made a move against one of your case officers, me”—she tapped her chest—“and not only has nobody even looked at it, but nobody’s had the brains to ask the question ‘Why?’ Plus I gave you actionable intel from a highly credible source on a possible major terrorist attack on the U.S. and so far nobody seems to give a shit except me. So you tell me what the damn issue is.”

  This time she did look at Saul and he looked green, like he was sick to his stomach.

  “Sit down. I mean it,” Estes said, biting off the words.

  She sat. He took a breath, then another.

  “Look, Carrie. We’re not the military here. We don’t just give orders. Our people are expected to act independently, to think for themselves. Management-wise, it’s like herding cats. But that’s the price you pay for good people who dig things up in places no one would expect that can save an entire nation. So we give you a lot of leeway, but this crossed the line.

  “You went outside the Agency completely on your own. You were way beyond the parameters of ‘need to know,’ which is why we only allow authorized interagency contacts through normal channels. The NSA’s job is to provide us with data. Period. They don’t have the intelligence-analysis experts to turn raw data into useful intel. We do. Most of the people on this entire campus do nothing else but analyze data. If we get the NSA into our business, then Congress has the right to ask what the hell they’re paying us for. And if you want me to do something about this so-called actionable intel about an attack, you better damn well give me something to work with.

  “Furthermore, while you’re busy playing in your sandbox with Sinai and Beirut, you are not paying attention to al-Qaeda, especially in Iraq, which is what I needed you to concentrate on and the only reason you’re still here.”

  “I’m looking at Iraq too. I—”

  “Cut the crap, Carrie. We don’t have time for this. What just happened in Abbasiyah is a gift to the bad guys. I can’t have you off doing whatever the hell you want. It doesn’t work that way.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I’ve notified HR. I’m removing you from CTC. In fact, not just from CTC, from the National Clandestine Service. You’re done here. Saul?” he said, looking at Berenson.

  Carrie felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She wanted to throw up. This couldn’t be happening. Didn’t they see what was going on? Missing files, a possible terrorist attack, and she was the only one who’d spotted it and now they were getting rid of her?

  “Carrie, you’re a great talent. Your language skills, your instincts,” Saul said, leaning forward, hands clasped, almost as if he were praying. “But you forced our hand. You’re being reassigned.”

  Relief flooded her. It was bad, but she wasn’t being fired.

  “I thought I’m out of NCS,” she said.

  “You are,” Saul said, glancing at Estes, “being transferred to the Intelligence Analysis Division. The Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis.”

  “Effective immediately,” Estes said. “No more fieldwork, Mathison. You’re done.”

  “Who did you piss off?” her workmate in the next cubicle, Joanne Dayton, said. Blond, blue-eyed, a little overweight and pretty enough to have been a cheerleader in high school, but according to Joanne, she’d been a doper, not one of the cool kids. “Otherwise, I’d’ve never ended up here,” she’d whispered, rolling her eyes.

  “David Estes,” Carrie said.

  “Really?” Joanne said, looking at her with greater interest. “I’m surprised you’re still working here.” She moved closer. Just girls. “What’d you do?”

  What did I do? Carrie thought. She hadn’t let them kidnap or kill her. Since she’d started running for her life on Avenue Michel Bustros, she hadn’t really stopped.

  “Oddly enough, my job,” she said.

  Her new boss was a tall, odd-looking long-haired man of Russian descent, with arms and legs disproportionately larger than his torso, as if his body had been assembled from cast-off odds and ends of other people somehow welded together like one of the Watts Towers. Someone said he’d been wounded in Bosnia, but no one would speak about it. His name was Yerushenko. Alan Yerushenko.

  “I don’t know why they moved you over from NCS and I don’t care,” Yerushenko told her, looking at her through tinted glasses. “We may not be the glamour boys of the business like on the other side of the house, but don’t think what we do is not important. And I’ll expect a daily report of your progress.”

  The hell with you, she thought.

  “What’s with Yerushenko?” she asked Joanne.

  “He’s a stickler, but it could be worse. He’s not entirely an idiot. Just mostly.” She grinned.

  Yerushenko put her on Iraq data analysis from NCS core collectors, CIA officers who collected data from case officers and forwarded the intel to Langley for analysis and evaluation. “You have to assign probabilities for credibility and accuracy,” he told her. “The rule of thumb is that most are barely credible and the rest are even worse.”

  She started to work on reports on AQI, al-Qaeda in Iraq. Their leader was a mysterious figure who used the nom de guerre Abu Nazir. She’d first heard about him while following up on a lead in Baghdad last year. But he was like a ghost; there was hardly anything real on him. There was little known about him personally too, although he was suspected of being in Anbar Province, where he had cowed local tribal leaders by cutting off the heads of everyone who got in his way. Sometimes, they were left stuck on poles along the roads like gruesome signposts. There was also mention of an equally ruthless lieutenant of his, about whom even less was known, code-named Abu Ubaida.

  But she couldn’t concentrate. She felt humiliated, sick to her stomach. Why had they done this to her? Why had Saul
abandoned her? And why didn’t they listen? There was an attack planned against America that might happen in a few days or weeks and nobody seemed to care. She went to the ladies’ room, into a stall, and closed the door. Sitting on the lid, her face in her hands, it was all she could do to keep from screaming at the top of her lungs.

  What was happening? Her skin was tingling. Prickling, like when your foot falls asleep. It’s stress. An emotional jolt of hormones, she told herself. The stress was sideswiping her meds, knocking out the circuits. She rubbed the skin on her arms to try to make it stop tingling. It didn’t work. Then she understood. She’d been running low on clozapine, so she had started taking them every other day. Her bipolar was kicking in. She was going into a depressive episode.

  She looked around the stall like a trapped animal. She had to get home.

  CHAPTER 8

  Reston, Virginia

  For a week and a half, she’d managed to drag herself to work, to get dressed, to put on makeup, to pretend she gave a shit. She had stopped taking the few meds she had left from Maggie altogether. It felt like she’d fallen into a black hole, abandoned, exiled. She read reports about AQI but had to reread everything three or four times. It was impossible to concentrate.

  The bastards, she thought. All this time she’d thought Saul was like the father she’d never had, or more like the wise, funny Jewish uncle everybody wished they had. And Estes. She’d thought he appreciated what she did, how hard she worked, how good she was at her job.

  But even when she brought them actionable intel, they not only did nothing, they punished her. They destroyed her career. It was over, she thought, and spent more and more time in the ladies’ room at work. She had nothing. She was nothing.

  She stopped going to work. She knew she needed to try to find out about the pending attack Julia had told her about, but she couldn’t make herself do anything.

  Sitting on the floor in a corner of her bedroom, the apartment in Reston completely dark and silent. She hadn’t eaten in how many days? Two? Three? Some part of her brain told her, This is not you. This is the disease, but she couldn’t make herself care. What difference did it make?

  She had to pee but couldn’t make herself get up to go to the bathroom. When was the last time she had gone? What did it matter? She was alone in the darkness. A failure. Like her father.

  Her father.

  Thanksgiving. Her freshman year at Princeton. Her sister, Maggie, was a senior at NYU in New York. She’d called Carrie to let her know she was having Thanksgiving in Connecticut with her boyfriend Todd’s family.

  “Dad’s alone. You have to go, Carrie,” Maggie said.

  “Why me? You need to come too. He needs us.” Thinking, It’s Thanksgiving. Maybe Mom will finally call. She was married to him all those years. Didn’t that count for something? And what about her and Maggie? What did they do wrong? If she didn’t want to call Frank, she could have at least called her or Maggie. She knew Maggie’s phone number at her apartment in Morningside Heights. And she knew Carrie was at Butler at Princeton. If she wanted to, she could have gotten hold of them. Their father, Frank, need never have known. Oh God, was her entire family crazy?

  Her father called two days before Thanksgiving.

  “Your sister’s not coming,” he said.

  “I know, Dad. It’s her boyfriend. I think it’s getting serious, her and Todd. But I’m coming. I’ll be there Wednesday. I’m looking forward to seeing you,” she lied, thinking it was going to be deadly in that house, just the two of them.

  “You don’t have to come, Caroline. I know you have things you’d rather . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Dad, don’t be silly. It’s Thanksgiving. Look, you buy the turkey. I’ll be there Wednesday afternoon. I’ll cook it. I’ll do the whole thing, okay?”

  “It’s all right. Maybe it’s better you don’t come,” he said.

  “Dad, please! Don’t do this. I said I’ll be home. I’ll be home.”

  “You were always a good girl, Carrie. Your sister too. She wasn’t as smart or as pretty as you, but a good girl too. We should have done better by you. I’m sorry.”

  “Dad! Don’t talk like that. I’ll see you Wednesday.”

  “I know. Good-bye, Carrie,” he said, and hung up, leaving her staring at the phone in her hand.

  She thought about calling Maggie and insisting, then decided against it. Maggie was with Todd. Let it be. But he sounded strange. Like he was down. She calculated. There was a midterm on Tuesday morning, but after that, nothing as the college started to close down for the holiday. She could surprise him. Leave Tuesday right after the exam and get home by Tuesday afternoon.

  That Tuesday, she caught a Greyhound bus in Mount Laurel and connected to Silver Spring. She got to Kensington in the afternoon. It was sunny and clear and cool, the leaves turning brown and red and gold. She caught the local bus and was dropped off near the small frame house she’d grown up in. It looked shabbier in the sunlight than she remembered. He hasn’t been keeping it up, she thought, unlocking the door.

  A minute later, she was on the phone calling 911.

  Happy Thanksgiving, Dad, she remembered thinking as she rode with him in the ambulance to the hospital.

  Only now, Maggie had taken in her father, Frank, to live with her nice all-American husband and her nice all-American children, and she, Carrie, was a failure and a crazy like her father. Like him, she had nothing.

  No man, no kids, no life, a total failure at work. Alone. Totally alone. Even Saul had abandoned her. She could have been on the far side of the moon, she was so alone. The exact opposite of someone like Dima. The party girl. The girl who couldn’t stand being alone, who was never without a man, although the men in her life went through the endless revolving door that passed for relationships among single women in North Beirut.

  Dima was never alone. It was a clue, but to what? She had disappeared off the face of the earth.

  “Maybe,” Carrie said out loud in what she realized was her first rational moment in days, “the bitch is with my mother.”

  CHAPTER 9

  McLean, Virginia

  The next day, she managed to make herself go to work. There was something about Dima, how she could never be alone. Carrie was determined to have it out with Saul. But not at headquarters, she thought. She needed to get him someplace they could talk.

  Putting on her makeup, she thought she looked like a ghost. That’s what I am, she decided. The ghost at the party. But before she disappeared into the darkness, she’d make Saul listen. He had to listen, she thought.

  She drove in to work. Joanne was all concerned.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked. “Yerushenko’s ready to dump you. You’re lucky he’s at an all-day meeting on the threat post-Abbasiyah.”

  Yeah, boy am I lucky, Carrie thought.

  The day lasted forever. It moved so slowly she could have sworn at times the clock moved backward. In her mind, she kept going back to the same questions. Who had deleted the NSA database records? And redacted the details about Beirut? Who was Dar Adal? What did he have to do with anything?

  An even better question was, why? What were they protecting? What had gone wrong? Why wasn’t anything happening on Beirut or on the intel she’d given them from Julia? There were only questions and no answers—and time, moving slower than the traffic on I-95.

  That evening, she waited in the parking lot until Saul came out, around eleven P.M. She followed his car, tailing him back to his house in McLean. It was a white colonial on a dark tree-shaded street without sidewalks. She’d been there once a long time ago for lunch. She watched him go in, waited twenty minutes, then got out and rang the doorbell.

  Saul’s wife, Mira, an Indian woman from Mumbai whom Saul had met in Africa and whom Carrie had met once before, answered the door in a nightdress and robe.

  “Hi, Mira. Remember me? I need to see Saul.”

  “I remember,” Mira said, not moving from the doorway. “He just
got home.”

  “I’m sorry,” Carrie said. “It’s important.”

  “It’s always important,” Mira said, moving aside so Carrie could come in. “Someday you people are going to realize it’s what’s not important that really matters.” She motioned with her head. “He’s upstairs.”

  “Thanks,” Carrie said, going up the stairs. A bedroom door was half-open. She knocked and went in. Saul was still in his trousers but had changed into his pajama top. He was eating out of a yogurt container. The bed was made and looked small to her. It made her wonder if they slept together. He put the yogurt down.

  “Who’s Dar Adal?” she asked.

  “Where’d you get that from?” he said.

  “Going through CTC files. The work you and David put me on when I came back. Only there’s a bunch of it redacted—and piss-all on the Syrian GSD out of either Damascus or Beirut Station. Plenty of reports, but once you squeeze the air out of it, there’s nothing there. So you tell me what’s going on.”

  “Go home, Carrie,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Ancient history. Not our finest hour,” he said, looking away. “I can’t get you back. I know that’s what you want, but I can’t. Go home.”

  “Not till you talk to me.”

  He shook his head. “Grow up, Carrie! It’s done. I’ve done all I can.”

  “It isn’t fair.”

  “You’re just finding out that the world isn’t fair? Get used to it; you’ll be a lot less disappointed in life. Look, this is my home. You have no right to be here. I mean it. I want you to leave,” he said, his face set like it had been carved in stone.

  “Listen to me, dammit!”

  “I’m listening, Carrie, but you’re not saying anything, just whining.”

  “There were records deleted from the NSA database. They said they’d never seen that before. Ever. They were deleted the day I was sent from Beirut,” she said. “Who can do that?”

  For a moment, neither of them spoke. There was the sound of a TV from the master bedroom down the hall. Jay Leno. They really don’t sleep together, she thought, feeling like an intruder. She really didn’t belong here in his house.